So this will be the first in short series of posts related to various aspects of marketing.  It’s mostly related to photography but a lot of what I’ll be discussing can be applied to other businesses as well.

Why do we market?  This is an important question.  Before doing something, it’s a great idea to know why we are doing something.  I find that understanding the why helps give me more motivation to accomplish the how.  So this first post will try and briefly tackle that question.

There are loads of photographers out there.  So many of them are fantastic as well.  With digital cameras it’s easier than ever to gain experience.  Back in the days of film, experience was actually something you had to pay for.  Today we can take countless pictures and as a result the experience people can acquire has accelerated tremendously.  Kids can have more shots taken than old film bugs and depending on how you look at it, can be way better due to their volume of shots taken.  Guess what, that don’t mean jack.  It’s great to be a good photographer, and it’s nice to be able to reliably take awesome shots.  Thing is, there’s 1 b’gillion  other photographers out there JUST LIKE YOU.  That’s where marketing comes into play.

Marketing for a photographer is like handing out a resume.  Teenagers all over the country head to their local malls and hand out silly resumes every day.  As a photographer, you can’t really just go up to people with your portfolio and make ‘em look at it.  It’s not really acceptable, at least not yet.  We’ve got to market ourselves.  We’ve got to make it easy for people to find us and let them know not only do we exist, but that we’re right for them.  The main reason being that if we fail to market ourselves people will simply go to the next photographer who did.

There’s a big difference between running a successful, well established photography studio and starting up a company of your own.  Having clients/word of mouth traffic is hands down the best means of acquiring future clients.  Getting to that point is the trick.  When you start your company you’re going to have no clients.  Your mother and friends don’t really count, sorry.  You’re going to have to find clients.  It’s a bit daunting at first but there are a few ways to do it (we’ll get into the how in the next post).  Unless you know of some secret method (please share if so) you’re going to have to market yourself.

Without marketing your brand, word of mouth will take a long time to really kick in.  Marketing is like putting word of mouth on steroids.  It’s not something to be afraid of at all.  I know most of you will agree with the necessity but for this first post I thought it was important to make it clear that we need to put ourselves out there.  It’s not an option that you can consider taking if business slows down.  It’s something you need to consider doing always.

Here’s a great little image I found while reading Chase Jarvis’ Blog a while back.  It really helps to illustrate the differences between the various forms of recognition.  It’s important we learn these all.

Being a great photographer + being heard of always = success!

Marketing 102 next week.

Thank you for reading.

David Dvir

Marketing 102: How Do We Market

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 10:38 am and is filed under Business of photography, How to, My two cents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.