6 recommendations to improve your photographic workflow

One of the first things you need to do when the volume of clients starts to increase is to consider a photographic workflow to make your working hours much more productive. Because there is no point in spending 10 hours working in the studio if you are only answering the phone or handling the work of 1 client.

For your photography business to run better and better and for your working hours to be really productive, you need to organise a photographic workflow and that is why, in this article, we are going to give you 6 tips to create one. Don’t miss the last recommendation, it’s the best of all.

Learn how to create a photographic workflow and get more work done every day.

Why is it important to review your photographic workflow?

The photographic workflow is the set of actions you have to carry out from the moment you capture a potential client until you finalise your services with them. Although this process may seem very obvious to you, since you know perfectly well the steps you have to take with your clients, the truth is that, if you do not create a list of well-defined actions, carry them out in an orderly manner and measure the times and results in each one of them, you will never know if you are doing things well or not in your photography business.

And if you are one of those who have already defined your own photographic workflow, this small guide with 6 recommendations will help you to validate if you are doing it correctly and if your workflow is really effective. But before we give you these tips, let’s take a closer look at what a workflow is.

What is a photographic workflow?

The workflow is all those processes that you have to do from the moment a potential client knows about your existence until you deliver all the pictures of their photo shoot and you finish the job.

Below we are going to share with you a series of generic steps that can help you create your own task flow:

• Customer acquisition: advertisements on the Internet, social networks, blog articles, etc.
• Information about your work: creation of dossiers, web pages, blog articles, etc. to explain to your clients what your photographic services consist of.
• Organising the workflow of a photo shoot: preparing a script of how the day of the photo shoot will run.
• Creation of a list of steps to define the post-production work to be done.
• Sending the photographs to your clients.
• Follow-up in the future for possible new recruits.
• Etc.

Learn how to be more productive by improving these 6 tasks you do every day

When planning all these actions, it is important that you polish each step so that, on the one hand, your customer service is much more satisfactory and your time spent with each of them is less and less.

The idea is that, once you have created your task flow, you can gradually polish each of them as you put them into practice to get the most out of your working hours.

Below we are going to share with you 6 recommendations that will help you to improve your photographic workflow.

1# Minimise the amount of time you spend with non-customers

When explaining to users what your work consists of and solving their initial doubts, you can use different means, for example:

• Telephone calls.
• Sending emails.
• Sending WhatsApp.
• Creation of a dossier with all the information.
• Website with information.
• Articles in the blog.
• Etc.

As you can see, there are many options available to you to inform people interested in your services about how you work and what services you offer that may be of interest to them.

Although direct communication methods such as telephone or WhatsApp may be fine, the idea is that you should spend as little time as possible on these processes.

As an idea, you can take advantage of all the potential offered by Arcadina’s photography websites to create a complete service page with galleries, opinions and information pages so that the users themselves can answer all their immediate questions without having to wait to contact you.

This action, in addition to saving you a lot of time, will allow you to capture the attention of many customers who, if they had not found all this information, would not even have contacted you.

Here is an article with some of the latest websites that have been created with Arcadina during the last year.

>> 10 photography websites destined for success in 2024 that have been created this year

2# Plan your photo shoots in detail

Some photo shoots are easier to tackle than others. For the more complex ones, such as a newborn shoot or a reportage that includes several wardrobe changes, it is essential that you have a well-developed script of how the shoot is going to take place.

If you don’t, you will probably spend a lot more time taking the photos you are looking for or, on the contrary, you won’t even get to take them at all because you will have run out of time.

To prevent this from happening, take some time to organise the day of the session, if you have several sets, plan the order and the time you will be able to dedicate to each of them. If you write down all this information in the form of a script on the day of the photo shoot, on the one hand you will be able to follow it and, on the other hand, you will be able to validate at that very moment if you have planned it correctly. Once you have everything well measured and planned, this script will serve as a basis for future photo shoots.

3# Limit your post-production times

When it comes to editing your photographs is where you can lose the most work time. Think that it is important to offer the client a quality final product but always to a certain extent. We know of many photographers who invest a great deal of their time in this type of process and in the end their clients, when they receive the images, do not have enough knowledge of the techniques to be able to appreciate all that work. By this we don’t mean that you deliver photographs without retouching and of poorer quality, simply that you look for a way to carry out all these processes in the shortest possible time and that you are very clear about how perfect you want to be.

