The Daily Habit That Will Help You Get More Photography Clients

Want to know how to get photography clients? The answer lies in your daily habits.

The reality of running a photography business means that you’ll likely have a high turnover of clients. So, you need to keep the flow of enquiries from prospective clients coming in thick and fast, and you’ll need to convert a decent proportion of those to fill your diary.

Focusing on marketing only when the enquiries dry up is a mistake that many photographers make. Sadly though, most marketing is unlikely to generate instant leads.

So, I believe that marketing your photography business should be a daily priority.

How to get photography clients

Even when you are at full capacity, marketing still is important because it is the work that will help you to stay visible and top of mind.

Focusing on it daily is the consistent and regular action that’s needed to keep a flow of those all-important leads coming in over time.

Many photographers, perhaps you too, consider marketing a necessary evil. It’s something that has to be done but isn’t something that you enjoy.

Procrastination on marketing is a BIG problem among photographers and, I get it! It’s easy to put tasks that you don’t enjoy on the back burner. You’d rather be behind the camera creating beautiful images, wouldn’t you?

The problem with putting marketing off though is that deep down, you know that marketing your business should be a priority and that it will help you to attract new clients. But by not prioritising marketing, you’re actually self-sabotaging!

By not promoting your photography and your services, you’re limiting your potential to attract new clients.

Take the action that will attract more photography clients

Marketing and promoting your photography business is so important because it helps you get visible, allows you to demonstrate your expertise and is a way of making offers to prospective clients.

I’m afraid to say, marketing is not something that you can ‘do’ for a while and then sit back and wait for the enquiries to ping into your inbox!

If you aren’t consistently marketing your business, you’ll probably find that you experience more of the ‘feast and famine’ – the peaks and troughs – in your business than those photographers who do market consistenly.

Why marketing your business every day is so important

While some marketing activities – such as online advertising and sale promotions – can have fairly immediate results, many don’t! Many marketing strategies have a longer-term impact, and consistent action is required to achieve and maintain results over time.

For example, PR and media relations, blogging (and guest blogging), search engine optimisation…these can all take a while to help you generate a return for your business in terms of more photography clients.

Recognise the ‘customer journey’

Also, it’s important for you to realise that there are several stages that your photography clients will need to go through BEFORE they even consider getting in touch with you.

When someone discovers you for the first time, say on Instagram, it’s unlikely they’ll convert straight away. In fact, this process can take many weeks, months or even years to happen, or it may never happen at all!

Which is why daily action is so important. 

If you can keep a continual flow of leads and prospects coming in your ‘sales funnel’, it will help you to generate the sales you need in the longer-term.

Every day that you are marketing yourself and your photography, you’re increasing your chances of being seen, being noticed and being considered by prospective clients. 

Plus, you are able to build up that know-like-trust factor that will help to influence them towards a purchase.

Use marketing content to attract, nurture and convert

Only a tiny percentage (around 3%) of your current audience is likely to be actively looking to buy your services right now! The rest are either not interested or don’t know they need your services, or they could be considering your services but are still not ready to buy.

These people need ‘nurturing’ towards a sale – they don’t have their credit card in their hand quite yet!

But, in the short-term, if you commit to doing some marketing every single day, you can do the work that helps to continually attract new people into your world and you can gradually ‘nurture’ them towards becoming a client.

Sharing your impressive image portfolio over time, creating, publishing and sharing useful and informative marketing content and wowing them with your powerful client testimonials are all ways to nurture prospects into clients.

You’re playing the longer game with this strategy, yes, but it will likely help you to convert a proportion of your audience consistently over time. It should help to keep sales coming in on a more regular, and predictable, basis.

How to make time for marketing

If you’re not sure how to find some time every single day to market your photography business, then you can theme your working days and allocate a set day per week for marketing instead.

In my own business, I aim to do marketing daily but I also allocate a set day per week to marketing. On ‘Marketing Monday’s’, I set aside time specifically for content creation, blogging and guest blogging, working on my website and SEO, social media scheduling etc. I don’t make myself available for client consultations on Mondays and I don’t do any 1-2-1 work. Mondays are my focused days for working on my business.

Similarly, the last Friday of the month for me is ‘Finance Friday’. This is when I work on business admin, invoicing for the month ahead, and when I consolidate expenses and receipts etc.

Batching tasks like this is a really effective way to ensure that you make the time for the tasks you know you need to get done. But it won’t happen if you don’t literally schedule it into your diary.

Make a commitment to market your business to get more photography clients

I really believe that if you market your photography business every day, or dedicate one full day of each week to marketing, then you’ll notice the difference it makes.

Yes, that’ll mean fighting through your natural inclination to do other more exciting or rewarding tasks. But, the long-term gain will be worth it.

Make marketing a daily priority and the photography clients should follow

There really is no ‘secret’ around how to get photography clients. It really comes down to the fact that you need to be taking consistent and regular (daily) action that will get you more visible so that you can reach more potential clients.

By making marketing a daily priority, you’ll be helping more potential photography clients to discover you. In effect, you’ll be helping to future-proof your business, because you’ll then be constantly bringing in new people into your world and it’s likely that some of them will eventually become paying clients.

Now you know how to get more photography clients!

Why not give it a try yourself and see whether more regular and more consistent marketing helps you to attract more photography clients? There is so much more to potentially gain from it and very little to lose!

Let me know in the comments below, how consistent are you with marketing your photography buisness?

• Do you try to do something every day to promote your photography?
• Do you choose one day per week to focus on marketing, scheduling content in advance for the weeks/months ahead, for example?
• Or is your marketing far more sporadic and inconsistent at the moment?

If the latter, will you now commit to yourself to doing the work, daily, to get more photography clients? I hope you will!

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Related: Five ways to optimise your client enquiry process (and convert more leads)