13 Best Photography Marketing Ideas For Photographers

Updated on November 2, 2022 in Photography by Alifiya Mustafa

Powerful and effective marketing is the key ingredient for a successful and profitable photography business.

When photography is talked about, most people only relate it to photographers and their professional equipment. However, there are a lot more to handle in a photography business, and photography marketing ideas are one of the most crucial.

There are many ways that you can leverage to pull off your photography marketing ideas – Let’s explore the most powerful ones.

13 Best Photography Marketing Ideas

1. Determine your Target Market

Before you jump right into implementing your photography marketing ideas, it’s ideal to identify for whom you’ll be putting your marketing efforts. Determine if the people you’re targeting could actually be interested in what you have to offer.

If you’re an amateur, you’d first have to identify your niche, if you’re a professional photographer, you probably already have chosen your niche. Here are a few examples of different niches in photography:

• Product
• Nature and landscape
• Real Estate
• Wedding and events
• Newspaper and journals
• Fashion and Makeup
• Lifestyle, Candid, Street
• Freelance

If you major in product photography, your target audience must be the businesses that deal in products. The best market that you can get your hands on is eCommerce. eCommerce stores highly depend on good quality product images to attract shoppers.

Here, targeting couples and families would make no sense until your niche is weddings and events. Having your target market determined can help you utilizing photography marketing ideas in a more effective and efficient manner.

You may want to segment your clients based on their demographics like:

• Age
• Gender
• Income
• Interests
• Job profile
• Location, etc.

It completely depends on your niche to determine on what basis to perform client segmentation.

2. Create a Captivating Website

Marketing majorly relates to promoting your services, and, what can be a better place than your photography website to market your skills?

However, a poor-looking website can easily shoo away your clients. Thus, creating a captivating and eye-pleasing website can be one of the best photography marketing ideas.

Here are a few things you need to take care of while preparing your photography website:

• Your website shouldn’t take more than 2 seconds to load, especially your gallery images
• Your pricing page should give all the required details precisely and clearly
• The color tone used should be eye-pleasing
• Your website layout shouldn’t be too cluttered and must look well organized
• All the contact details must be available

You’ll want your website to be updated regularly with new content. You can upload freshly clicked images, relevant blogs, and current offers so that your clients can see something new every time they visit.

3. Create Email listings

Email marketing has always been the most professional and sophisticated way to stay in touch with your clients. If you’re implicating the #2 photography marketing idea, then you may create email listings based on the segments you’ve created.

How this photography marketing idea is useful?

Well, when you create email listings based on the created segments, you have the option to include the customers that fit perfectly in your various marketing campaigns.

For example, if you’re running 50% off on your premium packages, then you may only target your clients with income that can afford your package.

If you’re providing freebies and giveaways within the state you live in, you may target your clients based on their location. If you’re in California, sharing such emails to people living in Georgia will make no sense.

With the creation of email listings, you can automate your email photography marketing as well. With the help of tools like Mailchimp, you can automate email marketing in a breeze.

This photography marketing idea saves your time and efforts along with making email marketing more targeted and effective.

4. Make use of Social Media

There are currently more than 4.8 billion social media users. This makes social channels the best place to showcase your work in front of a vast audience base. You get to share your work with the people who don’t even know you yet.

Hence, saying no to social media platforms would be like a carpenter not knowing the value of wood!

Using social media is one of the most strategic and useful photography marketing ideas that can never go wrong.

Create your business/skillful page on Instagram and Facebook, share your images on Pinterest, and leverage LinkedIn and Twitter for professional reach.

5. Utilize Digital Marketing

The photography marketing ideas you just read about in the above two points are just the off-shoots of digital marketing, but there’s more to it.

You can either choose to perform free photography marketing actions or go for the paid ones.

A. Free Photography Marketing Ideas (SEO and GMB)

For free, leverage SEO and Google My Business. SEO is all about optimizing your website with the most searched and trending keywords.

