Vk com all photographers 16. Case targeted advertising on VKontakte for a wedding photographer

Every photographer, sooner or later, is faced with a situation when it is necessary to expand his social circle and look for new clients. This can happen for various reasons: starting work in a new genre, increasing the cost of services, etc. Today, the easiest way to do this is with the help of social networks, since they are used by millions of people and promotion on them is free.

Thanks to social networks, it becomes possible to find new business contacts, find interesting people, and promote Internet resources, business card sites, and portfolio sites. There is also a rich exchange of information - links, books, interesting and useful information.

What is SMM?

Social Media Marketing (SMM) are complex activities that are aimed at increasing audience coverage, strengthening the image in social networks, thereby increasing interest and loyalty to the service provided.

Promote your services;

Attract new clients;

Create a favorable image of your brand;

Study the audience;

Maintain a microblog;

Create a portfolio of work;

Analyze reviews of your work;

Conduct promotions and competitions;

Keep your statistics.

Let's consider the main tasks of SMM:

1. Increase sales

With proper promotion and posting, social networks become a solid source of traffic. To do this, it is enough to redirect the target audience to your website. Another bonus of working with social networks is the ability to sell your services directly from your page.

2. Increase brand awareness

Brand recognition can be achieved through word of mouth. A person who is interested in purchasing your services, by own initiative tells friends about “a great deal/good discount/excellent quality.”

3. Formation of a core of loyal users

4. Selection and reaction to negativity

One of the most important tasks SMM is about counteracting negativity. In order not to spoil the work you have done on social networks and not to destroy the positive image of the photographer, it is important to respond in a timely manner to the manifestation of negativity on the part of users. At the same time, the sooner the negative is extinguished, the better.

It is very important to distinguish between the so-called “natural negativity” (the client is really dissatisfied with the quality of your service) from trolling, and even more so from a professional attack from competitors.

So let's take a look basic principles, without which your work on social networks will be meaningless:

1. Defining tasks (not only for SMM, but for the entire business)

The first thing you need to do is define a goal, and then, starting from it, engage in promotion. Until you clearly formulate for yourself what you want to achieve, you are unlikely to achieve anything. A clearly and competently set goal is much easier to achieve.

According to the SMART model, any goal, in order to be realized, must meet five parameters encrypted in the SMART acronym.

The goal should be:

Sales funnel

The more you do for your clients, the closer they will be to you. A so-called sales funnel is formed, the essence of which is to filter out uninterested audiences, and the result is the formation of your own statistics.

The sales funnel is a graph that resembles an inverted pyramid: the top wide part shows how many clients are on initial stage the sales process (expressing interest, negotiating, etc.), and the lower one - with how many clients an agreement has already been concluded.

From this table, several conclusions can be drawn that will serve as the basis for more detailed analysis or management actions, for example:

How many clients do you need to ultimately conclude the required number of contracts? Based on these statistics, appropriate estimates can be obtained;
- how many clients are eliminated at each stage or what proportion of clients move on to the next stage?

For example, there are 100 friends, of which 80 like your posts, 50 of them comment on your articles, 30 participate in sweepstakes, and 10 become your clients. That is, out of 100 subscribers there may be 10 potential clients. This makes it possible to make forecasts for the future and set specific goals.

Buyer portrait

A typical buyer of wedding photographer services in the middle price category looks like this: a girl 21-28 years old, who has a wedding in 1.5-10 months. Other types of service buyers - groom, mother of the bride, girls 30+ and under 20 make up a minority of customers.
We are interested in residents of Volgograd and Volzhsky.

Audience selection

The obvious audience option is girls with the “engaged” status. There are 4400 of them. A quick analysis of profiles shows that the status of “engaged” does not mean that the girl is going to get married in the near future. This status lasts for a long time. There are many with this status who are not yet 18. Nevertheless, we take the audience to work.

The next audience is participants of Volgograd wedding groups: photographers, wedding planners, salons wedding dresses. We collect regional groups with the words “wedding”, “wedding”, “bride”, “wedding”, etc.
Using Cerebro Target, we parse the audience of these groups with the condition “are in 3 groups”, and then “are in 2 groups”. This is how we cut off random people.

We are looking for wedding groups without regional restrictions. We gather participants with the condition “they are in 2 groups.” We remove previously found members of Volgograd groups from the list. When creating ads, we will limit the audience to Volgograd and Volga residents.

We select groups that still have a target audience. We remove items that are not relevant to the “wedding” theme. We divide the rest into 3 parts:
a) By crossing the audience of 40% or more.
b) Crossing 13-40%.
c) Intersection less than 13%.
We throw out the third, and gather participants from the first two. Where 13-40%, we select only those who are in at least two groups.

