Do you want to know how to market your real estate photography and the most powerful marketing strategies to do so right now?
As a real estate photographer, you have lots of competitors in your field and you need to find ways to make your photography business stand out. For that, you need to develop a successful marketing strategy that can help you build brand awareness and get more clients.
Even though your photography skills speak volumes about your work, if no one finds your photography, it’ll be close to impossible to grow and scale your business.
You need to get your portfolio in front of agents and Realtors with the help of proven and effective marketing tactics.
How to Best Market Real Estate Photography (10 Strategies)
Here are 10 powerful tips on how to market your real estate photography and get more clients for your business, starting with researching your target audience.
1. Research Your Target Audience
Before anything else, you need to identify and get to know your market and target audience. And as a real estate photographer, it may seem obvious that your target audience is agents and Realtors.
However, getting even more specific like learning about their age, gender, location, typical listing price, and marketing budget will help you develop a more successful marketing strategy that will appeal to your market.
In other words, it’ll prevent you from directing your marketing efforts to the wrong audience and waste valuable time and resources.
2. Create an Online Portfolio
Creating an online portfolio or photographer website where you can showcase your work should be one of the first things on your list when starting a photography business.
In today’s Internet era, you can’t expect to grow your photography business without having a digital presence. An online portfolio helps to distinguish yourself from the crowd. It’ll also help you grab the attention of Realtors, agents, and sellers to get more leads.
With a beginner-friendly website platform, like PhotoUp’s custom websites, you can easily build an online portfolio that’s well-organized, industry-specific, and highlights your best work. As well as include a headshot of yourself and contact information for branding.
Besides, being able to show up on Google when people search for a real estate photographer will help you get more clients directly from the search results.
3. Expand Your Product Offering
To be a great resource for new and existing clients, you should consider expanding your product offering.
The more you can say ‘yes’ to a client and take extra work off their hands, the more valuable you’ll get and the more money you’ll make. It’ll also help you stand out from the competition.
That said, here are 6 examples of additional services you can offer:
1. Virtual Staging
This relatively new technology of virtually staging an outdated or empty space using CAD software has exploded in recent years.
Especially in COVID times when people rather view listings safely from the comfort of their homes instead of attending a physical showing.
Another reason to why you should consider adding virtual staging to your toolkit, is that it’s generally 60-90% cheaper than hiring a professional standing company.
2. Single Property Websites
Being able to offer exclusive and beautiful single property websites with a unique URL will add value to your clients and help them beat the competition on the MLS.
These single listing sites are perfect to market high-end, luxury listings since you can add unlimited photos, video, 3D virtual tours, floor plans, and detailed property information to showcase the listing.
3. Aerial Photography
Aerial photography with the use of drones is a great addition to any real estate photographer’s portfolio. Not only does it offer a bird’s view of the neighborhood of a property, but it also shows that you’re tech savvy.
More importantly, it’s an excellent way to showcase a home’s special features and add extra marketing power to a listing.
It does, however, require an FAA 107 Certificate to be able to operate a drone in the US. Fortunately, this is rather easy to obtain.
4. Social Media Management
You can offer to manage your clients’ social media marketing. You can post listings and other engaging content on their social media networks to help them save time. As well as grow their following and increase engagement.
That way, your agent and Realtor clients can focus on showing more properties and building fruitful relationships. And at the same time, your photography will get more exposure, which can lead to more clients.
5. Virtual Tours
Offering 3D virtual tours can easily be achieved through a hi-tech camera and sophisticated software. This will help potential home buyers to tour a property without physically being there.
More so, you’ll also help your agent clients to get more hot leads who are at the end phase of the purchasing process.
Don’t worry if you can’t create them yourself because PhotoUp’s team of expert editors can do it for you.
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6. Video Editing
Even though video requires extra equipment and knowledge, it’ll help set you apart from the competition.
But if you don’t have time to learn how to edit videos yourself, you can hire a professional editing company to create impressive real estate walk through videos for you.
Lastly, some photographers even offer to connect clients with home inspectors.
There’s so much you can do and offer your clients except for real estate photography to become a valuable resource.
4. Become Zillow Certified Photographer
Becoming a Zillow Certified Photographer is another great marketing strategy for real estate photographers. Zillow has a major database and massive traffic for real estate photographers to tap into.
It allows you to market your photography business to Zillow’s registered agents and boost your portfolio. You’ll also receive discounts on gear and services like DJI drones and PhotoUp editing, and virtual staging.
All you need to do is submit the required documents and pass the quality check. And you can become Zillow Certified in a matter of minutes.
5. Build Your Own Email List
What is so great about building an email list is that you own that list. No one can take it away from you. And you can use it to market your business and create trust with your existing clients and prospects.
