As one of the benefits of being a Smugmug member, I have access to their various events and webcasts aimed at growing a photography business. About a week ago, Sandy Puc presented a webcast on marketing and how this can create a sustainable studio.
Her focus is on studio/portrait photography, but the lessons can potentially be applied to any genre.
The webcast run for over an hour and contained many great nuggets of information. I won’t go into the details, but I wanted to share some things that you might want to think about in terms of your photography business.
Here’s my biggest take-aways:
- Target Market – Who is your target market? How can you target them if you don’t know who they are and what they respond to?
- Google marketing – I don’t mean use google for marketing, I mean google search marketing to learn as much as you can from all types of marketing (not just photography) and try to implement your new knowledge
- Get organized – having a schedule of marketing, shooting, social networking, etc, activities can help you maximize your impact
- Sweat the small stuff – if your goal is to create customer loyalty, treat each of them as if they’re special and find ways of separating yourself from the rest of the pack; sell an incredible experience
- Keep in touch with previous clients – Do this through newsletters, e-marketing, referral marketing, etc.
- Branding – Make sure your branding is consistent especially within categories and to a lesser degree across categories. Make sure that your text is consistent with your brand – using professional writers will help avoid errors that come across unprofessional
- Programs – Create programs that result in customer loyalty and return customers over time
- Teasers – Do not post “teaser” images online before the sale – Sandy was very, very adamant about this!
- Give back – I’m going to be writing a series of posts on this subject, so stay tuned!
So that’s just a few of the many things I learned from the webcast. I wrote some notes with more details on each point, but I figured this would be a good place for you to start thinking about things.
Sandy has a website that is chock full of various marketing materials created by her team. I actually won one of her products during the webcast and am looking forward to what I can learn from it. If there is interest, I might even create a mini review.
