Photography Marketing: 5 Proven Strategies That Deliver Results

What’s the single thing that keeps most professional photographers up at night? It’s sales, because it’s how we make a living and keep the lights on.

We obsessively check our calendars and count our bookings for the year, telling ourselves that it’ll be fine and we’ll hit our targets. We open our inboxes in the hope of seeing new leads.

Sales keep us going, but marketing and selling ourselves is often the hardest thing for photographers to learn.

Here’s the thing—it doesn’t have to be that hard. There’s a smart way to do photography marketing, so that you naturally generate word-of-mouth and referrals. There’s a painless method to consistently collect quality leads and close new clients.

In this article, I’ll teach you how to do this with Honcho. These are photography marketing strategies that we’ve used to grow our own business, getting to 6-figures in revenue per year.

Stand Out From the Competition

Honcho gives you several superpowers, and the first one is differentiation. When you use Honcho, you stand out from the competition—by providing a better photography experience than everyone else.

I’ve been in photography for close to a decade now, and I believe we need to seriously rethink how we deliver photos today. 

The traditional method of sharing photos days or weeks after a wedding or event misses so many opportunities—to generate excitement, enhance the event experience, and create demand for your business. 

Do these instead.

1. Instantly share your photos: Honcho lets you share your photos right away, while you shoot. This creates the biggest impact, because attendees are the most excited to receive their photos during the event—not days or weeks after the event.
2. Distribute photos with face recognition: Attendees can find their photos just by uploading a selfie, without having to scroll through the whole gallery.
3. Show a live slideshow: Display photos on a large screen to engage the audience, spark conversations, and enhance the event’s atmosphere.
4. Provide instant prints: Honcho makes it easy to manage on-site printing, and it can be done wirelessly.

Provide these additional features even if you’re not charging for them at the beginning. It doesn’t cost you anything to instantly share your photos, distribute them with face recognition or show a live slideshow. 

This photography marketing strategy gets your momentum going and helps you collect leads at every event (which we talk about below).

Over time, clients will come to you asking for these features. That’s when you upsell them and make extra income, with little to no extra effort.

Get Free Advertising

What if there’s a way to advertise your services to everyone at an event or wedding? 

That would be amazing, wouldn’t it? Out of the hundreds of attendees, surely some are looking for a photographer or ready to refer one to someone they know—but only if the photographer provides a great experience!

Here’s the good news—if you’re using Honcho, you’re already providing a better photography experience than everyone else.

All you need to do now is to market yourself, and Honcho can help you do that for free with a profile—where you share your bio and contact information in the gallery. 

Attendees are motivated to visit the gallery because they want to see their photos. After they see gorgeous photos of themselves (which you took), they see your profile.

Do you get how powerful that is?

If they ever need a photographer, you’re the first to come to mind, because you’ve already proven your worth. Honcho helps you provide an extraordinary experience, and then it helps you market your business to anyone who wants the same experience for their own events.

Collect Leads at Every Event

Not all leads are made equal. 

There are warm leads that are highly likely to convert into clients, and then there are cold leads that convert at a much lower rate.

Honcho helps you collect the highest quality warm leads, because the leads are coming from attendees who have already experienced your service first hand.

There’s a big difference between a lead who already knows you versus a lead who is simply filling out the contact form on your website. Guess which one you want more of?

With Honcho, you will soon be able to create forms that pop up in the gallery and set rules for when they appear:

1. When attendees open the gallery
2. A certain amount of time after attendees open the gallery
3. When attendees tap on the download button to download their photos

Use forms to collect any information you want, such as names, email addresses and phone numbers.

Every event you shoot gives you more leads, which books you more events. It’s a powerful virtuous cycle that amplifies your photography marketing.

Build an Email List

You’ve created a form to collect leads at every event, but not every lead will convert into a client. 

What do you do with those leads?

Build an email list and nurture them over time. That way, you stay top of mind when they are finally ready to hire a photographer.

Email lists have many advantages:

1. You own your email list and reach your audience directly in their inbox. On social media platforms, you’re at the mercy of the algorithms, which often don’t show your posts to your followers. Too many photographers have sunk so much time building a following, only to find that their reach has been crippled.
2. Email marketing is much cheaper, and often more effective than paid advertising. The difference is that your email subscribers already know you and are interested in your content or services.
3. Email marketing tools provide insights into open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. Over time, you learn how to send better emails that engage your audience.
4. You can use your email list for many purposes, such as driving traffic to a blog post or raising sales with special promotions.

Many photographers struggle to build email lists because they don’t have a cheap or effective way to collect email addresses. It doesn’t make sense to run ads or special promotions just to build up a list.

Fortunately, you don’t have this problem because Honcho helps you collect email addresses for free. Maximize that advantage with this photography marketing strategy.

Demonstrate Your Value With Reports

As photographers, we need to have a deeper understanding of why our clients hire us.

Yes, our clients hire us to take photos. But are there other goals tied to our work? We need to dig deeper to find out.

For example, let’s say we’re hired to cover a multiple-day conference. A conference has many stakeholders—there are sponsors who pay for the booths, speakers who fly in from overseas and attendees who purchase tickets. 

The event organizer wants to show value to each of these stakeholders—sharing photos with them is one way to provide that value. 

As photographers, we can also show value to the event organizer, beyond just taking photos. 

The reports in Honcho help you to quantify that value with useful metrics that validate your work. When your clients see how many people have viewed, downloaded and searched for their photos with face recognition, they know without a doubt that you’ve added incredible value to their stakeholders—and hence, their event.

Reports strengthen your business case and show that you’re more than just someone who can take photos. That’s the type of photographer that event organizers want to work with.

Conclusion

Honcho gives you powerful tools to market and sell your services. It helps you stand out from the competition, get free advertising, collect leads at every event, build an email list and demonstrate your value with reports. 

All of these lead to a virtuous cycle, where bookings beget more bookings. It’s an unfair advantage that you have over other photographers.

Sign up for a Honcho account and start growing your photography business today.