The Photographer’s Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing
There’s more to running a photography business than technical skills.
An integral part of a successful photography business — whether individual or an agency — is marketing your services. That might feel like a foreign skillset, and you might be far more comfortable behind the camera than pushing yourself into the spotlight.
Luckily, today, digital marketing tools have made it easier than ever to showcase your talent, attract customers and promote your business, without doing any cringe-worthy sales pitches.
At Wishpond, we’ve helped photographers establish and run their online presences for years. We’ve collected our hard-earned wisdom and summarized it into one ultimate photography marketing post. Here, we’ll cover marketing strategies in multiple forms: how to showcase your photography business online, how to attract customers and how to keep them engaged.
Your Website
Working today, you’ll know the importance of having an online presence.
Your website is a key part of the impression you’ll make online, and it’s a brilliant opportunity to show potential clients your personality — and your skill — through every element of your design.
To help walk you through the different aspects of photography marketing, we’ll use this customized example of Jonathan and Drew.
This would be Jonathan and Drew’s website homepage.
It’s clean, striking, highly emphasizes visuals (absolutely essential in established credibility for a photographer’s website), the call to actions are clear and it’s mobile responsive.
Note how quickly, as a user, you understand what the website is about, and how all the elements work together. Without moving beyond the fold of the homepage, you can get a feel for the personality of the business (these photographers are probably more traditionalists than quirky, avant-garde photographers) and you know at the outset they specialize in weddings.
From a technical standpoint, the site works equally well on mobile and desktop. Keeping the layout impactful and appealing on mobile is more important than you think. With the majority of users navigating the web on their smartphones, your website should be designed to guide them through the experience on a small screen.
Although you might be designing on a desktop, it’s crucial to be working with a service that has mobile-responsive templates, or design a mobile-responsive version of your site.
Ensure your test your site before launch and view it on different types of mobile devices and screen sizes (if possible).
Landing Pages
Another important conversion point is landing pages. There’s an important distinction between your landing page and your website that people get confused: they aren’t the same thing.
Marketing pro tip: Although people often confuse the two, a landing page and a website aren’t the same thing.
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Your landing page shouldn’t be a stand-in for your website. Your landing page is where people come after a specific offer you’ve made, from a blog post or a Google Ad, for example.
A previous article stated that visitors should be able to glean what your landing page is about and what it’s offering them within 7 seconds of arriving on your page.
That may sound like a tall order, but it’s fairly simple to do if you follow a few guidelines. Let’s revisit Jonathan and Drew.
One of their landing pages might look like this:
Tip one: Don’t crowd your page with copy. Make it about your offer. They can find out more about your business, your past work, your favorite color on your website.
Tip two: Make your central image closely tied to your business and your copy.
Tip three: Give your users one call to action. Don’t offer a newsletter sign up on a landing page for a 50% off coupon.
Tip four: Make it easy to covert! This is where details matter. Do what you can to increase your loading speeds and reduce friction. This means bigger buttons and shorter forms.
