Pricing is often one of the hardest areas of the business for photographers. New photographers are sensitive about their lack of experience, afraid they don’t merit a large fee and can’t compete with more established professionals. But even for established professionals, a certain sense of guilt is common when it comes to talking price. Many professionals are almost apologetic when quoting a price, and are much to willing to come down.

I’m no exception.

I recently had a revelation that has helped me a great deal with the psychological aspect of pricing. It has to do with the difference between how photographers and clients perceive any given photo shoot. What many photographers, enthusiasts and pros, often forget is that a photo shoot is a rare and big event for a client. While we do shoots every week, most people might do a professional photo shoot a few times in their lives. A FEW TIMES IN THEIR LIVES.

If you charge cheap, cut corners, or otherwise short-change your clients, you really are depriving them of something special. You are depriving them of the opportunity they may only have a few times to experience a professional photo shoot – to be the center of attention during the shoot, the recipients of small gestures that make them feel like valued clients, and ultimately the recipients of truly beautiful professional images.

Instead of skimping on the price, go ahead and price high. And then make it worth it. GIVE YOUR CLIENTS THE UNIQUE AND MEMORABLE EXPERIENCE OF WORKING WITH A TRULY PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER. Dress like a pro, act like a pro, project confidence. Do your homework before the shoot. Go the extra mile to make your clients feel valued before, during, and after. Do everything necessary to create the ambiance of an idealized “photo shoot” as well as produce great images.

Think of yourself as selling an EXPERIENCE, not just a set of photos. If you can do that, I guarantee your clients will be happy to pay for your services. And they’ll remember the experience for a long time to come.

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For most photographers, the word “portfolio” evokes images of a physical “portfolio” of images, often in a big black portfolio case, that represents who you are as a photographer. There are still a few situations when such classic portfolios are relevant—for example, if you are applying for a prestigious art gallery, going to visit a high-dollar commercial photography client, or meeting in person with prospective wedding clients.

But for most photographers most of the time, the traditional “portfolio” has always been of limited value. That’s not to say most photographers don’t use portfolios. Indeed, every time a photographer sends a submission to a magazine, stock agency, or other prospective buyer—whether slides, prints, or an email with digital images—that photographer is sending a portfolio. In this case, each portfolio is different, depending on the client.

Today, however, the portfolio concept is taking on yet another connotation. In the digital era, your website is your portfolio.

A website is like a conventional portfolio in that it showcases your best work and presents an overall impression of your style and identity. Yet a website is also much more powerful. It offers an enormous range of creative design possibilities. And it is capable of reaching hundreds or thousands of people with relatively little extra work on your part. It’s also the first impression that most prospective buyers will have of your work.

Even the conventional situations above—art galleries, high-end commercial assignments, and weddings—most clients will see your website before they see anything else. Many stock agencies and buyers will now simply ask for a link to your website instead of asking for a submission of photos.

So in the digital era, the question “do you need a portfolio” is synonymous with the question “do you need a website.” And the answer is yes, absolutely. And you need to give your website — it style, the images it includes, the aura it projects — the same attention you might have given to preparing a portfolio in a bygone era. It’s the most critical step you can take to start selling photos and getting clients.

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When is the last time you updated your marketing plan?

This is of course assuming you have a marketing plan. If you do – good for you. If not – get on it. I certainly don’t want to hold myself up as a model of small business marketing. I have definitely made my share of mistakes (and will hopefully continue to do so) but I have invested a lot of effort, time and even some money into learning about what works and what doesn’t.

I’m not here to tell you what will work for you and what won’t because those will be different for each photographer. Your particular market, the type of work you do and your geographic location all come into play when determining the right mix. The point I want to make is that all successful marketing campaigns have a few things in common.

1. They are planned and executed according to a plan. Failing to plan is the biggest single error photographers when it comes to marketing.

2. They are executed as campaigns – not discreet events. I’m regularly amazed at how many photographers try a marketing technique, don’t see results and abandon it relatively quickly.

3. They are consistent with the core values of the business.

Whether you shoot commercial or retail work, people, food, or weddings – you’ve got to market yourself in order to bring in new business. As of this writing the international economy, well, sucks. Things are looking better now than they have for a while but they’re still way down.  In times like these it’s easy to pull back on marketing expenses, after all, if the money’s not coming in, you can’t put it out again. While I’m not indifferent to the plight of small business owners, and I certainly wouldn’t advise anyone to pay for and ad before their mortgage, cutting marketing budgets and efforts right now is a big mistake. Look at it this way. If you have a 10% market share of a million dollar market, you have sales of $100,000. If that market shrinks to $800,000 you need to increase your market share from 10% to 12.5% just to hold steady. That’s certainly not possible without marketing.

