I have a simple belief: Any serious photographer can develop a smart, measurable approach to online marketing, and will earn customers as a result.
NaturalApertures was founded on this notion, and has since become a drumbeat against a self-defeating behavior: photographers resorting to self-promotion as the core of their online presence.
It’s natural enough to do this, since our products and services are on our minds 24/7, but it’s a pitfall for any photographer trying to earn customers via social media, content marketing and search.
The trap opens widest when we act as though we’re more important to our customers than they are to us. This is exactly what we do by failing to make our online presence about customer needs.
A boring monologue results that literally throttles the business goals we go online with in the first place — to earn customers. You must break the monologue by delivering value.
“Value”, the cliché that’s overused by blogs covering social media, has the virtue of being the linchpin to discovering online marketing success. When you deliver value your audience grows, search visibility increases, credibility improves, and you win more customers.
Defining value takes work, but until you do the knowledge gap remains and time invested in attracting customers online is wasted.
Photographers must fill the value knowledge gap with an objective view of who we’re trying to serve. How does a photographer with limited time and resources accomplish this?
Start by asking questions.
“Photographers must fill the value knowledge gap with an objective view of who we’re trying to serve.”(tweet this)
Asking Our Way to Marketing Success
What we can learn by asking a few questions is remarkable. And, we can accomplish this in ways that are simple, free or inexpensive, and that can provide powerful insights into how to market to our audience.
Web survey: Host a survey, free of charge, using a service like SurveyMonkey. Before you do you need to write the survey, and before that you need to determine your objective for the survey.
Lets do this now: Your objective is to learn what’s valuable for people who are on the hunt for products and services like those that you provide. You need to understand the customer journey.
What kind of information do they seek? What questions do they ask as they define their need, search for solutions, compare providers and narrow down to a purchase decision? What information sources do use? Read The Customer Journey and Why It’s Crucial for Photographers to better understand this process.
Web poll: Similar to a survey but shorter, polls can be used to collect valuable feedback on blog posts and other content. A poll is an easy, interactive way to let readers voice their opinions, and can help you enhance engagement with your audience.
Polls are literally plug-and-play if you operate a WordPress blog. This post has a good list of WordPress poll plugins. As with a Web survey, you can literally have this up and running in a few minutes, and you can also use products like SurveyMonkey to develop and host polls.
Promoting Surveys and Polls
Survey recruitment can be a task, but there are a couple of proven approaches to getting people to participate.
Current customers and readers: The lowest hanging fruit will be the customers and readers you have already. Craft and send an email invite, and create a banner or other tout for your website or blog that directs people to the survey.
Social Media: Naturally, leverage your social media profiles by asking your fans and followers to participate. Once the survey or poll is posted, tweet the link and invite people to participate. Be sure to ask for retweets! Post on LinkedIn and LinkedIn Answers, as well as Facebook.
You can also host on certain social media sites. Here’s an interesting hack for running a poll on Google Plus, and SurveyMonkey has an app for hosting a survey on your Facebook fan page.
Video: If you want to get really creative, seed your YouTube channel with video segments about the Survey. This can be a great way to spread the word, creates a dedicated link to the survey for as long as you keep it up, and gives props to your brand, as well.
Other photographers: Ask your photographers buddies to help you promote your poll or survey.
Incentives: Survey participation is often driven using an incentive. This can be effective, but be careful with the approach. Mainly, ensure that a targeted audience is taking the survey. If you’re targeting consumers, not photographers, for example, you want to ensure that you promote the poll and survey to the right audience.
That said, an Amazon giftcard or even a free eBook giveaway can give your participation a very nice boost.
Conclusion
The critical takeaway here is twofold – the value knowledge gap is deadly to online marketing objectives but closing it is straightforward with a little effort.
Get started today– you will be on the path to finding more customers online as soon as you do!
Image credit “”jscreationzs” and FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Related Posts:
- Eight Essentials to Marketing Your Photography Online
- No One Cares About Your Photographs
- S.W.O.T. Yourself to Beat Social Media Clutter
- Photoblogging, Consistency, Digital Relationships, And How I Fell Off the Wagon
- Is This The End of Twitter As We Know It?
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
OK, I’m going to play devil’s advocate here since you engaged on Carl’s blog about this. I’ve read and understood well The New Rules of Marketing and PR and many other books about social media. I have developed 630 followers on Twitter in a little over 6 months. Not a record by any means, but way ahead of the average joe. My blog is followed in 67 countries by thousands of people. One of the things I DON’T LIKE about Twitter is that “everyone” is on there trying to skirt around talking about their own products and pretending to be interested in everything else under the sun except their own promotion. It’s a waste of time. The conversation would be more interesting if everyone talked about their own work in a low-key way, more than they do. I told you the story about my friend Jeff the #1 spa dealer in Northern California, who asked everyone to buy in his second sentence after meeting them. This approach, when done with taste, is much more appealing and impressive to me, than everyone sitting around being afraid to ask anyone to buy, which I believe is why so many people hide behind social media in the first place. I know that most people are not capable of leading with their own work in a classy way, but neither are they getting anywhere spending their whole lives and careers on social media. They are too cool to “sell.” They would rather “market.” What a lot of hogwash.
