There are hundreds of thousands of photographers out there, and millions more with an Instagram account and an iPhone. So how on Earth do you get noticed?
The answer is to create a photographers content strategy for your business. Creating a content strategy to know exactly how to start promoting your work and creating a brand for your business. You’ll essentially create a plan you follow when creating content, from deciding which platforms to use (Instagram? YouTube?) to what topics you’ll cover (photography tips? behind-the-scenes videos?).
Having a content strategy ensures that you’re putting out consistently high quality material that your ideal clients will find appealing. And it’s also a lot easier than trying to come up with a winning idea every day.
What Is A Content Strategy?
A content strategy is a plan for creating and distributing content that’s relevant, valuable, and consistent. It helps you create the right type of content for the right audience on the right platform at the right time.
Content strategies include:
- Metrics – What are your goals? How will you measure success?
- Digital assets – What are examples of what you’re going to create (text articles, blog posts, ebooks or whitepapers)? Who should they be aimed at (your target market)? Where will they be published – on your website or other channels like LinkedIn Pulse or Medium? How often should these assets be published (weekly vs monthly vs quarterly) and who will do this work (you personally or an outsourced writer).
Why Do You Need A Content Strategy For Your Photography Business?
A photographers content strategy for your business is important because it helps you to:
- Attract more clients. The internet and social media networks are crowded places, so it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd and get noticed. A great content strategy will not only help you attract more clients, but also increase sales and grow your photography business as a whole.
- Stay focused on what matters most by saving time, money and energy that would otherwise be wasted on creating content that no one cares about (or worse yet—that may even hurt sales).
- Save money by making sure that all of the hard work put into creating great content doesn’t go unnoticed or wasted because there wasn’t an effective plan in place beforehand for promoting it effectively online.
How To Create A Content Strategy For Your Photography Business
If you’re in the planning stages of creating a photographers content strategy, it’s important to start with a solid plan. Your content strategy will need to be built around your niche and target audience to make sure that it’s successful. Here are some steps you can take:
1. Know Your Niche
Defining your niche and target audience is the first step towards creating a successful content strategy. First, take some time to answer some questions about how you want to position yourself in the marketplace as well as who you want to reach through your photography business’ website or blog.
What do you do? Who do you want to reach? How many clients are available in this market? These are all essential questions that will help shape your marketing plan moving forward.
Once you’ve defined these two things, it’s much easier for other aspects of your business plan (like pricing) to fall into place naturally.
Your niche is often tied to what you specialize in, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that every photographer needs one.
2. Clear Goals
Set goals for your content strategy. It could be as simple as increasing your Instagram following to over 1,000 followers or gaining more clients in the next year. The next step is figuring out what success looks like for this particular project—what kind of results do you hope for? And how will those results be measured? This isn’t about numbers; think about qualitative measures instead:
Do people feel inspired by what they’ve seen so far? Do they feel like something has been missing from their lives until now? What does success look like from an emotional perspective rather than just an analytical one?
These are important questions because they’ll influence how much time/money/energy goes into producing each piece going forward—and how often new pieces need updating.
You should always have goals when you are working towards achieving your business goals because it keeps you on track and focused on what matters most to you.
For instance, if one of your main objectives was to increase revenue by 15% this year, setting a specific goal for how much revenue growth and return on investment (ROI) from each piece of content would help keep things organized and manageable.
3. Plan your content
The first step in creating a photographers content strategy is planning the content you will create and when you will create it. This process involves defining the type of content you will produce, who your audience is, and how often you plan on producing it.
Planning your content is one of the most important steps in creating a successful photography business as it allows you to create a calendar that keeps track of all of your marketing activities and makes sure they are done at optimal times.
It also helps define your niche and target audience so that they get what they want from the resources provided by the business (such as blog articles or product pages).
Having an idea of who these people are before starting work on developing any kind of strategy will allow anyone working within this field to understand how best-practice works within their industry/industries – which means that there’s no need for guesswork here!
Collect content ideas
You’re probably thinking, “I have a ton of content ideas already!” But the truth is that it can be difficult to keep track of ideas and organize them into a cohesive strategy. That’s why it’s important to use tools that help you collect your thoughts and organize them in an efficient way.
Here are some helpful tools to get started:
- A Content Idea Tool – An online tool like Trello or Process Street will allow you to create lists on different topics or themes so all your ideas are organized in one place. You can also use these platforms as checklists, where every time you come up with an idea for a blog post (or any kind of content), add it as a task onto the list for later processing. This makes sure nothing slips through the cracks when putting together your strategy!
- A Content Idea Notebook – If paper is more your thing than digital apps, then this might be better suited for you. Simply write down any potential topics content planners or sticky notes and put them somewhere prominent
Create an editorial calendar
- Once you’ve gotten your content plan and editorial calendar in place, the next step is to create a content calendar.
- An editorial calendar is a tool that helps you organize your content plan into a visual schedule that allows you to see what needs to come out when, so it’s much easier for you (or someone in your team) to keep track of everything on their plate at once.
When creating an editorial calendar for yourself or for your team, there are three main things everyone should consider:
How often will each piece be published? Is it weekly or monthly? Every other month or something else entirely?
What type of content does each publication need? Do all publications have the same structure/formatting requirements? Or do some need more photos than others?
Do they require different types of photography skills (e.g., portraits vs landscapes)? Are certain topics covered regularly while others aren’t touched at all—and if so, why not include those topics occasionally as well (e.g., “Best Of” posts)?
Creating a content strategy for your photography business can help you get noticed online and attract more clients.
A strong photographers content strategy is essential to any marketing campaign, but it’s especially important for a small business like yours. Your website is the first thing potential customers see when they research what kind of products or services you offer. If they don’t immediately find what they’re looking for, chances are they’ll look elsewhere—and that’s not what you want!
The goal of a content strategy is to help your business rank higher in search results and drive more clients to your website. If this sounds too complicated and time-consuming, don’t worry: there are resources out there that can help make the process painless (and even fun).
So there you have it. Some of the top benefits of having a content strategy for your photography business and how to create one. Once you have a plan in place, you can start putting out content that helps you attract more clients and grow your business.
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