The marketing mistake a lot of professional photographers make

As a professional photographer, it is essential to market yourself. No matter the niche you are in. Yet, marketing isn’t always that easy. What do you say in your content and ads?

There are millions of ways to market yourself, and it all comes down to what you want to achieve with marketing and what fits your customers.

The benefits of marketing for photographers

The benefits are pretty self-explanatory, but let’s talk about them for a second anyway.

By marketing yourself, you can gain clients. Either fast by directing them to your inbox with a request to book you. Or slower by making them aware of your services and work. I’m not going to go deep into how this works. That would be an entire post on its own.

However you look at it, marketing yourself as a professional photographer is essential to your success. Good projects don’t just fall in your lap out of thin air.

The big marketing mistake

So attracting customers is usually the primary goal of marketing. As a photographer, that client can be anyone.

For example, I focus on small to medium-sized companies that provide services to other businesses. Usually, my clients are marketing agencies, HR consultancies, and IT providers.

For that reason, I aim my messages to them.

The mistake I see many other photographers make is talking about what they know and think is interesting.

EXIF-data, lenses, camera gear, strobe lights, how they made the edit, …

The client does not care about those things; only other photographers care about them.

If you’re a food photographer looking for restaurants to become your client, this kind of content won’t help you.

The restaurant owner wants to know how long it takes to photograph a dish and how much it will cost them. Not what aperture you used to get enough -but not too much – depth of field to photograph that excellent gyoza.

Unless you sell knowledge, presets, or courses to other photographers, they are just not your target audience.

Aim your marketing material to what your client finds exciting, and you’ll get a whole lot further.