You Are Not A Photographer
Post Excerpt:
Marketing and selling are two of the key components of being a professional photographer. Without marketing and selling, our photographic businesses would wither and fail.
If you earn your living from pointing your camera at people (or things) and creating photographs, you might disagree with the rather odd-sounding title of this post. If I listen carefully I can hear you protesting your innocence – “of course I’m a photographer – I take photographs all day of weddings, families, products, children seniors etc. My camera has practically become a part of my body and would need to be surgically removed to get it away from me…”
I understand totally but, sorry, you are still not a photographer – not if you earn a living from your camera; not if photography is your primary source of income.
So, why not? And, what am I then?
You are, in the words of the great photographic educator Charles Lewis, “a marketer and seller of photographic services.”
Okay, you say, that’s just another fancy way of saying you’re a photographer; perhaps, but not quite. If we relied solely on capturing photographs all day long in the hope that someone might buy them, we would probably starve.
Marketing and selling our photographic services is at the very core of what do to run our businesses. Both of them are essential to our success. Without marketing, no one would know we exist and there would be nothing for us to photograph. Without selling, we might have people and things to photograph, but would be unable to make any money from the resulting images.
Many working photographers today are still stuck with the old paradigm that says our photography and art should sell itself. Newcomers to the industry in particular are prone to the misguided philosophy that if they produce good work it will automatically attract clients. It doesn’t seem fair, I know, but that’s not the way the world works.
If only it were that simple!
Unfortunately, it’s true to say that the best marketer wins – the standard of photographic excellence is almost secondary. If you doubt the validity of this statement, how many times have you considered the work of a competitor and wondered why they’re so busy (if that’s any real gauge of success) when you think their work isn’t as good as your own, or at least not up to the standard you might expect from someone that successful? We’ve all done that at some point or another.
The truth of the matter is that there are technically average photographers with amazing marketing and selling skills who are much more successful than many technically talented photographers whose marketing and selling skills are not as sharp.
Don’t misunderstand what I’m getting at here – there is no excuse for delivering a poor or sub-standard product and we all have a duty to hone our craft as well as we are able. Technical proficiency is still important, especially when making sure the client gets the best photography we can give them.
However, in order for our photographic businesses to be the success stories we read about so often, we need to focus heavily first on marketing our business and then selling our services and products. Only then can our photography give us the lifestyle we’re working so very hard for.
But Marketing and Selling are Hard!
Yes, they are. If they were easy then everyone would be doing it. However, there are many resources to learn from; the internet, blogs, webinars. forums, marketing companies, stories about successful people, books and other offline resources.
Whatever else you do, I urge you to learn as much as possible about marketing and selling because these are so much more important to the success of your photographic business than the latest Nikon camera or the new version of Photoshop.
To be honest, when I first started out in photography I was terrified of the very idea of marketing & selling, and I actually thought that photography would put me a safe distance away from such horrors! It’s quite funny and ironic to me that I’m now sitting here writing about the necessity of these two things in our business. I will say that I now enjoy the marketing and selling side of the photography business very much – it’s actually a lot of fun. Having taken the time to learn some things about them, they are not the faceless and frightening monsters I once believed them to be.
Another great idea is to join a local sales and marketing society – I became involved almost by accident with our local SMS after I offered to photograph their monthly meetings. Now, besides a complimentary lunch once a month, I get to meet other marketers and learn a wealth of information from the guest speakers. For me it’s a priceless arrangement.
It’s All About People…
Photography is (generally) a people business. To remove some of the fear naturally associated with the actual words, marketing and selling could also be considered simply as those terms we use to describe how we interact with people while engaged in the operation of our business. In other words, we as photographers really have a head start in understanding marketing and selling because they apply to something we deal with every day: people…
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