Uncategorized Visual Brand Identity
5 Photographer Branding Tips for Booking High-End Clients
It’s every professional photographer’s dream to tap into a high-end market. Not only does this come with financial prosperity, but it also allows your business to offer a luxurious experience to your clients. When you strategically position your brand to offer a high-end service, you will naturally attract high-end clients.
There are several strategies that your business can adopt to accelerate your journey towards booking more prestigious shoots.
We’re here to help you with just that.
1. Curate Your Online Portfolio
Establishing a professional and impressive online presence is key to reaching the right audience. But it’s a lot more than just having a luxurious logo and a beautifully curated social media feed.
While this is part of it, you need a beautiful body of work that is curated towards the clients you want to attract.
Random photographs that don’t have any connection to a high-end lifestyle aren’t going to speak to the right people. Focus on shooting high-end events and products and try to say no to projects that don’t fit within your curated aesthetic. If you’re lacking the photographs to book those clients, invest in creating that work as a personal project so that you can book the clients you want.
Always remember that your online portfolio is the face of your business. Never stop upskilling yourself and improving your craft. The better your skills become, the more likely you are to attract the clients you want.
As you attract an increasingly higher-end clientele, you can update your portfolio, trimming the weakest photos as you go. We recommend cutting the bottom 20%. Fewer, higher-quality photos are always better than quantity.
2. Adjust your Branding
Your branding is the face of your business, and it can visually communicate the perceived value of your brand and services. You’ll struggle to attract high-end clientele if you have a logo and branding that’s not in line with a more luxurious aesthetic.
At a glance, your branding will sum up exactly what type of business you are.
Be sure that the logo and color palette is in line with the first impression you want to make on a potential client. For your logo, opt for a font that is legible and elegant. Stay away from bold tall letters that might feel aggressive or messy handwritten fonts that feel amateur. The type of font you use depends on what mood you want to communicate. For the brand palette, fewer colors in more neutral tones are ideal for high-end clients, easy to brand manage, and don’t distract from your photography.
3. Strategically Structure Your Pricing
One of the hardest parts of running a photography business is setting your rates. No one is going to take you seriously as a high-end photographer with amateur rates.
Many photographers make the mistake of opting for a ‘99’ in their pricing. This can make you look cheap.
You might think this so-called ‘charm pricing’ is clever psychological trickery, but the modern generation can see right through this. High-end products and services should come with rounded figures. In other words, $500 not $499.99.
This is known as ‘prestige pricing’ and has been proven to play more on consumers’ feelings and to just feel ‘right’. For high-end clients, purchases are more likely to be driven by what feels right than what is a bargain.
When you set your rates, you need to determine what your cost-plus pricing model is. This means how much you need to charge to cover your costs and make a profit. You need to cover time spent traveling, studio fees, assistants, lighting, and all other equipment, as well as how you will supply the final product. Prints, digital, photo books, or other media all have varying costs associated. And don’t forget to include the time you deserve to vacation and pay for your health insurance.
Do some research into what other photographers in your niche charge, and what their pricing structures are like.
4. Always Look the Part
Like your social media pages, business cards, and online portfolio – your personal appearance is part of your brand.
Don’t show up to an extravagant wedding dressed in jeans and sneakers. This is both inappropriate and highly unprofessional. It makes you look amateur and everyone who interacts with you is inclined to believe that your service is similarly poor, and certainly not high-end.
Dress smartly and unobtrusively, and always check if there’s an address code for an event beforehand. If you look the part, you’ll earn clients’ trust in the circles that you want to shoot in.
5. Build a Killer Photography Website
As a professional photographer, your website is your most important marketing tool. Having a badly designed or out-of-date site is a death knell for anyone trying to attract high-end clientele.
You need a slick, sleek, up-to-date site that perfectly showcases your best work and is easy to navigate. That’s why we love Format.
Format is one of our favorites as it makes creating an online portfolio website easy, even if you have no web design or development skills. The template-based system is incredibly simple to set up, and keeping your site up to date only takes a few minutes.
Compared to Wix and Squarespace, Format has the edge as it’s geared specifically towards artists. Although it may have fewer templates to choose from, the templates are all designed for creatives, so it’s a much better platform for building a portfolio on.
Format’s templates are less generic and more aesthetically appealing overall. Just three of the top options for luxurious brands include:
Gloss: https://www.format.com/website-templates/gloss
Halogen: https://www.format.com/website-templates/halogen
Reel: https://www.format.com/website-templates/reel
Elevate your Brand
Booking high-end customers takes time and effort, but it pays off. As a photography business, you need to carve out a name for yourself and the audience you want to work with.
Once this is done, you’re on your way to success.
