Mind Your Own Business – Money Talk: Playing the Self-promotion Lottery Game

Here’s a common story. A talented photographer, with a bit of experience doing odd jobs here and there, posts a question to a forum: “What should I do now?” The responses come flooding in. “Put your best portfolio together and send it to as many people as you can,” writes one. “Do a direct-mail marketing campaign,” says another. “Build a great flash website,” chimes in a third. “Write about yourself in a blog,” echoes the crowd.

All these ideas are those you’ve no doubt heard a million times, and many people swear by them, citing personal success stories they attribute to these very techniques. Yes, one should do these things. But that’s not saying much. Everyone does them. Photography is too artistic and subjective to rely on techniques that everybody uses.

This is what I call the “lottery ticket” method of marketing, because your work getting noticed simply comes down to playing the odds. Clients you contact will be flooded with the very same email campaigns, portfolios and fancy websites from people just like you. No matter how much you tweak, or categorize, or improve to differentiate your photography or your presentation, the huge volume of noise that photo buyers/editors get means that such attention to detail is not going to yield much more of a difference than random chance—that someone just happened to be in the right frame of mind when he or she saw your portfolio.

Remember, I’m not faulting the tasks—you should always be marketing and promoting yourself. But these are just tasks, not strategies. The problem with this approach is that it’s based on a faulty premise: that getting hired is all about your skill as a photographer. In actuality, using images as your only weapon does not do well in getting work ahead of other photographers. You need to use your voice and an understanding of the marketplace to differentiate yourself—it is a vital way to become distinct from all the other millions of working photographers and shift the odds of winning the lottery into your favor.

That said, you need to stand out in a way that makes you more than just a photographer by appearing as an expert in  particular business sectors. You want to be seen as someone who can help with clients’ objectives by offering the outside, expert insight to help them see the forest from the trees (something they may not be able to do because they’re too close to their own niches). With your fingers on the pulse of many companies, perhaps even their competitors, you can offer a perspective from a broader industry outlook.

Achieving this industry-specific knowledge can be done in an infinite number of ways, depending on your particular experience in the areas of business that you’re promoting yourself. You need to write and speak authoritatively on matters pertinent to products or services in the selling segment of your target clients, as someone who can articulate a vision for the current or future of their business model.

It may sound like I’m pushing you to actually be an expert, or to sound like a CEO. I’m not. I’m merely suggesting you talk about things you know and use them in your promotional materials, specifically in ways that are either independent of photography or use photos only as examples to illustrate business points—not as a demonstration that your photography is great. You already do that with your portfolio and website.

People vastly underestimate their knowledge and experience in the fields of their own photography, and they certainly underestimate the relevancy of this knowledge, especially when they are new and trying to get work. When I’ve done individualized consulting for those who get stuck in their careers, simple discussions on these subjects often reveal that their insight and analysis on matters is quite advanced.

A good example is Clare-Louise (www.clare-louise.co.uk), a photographer based in the U.K. Her portfolio is full of self-produced images, but you’d never know it—they look like pieces she’s done for other clients. She posted the very question posed at the top of this article to a discussion forum on LinkedIn, which prompted the cookie-cutter responses I mentioned. I then wrote to her.

When we started talking, I probed into her interests, what industries she knows, her experience and expertise, and so on. This got her talking about stuff that, to her, seemed almost mundane and unimportant; to me, it was way over my head. She clearly knew about fashion design much better than I did, so I can only imagine she’d hit it off very well with photo buyers or editors from fashion magazines. This is a much better place to start a dialogue than trying to pitch a “silent” portfolio.

Now, let’s say Clare-Louise were to contact a potential client, for example, the marketing manager at Gap. Here’s Clare-Louise’s approach: Google the marketing manager’s name and see what she’s written, where she posts things, a blog she might have or any other mention. Now, imagine what response Clare-Louise might get if she started with, “I saw what you said about last year’s catalog. Did you see the lineup for kids this fall? The magazines are calling it a big departure for the pre-teens, and I hear Macy’s is stocking up ahead of the curve. What do you think?” The marketing director wouldn’t possibly know that this was a pitch from a photographer looking for work. This is just business banter between colleagues in the same industry.

In any case, you are more likely to get a reply back using this approach than if you just sent a cold-call email asking to send a portfolio. This way you’re starting off as peers, not within the master-servant relationship you might be used to. Now you have the opportunity to foster a relationship. Your goal is to show that you know this topic because you’re experienced and informed on the subject (whatever it may be). Before you know it, something about photography will come up in conversation, and you’ll be in a much better position to posture as someone she could use.
When photographers incorporate their particular knowledge into their promotional materials, websites, blogs and other communications, they always do better than they’d do by simply promoting their photo skills. They may not get work ahead of existing name-brand pros in the field, but they’re going to be far ahead of photographers with similar experience to their own.

Blogging is the best way to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise. If what you say and think is truly useful and wise, then your career will follow. But you need to talk about things that buyers are interested in; don’t talk about yourself, your personal life, or what you enjoy about photography. Buyers don’t care about these things—they won’t even go to your blog. You want people to land on your blog as a search result based on relevant and field-related keywords you use.

You’ll never hear this type of advice from photographers or photo buyers and editors because they, like you, are wrapped in the same mindset of the traditional marketing methods. They are used to having portfolios sent to them for choosing which photographers to work with or buy from. These photo buyers genuinely believe that they have unique insight into which photographer is the best one to hire. And you know what? They always pick the right one. But in reality, it’s like the game that toddlers play where there are a bunch of rubber duckies in the tub, and they have to pick the one with a star on the bottom to win a prize. They pick and surprise—they win! They really think they knew what they were doing. But the reality is, all the ducks had a star.

And this is what I call the inverse-lottery game, where almost every ticket is a winner. For them, the photographer they chose likely did a good job, but whether they’d admit it or not, almost all of the applicants take good imagery.

That’s okay. In reality, it’s part of your expert approach in the pitch—allowing the other to assume an expert quality in choosing you as well. Here’s where your strategic planning can be put to best use: the sleight of your marketing hand.

So, yes, contact clients, send portfolios, write a blog, have a sexy website. But those are minor and incidental tasks that you take up every so often as a regular course of business. Spend your time and resources developing serious and valuable materials focusing on your knowledge of the businesses and industries that are the focus of your photography. Most importantly, when you contact someone, first and foremost, discuss business!

I discuss this topic in much greater detail in my book, Profitable Photography in the Digital Age, which can be found at
https://www.danheller.com/books.

Dan Heller is a travel photography and photo business industry analyst. His website, www.danheller.com, hosts more than 40,000 stock images, as well as articles and tutorials covering personal business management to photo techniques. He has written four books on the business of photography, which he’ll be teaching at the Academy of Art in San Francisco in the fall 2009. His email address is [email protected].