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Inspiring Photographers

How Photographers Can Create A Well-Rounded Marketing Plan

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The internet has done great things to help us market ourselves as photographers, and social media in specific has made it possible for us to reach a large audience even easier. It is a double-edged sword though. While it's true that you can reach more people now, the same is true for everyone else. The social media space has become very crowded and the perceived barriers to entry in becoming a “photographer” have gone down significantly because of this.

Standing Out In Your Market by Bryan Caporicci

Standing Out

How do you stand out marketing yourself as a photographer online, then? Well, that is a whole other discussion, but I would suggest that a good place to start is to go “back to the basics” and adapt an offline component to your marketing strategy. Let's quickly recall a few of the online marketing strategies that we use today, along with a few buzzwords that have become commonplace:

  • Social media
  • Social networking
  • Engagement on Facebook
  • Content marketing on our blogs
  • RT's and @ mentions of other businesses on Twitter

What would it look like if we stripped away the “online” component to these terms and strategies?

  • Social media
  • Social networking
  • Engagement on Facebook
  • Content marketing on our blogs
  • RT's and @ mentions of other businesses on Twitter

We're left with media, networking, engagement, content marketing and relationship building. It's no surprise that these are the foundations of “traditional” business marketing, and we've just adapted them to social media and the internet. A lot of the time, though, we've forgotten about the roots of where they came from. Let's explore.

  • Media is defined as the main means of mass communication (television, radio, newspapers).
  • Networking means to interact with other people to exchange information and develop contacts, especially to further one's career.
  • Engagement is a marketing strategy that directly engages consumers and invites and encourages them to participate in the evolution of a brand.
  • Content marketing is defined as providing consistent, high-quality content that solves people's problems.
  • Relationship building is a marketing strategy that recognizes the long-term value of relationships and extends communication beyond intrusive advertising and sales promotional messages.

The Foundations of Marketing

Using these marketing foundations as a starting point, I would suggest the following 5 ways that you can use the basics of business marketing to increase your local awareness offline and ultimately get more business: speaking, networking, press, co-marketing and direct-mail.

I am a big believer in the idea of being specific, giving examples and taking action on what we learn. All articles that I write for my educational website Sprouting Photographer ends with an “action item” that gives a specific point of follow-up. For this article, I'd like to give 18 examples of how you can put into play each of these 5 marketing basics right away.

Marketing For Photographers

Speaking

  • Give a presentation to a local business clubs re: business portraits.
  • Give a presentation to the local Rotary Club about what you do as a photographer.
  • Present to a Mom group re: family and child portraits.
  • Put on a workshop to teach the basics of photography at the library.

Networking

  • Seek out local business associations such as the Chamber of Commerce or a local BIA and become a regular attendee to the networking meetings. Focus on building relationships and not just handing out business cards.
  • Personally reach out to local business owners and connect one-on-one. See how you can help each other.
  • Attend local niche trade shows and network with the organizers, sponsors and businesses. If you specialize in family portraits for example, a “home show” would likely have many businesses that serve a similar market as you do. This would be a great networking opportunity.

Press

  • Donate to a cause and attach your name to a newsworthy event/charity.
  • Volunteer your time locally.
  • Offer help to the local media – maybe they need photographs, or perhaps they'd like your opinion on a photograph-related topic.
  • Send press releases once you've built an established relationship with the local paper.
  • Offer to write a column in the paper.

Co-Marketing

  • Offer to decorate local businesses with wall portraits and wall art. Display your business card with it.
  • Run a promotion with a local business that has a similar audience as yours. You can share each in each other's customer base.
  • Exchange a stack of business cards with local like-minded business owners and offer to help market each other.
  • Offer a local business a few gift certificates to give their top-tier clients as a gift from them.

Direct-Mail Postcard Mailings

  • Come up with a specific, time-sensitive offer and mail it to 10,000 homes in the area via a post-card drop.
  • Repetition is key – plan to do one per month for at least 6 months.

