How I Generated Leads at The Beginning of my Photography Business (and what I do today)

As I mentioned in last week’s post (here), I was very lucky to have a few good friends who flew the flag amongst their contacts and generated a number of wonderful word of mouth leads in the first few months of my business. I was also fairly actively promoting myself using google ads. Over the years there has been a shift in how I generate leads for my business. In this post I want to discuss the various methods that I have used and where I think you could put your energy to help you generate more leads, especially in the beginning. Underwriting all of this is the idea that even before you can start marketing your business, the best thing you can do is understand some of the core values of the business. In my mentorship, the very first session is always a value setting workshop, where we work out what values are important to you and how you want to express them in your business. I will write a whole post about value setting in the future, but for now, I want to make it clear that many of the decisions we make about our business should come from the core values we hold dear. That way, we can make a set of decisions early on and not have to reappraise our own core beliefs every time we have to make those decisions. In a future post I will lay this out in more detail.

Early on I made a key decision that has shaped the way I have thought about marketing. When we market ourselves we have a choice (not necessarily mutually exclusive nor so black and white), between direct marketing or brand marketing. In the early days of any business you rarely have a “brand”, or a sense in the mind of your potential customers of who you are. I often see photographers at the early stage of their business not quite grasp this - what I call the Field of Dreams mentality (build it and they will come) prevails; surely if I just make work and put it online people will book me, and then frustration arises when the bookings aren’t flooding in. But without having done real work on building the brand (something I will discuss in more detail later), a business won’t be able to leverage their position to generate leads. In the beginning, just to get people in the door, we need to adopt a more direct approach - advertising, offers, networking, asking for referrals etc. - this doesn’t mean we won’t also be working on building a brand, but just that we recognise the necessities at this early stage. The decision I made was that I didn’t want to stay in the direct marketing approach for long - I wanted to build a brand, a reputation. Of course I still do the occasional piece of direct marketing - like reaching out to potential clients, or running the occasional Instagram ad - but predominantly this relies on the brand I have already started to build.

In this article I want to focus on the direct marketing options we have as photography business owners - later I will talk about brand building, but right now you need to get that phone ringing. Some direct marketing approaches are also about building a brand - like networking - but the long term work done in service of growing your reputation and the work of generating leads NOW aren’t often the same thing. Rather than just list all the direct marketing approaches, google is your friend, I will outline three I have tried (with varying success), and what I would do if I was starting again, and what I would avoid. We also need to acknowledge that when I started doing all this I was mostly just finding my way in the dark, yes I had researched the hell out of this, but I had no idea what would work for me, it was only through trial and error that I found my approach. I also won’t talk about running Google or Instagram adverts - these are productive approaches, but what I can offer by way of advice in this arena is likely poor in comparison to what a professional can. The three approaches I’ll focus on here are - networking, sales/offers, and direct outreach.

Networking

In the last five years, I’ve joined two business networking groups - The London Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) and Business Networking International (BNI). I belong to neither any longer. Let me start by saying that if your photography brand is more corporate/business oriented, these networking groups will be probably ideal for you, but my experiences are not fully positive - and I would probably say the main reason for this is that my business brand and that of LCCI and BNI are just not aligned. This is not to say these groups are bad, or you won’t get work from them, but that choosing which groups to join based on alignment of values is paramount. My lack of return on my LCCI investment is mostly my fault - I went to scarce few events and when I did I just didn’t feel like I fit into the very business oriented world. The unease I felt at having to “pitch” during a conversation, or to feign interest when talking about corporate stuff just meant I struggled to motivate myself to really make the most of my time there. Some of the events and talks at the LCCI were interesting - I remember attending a fantastic discussion around environmental responsibility in business (and it wasn’t all greenwashing nonsense) - but ultimately, this form of networking wasn’t for me. I am much better suited to more creative, arty or progressive business groups (which I’ve subsequently been a part of).

My involvement in BNI was more long term, I joined a chapter that met online every Thursday morning - thankfully at 10am not 6am as some of these groups seem to meet - and stayed in the group for ten months. I met some lovely folks in this group and have maintained sporadic contact with one, however, ultimately my investment did not generate enough business to justify me holding on to my membership. The point of BNI is not only that you meet on a weekly basis and pitch to your compadres, but you’re also meant to meet the group members individually for around another 3-5hours per week in your own time. So, a full day’s work per week and around £1000-£1500 per year investment? What was my ROI?

Despite every single one of the 25 ish members on the call every week desperately needing to update their headshots, only one of them booked a session with me. Nobody pushed work in my direction and it really didn’t feel like the kind of environment that would generate much business in the long term either. Again, this seems to me to be down to brand and value mismatches - my work isn’t obviously corporate oriented and I wasn’t trying to make it so, I was, and still am, an expensive photographer to work with, and the majority of members of these networking groups are on tight margins already. I also didn’t want to take on additional admin tasks and being part of a group like BNI means you do have to participate.

