Marketing for Photographers & Creatives: Why Bother?
Initially published to Substack. Please follow along there to get the latest updates.
There comes a point in any creative’s journey where the question of marketing arises. Often it centers around getting more clients, but can even (mistakenly) be as simple as getting more social media followers. It quickly gets overwhelming, with more confusion than answers. After all, marketing is a well-studied profession of its own, with hundreds of niche specializations and titles, like “email deliverability manager”, “marketing automation implementation specialist,” and the dreaded “brand evangelist." The pervasiveness of blogs with “ten-thousand marketing tips for photographers” don’t help clear the confusion either, offering generic but smart-sounding advice with little depth and items to take action on — unless they’re trying to sell you a course.
Fortunately I’m not here to sell you a course or anything for that matter. I’m just a jaded marketer by degree and trade, as well as photographer who is a bit fed up with all the BS out there. And I think it’s only getting worse with AI-generated articles flooding the web.
In this first post, I’d like to get to the bottom of what marketing is, who should market, and why. While marketing might sound scary and overwhelming, you don’t need to know everything. Not even close to it, or even what the aforementioned job titles even mean. Let’s start at the basics.
The wise owl of marketing. Stallion Springs, CA.
What is marketing?
At the highest level, marketing for creatives and photographers is the act of promoting yourself and your work to attract clients and, in turn, build a successful business. This can be a part-time or full-time business, and often involves creating awareness, building your reputation, and attracting clients. Unlike normal professions, you don’t need a specific amount of experience and can get started as soon as you pick up a camera, the caveat being that results, rates, and clients are typically commensurate with the strength and vision of your body of work.
When thinking about marketing, most go right to things like having an online portfolio website, running social media accounts, and doing content marketing and SEO. Paid ads like Google PPC, Facebook, and Instagram might also be a consideration. Networking activities, email campaigns, website placements (such as Thumbtack), and print media are also within the realm. But it's very important to understand that these are marketing tactics, not inherently marketing or a marketing strategy.
Marketing is the long-term, big picture of how you want to promote your business, while the tactics are specific actions to get you to your marketing goals. This means it is important to align all of your tactics to your strategy. Your tactics are also typically shorter term and should evolve over time. For example, if you have a new product, your first campaigns should center around driving awareness what your product is. But you should quickly pivot to selling the product once your audiences have gained that awareness. Thus, you may be using the same tactic of doing social media advertising, but the message and goal changes accordingly.
Why bother, and what can marketing achieve?
As the foundation of marketing rests in goals, these goals need to be clear. I’ve seen organizations burn hundreds of thousands of dollars on campaigns that don’t have a clear goal. Through obfuscation and vague presentations on impressions, these folks get to keep their jobs. But if the time and money are coming out of your pocket, a lack of tangible results is especially painful and actually has real-world implications on your success. Whether you’re investing money, time, or both, you need to have a clear goal of what you want to achieve with marketing. For photographers this looks like:
Attracting new, or initial clients: Without marketing, it’s difficult for people to find, buy, or book you. A standalone website portfolio on its own is unfortunately not enough in the crowded digital space. Especially since most portfolio websites are image-only and terrible for SEO on their own. You need get it in front of the right people, at the right time.
Standing out from the competition: The photography market is incredibly saturated, and as I mentioned earlier, a photographer with far less experience and a weaker portfolio, but more effective marketing can have the edge. Some tough love: anyone can pick up a camera and start marketing, taking worse pictures than you but getting more business. I hear this all the time in the creative field, but in my years of marketing consulting, I’ve seen this be the case in every industry. I can’t begin to put a number on how many times I’ve met with clients who say, “We have the better product, why is the competition killing us??!” As long as there are dollars to be made from a given market, there will be competition — creatives are not a special case, it’s just that the barrier to entry is lower than, say, making a new cell phone to compete with Apple and Samsung.
Building networks and relationships: Next to “competition” and “over-saturation,” networking seems to be another scary word to creatives. But consider the hundreds of professional photographers who have little-to-no digital or social media presence, yet they’re photographing massive ad campaigns or million-dollar weddings. The reality is, your network can be one of your strongest marketing tactics. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” remains the truth. I think this one’s a bit scary because it’s not within your control and the immediate response is often, “I don’t know anyone!” But by starting out with referrals from your first clients, friends, or even family, partnering with other vendors, and maintaining regular communication, you can turn this into a strong book of sustained business.
