Brandon Adam is a professional portrait, wedding and commercial photographer based out of eastern Pennsylvania.
His marketing tips for small town photographers are a bit different than what I’ve seen before, and I must say these tips seem perfect for my area. If you have a few tips or tricks of your own, please share in the comments below.
Personal Projects
Doing personal projects that center around your community is a great way to increase your visibility and also add to your portfolio. Doing large personal projects will also help you to gain reach within the photography community. If you undertake a long personal project, people will start following your work just to see it. They are also likely to engage in your posts instead of scrolling past it.
Ask for Referrals
Word of mouth is a massive driving force for booking clients in a small town. People trust the judgment of their friends and family and will likely take action on a recommendation. Word of mouth is the primary way I get business, followed distantly by social media.
Do Charity Work
A good reputation in a small community goes a very long way. I give free family shoots to families with a member going through cancer treatment. It gets word out, and it gives you good will with potential clients. It obviously also helps the families the work is for.
Search Engine Optimization
This one is tricky and often frustrating. The best approach, in my opinion, is not to aim too high. For instance, I would be hard pressed to obtain a high SEO ranking for the search term “Philadelphia wedding photographer.” It would be much easier to be ranked number one for the term “Shoemakersville wedding photographer.” Of course, there are far fewer people searching this term, but if you rank high for one area you may rank high for an area close by as well. Philly simply has so much competition that it would be extremely difficult to surpass everyone else.
Start a Blog
Blogs are great ways to be viewed as an authority on something. They also help tremendously for SEO. For instance, if you shot a wedding and wrote a blog post about it mentioning the venue name a few times, you may end up as a top search result for that venue’s name in relation to photography. If you write informational posts that help your clients, it will drive the traffic you want to your website as well.
Read the full article with even more tips over at Fstoppers.
Source: Fstoppers
