When you have your own photo business, you would want to maximize all marketing tools at your disposal. A combination of direct and indirect marketing strategies would not only create awareness and a buzz about your business, but this would also translate to business.
For a photography business, some say that it’s who you know and not what you know that matters more. Then again, there are also those who say that it’s who knows you that is most important in bringing in more business. Whatever the case, the bottom line of these two maxims is all about networking. As a professional photographer, you would need to know more people while getting other people to know you.
In this digital age, indirect marketing strategies like using business cards, placing ads, distributing flyers, doing specials or promos, and the like are not enough. These should be paired with direct marketing strategies that personally engage the clients. As more and more people are getting online and with the accessible digital tools and resources readily available to virtually anybody nowadays, tapping the online marketing potential for networking and promoting your photography business is the way to go.
Here are some of the things you can do online to promote your photography business:
Sign up for social networking sites. Millions of people around the world to go various social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter everyday. Create an account for your photography business in one or several of these social networking sites. You can post your sample portfolio and promotional video here.
These social networking sites usually have various applications that you can maximize for your photography business. In Facebook, for example, you can create a fan page where you can invite your clients to join you and become your “fans”. Invite as many would-be “fans” as possible as this will look good especially for prospective clients. You can also receive reviews from clients and you can post promos and updates in your Facebook fan page.
As in Facebook, you can activate your mobile account in Twitter so that you can keep your clients updated. You can keep your clients’ awareness for your photography business even without direct face-to-face contact with them.
Create a promotional video. There are a number of websites like YouTube that allow anybody to post videos for free. As a professional photographer, it would not hurt to use the audio-visual aspects of a video to market your photography business. You can explain to prospective client who you are as a professional and an artist, your philosophy, and your style, among others in a promotional video that you can post for free.
Your promotional video need not be fancy or anything like that. You can keep it clean and simple. Just remember to talk about engaging topics and to use good lighting and background. You can even do this video yourself and just make use of software like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker for editing and producing your output for web pages.
Maintain a website, webpage or blog. Depending on your knowledge and expertise, you can increasingly make your presence felt in the Web through a website, web page or blog. It would take more resources and upkeep to maintain a website. If you are not yet ready for it, you can avail for yourself a web page or a blog that you can get for free. Whatever of these you decide to have, just make sure to update it regularly and keep its content fresh.
Create back links. Of the aforementioned strategies, it would also be good to create back links to them in order to increase the chances of prospective clients stumbling into your Web accounts. As majority of the people who surf the internet do so for information, you can submit photography articles rich in photography-related keywords to various article directories and create back links in them to lead the readers to the sites where you posted information about your photography business.
I always include my course at the bottom of these articles via this link so you can get underway with your own photography customers when you’re ready.