For growing a photography business, your skill of clicking high-quality pictures is not sufficient. This is so because there are so many players in the market that any photography business would not sustain without consistent marketing. Taking this into consideration, we have compiled a big yet relevant list of photography marketing ideas that can open new doors for the growth of your business. Without wasting any more minute, let’s start looking at the promotion ideas:
1) Commence With Improving Your Website for More Conversions
Is your photography website not able to convert efficiently? If yes, then you are missing out on something major i.e. a sales-driven optimized website. One of the key metrics to measure a website’s success is the number of leads it is generating relative to the overall number of visitors visiting a particular site. To make the calculations clear, let’s consider your website receives 200 monthly traffic but only 8 of those visitors make a phone call or connect with your photography business, then your website’s conversion rate is just 4%. You must improve your site’s conversion rates for greater profits. Some of those strategies through which you can improve your site’s conversion rate are as follows:
a) A direct option to reserve appointments/services for customers from the website itself.
b) A contact phone number that is strikingly and clearly displayed on the homepage with the best visibility, for example, on the header of your homepage.
c) Website should be optimized for mobile devices to avoid clients from leaving the website because of problems with layout/text size adjustment.
d) Quick loading of the site should be ascertained to prevent users from clicking away to a different website because of loading delay.
e) Testimonials and other achievements like awards, recognition, media coverage need to be showcased to increase assurance and faith in your business.
2) Get Your Business Shown on the Local Display Pack of Google
The “Google Business Profile” [earlier known as “Google My Business” (GMB)] listings are an essential part of search results for most of the local search queries typed by people on Google. When creating this profile for your photography business, it is essential to include complete details like images, business name, location, operating hours, phone number, etc. These results also get displayed on Google Maps apart from the common search results. If your business gains more ratings and citations online, then your local business listing will be shown more times on Google. So you can learn GMB optimization to get the best results or can allow an agency to handle GMB optimization.
3) Rank Within Google Top 10 Results
Most of the leads and traffic, almost 90%, is consumed by those websites that appear on the first 10 results of Google. So if your photography website is not on the first page, it will fail to attract any major organic traffic from Google organic ranking. This necessitates for techniques to get your website into Google’s top ten rankings even more because the journey to the first page is not easy. However, a lot of elements must be addressed in order to achieve such rankings, which is commonly referred to as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). There are numerous free resources available online to help you better understand and implement good SEO practices on your website. Another reliable method to improve SEO performance and get more photography leads is to outsource the entire process to any SEO service provider or digital marketing agency.
4) Start Posting Content Even More
Do you want more visibility of your website on search engines for a wide variety of keywords? Just publish more content in the form of blog posts regularly. It’s as simple as that. The more traffic you get on your website, the better the chances of converting visitors into high-quality potential leads for your business. This makes content marketing so important for any business. Make a list of different keywords and questions that are associated with your photography business followed by writing and publishing 500 to 2000 words of content on these topics. Once you reach a sizeable number of blog posts on your website, you will start getting more search engine traffic to your site after a few months. Just remember consistency is the key, so don’t give up!
5) Buy Ad Slots on Big Networks
A quicker approach to promoting a company/business online is through paid advertisements. Paid advertisements across different channels will provide leads of different quality. When it comes to generating high-quality photography leads from paid advertising networks, Google Ads is the most preferred one followed closely by Facebook Ads. Before beginning paid advertising, you should have enough knowledge of the fundamentals of ad management and ad platforms. Having knowledge of different parameters like choosing target keywords, adjusting bids, A/B testing of ads, selecting the proper demographic, and so on, is required to effectively handle paid advertising. Without effective ad optimization, you may find that your returns from paid advertising are lower than the ad spend. For more efficient ad management, a digital marketing agency can prove worthwhile.
6) Send Out Photography Press Release
Even in this day and age, the vast majority of businesses fail to see the benefits of disseminating information through press releases. A widespread misconception is that the only valid use of press releases is within the realm of making some new announcements. When a firm employs a premium press release syndication service, the press release content gets distributed across hundreds of sites within a few days along with being picked up and published by reputed news organizations like Market Watch, Digital Journal, Associated Press, etc. They are helpful for increasing people’s knowledge of a company, brand building, traffic building, and backlink building for the website of a company.
