How to Market Yourself as a Real Estate Photographer
- Composition Tips for Photographing Real Estate Interiors
- Real Estate Photography Tips for Consistently Great Photos
- Real Estate Photography Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make
- How to Get Started in Real Estate Photography
Photo by Joshua Case on Unsplash
Real estate photography is a profession that is becoming increasingly popular, and that means more competition for jobs.
That being the case, you’ll need to work harder than ever to differentiate yourself from the crowd and draw customers to you.
The question is, how does one do that?
I’ve put together a short list of marketing tips for real estate photographers that will help you find your niche.
Marketing Starts With a Quality Product
photo by hikesterson via iStock
Clearly, the first step in marketing yourself as a real estate photographer is to produce a quality product.
This means putting forth the time and effort to plan each photoshoot, ensuring that the property has been staged appropriately, and that you adhere to common-sense composition rules to create the best photos.
But as I explain in this article, one of the most common ways that real estate photos go awry is due to complicated lighting - a dynamic range that’s too great for the camera to accommodate in one photograph. This situation results from a dark interior and bright windows.
You can’t very well provide clients with photos in which the room is well-exposed and the view out of the windows is overexposed, nor can you give them images in which the windows are well-exposed and the room is underexposed.
The solution is to bracket your exposures and merge them together to get a final composite image that’s well-exposed throughout, without expensive lighting equipment.
If you’re not familiar with the process of bracketing exposures, consult the video above. It’s a simple process that will have a profound, positive impact on the photos you create.
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Market Yourself Using Your Name
photo by Rawpixel via iStock
As noted in the introduction, you need to find ways to stand out from the crowd, and one of the best ways you can do that is to market yourself using your name instead of a business name.
For starters, doing so gives you immediate uniqueness. After all, there’s only one of you!
Secondly, using your real name in your marketing activities instantly makes you more authentic to potential clients. Would you be more drawn to Kevin Jones to be your real estate photographer or KJ Photography Enterprises?
In that regard, using your real name gives potential clients something concrete on which to latch - they can put a name to the face, so to speak. That’s simply not possible when you’ve marketed yourself with an abstract moniker.
photo by Panuwat Dangsungnoen via iStock
A third factor that makes using your own name for marketing a good strategy is that it’s often easier for people to remember - and that’s a good thing!
Word of mouth is one of the very best types of marketing for photographers, so having an easy-to-remember name will help facilitate the spread of positive reviews from satisfied clients to potential customers.
Now, there are exceptions to the rule - if your last name is very long or difficult to spell, for example, you might shorten it to just your last initial. But by and large, your marketing will be much more successful if you use your own first and last name.
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Take a Multi-Modal Approach
photo by izusek via iStock
An effective marketing strategy is one that endeavors to find clients via a variety of methods.
That is, you can’t expect your business to grow to its potential if all you do is take out targeted Facebook ads.
Don’t get me wrong - targeted ads on Facebook are certainly a wise investment. But not every client that might need your services is on Facebook.
Your best bet is to spread your marketing out over various mediums: use social media, set face-to-face appointments with local real estate agents, and place an ad in a real estate magazine.
Photo by Georgia de Lotz on Unsplash
Better still, it’s advantageous to use platforms where you can share your work and demonstrate your expertise in this field.
For example, Instagram is an excellent marketing tool because you can share the photos you’ve taken of properties. It doesn’t get much better than putting your work out there in a place where millions of people are hanging out…
Likewise, having a YouTube channel is virtually a must these days.
Not only does it afford you the ability to share your expertise with behind-the-scenes videos, tutorials, and the like, but YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world second only to Google. If people are looking for a real estate photographer, you certainly want to be taking advantage of those searches by having a high-quality YouTube channel.
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Use Your Prices as a Marketing Chip
photo by porcorex via iStock
Some photographers think that if they market themselves as a “bargain” that it will bring more customers their way.
But experience tells us that this is not always the case.
The problem with promoting yourself as an inexpensive option for real estate photography services is that people begin to associate your photos, products, and services as being cheap.
“Cheap” is not something you want people to think of when they see your work!
photo by Jirapong Manustrong via iStock
If you offer high-quality services to your clients and have built trust with the buying public by marketing yourself in an authentic manner across a variety of mediums, then your prices need to reflect that.
This isn’t to say that you should crank up your prices to be exorbitantly high, but they should be indicative of the quality of the products you create, the attention to detail, and the dedication to customer service you bring to the table.
After all, just like any other type of photography, real estate photography is about evoking emotions and making people experience something when they see your photos. It’s also about real, tangible results - do properties sell faster when you’ve photographed them or not?
If you have a demonstrated ability to make properties shine and help get them sold faster, then by all means, your prices should represent that accordingly!
