7 Lead-Generating Marketing Strategies For Your Photography Business

Sep 22

Like any business owner, your primary focus will probably always be centered around growing your current client base.

It’s just how our brains work… even when things are good, we’re still searching for growth! Odds are you are already spending hours upon hours networking, chasing promising leads, and selling your services to potential buyers.

But it doesn’t have to be that way!

Lead generation is about so much more than establishing a one-time connection. It’s about fostering deep relationships with your audience and convincing them that you do it better than anyone else- because let’s face it, you do!

When done right, lead generation strategies will not only land you clients, they’ll land you your ideal client: the ones you always dreamed about working with long term!

WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, HERE ARE 7 LEAD-GENERATING MARKETING STRATEGIES FOR YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY BUSINESS! #HappyToHelp

1. START WITH BLOGGING

This one is easy! As a business owner, you probably already have a website up and running. You may even have a few posts ready to go, but you’re just not sure how a blog can help you land new clients.

Let’s start with the basics. Your blog should be easy to read, appealing to the eye, and provide unique value to your audience. The best way to ensure value in your posts is to ask yourself what your audience wants to know. Do your best to answer that question completely and provide a specific plan of action for your audience to follow after reading.

This is known as a call to action. It may appear as a button at the bottom of your post, or a link to a helpful piece of content, like a downloadable checklist or free course.

You may also consider enabling comments on your page. That way, if your readers wish to know more about the topic, it’s easy for them to ask and receive an answer. This strategy also helps you understand what exactly your audience wants to know, where you can improve your post, or how you can “capture” them.

Blogging can feel like a rather intimidating task at first, but once you pick up on strategies like batching, your blog will become a lot easier to manage! Batching just means that you are completing a series of similar tasks in one sitting (like all of your blog posts or social media posts for the month). Not only does batching push you to plan and strategize better, it allows you to spend less time each week working on marketing tasks and more time perfecting you craft! Check out our guest post about batching to learn more about how batching can help grow your business!

2. USE CONTENT MARKETING TO YOUR ADVANTAGE

Okay, when we say it that way, it sounds terrible!

Capturing your audience just means that you are trading one thing (your expertise) for another (their email).

As a photographer and business owner, you have a certain knowledge base that your audience is dying to absorb, and content marketing is the perfect way for both parties to get what they are after! By trading some of your knowledge, you are single-handedly establishing your expertise as a photographer. This way, when your audience is ready to buy in, they’ll automatically think of you first. You’re also gaining something from them: like an email address or their loyalty.

There are so many different types of content marketing you can include in your marketing strategy! You could do a Q&A blog post to answer your most commonly asked questions, an infographic to walk your audience through the photoshoot process, a case study to prove your success with past clients, an eBook to teach a skill to up-and-coming photographers, a checklist to help your client prepare for their session, and a video post to make the entire photoshoot process feel real for your first time clients.

3. GET YOUR NAME OUT WITH GUEST POSTS

Another way to turn your expertise into a lead-generating machine is to guest post on someone else’s blog. With guest posts, both you and the brand you work with will benefit. You’re gaining a new audience and establishing your expertise, and they’re receiving free content for their blog and potentially filling a gap in their expertise. It’s a win-win!

You can start by reaching out to other creatives in your industry (or related to it) that you admire. Tell them you love their work but see a missing perspective on their blog that you feel you could compensate for. Offer to write a FREE blog post for their website that fills that missing perspective. In the end, they get free content for their blog, and the added benefit of the missing perspective, and you get free promotion on their website!

Some brands may even pay you to guest post on their blog, so it’s always worth the try!

4. UTILIZE THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Even if you’ve been on social media since Myspace, odds are you aren’t utilizing the full power of your social media.

The first rule of running business-focused social media is that it’s about more than just connecting. You can’t only interact with a potential client once and expect them to come back for more. To run a truly successful social media account, you must continue fostering a rewarding relationship with your followers that goes both ways.

Another trusted rule of social media management is that you should always have equal parts brand-related content, industry-related content, and personal content in your marketing strategy.