7) Grow Your Social Network Following
Social media is free to use, has a vast audience, and has the ability to generate numerous leads for any business if utilized the right way. Social media marketing for your photography business will require time and patience to yield results because the initial stage of building a following over social media platforms takes consistent efforts. To make your photography business profile page popular, you will have to share interesting content over a few months along with constantly interacting with people. After some time, your target audience will start trusting your business and you can then gear up your marketing efforts after achieving a decent follower size. Local Facebook groups also provide a great opportunity to mix with people from your region along with marketing your business to members of these groups.
8) Use Popular Figures on Social Media
The new trend of influencer marketing can also be used to advertise your photography business. The process of promoting a business through influencer marketing is very simple. You first have to search and locate all such social media profiles from your region that have amassed a good audience size of a few thousand followers by asking them if they are open for business collaboration. Since the followers of these influencers trust them, therefore, getting your products or services promoted through them is a great way for growing your photography business.
9) Get Bigger Photoshoot Projects Through Linkedin
There is no better place for building business relations with high-net-worth clients and companies than LinkedIn. LinkedIn provides very simple options to search for and connect with profiles of key decision-makers of companies from any region. All you have to do is choose your target company or region, filter out the key decision makers, and send them a connection request. Once they accept it, you can take the connection forward. Apart from availing of the free features on LinkedIn, LinkedIn premium plans provide additional benefits to enhance your marketing efforts. Unlike most other social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, where the majority of people come for entertainment purposes, LinkedIn offers a much more professional network, which creates a great opportunity to market your photography business.
10) Start Getting Referred
Since word-of-mouth advertising is an effective element in growing a business, it’s important for your business to take all the necessary steps to encourage word-of-mouth advertising. While traditionally it is thought that word-of-mouth advertising is a natural outcome of providing quality goods/services, a business can intentionally cause word-of-mouth advertising. The right way to proceed with this is to have good incentives ready to be given away for all those customers who bring in new customers to your business. These incentives can be in form of cash, gift coupons, discount coupons, gift certificates, etc.
11) Hand Out Customized Merchandise
People usually ignore marketing materials like pamphlets, brochures, etc as they find little to no value in them. By attaching a utility angle to your marketing materials, you can ensure that people keep it for their use and this will in turn promote your photography business as well. This method of marketing your business by offering low-cost utility materials to your customers is known as merchandise marketing. The most common custom-printed products that are used for this kind of marketing are diaries, pens, mugs, fancy items, etc.
12) Get More Work with Email Marketing
Some people wrongly believe that “email marketing” entails sending unsolicited messages to thousands of people. Email marketing is a professional and systematic method of building an active list of target customers. Actively seeking out the email addresses of potential customers visiting your website as well as those of current customers can end up giving you a list of a few thousand email addresses in a few months. These email addresses can be then contacted anytime regarding your new offers, discounts, announcements, etc. To get started with email marketing, you should first create email opt-in forms succeeded by putting these forms in all digital assets (website, social media profiles, etc) under your control.
13) Get Listed on Selected Directories
Business-owned sites are not the only ones that do well in Google search results, many reputable directories like Yelp, Nextdoor, etc also tend to grab high ranking for many search terms. Having a presence of your photography business on these popular websites can lead to more leads and sales for your business. It doesn’t cost anything for businesses to create business profiles on these websites even though you can take the advantage of the premium plans offered by some of such sites for added exposure.
14) Get Views and Leads With Videos
The strong link profile of the Youtube platform is the most significant reason why videos posted on Youtube can get ranked much faster in search engines. Due to this, if you upload videos on Youtube with even very basic optimization, your videos will start performing well in search engines. With more videos made and uploaded for your business on Youtube, the end results will be accordingly proportional. Since videos that address low competition keywords usually rank much faster, so make a list of all low competition keywords related to your business (using any keyword explorer tool) followed by making and uploading videos on them. Video marketing also helps indirectly in raising the brand perception of a business.
15) Start Building Your Reviews
There are numerous statistics that point out the growing tendency of potential customers to search for online reviews before choosing products/services. Growing online literacy and access to the net has made “reviews” a big pre-sale factor. Therefore, it is sure that your business name is also searched online by many potential customers who decide to take your photography services. If people find out positive reviews of your photography business online, they are more likely to use your service. Likewise, if customers search for your business name and discover little to no or perhaps negative reviews, then they just wouldn’t think about dealing with your business. Hence, in order to get more positive reviews, encourage your happy clients to leave feedback online.
