Advertising Your Photography Business

Advertising Your Photography Business

by William Lulow

I had an interesting thing happen a couple of years ago. I received a call from a company that wanted to do an interview of me for some kind of on-line radio station. The woman said they were looking for photographers to add to their stable of businesses they would feature from time to time. I agreed and a couple of weeks later, they actually called me to do a “recorded interview.” I answered their questions and all in all, it was a pleasant enough experience. I really had never heard their “broadcasts” but I did research them on line and, sure enough they had a nice website highlighting their “personalities” and what they did. Then, a few days after the interview, I received a phone call with the “pitch,” which I suspected was coming. They said that my interview went over so well (I scored a “favorability” of 9.4 on a 10 point scale). The woman said that most interviewees only scored around 7.4 on this scale. Okay. So much for all the “buttering up.” When they finally got down to the gist of it, (and this was fairly contrived) this was a solicitation for an advertising campaign that, if I continued with it, would have cost me $2,500 PER MONTH! Now even for an experienced photographer/sole proprietor like myself, that’s a lot to spend on advertising, period. Plus the fact that I had no idea where this interview went or what the demographics of their audience was. And they expected me to sign up for this? It’s one thing to try and promote your product or services in a magazine or other medium where you can verify what the circulation is. But for some kind of medium you never heard of before? I don’t think so!

A good rule of thumb from a few accountants I have talked to over the years is that around 5% of your GROSS SALES can be allotted to advertising for most businesses. So in order to spend $2,500 per month ($30K/Year) a business would have to gross around $750,000 per year. My sole proprietor photography business never made that much money even in 1980 dollars when my studio was the busiest it has ever been. Maybe in my best years in the 1980s and 1990s, I had about $200-250K in gross sales which would now be worth over $750,000. (At that rate, maybe I could have afforded $10K per year in advertising, but back then, I never even spent close to that much).  So, mine was never a big business and I was always content to have it that way. It provided a fairly nice living in pursuit of something I loved and “quality of life” is often more important than the money you can earn.

By comparison, a celebrity wedding shooter who can charge $25K per wedding and book four weddings a month, every month, will gross $1.2M in a year. I have never known any sole proprietor wedding photographers who can book four weddings each and every month. On the other hand, if you run an advertising or catalog studio, and have big name clients like a JC Penney or Macy’s that needed photography each week for circulars, catalogs and such, you might be able to gross even more than that, but it is the exception rather than the rule. And a few of those photographers for whom I worked in the 1970s really spent more time running their businesses than they did actually doing photography. One such photographer I worked for briefly, spent more time organizing his staff than he did behind the camera. He complained about what a headache running his business was. If you had a business that was grossing in the millions of dollars, you could probably think of spending $30-50K on advertising. But even then, you would diversify your ad placements, not just spend that much in one place.

Another photographer for whom I worked in New York City probably grossed a lot more and was able to maintain a studio with five or six full-time employees year after year, and I don’t think he did ANY advertising. He was just one of the most reliable shooters I have worked for. Photography is not high grossing unless it is run completely as a business with multiple studios and many shooters on staff to handle a constant flow of assignments and/or individual clients. But then you are not talking about trying to make a name for yourself in the photography game. Rather it would be a company name you would be advertising. Here, I’m talking about a business that is involved in photography and at this level, the business could be anything from shoes to yogurt. This would be quite different from a person such as Richard Avedon or Irving Penn who were really superstars in the commercial world, used photography as their means of self-expression and were fortunate enough to become well known. Their reknown and incomes grew commensurately.

I have to say that the only real advertising results I have ever had direct evidence of was one I used to place in the old Yellow Pages. For quite a number of years I ran a very small display ad under “Portrait Photographers-NYC”. It used to cost me about $1,600 for the whole year. I tracked my results from this ad manually on a tally sheet (before computers) and found that my annual income produced by this ad alone was in excess of $30,000. Now that’s what I call a good ROI!

