Marketing Plan

Introduction to marketing

Anyone who runs a photography business needs to make sure that they are actively marketing it. Even those who are currently very busy should build a marketing plan to secure business for the future.

As photographic work can be inconsistent, the trick is to use downtime between jobs to invest in your marketing. Initially this means writing up a marketing plan and then implementing it and measuring the results. 

Clarifying what you want to achieve

The first stage in marketing is to be clear about what kind of product you want to sell and what the market requires. Make sure you have already done our Start here section which will help you see where your photography fits into the different markets available.

While looking through the Start Here section you should also ask yourself these questions and write down your answers:

• Who am I? What do I produce? Be honest

• What do I want to tell others about me and my products?

• Who do I want to tell?

• Why should they care?

• Who else are they listening to?

 

Answering these questions should help to clarify your thinking so that you can start to build a marketing plan.

Creating a marketing plan

Your marketing plan can be as indepth or as simple as you want it to be - the most important thing is to have a plan and to implement it. A basic marketing plan can be generated around these 4 areas:

1. Goals: Set measurable goals for yourself
2. Budget: Decide how much of your income you will spend on marketing - you could make it a percentage of your income in the range of 5-10%
3. Methods: Going through this course will give you many ideas on methods to use for your marketing. Elements that you are likely to want to include are: branding, blogs, website, social media and newsletters. We will look at them all in more detail. Decide which you will use and detail how you will use them
4. Measure: Decide how you are going to measure your success. Before you start marketing get some statistics on your average sales and your website traffic as well as any other measurable. Use these as the basis to measure your success against.  Keep records and use some of the tools recommended in this course

There are numerous templates for creating a marketing plan that are available on the internet, as well as instructions on how to do an indepth marketing plan. That detail of creating a full marketing plan is beyond the scope of this course, but you could look at these as a start:
5 minute marketing plan
Medium length marketing plan