Photography Tips And Techniques

Photography Marketing

or in other words…

Getting more work by telling the right people about yourself

Here’s a list of my favourite strategies. It just so happens that most of them are really cheap at the same time. You don’t need a massive budget to get the bookings coming in.

Look after your clients and they'll return the favour

1. Word of mouth referrals from your clients

How?

Be AMAZING at what you do. Great photos, absolutely, but what I’m really talking about is the overall experience you give your clients.

If you make sure that every single element of the service you provide is designed with your client at the centre, that you really look after them and treat them with respect, they will be falling over themselves to tell friends, family and work colleagues about you. You can set up a formal referral programme with incentives – print or future booking fee credits for example – but even without that, they’ll be more than willing to find you work.

The thanks you cards I get from wedding and portrait clients mention the photos of course but what they often focus on is what a great time they had, and how much I helped make the day so special for them.

3 quick ideas:

Exceed expectations – delivering ahead of schedule is one of the easiest ways to do this (not too early though, you don’t want your clients to think it was a rush job).
If you’ve got a problem with some aspect of the service, tell the client as soon as you can, have a solution ready for them, and some form of compensation too (which doesn’t necessarily have to be financial). Despite the fact you’ve messed up, this can engender an incredible amount of trust and repeat business.
Keep good notes about your clients, in terms of the business relationship but also their personal circumstances. If a family portrait client rings with a query on their upcoming shoot, having all the arrangements at hand, plus everybody’s names and ages and little foibles comes across really well.

2. Keep your existing clients

As far as photography marketing ideas go, this one can easily get forgotten. The first point was all about getting new clients, but better still, keep the ones you’ve got. If your photography and customer service are out of this world, commercial clients will keep coming back, families will be after more shots of their children as they grow up, and little ones will arrive for the married couple, so enquiries for baby portrait shoots won’t be far away.

Keep your business to the forefront of your clients mind:

If you are a wedding photographer, you really should know the date of your client’s wedding anniversary. Send them a card when it comes around offering other services like a family portrait or baby shoot.
Set up a newsletter service to keep old clients informed of your latest projects and services on offer.
Keep your blog or website updated with lots of fresh and new content so people want to come back and check in on what’s new.

3. Link up with other photographers

They aren’t the enemy. Here’s why:

Send referrals to your direct competitors when you’re booked and they will do the same for you.
Received an enquiry for a type of photography you don’t do? Pass it on to the right guy and agree the same in return.
Grab the opportunity for personal and professional development. Share the latest news, be a sounding board for each other, practice skills and techniques together, go out for a drink and wind down/let off steam.

You can end up quite isolated as a photographer if you’re not careful, but the solution is right here.

4. Sort your website out

A beautifully designed website is an absolute must for anyone in a creative industry like photography, especially so if you don’t have a studio. It is your shop window, where you can showcase your best work with global reach.

Expensive? It doesn’t have to be. There are some excellent photography template websites out there that are breathtakingly cheap to set up and maintain, they look great, and it is super easy to customize them around your brand and content.

Here are a couple of my favourite photography website companies you might want to check out:

Big Folio

AND

PhotoBiz

You want to be able to direct prospective clients to a great website, but you also want to get found by people browsing through the search engines, normally Google. There are lots of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques you might want to employ, but one of the key components is to have lots of good quality content on your site and to keep it regularly updated.

You can do this on your main site, or set up a blog separately that links to your main site. Tell the world what work you’ve been doing, what awards you’ve won, but how about providing advice and tips to other photographers or your clients as well. If the quality is really good, people will start linking to you as a resource and Google will love it, meaning your rankings in the search engines will improve too.

5. Free Advertising

Rather than pay the crazy fees for advertising in magazines and other media, create a buzz around your business that makes them want to run features on you, at not charge to you.

Spot a newspaper article about a bride and groom who had a nightmare wedding photography experience, offer to do a complementary shoot, and that paper will definitely pick the story up.
Sponsor a giveaway or competition.
Help out at a charity event, shoot the PR, or offer gift certificates for the auction.
Spend a bit of time shooting a project you’re interested in, and one that is newsworthy too.
Do a sponsored ‘something’ or some other kind of challenge. See if you can photograph 1000 smiles in one day, or take a street portrait of as many nationalities as you can in your capital city. Get the lot and I’ll bet a newspaper would pick it up. Would make a fascinating photobook too.

Follow everything up with press releases to the media, your mailing lists and post it on your website or blog. For maximum exposure, tell the national press too if the story is strong enough.

6. Amazing Photographs

Having amazing photos is going to support each and every marketing strategy you go for. Here are some good ways to up the quality:

Check out all the very best publications in your field for ideas and use these as inspiration in your own work.
Go find a model, the right outfits, location, source make-up and hair suppliers and get set up some shots. All this effort for one stunning image is well worth it if you come away with a flagship piece of marketing material.
A great one for wedding photography marketing – offer to set up a marketing shoot with a wedding venue and use this as your setting. They get great photos for their literature, you get time to set up some fabulous shots outside of an actual busy wedding day, and in all likelihood the venue will add you to their preferred supplier list at the same time.
Heard on the grapevine about a great event coming up? Offer to shoot for free to get access and add some stand out images to your portfolio.
Practice like mad. Set up the kind of scenarios you are going to face on a client shoot, and perfect your skills.

