Realtime Marketing Strategy With Realtime From Bitly
Realtime is a new search engine, currently in beta. It was developed by the company who brought the world Bit.ly. What is really neat about this search engine is the…
12 Steps To Blog Promotion Success
Content marketing is more than just writing, photographing and publishing content. It's also about the promotion of that content. The team at Divvy HQ published a great infographic that doubles…
Bad Comment Marketing And How To Fix It
Comment marketing is the use of a website's comment feature to engage with others as a way of promoting (marketing) your business. There is something very important to remember when…
Get Trippy With Local Marketing
Previously I wrote about why photographers should use Pinterest. Today I want to share another website, similar to Pinterest. However, this bookmarking tool has a niche that is great for…
Cause Marketing for Photographers
As we move towards the coming new year many of us are beginning to implement a new marketing plan. Also, as the holiday season comes to a close many of our thoughts are on giving. Cause marketing is an opportunity to combine the two. For those unfamiliar with the term, cause marketing is a form of marketing that allows two organizations, one for profit, and one non-profit, to work together to further each of their individual marketing/development goals in a cooperative fashion. Think of the (product) RED campaign, or the partnership between the NFL and United Way.
Cause marketing can be as simple as offering a sponsorship to a local charity event, or as involved and complex as you care to make it. Below are some examples of actual cause marketing campaigns I’ve seen photographers in my market employ”¦
- A local portrait/wedding studio holds quarterly workshops for photographers on various business practice issues. They host at their studio and usually bring in a guest speaker. They don’t charge attendees directly but ask that they make a donation to a specific charity ($40 to the local food bank or so.)
- A commercial photographer sponsors a hole-in-one contest at a charity golf outing. If a participant scores a hole in one, they win $10,000. He gets a bond each year to cover it for about $100. He’s at the tee of that hole, shoots a photo of the foursome and mails each of them a print (with his logo and web address of course.)
- A fine art photographer gives 25% of sales of a series of images of the Chesapeake Bay to a local environmental charity.
- In lieu of holiday gifts for his corporate clients, an industrial photographer makes a donation to the USO (many of his clients are in the defense industry and are veterans). He then sends the clients a note thanking them for their business and letting the client know that he’s made that donation. (more…)
TimeLapser app for iPhone
One thing that many buyers of commercial photography like to see are behind the scenes videos of a shoot. It allows them to get a sense of how you like to work and what kind of shoot you might run if they were to hire you. Even for photographers working in the retail and personal fields, behind the scenes video can be a great marketing tool, showing potential clients and customers what their shoot might be like.
Of course, like photography, productions vary widely. You can shoot a scripted narrative with voice overs and scores. You can shoot a time lapse of the shoot and simply post that. The latter is certainly the easiest to shoot, and the TimeLapser app is designed to make that easy.
TimeLapser uses the built in camera to shoot individual frames, at a user-determined rate and resolution, then stitches those images together into a .mov file (at a user determined frame rate). At its heart, it’s basically an intervalometer that will combine the individual files together for you. (more…)
The Purple Cow
I’ve decided that it’s time to start putting my foot down and really begin promoting my freelance business. As I wrote previously about life as a corporate photographer and being at the mercy of the bean counters I think it’s time to get this party started before the next round of layoffs appear over the horizon. I’ve been “freelancing” part time for almost thirty years, I’ve also been very fortunate in that I’ve always had a full-time job as a photographer in that time. Well as I get older I realize that the corporate gravy train could dry up at anytime and it would be nearly impossible for me to get another full time corporate gig, especially at my ripe old age of 47. That realization is why I made the decision to build up my freelance business now, while I can. (more…)
Book Review: Tell the World You Don’t Suck
Tell the World You Don’t Suck: Modern Marketing for Commercial Photographers by Leslie Burns Dell’Acqua
I’m a big fan of marketing and advertising my business. I really try hard to put my work, my business and my name out there as much as possible. With that said, sometimes I get stuck. Getting stuck in your marketing is no different from getting stuck creatively. It happens to all of us and learning how to break out of that rut and into more productive areas is important for any business owner. It’s at times like these that books like this one come in very handy indeed. Sometimes we need a creative kick in the pants, sometimes the foot is more business oriented. (more…)
A few words about postcard marketing
I’ve got a show coming up soon (a two-person show, I’ll be showing a new set of dune abstracts), so for the last week or so I’ve been spending a fair amount of time on marketing the show. I’ve sent out an email to my on-line mailing list, updated my web site and my Facebook fan page, and so on. It would be just so easy to stick with electronic marketing, but I think in this case that would be a mistake. Even in this modern age, there’s a place for the postcard.
Designing a simple postcard isn’t that difficult if you have moderate graphic design and Photoshop skills. For announcements of photographic exhibitions, the front of the card should contain one or two eye-catching images and your name, it should also suggest that the card is about an exhibition and not waste ink on a whole lot more. Save most of the time/place details for the back, the more “real estate” on a small card you give to your own work, the more it will attract the notice of your customers. What goes on the back of your card– which is heavily constrained by US postal regulations– all of the major postcard vendors provide templates so you know what areas you need to leave blank, and so on. (more…)
Keywording for Fun and Profit
One of the markets I’ve only recently started exploring for my own work is the stock photography market. It’s a challenging and arguably declining market, but in these financial types I can’t afford to ignore any way I can supplement my photographic income. One of the most parts of getting work ready for stock is keywording, putting together a list of search terms that potential customers might use to find your work. In this post, I’ll talk about a few things to remember when keywording images for stock sites. (more…)