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10 Free Marketing Tactics for Photographers – Part 8: Our Secret Direct Outreach Method

 

If you want to start booking PAID photography jobs, but don’t have a single dollar to spend on paid marketing or social media advertising, this is the series for you! Welcome back to our Blog series, “10 Free Marketing Tactics for Photographers”. This series is all about the different ways you can get the attention of potential clients, even if you’re still early on in your photography business!

 

A couple of weeks ago, we posted Part 7 in this series, where we talked all about winning over your personal network using social media, and good old-fashioned in-person networking. This week, we’re continuing on that theme by talking about how reaching out directly to people in your network can be a great way to book paid jobs, especially as a new wedding photographer! But a lot of what we’re talking about is building on that post, so be sure to check that out if you haven’t already!

 

 

What is “Direct Outreach” Anyway?

So, as you probably noticed from the title of this post, today we’re talking about direct outreach. But if you read that and the first thing that popped into your head was cold-calling random strangers and asking them to hire you, don’t worry. That’s NOT what this marketing tactic is about!

 

Instead, we’re taking a direct outreach approach, and applying it to the network marketing strategies we talked about last week. In other words, you’re going to be directly reaching out to your friends and family — to people who already know and trust you and are potentially looking for a photographer — and just reminding them that you’re available. And we’re going to talk about how you can do it without seeming desperate OR spammy! So let’s dive in!

 

 

Direct Outreach for Wedding Photographers

So, as a disclaimer at the start of this section, if you’re a wedding photographer, this direct outreach strategy is going to be most effective if you’re in a stage of life where many of your friends and family are getting engaged and married. For us, our early 20’s were a great time to book a LOT of weddings in the $1,000 – $3,000 range from our own personal network as many friends were graduating from college and getting married right away.

 

And now that we’re in our late-20s, many of our friends in their late-20s and early-30s are in the stage of life where they’re making good money, and we still occasionally have friends hiring us, even though our coverage is in the $8,000 – $11,000 range. But no matter what age and stage of life you’re in, this strategy can still work!

 

And it’s as simple as can be, since social media networks do half of the work for you. These networks –especially Facebook and Instagram — want to put content in front of you that’s both relevant and personalized, since that’s how they keep people engaged with their platform and make more money. So if a friend or acquaintance of yours — even someone you don’t know very well or haven’t spoken to in years — gets engaged and posts a photo to Facebook or Instagram, the slew of likes, hearts, and comments almost always drives the announcement post to the very top of your feed. So Meta had just done all your market research for you!

 

 

And when we see that in our feed, we send them a simple message, and begin a conversation from there (more on what we send later in this post). Since we would usually reach out to them within a day or two of them announcing their engagement, we usually had their attention MONTHS before they even booked their wedding venue! And since we were using the strategies we talked about last week, once we’d reached out, they were more aware as we posted our work week in and week after that first conversation.

 

This helped us achieve what’s called “top of mind awareness”, which is a business term that essentially means that when the time did come for them to book a photographer, we were the first people that popped into their heads! And this top-of-mind awareness often translated into reaching out to us and eventually booking their wedding day with us!

 

But just reaching out once when they get engaged won’t keep you top-of-mind for more than a few days. It’s the consistent posting we talked about last week, that will make them feel like they can’t stop seeing you every time they check out social media! Huge corporations will pay millions of dollars a month to have top of mind awareness with their target audience, and you can get it for free.

 

 

Direct Outreach for Portrait Photographers

Now, for all the portrait photographers out there who don’t shoot weddings, don’t worry — we haven’t forgotten about you! Essentially, this same principle applies with all kinds of photographers, but you just need to get a bit more creative. For example, if the summer is coming to an end and you want to encourage a big push in your senior photos, you’d reach out directly to any rising high school seniors — or even better, the parents of rising high school seniors — who you know. Even if the connection is pretty loose, like a friend-of-a-friend or someone you haven’t spoken to in quite some time.