Use correct keywords in your website content, titles, and meta description. The same applies to your blog content too.

Well-optimized web pages can help you rank at a better place in Google SERPs. This is utterly important people mostly pick the top-ranking websites.

If they don’t see you anywhere in Google search results, how do you expect them to find you organically?

If we talk about Google My Business, it’s one of the other most important photography marketing ideas.

Being a photographer, you must be having at least a home office or studio so that your clients can visit and meet you. The best way to make them find you easily is to be available on Google Maps.

When looking for photography services, people mostly search for ‘photographers near me. You’ll want to make sure that you appear on top Map results within your locality so the clients first meet you.

Again, you’ll need to optimize your GMB account with correct keywords too to rank at the top among other Map results.

Add all the necessary information like precise address, phone number, well-clicked and edited images for reference.

B. Paid Photography Marketing Ideas (SEM)

I’ve already spoken about running Facebook and Instagram Ads and over some relevant websites too. Additionally, you may run ads using Google Ads too.

All you’re required to do is bid for the keywords on which you want to rank.

6. Never underestimate the Image Editing

I’d highly recommend that you never post your images raw over social media and even on your website. This is the must-follow photography marketing idea.

The type of content that you’ll post is available on such platforms in abundance, and each image that you see is more competitive than the other.

Hence, sharing raw or poorly-edited images can gain no attention. They can rather degrade your brand name.

Before posting, ask yourself ‘Would I stop scrolling and leave all my work just to explore this image that I’d be posting?’. If not, then you can’t expect your viewers to give it any attention.

To survive the photography business competition, you must take a step ahead to stand out from the crowd.

This purpose can be accomplished with the help of professionally edited images. If you don’t have enough experience in using high-end, professional editing software, or if you’re someone who doesn’t have time to edit each image after every photo shoot, then it’s much better to outsource your editing work to professional photo editing services.

These companies have experienced professionals who can edit your images professionally within a few hours.

Being a photographer, you may understand that you can never end a photoshoot of one thing without capturing hundreds of images, and sometimes even thousands. Editing each image one by one can be pretty frustrating and time-consuming.

Photo editing and image retouching services like PixelPhant can edit hundreds and thousands of images within the minimum turnaround time of 24hours.

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Here are a few benefits of hiring professional photo editing services:

• Extreme experience with editing even the most complicated designs and structures
• Expert in using the latest software and tools available to leverage them the best
• Determined to stay in line with brand consistency and client guidelines 
• Delivery of your photo editing folder within the promised timeframe
• Perfect in the processes of improvement and editing
• Affordable and time-saving
• Have multiple customizable packages as per the clients’ needs

Hiring such services is one of the best photography marketing ideas you’ll want to steal from this article.

7. Run a Referral Program

No photography marketing idea can beat mouth publicity. When people hear about you from their friends and family, they are more likely to prioritize you for their photography requirements. Most people don’t believe what brands talk about themselves.

As per Review42, 92% of customers trust recommendations coming from friends.

Running referral programs through social media and email marketing can be one of the best marketing strategies for photographers.

It is basically a ‘win-win-win’ for all three parties – you, your existing customers, and the persona end person using the referral code.

You may provide a discount to the person who comes through a referral and add some bonus points in the giver’s account that he/she can use at the time of the next project.

With this photography marketing idea, both your client parties get some discount and you get to have new customers coming. So as I said, it’s a ‘win-win-win’!

8. Offer Discounts

Offering discounts is one of the most common and effective marketing tips for all kinds of businesses. I mean, who doesn’t like offers?

You may create exclusive discounts for different sets of your clients like

• For new clients
• Existing clients
• VIP and Loyal clients who have spent more than a certain amount on your skills, etc.

You may also run discounts during a few seasons like

• Holiday
• Wedding
• High-demand, etc.

However, this depends on what your niche is and what months are best to offer discounts.

This photography marketing idea can benefit you easily and provide instant results while others may take time to affect.

