How to Build a Photography Brand in 5 Steps

One of the most important aspects of creating your photography business relates to building your photography brand.

Unfortunately building a photography brand is something that many freelancers tend to forget about or glaze over.
Sometimes it can even become a bit of an enigma to amateurs. What does it mean to build your photography brand? Is it creating business cards? Or building a website? Is it your style of photography?

The simple fact is, building a photography brand encompasses all of those aspects, however they are not specifically or individually what building your brand should be all about.

Building a brand should be your overall goal or feel to your work. It’s the aesthetics, however it’s also what you offer to the world. Everything encompassed in a neat little package.

However, it is not always an easy thing to achieve. It definitely takes some time to figure out what exactly you want to offer to the world.

Below are my top 5 steps for creating a photography brand.

1. Consider the Aesthetics

How do you want everything to look? Your photography style is of course important, but consider the other aesthetic elements of a business.
Your website, business cards, products you offer, email signatures, social media presence or even a uniform. How do these elements all work together in terms of aesthetics?

Picking a favourite colour scheme is a great way to start with this. If you’re unsure of what colour scheme to select, finding inspiration on Pinterest is a great way to find out what you may like.

2. Decide what products you can offer

Within your photography business, you’ll need to decide what products you’ll be offering. Whether you are a wedding photographer and offer specially designed albums, or if you are a landscape photographer and offer prints, this is essential to building your brand as a photographer. People need to know what you offer and what you sell.

3. Let your brand have personality and a voice.

This is where YOUR personality comes into the mix. It’s important that people are able to see the human element behind the photography. Whether that be in the form of written posts, behind the scenes or just general social media imagery or content. This is surprisingly a very important factor when it comes to clients booking you for a job. Mostly they want to see if you’re a good fit and potentially are in line with their values.

I find it to be a very underrated aspect of owning a photography business, too often a photographer’s personality is never conveyed enough through their work or online presence. Sometimes this can make all the difference on getting your work out there, as even from an audience’s perspective, most people on a human level want to have that sense of being relatable.

4. Focus on the ‘X factor’ that your brand centres around

What is that one thing that differentiates your business from the rest? This is an important factor you must be able to figure out in order to stand out. Whether you incorporate different products into your business, or whether you choose to run educational programs as well, or if it’s your beauty retouching for example, there are many aspects that you can choose to focus on and help elevate your business.

5. Know your client

Knowing your client is the single most important key to getting hired. However knowing your client means that you are also able to centre your brand around potential clients who you may work for one day. Drawing inspiration from certain brands may help you design your own aesthetic for your business in more ways than one.

I would highly recommend making a short list of your dream clients and then looking through their content to use as inspiration for your own brand. This is an essential way to one day being booked.

I hope these tips have been insightful and helpful to you all!

Make sure to leave a comment if you have a question and tell me, how would you describe your photography brand in three words?