photo by monkeybusinessimages via iStock
If you’re serious about expanding your photography business in 2021 and beyond, then you need to get serious about your photography marketing tools.
Photography marketing tools aren’t necessarily all that different from marketing tools that you would otherwise use for your business, you just need to use them a little differently.
One major problem a lot of photographers face when trying to improve ROI for your business is figuring out whether a tool is worth it before spending a ton of money on it upfront. Unfortunately, a lot of photography marketing tools don’t have free trials, so you could end up wasting a ton of money instead of actually learning how to boost ROI.
To prevent you from falling into this trap, we have pulled together the top photography marketing tools for 2021. All of the photography marketing tools on this list don’t require a bunch of money up front, so you have time to figure out if they will actually work for your business.
Plus, each of the photography marketing tools we’ve chosen offer different tiers if you do choose to purchase them so that you’re only paying for what you need.
Let’s get started.
Google Analytics
Our favorite photography marketing tools are free, just like Google Analytics. If you’ve never worked with Google Analytics before, it is just as simple to use as every other Google product, which is an added bonus.
Google Analytics allows you to understand where your search engine optimization is currently at so that you can slowly improve it over time, but it also allows you to understand how well your pay-per-click campaigns are doing. Plus, since it’s free, there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t have an account set up.
Google Analytics breaks all of this data down into simple charts that track your top traffic sources, your bounce rate, and your conversions, so that you can keep track of your sales.
Of all the photography marketing tools on this list, Google Analytics is the only one that will help you understand whether your website is keeping people engaged or not. And, as a photographer, you know how important it is to have an engaging website.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a little bit more advanced than Google Analytics, and with this advanced performance comes cost.
BuzzSumo is an ROI tracking tool that helps you understand where your business is being talked about online.
BuzzSumo pulls every mention of your business across the internet, but it can also pull information about trending hashtags and keywords so that you can make your website work better for you.
Of all the photography marketing tools on this list, BuzzSumo is the only one that allows you to actively monitor things going on in your industry.
photo by Ivan-balvan via iStock
So, for example, I like to keep up with photography trends by watching videos that a few famous YouTube photographers put out. BuzzSumo can track those videos for me and alert me the moment they come out so I don’t miss anything important. It can do the same thing for specific journalists, influencers and blogs in the photography industry.
Like Google Analytics, BuzzSumo also helps you to track your SEO, but it does so a little differently by tracking backlinks from other websites that have linked to your website.
While this may seem like a tool you wouldn’t need for your business, you’d be surprised how many people I’ve collaborated with just by tracking what other websites are linking to mine.
photo by artiemedvedev via iStock
I’ll give you a recent example. I noticed that a popular event planner in my town created a page on her website that included information about different photographers, caterers, and DJs in our town and she happened to mention me under the photography section. BuzzSumo let me know about it and I reached out by the end of the week letting her know I’d love to give her a kickback for sending her clients my way.
BuzzSumo is built for professional marketers, though, so if you haven’t been trained in marketing, you’ll probably want to search the PhotographyTalk site for some photography marketing tips before doing anything else.
BuzzSumo is available starting at $100/month.
Learn More:
- How to Streamline Your Photography Business
- It’s Time to Use Contactless Payments for Your Photography Business
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is yet another one of my most-loved photography marketing tools. Ahrefs bills itself as an all-in-one SEO toolset, but my favorite part of it is that it offers a 7-day trial for $7.
Ahrefs helps you optimize your website, while keeping an eye on your top competitors and searches that are most popular in your industry.
Ahrefs also allows you to keep track of where you’re ranking in comparison with others in your industry. Ahrefs breaks all of this info down into really easy to use charts. For instance, the moment you set up your account, your website will receive a “health score” that helps you track internal URLs on your site. The software also pinpoints specific SEO problems so that you can immediately get to work on them.
If you get past the first 7-day trial and decide to make the purchase, then you can do so starting at $100.
Podium
I personally believe I’ve saved the best of all of our photography marketing tools for last with Podium.
Podium is definitely a much different tool than the rest of the ones on our list because it doesn’t track website analytics at all, it’s a messaging platform.
So Podium pulls all of your emails, your text messages, your reviews from Facebook, Yelp, and Google, and brings them onto its platform so that you can respond to all of these messages in a timely manner.
Podium also features a built-in invoicing platform that makes invoicing your clients a breeze and has led to me getting paid much quicker than I ever did before because my clients can now pay their invoices via text message.
As a photographer, you know that the quicker you can reply to potential clients, the more likely it is that those clients will work with you, but you also know that replying quickly to clients while you’re working is really stressful. Podium prevents this stress and it prevents human error in the business communication chain.
Plus, Podium offers a free trial so that you don’t have to spend a penny on something that ultimately may not work for your business.
I hope these photography business tips have given you something to think about in terms of things you can do to improve your ROI in 2021 and beyond.
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