3 TIPS ON HOW TO GROW YOUR CREATIVE Photography BUSINESS
Want to grow your Creative Photography Business and generate income through something you love doing?
Well, why wouldn’t you want to make money with something you love?
The REAL question is:
How?
Wether you’re a photographer in Luxembourg or anywhere in the world, I think we all would agree that getting paid for photography, videography or just any other creative service in which we don’t necessarily have a degree, can be quite difficult when just starting out.
Me myself I’ve known an uncountable amount of creatives who are seriously good at what they do, though they were never able to make a penny out of their work. The reason is not that they didn’t want to, but people just wouldn’t book them, and the reason for that is explained psychologically which I’ll explain in the following.
In this blog post I’ll explain to you, how thousands of others did it, and how YOU can expand your creative business, get more clients, and start making some money with 3 simple little tips!
Photo by Lane Smith on Unsplash
So now… How would you do that? In this article I’ll share my experiences, tactics and strategy on how to get more clients as a Creative, and out-leverage your potential photography clients.
Have empathy
Understanding who’s on the other side is so important, it’s insane. Who is your potential client? What does he want? What does he need? What’s his budget? What’s most important to him, and how can you deliver exactly that?
If you just blindly offer your service without ever asking yourself at least some of these questions, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. Understanding people is crucial to business.
The in Marketing well known ‘Empathy Map’ is definitely something you should look up to level up your empathy-game.
The importance of empathy in business understood, if we do our empathy correctly, we start understanding why people want, or don’t want to work with with us.
Some genuinely appreciate our work and therefore want to collaborate or work with us.
On the other side some people do not want to work with us because there’s risk involved, which leads us to our next point: Minimising risk.
Minimise risk
See, humans generally have an instinct which is helping them avoiding risks and keeping them safe.
If a man for example stands on the edge of a cliff, he obviously won’t jump, even if he never jumped off of a cliff before, because it simply would kill him and he can easily tell that.
Therefore, if you try to sell something to someone, whether it is a product or a service, what you try to do is minimising the risk involved in the service or product you’re offering.
What risks are there though? The risks for the client are numerous: Bad content, wasting money, wasting time, … This could even go as far as ruining their event, wedding or whatever, because they trusted you and you fucked up.
A great way to minimise risk for your clients is having a well put together portfolio showing off work you did for prior clients. That way the potential clients can clearly see what you’re capable of doing and maybe even visualise themselves in some of your photos or videos (couples for example). Being honest is in my opinion very important as well. If for example you’re shooting a certain type of photography for the first time, be straight up about it, and make your client aware of it.
If this brutal honesty makes your client even more thoughtful about the collaboration with you, there’s one very important thing to consider: Pricing. Pricing yourself under market for a domain where you don’t have a lot of credibility gives you a huge advantage, cause even though you may be unexperienced, your client has not much to lose (at least no money).
Which leads us to our third and last point, which is…
Work for free…
…or at least very affordable.
I’m very well aware of the endless debate of those saying ‘Don’t undersell yourself!’ and those saying to work for free.
You definitely shouldn’t underprice the value you bring to clients, but wait…what if there are no clients? What if no one’s willing to pay for your services, be it because of your lack of experience or any other reason really?
Again, we have some risk involved here, and it’s monetary. What did we learn earlier? Minimising risk is key.
If you want to build a portfolio for something you’ve never done you simply have to consider doing it for free or very little money in order to build a little portfolio, and only then charge people and book more shoots. At the end it pays off.
Actually that’s what I’m still doing up to date! And it works. I consider it an investment, because those free shoots brought me at least one paid shoot. Consider it an investment as well: An investment in yourself, because you gain experience ut also an investment in your business, because you build leverage over potential clients, simply because you can show off good content you created, and even charge good money.