Writing a marketing plan is not an easy task and brining in outside professional help can be great. A marketing consultant can bring their expertise to yours and help you drill down through your business data. In the event you’re not able to afford or find a good marketing consultant there are a plethora of books and internet tutorials on writing marketing plans. Ask 100 different marketing experts how to write a marketing plan and you’ll get 100 different answers – but the basic concepts are the same.

1.  Establish your goals – these should be solid, measurable goals, ie increase sales to $350,000 or shoot 47 weddings this year.

2.  Establish a budget – usually a percentage of your monetary goal.  It will be different depending on your particular area of expertise, geographic area and your customer base. My personal marketing budget is 7 percent of intended sales for this year.

3.  Establish methods to reach your goals.  This is the meat of the plan and requires the most research. This includes the tools you’ll use as well as a schedule.

4.  Establish systems and methods to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

I use a program on my Mac called Omni Outliner to keep track of my efforts. This program is great because I can essentially create an outline very easily add sub headings and break down larger tasks into smaller discreet tasks.  How do you eat and elephant?  One bite a time.

Of course writing the marketing plan is not enough, one must follow and execute it.  But this is the beauty of the plan. This business is usually very cyclical and inconsistent. With a well written plan and schedule in hand you can best utilize your down time.  If this week is slow get your newsletter articles written, start the printing on your postcards, shoot for your portfolio.  In other words, use your downtime and check those things off of your list.

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So here are some tips on how to get started with Google Adwords and how to make sure you get the biggest bang for your advertising dollars.

Have a good website

Before you start, let me underscore that you need to have a good website. Ideally, you’ll have a great website. With Google Adwords, you will be sending prospective clients to your site. So the overall design and functionality, as well as the images you have in your online portfolio need to be of sufficient quality that they will convince at least some of people who come that you are worth contacting.

Set up your Google Adwords account if you don’t already have one

Assuming you’ve good a high caliber website, the other basic thing you need is a Google Account. You can set one of these up very quickly and easily. Just go to www.google.com, click on Business Solutions underneath the search box, click on Adwords, and follow the instructions.

Add a new Adwords campaign and set your settings

Now it’s time to get started. Once you are inside your Adwords account, you will want to click the Campaign Summary tab, and then click “New Campaign.”  This brings us to a quick aside about the structure of campaigns and ad groups. A campaign is highest level categorization. Use different campaigns for very different projects (ie, say one campaign for you wedding photography, and one campaign for your corporate product or real estate photography). Within each campaign, you may want to have different ads that use different titles and keywords.

GEOGRAPHIC TARGETING. When you are first setting up your campaign, there are a few settings you need to pay close attention to. One of the most important is geographic targeting.

If you live in Atlanta Georgia, and you are trying to find wedding clients, you don’t really need your ads to show up for users in Oregon. Google gives you the ability to narrowly limit the geographic space in which your ads appear. So you might set the geographic targeting to the state of Georgia. That way, any users in Georgia searching for “wedding photographer” will see your ads. But those in other states will not. That can save you a lot of wasted advertising revenue.

TOTAL BUDGET AND MAXIMUM COST PER CLICK. You will also need to set your daily budget and your maximum cost per click. These two amounts are obviously related: if you have a high total budget and a low cost per click, you’ll be able to generate more traffic on your site and more leads. If you have a low budget and high cost per click, then you’ll get less.

Your cost per click is critical here. The CPC is how much you pay every time someone clicks on one of your ads. It determines how quickly you blow through your advertising dollars, but it also determines where you ads appear in the list of ads that appear alongside Google search results. The higher your ads appear in the list of ads, the more clicks you will receive.

Unfortunately, the ideal CPC varies from keyword to keyword and is largely determined by the amount of competition over any given key word. If you specialize is Poodle Photography, and you want your ads to appear every time some types “poodle photos” in Google, then you’re probably not going to face high competition, and you can set a low CPC (maybe .15/click) and still appear very high if not first in the list.

If, by contrast, you want to appear on the first page of search results for “denver wedding photographer”, you may need to increase your cost per click to $6 or higher just to appear on bottom of the first page. (I know this because I’ve had to go that high several times over the past month for my own Adwords campaign for wedding photography in Colorado).

