Digital marketing for outdoor and adventure sports photographers (Part 3) - Driving additional traffic to your website
Part three in a series on digital marketing for outdoor and adventure sports photographers, with hints and tips for how to help photography buyers find you online.
Think about the clients you’d like to work with and find out what they require from their photography. Tailor your approach to meet their needs.
If you build it, will they come?
Possibly. The minimum I’d suggest photographers do when setting up a website is to optimise it for organic search traffic. You’ll put yourself in a decent position to be found online but there’s no guarantee of numbers and you’ve no control over who your visitors are. It all depends on the keywords people choose. Whether you choose to spend more time driving organic traffic to your website is purely a business choice, which you’ll have made when you created your marketing strategy and decided how much of your time you wish to devote to it (you may have decided it makes more sense to do the minimum for your website and focus your efforts on offline marketing, valuing human interaction as a way to build up relationships over online communications, or building up your engagement using social media instead). I’d imagine most photographers will include at least two of these different approaches in their digital marketing strategy, keen not to put all their eggs in the proverbial single basket.
Additional ways to drive traffic to your photography website
Let’s say that you’ve made the decision to maximise traffic to your website. What tools are available to the photographer who wants to use digital marketing to increase their brand awareness and help them secure more income? Before you look at your options, it’s important to understand clearly the purpose of your website. Is it;
Purely for brand awareness
Brand awareness and product (You’ve got something that you sell, on top of your creative services)
Brand awareness and education (You’ve got information of value you like to share, on top of your creative services)
A combination of the above
Once you’re clear on the service your website provides for your business, you can consider your objectives and tailor them accordingly. For example, let’s say you’re selling a product (e.g. fine art prints or an online training course direct to a client). You’re below your monthly targets. You do some calculations and you know you need x numbers of visits per month to make £y in sales. Your objective therefore is purely to increase numbers and what might make sense is a paid search advertisement (see below) which you conduct on certain keywords to increase your monthly visitors. But what if you have new commercial work that you want to share? You also want to increase eyeballs on that but it’s likely your audience isn’t the same type of people who will buy your fine art prints. So your approach instead may be to issue an email campaign (personalised to individual art buyers or shared more widely using an email distribution list which you’ve collated online) which showcases your work and encourages people to hire you. Or you could run a social media campaign. What’s key is to understand what your audience wants or needs from you, so you can drive them to appropriate, engaging content, tailor your calls to action and maximise your desired result.
a.) Paid search on top of organic search
Organic search is visits to your website purely off the back of search engine traffic, with no input by yourself other than the efforts you put into search engine optimisation. It’s a default approach I’d highly recommend all photographers adopt if they have a website (see ‘Do I need a website?’). Paid search is where Google and other search engines allow you to bid on search keywords and you pay them to have your business advertised when those keywords are used.
The majority of photographers I’d imagine will rely on organic search traffic (appreciating that SEO is free to work with once you’ve purchased your website). If you play in the paid search marketing space you’ll perhaps have a specific thing you’re wishing to sell (e.g. a course or a book), done a lot of research as to what you think will work and you’ll have an established plan for measuring and establishing what return you’re getting on your investment. If not, I’d suggest employing an agency to review your strategy for you. Effective paid search can have a positive effect on your bottom line (think selling fine arts landscape prints for clients buying office art) but it is easy to spend a lot of money for little tangible benefit.
b.) Blogging
Blogging is an effective way of generating interest and increasing your site traffic (especially so because the amount of content you can generate but also because frequency of site updates is a ranking factor for Google and other search engines). You just need to be keen to write content and have a plan or content strategy for what you want to say and how often you say it. If not, I’d suggest to consider whether it’s best to even start - a stale blog is a surefire way to lose the interest of your clients.
Some things to think about -
Don't underestimate how much work it is to maintain a blog. There’s a fair amount of effort in writing regularly, e.g. continual idea generation, researching, drafting, editing and fact-checking.
Don’t think you have to write every day, or even every week or month. Choose a timetable that suits you and be consistent.
Choose a topic you’re confident your clients will be interested in and write naturally and enthusiastically about it (Google recognises quality content, as do humans). Be sure to include your keywords in your copy.
What do you want a person to do after they’ve read your blog? (Does it make sense to include a call to action at the end? For example, ‘Visit page x’ or ‘Read blog y’?). If it is useful to provide your clients with more information, you could link to content on the web and on your website (Google uses internal links to help it identify what it thinks is the most important content on your website)
How are you going to measure if you’ve met your goals? Consider key performance indicators (KPIs) and use analytics tools to see if you’ve been successful (for example, if you use Google Analytics, use Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder to append tracking data to your hypertext links).
Once you’ve written your content, share it far and wide. You’ve put a lot of effort into it so aim to get it seen by as many people as possible,
Tip - Consider other publishing mediums. Why not approach a popular third party website and offer to write a blog for them? This could an editorial publication or a corporate blog. Just be sure the reward is worth your while (it doesn’t have to be monetary, the extra brand awareness may be valuable enough but do ensure you get some value and don’t give your work away for free).
c.) Email marketing
If your content is compelling and you have the ability to include an online form on your website that correlates to a database (e.g. using a supplier such as Mailchimp), you can persuade clients to share their contact details and permit you to communicate with them offline. These ‘warm’ leads need continually nurtured and you’ll need to produce regular content if you wish to keep them engaged.