As a result, we have 6 audiences:
1. Girls with engaged status.
2. Participants of Volgograd wedding groups (minimum 2).
3. Participants of Volgograd wedding groups (minimum 3).
4. Participants of Russian wedding groups (minimum 2).
5. Target audience with an intersection of 40% and above.
6. Target audience with an intersection of 13-40% (minimum 2).

We limit the city and age at the ad level.

Stop list

In wedding groups there is a high percentage of industry professionals - photographers, videographers, presenters. Apart from them, we are not interested in those who are already married. Let's remove them.

We are collecting a list of group administrators that we selected earlier. We find people who indicated in their profile that they are a photographer. Wedding industry professionals are familiar with good photographers and when getting married, they don’t look for them through VKontakte or Yandex.
From the collected audiences we are minus girls with the status “married”. There is a possible catch here - someone who lives in a civil marriage also sometimes puts the status “married”.
We add the resulting ids to one file and upload them as a retargeting group. When creating ads, we use it as an exception base. We use our database of offers (users who join groups for money) in the same way.

Creating ads and launching a campaign

We create an ad and launch it advertising campaign. It turned out that the “Large Image” format is more often clicked on than the “Image and Text” format.
The audience for “Girls with Engaged Status” clicks a little – CTR 0.28. Instead, we are gathering a new audience - girls with the status of “engaged”, “have a friend”, “in love” and those who are in wedding groups. The ad for this audience showed a high click-through rate of 0.92%. But the audience is small and quickly burned out.
The rest of the ads kept the CTR in the region of 0.3% – 0.37%.

Since the audiences are small, we expanded the age range to 20-30 years old, instead of 21-29.
The photographer’s group is rarely updated, so the ad is directed to a page with a wedding service on the website.

results

The advertising campaign took place in May-June and continues. In the first month, formats and audiences were tested. Based on the results, it cannot be said that one of the collected audiences performs significantly better/worse than others. Members of Volgograd wedding groups get slightly better clicks.

May:
Consumption: 798.72 rub.
Clicks: 119.
Cost per click: 6.71 rub.

June:
Consumption: 464.63 rub.
Clicks: 112
Cost per click: 4.12 rub.

After testing, the cost per click decreased by 2.6 rubles. On average for 2 months the cost per click is 5.46 rubles.
90% of orders for a wedding photographer come through the phone. Call tracking is not installed on the site, so it is impossible to understand how many applications VKontakte advertising brought.

Retargeting VKontakte

A retargeting code was installed on the kamyshan.ru website. In a retargeting campaign for 2 less than a month 21,000 impressions, 17 clicks. CTR 0.081%. average price click 2.28 rub.

Targeted advertising - YandexDirect

Let's compare the results of targeted and contextual advertising for one period. A campaign has been set up in search and separately in the Yandex advertising network (YAN).

Keep in mind that YAN ads are shown on VKontakte. But in 2 months, Metrica recorded only 5 such clicks.

Advertising in YAN brings more clicks. At the lowest price. Even taking into account the fact that in the second month we managed to achieve a reduction in targeting to 4.12 rubles, this is a ruble more expensive than YAN. There are few clicks in search, they are more expensive, and competition is high. But the users there are “hotter”. This is confirmed by statistics on views and average time on the site.

You know all this without me.

• The first step is to assess stability.
• The second is expediency.
• The third is durability.
• And finally - balance. Investing more than you get is stupid. And “living in a canal” is stupid. The main activity is photography, not the profession of a marketer.

For those who are interested in hashtags, rules for captioning pictures and frequency of publications, there are corporate SMM blogs.

I'm writing about something else.

Where does the desire to write an article come from?

Since July 2014, I have not looked at the VKontakte news feed, but in August 2016, after new ranking algorithms took effect, I opened the news feed and realized that nothing had changed. SMM doesn't think about efficiency and just bangs its head against the wall.

What am I talking about?

Think for yourself. If a person is a photographer, then naturally he accepts orders. Otherwise, why would he post works with strangers in social networks? If I don't understand something, please explain.

How important is a photographer’s presence on VKontakte?

I’ll paint a picture using my region as an example (individually, for yourself, draw according to your data, it’s more objective).

As of March 2016, 32% of the population of the Stavropol Territory has access to the Internet. Are they all VKontakte users? Obviously not.

One of the tools, or rather a platform. Even more precisely, it’s a piece of the pie that you can’t get entirely, even if you spend all your finances on targeting and write posts all day and night.

One part of the forces awaits oblivion. The other is marked as spam.

