Today we are celebrating our new promotional pieces, which have arrived in the mail, thanks to a wonderful sister who sent them all the way here to Muscat! It was a difficult task to put these together, not only did we have to learn more about Adobe InDesign, but we definitely had to brush off a few layers of dust in the old page layout attic.

For photographers trying to enter the market, there is a lot of competition and a lot of hurdles to jump in order to get seen by editors. Here is the path we took for promoting our photography company.

Step 2. RESEARCH YOUR MARKET – GOAL: Hunt down the contact info for your newly created wish list of clients.

Now comes the most difficult part in promoting your photography. Previously we would search the internet on ad agency’s or magazine’s websites looking for breadcrumbs that might lead us to an email address or a person to send a promo to, but after many years we finally decided to invest in Agency Access.

Now we don’t get paid by them to say this, but we’re big fans of their services. They have an extensive database of photo editors and creatives for photographers to comb through. Yeah it’s a little pricy, but if you count up all the wasted hours we spent looking online, you would see why we put down the cash. When promoting your photography you need specifics to attack your audience and Agency Access sure has the details.

Step 3. SHOOT FOR THE PROMO – GOAL: Create a PROMO, whether it's a postcard or a whole book, push a specific concept that represents your artistic abilities.

For many years, we would just grab a few of our best images and slap them on a postcard. Now we have a new outlook when it comes to promoting our photography. Promos are all about the hook, the concept that pulls the editor towards your site, or to make that call. We think it’s a lot easier to have a cohesive concept that is engaging and unique when it’s exclusively shot for the promo piece.

We started with an idea to create a mini mag, we laid out some rough story ideas and when it came time for our next trip we traveled to make images that would fit our promo concept.

Step 4. LAYOUT & DESIGN – GOAL: Gather feedback from your network of friends. This will be different for everyone, but this step is critical for success. 

When it comes to promoting your photography it can take some time. You might even have to learn some new tricks. We had to brush up on our InDesign skills, but once we got the rough sketch, it all kinda fell into place after that. Our mini mag has a lot of writing in it so we sent it to a gracious friend who is a journalist, to help with the spelling and grammar, which was extremely valuable.

We made a few test prints and laid them out on our gallery system at home. We spent a few weeks making corrections, having our friends come over to give their two cents, we even sent it over to a creative director to get his feedback. So after a month or so messing around with different designs all we had to do then, is upload to a site and it was printed.

Step 5. POST IT – GOAL: At first your wish list of clients might be grand. The goal here is to narrow that list down to a smaller set of clients who show potential interest in your photography.

This is where Agency Access really kicks ass, not only do they give us the photo editor’s name and address for each publication, but we can send a test email to them as well. When I say a test email, I mean sticking your toe in your “target market pool.” We were able to send a email promo to all the people that we wanted to send the mini mag to rather cheaply and through their analytics, we could see who opened it and clicked through, whittling down a smaller list of possible clients to send our printed mini mag to. (but companies like Mail Chimp can do the emailing too, you just have to have your own contact list and overall it just takes a little more work)