Marketing, the thing we need the most but might despise the most. It’s tough, complicated, and takes a significant amount of time and energy to do it well.
Marketing ensures that your customers get their questions answered and it makes it easy for people to understand most parts of your business. There are many facets to marketing and it can be overwhelming to think about how many parts and plans will go into effect to make your marketing worthwhile, but there are four main components to consider and four parts that you should be focusing most of your energy on.
Price
One of the biggest challenges that photographers in all niches struggle with is pricing. How do you value yourself and how do you value your products? It can be really complicated and tiring to worry about how much money you want to make and how much money you need to make.
Price is one sector of marketing that you really should spend some time on analyzing to be sure that you are getting your value from your services. Start by understanding the hours you will put into each job or client you work with. Add those hours and think about the effort that will be put into those hours. From there, find an hourly rate that you believe is matched with your value and add it all up. If you offer packages, understand that those hours encapsulate a lot of time that the clients won’t see and stick to that price.
Product
Product is an obvious part of marketing and it might not always be a physical product. However, this does not affect the value of the product- whether or not it’s physical. Your product might be the single most important part of your marketing strategy because it needs to be at the forefront of what you are offering.
If customers or potential clients don’t have a clear grasp on what exactly you are offering, they will be less likely to buy in. Marketing your product as genuinely as possible is also important here. Being sure to give them just enough details about it that are completely true and leaving just enough mystery to capture more interest is also a key to marketing this aspect of your business.
Promotion
Third is promotion. Promoting your products, your value, and your business is another huge part of marketing as a whole. Promotion has a lot to do with language. How you share what you have to offer and promote it with your words is just as important as the product you are promoting.
Promotion also needs more consistency. Your followers like to be reminded of your services and what you do from time to time otherwise they might forget you. And you don’t always have to promote a product, you can promote a giveaway, a new update, or just an informational blog post about yourself. Promoting the things necessary for your business are another facet of marketing and when you promote yourself, placement is also important.
Placement
Finally, placement is the fourth important part of marketing. Promotion plays a huge role, but the placement of that promo is also highly important. Placement can mean a ton of different things to different photographers.
For wedding photographers, placement might be in the form of bridal shows. That way, you can get in front of the ideal clients in that niche. Similarly, placement for nature or landscape photographers might in magazines or even on Instagram. Locations, where photos are the most important aspect, are going to give you the highest advantage of being seen by the right set of eyes.
Marketing is a science, but it doesn’t have to be rocket science. It’s a key component that you want to be on top of from the very start. Whether you are going for more social media marketing, email marketing, or local public marketing, knowing the price, product, promotion, and placement are going to change the way you run your photography business.