If you build it, sometimes they won’t come. A home abandoned during construction. Salton Sea, CA.
Who should and shouldn’t market?
The easiest answer to this, is that anyone who wants to build a career or at least some sort of income from photography should market. But as with most things you might have noticed in marketing, it’s not always that clear.
For freelance photographers, marketing is essential to booking business. This is often the most crowded space. Think of the countless amount of wedding photographers — the need to stand out from the pack is paramount to getting bookings, and again, this doesn’t come down to whether you have the better portfolio. If you’re not in front of, or referred to potential couples, they’ll never even see your work and have you up for consideration.
Professional photographers, who are already deriving their income from photography, also need to use marketing to stay relevant. This is not just for attracting new clients, but also for utilizing existing or past relationships to stay top-of-mind for new opportunities and referrals. For example, a photographer shooting ad campaigns would focus their marketing efforts on the ad agencies and art directors that they’ve previously worked with. Similarly, a photographer selling prints or books would be well served by marketing to their existing customers and followers.
Hobbyist photographers (sorry, I hate that word, too) are where the line starts to become less clear cut and some tough questions come into play. If you’re working a typical job outside of photography, the question is whether or not you want to make the transition into photography. If so, marketing is essential and can help you make the jump into shooting side gigs or working full-time as a photographer.
If not, then marketing starts to deviate from clear business-oriented goals. Having a social media page, followers, and a website isn’t inherently marketing, especially if you have nothing to sell. If you want to do marketing just for the sake of increasing your follower count, the question to ask is, why, and what purpose will that serve? Marketing is goal-oriented for the sake of business outcomes, so maybe it’s time to consider if becoming a business is something you want to do.
Now, there’s just one giant barrier to entry that prevents a lot of creatives from taking action.
Self-promotion is uncool
As a skateboarder throughout my youth and young adulthood, this is where I struggle with a lot of self-imposed constraints that I’ve come to realize, as written in my first Substack post: The self-imposed constraints in our photography and video work.
Self-promotion and marketing yourself is another one of those constraints, and is totally uncool. Skateboarders are supposed to be chill and punk rock. But even punk rock bands sell merch. Working a 9-5 when you’d rather be doing anything else, or getting envious of others’ success in place of your own is also not very punk rock. Being humble, respectful, and authentic to yourself can help overcome these mental constraints. And it’s important to get past what the childhood bullies think is uncool, because in creative professions, your “brand” is your own self — so you’d better have some degree of budding confidence.
You’ve probably also have considered that marketing yourself and your work opens you up to judgement — a clear obstacle for many photographers and creatives who have hesitated to put themselves out there. I’ve struggled with this for years, and only recently realized the irony that I have no problem speaking to a room full of executives on marketing strategy, yet have serious self-doubt when publishing a blog on the same topic on my own media.
Without getting into too much psychology, understanding that perfection is an illusion, embracing and learning from mistakes, enjoying the process, and not taking criticism personally are all important mindsets to have. Build your confidence one step at a time.
What’s next?
In this post I covered what marketing is and isn’t, what types of outcomes to strive for, who should and shouldn’t market themselves, and how to approach the feelings of self-doubt on putting yourself out there. Over future posts I will get into specific tactics and strategies, like how to approach building a website, SEO, competition, paid ads, and other topics as it relates to photography and creative professions.
My aim is to cut through the BS that’s out there and share what I’ve learned in over a decade of marketing management and consulting for companies ranging from the largest tech giants to small businesses and entrepreneurs. You’re not going to see generic advice like “find your niche!” and “do SEO!” without frameworks or other specifics to get you towards action. In some cases I’ll probably even challenge some of the boilerplate marketing junk in favor of evidence or prioritization towards your goals.
If you’d like to follow along and maybe learn a thing or two, please consider subscribing to my Substack, where future posts will be shared. I’m really enjoying the community and two-way communication Substack offers over the traditional web blog. Also, do feel free to let me know what you’d like to see in future posts.