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A big part of the work we do at Wonderful Machine is helping photographers connect with the types of clients that are most important to them. We have 14 Analysts who do basic research and update the 31,000 people and 21,000 client companies in our database that we promote our member photographers to. And we have another seven marketing consultants on our team who build custom client lists for individual photographers.
When our consultants meet with a photographer to identify their target audience, they start by learning about their photographic interests, skills, experience, and their business objectives. With that information, they then review all the potential client types that line up with that photographer.
We divide client companies into three main categories: Publications, Agencies, and Brands. We further divide those into sub-categories called Industries. For example, publications could be newspapers, magazines, or book publishers. Agencies could be advertising, public relations, or graphic design. For brands, we identify the industry that appears in their LinkedIn profile, but we also assign them to a more specific vertical market. For example, if a company is in the Hospitality industry, we take a closer look to determine whether they’re an airline, hotel chain, cruise line, or tourism office.
The value of vertical markets for photographers is that if you have a portfolio of photos that match up with a particular type of client, you’re more likely to get hired by other clients with similar needs.
Doing client list builds for photographers all these years has made our marketing consultants experts at connecting the dots between commercial photographers and their ideal prospects. But our tech team has taken that process one step further by creating a free online application that makes it easy for any photographer to identify the vertical markets that match up with their interests and skills.
Go to our Vertical Markets app on the internet. On the Select Specialties page, check all the photographic specialties that match up with your interests, skills, and experience.
Click the arrow to advance to the Select Vertical Markets page. There, you’ll see a list of all of our vertical markets. The ones that appear in bold are the vertical markets that we think are most likely to match up with your specialties. On the right, select from the dropdown menu showing how many companies you’d like to focus on. (Whether you’re hiring our consultants to research clients for you or you’re doing the research yourself, it’s useful to identify your priorities.) You’ll see that when you select a number, the name of that vertical market will turn blue.
You can also select Other to add any number of companies.
Once you get to the bottom of the list, you also have the option of adding your own Custom Vertical Market. Type the name in and click the Add button. Then you’ll have the opportunity to indicate the number of companies.
Next, clicking the right arrow will take you to the Select Locations page.
To the right of each vertical market, you’ll have the option of checking the Global check box (which means that you want to focus on those clients worldwide), or you can check Other to identify a more specific region.
Within each international region, you’ll also see sub-regions. Clicking any check box will indicate that you’re interested in that whole region. Clicking on the name of the region will reveal more choices that will allow you to be more specific.
Once you’ve selected your locations, click the right arrow to see a compilation of your Results. You can then email the results (as PDF and CSV files) to yourself (or your consultant) so you can refer to it as you’re doing your research.
I hope that’s helpful! Since our app and all the information contained in it are a work in progress, please email me with your comments, concerns, or suggestions about any aspect of it so we can continue to make it more useful to you.
Further Reading
Guide: Find Clients
Guide: Premium Data for Photographers
Need help with a Client List Build? Reach out!