There is a segment of the population, an auction, cost per click and, of course, the interest of the site owners.

Did I forget about the photographer?

VKontakte is a platform for entertainment content, with an audience of school and student ages (the basis). If your target audience meets this criterion, then turn your public page into a thematic portal, and your photography into a business. Using the proceeds, develop new channels to attract customers. This will protect you from competition, dumping, and the moment when the conversion of traffic from VK drops to 0.

If you are targeting a different target audience, then use VKontakte as an additional channel, a platform for posting excerpts from your portfolio, mission.

“Sarafan” will bring clients to the photographer, the main thing is to indicate where. The site is useful as an independent universal platform to which all advertising channels lead. Otherwise, VKontakte will turn into a dead end.

Opportunities for promotion. Present, future and prospects

Wanting to explain the commercial unsuitability of VKontakte for a photographer, I will analyze the main tools that MK speakers, experts in the field of SMM and, of course, people’s experience “pressure” on.

Portfolio

1. Sorting. Inconvenient and illogical sorting by date. The photographer is deprived of the ability to control the sequence of viewed works. The client's view looks as it is, or as he wants, and not as the photographer needs it.
2. Miniatures. Crop is detrimental to vertical shots. The tiled standard overloads the viewer's attention, feeding him a visual mess rather than a verified message from the author.
3. Fragmentation. Portfolio on a social network - a poster for a photographer. And the more accounts, the greater the time costs. Is this beneficial for the photographer? I think no.

Recognition

If you indulge in this kind of thing, then it is pertinent to know:

1. VKontakte is a narrow niche. The world is wider, there are more people. Limiting yourself to development on VKontakte is stupid and short-sighted. Society lives beyond the screen. This is where you need to “swing”.
2. Zero effect. Art critics, owners exhibition halls and influential people are indifferent to publications, ratings and audiences on VKontakte. Don't waste your time.

Advice:

Focus your attention on organic promotion. For a long time, without “Wow!” But it is predictable and with growing trust from a potential client.

SMM is not a salvation, you just need to learn.

Contacts

If the photographer’s priority is business (and not my favorite), then finding colleagues is a personal communication tool. Like all people. Where is the commerce here?

Advice:

Phone, email and personal meetings - best tools to keep in touch with colleagues. They are based on respect for the time of life and reasoned construction of the conversation.

It is necessary to learn to ignore conversations out of politeness, blah-blah conversations and the habit of talking about nothing, typing out of respect. Life is short. It is necessary to give it meaning, and not burn it on the advice of a marketer or expert.

Business correspondence

VKontakte chat, like any messenger, is inconvenient for conducting dialogues with a potential customer. If you think about it, VK has made the photographer’s job more difficult:

1. The approach to dialogue is distorted: correspondence instead of contact.
2. The line between personal and public page(groups).
3. The chain of interaction has been destroyed: portfolio assessment, chat and... Where is the call? Idk.
4. The value of time is lost. “Eternal” dialogue and not the fact that it is effective.

VKontakte fights for people's minds. It “stitches” the logic of behavior and teaches people to “communicate”, consume, rather than analyze the information provided and make a decision:

Should it or not?

In fact, the principles of VKontakte reduce the work of posting a portfolio, contacts and additional information to zero...

It becomes the norm: “How can I contact you?” And this is in the vastness of standardization, where the block personal information has a fixed location for everyone…

And it will always be like this (possibly worse), because the owners social networks strive to retain users on their resource. The desire for personal commercial gain...

Nothing personal, it's just business.

/Al Capone/

Posts, content marketing

To be fair, CM (content marketing) is not all the same.

• Content marketing - promotion with information. Relevant for business.
• Content marketing - promoting information. Necessary for the craft.

In both cases, VKontakte (like other social networks) does not The best decision for KM:

1. Posts don't last long. The photographer is forced to be distracted by creating, publishing and promoting content, the lifespan of which is from 2 to 6 hours (depending on the information field of subscribers). Time is money. Do we remember?
2. Helpers are not profitable. Weed experts (read: marketers) offer themselves to solve the problem. In any case, it is expensive, and this is without talking about efficiency.
3. The owners are not the authors. VKontakte is a platform with free registration, but with commercial benefit for the owners. The photographer is given the opportunity to post information, but she develops the social network by maintaining a content update schedule. p.s. The island of entertainment from “Dunno on the Moon,” remember.

To use VKontakte as an advertising channel, it is enough to have a couple of friends who will post your pictures in thematic public pages or on their pages. This will be content marketing, i.e. showing photos to the target audience, and not thoughtless content marketing, to support someone else’s system and your own dependence on it.

