4 Surefire Photography Marketing Tips
- Upgrade Your Website for Photography Marketing
- Create a Google Business Profile and Update Regularly
- Network with Other Businesses for Photography Marketing
- Use Fulfillment Services to Simplify Workflow
- Leverage Social Media Judiciously
- How to Sell Photo Prints
- How to Impress Your Photography Clients
- How to Grow Your Photography Business
Photo by PixelsEffect via iStock
Photography marketing can have us running around like Chicken Little, doing a ton of work without getting much real benefit. On the flip side, marketing photography businesses can be very fruitful and fit in seamlessly with the other aspects of running our photography business.
Here are some surefire photography marketing tips that you can implement right away, and that won't make you feel like you’re just spinning your wheels.
Table of Contents:
Upgrade Your Website for Photography Marketing
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A great website is a superb photography marketing tool and stays working for you all the time and virtually anywhere. Like many of us, you probably set up a website early on in your professional photography career. How well is it working?
It may be time to upgrade your website to help you out in your photography marketing efforts. When shopping or researching online, nothing puts me off faster than a hard-to-navigate, confusing, or amateur-looking website.
Sometimes, it makes good sense to hire someone to remake our website. There are many tools that can be incorporated into a website that helps it be easier to navigate and present your brand in a way that creates a good lasting impression. Just like we are great with the tools of photography, a web designer is great with their tools.
The specifics of what should go into your website for photography marketing will be determined by what type of photography you do. A wedding photographer booking dates will have different web page needs than a nature photographer selling fine art images. If we engage in multiple genres of professional photography, it may be good to have more than one website.
Create a Google Business Profile and Update Regularly
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Formerly Google My Business and Google Places, few marketing aids have as much visibility as having a Google Business Profile. Everyone knows to go to Google when they are researching for services or products. A photographer without a Google Business Profile is unlikely to be found in a Google search.
According to some recent surveys, about half of people searching for a photography business want to do business locally. Google Business Profiles can be linked to your website and also show a physical location. Even if you’re not running a photography business that relies on a studio or physical gallery, providing a local address will help some decide to call you and not someone far away.
Interacting with reviews that clients leave increases the likelihood of being found early in a Google search. Posting new photographs and new stories will also work better for your photography marketing than making a profile and never going back to it.
Network with Other Businesses for Photography Marketing
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Networking with other businesses related to yours is an idea that has been proven effective over and over for all types of businesses and will work to boost your photography marketing effectiveness.
The general idea is to think of other businesses that are related to what you do as a photographer. A portrait artist or wedding photographer could team up with a florist or a beauty salon to cross-promote with each other. A real estate photographer could team up with a realtor (duh) or a remodeling contractor. And so on.
Offer the customer a deal, but to access it, they have to be at the other business, and do vice versa for the other business. The specifics of the deals offered and how each business will benefit will need to be worked out according to your specifics, but networking is a wonderfully effective photography marketing tool.
Use Fulfillment Services to Simplify Workflow
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Some photographic genres like portraits and event photography seem to be more in tune with this idea, but it can work for virtually all types of photography businesses. The idea is centered around having someone else print your physical enlargements for your clients and send those prints directly to them.
Some people call this drop shipping, but it’s a very useful tool for photography marketing by whatever name it’s called. It’s a photography marketing idea in that you can often get greatly discounted pricing from the printer, and your client doesn’t have to make any extra trips to meet you in order to get them.
A white label service from Artbeat Studios is a service I use for many of my portrait clients. Not only is Artbeat Studios one of my favorite printers for their superb prints and excellent customer service, this white label service is made for anyone doing photography marketing.
“White label” means that there is nothing about their brand on the packaging. So, instead of receiving a package from a printer with their name all over it, your client simply receives beautiful prints.
There isn’t even a branded invoice, and the return address is a FedEx dropbox, so reverse searches won’t show Artbeat Studios. All of that put together makes White Label service an excellent tool for your own photography marketing.
I’ve purchased many prints from Artbeat Studios over the years for my personal collection, and each time, I’ve been blown away by the quality of the print. That matters when you use a company for a dropship white label service. You need to know that the product your clients receive is of the very best quality.
Think of a print that you send to a client as your own mini billboard. It will hang in their home, their friends and family will see it, and if it’s a beautifully-made print like those you get from Artbeat Studios, all those people will ask, “Hey, where’d you get that?” Word-of-mouth advertising is among the most powerful types of marketing. And with a white label option like this from Artbeat Studios, you can tap into the power of word of mouth!
Bonus Photography Marketing Tip: Leverage Social Media Judiciously
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My bonus fifth photography marketing tip is to use social media the right way. You might see “amazing but true” stories of how greatly your business can grow if you just had the right social media posts.
The truth of the matter is that we can end up wasting a lot of time and causing ourselves stress by overworking our social media. While having a branded social media presence is good photography marketing, the very nature of social media seems to encourage trying too hard.
Regularly update your social media accounts, interact with people regularly on it, and then leave the stress of having a perfect social experience behind on your smartphone. I find that social media worries are my biggest Chicken Little problem when I’m concerned with engaging in photography marketing for my photography business.
Marketing photography businesses effectively is all about balance and spreading it out concerning our efforts. Follow these four tips and my one bonus tip for photography marketing, and you should soon be seeing some positive results.
