Marketing Your Photography: Quick Wins for Busy Photographers
A few years, the family photographer Nina Mace changed locations, which meant building an entire client base from scratch. She hit the ground running with a marketing campaign on Facebook and Instagram, shared on community pages and via targeted ads. In exchange for some free photos (made in their favorite locations), five local families were chosen to take part. “I had hundreds of families apply and follow,” she remembers.
“The ones I featured agreed to share the final images, which drove even more followers to my pages. I then took paid bookings off the back of my campaign. The cost to me was only my time to create the campaign and shoot and edit for two hours per family, and it was one of the biggest wins in terms of reaching my ideal client in a brand new location. Over the weeks I ran the campaign, I grew my followers by close to 1,000 people across both socials.”
When conducting research for this article, I learned two things: first, most photographers hate marketing because they think it’s a major money pit/time suck, and second, they’re (usually) wrong. When planned well, a few hours of work spent on marketing can pay off big time, raising awareness about your brand and attracting new clients in the process.
To create a guide that resonates with all photographers, we reached out to photographers working across fields, niches, and industries—including editorial and advertising photographers who are regularly hired by leading magazines and wedding and family photographers who are booked months in advance. From printed mailers to SEO, here are their best tips for getting started.