Yes, it is beneficial for a photographer to use VKontakte for his own purposes, but in life it’s the other way around. The lead photographer, and the owner of the site as the host. One day, the photographer may be left with nothing (the situation with LJ will be repeated with VK, give it time), think about it.

Targeted advertising

Not a bad tool, most effective for:

1. Consumer goods niches.
2. Pop niches and trends.
3. Niche services, and low-budget ones.

If a photographer is not engaged in providing services, but is working on creating a narrowly focused product, the cost of which is higher than average, then the effectiveness of targeting decreases. It’s better not to waste time on daily work with your advertising account, but to develop other, more effective channels for attracting customers.

Native advertising

1. Fresh memories. I remember similar content was visible in 2011-2012, then disappeared. Soon, targeting appeared again. Many will remember, not everyone will appreciate it, but they will unanimously ignore the sponsored content.
2. High price. Disguising a photographer's sales pitch can be expensive. You will have to either reduce the cost or shift the costs to the client.
3. Insufficient solvency of the VK audience. Natural advertising does not provide direct sales, but provides for a strategy and long-term goals. And this is the approach of artisans and premium brands, whose products are expensive, and there is a crisis in the country...

It’s a shame that our brother is again being stuffed with Western technology that is not the first freshness, and not for ours (at this moment) mentality.

I could be wrong, but VKontakte users are quickly getting tired of the business approach, namely: the desire to sell a product or service. There is no need for more, although I may be wrong.

Maybe doubly so, considering that the future does not lie in advertising, and not entirely in the ability to work. The future, as futurologists, researchers and artisans see it, lies in the ability to offer a product, or do work that is beyond the capabilities of a robot.

Maybe I’m triple mistaken in believing that the future is closer than any of us thinks.

Inspiration

Gritting my teeth, I agree that VKontakte is suitable for finding inspiration, but I’ll clarify:

Modern fashion, albeit local in the vastness of VK, suffers from the presence of trends, not taste. The “editors” are to blame, whose knowledge does not allow them to distinguish Rembrandt from Malevich, and the viewers who blindly believe what is offered to them.

Advice: when looking for a source of inspiration, the main thing is not to become a consumer of content.

News

Reading news (most of which is manipulation) on social networks does not affect the commercial promotion of the photographer.

Canon, Nikon... The guys, to put it mildly, slept through the start of a new technological revolution, but they are still saying something about megapixels...

Believe me, in matters of technology it is better to understand the principles once, and not to read reviews 100 times.

Is it necessary to promote a photographer on VKontakte?

The photographer’s stay on VKontakte resembles the life of a rodent:

• rat race;
• rat race;
• Groundhog day.

And the feasibility of using this tool for commercial promotion must be considered through a well-known prism creative path photographer:

First, you look for ready-made actions, then you learn how to work, and then you write your own actions to optimize your activities.

There are no secrets.

Peace to all, and favorable light on the sites of photographic battles.
Your,
Andrey Bondar.

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They have hundreds and even thousands of subscribers. Their posts and photos receive dozens of likes, and their photos win international competitions wedding photography. We present 12 wedding photographers who are most popular among users of the VKontakte social network.

Laszlo Gabani, Moscow

VKontakte since 2008, more than 9,400 subscribers

Laszlo Gabani is one of the most famous wedding photographers in Russia, winner of international competitions, and since 2007, President of the Association of Wedding and Portrait Photographers (ASFO). Laszlo was the first in Russia to propose as a standard, why it was organized own production, still an example of first-class quality. He has devoted more than 10 years to this genre. Laszlo Gabani photographs weddings all over the world and actively conducts master classes, thereby making a significant contribution to the development of Russian wedding photography as a whole.

Alexey Gaidin, Petrozavodsk

VKontakte since 2007, more than 7,000 subscribers

Alexey took up wedding photography in 2005. He says that he chose this profession because he really loves “getting to know interesting people And he’s a pretty sociable person himself.” Over his almost ten-year career as a wedding photographer, Alexey has achieved great success: he is a winner and member of the jury of various Russian competitions wedding photography, member creative association F2Pro, winner of the Wedding Photojournalists Association (wpja.com) competitions. The number of Alexey’s subscribers on the VKontakte social network is approaching 7,000 people.

, Rostov-on-Don

VKontakte since 2008, more than 1,500 subscribers

Igor has been taking photographs for about six years; this activity is to some extent a tradition in his family: his father worked as a wedding photographer for more than 20 years. One day he asked his son for help in shooting, and after trying it, Igor realized: not only did he like photography, he literally “fell in love with this direction so much that he quit his main job and became a wedding photographer.” Igor is a member of the MyWed and Fearless Photographers communities of wedding photographers, a finalist of the WedLife Awards - 2013, and a winner of various competitions.

