Photography is all about building connections with the clients you serve. This makes it an amazing career opportunity for people who want meaningful interactions, serve their clients well, and do something they love—all while earning income.
One thing photographers need to remember is how important it is to build connections with other business owners. Finding and working with partners is an excellent strategy for building a photography business. It can be both fulfilling and lucrative, bringing more business for both you and your partners while you strengthen connections in your community.
Finding and joining with ideal business connections can be intimidating. Still, you can take a few simple steps to do it successfully so that you and your partners find joy in serving your clientele together.
Why Find Promotional Partners?
If you’re transitioning from the traditional digital file model of photography to the boutique business model, you’re probably bringing a few loyal clients with you to your new system. However, many of them might not be interested in your new model, and that’s OK!
You don’t need to be the photographer for everyone—in fact, you shouldn’t even want to be. Fewer, right-fit clients means more time to serve those you do work with and more time to spend with your family and friends.
Whether starting from scratch or having been a photographer for years, establishing business relationships can help build up your client base. Essentially, this involves collaborating with a local business, charity or entrepreneur. You find your ideal partners and build a relationship with them.
One of the end goals is for them to share your business with their client base—not because you’ve sought a promotional partnership, but because you’ve established a relationship and served them well. When they share your business with their clients, you’ll bring in a new group of potential clients for your photography.
As a boutique photographer, your interpersonal skills, professionalism, and outstanding service will leave a good impression in your partners’ minds while your photography skills build your credibility. Partnering even allows you to try new photography techniques and hone your skills. Overall, you’ll strengthen community ties and build lasting relationships that will help grow your business.
Establish Your Ideal Partners–Your Dream 100 List
The first step in creating promotional partnerships is to find your ideal partners. You don’t want to contact every local business about partnering. While it’s great to have a good relationship with local small businesses, many don’t have the type of client who you want to serve.
Instead, think of your ideal clients or businesses that share your ideal audience. Local entrepreneurs might include realtors, veterinarians, hair and makeup artists, upscale clothing boutiques, interior designers, home organizers or boutique toy stores.
You can also consider establishing partnerships with people you’d love to meet and grow a friendship with. Remember, boutique photographers serve a smaller client base, and we don’t need the masses to become our clients. We’ll call this list of clients and businesses your Dream 100 (coined by Chet Holmes), but quality is much more important than quantity. You may not have 100 names or anywhere near it, and that’s fine.
Boutique photographers should place an emphasis on business owners who see the value in photography and are also passionate about decorating their homes with images of their families. As a photographer, you solve problems for your clients. So, recent home buyers, growing families, new pet owners and people with school-age children are all audiences that would be compatible with certain local businesses as well as boutique photographers.
Reach Out and Build Trust
After identifying your Dream 100, it’s time to establish trust and build rapport with them. There are two ways you can go about doing this.
The first—and you’ll understand soon why we don’t promote this—is to send them a message over social media telling them you’re interested in a partnership, listing your ideas and proposing a collaboration. This might be effective, but it’s likely to turn off businesses from working with you. You never took the time to get to know them, their story, their needs and what they’d be looking for in a partnership. You never built up that trust, which is integral to the boutique photography model.
The second option is to lean into building a true, honest relationship. Use their services, comment on their social media posts and create meaningful interactions with them. Take them out for coffee or lunch to learn more about their business and its challenges. Small business can be lonely. Your goal is to make a friend.
This choice not only aligns with the boutique photography model of serving your clients well, but it’s also far more likely to earn you partnerships. Because you’ve taken the time to build trust and show them you’re interested in forming a solid relationship, they’ll be more inclined to trust you and create a relationship in return.
Once you’ve built a solid relationship with members of your Dream 100, you can start providing value to them. When you learn what they are struggling with, you can determine how you can help them solve that problem with your photography. Maybe a small, one-off photography session could help them get the traction they need. Or maybe there is a potential collaboration you could work on together that would allow you to showcase your skills and creativity while also helping them. As Zig Ziglar says, “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help other people get what they want.” Remember: partnership is a two-way street.
The overarching idea is they’ll genuinely want to share your business with their clients or followers because you’ve served them and built a friendship with them the same way you do with each of your clients. Doing this sets the stage for them to become both loyal clients and influential partners who can spread the word about your business to their audience.
Collaborating with Others to Build Your Business
One of the best parts about being a boutique photographer is how you can position yourself to serve your community in unique ways. One way you may not have thought about, though, is collaborating with other entrepreneurs to help both your businesses grow. Seeking out partnerships can be an incredibly lucrative marketing strategy for photography businesses, and it can also help you form new friendships along the way.
