Once you have a photography business up and running and you’ve had a few customers, things are feeling pretty good. You’ve got some happy customers, a few good references, and a bit of income already starting to build up. I bet you could do with a little more business though, couldn’t you? Yes, yes you could. A business can always do with more customers, that’s what a business is all about.
The good news is that there are plenty of ways to advertise your business. Let’s go ahead and take a look at a few of the more exciting ways to advertise.
Promoting Your Startup Photography Business Through Adwords
Adwords is Google’s own online advertisement tool. With Adwords you can drive people to your website. Not only will you get people coming to your site, but you will get very targeted people coming to your site. If you are a wedding photographer, you will get people coming to your site who are interested in weddings. If you are a sports photographer you will get people coming to your site who might want photos taken at their soccer game.
The reason Adwords works so well is because Google places ads on websites based on the content of the website. So if someone is searching for wedding photographers and lands on a website that is talking about weddings, and this website has ads, some of those ads might be ads for a wedding photographer. If you signup for Adwords you can be one of those ads. This would mean that if someone clicked that ad, they would go to your site and would be able to hire you as their wedding photographer!
This is one of the best advertising techniques that you can use.
Advertising Your Company Through TV
If you are wealthy and have a good amount of money to invest in your business, you can use the TV. This is a more expensive route to follow but can be extremely effective. If you are doing a type of photography that a lot of people are interested in, such as senior portraits or something to do with kids, you might want to try TV. This is especially true if you feel that your local area will respond well to you. The TV can give you great coverage since so many people watch TV. Again, this is more risky because it costs more but can really be worth the risk.
Advertise With Roadside Billboards
When you drive down the highway, do you pay any attention to the billboards? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The thing with billboards is that they are very big, but that’s because they need to be. People are generally traveling by at 60 miles an hour on the highway and they have to be big if anyone is expected to read what’s on there. Also, if you use this method of advertising you want to make sure that your billboard is extremely simplistic. Consider a large attractive graphic with a few short words that capture what your business is all about. If your billboard is too busy people won’t be able to get the point before they are already gone and it’s too late.
That said, billboards are very good because there are many people that travel to and from work on highways. You’re going to have an extremely large amount of people being exposed to your business if you stick yourself across a couple of well placed billboards on a popular highway.
Advertising Via Word Of Mouth And Other Personal References
What people say about you really matters. Word of mouth is one of the most powerful methods of getting the word out about you. If you do a good job for one person, he might go tell someone else about you. If you do a bad job for someone he will DEFINITELY tell ten people how bad you are. As you can see, it’s really easy to spread your reputation around if you do a bad job, so make sure you do a good job. It’s harder to spread a good reputation around but it will happen if you are consistently doing a good job. Sooner or later the dams will break and everyone is going to know about you. When this happens you won’t need to use the other methods of advertisement because everyone will know about you anyways and you can start concentrating more on just being a good photographer than concentrating on making sure you get noticed.
Local Ads in the Newspaper
You might think that the newspaper is dead or at least is dying. Well maybe so but it’s not dead quite yet! You can still make use of the newspaper to advertise your services. You won’t pay nearly as much as you will for TV ads or for a billboard. You will still reach a lot of people and the best part is that you will reach different people than you would for the other advertisement methods. Say for example you want to shoot photos of kids. Maybe a grandmother is reading the newspaper and she sees your ad. She might tell her daughter about the great new photography business and so you’ll get a new customer because of that.
Thinking Outside The Box
With advertising it’s all about diversity. If you only choose one method of advertising you’re only going to promote yourself to one group of people. This severely limits your effectiveness and stunts your growth as a business. If you want to have the best coverage and exposure possible, you should be advertising in as many different ways and methods as possible. Use Google Adwords. Use TV ads. Use the newspaper. Use billboards. And definitely make sure you get good references to make the most of your word of mouth advertising. You will be surprised how effective you can be when you spread your eggs out between many baskets.
Good luck with your sales!