Consider this…
…social media can decide to change its algorithms, your website can go down and take your database with it, making you lose the network you’ve built up. But your email list can never be taken away from you.
So, try to redirect your audience from these platforms to email communication. You can do this by, for example, stating in your bio that you only accept bookings via email.
This allows you to stay in touch with your audience in a more personal way and build trust. You can then send news about your business, personalized offers, and success stories to increase engagement.
Also, processing your email list regularly makes it more likely that clients will think of your business when they need real estate photography services.
6. Highlight Your Client Reviews
One of the most powerful marketing strategies for any business is to showcase their client reviews.
You should create a system for collecting reviews and then add them to your website, social media, and other promotional materials.
People tend to trust their peers and the opinions of others over the actual brand itself. So, being able to read about other people’s experiences with your business will create trust in your brand.
For instance, Amazon owes a lot of its success to having a good system for online reviews. They send out automated emails asking people if they are happy with their order, encouraging them to leave a review. Customers can then easily see what other people think about the product.
If you feel it’s difficult to ask for reviews, you can give your clients an incentive to leave a review. Why not offer them a discount on their next order to encourage more reviews?
7. Create a Google My Business Profile
If you’re running a local real estate photography business, you should create a Business Profile on Google My Business.
This allows you to be more visible in local searches and on Google Maps, where prospective customers can easily find your business.
In other words, it improves the chances that clients will find you on Google when searching for a real estate photographer in their area. Or when simply using the search term, “real estate photographers near me”.
Once you’ve created a Google My Business account, you’ll have your own profile where you can add your business and contact information, hours of operation, and photos of your work.
Best yet, the reviews you’ll collect through Google will show up directly in the search results. Not only will this increase the click through rate to your website, but it’ll also make it more likely that people will choose to work with your business over others.
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8. Offer Referral Discounts
An effective marketing strategy that will help spread the word about your real estate photography business and give a kickback to your most loyal clients is to offer referral discounts to agents and Realtors.
You should develop a system for when your existing clients refer you to new clients by offering them, for example, a 10% discount on their next order. That is if the customer mentions their name.
An easy way to do this is to add the referral discount to the back of your business cards. Then, make sure to always have them on hand. And give them out to as many agents and Realtors as possible.
Additionally, stopping by a broker’s office in person to give a presentation of your business is another excellent way to let people know about you.
For instance, you can offer to bring them free lunch and then present a discount of “first shoot free” or a 50% discount on their first shoot.
9. Add Your Business to Local Directories
You can look up local directories and add your business to them to get more visibility online. Many potential customers visit local directories like Houzz.com to find real estate photographers.
Houzz has local subsites all over the world, so it can be beneficial to study your competitors on this site, learn its ranking rules and try to beat them to the top.
Even though you may have to pay for a membership, a single new client will cover the costs for months to come, which is worth considering.
Remember that to make money, you have to invest money. Knowing this makes it easier to overcome this step.
10. SEO Optimize Your Site to Boost Rankings
As technical and difficult as SEO may be, it’s crucial to optimize your website for rankings on Google and other search engines.
As mentioned earlier, if no one sees your online portfolio and your work, it’ll be very difficult to scale your business and get new clients.
Fortunately, many website platforms like PhotoUp’s DIY website builder make it easy and straightforward to SEO-optimize your site without having to know any code.
All you need to do is add high-quality content to your site based on the keywords you want to rank for on Google, develop a good internal linking structure, and the intelligent platform will optimize it for you.
In addition, because backlinks are a major ranking factor today, it can be good to also develop a guest post strategy to try and collect authoritative backlinks.
Google judges your website to be more relevant if other websites are linking to your site (as long as they are of high quality and not spam links) and will favor it in its rankings.
However, it takes a lot of time and effort to reach out to other blogs in your niche and write quality content that will get them to feature you on their sites.
As a result, many real estate photographers hire professional SEO outreach companies like Quality Guest Posts or Fat Joe to help them get more backlinks.
The Bottom Line
As people use the Internet to search for pretty much anything nowadays, you have to make sure to build an online presence and build brand awareness.
It’s crucial to first create your own digital asset i.e. your online portfolio where you can showcase your photography and get potential clients to find you.
To conclude, implementing these 10 powerful marketing strategies will help you get more visibility online and new clients. Before you know it, you’ll take your photography business to the next level and increase revenue.
One more thing…
Sign up for a free PhotoUp account today, and take advantage of a full scale real estate marketing service eager to serve your marketing needs.
We hope this blog post helped you learn how to market your real estate photography. If you found it useful, you may want to check out the following resources as well:
