When you first start your photography business, it can be a little hard to nail down just one niche. Honestly, any person who needs any sort of photography is your ideal client when you’re new! However, as you start to grown and gain a strong portfolio, there will come a time to narrow down your body of work and find out what suits you best.
Each photographer is different and a choice of niche can be based on many factors such as skill, passion, experience, or goals. Based on these factors, when you specify your niche, you have to go through a few trials of finding ways to get your name out to your audience.
Center Your Audience
One of the first factors in narrowing down your niche is finding the center of your ideal audience. Find out everything that you can about them so that you have a better chance of targeting them when they are most comfortable and most vulnerable.
Find out some of the things that your audience likes and starting researching those things or taking note of people who buy those things. For example, if you shoot boudoir photography, you are most likely looking at an audience that is entirely female. To cater to that, most females, married or about to be are partaking in a few common activities; brunch dates, Starbucks drinks, and yoga.
Now, that’s quite stereotypical but in all honesty, those are the items you could be focusing on. Work in a coffee shop a few days a week and strike up a conversation. Take a few yoga classes to make some new friends and potentially some new clients. These are extreme examples, but these niches of people are fairly simple to target once you figure out what they are interested in.
Your Good Friend Facebook
Did you ever think that Facebook would be the friend who helps your business?
If you have a photography page, or admire a photography page of someone else’s, you can find out a lot about those people in that group. Their following tells a lot about them. Just a quick scan through the members of the group let you in on the things they enjoy, if they have kids, if they travel, if they are married, if they have an education and more.
With thirty minutes of your time, you should take the time to just scan through the people in your group. Are they your target audience? If yes, keep up the good work and find a way for those members to bring their friends. If not, you may need to refocus your content. Choose the images you post wisely, create posts that engage and require a response and see what you can get.
Interact With That Audience
One of the toughest things for photographers to do is interact. You find any reason not to confront or even converse with a stranger, unfortunately, that’s more like most humans now.
However, think about this example. You move to a new city and have to start your entire business over with new people. Scary, right? Well, it doesn’t have to be. This can be the best time to really put yourself out there and start interacting.
Maybe you take senior portraits and you need to find a way to get in touch with teachers from the school, contact the art teacher for a speaking day, go to some sporting events to meet the parents, and any ideas you can think of. It’s true it might uncomfortable at first, but it will pay off because it’s taking a little time and almost no money for you to simply talk, make friends, and offer a professional service that most of them will need eventually.
Aiming in the right direction has a lot to do with whether you hit the target or not in your business. Take the time to sit down and analyze your ideal clients. Are they moms, daughters, sons, brides, or businesses? Once you have done that, use the tools available to you via Facebook, local newspapers, town meetings, and more.
Then, meet them. Find a way to interact with them face-to-face and leave a lasting memory that will represent your business. These are tips you can implement immediately into your business. They don’t cost anything but time and a little courage and they will get you even further down the road to a successful photography business.