All professional photographers need paying clients. Clients are the lifeblood of all businesses and should always be at the forefront of your mind. It is clients that you create images for, not yourself.

Clients can be people who pay you to create images specifically for them by commissioning you in exchange for your time and expertise, or clients can be people who buy images you have already created as art or as stock photography.

To make your business grow, you need the right sort of clients in your niche.

The right sort of clients do not have to be lovely or easy to work with. Sometimes the best clients are highly demanding and a bit rude but are still good clients if they fulfil the right criteria.

Once you start running your photography business a huge chunk of your time will be spent on marketing to finding clients. In fact you will probably spend more time trying to find clients than taking photos.

Whatever niche you enter, you should think about the client relationships you can form in that niche. It will be a big factor in helping you decide whether you can make a sustainable business.

There are four ways that client relationships will affect the sustainability of your business.

Can you find new customers in a time and cost efficient way?

Finding new clients is a basic requirement of running a photography business. 

For now, think at a high level about how you could find customers. 

Will you have to pay lots of money in advertising, or could you use your network to find clients for free? 

Will you be able to identify ways to get in front of potential customers when they are looking to buy, such as through art fairs or wedding shows? 

Will you have to build a huge social media following or wait until your website ranks highly in search engines?

Are clients like finding a needle in a haystack, requiring lots of time and money to find each one?

If you have properly identified your niche, you should be able to think of a few ideas of how you would reach potential customers. If you can’t, then you should reconsider the niche and either make it more specific or change the focus.

It’s fine if it costs you £1,000 and takes a month to find one client if that client is going to spend £10,000. But if it’s going to take you a lot of time or money to find clients that don’t spend very much, you’ll find it difficult to build a sustainable business.

On the other hand, if you can identify cheap and easy ways to find plenty of clients, then it’s probably OK even if they don’t spend much money with you.

Finding clients is inextricably linked to your non-photography knowledge, attributes and network that you can leverage to get people to know about your business. 

Finding clients also happens more easily when you have properly identified your niche, because that makes you understand who you should be looking for.

Depending on what you find here, it may sway you to go for one niche over another. If you identify time efficient and cost effective ways of finding clients in that niche it’s a good sign. If you struggle, that’s a danger sign which says you need to do more work to refine your niche.

How much potential is there for repeat business? 

If there is a likelihood of repeat business either from working with the same client multiple times, or selling the same image again and again, then that’s a positive sign.

You should view finding clients as an investment in your business. It costs you time and money up front to find them, and one way to maximise the return on that investment is to be able to sell your services to them again and again. 

Finding a client initially is usually the hardest and most expensive part of your relationship with a client. Each time they come back to you with more work should cost you nothing.

If a client requires imagery from you on a weekly or monthly basis that’s fantastic. But even a client who only requires your services one per year is valuable. You only need twelve of them to have one paid assignment per month. Next year you will find 12 more, and so on.

Some niches lend themselves to repeat business. Product photography, event photography and corporate headshot photography could all produce regular business.

Stock photography also provides repeat business if you make images that are frequently used, that means you get paid every time the photo is licensed. 

Other types of photography do not lend themselves to generating repeat business. Wedding photography is an example. But they are attractive for other reasons.

Thinking about whether your niche will provide you with repeat business will help you decide on the suitability of that particular area of photography.

Are there strong networks that could get you referrals? 

Referrals and recommendations is a super powerful way to get new clients.

Think about it. If someone you trust tells you about a great experience they had, how much more likely would you be to buy that service too.

Networks run much deeper than direct connections. Indirect connections through friends of friends are also capable of generating lots of referrals. 

These network connections can provide you with a steady stream of new clients.

In fact some photography niches self generate new clients because of the strength of the network connections. 

Family photography is one example of this. Parents are likely to have loads of other parents as friends with similar aged kids. Each of those friends also has their own network of friends with kids. You do a great job for one of them, and the likelihood is that they will outright recommend you, or will at least mention you when they hear of someone looking for a photographer.

Finding a niche that has strong network connections has a huge impact on the success of your business. Each and every assignment you do, has the potential to provide you with a stream of new clients through referral.

Network connections are only valuable if the people in the network are in the same niche that you are focusing on.

It happens less often in photography for businesses. Marketing directors are less likely to hang out with less other marketing directors than parents are with parents.

But actors know lots of actors, musicians know musicians and brides know several brides to  be.

A lack of strong network connections does not mean you have no chance of success. However, if you recognise that there is a high likelihood of referrals in your niche, you should take that as a positive signal.

Could the work you do get you exposure? 

Certain types of photography lend themselves to being shared widely by the clients that you created them for. If that happens, and your name is associated with the work, you get a huge amount of exposure, for free.

Clients sharing the photos you took for them is a great opportunity to spread the word about your work.

Your photos could be shared by clients on social media. They could be used in books or magazines, websites, posters or even billboards. However it happens, your work just got shared to hundreds or thousands of people without you having to lift a finger.

If you identify that there is a likelihood that your photos will be shared widely by clients in your identified niche, it points to a genre that could be sustainable and profitable as a business.

A steady follow of free advertising, and new clients, generated by clients sharing your work is like gold dust for a photographer.

Fashion photography, where your work is used in magazines, on websites and in advertising should give you this level of exposure. Wedding and family photography is likely to be shared on personal social media accounts.

Think about whether your niche will mean your images get published, or get shared on social media.

It is unlikely you’ll find perfect clients with all four positive attributes. 

As a bare minimum you must be able to identify how you would attract clients initially. If you can identify at least one other positive attribute it is a sign that working in that niche should be sustainable. 

If you think there are 3 or 4 positive client attributes in your niche then you may have hit the jackpot!

If you can only find one positive attribute, the niche may still be worth considering, but it must be very strong. For example: you know a very easy way of finding clients that costs very little in comparison to the amount they will spend.

Here’s how it looks for wedding photography.

1 – You can identify ways to find clients e.g. wedding fairs. Positive.

2 – There is unlikely to be repeat business. Negative.

3 – Newly married couples have strong networks of people who may be about to get married so there is a strong possibility of recommendation. Positive.

4 – There is some exposure gained because clients may share their wedding photos on social media. Positive.

Wedding photography has 3 positive client attributes and only 1 negative. It is obviously a sustainable photography business niche.

In summary:

Positive client attributes:

Low effort / cost to acquire vs what they spend

Offers repeat business

Strong possibility of recommendations

Creates exposure for you

Negative client attributes:

Large effort or cost to find them

Mainly one off jobs

Don’t have a strong network to make recommendations

Working with them doesn’t create exposure for you.

Andrew Mason

Andrew is a professional photographer and the founder of the 36exp Photographers School plus the London Photo Show.