Week 4 Challenge: A Marketing Plan

Marketing can be challenging for photographers.  A marketing plan is basically a plan for the success of your business, and there are two main points to think about: your objectives and your strategy.

Create a marketing plan for your practice which covers the next 10 weeks.  Think about what you want to achieve with your photography during that time, and how you will make it happen.  Your plan should include your objectives and weekly actions.  Below are a few points you might want to think about.

Your objectives:

• To raise your profile in the photography industry
• To earn a certain amount of money from your photography
• To develop your skills and knowledge
• To arrange regular meetings with clients
• To add a certain number of new contacts to your database each week
• To increase hits on your website by a certain percentage

Your strategy: 
Think of this as a list of weekly actions, such as:

• Editing your portfolio
• Updating your website
• Preparing a PDF portfolio presentation
• Sending out a newsletter
• Researching a new personal project
• Spending 10 minutes a day on social media sharing posts on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter
• Making three appointments to show your portfolio

Anna-Maria Pfab

I am somewhat separated from my work and have just found Internet connectivity for the first time in five days, while enjoying a heatwave in the South African late spring. While other distractions have occupied my mind, I have been considering this challenge.  It throws open numerous considerations, all of which are time-dependant.  I have commented previously that a very full-time job allows time either for photography or for coursework, but rarely both.  So it is that my photography takes the back seat for the time being while I address aspects of the coursework.

So far as marketing in the broad sense in concerned, I have various options that I am yet to investigate, but do not wish to rush into any of these just for the sake of a Module Challenge:

Getty Images: I have had an account, enabling me to contribute to Getty Images for some months, but have yet to put my mind to building my portfolio on the platform. Now seems an opportune time to start on this – while it is not necessarily my preferred ‘output’, it will enable my work to reach a huge potential market in a way that would be so very difficult through the more traditional digital platforms.  However, Getty Images would have file exclusivity, precluding any other usage.  Perhaps I must consider a separate set of images specifically for Getty Images?  However, there sister site iStock does allow non-exclusive licensing, enabling original work to be marketed through a third party as well.

Greetings cards: For many years I have had a finger in this market, through a distribution company.  Sadly the slow and gradual demise in this market has recently seen that company cease trading.  Notwithstanding, there remains a potential market to be tapped, but more for seasonal cards.  Stained glass window photography has revealed an area that could be exploited readily: many chapels include windows depicting scenes relating to the birth of Christ.  The production of a series of Christmas cards featuring a selection of those windows would seem a sensible forward step and could be distributed in a host of outlets within Oxford.  In addition to seasonal cards, a College may well be interested in marketing a selection of cards specific to their chapel.

Prints: mounted and/or framed prints – whether through a local gallery, directly through a college, or via a website.  For the past six years, my printing and framing needs have been met by an Oxford-based company that specialises in architectural styled images of Oxford and Cambridge Colleges.  It is set up to be able to print, mount, frame and ship, with my only involvement being signing and numbering of editions, and of particular interest to me: it already has a significant footprint within the Colleges of Oxford.  I have yet to discuss the promotion of my work on their site, but that must be a sensible next step for me.

When I return to Oxford, I will commit myself to the production and marketing of some stained glass window Christmas cards – just a small batch targeting a specific audience.

My website is ripe for overhauling, but again, this is not something I plan to do simply to tick a box – I need to spend sensible time planning and developing this area.

It has been an uphill battle arranging gallery meetings – my preferred location has a manager who is ‘very busy’, so I am inclined to look elsewhere.  Pleasingly there are various other locations within Oxford, with two right on the doorstep: the Sarah Wiseman Gallery and the North Wall Gallery?

A new personal project:  Within the school in which I work, I am routinely working on new projects and always have a long list of future projects.  Of course, these cover a host of different fields, but often have the central theme of ‘design’ in recent weeks, I have designed a new IT suite for the music department; designed and sourced new kit for our athletics team, and I am currently working on a redesign of the open spaces within our main classroom block.  On the photography front, sadly GDPR technicalities prevent me from publishing the majority of my projects beyond the confides of the school, as they relate to students within the school.  However, in the past two weeks, I have converted a tatty pin board covered corridor into a gallery featuring a large number of my framed images, ranging in size from A5 through to A2.  Foreshortening in the image below makes it look far more crowded than it is… although this location is deliberately far more crowded with images than would normally be the case in an exhibition space.  All of these projects are squeezed into the twilight zone between my full-time job, my coursework and the development of my research project.

Part of the Wavell Building gallery.

Right now, I am traveling light in South Africa, not even with the delights of an iPhone X… instead relying upon the photographic capabilities of the iPhone 7 (as that is my South African mobile) and the Canon G3X.  While there is scarce opportunity for work that is even tenuously linked to my research project, each location I visit presents new and often beautiful opportunities…

Sunset at Paternoster, Western Cape

Strelitza (Bird of Paradise Flower)

Week 7: Your Market

I want you think about who your audience and your market are. Are they the same? If you haven’t got a market yet, think about who you want your future market to be. For this week’s forum I want you to sell one picture, in whatever way. You might sell an image through a picture library, a print to a relative or a stranger on the street, or a current affairs image to a newspaper.

