Free Survey on Getting Photo Buyers Attention

Rob has some great experience in the publishing world, most notably as photo editors at Outside Magazine and Mens Journal. This experience and his professional resume allow him some nice access to other photo editor and art buyers.

Rob was generous enough to take the time to create and post this survey which benefits all photographers. You can examine the survey and download it as well as read his fabulous blog.

I wanted to take some time to review his survey and form my own opinion as to what the results mean. I selected a few of the questions that I felt were the most important and have commented on them below.

• Question 1 asks how large is your company/publication and the responses came from huge companies to single photo editors. Of the total surveys sent out 171 replied so this indicates to me that there is a clear representation of different size publications/companies.

• Question 2 asks: What is the best way for photographers to contact you? The majority (58%) respond that all they need is a link to the photographers website.

So what is the best way to get that link in front of them? The responses indicate that email promotion was the best way followed closely by a printed piece (I assume mailed) and a portfolio showing. Social media was only 8.8% and phone calls only 4%.

These are great stats and are counter to some of what we hear about marketing. Most marketing specialists suggest that the phone call is the best way to make contact and it is really the only way (yes email works but they can ignore it easier than when live on the phone) to set up that portfolio showing, but that may have changed in our online world.

I am honestly surprised that email is so highly suggested when it can so easily be consider spam and even violate anti spam laws. I have received that “quit spamming me” reply before and from a permission based list.

• Question 3 is ‘How many printed marketing mailers do you receive in a day?’ and I am shocked that 67% say less than 10 and 29% say 10-20 per day. Are all the photographers using email? Is this a sign of the poor economy and photogs having no budget to print and mail? It could be both, but I have had better success with mailers than emails.

• Question 4 results may just have answered my question about question 3 and that is ‘How many unsolicited marketing emails do you receive per day?’ 31% say less than 10 while 38% say 10-20 and 23% receive 20-50. 5.8% receive 50-100, 1.2% get 100-200, .6% get over 200. Whoa! That is a massive amount of email for a few and if you add two of the response options together you find 61% receive 10-50 emails a day.  Does the photo buyer really have time to review each email and make much of a decision?  Can a photographer really stand out here?

Consider that in the printer material category, 67% get less than 10 printed pieces.  So obviously the buyers get way more emails than printed pieces and this makes me wonder where you would get a higher probability that your promotion would be viewed. Sounds like the printed piece would.

• Question 7: ‘What is your opinion of email marketing?’ This is the one that I always wonder about and of all the questions this one seems to be the closest in opinions by respondents. Leading the way with almost 27% having a ‘love hate’ opinion of email marketing. 18.7% called it a ‘Necessary Evil’, 15.8% ‘Consider it Spam’, 19.9% say ‘Okay but getting worse’, 26% saying ‘It’s my job to look at them.’ This basically reinforces my long held opinion that email marketing is not that popular.

• Question 8 gets back to printed promotions and here the responses are a little more positive to this approach to marketing. By only a few percentage points, the respondents viewed printed promotions more favorably than email and fewer had objections to receiving them.

• Question 9: The last question was ‘What is the best way to find new talent?’ Overwhelmingly ‘Peer Referral’ was the most popular way to find new talent at 67% with browsing the internet at 49%.  Browsing agent websites was 42% with Awards and Contests, Consumer and Industry magazines, were in the 30% range. Here the most surprising is that social networking on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn were not places where art buyers are looking for new talent and you could also interpret the results suggesting source books may be on their way out with only 12% using them.

As I try to read into these response percentages I would say that photo buyers appear to dislike, or have a distaste for any photographer promotions. Only 10% love getting printed promotions while only 1.2% love getting emails with the majority of respondents having a more negative view than a positive view of both marketing methods. If I was to guess I would say this is due to the volume of promotions they receive.

Another interesting result was that 37% say email is the best way to get in touch with a link to your website, but 44.5% don’t like email while 26% have that love/hate opinion. So most prefer you get in touch by email but don’t like getting them. I would guess this means they don’t like email but if you are going to promote then email is the best way to do it.

My opinion of these results is that nothing stands out above any other method as the best way, rather each approach works today to some degree. What one buyer does not like another does making me think that you have to do more than one thing which might be an approach with some attention grabbing direct mail followed by some email and some cold calling (or emailing) to show the book. Despite all the new options for marketing and promotion, I come away thinking that we need to still do a lot of the same strategies of the past.

Thanks to Rob for the effort to create this survey of valuable information. You can download it here and read his blog here.

If you have an opinion on Rob’s survey or on marketing in general please leave a comment.

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