16) Prepare Your Photographs for Image Marketing
Google and many other search engines also display image search results. Therefore, whenever you post photographs on your website with good local SEO descriptions, the chances for such photographs to get displayed in Google images increase along with the possibility of increasing traffic to your website. For example, if you click photos of a wedding event on XYZ Avenue, you can post a few of those photos with the keyword and alt-tag “wedding photography XYZ Avenue”. By doing such type of naming to your photographs, these photographs can rank (and bring traffic and leads) for various combinations of local search terms.
17) Take the Help of Local Vbloggers (Video Bloggers)
Search for big YouTube channels that are operated by people from your location. After this, find their contact details and send them a request to make a video for your photography business followed by uploading it to their channel. Since such people have already gained large subscribers, these videos for your photography business will not only reach out to those subscribers but will also help to get views and leads from searches related to local photographers on both Google and YouTube.
18) Start Tagging People Present in Your Photos
Whenever you work for any client, make sure to ask for their social media profiles. At the end of the photoshoot, upload a few of their photos on your Instagram page or Facebook, along with tagging their social media account. This process can get cross-sharing of these photos by the tagged people which will give more followers to your social media profile along with making more people aware of your photography business
19) Create an Active Portfolio on Pinterest
Pinterest generates millions of traffic monthly and the key feature of Pinterest is “images”. By maintaining a Pinterest board with the name of your city/town included in your board name, you can get more views when such Pinterest boards will start ranking on Google for various search queries. You can also use Pinterest to actively show your work portfolio to people.
20) Take Advantage of Trade Fairs and Events
Book your stall at trade fairs and make connections with all people who visit there. You can also hand out free custom-printed gift items (with your business name printed) to potential customers for your brand-building efforts. Using such trade fairs and events, you can also approach many businesses with the offer of clicking photographs of their business for their branding.
21) Make Detailed Client Records and Utilise Them Effectively
For every task that you receive, make a record that will also list out the occasion for which the photo shoot was required. By doing this, you can send personalized anniversary gift cards to your previous customers every year. This will assist in maintaining a healthy relationship with your old customers and will also boost the chances of getting more referrals and repeat orders from these customers.
22) Do Free or Discounted Photoshoots for Local Charities to Grow Your Business
One way of helping out charities is to conduct a free or discounted shoot for them. With this, you can leverage their network to get more clients for your photography business. If these charities send out newsletters or organize events, you can ask them to mention your photography business too in such newsletters and events so that it can work as a good advertisement for your photography business.
23) Make New Partners for Growing Your Business
Reach out to other photographers, real estate agents, talent hiring agencies, and all such businesses and services that occasionally require photographs. Ask such businesses and services to refer your photography services to their clients and, in turn, you can return the same favor for them.
24) Give Free Wall Art To Famous Local Vendors
Go to those local vendors who are well known in your region and offer free photographs being clicked and arranged as wall art for them with the name of your business displayed beneath the wall art. When these businesses will display this wall art in their shop or store, the name of your photography business will also get highlighted which is good for branding your business locally.
25) Photo Contests Can be Great for Your Business
You can either hold photo contests or can participate in various photo contests in your region so as to get noticed by more percentage of the local population. The visibility thus attained, will definitely prove to be good for marketing your photography business
26) Select and Get Listed in Top Photography Directories
Find out the list of all big photography directories like The Photography Directory, Photography Directory Project, etc, succeeded by making your account on such directories. These big directories will not only help to give more publicity to your business but will also help towards the ranking of your website in search engines because of good quality links provided by them.
27) Don’t Go Loose on Offline Marketing
Strategy wise, more businesses are moving towards online marketing as it is relatively more targeted and less expensive. Despite this, you will find that very few businesses completely ignore offline marketing. If we look at the perceived value of both offline and online ads, then we will find that offline ads are considered more trustworthy. If your marketing budget is good enough, you can definitely try the common offline advertising methods like newspaper ads, flyers, billboards, etc.
These photography marketing ideas when applied can help your business move faster. All questions, comments, and feedback are welcome and you can ask them using the comment section below.
