Content Planning Tips For Photographers
In this article, I’m sharing my top content planning tips for photographers. So, if you want to finally get on top of your content creation with a strategic content plan to give you focus, and that will help you be more consistent with your content, keep reading.
Why plan your marketing content in advance?
Your photography business won’t promote itself. So, you know you need to be creating marketing content in order to maintain visibility online.
But, if done at the last minute, inspiration may fail to strike. You’ll end up posting something…anything…just to get it off your to-do list. You’ll feel panicked and stressed.
This, done on repeat, may lead you to dread creating marketing and promotional content. You’ll put creating content off for as long as possible. When you do finally hit that publish button, you may not feel proud of your efforts.
The content probably won’t be doing as an effective job at promoting your business as it could have because it was rushed and not well-thought-through.
And, you’ll be annoyed with yourself because you know that if you’d planned the content better in advance, all of this could have been avoided! You just didn’t make the time.
So, rather than create content at the last minute, I’d urge you to consider my content planning tips and to create a content plan.
Content planning tips for photographers
1. What and how much content will you create?
The very first of my content planning tips for photographers is to decide what format your content will take and how much content you can realistically, and consistently, create each day/week/month.
Do you prefer creating:
- written content (blogs, editorial comment pieces, text-based social media posts)?
- visual content (images, social media graphics, infographics)?
- audio content (podcasts or voice recordings)?
- video content (live or pre-recorded videos, screenshares)?
- or, a combination of these?
Whatever your preferred content type(s), choose what you’ll enjoy creating and stick to that. There is no need to try and do everything, and certainly not all at once. If you’re just starting out with content creation, start small and build up gradually.
If you can create just one quality blog post for your website each month consistently, great. Do that! If you can regularly commit to two per month, even better. One per week, brilliant.
For social media, posting consistently on a daily basis will help you more than posting sporadically when inspiration hits. The algorithm rewards those who create high-quality, consistent content that your fans and followers engage with.
2. Dedicate time to creating your content plan
With that decided, now you’ll need to set aside time for your content planning.
Creating your content plan for your photography business isn’t something that you can pull together in a few minutes. A fully-fleshed out content plan will take time to create initially, and you’ll need to consider one channel at a time – so, your blog, your Facebook page, your Instagram page etc.
But once it’s done, then you’ll have months of content already planned out which will make the whole content creation process so much quicker and easier in the long run!
3. Use a calendar template to map out your content intentions
A content plan can be in any number of forms. It’s ultimately just a simple planning document that allows you to map out the content you intend to create for the days, weeks and months ahead, for the various channels you create content for.
You certainly don’t need any expensive planners, workbooks or apps to create a marketing content plan. Ultimately, the format of the content plan is completely up to you. Whatever works!
You may be an Excel wizard, or you may prefer using a Word document to create your content plan. Or, you might want to use an app such as Evernote or a list-based tool such as Trello or Asana. Or even good old-fashioned pen and paper would do.
Personally, I have used both a basic printed calendar template, like the one in the picture below, before moving on to Trello, and this served me well for years (similar tools are Asana and ClickUp).
More recently, I’ve moved over to using ProperPlan* – a planning tool powered by AI which also helps with strategy and content creation. But I do still love my monthly calendar view printout to use alongside whatever digital planning tools I use too.
If you’re not sure what tool to use, start with something basic like the calendar month-to-view layout. This continues to worked really well for me because I can see a full month’s plan on one page. And I can print out as many copies of the template as I need to cover off the different platforms I’ll be sharing content on.
Store all your content ideas somewhere (Trello is great for this) and put them into order by categorising them. Then, once you’ve finalised your ideas, use the printed template to write in your content intentions on the calendar, plotting them out against the dates you plan to publish.
With that publication date set, simply work backwards from that date to ensure you allow time to create the content. You’ll know how much time you need for content creation based on past experience – always allow more than enough time so you get the chance you need to create the best possible content.
4. Always focus on creating content that adds value
One of the very basic rules of content marketing is that what you create should serve your intended audience.
Having a content plan is a great step forward for your photography business but do be sure that every piece of content you create is valuable. It should be focused on helping, supporting and serving those who have allowed you into their newsfeeds or email inboxes.
Promotional content is, of course, OK. But try to keep a good balance of value vs promotional content. Some suggest 80% value, 20% promotion.
Teaching what you know or answering your ideal customer’s questions about your services and products is a great place to start if you are short on content ideas. But strive for a mix of content so that you aren’t always sharing educational or how-to content.
Consider your content as a tool to attract, nurture and convert clients. Don’t just educate and then forget to sell! Include content that talks specifically about your photography products and services and how they help your ideal clients since this is the content that will help to generate leads and enquiries.
5. Maximise efficiency by batch-creating content
With your content plan in place, the next step is to commit to your planning intentions and get creating content on a regular basis. To make this process all the more efficient, I’d recommend that you consider batch-creating your marketing content.
Perhaps dedicate a half/full day once per week or fortnight to creating a load of content at once. Then, drip-feed it out over time. It’ll feel amazing to know that you have months’ worth of content already organised and ready to go!
6. Don’t be afraid to adapt and change as you go
Even if you create the most amazing well-thought-through content plan ever, you’ll still need to edit it as you go. Despite the very best of intentions, things change. That’s just life. And so, your content will need to be a working document that is tweaked and adjusted over time.
Ideas may evolve, and things may happen in your business or personal life that you hadn’t (or couldn’t have) anticipated. You may well realise you can create more or less content than you’d originally hoped. Some of your content will gain traction while some of it might not (see point 7), and you may need to have a rethink.
For all these reasons and more, I’d recommend that you make a plan but recognise that it will not be perfect from the get-go. Chances are, it’ll need to be revisited multiple times throughout the year and adapted to suit your business priorities and objectives, which may well change.
7. Measure what’s working
Finally, be sure to track your activity and the results you are achieving.
Measuring the impact of your content efforts will help you to identify what content is resonating most with your audience. By reviewing what content is most, and least, popular you can determine what content you should create more of and what you should create less of.
Use the insights from Google Analytics and your social media accounts to identify which content and channels are driving the most traffic to your website.
8. Refine and edit
If something is proving popular, what additional content could you create around that same topic? Could you go more in-depth? Or create an ‘ultimate guide’ on the topic as a lead magnet to attract more people to sign up to your email list?
If something isn’t working so well, could you better optimise the content for search so it can be found by more people? Could the content be expanded upon, or more value be added? Perhaps you’ve not shared it widely enough?
Without tracking and measuring the impact of your content, you won’t have the insights you’ll need when it comes to planning your next month’s or 90-day’s worth of content.
Do you need more content planning tips or ‘done-for-you’ help to plan your content?
If you’re a photographer who struggles with content creation, I can help you gain clarity on what content you should create and help you develop a strategic content plan to follow, and with the publishing and promotion of your content too.
Work with me
1. The Photothority Programme
In my group mentoring programme, I’ll guide you through my tried and tested content planning process, and give you a template to use to plan your content. You’ll learn the strategy behind content creation and come away with hundreds of content ideas.
But that’s not all. Blogging strategically (and amplifying the reach of your content using social media and other marketing channels) is just part of what’s covered in the programme. We also cover Search Engine Optimisation and PR – find out more.
2. ‘Done For You’ Content Consultancy
Or, if you’d prefer to outsource your content creation, get in touch to enquire about my current availability for ‘done-for-you’ PR and content consultancy.
Also, do come and join my free photography community on Facebook, ‘PR-Savvy Photographers’ if you aren’t already a member. It would be great to have you with us and I share more content planning tips for photographers in there!
