Come to my restaurant that serves food: A marketing analogy for photographers
Image by: @ostranenie
If you saw an advertisement like the title of this blog post: “New restaurant, serves food, come dine with us” would you think it was a joke? It sure sounds like one, doesn’t it; like being a literal Lucy? And yet, this is kind of the story that unfolds with photographers everywhere and for some reason we don’t hear it the same way: New photographer. Hire me.
When a photographer opens shop, they get themselves a camera and start telling people they are open for business. Would that be sufficient in our restaurant analogy? Successful? The first thing people would ask is: well, what kind of food do you serve? A restaurant needs to define if they are breakfast, lunch or dinner or some combination. They need to define the cultural influence: Italian, Chinese etc. They need to define the slant of the food preparation: counter-service only, fast food, fine dining, fusion, traditional, vegan, etc. In other words, we need details! A client ideally knows at least some of these elements before deciding to dine. Some information at minimum is needed, but the more information a diner has, the better they are equipped in deciding to patronize the establishment.
No one ever opens just a "restaurant.” A restaurant might be Italian fusion and be bistro-style for a younger, hipper crowd. Light and airy atmosphere with lots of greenery, with a long, deli counter with yummy pastries on display and bold, Italian coffee. Open only until 3pm for the breakfast and lunch crowd. Or, a restaurant might be full on supper club for exclusive business executives, where they come to entertain clients and be entertained. Bottle service, private booths for business and pleasure, decadent decor to make them all feel like a million bucks and dark, atmospheric lighting for privacy and ambiance. Opens only after 9pm and until 1am for the late entertainers. The thing is, the restauranteur has to define these elements in order to even create the restaurant in and of itself! If I’m opening a bistro, I have to source very different things — space, decor, food suppliers — than for a supper club! But us photographers, we start with cameras and lenses and well, we dive right in usually shooting anyone and anything and our industry doesn’t have those same entry requirements we’d have to go through in defining a restaurant. But it would be ideal if we imposed that upon ourselves as it can help us with attracting the right clients from the get go and avoid many of the marketing pitfalls that come with attempts to market a generic “restaurant.”
Each of the restaurants I defined above would then have a different approach to marketing - they might use the same overall strategies, but the way they would use them might be different. The details of their brand and their business models already hint what marketing might need to be developed.
For the Italian one, mailbox flyers in the community might be a good way to get the word out, but a top executive looking for a spot to entertain and impress a high-end client wouldn't really respond to a flyer because for that brand, that strategy would cheapen the experience. For that one, they plant a seed of exclusivity instead maybe through a series of posts on LinkedIn that it's an invite only for the first few months and let the word disseminate word-of-mouth in the business community.
Especially when we start out, we struggle to define our differences. But as any number of differences exist in the restaurant landscape, there are so many iterations of photography. We often just don’t cast an eye on developing those details and instead just try to do the same things as the others around us, and it doesn’t get us far. It’s a bunch of ‘restaurants’ serving food and trying to entice diners in, where diners simply do not respond to that level of ambiguity. Or, they close their eyes and pick from the ‘same’ options without building any affinity towards a certain service provider.
Just like the restaurant analogy, if you dig deeper, you can find the differences that make your business unique. Once you know those and the customer that would respond to those elements, then the marketing strategies are an extension of those things.
Join the Facebook Group with over 6,000 like-minded members to chat with others on this topic, and more!