Four Marketing Techniques You Might Not Be Using
Recently we had some requests for more marketing posts, and if you ask, you shall receive (at least we try to make your dreams come true whenever we can ;). Marketing is one of those things that we wish we didn't need to do, we wish that all of the incredible clients would just come flocking to our door, but unfortunately it's usually necessary to put ourselves out there as much as we can. T
his is especially true in the beginning, but honestly marketing never truly ends if you want to continue to grow your business. I'm always looking for more ways to get our content in front of the clients that we want, and recently I've been experimenting with some new-to-us platforms so I thought I would share them with you!
LinkedIn
This platform is the newest to us, neither of us have ever had a corporate job and never really needed to use LinkedIn in the past. Recently I've heard more and more people talk about using it as a way to gain clients since social media platforms are becoming so saturated. I went through and updated both our business page and my personal page and have started playing around with posting content and connecting with people with the goal of cold emailing them directly on LinkedIn.
I'm a big fan of pre-scheduling content so my goal in the next week or so is to set up a platform like Later so that I don't have to remember to post constantly since I'm bad at that. I've found that it's been pretty easy to make connections and we got LinkedIn Sales Navigator so that we could build leads lists. From what I've read it's important to not sell your services right away when sending a message unlike when you send a cold email so I wait until I get a response and start a conversation before I mention any sort of sales.
Pinterest is not a new platform for us, but in the last few weeks I've really amped up how we pin our work by taking all of the images that I could crop to be the optimal size and scheduling them out over the next several months. I'm also going to be scheduling out a ton of BTS content and all of our past blog posts and products. We use Tailwind to schedule and as soon as we started using it a couple years, our followers and views skyrocketed.
We make sure to pin a mix of original content and repins since Pinterest definitely favors fresh content. Another important tip is to make sure to use keywords in your description and title since Pinterest is actually a search engine. It's a place that lots of art directors and marketing managers hang out so you want your pins to come up when they're searching for images for briefs and have them click out to your website. Something else I'm going to start doing is creating more Idea Pins because those get good traction too. We created this video on creating engaging pins with Pinterest Creators last year if you want to check it out.
Sharing BTS
This is something that we have done from the beginning, but it's definitely the #1 reason that our platforms have grown the way they have. It's also led to many of our educational opportunities and additional revenue streams. We started sharing because 5 years ago we weren't seeing a lot of people posting their process and it was something that we wished we could see more of.
Sharing how you work and how you create is not only good for other photographers, it's also good for your clients. It shows them that they can trust your process and also can help to justify your rates. It also sets you up as an expert when you're teaching others. The place that we do this most is on Instagram, but we're starting to do it more on Pinterest and LinkedIn as well.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is something that we have done on and off over the last five years. I don't mean cold emailing, though that is always helpful, but right now I'm talking about sending out an email newsletter. Having a newsletter is a great thing because you will always have access to those email addresses. Who knows what will happen with this or that social platform, but it's a pretty sure thing that email is here for the long haul. It's also professional and not as many people use it.
The thing is that you need to have people's permission before you can add them to an email list so make sure to ask prospective clients before you add them. You can also set up an opt-in with a freebie on your website, something potential clients might want to have to get them to give you their email address. Make sure to tailor your newsletter to clients if that is the sole purpose of it, sharing your availability and recent work as well as giving them something of value.
There you go, a few ways that you can market yourself! Have you tried any of these? Do you have anything to add to the list? Let us know below!
Is it the weekend yet?
Elle