Email marketing I find to be similar to blogs. The focus is on producing interesting, engaging content that people wish to hear about. You could, in theory, simply summarise your blog posts in your email and send those but if your clients have already visited your website, they’re seeing the same information again. Is this a bad thing? Perhaps not, as it can reinforce your name and your work in their mind. But what if you produced specific content just for clients who had signed up to your email newsletter? There is a skill to encouraging people to sign up and stay signed up and it’s wise to think outside the box but primarily it’s about your great, engaging content. You’ll quickly realise people will soon leave if you’re not holding their attention.
Three standard approaches to email marketing are;
Email ‘blasts’ - Where you sign up to a company who manages large databases of email addresses and then you ‘blast’ those lists with your content (‘Dear Sir/Madam’ style), hoping that the email addresses are still up-to-date and people find it of interest. (Typically, I experienced a tiny open rate - less than 1% - when I trialled this for my business)
Personalised email - You research individual clients you wish to work with and tailor a personalised message for them, addressing them by their name and referencing recent work (I experienced a 50% open rate when I adopted this approach instead)
Email newsletters - You have a form on your page and the quality of your content encourages people to sign up to find out more about you and be contacted by you when you publish new work
If you were your client, which would you rather receive? I’m fairly certain it’s going to be either of the latter two emails. For the second option, yes, it takes much longer to find someone and ensure you have the right contact, research the work they’ve been responsible for and then create a communication that references that and demonstrates why you feel you can do similar work for them and why they should choose you over the photographers they’ve already hired. But if you don’t gather email addresses for an email newsletter (and even if you do), I’d highly recommend you consider it as the difference in open rates is dramatic.
Caution - In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), dictates what data you can capture from your clients and the essential controls you need to ensure are in place to manage their information and keep it secure. My legal page outlines how I manage my GDPR obligations. I’d recommend you consult a lawyer to ensure you’re compliant.
d.) Social media
You may, like me, find it’s very easy to get distracted with social media, spending time admiring the (apparently) amazing lifestyles of those around you and forgetting the value it can add to your own business. Social media marketing is a subset of digital marketing, and a highly effective method of finding and engaging with clients online. How you act and the content you produce will all contribute to increasing your brand awareness. In most cases, the higher the number of followers you have, the greater you’re seen to be performing (which I’d suggest isn’t always the case) but, even if your numbers aren’t as high as your peers, there’s a few things you can do that will give you a baseline level of optimisation in your channels overall that could increase the number of visitors to your website (and, regardless, will help clients’ impressions of you overall).
Instagram - Instagram’s strength comes in its ability to engage your clients with visual content. Publish strong images and content with a consistent theme plus commentary that stands out and demonstrates your worth. Treat it like your blog and post regularly and consistently (using Reels for engagement and Stories for sharing fun things about you and behind the scenes). From an SEO perspective, Instagram is not a great application (Facebook, who owns Instagram, blocks access for Google to your images) but it’s worthwhile considering a few things. Match your username to your domain name and include keywords and your website URL in your profile.
Twitter - Much better for SEO than Instagram but still limited by the number of characters you can use. Key considerations are to include keywords in your profile and link to your website and regularly provide links in your posts back to your website (Google ranks inbound links very highly).
LinkedIn - Optimal I’d suggest for SEO out of all the social media platforms (perhaps on a par with Facebook) as you can write long-form articles but, based on some trials I performed, not as beneficial as blogging on your website (I published an article on both at different times and my website post ranked better).
Facebook - As with the others, match your username to your domain name, put keywords in your biography and link to your website. There’s also the option, like LinkedIn, to use their paid advertising tool, similar to Google’s paid search, which you can use to target your communications and increase your engagement.
There are other social media platforms, e.g. TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr or Snapchat (which Cory Richards and Adrian Ballinger took much advantage off on an ascent of Everest) but what’s key I’d suggest is finding out where your clients spend their time and focusing your efforts there. (Plus, I’d recommend, using platforms you enjoy. I stopped using Facebook because, although it may have advantages to me as a business, using it overall simply makes me annoyed). I do think you’ll enjoy a much better return on your investment by targeting just a few social media platforms and customising your approach in each, rather than trying to use all of them (posting on one platform and copying it across to the others isn’t an optimal social media strategy). However you use social media, make sure you talk about yourself consistently and be sure to give out the same message regardless of the platforms you use. Follow others, especially photography buyers and interact with them. Build up a relationship online so when you do get some work you’re not brand new to them and they have confidence in how you conduct yourself as a business. Above all, keep trying new things and be sure to measure (and celebrate) your success. Don’t be afraid to adapt.
More information
Consult the experts. Useful digital marketing and search engine optimisation information and services can be found online, for example;
There’s many others.