Tag: Marketing

Photography Marketing-Social Media

This marketing post is moving on from Google adwords to discuss my social media marketing. I try to have a presence on as many social networks as possible, but, because of time constraints, I participate regularly and focus on four social media tools. They are: this blog, twitter, facebook and e-mail newsletter. Each tool requires a different amount of time, serves different audiences, and has its own purpose.

Blog:
I keep this blog updated for several reasons:

  • SEO, there are many more words here than on my portfolio, and Google is very good at indexing words, not so good at indexing photos
  • This is much easier to to update than my portfolio site, so I post all updates on photo-shoots, pricing and availibility here
  • This blog has more personality than my portfolio, giving potential clients more information about my personality and style.

Twitter:
Easy to use and very effective at spreading good ideas fast. I follow mostly photography-related people and businesses, businesses I want to work for, and several random accounts that interest me. I make sure the majority of my tweets are relevant to the people I follow and that follow me. So most of my tweets are related to photography. I maintain a separate twitter account for my current documentary project, VASADP, where I follow groups/magazines/people related to sustainable agriculture (the subject of the project).

Facebook:
I have just started to use Facebook again–I created a business page and I am slowly gaining fans. I feel that facebook will work best for showing off my wedding work because I can post wedding photos and tag who is in the photograph, and then all that persons friends can see that photo, including friends who are looking for a photographer. I am less certain how to gain commercial clients through facebook without purchasing ads (which I am doing, but that is a topic for another post).

E-Newsletter:
 My e-mail newsletter is an opt-in (meaning the recipient has to sign up) and updates recipients on recent photo shoots and upcoming events, such as art shows that they may want to attend. For those who care, I use Mailchimp.

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Social media is good, mostly free marketing, but I just have to make sure I do not spend to much time on these tools so I can keep producing photographs–larger companies literally hire people to do social media all day, every day.
Other social media services I have accounts with, but do not use regularly due to time or other concerns are: LinkedIn, Model Mayhem, Agency Scoop, Flickr, Youtube, Squidoo, and several others that I can’t even remember.

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No Comments by admin on January 7, 2010
filed in Marketing, commercial
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Photography Marketing–Google Adwords

Happy New Year! This year I am starting to use several new marketing tools, which are: Adbase Emailer, Facebook Ads and a portfolio directory service (ie Production Paradise, Dripbook, Workbook, PDN Photoserve, etc.). The main active marketing tools I already employed prior to adding these services are: google adwords, social media sites (twitter, facebook) and direct mail pieces. I am starting several posts to discuss how all of these marketing tools have been working for me. And I am going to start by discussing Google Adwords.

Google adwords has not been a successful marketing tool for me thus far. After $500 of adwords, I have gotten maybe two inquires for services, but no one has actually hired me. I believe that this is mostly because I did not know what I was doing with adwords; how to bid properly for ad placement, interpret analytics, keyword and target my ad properly.

My previous ad was too broad and keyworded for every type of photography I do. This meant that my message could not be compelling to a particular potential client, like a bride or photo-editor. This broad message probably contributed to a high bounce rate and very low ROI. I created my ad with a broad message because I was thinking adwords was going to be a cheap way to advertise–and to maintain adwords “cheapness” I decided I needed to minimize the number of ads I was running. Oops.

The other problem with my ad was that it was always placed too low on the page so that I got a lot of impressions (meaning the ad was showing on the page) with very few clicks, again leading to a low ROI (ie lots of paying per-impression with no click to website and therefore no chance of catching someone’s eye).

So I have now learned much more about Google adwords and am going to do the following this year:
1) Create compelling well targeted ads. For example, create separate ads for brides and photo-editors.
2) Give the ad-target a compelling reason to click on your ad–maybe by adding a discount for brides, or show unique imagery.
2) I am going to create ads using images, as opposed to pure text ads.
3) I am going to bid properly so that my ad appears in a favorable part of the page near the top.

This was definitely an expensive lesson, however, I think I have learned from it. If not let me know!

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2 Comments by admin on January 6, 2010
filed in Marketing, Uncategorized
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Gordon Stillman Photography | gordon@gordonstillman.com | 845.702.7049 | food and lifestyle photography