As a food photographer you know you should be marketing your work, but you may not know exactly what that looks like. You might be sending out a pitch here and there, or hanging out on LinkedIn, or spending your free time perfecting your portfolio.
These are all good and necessary, but a fraction of what is required to market your food photography. Too many photographers passively wait for clients to come to them via their website and Instagram. This can result in some work, but if you’re relying on these two strategies, chances are it’s not enough.
It comes down to this: your success as a food photographer is directly proportional to the amount of marketing that you do. If deep down you know this is true but don’t know where to start, I’m here to help!
In this post, I’ll lay out the various tools you need in your toolbox to market yourself as a food photographer.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. Marketing is vast topic and can be complex. However, these essential tools are more than enough to get you started in creating a robust and cohesive marketing strategy.
Identifying Your Ideal Client and Doing Intensive Market Research
Before you can market, you must know who you’re marketing to. You have to identify your idea client and do intensive research in order to align your core message to what they are looking for. This involves studying their website and social media channels and doing an Internet search for articles on their company. Whatever information you can find will paint a picture of your prospect’s goals and aesthetic style and where you can potentially fit.
It’s key to use a spreadsheet or CRM to keep track of each client, their contact information and subsequently, any contact you make with them.
Portfolio Website
Your portfolio website is your biggest selling tool and should target your ideal client and show your best work.
Be sure to have an “Overview” section, knowing that many potential clients might look at this section only. Your strongest images should be at the top of this section. You only have a few seconds to make a first impression. Get rid of older images that can make your work look dated.
Also, intersperse your images with motion work such as video, GIFs, or cinemagraphs.
Your website should be clean, simple, and easy to navigate. Avoid coloured backgrounds that will compete with your photos. Have your logo professionally designed. Even better yet, have your website professionally designed too, and work with a photo consultant on curating and paginating your images for maximum impact on your target market.
Testing New Work
This may be surprising, but testing new work is one of the most import aspects of your marketing stack and should be one of the bigger investments of your time and money.
In order to attract the clients that you want, your portfolio needs to speak directly to them. This means your images need to align with what they are looking for and that they must show the breadth of your skills and look as polished as possible.
Stylists make the biggest contribution to rising the production value of your images, so unless you’re an excellent food stylist, be sure to hire one to test with you. It will be worth the investment.
A part of testing new work should also be developing your motion skills. More and more clients are looking for motion footage in addition to stills. If this has not been your experience yet, know that it’s coming.
Social Media Posting and Engagement
There is no doubt about it—posting and engaging on social media is a critical marketing strategy for all photographers. Despite the continual changes at Instagram, it’s still important to post consistently in the feed and add Reels and Stories to your repertoire. However, social media can be a big-time suck and only you can decide how often to post works for you. I post three times a week using the app Metricool, which has tonnes of free tools for posting across several social media platforms. I sit down for half-an-hour on Saturday to schedule my posts for the coming week and can then forget about them as I move on to other tasks.
One of the best ways to get your foot in the door with a brand you want to work with is to regularly comment and engage with them on their social media posts. Sometimes the person who oversees hiring photographers is also managing the social media accounts.
LinkedIn Research and Engagement
If you’re not on LinkedIn, then what are you waiting for? LinkedIn has the power to completely transform your photography career yet is perhaps the most under-utilized tool by the very creatives who would massively benefit from using it.
The organic reach on LinkedIn is far wider than on any other social media platform. If someone likes or comments on your post, your post gets share with their connections, even if that person is not connected to you.
LinkedIn allows you to skip the gatekeepers that stand between you and your ideal clients and go direct to the decision-makers. You can discover information that can be difficult to find anywhere else, like the projects they have worked on and the future direction for the company. The platform is not only a great research tool, but a place where you can get to know and engage with the people who have the power to hire you.
Cold Calling and Pitching Prospects
As a photographer you must do cold and warm outreach. Pitching to brands is one of the quickest ways to accelerate your career as a photographer.
Pitching starts with getting to know your ideal clients, analyzing your work to see where you fit, and starting to build a client database. This doesn’t happen overnight. Pitching is something that you’ll be doing your entire career. You’ll always be networking. You’ll always have your business goals.
Once you have a system for pitching in place, you’ll be able to drum up business again and again, and break through bigger and bigger clients.
Personal Email Promos
The email promo is an important piece of marketing collateral for the food photographer and your calling card when approaching cold and warm leads.
These promos can take various forms, such as a magazine, newspaper, poster, or postcard. However, I generally don’t recommend postcard promos because they usually get thrown away. They work great as a business card.
It’s best if you can have a professional design a template for you in InDesign or Canva that will allow you to switch out the images seasonally as well as to target certain clients. If this isn’t in your budget, you can by attractive templates for a good price on Etsy or Creative Market.
Mass Email Blast Newsletters
A general quarterly email campaign that you send out to all the prospects in your CRM should also be a part of your marketing strategy. This is something you’ll want to do seasonally and keep it simple. Select a few images according to a theme and create a collage within your email. You can add a little text but keep it short. Include your logo and link to your website and contact information.
There are different ways to design your email, but the point is to be brief and aesthetically pleasing. This is where you showcase recent work with general appeal rather than showcase work that is meant to appeal to certain clients.
For simple to use and attractive email templates, I recommend Mailerlite or Flodesk.
Portfolio Reviews
It’s important to get professional feedback on your work from agents, photo editors, art directors etc. Signing up for portfolio reviews is the perfect way to put your work in front of these professionals who may not ordinarily be able to access and learn how your work can be improved. A portfolio reviewer will look how your photos work in context in the overall visual language of your work.
Professional photos require a financial investment in registering for the portfolio reviews but also preparing the material that you will show the reviewers.
A couple of portfolio reviews you may be interested in are Palm Springs Photo Festival and NYC Fotoworks. They both offer online reviews so you can take part no matter where you live.
To Sum Up
You can market yourself perfectly, be in all the right places, be on social media, at the top of Google, but if you’re not putting yourself directly in front of the clients you want to work with and leaving it up to them to come to you, you’re minimizing your chances massively.
This means that whenever a job lands in your inbox, you take it. It leads to a scarcity mindset, which you won’t be able to move away from.
Marketing is a matter of persistent effort and requires a multi-pronged approach. Not every tool works for every situation. Some photo buyers hang out on Instagram, while others rarely refer to Instagram when looking to hire a photographer for a shoot. Some love to receive printed promotions, while others barely glance through them before throwing them in the wastebasket.
Also, be aware that marketing your business costs money. If you’re reluctant to invest money in your photography business, it will eventually hold you back. Ten percent of your gross income is a good place to start, but some photographers spend fifty percent or more on marketing their business.
Interested in learning more about marketing your food photography? Get on the waitlist for Pitch Perfect, my upcoming marketing masterclass for food photographers, coming up summer 2023.
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