5 Different Kinds of Brand Photo Shoots to Book Based on YOUR Business Goals (with FREE Shot List Starter Kit!)
[NOTE: In case you missed my last post on this topic, bookmark How to Put Together a PROFITABLE Shot List for Your Next Brand Session. It’s a great prequel to what I’ll be covering today.]
If there’s anything I’ve noticed about young, bright-eyed coaches and bloggers and social media managers who book sessions with me, it’s that all too often, they come with the expectation that professional headshots will help them make sales, and that’s just not the case 99.9% of the time.
For one thing, headshots are just headshots. They put a face to your name, but that’s about it. What most entrepreneurs actually need is professional brand photography, and that’s a whole separate thing.
For another, photos of any kind don’t close sales. Rather, brand photos introduce a target audience to an offer. Brand photos pique interest. Their job is to point out into masses of people who probably aren’t right for the offer, and grab the attention of that one specific person who is right for the offer, such that they look up and say, “You’re talking to me?”
Photos get the right people to pay attention to your pitch; they get the right people to read your copy, or play your video, or otherwise dig into the information that will lead them to a sale.
So what does this mean for your next brand photography session? Well.
Brand photography can take many forms. It can be mood-evoking photography. It can be grabbing, eye-catching, startling. It can be full of action, for example demonstrating what you do or your process. It can be community-building. It can set expectations. Brand photography is fairly fluid, but it’s always about storytelling, in the sense that it provides an introduction to the story you want to tell, whatever that means for your company.
And there are several contexts in your digital marketing efforts that you’ll want to be telling stories in wildly disparate ways. This means that the photos you use should be different—i.e., you won’t be taking photos just once and using them across every single channel, let along using them the same way.
Here are 5 brand photography shoots you can book in 2022 that are practically guaranteed to help you take your marketing reach to a whole new level!
Shoot No. 1:
The Marketing Materials Shoot
This is the “practical” shoot—the photos that come from it will be like the capsule pieces in your closet. In this shoot you’re going to get all the images you need for your foundational business materials, meaning photos for your website and direct offers.
For many digital entrepreneurs, this means photos that contain negative space. If you offer a product, you’ll get photos of that product off to one side of the frame, with a blank or neutral backdrop either next to or above it where text can be added later. If you’re a personality-based brand, it will mean the same thing but you’ll be the subject instead of a product.
There are so many times you’re going to find you need photos with negative space in your business that it’s almost a mistake not to have a shoot dedicated to this goal alone. Your website banner will probably be an image that has text on it; your business card may very well be the same; when you host local workshops and events and hang printed flyers around town, you’ll need negative space for text; your opt-in boxes, Facebook Ads, Instagram Stories, Pinterest pins, and more will often require photos with negative space.
So book even a one-hour session to get these shots, and then you can use them for years.
Shoot No. 2:
The Relationship Shoot
(A.K.A. the “Fun Shoot”)
This is the “fun” shoot. This strategy of this shoot is to build excitement for your brand and garner engagement on social media (i.e., train social media algorithms to favor you in your followers’ feeds). In this shoot, you’re going to get the shots that show how much fun you’re having doing what you do and creating the life you’re living.
Based on that brief description, you might think a “fun” shoot is just “behind the scenes,” but it’s actually not quite the same, although there can be some overlap. A “behind the scenes” shoot would typically just offer your audience a peek behind the curtain to your process, which may be interesting to them… but it also may only be interesting to you. On the other hand a “fun” shoot shows passion, relationship, fervor—which are things most people want and even crave.
Here are some examples of “fun” shots that aren’t just behind-the-scenes shots:
Shots like these invite your audience to let their guard down and participate with you in the highlights and most joyful parts of your work, which makes them feel included. Like even if they aren’t there with you, you were thinking of them and wanted them to share in your fun.
While some of the best moments in your business will be things that happen in real time without a pro photographer present (“We were featured on 29Workshops?! Oh my gosh!”), you can anticipate the events and seasonally wonderful things that will bring a sense of joy and community, like when summer suddenly rolls into pumpkin spice season or your business’s annual holiday toy drive is just a few weeks away, and you can create scenes in advance that will match the tones of those fun, exhilarating, relaxing or exciting times, and then photograph those so you’ll have something to post when the events and seasons roll up.
I’ve had clients stage floral workshops, fashion styling sessions, cooking classes, days at the beach, and more to show the fun they have in their business and drum up excitement for events and offers to come—but you can also just book a session where you plan to have fun and be creative with your shots. Especially if you have a team, this can be an massively helpful shoot for your Instagram strategy and email marketing!
Shoot No. 3:
The Split Shoot
A split shoot usually has a theme, such as “color.”
This is the shoot you book to cross-purpose your peers’ and colleagues’ audiences to generate new business leads.
The premise of this shoot is to gather a small group of businesses or personalities that are trying to reach the same general corner of the market (such as brides, new moms, or solopreneurs) and do a shoot together so that you can both save money and cross-tag on social to expose all your brands to each other’s followers, email subscribers, buyers, etcetera.
This shoot can take a variety forms:
It could be a styled shoot. Wedding vendors often do these. A group that includes, say, a gown shop, a hair stylist, a makeup artist, a cakery, and a florist will go in to pay a model and a photographer, and together they will put together a sort-of mock wedding set for pictures they can all use across their channels to show their offer in context. In this case, everyone brings something to the table—it’s a like the photo shoot version of a potluck.