Since leaving these two groups, I have been somewhat cautious of joining others, but have attended smaller, more creative, events and have built friendships, connections and associations - my feeling here is that the obviously business forward networking events which promote making deals rather than ones which favour connection due to shared interests or passions just aren’t right for me.

One group I am part of that feels more likely to generate business is The Foundxr’s club. I was approached by JP, one of the founders of the club, to join them as one of their favoured portrait photographers and have been in the club for a year. Around three times a year we will setup a studio shoot for around ten of their members. Not only does this pay me a modest fee, but I tend to generate a few extra sales on the back end as members buy a few extra images each time. Not only that, but it’s a great way to connect with people in a more honest, friendly way - they get to see what I can do, and the hope is they will reach out to me in the future.

Sales/Offers

There are a number of ways to think about offers or reductions. The first is as an advertised or promoted offer that anyone can sign up for - a Boxing Day sale for example - the other is an offer specifically meant for members of a particular group or club. Both have their merits, and I will run through some of the ways I have used them both in the last five years.

One of the most successful sales I ever did was to tie into my birthday in 2023 - I posted on my Instagram account giving people 72hrs to sign up to work with me the following month with a 50% discount on the session fee, and managed to get a little over 20 new clients in just that short space of time. Later that year I tried something similar with a Boxing Day Sale, offering 50% off for people booked in before the start of January (they didn’t have to have the session that week, of course). This sale generated around the same number of new clients and lead to a very productive start to the year. Both of these approaches relied on three things: having already generated a decent following on instagram/interest in working with me (and thus wouldn’t work right at the beginning of my business journey, there just wouldn’t be the take up), a time limited approach, just a few days to book in (this motivates people to take the leap rather than prevaricate), and was a substantial enough discount that people felt like it was worth jumping on. Nowadays, I wouldn’t make such an offer or run a sale in this way. The way I approach my business doesn’t really gel with sales and offers like this. However, at a certain stage of business, especially when you need to generate a large amount of income in a short space of time, this can be highly productive.

These days, I am much more likely to run a promotion for a specific audience or group. For example, I have successfully worked with acting coaches, agents and drama schools to provide their members/students a discount on my services or a specific type of reduced shoot. This is not promoted online or pushed through any channels, but an agreement between service providers who share a client base. One such service provider that I have just started working with is Sophie Bloor, who runs the Voice Reels Production Company Blooom (yes, with three O’s). Sophie is an actor and voice actor herself and has recently built her own voice reels recording company. She approached me in the middle of 2025 to ask if I wanted to work on a collaboration where we could each promote each other’s work, and I took it a few steps further. I built out my small home studio to make it perfect for sound recording, sat sown with Sophie to help her build her business and brand from the ground up, and I also heavily promote what she does on my social media and website. I offer my acting clients a discount to work with Blooom and she does the same with her clients. I also get a percentage of Blooom’s take home to cover my expenses and rental of the studio. This arrangement is brand new, but so far we’re really enjoying the process of working alongside each other.

Direct Outreach

This is not something I have done a lot of in all honesty, but it is something that will form a portion of my 2026 strategy. So, why include it in the list? Because I think it’s worth assessing in some detail. Here’s an anecdote - in 2023 I emailed a handful of London drama schools to offer them a short talk on headshots for actors. I have taught at universities for many years, so this was a natural fit for me. LAMDA took me up on the offer and I gave three talks in total to their undergrad and postgrad students. From this process I generated 8-10 photoshoots with students of LAMDA and built a wonderful relationship with JO Edwards who used to be their industry liaise but has recently joined and heads up Divergent Talent - an agency for neurodivergent actors. This approach combines the networking aspect and the specific offer approaches from above, as I offered LAMDA students a small discount.

The thing is, I hate it when business directly reach out to me - how many emails, calls and texts can we receive from retouchers, Google ads specialists, or website designers? So why would I want to do the same thing? Direct marketing has a sticky feeling to it, and direct outreach is probably the stickiest of the lot. For me, interrupting someone’s day, pushing ads or sales talk down their throats, demanding attention just isn’t how I want to run a business. So instead, I really like the approach outlined above where I offer something completely for free without expectation or obligation. I prefer to use direct outreach as a way to build brand recognition than to drive immediate sales. In the next year, I will be reaching out to companies with this exact ethos in mind - don’t ask for a sale, but offer something completely free with no expectation. Since I’ve been offering mentorships, I have always conducted a free discovery call during which I try to offer people as much value as possible, I don’t really like the hard sell, and to me, if I ever do anything that feels like a sales call, I’ll be a little bit sick, so my approach has always been to have the needs of people in mind above profit.

Summary

Network according to values not just because it seems like the right approach. Offer very specific targeted sales or offers that can’t be ignored. Only reach out to people if you can genuinely offer them something of value they need.