How to Determine Your Clients & Shoot for Them

As an outdoor and nature photographer, you obviously spend time out shooting your favorite subjects, then process and organize those images, before submitting them to requests. But how much of your time is spent determining who you will submit those images to? Do you know who your customers are?

It is important to understand that there is a huge difference between photographing for your own pleasure and photographing for profit. Most businesses know who their customers are. They do extensive research to establish the demographic that is best suited for the product and often customize the product for that demographic.

With millions of images available for image buyers to consider it is too easy for them to get lost in all the options. Like us, they don’t have a lot of time these days to search aimlessly for the perfect image. Instead they go where they know they can find what they need and fast. It could be long established photographers they have worked with or agencies. Are they finding you and your work?
With today’s market crowded and quiet, you need to go find them. With the current business environment the photographer is the one who needs to be proactive, hustling to find any client that buys what you shoot. If you are a generic shooter, meaning you shoot anything that catches your fancy, the task becomes harder. It is becoming increasingly difficult to market and sell a random collection of imagery to a random selection of clients. Instead ask yourself: “What specialty product do I have to sell a specialty client?”

If you don’t have a niche then you need to create one. You may be a landscape photographer that travels the country shooting all the national parks. If that is your niche you will join countless others who also market national parks as their niche. But at least this will help you narrow your search for those clients who buy photography of national parks.

However, you might be more successful if you market a sub-niche that is less crowded. Let’s say you have a passion for butterflies after studying them in college biology class. You take a trip or two per year just to photograph them during migrations or in exotic locations. Why not promote that niche to a specialty list of buyers who use that type of photography?

What is most critical is knowing what the client wants and buys. It is much easier to sell clients what they want over what they need. They want to find images that fill their needs. This is sometimes not that easy to do, but it also depends on their product line.

Take calendars for example. If you see their products while in the book store looking for new calendar companies then an internet search should bring up their website and examples of their product line. Does your niche meet their needs? If your niche is the national parks you may find that they have a favorite photographer or several already filling that need and have been for years. It may be tough in that case to unseat the current photographers, but no editor will turn down superb work done in a new way.

As you prepare a letter and some examples to pitch your still image collection, consider also proposing calendar ideas that would allow you to complete the entire calendar and have your name on it.

For example, take Browntrout, one of the largest calendar publishers. An examination of their product line shows many calendars are produced by a single photographer and here are two titles by Steve Mulligan and Charles Gurche, both noted photographers. Other titles are designed with images from a variety of photographers but the fact that you could get your own title is incentive enough to market that niche title to any publisher.  If you have wide coverage of your own state you could become the next photographer they count on to produce that title.

Use the same approach if you are marketing to the ad agency that handles your states tourism account and publishes the travel guide. You may shoot general scenics around the state but also have a niche like skiing or climbing or restaurants and dining. Market that niche to them as long as it is applicable to their needs. You may get a call for a subject that is unrelated to your niche and promotion, but they called because they like your work.

This has happened to me. I once printed a series of promotional postcards that had 5 outdoor adventure images on each card. This image above was on one of them and it got a lot of attention because it was weird. Later a client contacted me and gave me a 4 day assignment to shoot for Camelbak. I used a niche approach in my marketing, promoting my outdoor recreation images, to a general clientele, and landed a sweet assignment.

The approach works! Go find the clients and determine if you have a product they can use. Promote to them as a niche photographer with exceptional work and depending on what their products are, propose something that you can fill. The same marketing approach can also work for buyers with less defined needs as indicated by my above example.

No matter what your specialty, the need to research clients prior to shooting some of your favorite subjects and locations will provide you some guidance as to what you should be shooting and where you will sell it.

If you have a similar experience please leave a comment.

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