Creating a well-rounded marketing plan is crucial for long-term success as a photographer. We need to include online and offline marketing strategies to ensure that we are in front of as many prospective clients as possible. The ultimate testimony to a consistent offline local marketing initiative is when your clients start telling you that they “see you everywhere” – that is a well-executed branding and awareness campaign!

3 Important Tips For Photographers To Choose The Right Social Media Channel

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This is Aaron Hockley's third guest blog post. Aaron is a professional photographer and writer who tweets too much and blogs a few times each week. His professional work finds him working with businesses for events, publicity, and editorial work; he also creates abstract and travel photos for leisure. In addition to photography for clients Aaron often works with other photographers to help them understand and refine their online and social media presence. Read Aaron's first blog post here. And, his second post here.

How's your social media life today?

Have you Tweeted? Pinned? Instagrammed?

What about LinkedIn? Facebook? Flickr?

Feeling overwhelmed? You're not alone. There are a lot of social networks and social media outlets that compete for our time as photographers. One could probably easily fill an eight-hour workday with nothing but online social media activities. That wouldn't leave time for actually making or editing any photos!

Post-Storm Fort | Aaron Hockley

How do you decide where to spend your effort with social networking? I think you can make those decisions based on three factors, and one of them is a bit of a cheat.

1) Where Are Your Clients (or Fans)?

When we look at social media marketing or social networking from the aspect of trying to grow one's photography business, the online world is no different than the offline world. If you're engaged in offline advertising, mailers, networking, or other marketing efforts, you're (hopefully) targeting your audience. If you're trying to sell your senior portrait services, you're targeting high school juniors and seniors rather than sending a mass-mailer to everyone in your city. The same principles should apply online.

Identify your ideal clients. We already mentioned high school seniors if that's what you do. If you photograph weddings, you're looking for brides and can make some generalizations about their age and, depending on your positioning, income levels. How many wedding planning boards are there on Pinterest? Thousands? Millions? If I shot weddings I'd be all over that. Do you make fine art landscape images? Odds are that you know something about your typical buyer. If you're a commercial shooter, you probably want to connect with marketing folks, agencies, art directors, and the like.

Figure out where those clients live online. For high school seniors, right now the buzz is that Twitter and Instagram are the most popular networks. Corporate types are found on LinkedIn and increasingly on Twitter. If you want to find brides, Facebook is a good place to be and to connect with others in that segment. I'm seeing a fair amount of discussion on Google+ that involves folks willing to buy fine art prints and books.

2) Where Are Industry Connections?

Building relationships with clients (both existing and potential) is one aspect of social networking, but the other big area that can benefit photographers is connecting with industry professionals. Developing connections with other photographers, manufacturers of photo equipment, and vendor partners can have various benefits to your photography. In some cases, “it's who you know” can lead to referrals. Perhaps getting to know other industry folks can lead to publicity or an “in” with a gear manufacturer. Maybe you just want to bounce ideas or problems off of someone who has been in a similar situation.

Right now, I'm making the most connections with other photographers and industry folks on Google+.

The Atrium Transport | Aaron Hockley

3) Do You Just Want to Have Fun?

If your purpose in social networking is purely to have fun, then heck, do whatever you want … but don't complain that you're not getting business results if you're not making social media choices based on business criteria.

Lowering the spout | Aaron Hockley

So … Where Do You Go?

There's not a single right answer. I've given you some ideas above, but ultimately you need to look at your business and figure out what makes sense for you. You don't have to be everywhere, on every social media channel. You can't be everywhere. It's okay to ignore a social network that isn't relevant for your business or area of interest. Trying to reach retail photographer customers? They're not likely to book you via LinkedIn. You probably won't pick up a corporate job via your Instagram images. Look at what you do, where you want to be, and where your clients and partners are hanging out. Be there, and don't feel bad about about ignoring other places.