Photographers Handbook

Published by Cris Mitchell

There is no question that in the ever-competitive photography industry you need every advantage to set yourself apart from your competition. It’s no longer enough to just place an ad in the local Yellow Pages and wait for the phone to ring. You need to start thinking outside the box when it comes to your advertising efforts and you need to start now.

Unless you have been living under a rock or have been so busy the last couple years, in which case you probably don’t need to read this article, you’ve heard of social media networks such as MySpace and Facebook. These websites are generally used to connect with friends and family, but lurking just beneath their exterior is a wealth of marketing gold. For little to no money you can tap into the over 100 million registered members that comprise the facebook network alone. Try doing that with your local yellow pages.

At this point you are probably still wondering how this is all applicable to you as a photographer, so let me show you how by placing a small facebook advertisement you can directly tap you into your target audience.

For example, if you are a High School senior photographer you can use the Facebook advertising system to locate all 17 - 18 year old kids in your local town that have accounts on facebook. Each day as eager young high school kids in your home town log into their facebook accounts, your ad will be served up in all its glory for them to view.

Let me walk you step by step through the process of creating a facebook advertisement of your own and get you well on your way to generating new leads for your business.

To start creating ads on Facebook, you’ll first need to create a Facebook account if you don’t already have one. Once you’ve got an account scroll to the bottom of the browser window and look for a link that says Advertising and click on it. It should look something like the graphic below.

This will take you to the welcome page, next click the button that says Create An Ad.

This is where all the fun begins. Start by entering the url of the page you want your link to go to when a Facebook member clicks on your ad. Then fill out the following fields below.

Title: Create a compelling title that will increase your chance of the user reading the rest of your ad: ie: Free Sitting Fee

Body: Create text that describes what your offer is about, in this case it could read something like: Book your senior portraits today at Pismo Beach Portraits and receive your sitting fee at no cost.

Photo: At this point you have the choice of uploading a photo to display with your ad or not. Even though the photo are small 110 pixels wide by 80 pixels tall I think it looks better to have something visually eye catching than just plain text.

As you start to fill out all this information you’ll begin to see your ad come to life on the right hand side of the screen. Once you’ve finished with the Create and Ad section drop down to 3. Reach the exact audience you want.

This section is where you can begin to drill down and really sculpt the exact niche you are going after.

Location: Select Your Country and from there you can either select everywhere in that country or a particular state or even city.

Sex: Choose either male or female, leave blank to select both.

Age: Choose the age demographic for the niche you are going after.

Keywords: This allows you to really get exact about the market you are targeting for instance High School Seniors etc… As you begin to type it will offer suggestions.

Education: Select All or a the particular education level that you are after in this case High School

Workplaces: You can enter the name of a company or organization in this field, most likely you’ll just leave this one blank.

Relationship: Self-Explanatory

Interested in: If you are only interested in people interested in men or woman check one of these. Again most likely you’ll want to leave this blank.

As you began to enter this info in you’ll notice that it will dynamically show you how many people your intended advertisement will reach.

Now it’s time to price your ad

At this point you have the choice to either pay by click or by pay by views. My suggestion is to try them both and see which you get the best results with. I’ve been getting the best traction with my ads using pay for views.

Daily Budget: Set your daily budget, this is the amount you agree to spend in a given 24-hour period of time. Once your daily amount has been reached the ad will stop running until the following day. In the beginning you might want to start of with a small amount maybe 15.00 to 25.00 dollars. This gives you the ability to really learn how to craft an effective ad that gets results without dumping a bunch of money down the drain while your learning.

Max Bid: This is the maximum amount you wish to bid for this ad, my suggestion is to use the suggested high, this will guarantee you the most exposure.

Schedule: Choose to start running your ad continuously or for a certain time frame.

Once you’re all done give everything a cursory once over and select the Continue Button.

Warning: There is a staff dedicated to hand approving each and every ad submitted to them. Typically the approval process takes anywhere from an hour to a half-day. So before you submit your ad make sure to really look over the title and description because your ad will get rejected with something as simple as a missing period or a capitalization error, at which point you will receive a notification of the problem to fix and then have to re-submit it all over again. Arghhh.

After you hit continue you’ll be prompted to a final screen to make sure everything is ok at which point you can either go back and edit or submit your ad for approval by clicking the Place Order button.

That is all there is to it. Within a few hours your ad will either be approved or rejected and sent back to you for further modification.

In step two I’ll show you how to track your ad results using the Facebook Ad Manager

As always if you have questions or comments feel free to leave them in the comments section of this post or email me directly, I’m always happy to answer reader questions.

Jan 03, 2009
Filed under: ADVERTISING, MARKETING, ADVERTISING, Facebook, MARKETING, social networking