So your cost per click is partly out of your control. You can set it at initially what ever level you want, from 1 cent to $10 or more, but you will want to adjust your CPC strategically. In short, your goal is to find the lowest CPC that will get you onto the first page for your keywords and, ideally, will get you into the 4th position or higher.

It’s important to note that you DON’T need to be the first result. The difference in click throughs for spots 1-3 are not all that different, and you can save a bit of money by appearing a bit lower.

The combination of your CPC and your daily budget will determine the maximum number of visitors you get each day. If your max CPC is $.20 and you set a daily budget of 10, then you will get about fifty visitors a day on your site. If your CPC is $1, you’ll get ten.

TURN OFF CONTENT NETWORK. There’s one last setting you should adjust. You’ll probably want to turn off the “Content Network”. You know all those Google ads you see when you are tooling around on websites? Those are the content network. For some kind of advertising these spots are very valuable.

In this case, however, you want to put your ads in front of people are looking for your kind of services RIGHT NOW. If you are a Chicago portrait photographer, your target audience includes people actively looking for Chicago portrait photographers. And those are the people going to search engines and typing “Chicago portrait photographers.” If you leave the content network on, your ads can appear on any site where key words like chicago, portrait, photographer appear. Those might be photography blogs or news articles or something else. But in any case, someone who sees your ads while reading a photography blog is not likely to become a client. And you will still need to pay when they click on your ad. So it’s better to keep your campaign as targeted as possible.

Tips on Designing Adwords Ads

A google ad includes a one line title (maximum of 25 characters) and two lines of description (maximum of 35 characters each). So you have three lines of 25, 35, and 35 characters. That is not very much space in which to convey your message, so you really need to give it some some thought and make every word count.

In choosing your title and description, try to empathize with your customers and think about what they would want to see. If you were looking for a photographer in your line of work, what kind of headline and description would compel you to click?

It’s needs to be descriptive, clearly conveying what kind of photography you do. You may want it to include buzz words in your area of photography. In wedding photography, for example, photojournalism or photojournalistic-style wedding photography is very popular.

You may also want to include specific reference to your geographic area. Many people are looking for photographer that work in the same city, so they will more likely to click when they see their location in your ad.

Another important tip is that you may want to create different ads with different wording for each of your important key words. For my wedding photography business here in Colorado for example, I have separate ads for Denver Wedding Photography, Boulder Wedding Photography, Wedding Photojournalism, Engagement Photography, and other key words. The trick is to match the wording in the ads to the keywords that people are searching for. If some one is searching for “denver wedding photographer,” then they are more likely to click on an ad that includes those same key words.

The great thing about Adwords is that you can create as many different ads as you want, even one for every keywords, at no extra charge.

Making Adjustments

Once you’ve created your ads, they will start to run and you will immediately generate some relevant traffic and potential leads for your site. At this point you will need to constantly go in adjust your ad settings. If your ads are not appearing on the first page for relevant terms, then you may need to increase you CPC. If you are appearing in the #1 spot for everything, you can reduce your CPC and save some money. Depending on which ads seems to be generating higher click throughs, you may adjust wording of other ads or create new, more effective ones.

How Much to Spend?

Finally, you may want to control you overall spending by increasing or decreasing your daily budget.

The budget issue brings us to a final point. Be careful with Adwords. It’s easy to spend a lot of money on Adwords advertising. You can set a budget of $1-200 per day and generate tons of traffic. But you’re also spending $3-6000 per month on advertising. Set a budget of $20, and you are $600 per month.

How much should you spend? Think like a business person. How much you spend depends on the returns. If you sell wedding packages for $1500, you can spend $1500 in advertising, get one job and cover the costs. Of course, that doesn’t leave any profit for you or any money to cover your overhead.

In large part, how much you spend depends on your “conversion rate” – the percentage of people who come to your site and actually decide to use your services. You should assume that less than 5% of visitors will become clients. A good estimate is 2%. Using that number, if you send 100 people to your site at a CPC of $1, then you have spent $100 in advertising.

If you have a good website, somewhere between 1 and 5 of those people will contact you and strongly consider buying your services. If you are charging $300 per shoot, then that’s $3-1500 in revenue depending on your conversion rate. As you can see, a high conversion rate dramatically increases the returns on your advertising dollars. That’s why having a good site is so important.

Unfortunately, you probably can’t precisely guess your conversion rate. You will need to launch your campaign, watch the numbers, and adjust accordingly.

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Do you use Adwords? If so, how has your experience been? If not, why not?

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