Top Tips for Booking Your Dream Clients
We hate to break it to you, but your dream client probably won’t accidentally stumble on your Instagram account and reach out to breathlessly offer you work. If you want to book your dream clients, it’ll take work. These three tips are a great place to start.
Rachel and Daniel of Mango Street Lab shoot with a lot of interesting brands and clients, but that wasn’t always the case. In order to get the clients they wanted, they had to refine their approach. Here’s what they learned.
1. Invest in Styled Shoots
If you want to shoot a certain aesthetic, you need to prove to brands that you’re capable. For newer photographers without enough appropriate work in the portfolio, that means out-of-pocket styled shoots.
This is not “working for free.” This is building a photo shoot from start to finish out of your own pocket—hiring makeup artist, hair stylists, models, finding a location and getting the right permits, etc—in order to capture appropriate work for your professional portfolio.
Unless you’re Brooklyn Beckham, you’ll probably have to do this at least once. Nobody is going to hire you to shoot a particular product or style if you’ve never actually gone out and shot it.
2. Be Selective with Your Portfolio
“The key to transitioning into only shooting what you want, is only showing what you want.”
This is great advice. Whether you want to shoot punk rock bands, or high fashion, or high-quality product photography, or hipster weddings, craft your portfolio to match. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t accept other, off-subject work to pay the bills, but you shouldn’t be posting those images to social media or your portfolio.
Build the online portfolio your dream art director is looking for.
3. Do Spec Work and Cold Emailing
Last but certainly not least, Rachel and Daniel discuss the long-lost art of the cold call email. You absolutely need to pitch your dream clients; and when you do, you need to do it right. That means getting creative.
The best tip in the whole video might be the cold-email technique Rachel and Daniel said they occasionally employ. They search for mid-size brands with an unrefined Instagram presence, take 10 great pictures of their product on spec, and then Photoshop them into a screenshot of that brand’s Instagram to show them what their social media presence COULD look like.
You don’t have to do this exactly—other photographers have gotten similarly creative in other ways—but find a way to grab your dream brand’s attention while simultaneously proving your value to their brand.