Brand-related content includes posts about your values, your services, your case studies, and so on. Industry-related content is content from others in your industry. You might share a post about a helpful blog from another credible photographer, or a news article that relates to and impacts your audience or industry. Regardless, you should always relate that outside insight back to your brand. How are you reacting to the situation? What additional value can you offer? It is also important to consider whether or not that content strengthens or hurts your brand.

Lastly, you might share some posts about your personal life: working from home, your family and pets, your personal values, and whatever else applies to both your life and your brand. At the end of the day, people want to connect to a person, not a brand. Personal posts help your audience relate to you and connect with you on a deeper level.

If you’re just getting started with social media marketing, we recommend starting on Instagram and Pinterest. Instagram is an incredible way for photographers to show off their work and build a personable brand. Pinterest, on the other hand, is one of the best ways to promote your blog and generate leads. If we could only choose two platforms to be on as photographers, Instagram and Pinterest would be it!

Keep in mind that Instagram is very visual because it is photo and video posts only, so it should be taken with great care. With Instagram, you should always think about how each post will look with the rest of your feed. Pinterest is very similar. How will your posts look together on a board?

Tools like Planoly allow you to plan, create, schedule, and analyze your content strategy in one place. To make things even better, Planoly has a completely FREE plan that includes 2 free accounts, 30 uploads per platform per month, and one user. It also lets you view your current and planned feed at once to ensure cohesiveness and consistency! (Click the link above to get your first month free! 😉)

5. OWN YOUR AUDIENCE WITH EMAIL MARKETING

Often, email marketing is one of the last practices most business owners stumble upon. If anything, it should be the first! Unlike other forms of marketing, with email marketing, you own your audience!

This means that you have power over who sees your content and when they see it. When you send an email, your subscribers receive your content immediately. Furthermore, your email subscribers are oftentimes more dedicated to your brand and want to learn from you.

On the other hand, you have your rented audience, like your social media followers. When you post content, you’re at the mercy of the social media platform. That platform’s algorithm decides who sees it and when they see it. Even if they’re a loyal follower of yours, they may never stumble across your post in their feed!

It’s so important to be able to own your audience, and for that reason, email marketing is one of the best ways to generate leads. Your email subscribers are genuinely there because they want your knowledge and expertise, and you can easily give that to them with email (and content) marketing!

6. TAKE YOUR BRAND TO THE NEXT LEVEL BY NETWORKING

There’s a reason networking is a thing… it works!

The rules are simple: if you can dedicate a few hours every month to going out to various events or meetups (or attending zoom meetups because of COVID-19), we can almost guarantee you will find new clients from it. You’ll likely also learn tons of tips and tricks from other creatives and even find new business partners to grow with!

You’ll probably find yourself in a few fantastic groups, and you won’t ever want to leave. That’s great! Keep meeting up with them and fostering those business relationships, but don’t forget to venture out and try new groups every now and then. You never know where those new connections will take you!

7) FIND A CO-MARKETING PARTNER

Okay, this one is a little out there. If we’re being honest, we didn’t even know this was a thing until recently, but we’re glad we discovered the joys of co-marketing!

A co-marketing partner is another business owner that shares your audience but is not in direct competition with you. For example: if you’re a boudoir photographer, you might partner with a local lingerie boutique. The boutique would supply you with “free” garments in exchange for promotion on your site or social media. You might also send some of your clients to the boutique with a special discount. With this kind of business relationship, both brands win!

It’s vital that you and your co-marketing partner share a genuine relationship. If it doesn’t click, move on! You should both want to support the other and wish to see them thrive.

Lead generation is not a one-and-done type deal. It takes grit! At the very least, we recommend scheduling an hour each month to carry out each of these lead-generating marketing strategies. Doing so not only puts you on the path to landing new clients, it reduces a lot of the fear and guilt many creatives have around not doing enough for their business.

As fellow business owners, one of the things we pride ourselves on as business owners is providing value to our community in any way that we can. We’re more than happy to take some of the stress off of your shoulders each month, as we understand how overwhelming running a business can be (especially if you’re new to it)!

We firmly believe that supporting and strengthening other business owners is one of the best ways to help our creative community grow and succeed, and for that reason, we’re dedicated to providing you with transparency and value in our blog posts for years to come.

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for being a part of our creative community.♥️