The moral of the story is that solo entrepreneurs have to be very careful when spending dollars on advertising. You have to have a really good idea who your audience is, what your target market is and what your basic “brand” is. Many independent photographers I have encountered in my long career really have no idea about this. However, I have found that direct mail advertising and other on-line mentions are the best form of advertising for photographers. And this includes normal “word-of-mouth” recommendations.

If you are a commercial photographer these days, it’s almost not enough to have a dynamic portfolio and a great, eye-catching website. Most people look for a photographer when they are in need of photographs. Sounds too simple, right? But, if you want your business to thrive, you need to be available and findable exactly when someone is looking. Not only that, but not all potential customers do Google searches when they are looking for photographers. Sometimes they use Bing or Yahoo or whatever search engine with which they are already comfortable. Sometimes people look to “group websites” like the various “City Moms” Facebook pages out there. Or they may just ask friends for recommendations. Whatever the source may be, that’s where you have to be as a photographer. When someone is looking, you need to be there. I have spent some time on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), worked with a computer expert a number of years ago and developed some key words that I use all the time. As a result, when you Google photographers in my area, I am the very FIRST LISTING. So it pays to look into this and how you can use it for your own site.

A number of years ago, I attended a Google-sponsored conference where the speaker talked about a “nano-search,” which is a search conducted on a smart phone while the person is waiting for something else. Searches are not always conducted on a computer. So, your website needs to look good in all formats.

I check my website stats from time to time and I have noticed lately, that the average time spent looking at my site is anywhere from 45 seconds to 2 minutes. My website has 17 pages! Two minutes is not enough time to get a good sense of me as a photographer and what I can do. So, I have put some of my more famous images on my home page to see if they will capture more interest. But when people are scrolling on their phones, your images need to grab them so that they will be encouraged to look at more.

Word of mouth is still the best source of leads for your business. So you have to have testimonials on your website. And, you have to have satisfied customers review your business on Google. Most sole proprietor commercial business owners in photography have a business model that is something like a day rate (what the photographer charges for his or her time) plus whatever the expenses to produce the job would be. These days, since there is really no more film & processing, there are items like transportation, post-processing time (digital editing), stylists, assistants, location costs (scouting and permits) and models (talent). Perhaps there could be studio and equipment rental added to these things. Many photographers don’t actually maintain studios these days. (I closed my big studio in Manhattan way back in 1998, but I have full facilities in my home/studio, including backgrounds and more than enough lighting as well as equipment for product shots.)

There are some portrait studios that have a model that establishes a reasonable shooting fee, but then try to make up the difference in charging high prices for prints. These are usually portrait studios that rely on a high volume customer base. So the shooting fee really just pays for their photographers’ time while the profit is built into the print prices and it takes a good sales pitch to convert those sittings into high-paying customers. Since I hate sales pitches in general, I don’t use this model so, I often use 8×10 prints as give-aways because my profit is built into the shooting fee, which it always was for my advertising clients. Prints have become not only a DYI item but have become fairly inexpensive. If larger prints are wanted for wall exhibition, say, I would, of course, charge extra for those.

So, photography is one of those services that people want when they need it. Many of my customers need head shots or portraits for their social media presence. Or a corporation needs special event coverage. The wedding market is completely different and the business models usually include a shooting fee for time, second shooter or assistant fees with an album sold separately. A good wedding photographer might charge $5,000 and up for the fee, $500 for a second shooter and then another $2,000 to $2,500 for the album. The total bill for a wedding might be around $8,000 to $10,000 with some famous shooters able to command, as I mentioned, $25,000 and up for celebrity weddings.

There are different business models for almost every business. You have to use one that is convenient for you and the way you like to shoot and manage the rest of your business, especially if you are a sole proprietor. But you need to treat the whole process as a “business.” It may be something you love to do, but you also have to learn how to run it properly if you intend to make a living from it. And advertising, if you do any at all, needs to be very direct and quality oriented. You also must be able to ascertain which jobs come directly from your ads and which by word of mouth, etc. Knowing how to spend advertising dollars is often difficult for a sole proprietor in the photography business.