 

And if that feels too self-promotional for you, try thinking about it this way. Imagine for a moment that you’re the parent of a rising high school senior. You probably have a million things on your mind already: maybe your child has sports or extracurricular activities starting back up; maybe they’re applying for colleges; maybe they just got their driver’s license; there’s a lot going on. If senior photos are on your to-do list, but have fallen pretty far to the bottom, then suddenly an old friend reaches out and politely lets you know that they could take care of it for you, that’s not spam, that’s service! In all likelihood, you’ve just saved them time and energy, not bothered them!

 

The same applies when someone announces that they’re expecting if you’re a maternity or newborn photographer. If you love families, then you don’t really even need an excuse! Just reach out to people and let them know about your offering, and see if they’re interested!

 

 

How to Avoid Being “Spammy”

Okay so, let’s pause right here. We know you’re probably thinking: “Sure, this might be a very effective strategy, but won’t it make me seem spammy to all my friends and acquaintances?” But the answer to that question depends entirely on how you reach out to people! If you see someone get engaged or announce that they were expecting, and immediately message then with an unsolicited elevator pitch about why you’re such a great photographer and your full pricing information, then yes – you would totally seem like a spam bot.

 

But that’s not at all what we do! When we see a friend of ours get engaged on social media, we send them a private message with a personal and genuine congratulations. We relate with them regarding our own engagement, and tell them about how much they have to look forward to during this season! But here’s the key. We don’t want to “bait-and-switch” them, where we pretend to catch up with them over a few personalized messages back and forth, then drop the bomb that we only reached out to tell them about our wedding photography. If you’ve ever had old friends reconnect out of the blue then, a few messages in, they start asking you to join their multi-level-marketing scheme that sells energy drinks or make-up products, you know how disingenuous that feels.

 

That’s why, right from the first message we send, we make sure that they know about our experience in the wedding industry, and we invite them to reach out to us if we can help them in any way – whether photography-related or even just with more general wedding questions. And when we tell them they can reach out about anything, we mean it!

 

 

In the past, we’ve of course booked weddings with this simple message. But we’ve also helped old friends book other wedding photographers when we were unavailable for their date or outside of their budget. Because we reach out very candidly about our services, but in a way that’s also genuine and polite, it doesn’t feel spammy. It feels like an old friend saying, “Hey, congratulations! Enjoy this season of life, and let us know if we can help.”

 

And it goes without saying that this method works just as well or even better in-person! If you have a close friend or a coworker who you see in-person, and they get engaged or have a graduating senior or just want family photos, this same method can be used to put yourself on their radar, and maybe book a session or wedding with them once they’re looking for a photographer!

 

 

Our Results with Direct Outreach

Now, to be totally honest, we don’t have any results to show from direct outreach with portrait sessions, because we specialized in weddings and engagements very early in our career. But with weddings, we definitely have some results to look back on.

 

If you saw our last video/post, you know that we shared that in our first 5 years as wedding photographers, we booked 40 weddings, worth just shy of $100,000 from our personal network. Of those 40 weddings, and $100,000, a full 25% was from this direct outreach method. That’s 10 weddings worth $25,000 who may or may not have eventually booked us, had we not first reached out to them. And all it took was a quick DM on Facebook or Instagram!

 

Looking back at the list of weddings we booked this way, some of them were dear friends who we immediately and excitedly begin discussing photography with once they were engaged. But others were friends of friends from high school or college who we hadn’t spoken with in months or years. And of course, there were plenty of people who we reached out to who never even responded to our DM. But even if we had to reach out to 40 engaged couples to book those 10 weddings, it was well worth it, especially in the early days of our business!

 

 

That’s it for now, friends, but we’ll be back next week with another marketing tactic!

 

Want More?

 

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Check out the other segments in this blog series!

• Part 1: Maintain a Strong Portfolio
• Part 2: Join Local Facebook Groups
• Part 3: Referrals from Past Clients
• Part 4: Begin Your Social Media Presence
• Part 5: Network with Other Photographers
• Part 6: Networking with Venues and Vendors
• Part 7: Win Over Your Personal Network
• Part 8: Our Secret Direct Outreach Method
• Part 9: Four Reasons to Start a Photography Blog
• Part 10: Get More 5-Star Review from Past Clients