Keys to Marketing your Photography Studio on Instagram
Figuring out social media and how it fits with your brand can be an arduous effort. Once you get each time you get one platform figured out, you then have to go through the long process of figuring out what content you want to create and post, and how and when you want to distribute that content. After all that you have to hope a new platform doesn't arise that then siphons away the attention that you have gained there. It pretty obvious right now that for visual brands like photographers, influencers, and videographers, that Instagram is where the attention is right now. This is why we spend about 80% of our efforts on Instagram, but that also means we spend 20% of our time on Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Youtube and others just in case there's a shift in attention.
Mindset behind our content strategy
We have been hitting Instagram HARD this past year and it is paying off in dividends. As we have transition from Weddings to Seniors we obviously are now targeting a younger demographic which is now spending exponentially more time on Instagram than they are Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg saw this coming well before any of us did which is why he STOLE (not bought...stole!) Instagram for $1Billion in less than 2 years of being online. Even if you are a wedding photographer there is still plenty of ways you can use Instagram as well. Wedding Planning is still a VERY visual thing which is why it was so popular on Pinterest and now on Instagram so a lot this applies to you too!
We have moved to creating a ton of content. 9 times out of 10 if you want to grow on Instagram the answer is more! Now we know there are Social Media "Gurus" out there willing to sell you their $400 eBook or $1000 Mastermind class to tell you exactly what to post and what times and how many times to post on Instagram to maximize reach, but we are gonna go out on a limb and tell you that most of what they are selling you is absolute BS. You can obviously track when people are on Instagram and when they view your posts, but trying to post at the exact moment somebody is online really isn't going to add much value. What you need is more. We went from posting 2-3 times a week, to posting 1 once a day, to posting 2 times a day, and now 4 posts every single day (not including Instagram Stories) and have grown from 600 to over 900 followers in less than a year and still growing every single day. These aren't fake followers bought online or "Follow4Follow" groups (please stop doing these BTW!). These are active followers who like our posts and comment and interact with our stories. Long story short, we are constantly creating and posting as much content as possible and in a way that is contextual to the platform we post on.
Since what we are doing has been so effective, we want to give you all the breakdown of some things you can do NOW to grow your following on Instagram and not just grow your following, but actually BOOK CLIENTS off of Instagram. Shared below are video meetings where we discussed with an incredible photography business mastermind (which you can join!) what we are doing on Instagram, a complete breakdown of our content model in a slide deck, and then an additional video tutorial on how to run Instagram Story Ads. We are very proud of this content model and hope that it brings you and your studio some serious value. Don't forget to watch what we do, and not just what we say. Follow us on Instagram and if there is everything something we are doing that you want to know more about or see something that seems like a marketing tactic and want to know why we are doing it, just send us a DM and we are happy to share!