Everyone wants more clients. Even more so, everyone wants more High End Photography Clients. But how do you get them! We aren’t going to create a list of the same old things you read everywhere else. We understand there are many of us that don’t want to go out and talk to random strangers at the park, or leave business cards at the table when you’re done eating out, we aren’t even going to tell you to hang up flyers at the local grocery store.
No, we are going to show you how to get in touch with More High End Photography Clients, without having to step foot out of your office! We know your busy taking images, editing images, working with clients – and it is hard to make time to beat the street drumming up business! Here are 6 keys to focus on to bring photography clients to you!
Website – Your website serves two huge purposes – it is a place for you to show off all of your amazing work, but perhaps more importantly it is the hub where all of these other strategies meet, and overlap. Potential customers sign up for your email newsletter on your website. Facebook “friends” come to your website when they click on links that you posted. Google users end up on your website from their targeted searches. Everything ties together with the website.
And… oh yeah… you get to show off all of your work their too! Photography is a visual world. Clients see what you have done for someone else and they want something like it! You’re images have to be able to incite an emotion and your website needs to be optimized to capitalize on that emotion to bring in clients and ultimately to help you pay the bills!
SEO – Search Engine Optimization – We all get kind of tired of hearing about how such and such a company is going to “make sure we rank #1 for top keywords on Google!” That is not SEO! The key word in SEO is the last one – Optimization. We are going to optimize our website, so we can optimize the results we get from Google. Who cares if your website ranks #1 for photography, unless you want to spend your days explaining to people in Singapore why you’re not going to be able to book their shoot!
With and Optimized and Targeted Search Engine plan however, you can make sure that potential customers who are searching on Google, or Bing, or Yahoo can find you and your website! When you have your website optimized every customer that comes from a search engine is a highly targeted potential client who actively sought out your business and your service! You’ve already passed the first test, you don’t have to convince them of anything… they came to you!
Blog – I know you’ve heard this literally everywhere; I know there are times when it is not fun; I know it is not quick; I know it might be something you dread; but I also know, firsthand, the amazing benefits of blogging. Hopefully I can help you see the value of blogging and maybe convince you to finally buckle down and give it a shot.
There are 3 main advantages to starting a blog it demonstrates that you are a business – a long lasting thriving, professional entity with years’ worth of shoots and images backing you up, it spotlights your clients, and it boosts your SEO and overall website presence. If you’ve heard all three of those somewhere else, allow me to simply a voice in the back of the room seconding their motion! If not, lets look a little bit deeper.
If I am a potential client that stumbles onto your website via Google or through a Facebook link and I make it to your blog. When I see posts going back a few years, when I see you consistently putting out beautiful heartfelt images, when I see all of the happy smiles on faces as I scroll further and further down the page, it is easy for me to imagine my family session being your next blog entry. Your blog tells a story, and if done right, it is a story that future clients will want to be a part of!
Blogging can literally turn your photography income into a sort of residual income. If you aren’t familiar with residual income, it means money that reproduces and pays you again and again. When you work hourly you make your hourly wage and that’s it. When you stop putting in hours you stop making money. When you make money by the shoot, when you stop doing shoots, you stop making money. Well with residual money, you can stop actively working your business and still make money. When you finish a shoot, have a sales session, and deliver the final images or products – what happens to that client? How do you stay relevant in their minds? Hopefully your images were so amazing that the next time they even think about photography your name is top of mind… but that’s a big thing to leave up to a “hopefully!” But by taking the time to write about their session and their family, you have the opportunity to re-connect with them weeks after the shoot! You have that touch stone on your website to be able to a year, 2 years, even 5 years from now to reach out and say “Hey, Sally remember this… [link to your blog post here]” and guess what that blog post also gives your clients the opportunity to say “Hey family look at these awesome pictures we had taken… [link to your blog post here]” While you are not actively marketing and pulling in clients your blog will be doing residual marketing for you!
Finally, we all know the old SEO story, the more words you have on your website talking about a specific subject (Sioux Falls Family Photography, South Dakota Landscape Photos, Beautiful Midwest Senior Portraits, etc…) the more likely you are to rank higher and higher for that term when it is typed into Google. Basically every blog post you write and post is a tiny SEO boost! Enough tiny boosts put together turns into something pretty substantial, pretty quick!
Facebook – Every photography session should be accompanied by at least three Facebook posts. You should be posting right away after the shoot, with some encouraging words and a teaser image. You should be posting during the editing process with an update and teaser. And you should be posting after the editing is done with a few finished products and a reminder about the ordering session. You can do more than these three if you are really dedicated!
After you make these posts, you let Facebook do the networking and marketing work for you. People will see your work on Facebook, people that you never would have met, people you never would have had the opportunity to show off your work to, people that are very intrigued by the particular brand of photography you are offering. Every like, every share, every comment is sending your artwork out further and further reaching a broader audience! The more people that see your amazing images, the more likely one of them is to book a session!
Instagram – Here’s a free secret… people are looking for themselves in photos and to a lesser extent when they look for a photographer. Basically as they browse through your website, blog, Facebook page, or otherwise they are looking for people just like them. They look at the images in your portfolio and imagine what you would make their engagement pictures, family session, or senior portraits look. They are looking for a photographer that is able to execute the vision they have in their brain.
There is no better way to display and share a large sample of your work in a quick and ongoing fashion than Instagram! Aside from its worldwide reach and growing popularity, Instagram gives potential clients the ability to quickly browse your photography and see something that grabs their attention and demands further investigation!
Email Lists – We hate spam email, but no matter how much we hate it, we can’t wish it away! Any mail that makes it into our inbox has to be “dealt with” individually. Even if you just delete it, you have to take the time to glance at the subject, determine if you should open it or not, check a box, hit delete, and confirm delete. That is a 5 step process we go through for the mail we know we don’t want to read! How much more attention do we give the mail we want!?
The fact is as long as we aren’t spamming random individuals, we only have emails of people that WANT us to have their emails. And when we send them our newsletter they WANT to read it, because they signed up for it! Every time we put something in their inbox we are reminding them one more time why they WANT to be on our list in the first place. Maybe they like your vibe and are thinking about booking you for their family portrait or the senior’s graduation pictures… we don’t know. But, each time they see our newsletter they are saying, “Oh, yeah I’ve got to get a photographer for… Why not check out what’s in this newsletter!”
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