Should You Try a Newborn Giveaway to Get Bookings?

The short answer: maybe. But you’re probably asking the wrong question.

Competitions and Giveaways are not new to the photography industry, but in the last year they have been more visible, more debated, and more strategically deployed than ever, especially for Newborn Sessions.

Especially if your bookings are low right now, you might wonder whether you should do it too.

So, from someone who has used them in my studio, and selectively implemented them for certain photographers I coach… do they really work? And if so, should you try?

Marketing Is Not Your Offer

Before you decide anything, it is critical that you keep the following in mind: there is a big difference between your marketing, the strategy you choose to achieve a specific goal, and the tools you use to implement that strategy.

So… what IS marketing?

Think about your business as a house you’ve built.

Your branding it’s how the space looks and feels: the aesthetic, the atmosphere, the experience someone has the moment they walk through the door.

Marketing is the network of paths that lead people to that house. Some paths you build slowly over time, website optimised for search, a consistent social media presence, a reputation that spreads through word of mouth. Others you can construct quickly, like paid ads. The overall goal, however, is the same: to bring the right people to your door.

Your message is the promise your business makes: who you are, your philosophy, who you’re for, and why you’re the right choice. This message moves through every path you build, every post you write, every ad you run.

Here’s what that means in practice.

You can have the most beautiful house on the street, but if no paths lead to it, no one arrives. And you can build dozens of paths (run ads, post every day, give sessions away for free) but if the house at the end of them is not strong and “ready to be found”, people won’t stay, won’t buy, and won’t come back.

This foundation always comes first: marketing is the environment your strategies operate inside.

If your marketing foundation is weak or unclear, no strategy will fix it. A giveaway built on a shaky foundation doesn’t attract better clients. It just attracts more of the wrong ones, faster. And it amplifies the gap between visibility and profitability.

A Giveaway Is a Strategy: Not a Solution

A strategy is a deliberate move made to reach a specific business goal. A giveaway, a free session, an offer… these are all strategies. They are not inherently good or bad.

What matters is whether they’re the right move for your business, right now.

That question can only be answered by looking at your actual numbers and circumstances, and this exactly how I choose strategies for my new clients:

1. I look at their financial situation: how quickly do they need their business to “grow” (or more accurately, how quickly do they need revenue to increase?)
   How much can they invest in their marketing?
   How saturated is their local market?
   
2. Once that is established, I simply pick from my “marketing toolbox” the strategies I know have the highest chances to take us to the results they want, with the time and budget we have.

This also means that the same studio might need different strategies at different times: a single mum with 2 children will have different needs than a photographer working part-time, someone with a healthy-looking diary can afford different strategies than someone who has barely been shooting in the last few months.

In other words, your strategies should always be a calculated response to specific business conditions. They are tactical decisions, not identity statements.

If your studio is stable and building long-term brand equity, constant offers quietly erode your positioning. If you’re in an early growth phase or facing a real cash flow crunch, a more aggressive strategy might be exactly right, as long as you go in clear-eyed about the risks and you enter it with an exit plan.

Newborn Giveaways: The Risk Nobody Talks About

Free sessions are not actually free. They cost you time, energy, opportunity, and a portion of your perceived value every time you run them.

They only pay off when three things are true: your in-person sales process is strong, your pricing structure is built to absorb the front-end cost, and your marketing already supports a level of perceived value that survives the offer. Remove one of those, and the model becomes fragile.

There’s also a market dynamics problem worth understanding. Aggressive strategies work best when they’re uncommon.

The moment multiple studios in the same area are all running free newborn sessions, heavily automated, the differentiation disappears. Clients start comparing. And comparison almost always comes down to price… which is precisely the race to the bottom you were trying to avoid.

Ps: If you want to know more about the consequences of “being too similar” to others, read my article “When Every Photographer Sounds The Same, Price Wins”

Advertising Is Just the Amplifier

One more distinction that trips photographers up: advertising is not marketing, and it’s not strategy. It’s a tool, a vehicle for delivering your marketing to more people, faster.

Facebook ads, Instagram, SEO, email campaigns: they amplify whatever already exists.

If your foundation is strong, advertising accelerates growth. If your foundation is weak, advertising accelerates confusion. This is also why copying someone else’s ad campaign or offer might not be as simple as you think (if it was, we could just do that and enjoy the financial rewards). Tools scale structure. They don’t replace it.

This is even more true for competitions and giveaways.

Take two photographers in different areas, running giveaways exactly the same way, except… one is located just 5 miles away from a couple of big studios known for their “Win A Session” strategies.

These studios are well established, invest heavily on ads for free sessions, and… have also created in the local market the impression that “you’re then forced to spend thousands to get your images.”

The other photographer, instead, lives in a more remote area – with limited competition.

Do you think our two photographers will experience the same results? Same strategy. Same tool. Completely different marketing environment.

One Last Point Of Reflection

Want the proof of the importance of understanding the distinction between marketing and a marketing strategy?

Let’s assume your studio has been running competitions successfully for years, so much that you rely almost entirely on them.

All of a sudden, two of your competitors decide to go down the same route, maybe with lower prices, maybe with significantly higher advertising budgets.

If your overall marketing is strong, you will be able to pivot your strategies fast, and compensate for the possible reduction in leads and enquiries.

But if all you’ve ever known are free sessions, the story might be different, because you haven’t built depth… you’ve built dependency.

The Question Worth Actually Asking

Instead of “are free sessions working?” ask this: given my financial position, my local competition, my urgency, and my long-term goals, is this the right strategy for my business right now?

That question puts you back in the driver’s seat. Marketing decisions made by watching what others are doing will always keep you one step behind. Decisions made from a clear understanding of your own business keep you in control.

Build the foundation first. Choose strategy second. Use advertising to accelerate it.

In that order, the market doesn’t dictate your moves, you do.