Yana Zharintsova, Saint Petersburg

VKontakte since 2008, more than 3,600 subscribers

Photo that took 14th place in the “Bridal party portrait” category at the ISPWP wedding photography competition

Yana Zharintsova started taking photographs about five years ago. To our question why she chose the wedding genre, Yana answered: “It’s interesting, fun, this kind of work allows you to travel a lot and brings in a good income.” Yana works not only in St. Petersburg, but also films a lot abroad, fulfilling orders from clients from other countries. She has repeatedly won prestigious international wedding photography competitions and is a member of the International Society of Professional Wedding Photographers (ISPWP), Wedding Photojournalist Association (WPJA) and Fearless Photographers.

, Saint Petersburg

VKontakte since 2007, more than 7,300 subscribers

Alexey Usovich is a professional wedding photographer from St. Petersburg. He became interested in photography in 2003, when he entered the art and graphic department of the Pedagogical University. At first, Alexey shot with film cameras, and when he switched to digital, he realized that he wanted to make his hobby his job. He began experimenting with various genres, including practicing creating photo collages; some of them later won awards at various prestigious exhibitions.

Alexey turned to the genre of wedding photography around 2007, when friends who fell in love with him artwork, asked to film their wedding. He “enjoys interacting with people throughout the day, the unique emotions of the newlyweds and applying his knowledge and skills at every wedding.” He rarely participates in competitions, but the appreciation of his work by social network users makes Alexey one of the most popular wedding photographers today.

, Ekaterinburg

VKontakte since 2007, about 10,000 subscribers

Sophie became interested in photography as a child. Her grandfather taught her everything, and Sophie’s first camera was a Zenit. IN wedding photo she came by chance. By in my own words, Sophie only photographs weddings “exceptionally interesting in plot and concept” and is not limited to this genre, also actively engaged in portrait and staged photography.

Pavel Gomzyakov, Moscow

VKontakte since 2008, more than 700 subscribers

Pavel Gomzyakov began taking photographs in adolescence, in 1994. As he himself says, he likes to show “people’s emotions, their uniqueness.” What brought him to this genre was “the desire to create his own recipe for a wedding product.” Pavel is a multiple winner of various regional photo competitions, a member of the MyWed wedding photographer community, he is among the top 30 wedding photographers in Ukraine.

Free methods that will make your group visited, interesting and ensure an increase in the number of fans.

1. Who do you need in your group?

It is important to understand that you need not just hundreds of people in your group, not just their number. They are important to you interest, involvement in the group.

2. How can you interest them?

So that potential clients want to join your community, they should be interested there. Very often photographers make the mistake of creating such a group – a la “wall of fame”.
If you simply post information in your group about how good and wonderful you are, then reposting it is not interesting. Think about what would be useful or interesting to them?

3. Natural growth of the group

Yes, for people to add themselves to your group, without paid advertising, and even share your news - this is the most desirable option.

Advice on how to achieve this: create viral messages that are interesting to your customers.

How to check if a post is good for virality? A simple ratio of the number of “likes” to “reposts”. For example, if 10 people put a “heart” (“like”) under your news, and 5 people reposted it, then the virality is 50%. This is a good result, this news is viral. This means that people are interested and people are ready to share this information.

4. Be useful to your clients!

To make it interesting in your group, people should find something necessary and useful there for themselves. For example, make a series of tips. Post short video tutorials related to your shooting profile. In general, something that your clients can use themselves to their benefit.

5. Give variety

Don't be a boring “one-format” author. Delight your members with the variety of information you publish. In your “arsenal” There should be audio and video recordings, and collections of photographs, and text articles. The opportunity to download something useful for yourself, read entertaining information, look at a beautiful photo selection - all this will only make your group better!

6. Competitions? It's possible, but...

Carefully:-). As with everything else, it is important to understand who this competition is aimed at and will it motivate clients sufficiently?

Now there is a whole “army” of so-called “likers”, and even automated “cheat” services, so you should always be careful about:

• Your goal, which must be realized during the competition
• Theme of the competition
• Conditions of the competition
• Target Audience

7. Everything is going according to plan!

You must have media plan A group is a kind of media for your target audience. Therefore, you should know clearly, directly for every day: today I am posting this (for example, some tips), tomorrow I am posting this (some kind of thematic survey). And so on every day.

Your group should be “live”, interesting, so that it is pleasant to join and you want to stay. And once you take on the task of leading a group, you must constantly engage in it. If the site can be compared to a book that you take from the shelf to re-read, then the group on the contrary is a daily magazine.