Again, promote your offers on your website as well as on all social media platforms for people to know what’s in the box for them. Such marketing strategies for photographers help gain engagement, improve traffic, and ultimately increase sales.

9. Join hands with co-marketing partners

This photography marketing idea asks you to be more open and build a network.

It’s not you alone who can market your photography services. To promote your skills and services, you’ll have to shout out to your target audience wherever you can.

Partner with businesses and places that aren’t your competition but can do some good for your photography business. For your determined target audience, analyze

• Where do they mostly hang out in their free time online?
• Where do they go for yoga or the gym?
• Where do they shop?
• Which cafe do they usually visit? And more.

These markets are best to showcase your work to reach clients. Gyms, cafes, boutiques – there are so many places that aren’t your competitors.

You can use them to share your visiting cards, gift cards, and flyers. Get mentioned in their newsletters, run your ads over the online channels where they usually spend their time. It could be places like Amazon, social media, or several websites that are relevant to your niche.

It’s better if your clients can see you at other places too rather than just the campaigns run by you on your website and social accounts. This photography marketing idea enables you to have a wider reach and gain goodwill.

If you’re a fashion photographer, reach out to salons and fashion boutiques. This could be a great cross-marketing campaign.

If you specialize in food photography, reach out to cafes and restaurants.

10. Get featured in blogs

So far we’ve covered running ads on the websites relevant to your niche. Now, if they’re relevant to your niche, they must also be writing blogs about your mutual niche.

Contact and reach out to such websites to get featured in their blogs. See if you can get a backlink in their blogs. You may also exchange the link of your blogs with them.

Doing this would increase traffic to your photography website. Apart from this, you also get to gain popularity, authenticity, and credibility for your photography business.

These blogs may relate to photography, photo-editing, or a website selling even tools and software used in your niche.

11. Build a Relationship with a Charity

There are a lot of non-profit organizations that can help you boost your photography marketing campaign.

Implementing this photography marketing idea may be a little more difficult than other ideas. All photographers have to have their tough share in the industry to build their name. Who knows if this is the only photography marketing idea you’ve been missing to leverage to be found.

Doing something for free may seem daunting. However, this could mean creating new opportunities.

If you do portrait photography, take photos of children and charity workers and get them featured. If you specialize in food photography, build relations with charities like food banks. This could help you reach chefs and many high-end restaurants.

Along with this, you may also get recognized as someone who’s doing things out of passion and love. Such societal status can aid in growing your photography business.

12. Plan an Open Photoshoot

An open photoshoot is a great photography marketing idea. It enables you to display your skills, add value to your guests, and expand your reach.

People voluntarily coming to your open photoshoot are the most potential clients. Open photoshoots are also great as you have complete control over how you perform, what kind of clicks you take, and what style you pick.

There are no given guidelines or restrictions. It also aids in improving your followings and build strong networks.

Use this opportunity to its fullest. You can give away freebies or discount coupons to your guest. This gives them a reason to contact you back.

13. Create a Customer Database

After utilizing all the photography marketing ideas, it all comes down to your customer base. Your clients are your assets and in no manner, you can ignore them. You need to be mindful of their needs, understanding, preferences, and order pattern.

You can make use of tools and CRM available online to organize your customers in one place.

A few categories you may divide your clients are:

• Prospects
• Old clients who haven’t visited lately
• Clients who’ve had a poor experience with you (give them some more love)
• Co partners opportunities
• Charity partners and clients through them

Your customer database can work as your backbone as if something goes wrong, you know what you need to turn to. This can be your master key to execute all your photography marketing ideas.

Conclusion

Marketing is one of those handy tools that you can leverage anytime you see your business going down. Most photographers overlook the need for photography marketing, which, in the long run, leads to the failure of the business.

This article talks about spoke of the most powerful photography marketing ideas that can help you boost your photography business growth.

If you want your photography business to reach another level following these photography marketing ideas is a must. I’d also suggest you leverage 10 Efficient Photography Studio Management Software for better and planned growth.

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