Photography

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A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

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Photography marketing strategy to get you leads (alien.top)

submitted 10 months ago by ConversationMobile51@alien.top to c/photography@viewfinder.pro

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Hi Everyone, my name is William. I believe I’ve come up with a marketing strategy that can help photographers get leads fast and free depending on the amount of work that they put in!

So pretty much throughout this entire year I’ve been trying to figure out why it was so difficult for me to get clients and I did my research and found out there is really no reason for a client to come to you for a paid photoshoot when there are countless photographers who don’t charge anything so that they can “build a portfolio”.

But I put together a marketing strategy that has so far been working; photographers offer products and services right? So I’ve been marketing my photography services for free and charging them for the photos alone afterwards.

What do you guys think about this? If you more information I can send you a link to my discord and we can discuss it!

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[–] JohannesVerne@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago

That's a tactic that's been used before, and generally is either a scam or used by someone who doesn't know what they're doing/doesn't have good enough work to stand on it's own. It sounds decent in theory but in practice you aren't going to land as many clients, there's no guaranteed payout, and the type of client who would hire a photographer with this practice is generally not the type of client who's going to pay large amounts of money for a photo and will likely complain about pricing or just not buy anything then complain online that it's a scam.

Generally, marketing is more about reaching out and interacting. If you can do that well, and your portfolio is good enough that people would want to use you as the photographer, you'll land clients. Just spamming advertisements isn't going to work no matter how your pricing is set up, and charging a high price for delivery after a "free" session isn't going to be well received or get many referrals.

If a client is going to go to someone who will do a free session over you, it really doesn't matter how you set the pricing. If the prices are upfront, they'll still go to the photographer who isn't charging anything for delivery. If the pricing is hidden until after the shoot, it's a scam. And people will rightly call it out as a scam. The best practice in this scenario is to just look for different clients. Don't market to the people who are looking for free or really cheap. There are people out there who are more than willing to pay for quality, and as long as you can provide that quality you can land the clients.

There are some instances where a model similar to what you laid out works, but it's generally not with portraiture. And the fact that you're pushing a private discord server to "talk about the details" just screams scam. So no, I don't think it's a good marketing practice. Especially since it has nothing to do with marketing, and is just a pricing scheme.