In photography, just like other endeavors, marketing plays a massive role in boosting your image to your audience, and also helps you attract more clients. Good photography can help you win over some clients, but if you aim to make huge leaps in your work, you need to market your work to reach a wider audience, from which you could bag more clients. Your portfolio is what the audience would look at, and the decision to hire you will largely depend on what they see in the portfolio.
There are various marketing ideas that you can explore that could have a positive impact on your portfolio.
Marketing Ideas For Photographers
How To Boost Your Portfolio
Photo by Erik Lucatero on Unsplash
Maintaining A Social Media Presence
In today’s age, every person with a smartphone and access to the internet has a presence on at least one social media platform. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and messaging services such as WhatsApp and Telegram have changed how people interact. Further, the consumption of content on these platforms skews heavily to audiovisual content, which gives an upper hand to photographers.
Creating and maintaining accounts on social media platforms can help to bolster your work to areas that are far from your location. Social media gives every individual a platform to showcase their abilities. As a photographer, you might not want to throw away the chance to showcase what you can do, and some of your exceptional works for that matter.
Maintaining a social media presence is not enough. You have to ensure that you have a proper but brief description of yourself and what you do on these platforms. These profiles help to show the person that you are, what you do, your strengths, and why people should hire you or work with you. From whichever angle you look at social media, it is a photographer’s key tool when it comes to marketing and publicity.
Designing A Website
As a photographer seeking to boost your portfolio, a website is a must-have tool. It is incomprehensible to have a social media presence without having a website to which you will direct your traffic. You, therefore, have to seek the services of a professional website designer who will help you set up a presence on the web. Since you are a photographer, you have to ensure that the aesthetics are top-notch and are in line with your brand colors. Since you are in the business of boosting your portfolio, ensure that you upload your best works on the website.
Provide the relevant communication details for people to get in touch when they feel the need to.
Other folks might opt to look you up on the web, and that is why you should put in place a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. SEO helps your website to be among the top results of a search relating to a keyword, keywords, or key phrases. In this sense, you have to ensure that you SEO your site for better visibility in search engines.
Photo by Brandon Morgan on Unsplash
Harness The Power Of Partnerships
Working with other individuals and entities can do a lot for you as a photographer with regard to marketing. In the partnership arena, photographers can leverage cross-promotion to market themselves and their works. Cross-promotion is where you promote the products of another entity to your clientele, and the entity does the same with your actions to its client. Though the approach is wide-encompassing, there is a good chance that you will have marketed yourself and your products to a broader audience.
A photographer and a restaurant can form a good example of cross-promotion. The photographer can market the offerings of the restaurant to their clients, and the restaurant can market the top-notch works of the photographer to their clients. This cross-promotion can work if approached carefully and can have meaningful results for you as a photographer.
Work For Charity Causes
Working for charity organizations or not-for-profit drives allows you to give back to society, support worthy causes, and connect with people from different backgrounds. As a photographer, it does not mean that you do not have the opportunity to get involved in charitable causes. There are various avenues that you can seize and make a contribution.
In the process, your name and your brand reach out there to the people, and this in itself is a way of marketing the person that you are as a photographer and the work that you do. Since you will be interacting with various folks, you must let them know who you are and what you do. This is where you can get some leads and conversions, which could help to bolster and propel your work.
Work On An Email List
Even when you are marketing your work to other folks, it is important to ensure that you keep in touch with your current clients. Email lists are an effective way of ensuring that you are in constant contact with your clients. Not all of your clients may keep tabs on your social media activity. People have different tastes and preferences. While there could be those clients who prefer social media, there are those with a preference for emails. In such scenarios, using email would do a better job than using social media channels.
The emails could center on past works, current works, and other general information that you think the clientele might be interested in. Embedding a sign-up function or button on your website could help you get your message out there to your target audience. Email lists help to inform the audience that you are still in the photography business and that you are in action. Otherwise, in today’s age, where there is a lot of information overload, people, including your clients, could easily get carried away.
Network Widely
Photography marketing efforts do not start and end online. It is worth noting that online spaces are virtual spaces. For you to market yourself widely as possible, you also have to meet people physically and network with them. Going to photography events, galleries, industry meet-ups, and conferences, as well as other related fairs, can help you to connect to other folks.
These fairs not only allow you to meet with potential clients, but they equally will enable you to meet other established photographers. You could learn some tricks from these photographers that could help you advance your skill and craft.
Create And Share Your Business Cards
If you are marketing yourself, you have to deploy viable techniques and deploy as much as you can to ensure you attract more leads, which might result in more conversions. When attending industry conferences or when out for non-official business, you can share these cards to the people you meet. Members of your network need to have your business card, as some may prefer the card for reasons of communication.
Since you are in the photography business, you might want to ensure that the card has some taste of photography to make it even more appealing.
While technology has seen most people embrace online platforms as sources of contact information, the business card has its place in the marketing space, and you might want to use them in your marketing strategy.
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Work On Your Logo
When people look at your work, and the business part of it, among the aspects that come to mind, is checking out the basics or the ‘bare bones’ of the business. A logo is among these bare bones. Design a classic logo, and if you do not have the requisite skills, you might want to seek the services of a professional designer. A classic and aesthetic logo that is in line with your works can go a long way to market your work.
Participate In And Organize Competitions
Competitions are proper avenues to showcase your skills. Technology today has brought up avenues that were non-existent a decade ago. You can organize a competition for the best photo for a particular scene or event or something along those lines. Participating in contests also brings people to light on what you do. In the course of participating in these competitions, you could also share your business cards.
The upside here is you get your details and name out so that people interested in your works can reach out to you at their convenient times. For example, for an upcoming event that will feature a host of personalities, you might organize a competition for the best photo. The criteria for selection of the best photo should also be clear, so participants know the expectations.
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Final Thoughts
To sum this up, photography, no matter how top-notch it is, is not enough to boost your portfolio when it comes to reaching your target audience. Boosting your portfolio requires concerted efforts in the marketing front to ensure that your message reaches the target audience. Marketing is an essential aspect of any business operation, and photography is not an exception. From maintaining a social media presence to participating in competitions, there are various marketing strategies that photographers can pursue that can help in boosting their portfolios to their target audiences.
Erica Sunrajo
Professional Marketer, Writer
Erica Sunarjo is a professional marketer and writer with more than five years of experience. In addition to writing, she is also an expert in legal translation, editing, and proofreading at The Word Point. Helping writers achieve more with their content is one of her passions, so she frequently publishes guides on writing for the web for beginners.
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