It could be a mini networking event. I actually initiated one of these a couple years ago for my own brand. I wanted to help out a non-profit with professional pictures of their retail products, but as a young businessperson without a lot of cashflow I had to make it worth my while in some other way. I asked a bunch of local businesswomen I didn’t necessarily know in person yet, but who were serving similar audiences, to be models in exchange for access to the photos. Because the event itself was fun and notable, they all posted photos of the event in real time to Instagram Stories, so we all got two waves of engagement: Behind-the-scenes tags from that day, and then another wave of engagement when I sent the photos out to all the models and they posted them to social media—tagging me, the non-profit, and the company that donated the food and beverages all in the same posts. Everyone got new followers, and new connections in business.
It could be a creative, just-for-fun shoot. In this case, there will be some kind of broad theme, such as “color,” “flowers,” or “autumn,” and a small group of people will come together and use the same general set and/or props and interpret them to their own brand. (In order for it to work for cross-promotion, part of the time needs to be set aside for group photos—even if it isn’t the whole group, it could be two or three people at a time having shots taken together so they can cross-tag later.) This is a great way to “mix up” the social feed and showcase your brand’s unique personality in the context of the theme.
Shoots like these are especially good for Instagram and Pinterest reach! A minimum of two hours is recommended for a split session, and they go a lot better if you can make sure there’s food, music, photo inspiration, and a list of everyone’s Instagram handles handy on the shoot day!
Shoot No. 4:
The Ideal Client Avatar Shoot
This shoot is where you’re going to show off your customer.
I’m lucky because as a photographer, I get tons of pictures of the types of clients I’m trying to serve—it’s 90% or more of my photographic material (see above!). But if you’re not a brand photographer, it’s likely you get a lot of photos of you or your product, and yet not so much the people who love your offers and brand.
Think of the kind of client or customer you could serve all day, every day, and never get sick of it. In whatever you do, you almost certainly have a picture in your mind’s eye of your dream client—maybe your dream client even works buys from you already! This is the kind of person you want to reach out to about being in some photos for your business so you can attract more people like them.
In other words, you don’t have to hire a model who costs $150 an hour to get customer/client shots. You can absolutely ask real people to model in photos for your brand, whether in exchange for what you offer (for example, a free hair color at your salon, or a gift card to your boutique), or for actual monetary compensation. Try to get at least 3 real-people models if you’re booking a paid shoot! Then capture them shopping in your store, or holding up menu items from your café, or modeling your accessory line out on a city corner in the summer sunshine. Show what you offer and the experience your “ideal customer avatar” has when they work with you.
One little caveat: Most of the time, you’ll end up asking someone who is totally excited to be offered a $75 gift card to your restaurant, or half a dozen free candles, in exchange for being in a few pictures for you to use on Instagram. But more than ever, there are “influencers” out there who may turn you down for work in exchange for free goods, who come armed with contracts and request extra compensation if you’ll be using their likeness in your marketing. Unless you’re used to working with influencers and are fine paying hundreds or even $1000+ for an hour of their time, you can save money by letting them know they’re a favorite customer, but you didn’t realize they were an influencer, so you need to find someone who will work in exchange for products/services. Just make sure the terms are clear from the get-go, including whether they’ll have access to the final photos!
Shoot No. 5:
The Media Kit Shoot
(A.K.A. the “Editorial Shoot”)
As your business grows and you are approached for guest speaking opportunities, collaborations, podcast interviews, and coverage on blogs and in magazines, you’ll want to have a media kit at the ready.
What’s a media kit, you wonder? A media kit is a bundle of materials, usually digital these days, that you can send over at the drop of a hat if, say, CNN or Eater reaches out to you to see if they can run a story on your business. (I use these examples because my clients have been contacted by these major platforms!)
When someone big wants to run a story on you in five days and they need you to provide photos (you’d be shocked how often this is the case), you don’t want to be scrambling last-second to book a photographer who can turn around photos fast, or worse, have to pass on the opportunity. So it’s best to build a media kit ahead of time, and then have the file somewhere easily accessible so you can send it over as soon as a request comes in.
What goes into a media kit? This depends on your field. Influencers, for instance, need to have their current follower counts, number of email subscribers, and engagement rates across all channels in their media kits; but if you’re the proud owner of a destination gelato business, basically all you need is the story behind your business, complete the significant dates; the correct spelling of your name and of all business partners’ names; and a lot of high-resolution photos that your photographer is willing to release for photo credit and a link.
Imagine your favorite magazine or news outlet running a cover-page story on you. What story would you want them to tell? What would you want the photos to look like? Book a shoot that helps you tell this story and get those shots!
Download the Shot List Starter Kit
If 5 shoots seems like an awful lot for your photo budget, you might consider starting a photography subscription with AG so you can get a lower monthly rate and still get all these photos and more.
Either way, I’ve created a FREE Shot List Starter Kit that you can download in the next 5 minutes and start brainstorming what’s going to really take your content from flat to FIRE in 2022. It’s a PDF full of creativity-inspiring questions and prompts, plus some universal shot lists for each type of shoot that are likely to be helpful based on your business model. Just pop your email into the form linked here and I’ll get that over to you in a snap!
Which photo shoot are you most excited to schedule? Tell me in a comment below! If you have other ideas for shoots that you think should have been on this list, I’d love to hear what they are, too. And as always, pin this post so you never lose it! Until next time!
HELLO! MY NAME IS ALEXIS.
Coffee lover, day dreamer, foodie, and creative. I believe in doing what you can with what you have where you are. I blog to help you do more with what you have. I hope you love it here!
Want to try passive income by selling online courses? Keep your overhead low with this plugin!