Use the space below to tell us more about how you chose the image, how you sold it and how you negotiated its value / price.

Anna-Maria Pfab

The Photography Show always brings welcome opportunities.  One I always appreciate is the ability to have 24″ prints produced FOC by a number of companies selling their printing technologies.  At this year’s show, I took the opportunity to experiment with different paper types in order to identify the print solution most appropriate to my stained glass images.  Consequently I have a couple surplus, identical, high quality archive prints, each on a different paper type.  Having helped me to decide upon the preferred paper, these duplicates now serve no sensible purpose.  Not wanting to jump into more significant marketing just yet, it is these two prints that I shall proffer for sale… with all monies being profit, in this instance, I have nothing to lose!

Perhaps a little bit of a cop out, but they are each perfectly good, archive quality prints that deserve more than to sit in a portfolio folder.

Additionally, the image predates my current Research Project portfolio (albeit featuring a window that I will inevitably revisit before too long) and can definitely be improved upon in the future.

Week 7 Challenge: Innovate Distribute

As you have heard in this week’s lectures, the markets for photography have changed and are rapidly continuing to do so. For this week’s activity, please imagine you are able to erase all of your knowledge and ideas about how to present a photograph or a photo story. You have never heard about newspapers and magazines or prints and photo books. But you have a brilliant photograph, or photo story, and you want it to be seen. So you will need to find a new way of communicating this to a chosen audience.

First, ask yourself which audience you want to reach – this can be anything from another country to your family. Then, think about the most effective and innovative way to bring your image or story to that audience. A few things are now allowed: you are not allowed to make prints, you are not allowed to make a publication, and you are not allowed to publish it in a magazine or newspaper. And you also cannot publish it online.

Try to find a new way of distributing your image or story: everything else is allowed, from peanut butter jars to license plates.

Anna-Maria Pfab

This is going to take quite a bit of off-piste effort to sort out and is thanks to a fantastic idea from Tessa Huff: Stained Glass Cookies

A discussion with our Head Chef has ensured that this is the most appropriate recipe.  However, the images are stock and do not compliment directly my particular field of stained glass windows.  It is my hope to produce some cookies of a more appropriate and fitting design in due course.  My concept for this challenge is to produce a number of small card boxes containing a number of cookies of a design befitting stained glass windows – ideally linked directly to the image being marketed.  The box would be printed as an advertisement for my image.  The boxes could then be left in the reception area of an appropriate location (be it the Porter’s Lodge of one of the Oxford Colleges, for example).

Stained Glass Sugar Cookie Recipe

• 250g all-purpose flour
• a pinch of sea salt
• 170g unsalted butter
• 200g granulated sugar
• 60g icing sugar
• 50ml milk
• 15ml vanilla extract

& 200g bag boiled sweets (Fox’s Glacier Fruit, for example) for the ‘glass’.

1. Whisk the flour and salt in a bowl. Set aside.
2. Mix in a large bowl the butter, granulated sugar and icing sugar until light and fluffy (about 3 minutes using a mixer or hand whisk). Add the milk and vanilla; mix until combined. Slowly add in flour mixture and stir until smooth.
3. Divide the dough in half, shape into disks, and cover in plastic wrap.  Chill the dough in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.
4. When ready, roll out half of the cookie dough at a time to 5-6mm thick on a lightly flour-dusted work surface.  Using a decorative cookie cutter, cut out shapes of dough.
5. Transfer the cookies to a lined baking tray, spaced about an 3cm apart.  Use a smaller cutter or the end of a round piping tip to punch out holes.  Chill the cookies (on the baking tray) for at least 30 minutes.
   

   © Food Network Canada (2018) filling-stained-glass-cookies-with-candy

6. Repeat with the remaining dough (and off-cuts).  Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 190°C.
7. Grind the hard candies into a powder using a food processor, one colour at a time. The powder will begin to clump and harden if left out, so use immediately.
8. Using a small spoon, carefully fill the holes of the cookies with different colors of ground candy. Fill the holes completely.  Try to prevent the candy from spilling onto the surface of the cookie.  Brush away any excess candy.
   

   © Food Network Canada (2018) stained-glass-cookies-on-tray

9. Bake the cookies in the pre-heated oven for 9 to 12 minutes.  If at 9 minutes the candy-filled holes seem thin, very carefully spoon in a little bit more candy and continue to bake just until melted.
10. When done, place the baking sheet on a wire rack. Allow cookies to cool completely before removing with a metal or rubber spatula.  The melted candy will be very hot.  Please take case and do not touch until cookies have cooled.
11. Store cooled cookies in an air-tight container.
    

    © Food Network Canada (2018) Stained-Glass-sugar-Cookies-on-plate