Another point that you also have to take into account is the price at which you want to charge for all those hours of work. Remember that the more time you spend on these processes, the lower the final profit you will get for this work.

4# Create email templates for replying to your customers

From the moment a client first contacts you to ask you for information about a photo shoot until you finalise the work with them, you will have to send them many emails:

• When they are not yet a client: inform them about the type of reports you do, available dates, if they are undecided, follow up with them until they make a decision, send them a budget proposal, etc.
• When you are already a client: informing you of the dates and conditions of the session, reminders a few days before, sending photographs, etc.

To make the process of sending all these emails really fast and not waste half a morning sending a reply to a client, a very good idea is to create a series of predefined emails resolving all these issues. This way, when you have to send an email like this, you will only have to copy the text and change the client’s details.

In Arcadina you will be able to send a series of personalised emails and WhatsApp messages through the Management Panel to your customers and you will also be able to create your own templates to optimise your workflow. In the following article of our help we explain how to do it.

>> Arcadina Help: Email

5# Automate as many processes as possible

Once you have acquired a client, you have done their photo shoot and you have finished all the editing processes, you may think that you only have one last action left to send them their photos. If you just send them a download link with the images of their shoot and that’s it, you will be missing out on a lot of opportunities to do new business with this client.

If you automate processes with the help of public and private sales galleries and also add a session booking system to your website that users can manage themselves, you will not only save valuable time, but you will also increase the chances of new sales from your customers.

Private galleries

We have already told you this many times but it never hurts to repeat it again. With private sale galleries, your clients, in addition to being able to view the images of their photo shoot, will also be able to: select the photos for their album, download the images already retouched, buy prints or prints in more special formats, select extra images, share the link to the gallery with their relatives, have the option of buying predefined packs, etc. The options are many and so are the possibilities to increase your income.

>> Private galleries: the best tool for delivering photos to clients

Public galleries

It’s a similar story with the online shop. If you take photos in your spare time of landscapes, nature, love to document your travels or simply like to create stock photography, you can now sell them independently of your photo shoots through the online shop. The great advantage of this system, apart from the fact that you are practically not involved in the process, is that interested people will be able to make purchases any day of the week through the device they have at hand (Mobile, Tablet, PC).

Booking

And to continue automating tasks, what could be better than implementing the booking calendar option on your website, where your clients will be able to consult your available times for a session, make a booking for the day and time they are most interested in and make the payment.

>> Want to improve your sales? Discover the 5 advantages of Booking

6# Create a workflow for each type of photo story

When it comes to defining your photographic workflow, especially when you offer different photo shoots, although it may seem that you do the same type of work in all of them, the truth is that, especially if the prototype of clients is different, this flow of tasks will vary slightly. To give you an example, it will not be the same steps to take when you do a wedding shoot from start to finish as when you are hired for a pre-communion session.

Although at the beginning you will dedicate more time to this work, the ideal is that you create a different work schedule for each type of session. In this way, once you have them all defined, we can assure you that your execution times for the different processes will be considerably reduced, as you will know at all times which step you are going to have to take.

Improve your photographic workflow and enjoy more time for yourself

If you aim to improve your photographic workflow, in addition to offering your clients a much more controlled service where even the smallest of details will be under control, you will be able to have a number of extra hours a week that you didn’t have before in which you will be able to do more photo shoots and thus increase your income or simply dedicate them, at certain times of the year, to rest and take care of yourself.

At this point in the year when there are only a few days left to finish one stage and start another, it is the best time to stop the pace of work, analyse how the year has gone and apply all possible strategies to make the next year much more fruitful and productive, for example, by improving the photographic workflow you have at the moment.

If you still don’t have a website with us or you would like to try the rest of the business solutions that we offer in Arcadina, we encourage you to try our services for 14 days for free.

Today we want to share with you the testimony of Enrique Medrano from Tonos Fotógrafos, a fantastic photographer and friend who knows very well what it means to have a correct workflow in his various photographic businesses.

>> Video: Enrique Medrano from Tonos Fotógrafos tells us how his Arcadina website has increased his sales

And to finish this article that we think you should read carefully before the end of the year, we would like to ask you a question: Have you used any kind of photographic workflow so far? We would love to read your answer in the comments.

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