Get noticed: Marketing tips to stoke profit

You may be a talented photographer, but if you don’t set your business apart from the pack, you won’t win clients, which is key to profitability.

Photographer Darty Hines
© Darty Hines
Photographer Darty Hines

Darty Hines, Cr.Photog., who will present the session “How to Get Noticed in the Crowd” at Imaging USA 2018, offers tips:

  • Get social, really. It’s one thing to open a social media account for your business; it’s another to really engage with your audience. To rev up the interaction, post questions and respond to answers and comments. “There is nothing worse than putting questions out there on social media and not commenting on your followers’ responses,” Hines says.
  • Tell stories. “Instagram is one of the best platforms for photographers,” says Hines. Even though the social media network is now allowing advertising, you’re still better off telling your studio’s story through your own posts. By stories, he means, for example, a photo diary of a wall portrait—from session to framing to wall hanging at the client’s home.
  • Be thumb worthy. Most of us use our thumbs to scroll through posts on our phones, but have you ever stopped to think what makes your thumb stop? Thinking about what makes you stop to look at something will inform your own posts. Take the time to post something unique.
  • Blog. Blogging is not dead, says Hines. Social media shouldn’t be your only marketing outlet. (Keep in mind that Facebook’s constantly changing algorithms make it hard to know which, if any, of your posts followers will see.) Plus, Google loves blogs. Pointing social media followers to your blog will help it gain more subscribers. And when folks subscribe to your blog, you have more control over what they’re seeing of your brand.
  • Get those emails. What’s the first thing people do in the morning? Check email. So use social media to lead followers to your website—for example, to download a PDF on what to wear for a portrait session—and in the process collect their email addresses. “If you provide valuable information, clients will be more than happy to share an email address,” he says. Once you have contact information, add them to your email list. Then make sure your email subject lines and content are “thumb worthy.”  

Amanda Arnold is associate editor of Professional Photographer.