How To Become A Brand’s Favourite Photographer
One of the most important aspects of a photographers’ career is building and maintaining solid working relationships with clients. Because did you know that its much easier to retain a happy customer, than it is to find a new one?
Think about it: the amount of time you spend pitching to clients, reaching out to new brands hoping that they’ll hire you, posting on Instagram, attending networking events… that’s hard work! But once you land that client, keeping them is FAR easier - if you do a good job.
So I want to share with you some of the main ways that I make sure to keep my customers not only happy, but deliver them amazing results, which means that they come back to me time and time again.
Reply To Emails As Quick As You Can:
If you get an email in your inbox from a new or previous client, I highly recommend you reply to them as fast as you can. It doesn’t need to be within a minute of them emailing, but if I can (Monday to Friday) I try my best to reply to people within the hour.
Obviously some days are harder than others - if you’re on a shoot, driving long distance, or something else is going on, so don’t beat yourself up if you can’t nail this every time. But try to make a point of being prompt.
The reason this is so important is that clients tend to want to plan things quickly. Fashion tends to run to short deadlines, so the quicker you can get back to someone, the quicker they can get their images done. I know for a fact that people love that I reply quickly, and don’t leave them hanging.
Note: I don’t reply to emails on the weekend, unless it’s very special circumstances!
Be Polite, Friendly, Positive and Happy:
This is probably very obvious, as no one would ever tell you to be rude (lol) but manners go a really long way. As does a smiling, happy face on set. I make a really, really big point of being as positive as I can when I’m on set, no matter how tired I may be.
As the photographer, you’re basically in charge of the whole thing (most of the time) and people will look to you for guidance and as a basis for the day. If you’re feeling down, stressed, unhappy or are really cold in attitude, that will rub off on the rest of the team, and trust me, the last thing you want is a whole set of people feeling stressed and grumpy!
If I’m not feeling great on the day, I make a point to not let anyone else know about it. If I’m close to someone on set, I might pull them to one side and have a private rant, or call my boyfriend during the lunch break to vent, but I would NEVER mention anything to a client.
The only exception was when once, I had a terrible panic attack the night before a big shoot. I hardly slept, and was feeling quite delicate, so I told the whole team that I may need a bit of extra moral support, but you better bet that I gave that shoot ALL my energy, and the whole team pulled together and got us all through it.
That client only respected me for having been honest with them, and I continued to work with them after that shoot.
Have Ideas:
When a client approaches you for a shoot, most of the time they’ll have a brief of some kind. Sometimes they’re detailed, other times they’re more open. Either way, I believe that we get hired because clients love our work, and if they love our work, they’ll really love it if you come up with ideas to compliment and enhance their idea.
Think you’ve got a great location you can recommend? Tell your client.
Know a great model who would be perfect? Tell your client.
Be as helpful and have as much initiative as you can - you’ll do nothing but impress your clients.
Be Organised:
Clients love thing more than a very organised photographer. That means things like getting your files nicely organised post shoot, separating your Dropbox folders into neatly labelled files. Renaming your files to the season and year for the brand. Deliver you files on time (early if you can) and just try to really think of every last little detail. It won’t go unnoticed.
Under Promise, Over Deliver:
You may have heard this before, but whenever possible, you want to wow your clients with a little something that they may not have been expecting. As often as I can, I like to go the extra mile for my clients and think about what else they may need.
It can be as simple as resizing your images into square crops for Instagram, as well as the usual portrait/landscape sizes.
Maybe you capture a couple of iPhone shots as well. Delivering behind the scenes images that they can share on their social media. Grabbing some boomerangs of the model.
Try and think of ways that you can do something that will wow your client, but that won’t take you too much time. A lot of the ideas listed above would literally take you an extra few seconds!
Bring Food:
A lovely friend of mine who is a big producer in the industry once told me that the absolute best thing you can do for any set is provide food. She suggested that whenever possible, set up a small client area with a table, water, snacks and chairs, so that the clients can sit, relax and stay fed. I’ve followed that advice and always made sure to turn up to set with snacks, and it’s always gone down super well! I shoot on location a lot, so it’s not always possible to set up a little table, but when I’m in a studio setting, you better believe I’ve got the cosiest little snack table set up imaginable.
So there you go! The above tips will pretty much guarantee that you provide your clients with the single best photographic experience that they could imagine. If you can do even just a few of these, you’ll be leagues above most, and will really impress them… and hopefully get booked time and time again. Let me know how you get on in future thanks to these tips, I’d love to know!
