Last Thursday we took a trip to Middletown Connecticut to do a photo-shoot for one of our newest clients: A.R. Mazzotta. It was a lot of fun and great opportunity to spend time with the A.R. Mazzotta staff.
A.R. Mazzotta Employment Specialists is a staffing company that serves the state of Connecticut. They contracted us to develop their new website as well has to partner with them for their Digital Marketing. In the past few weeks we formulated the plan for new site and also started development.
Of course one thing every new website needs is quality images and photography. The President at ARM, Laura is fundamentally against using stock photos. You know, the photos that you can buy online that hundreds, maybe thousands of other companies are using. So, she wanted to use real photos of the company staff and employees.
One thing we always incorporate in our projects is a weekly status call. So while working on the planning stages of the website, I really started to get to know Laura’s and her company’s personalities. In this time I watched Laura go through two local professional photographers, without getting the quality of photos that she really wanted. Instead of just sitting and waiting until she found the right photographer or trying to push her to use stock photos, I decided to be proactive and take action.
Thinking outside the box to solve a client’s hard to resolve problem goes a looong way.
We don’t have an in house photographer, so I reached out to a photographer in our area: Matthew Lester. He travels around the country doing corporate photography. His niche is really recruiting material for universities. Recruiting for universities… a staffing company… I’ve seen a bunch of his work through social media and his site and I was sure he would be a good fit for ARM. One of the selling points besides the quality of his photos, is he also uses a special tool that syncs his camera to an iPad as he shoots. So we can see what the pictures look like as they are taken. This is something I think all photographers should use. No waiting, you can tell if the shots are working or not, right away. This excited Laura!
So we set everything up and headed to CT for the shoot. And guess what.. it went REALLY well! We managed to get all the shots we wanted and more. The client was at ease because they saw how good they were right away. Now with so many good shots, the hard part is choosing which ones should go on the site! I Can’t wait to see the finished product when the site launches.
“I really appreciate that you are solution driven. A perfect example is the photo dilemma.” Laura Pedersen – A.R. Mazzotta
This experience is not new for us and it embodies the philosophy of Blackbird e-Solutions. Thinking outside the box to solve a client’s hard to resolve problem goes a looong way. Even though we don’t typically do photography, being a solution is much, much better than waiting and letting the client get frustrated. After all sales and successful businesses are about building relationships. Not taking orders and dispensing a product.
Check out some “behind the scenes” pictures or our photo-shoot on Google+ or Facebook.
~~~ Just a disclaimer these are photos of Matt (Taken with a Samsung S4 phone), not by Matt. So don’t judge Matt’s skill by these photos. You can blame me. Haha ~~~
