What do most business want? It’s fair to say – more customers.
There are dozens of channels to attract all these customers, from social media to banner ads, pay per click, PR and advertising, but most of these channels have one thing in common: professional visual content.
AirBnB wouldn’t be where it is now, if they hadn’t offered free professional photography of all their properties. You would want to rent an ugly looking flat, regardless how fun and engaging the description is.
You wouldn’t attend a conference, if all they had were some dodgy highlights posted from the last year’s event.
You wouldn’t order any food from Deliveroo, if a waiter took menu photos with their iPhone.
Nor would you hire a lawyer or an accountant, if their blurry headshots were done by uncle Bob with his 1990s DSLR camera.
Let’s face it:
PROFESSIONAL VISUAL CONTENT SELLS.
Most large businesses have figured it out and are paying billions to large marketing and advertising agencies to create content for them.
But if professional visual content sells, why isn’t every startup and small business doing it?
Because of John!
John is an amazing professional photographer. 9 out of 10 photoshoots that he does could easily win some sort of an award. But John is busy. And expensive. And disorganised. It regularly takes John weeks to send you your edited photos.
And of course John is only available when he is available. He doesn’t care about you, or your investors and your board meetings. You can book him only when HE is available.
But businesses don’t sell enough not just because of John.
It’s also because of Jane.
Jane is also a photographer. She is a lot more organised and reasonably priced than John. She managed to scrape together 20 amazing looking photos from 100+ sessions that she’s done for her wonderful looking website. She replies to your emails within two hours and she delivers photos the next day (because she doesn’t have much work). But 9 out of 10 photos look terrible.
As a busy business owner, marketing manager or event organiser – how can you know which professional content creator to choose?
You search on Google and end up with more Johns and Janes. You find a few “creative marketplaces” – but it’s more of the same.
You find a local marketing and design agency. “They should know what they are doing”, you reason, but the price is 10x higher than your budget.
What should you do?!?!?!
At Splento, we understand your pain. It really sucks to have an amazing event, an awesome restaurant, a quirky studio with the best views in London, rock-solid team of professional advisors – yet no kickass photos and videos to showcase them to the world and attract new customers.
As a serial entrepreneur, I had this same problem and I thought: “Enough is enough”.
That’s how Splento came about in 2015 and why we exist: to help great businesses stand out with professional visual content.
Splento is an Amazon-like hybrid marketplace that controls the entire process from start to finish. From how you make your booking, to customer support, to photo editing, delivery and storage. Splento carefully interviews, vets and tests every single one to make sure our quality is consistent throughout.
As the saying goes: “A photo is worth a 1,000 words”. At Splento we believe a great photo is worth a £1,000. Because it will bring you many times over in new business.
Our private clients continue raving about how we help them capture their splendid moments and our business customers cannot get enough of the professional photos and videos we create for them that help them sell more tickets for their events, more products and services online, more properties to buyers and renters.
Over the past three years Splento has grown from a couple of guys in a garage to a well-oiled high performing machine. Our turnover and number of orders keeps growing: three times year on year in 2016-2017 and we’ve been growing 30% month-on-month since January. Last year we serviced clients in 23 countries around the world. From small mom and pop shops to large corporates like Investec, Facebook and even the British Royal Family with their famous Pitch@Palace event.
Whenever and wherever you are – if you need professional visual content, Splento can deliver it for you faster, more reliably and with consistent quality.
Naturally, this growth came about from trial and error, terabytes of auidobooks, courses, seminars and webinars, thousands of meeting with very smart people and accompanied by hundreds of mistakes and an equal number of successful learnings – both for me personally and for Splento.
In a series of posts in the coming months and perhaps years, I’ll share many of those learnings with you, so when you come to build a company or find that you some inspiration or extra oomph – you have one additional resource to turn to.
P.S. Why Beyond the Wall? It’s all to do with my love for running marathons, but we’ll come back to it a bit later.
Contact Splento if you are in need of:
Event Photography and Videography
eCommerce Photography and Videography
Looking for stunning photos? Find a trusted photographer near me and book your session today!