Photography is an art, and although great art should sell itself, the same digital marketing strategies should be in place when selling any products online, virtual or not! In this post, we are going to customise the sales and marketing process and aim it specifically at digital marketing for photographers.
Your Website
Firstly we will start with your website. We know there are plenty of websites where you can promote and sell your images, but they should also be listed on your own website. Your customers are not photographers and are unlikely to know about Alamy and IStock etc. Most people will Google search for what they are looking for and take an image from there.
Listing the photographs on your website is crucial to get traffic to your site, showcasing all of your work, and capturing data.
You do not need to pay a fortune to build a website and considering you are already artsy, if it’s a photography service that you provide, you could use a free WordPress theme. However, you will require good hosting if you are to display plenty of images.
If you are selling your photography online, then it would be crucial to use a paid theme so that you can watermark your images and have a very professional, clean designed website. Websites are easy to build now and there is often no code required with a WordPress Theme, I will post a tutorial that is easy to follow.
Pro WordPress Theme
Purchase With Theme Forest
Website Hosting
So now that you understand the importance of having a website, you are now on the right track.
I am going to show you the video tutorial of how to build your website but first I want you to understand the importance of your web hosting. Yes, you can get web hosting for a couple of dollars a month, but your website is going to be packed with high-resolution images, and they need to load fast. If a website does not fully load in less than 3 seconds, you increase the risk of your visitors leaving the site to buy from your competitors. You have great work to showcase, and there is no point in having a website if your hosting cannot handle it.
If you already have a website or are about to build one, I would recommend TMD Hosting. Not just because their cloud hosting is light speed, but their customer service is outstanding, they respond on live chat within 5 seconds! We will touch base on why live chat is so important later on in this post.
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Setting up TMD Hosting
This short video will show you how to set up web hosting with TMD in less than 20 minutes!
Website Traffic
So now you have set up Lightspeed web hosting and have built a nice clean designed photography website.
Getting traffic to your website is the next step. You do not need to pay heaps in advertising fees. I am going to assume that you are already posting your work on Facebook and Instagram, make sure you add links to your site as well.
Using ALT TAGS on each image uploaded on to your website will allow your images to be picked up on search engines.
Data Capturing
Did know that only 3% of website visitors take action on a website? And that is a good result if achieved. This means that if your website receives 100 visitors, only 3% will take action. Taking action refers to anything that a website visitor does to show an interest, this could be subscribing, buying, or filling out a contact form. For photographers, you should be focusing on subscribers rather than going straight for the sale.
These are called Call To Action´s (CTA), and there should be 7 visible on each page. Although many may seem benign, they all serve a purpose.
- Push Notifications banner.
- Sidebar widgets should include a subscription form
- Sticky headers with contact details. As a visitor scrolls down the page they a call to action should be visible at all times.
- Subscription banners should be displayed.
- Popup to “subscribe for a % discount” or money off.
- Automated chatbots to capture data via a live chat.
- BUY NOW buttons.
I am not going to go into detail on each Call To Action in this post as we will be going a little off-topic. But, if you subscribe on the link below we will email you with links to important articles explaining each CTA, as well as other digital marketing tip
Marketing to your captured data
Now that you have started to build a database using your CTA´s, it is now time to market to them. Most people who make a purchase online, do so on their second or third visit, rarely the first visit.
All of these marketing techniques I am going to be explaining are available free of charge if your website is built using WordPress.
Push Notification
Push notifications are those annoying popups that appear on your phone or when you turn on your computer. They may be annoying for some, but they are great at bringing customers back to your website. You can send push notifications to people whilst they are visiting other websites. You can target these ads to people who have visited certain pages on your website. Offer discounts to bring people back!
Email Marketing
From your subscription banners and popups, you have started to build an audience. You have captured their email addresses and it is time to build an email workflow and enter them into your sales funnel.
An email workflow should be based on 5 emails.
- Welcome Email: Explain who you are, and introduce yourself to your new subscribers. This is about building trust and creating brand awareness. People buy from companies they know.
- Problem Email: Explain the problems with taking photos from Google Images without paying for them. Write a post about people being sued due to copywritten images being used. Direct them to this page and use scare tactics. Photographers do no work for free!
- Solutions Email: Email them with a link to a post that explains how you can solve the problems listed in the Problem Email, and the benefits of paying for the license to use an image etc.
- Testimonial Email: Build more trust by letting your prospect know what your customers have to say about you. If you have positive reviews on Trust Pilot direct them there, or build a testimonial page on your website showing positive reviews.
- Closer Email: Now its time to go for the sale. Brand awareness has been achieved as they have seen your emails bouncing around and are now familiar with your website. They understand the problems and consequences of stealing images and the benefits of buying them, and they know that your customers are happy with your service! The closer email should offer a discount and create urgency! Buy today for a whopping 20% discount! Provide them with a discount coupon to use online and set an expiry date.
There are plenty of email marketing companies that offer free email marketing subscriptions to a limited audience. I use a few and would recommend MailChimp. It is free for up to 500 subscribers. There are other companies to use such as Sendinblue, and Sendgrid, but I believe Mailchimp to be the easiest to use.
If you subscribe to our mailing list we can email you with more details on how to set up Mailchimp Workflows with a video tutorial.
Live Chat
You probably will not have time to answer live chat messages personally, but that is not the only purpose that Live chatbots serve.
They are great lead-generation tools. engage with website visitors and can be used to direct visitors to useful pages and subscribe them to your email list. I use Tidio on all of my websites as they are free for up to 100 actions per month. Again, I will go into this in more detail in another post and include a video tutorial.
This is enough information to get you started. Please subscribe to my mailing list to see how I handle email marketing and that will give you an idea of what you should be doing. I will also give tips and advice on anything your need. If you do not want to set everything up yourself, I do also provide this as a service. Get a quote for any jobs using the link below