How to get clients for photography is every is the burning question, every photographer’s dream is to have a steady stream of clients who value their artistic vision and are happy to pay top dollars for their services. When clients know you are worth your high prices, you don’t have to worry about making ends meet and paying your bills.
You get the freedom to shoot the kind of photographs that you love rather than taking any job you can get. Also, your artistic vision is trusted by clients, so you can deliver the best services without having unhappy clients.
If you are not getting enough clients, there are specific things you can do to get more clients to love your work and hire you for their photography work. In this article, we will examine some of the most effective ways to get more clients and build the business of your dreams.
Social Media Strategy For Photographers
Social media marketing is on the rise, and it is not showing any sign of slowing down soon. For many photographers, building a meaningful social media presence can be quite tricky, especially with those who have more real-life networks. Although there is a learning curve, social media, however, remains one of the most effective ways for photographers to build their personal brand, and many photographers leverage the power of their massive global audience to build successful photography business models. Here are some strategies that will guide you in developing real social media connections while avoiding some pitfalls and mistakes along the way.
1.Interact and Engage
To develop a significant social media presence, it is a must to interact and engage your prospects. You will have trouble building useful networks if you don’t get to interact with and know your virtual friends and followers. Social media is a two-way street. To have your work to be taken up by your audience, you need to care about them. You can foster interactions by asking questions that draw responses.
Social media can get pretty lonely if you are only sharing nothing but photos and links and not interacting with your social media connections. However, if you start engaging with social relationships, you’ll find that they interact more with you and are willing to share more of what you post.
1.Post Frequently Throughout the Day
When you post frequently, you keep your name and work on top of people’s minds. Once-daily posting is ideal for social networks. An average Twitter or Instagram user follows many accounts, so if you are not posting regularly, you may get lost in that sea of information.
Time your posts properly because if you share your posts when most people are sleeping or driving to work, it could be pushed down their timelines and may never get noticed.
1.Post Interesting Stuff
Eye-grabbing descriptions can catch people’s attention. If you are more into posting interesting links, content, and photos, people will likely interact with you more. A good idea is to post a variety of content, instead of focusing mainly just on links, texts, or only photos.
As you are looking to build an audience, find workshop participants, or share your photos with people who might be interested in them. When you take the time and effort to distinguish your social media presence as one who is more than just a sum of their photos, you are sure to get more traction, and the customers will follow.
1. Do Not Spam
Spamming is never cool. A standard behavior on social media is for people to post spammy words of compliment like “nice,” “great,” “cool,” on pictures hoping to get a compliment in return, and possibly people coming to view their work as well. Shallow interactions make it impossible for you to build meaningful interactions with people.
Do not spam with automated messages as well as this can be pretty generic and annoying. For example, when a Twitter user follows you, then an obnoxious spammy message saying, “thanks for following me. Please visit my website and follow my Facebook page”, they will not be interested in you or your service. If you take the time to make real connections on social media, your friends are more likely to visit your website and also check out some of your works and share them with other followers.
1. Use Multiple Social Networks
Many photographers ask questions about which social network they should be on. The truth is that the more social networks and more essential connections you can make, the better. Some times It can be challenging to find the time to develop relationships and post content on multiple networks, but if you create a suitable schedule for yourself, you can manage it.
Rather than posting at random times to social media, set up a schedule for each day for social media work. You can focus on some networks on some days than others and turn to the others on certain days. But with a schedule, you will be able to stay on top of things.
Content Marketing For Photographers
Traditional ways of pushing products and services at people have grown less effective over time. With the coming of websites, blogs, and social media, customers now have more power, and shoppers have become researchers and reviewers looking for recommendations, advice, and interactions.
The marketing world revolves around content marketing and regularly creating valuable and relevant content that doesn’t feel like a sales pitch but resonates with your niche audience is vital to building trust and respect of your target audience.
A great way to go about content marketing for your photography business is to create content that relates to your niche audience but is not directly about your business. For example, a parent is looking for a children’s photographer, and you can efficiently market yourself to them if you write content on something that they might search on like ‘how to dress a child for a photo shoot.’ A helpful article detailing how to dress a child for a full or portrait session while adding photos from your previous sessions is a great way to build organic leads.
This not only works for child photography but can also work for other kinds of photography like wedding photography. A wedding photographer can write on great places in the local area to hold a wedding or how to make the day go smoothly.
When it comes to implementing a content marketing strategy for your photography business, there are three essential spaces you’ll want to achieve your strategy through. Through blogging, social media marketing, and email marketing. All of these three work together to produce exceptional results.
Having created a blog or website and published helpful articles that your prospective clients would like, you must ensure your content is seen by as many people as possible, and this is where social media comes in. Social media enables you to direct people to your blog or website to learn more about your service and hire you. Introduce your content to your social media friends with teasers and excerpts of helpful content from around the web and introduce your blog content. No matter what platform you are using, social media or your website, list building for sales should be in effect at all times.
However, chief of these channels is email marketing because it allows you to develop your platform, engage directly with prospects, and to build an audience that you own. The others do this, but email marketing goes further in giving you full control of your audience rather than being at the mercy of social media companies.
The most important thing you might ever do for your photography business is to build your list. In fact, every marketing strategy you’ll implement should come down to creating your very own list of existing customers and new prospects.
Using an email marketing strategy can be used to build intimate relationships with clients because when they grant, you access to their inbox, which shows trust and confidence. An email is the extra conversational tip on all of your content marketing strategies.
How To Get Commercial Photography Clients
Having built a professional photography portfolio and started marketing to clients, you might start considering moving up the ladder to shoot for commercial clients to earn bigger pay, and with all of the marketing resources available, there has never been a better time to market your business to brands and clients all around the world than now. So let us take a look at what you need to do to put your service in front of these people.
⦁Market to a Specific Demography
While you have plenty of skills that you’d like to showcase, it is never a great idea to be a generalist if you want to get noticed by commercial clients. A stronger and more precise way of reaching the right clients is to market a streamlined style of photography. If you want to shoot specific images for commercial clients, then curate your Instagram and other image sharing channels around what you want to shoot. If food is what you want to shoot, then keep at it. If it’s portraits, make that your focus. You can create different accounts for each portfolio so the right clients can find you.
⦁Build a General Commercial Image Portfolio
You have to start shooting commercial photography to show that you can create commercial work. Once your portfolio is reviewed by a company and they see that you can shoot a particular type of work, they will be more likely to hire you. For example, while you may be great at landscape shooting, it doesn’t necessarily portray you as a commercial photographer. Start creating images based on products you own or label-less products to show that you possess the skills to shoot that type of image.
⦁Bring Ideas, Not Just Photos
Many photographers approach commercial clients with lots of stunning photos, but to be ahead in the game, you need to come with ideas alongside the images. You will find out that you are not the only stunning portfolio that has approached them, so you need to stand out with something that matches the brand and shows why you are the right photographer for them. You can come up with an idea for fitting campaigns. This will demonstrate that you understand the brand’s vision and that you are not just another run-of-the-mill photographer looking for quick pay.
Marketing Calendar For Photographers
If you are a photographer who markets him or herself, it would surprise you to know that you are part of a minimal number of photographers out there who do this. Many photographers don’t bother about marketing themselves. This is why you must set a rule for yourself that you will touch up to three clients daily, weekly, or monthly.
You can send an email, call a prospective client, or direct market every other Tuesday, Wednesday or Throughout the week which means by the end of the month, you would have reached a significant number of prospects instead of the typical sending emails once in while which happens once every other month.
Conclusion
Getting clients for your photography can be pretty difficult if you don’t know what to do. You have to engage the right knowledge and strategy to succeed. After going through the exercises in this article, you should start building a list of prospective photography clients ready to pursue.