7. Check your results!

Keep records of where all your bookings are coming from. You can then refine your photography marketing plan over time, putting more resources in to the successful strategies and pulling out of what fails.

A marketing plan doesn’t have to be a long and convoluted, something which takes a lot of time to put together in itself. But notes on what you’re going to focus on and when, and allotting regular time in your schedule will makes sure you don’t let this important aspect of your business slide.

Good luck, and if you’ve got any queries or ideas of what’s worked for you, please leave a comment below. All the best, Stefan

A quick article describing some of the main options for wedding DVD cases on the market at the moment – which come out on top for me, which I would definitely try to avoid, and how you can use this product to stand out from the crowd and really impress clients without too much expense.

DVD Cases By Queensberry

I’m a photographer, so I’m really writing this article from that perspective, although a videographer is clearly going to be using this product too. For me, I’m after something to allow me to beautifully present a CD or DVD of images, on its own something not necessarily that interesting to look at.

What’s Out There To Choose From?

Standard plastic DVD cases

Just like going down the video store for a movie. Oh dear, not very impressive. You can buy inserts (normally called a wedding DVD case template) pre-designed or to for you to print the wedding details on. You can also get hold of photographic paper inserts, so you can use a laser or inkjet printer to include a photo, with text overlaid in Photoshop. They come with 1, 2 or more slots for as many DVDs as you need. But however well you print the cover, I cannot see it ever being able to WOW your clients.

Purpose built wedding DVD presentation cases

There are a massive range of suppliers out there offering all manner of wedding DVD case options, often with embossing or other caligraphy, in every conceivable material from leather to metal to fabric to vinyl. The text is often on the tacky side though, as are the styles that are available. Perhaps one or two ok products hidden away but let me know if you can find them – I’ve had no luck over the years.

Pre-printed DVDs

Supplement the case with a printed disc that comes with a standard phrase like ‘Our Wedding Memories’ or go for a service that will print specifics of a wedding on it or get a printer to do it yourself. The text on the former option leaves something to be desired, the latter can be quite expensive and time consuming.

Photo apertures

Some products allow for this, either embedded in the cover of the case or on the inside, normally a single aperture for a pic of the happy couple.

USB and memory card cases

Just came across these as options too. Bit techie though, not very personal. And harder to add your brand, and pretty much impossible to showcase any images. That said, it’s a very easy way to store and access your files, so I’m sure this option will become more popular over time.

Bespoke case from an album company

My favorite, no question.

DVD wedding cases produced by a good album company look awesome. It makes all the difference, providing you go with a good company, see my suggestions at the bottom. Here’s why:

A successful well respected album company moves with the times, so there’s less onus on you to make sure your product doesn’t all of a sudden look dated. They tend to update their designs fairly regularly.
The case design often reflects an album design, partly because they are using some of the same materials and binding techniques. This is great because it blends much better in to your other main products…your albums.
Better still, some of the album companies offer options on cover and internal matts, so you can reflect your brand style and colour.
Even better, if you’re using that company for your albums anyway, you can make sure the style mirrors your other products perfectly.
Even if you don’t go down that route completely, many of the designs are very neutral, very stylish, so shouldn’t clash anyway.
Many of them allow for one or two apertures to slot in images. I think this is well worth the effort. It’s the perfect chance to showcase your work, and create something that is unique to your clients. A photo of them together can work, but if you’ve got two small apertures, try using some detail shots, say the groom’s button hole and the bride’s flowers, or a portrait of each of them separately. Really nice touch and a little different.
The cost isn’t going to hit you where it hurts. You will definitely pay a little bit more than for a plastic alternative, but not necessarily more than some of the other suppliers out there, and as an overall % of the profit from the wedding, it’s virtually insignificant. The impact, on the other hand, is much greater.

Album Companies That Offer DVD Cases or CD Folios (same thing)

Take a look at these three. They all offer really nicely designed cases:
Queensberry

This is who I use – lovely quality, and they come with the 2 small apertures on the inside that I mentioned. I also have a branded disc in a single color tone that doesn’t detract from the images. You can order single and double disc cases. I’m in the UK, Queensberry is based in New Zealand, but shipping is free providing you order a few. You can also buy velvet bags to put them in if you want to go one step further.

The cases really do look great and the comments I get when I hand a sample to a potential client back that up.

Albums Australia

Called the CD folio, also allows you to include a photograph. For full pricing as with I think all 3 of these companies, you’ll need to give them a ring or email for details.

Jorgensen

Loads of options last time I looked, single and double, deluxe and standard cases with mats, photo cover cases and a DVD mini album.

Anyway, that’s about it. Please let me know if you have any questions, or know of any other options that work even better.

All the best, Stefan

Photography Marketing Ideas – 7 Of My Favourites And Super Cheap Too