Often I hear photographers talk about how their market is shifting, how their studio billings have fallen off in the past few years, and how they are considering expanding or changing the services they offer. I’ll ask them if, in their heart of hearts, can they honestly say they’ve done all they can, from a marketing point of view, to help their business.
A website is becoming more and more an essential marketing tool in today’s connected world. But it has to complement everything else you’re doing in terms of marketing. Here are a few suggestions on how you might maximize the effectiveness of your Internet marketing program. It’s by no means an exhaustive list.
Be Consistent in Your Branding
You website should match the “look and feel” of your business cards and your printed promotional materials such as snail-mail postcards. Don’t forget to brand your email promotional campaigns to match your website. I always remind photographers that we are not graphic artists and the design of our brand should be left to a designer. We don’t skimp on gear, we don’t skimp on the latest and fastest computer, yet photographers are sometimes reluctant to spend money on good design and instead think they can nest the initials of their name in a cool font and think they have an attractive logo.
Design For Ease in Navigation
Jakob Nielson is widely regarded to be one of the top website usability experts. His book Designing Web Usability and his weekly blog are both highly read and in them he shares tips for optimizing your site to benefit the user’s experience. One of the items he mentions again and again is the importance of your site’s intuitive navigation. His studies have shown that if a person is coming from a search engine, you have six to eight seconds to engage them and get them moving into your site.
Let me describe an actual photographer’s site that lacks intuitive navigation. The home page is filled with a large photograph of a gorgeous model. That’s it, no text, nothing to guide the user experience. If you roll over the model’s eyes, a pop-up reads “PEOPLE”, if you roll over her mouth, a pop-up reads, “PLACES”, and if you roll over the studio’s logo, it pops up with “CONTACT US”.
If your visitors struggle to any extent in trying to figure out how to navigate your site, they’re likely to click the back button in the browser and go on to the next person in the listings. Instead, your navigation should be prominent on the page. Help the user to get into your site with attractive images and graphics on the home page.
Opportunity to Show Your Work, Gain Credibility
Photographs should be large. Custom website designer liveBooks came into the marketplace in 2003 and featured large, screen-filling, fast loading images. Any web designer that stays current with the industry knows that nowadays, large images are impactful. They look impressive on any size monitor and even better on iPads and other tablet devices.
Be sure to include a few of the clients you’ve done work for. There is some degree of credibility if you’ve worked for major corporations. If your work up to now is limited to local clients in your home market, then you may consider leaving this feature off of your site until you can do some better name dropping.
Design for Portable Web Browsing Devices
In today’s business climate, art buyers and art directors have more work to do and less time in which to do it. They are searching for photographers during their commute on trains and buses. And they’re doing it on portable devices such as iPads and iPhones.
The New York Times categorized this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, “The Year of the Tablet.” Apple’s iPad is wildly successful and other computer manufacturers are eager to tap some of that growing market. Is your website compatible? That means no Flash content and a heavy emphasis on HTML5 encoding. The owner of an iPad expects to browse images by “swiping” a finger across the panel. This navigation is a must for your site when viewed on such a device. Your web designer should deliver a version of your site that is optimized for tablets, and the iPad in particular.
We’ve Got Blogs, Websites… Some of Us More Than One!
So how do you get the word out that you have more than one presence on the web? If you decide that the various sites you have don’t detract from one another, check out www.flavors.me.
I refer to it as a place I can present my “lifestream”; think of it as a landing page of sorts that takes in all of my online personnas. Mine is at www.blakedischer.com. CNN described it as “A dead simple way to pull your online presence into one place.” LifeHacker said “A simple and elegant personal portal,” and theNEXTweb labeled it “The simpler, more beautiful aggregator.” There are certain design constraints when creating your flavors.me presence just so that they can keep it simple, but you should be able to match your branding and “look and feel” to a great extent.
What About SEO?
If content is king in SEO, then quality, relevant incoming links is queen. There is no doubt about it, a site designed and created entirely in Flash is more difficult to optimize for the search engines than a site that has at least some body text in pure HTML markup. If your site is a Flash site, you’ll need to rely heavily on “off page optimization” techniques such as link building to have your site rank highly in the search engines. If your site contains no Flash or is a hybrid of Flash elements combined with pure text, then you need to include body text containing the keyword phrases you think buyers use when searching for a photographer that provides the services you do. Specifics are beyond the scope of this article, but you can check out others I’ve written here on the subject (“Search Engine Marketing: Driving More Buyers to Your Website”) or do a search for “SEO” in any of the engines.
In the end, your website is one of the most important marketing tools you can put out there. Get a designer involved in the process and use the services of creative consultants in our industry to help you select images for inclusion on your site. We’re lousy editors of our own work!
Your website is easily updated and can be tweaked as you go forward, but the important thing is to get a site up and running. Don’t be intimidated by the cost, there are companies offering websites for photographers for as little as a few hundred dollars. I think it can be safely said that every art director out there uses the web to find photographers. What are you waiting for?
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ADBASE is the proud sponsor of Blake Discher’s workshop, Your Website: Your Essential Marketing Tool, at the American Society of Media Photographers’ Strictly Business 3 Conference series.
Designed by ASMP to enhance professionalism and help photographers build business, SB3 takes place in Los Angeles (Jan. 21-23), Philadelphia (Feb. 25-27) and Chicago (April 1-3).
Customize your conference experience by choosing from a wide selection of workshops, roundtables and presentations. Click here for further information and to register.