This Is What Happens When You Stop Marketing Your Photography Business
For a couple of years I was the go to photographer for water bottle companies. While you can say what you want about photographing outdoor lifestyle campaigns around water bottles, it was rad. Right now, I am smiling as I look through my archive at the countless photoshoots I did for brands like MiiR and Klean Kanteen but something is off!
Photographed for MiiR highlighting sustainable surfboard shaping practices. Photo by Dalton Johnson, follow him on Instagram
Almost every shoot was deeply rooted in storytelling like:
1) Highlighting sustainable surfboad shaping in Santa Cruz
2) Surf and climb long weekends around Joshua Tree and San Diego
3) Collabs between coffee roasters and water bottles
4) Love on the beach
5) Mountain biking around San Francisco
6) Valentine's Day themed shoots
The shoots were great, the clients were happy with the creative, and they got results from the campaigns. However, this brings me to the question, why did I only land water bottle jobs and this work didn't take me into the CPG industry, the beverage industry, or other product focused lifestyle shoots?
My guess: marketing
Shot for the launch of MiiR Seltzer coozie. Photo by Dalton Johnson, follow him on Instagram
What do I mean by marketing? Well, this might be the first time I am ever sharing this work. Can you believe that?! I completed a shoot, the client was happy, at the time it was portfolio worthy work for me, and I didn’t share it. How stupid was I? Why did I do that?
Once I delivered the images to the clients, I just carried on with my life. I was 26, or 27, years old and didn't understand the business of photography. Marketing wasn't in my vocabulary until I was tired of being a homeless dirtbag at 29 years old doing nothing but rock climbing, surfing, and one-off photo/video shoots for brands.
Shot for a Valentine’s Day campaign for MiiR. Photo by Dalton Johnson, follow him on Instagram
I photographed and photographed and photographed, but never shared the work.
I was proud of the work, but the resistance to sharing was so great, because I was living in a car, or van, relying on the coffee shop internet, that I couldn't share. That isn’t true. I could have shared the work, but at the volume needed to get eyeballs on it wasn’t available to me.
Now, however, that has changed. Marketing my work has taken over my life, in a good way. Instead of storing images and films on my hard drives for nobody to see, I try to put out 439 pieces of content each week. Yup, that isn’t a typo. My weekly goal is 439 pieces of content each week. You reading this is a prime example of one piece of content. Granted, I hope this piece of content has a much longer shelf life than one week.
Photographed for Klean Kanteen. Photo by Dalton Johnson, follow him on Instagram
So, how do I market now as a photographer? Often is the key and here are the outlets:
Newsletter - you can sign up here
Email
My special sauce, phone calls and snail mail
Each one of these outlets could be broken down into several different steps and I will do that in a later article, but for now, this is my marketing outlet breakdown. On average, I reach roughly 30K people each week which leads to about 3 discovery calls a week of potential clients.
Photographed for MiiR while highlighting a story about mountain biking spots in San Francisco. Photo by Dalton Johnson, follow him on Instagram
Now, here’s the real kicker. If I would have been on top of my marketing, when I was 27 years old, who do you think I could have photographed for... Yeti? Maybe, alcohol brands like Coors Banquet? Coffee roasters like Verve Coffee Roasters?
Who else would fall into this kind of photography?
