The most significant hurdle when running a photography business is booking more clients. If you feel like you’re in a “booking rut,” here are a few ways to help spread your brand awareness and book more photo clients.
One of the worst things any business owner can do is put all of their eggs in one basket. The same is true for photographers. If we’re only focusing on one avenue to gain new clients, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. If business feels slow, it may be because you’re not utilizing every way to attract and book more clients. Luckily, in today’s age of content marketing, there are plenty of ways to get your photography business in front of your ideal audience.
Start an Email Marketing List
Email marketing is hands down one of the best marketing strategies with the potential for incredible results. By starting an email marketing list, you’re essentially taking the ball out of the potential client’s court and putting it in your court. You’re capturing a potential client’s email so that you can send them valuable content that will, in turn, keep your business and brand at the front of that potential client’s mind. If this sounds pushy, it’s not. Remember that when someone signs up for your email list, it’s because they want to hear from you.
One of the most important aspects of email marketing to remember is that it should be considered a privilege when a potential lead gives you their contact information in the form of their email address on an email marketing list. Because of this, it’s important to provide actual valuable content to your email subscribers instead of pushing sales and bookings upon them. If you can grow a list and regularly supply that list with relevant content, you give yourself a much better chance of being booked by one of your subscribers in the future.
Image by Studio 7042 Dominika via Pexels.
Make Sure Your Brand Is Solid
Even before establishing an email list, it’s important to make sure your brand is solid. Having a strong brand is the biggest way you’re going to attract your ideal client while simultaneously repelling clients that are not ideal. The stronger your brand, the more excited a potential lead will get at the prospect of working with you. And if that wasn’t incentive enough, having a strong brand also helps to set you apart from your competition.
If you’ve never worked on building your brand, start by considering if your brand is authentic and conveys your personality to website visitors in an accurate manner. Making sure your personality is part of your brand is a great way to add value to yourself and in turn make more clients want to book you.
Using Automation in Your Inquiry Process
It’s no secret that the faster you can reply to a new inquiry from a potential client, the more likely that client will be inclined to book you. Using an automated client management service like Honeybook or 17hats is a great way to send instant automated messages to potential clients as soon as they reach out. And although automated emails should never take the place of personalized emails, they are a great way to set an instant expectation of when to hear back from you and what to expect throughout the booking process with you.
In addition to sending instant responses when someone fills out your contact form on your website, using an automated email service or client management software also gives you the ability to send “Inquiry warming” tools like questionnaires to your clients. Questionnaires are such a powerful tool within my inquiry process and have helped me to book many clients by having a bit of additional information about them that I can use to turn my booking process into a more personal and relationship building experience. Whats more, even if you’re not in a position where you’re ready to invest in a new service like email automation or client management software, you can always use pre-made email templates and questionnaires that you can quickly send off to new inquiries.
If you’re having trouble booking more clients, remember that the booking process of finding potential leads and courting them through the booking process is ultimately meant to be relational. People don’t necessarily want a business transaction, but instead, they’re looking for a great experience. So long as you’re providing your potential clients with an excellent experience from the moment they land on your website, through booking them, providing them with a photography service, and even after the service, your business is sure to thrive.
Lead image by rawpixel.com via Pexels.
I agree that having a solid brand or being focused in your service is probably the best way of getting better business. I am not sure if having more bookings is necessarily a good thing. There was a time in my career where I shot everything and quite frankly while I did do more, I felt the quality of my clients were really just mediocre. What I mean is that maybe because I was not focused enough in the area of my work, some clients that wanted to find someone specialising in a specific area of photography was not as confident to book me. I can understand because let's say if I was looking for a product photographer and I had to choose between one that was solely focused in doing product photography and one that was doing product photography and all sorts of photography work, I would probably choose the first as well. I think in the long run, the quality of the client matters more than quantity. Just like our work. I think the best way for marketing is actually from word of mouth. Nothing beats one client telling a potential client "this photographer is rock solid and gets the job done right every time." While I don't disagree that it's important to have a good portfolio/social media pages/webpages/email lists etc... but at the end clients will bring in most of your clients.
Recently I have posted an article about why some photographers make more money than others. Just some insight I gained from experience and talking to many photographers.
https://www.paperfishphoto.com/blog/why-some-photographers-make-so-much-...