Successful Digital Marketing Plan for a Photography Business

Digital Marketing Plan for Photography Businesses

A digital Marketing Plan serves as your roadmap to success and you’ll get there much more quickly if you start out right.

Photography is one the most competitive businesses out there which is why you have to work a little harder to set yourself apart from the flock.

To build and grow your business, you need both raw talent and a knack for marketing and one of the most important factors for the success of a photography business is the ability to market yourself. You should continually be working to improve your craft and evolving your product, and work consistently on your own branding, online marketing and people skills.

With skill, careful marketing and a professional reputation, you have a good chance of creating a lucrative photography career. Follow the digital marketing strategy below to build your personal brand to success.

Creating your strategy plan

1. Measure your current success

A Photography business is all about word of mouth and marketing yourself on social media. It is utilizing the right tools and resources to determine your success.

• If you are using Google Business you can make use of google analytics.
• You can use Google ads to drive traffic to your website which can be analyzed.
• If you are using Pinterest, the tool you would use is Twitter analytics.
• The tool to use for Facebook would be Facebook analytics.
• If you are using Instagram, you will make use of Instagram analytics.

2. Setting Goals

To set goals you will start off by identifying your goals that should be tied to your business mission, vision and values. Once you have evaluated your business analytics, you will set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound.

Short Term Goals (ranging from 0 – 6 months)

Within 3 months, sign up 10 clients for a photo shoot.

Within 6 months, sign up 20 clients for a photo shoot.

Gain more than 150 followers on Facebook.

Long Term Goals (ranging from 6+ months)

Within 9 months, sign up 30 clients for a photo shoot.

Gain more than 350 followers on Instagram.

Make a profit to buy another camera lens.

3. Create a Digital Fingerprint

Creating a digital fingerprint is crucial for your business. Digital fingerprint has become a hot topic and is very impressive. It is a computational process used to identify and track internet users and devices online.

To create a website is one way to improve your brand, reputation and online marketing. Your website should present information about your business, what you offer, where to find you, who you are and reviews from clients to increase your credibility.

Google My Business

Google recently released a website builder tool for local businesses called Google My Business. It is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. If you a start-up or small business, this is great tool to start with to create a striking website and to help customers find you.

When customers search for your business on Google, information shows in a box that appears in their search results, known as a Knowledge Graph. This includes your business name, location, business hours and customer reviews.

Focus on your Unique Selling Points

Your business unique selling point is the one thing that makes your business better than the competition and what sets you apart from the rest. This is a marketing strategy of informing customers why your brand is above the competitors. It focuses on what customers want, what you do well and what your competitors do well.

Focus Points

• Know Your Target Audience
• Clarify the “Problem” You Solve
• Research the Market
• List Your Competitive Advantages
• Define Your Brand Promise
• Combine and Rework
• Cut It Down
• Test Your Unique Selling Proposition

Examples of Unique Selling Points (USP)

• Membership discounts
• Monthly Deals
• Package Deals
• Seasonal Package Deals
• Customized Packages

Photography Markets to explore that is not over saturated like wedding and baby markets

• Stock photography
• Contract work
• Commercial photography
• Real estate
• Pets
• Boudoir or glamour
• Sports
• Local news
• Image or video editing
• Food or Product images
• Music
• Paparazzi
• Prints
• Contests

4. Research your competition

All businesses face competition, that’s why it’s essential to research and stay on top of trends in your sector. Knowing your market is essential when growing your business. Here are 10 tips to get you started.

Keeping tabs on your competition is a great strategy for growing your business. It is important to know how you can use market research to gain deep insights into how customers perceive your brand compared to your competitors.

10 Tips on How to Research Your Competitors

• Become a customer
• Where to find your competitors
• Utilize social media
• Go further than a Google search
• Talk to your competitors’ customers
• Talk to your customers
• Attend industry conferences and events
• Assess your competitors’ goals
• Watch who they are hiring
• Don’t just focus on the now

5. Content is King

In a Photography business your content is your reputation and brand. This is why you need to ensure that your content is interesting and appealing. To build and increase your audience you need to keep your content exciting, engage with the user reactions, likes and comments.

Be creative with your content and tag people to create brand awareness and increase traffic to your sites. Include blog posts, educational posts, informative posts or inspirational posts to keep your audience coming back for more and want to share, like and follow your brand.

6. Social Media

It is critical for any business to have a social media strategy. A social media strategy defines how your organization will use social media to achieve its communications aims and the supporting platform and tools it will use to achieve this.

A social media strategy is statement of intent, outlining the goals and measurable objectives for using social media, and the target outcomes you want to achieve. The focus is to have a strategy that is actionable and understands your customers. It should help you to converse with them about the things they care about, on the platforms where they are already visiting.

Your social media marketing strategy should also list all of your existing and planned social media accounts along with goals specific to each platform you’re active on. A popular trend to use is hashtags to gain visibility and show emotions to related to more social media users.

Social media marketing helps businesses:

• Increase brand awareness
• Build engaged communities
• Sell products and services using native social commerce solutions
• Measure brand sentiment through social listening
• Provide customer service on social media platforms
• Advertise their products and services to target audiences

7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It is important for any business to increase traffic to your website by improving your SEO. Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines to rank the content higher on google.

How to improve your website’s SEO in 5 steps:

• Choose the right URL.
• Create titles and descriptions for each page.
• Utilize anchor text.
• Add alt text to all your images.
• Give your site structure with the right headers.

Diagram

By improving your SEO, you increase your chance of driving traffic to your website and allowing your content to be found and clicked on. SEO can help you build better relationships with your audience, improve the customer experience, increase your authority, drive more people to your site, give you an edge over the competition, and increase conversions, which means more sales, more loyal customers, and more growth for your business.

Now that you have learned what a digital marketing strategy entails, time to start with your plan.