Many photographers simply rely on word of mouth or their website to promote their services. This can be effective and a great source of work but the best photographers know how to use digital marketing to their advantage to keep the clients flowing.
In this guide we show you six simple steps that allow you to transform your photography business and take your digital marketing to the next level.
Step 1 - Know your customers
- Many photographers fall short with digital marketing because they try to appeal to a broad audience and never consider their target customers.
- Before doing anything like creating social media profiles or researching keywords, take time to find your niche.
- What type of person actually needs your services? Are you a wedding photographer who needs to target young couples? Perhaps you specialize in family portraits or landscape photography? Dissect your business and identify your main customers and from there you can create a more targeted digital marketing campaign.
Step 2 - Understand how your business works
With your target customer identified, think about how your business works. What do you do? Do you simply sell the rights to your photos? Maybe you have an online store where people can buy canvas prints and framed photos?
Knowing how your business works and how customers interact with you is vital so that you can promote things like online stores or contact methods effectively.
Step 3 - Choose relevant marketing strategies
You now know who your customers are and you understand what they give you money for – perfect. It’s time to choose your initial digital marketing strategies and potential examples include:
– Social media marketing
– Email marketing
– SEO
– Content marketing
You should be able to choose easily as you now have an in-depth understanding of your customers. If you specialize in wedding photography for example in a particular location you may want to concentrate on SEO and ranking for local keywords.
Start with one or two marketing strategies so as to not overwhelm yourself and you can always develop more in the future.
Step 4 - Research keywords for your niche
Regardless of which strategies you use, your business can benefit from keyword research and this is a key aspect of SEO for photographers.
Let’s say that you are a family portrait photographer in London for example. You could use keyword research tools to find suitable phrases like “family photographer London”, or “portrait photography London”.
There are many tools available like Google Keyword Planner that make this task easier and help you identify keywords that aren’t as competitive or that suit your photography niche.
Step 5 - Create interesting, unique, and SEO-optimized content
You have a better understanding of your business combined with a list of keywords and a handful of marketing strategies ready.
It’s now time to produce content and start the marketing conveyor belt running. Regardless of the medium or method, the content must be unique, interesting, and useful to your target audience.
Make your awe-inspiring photography the focal point of your marketing so that your skills are immediately apparent. Create content regularly and make sure it promotes your business but at the same time gives people a reason to digest it.
Step 6 - Make sure your marketing has a consistent message
Throughout all of this, you must make sure that the message, tone, and quality of your digital marketing are consistent.
The aim is to build your online presence and boost your brand reputation so that people can see you as a trusted photographer. Use consistent brand messaging including fonts, colour schemes, and imagery. Also try to use a similar tone across all platforms like social media, blog posts, and email newsletters.
If your tone and content is fractured, your digital marketing will ultimately be less effective and your brand image diluted and this could give your competitors the edge – regardless of how incredible your photography is.
Digital marketing for photographers can be difficult but the important thing is to really sell yourself and show why a potential client should choose you over one of the hundreds of other local wannabees.
Let your epic photography show your skill, but also utilize SEO, keyword research and digital marketing to build your online presence and get consistent work.
Joshua George is the founder of ClickSlice, an SEO Agency based in London, UK.
He has eight years of experience as an SEO Consultant and was recently hired by the UK government for SEO training. Joshua also owns the best-selling SEO course on Udemy, and has taught SEO to over 100,000 students.
His work has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, AgencyAnalytics, Wix and lots more other reputable publications.