On a less vindictive note, I did enjoy your article and the ideas. I feel it would be useful for me to do some surveys. However, it would be useful to do many, many things I’m not already doing because I’m spread too thin as it is. What I need are article on how to make it all more automated, simpler, easier to market myself, easier to do all the platforms at once, etc. How to SAVE time, not spend more of it. Also, what if you do know exactly what your target market is looking for? How do you close the knowledge gap without talking about your own work?
Hey David. I don’t take your comment as vindictive, but I also don’t see the retail example as a relevant comparison to the subject of this post. The monologue only sells, and while this approach may work in a strictly retail scenario like the spa dealer’s, it simply doesn’t online.
Every client I work with struggles with limited time; this is one of the main reasons I advocate so strongly for customer-centric communication. Who can afford to Waste it? My point is that photographers with limited time and resources can develop more effective, efficient marketing by investing the time to develop a better understanding of customers. The payoff is insight that provides a reason to participate in social media.
If you know exactly what your customers want, then you know when to talk about your own work. If a person is at this point of the customer journey, your work is the conversation.
Hi Wesley,
Happy Holidays and good response. I think I skimmed your journey to being a customer post, but I need to re-read those two posts to see what you’re discussing there too. From what I’ve discovered, most landscape photographers are in a quasi-wholesale business, that is, they sell to outlets that sell to the consumer, either media buyers or stock agencies. I’m not sure whether social media is the BEST way to reach these middleman-buyers, but I have heard enough success stories to know it should certainly not be ruled out. On the other hand, unlike most, my primary income comes from print sales, which is essentially a retail business. So, I suppose a more direct monologue approach will work for these people. I am targeting the collector directly, either those looking for vintage prints, who I find are online only for short periods and very rarely on social media, and the general interest inexpensive digital print buyers who do use social media, at least a segment of them do that is the most relevant to our discussion. The majority of my print sales actually come from people who are new on the internet, can hardly get around, are literally afraid of using it and avoid using it. However, I won’t get into discussing these people here because they certainly have limited social media use and I’d like to get away from teaching people to navigate online as much as I do. I need to attract those who are already comfortable shopping online. I know what I need to improve. At this moment in time I way behind in cultivating back links, in simply getting more images on the site and in writing articles around the internet. I already have a very full plate, but I work on these projects as I can. Would you say that rolling out and developing my social media presence is as important as these other so far lacking fundamentals? My impression is that I need to get the SEO foundation built first and then worry about social media. Is that the correct way to look at it? I know social media is part of SEO in a sense, but I can only do so much as one person. I need a prioritization strategy to know what to put in what order of importance. I am reading and learning as fast as I have time to do so.
Oh, I meant to say that one of the reasons I ask the questions above about what to prioritize when is that I subscribe to a number of the top SEO and social media website newsletters. I find that everywhere I look people are blasting me with tips of what I could be doing to increase traffic and conversions in a million different ways. Talk about a monologue. I am bombarded with information and advice and feel generally like I have so far to go that it is discouraging and overwhelming.
David, happy holidays to you! You’re asking great questions. One of our greatest challenges as small businesses is determining priorities in an integrated marketing landscape.
Many photographers have multiple sources of revenue, spanning print sales, workshops, ebooks, etc. The importance of the customer journey and application of search and social to drive marketing will vary based on the product / service in question. It sounds like you have a good understanding of at least one customer segment that you cannot effectively reach online, but that there are others you feel are viable.
My gut reaction to the challenges you describe is to focus first on your catcher’s mitt — your website(s). Building traffic to a site that’s ill-equipped to meet the needs of your visitors or the business will be frustrating. In short, before optimizing for search and social, optimize your site’s experience.
If you’re confident about this and have also developed customer insights strong enough to inform the creation of original content that maps to the customer journey, I agree that your next step is SEO research and site audits. The former requires a little research legwork (I have a post on this topic in the works) while the latter can largely be addressed with a Webmaster’s account for both Google and Bing. These won’t address the gamut of issues a true site audit assesses but if you haven’t done so already, account setup is easy and provides important information about the health of your sites. The Google webmaster’s account also integrate into Google Analytics, which I see on both of your sites, to provide additional information about site visitation.
In addition to SEO research, you can conduct simple (and free) social listening to identify where relevant conversations are occurring (I hope to publish a post about this in the next day or two). As you have probably gleaned from all of the reading you’ve done, optimizing your site for keywords is akin to bolting wheels onto a car. The car still needs gas to go, and as you mention in your comment, developing quality backlinks is part and parcel to this. Knowing where relevant conversations are occurring helps to focus your link-building efforts and social listening is excellent for this (and, I imagine you may have important link-building opportunities given your father’s role and stature in landscape photography).
Regarding your comment about the newsletters you receive, I can relate. On any given day the information you receive may be excellent, but applying it all or simply keeping pace with it is impossible. We have to walk before we can run, and obviously balance this with the need for putting food on the table. I advocate for beginning with the beginning, which is a hard argument to win for a business that needs to be fed now, but it’s the surest way to build successful online marketing. All this said, it sounds like you’re proceeding in the right fashion as time allows.