You’ve worked hard for months to plan your upcoming event. You found an amazing venue in Grand Rapids, the details are perfect, the event sponsors are creatively represented, and your attendees are buzzing with excitement. How will you capture the magic and use it to drive attendance at your next event?
Here are seven reasons why you should hire a professional photographer for your next event:
- Use images from this event to promote future events.
- Create a promo package for event sponsors and attendees to download and share.
- Celebrate your awardees and speakers.
- Celebrate your community. Your supporters are important!
- Use the images from your event to illustrate web content all year long.
- Grow your relationships with keynote speakers and event sponsors by sharing photos of them at your event with them.
- Recap the event afterwards on social, web, and email to encourage non-attendees to come next time.
Ronnie Higgins writes on Eventbrite’s blog, “Photographs set a vibe and answer event-goer’s questions about your event’s atmosphere…Photography is also crucial for making the other techniques on this list — from advertising to email — more effective.”
1. Use images from this event to promote future events.
Few people want to commit to going to an event if they don’t know if they’ll have a good time. What better way to show potential attendees what their experience will be like than using photos from previous events?
One of your strongest communication channels is your email list. Wield it more effectively and create hype by including photos here. Each email should be short and illustrate one specific aspect of your event, like an award or speaker, and photos build a concrete example of what that will be.
You’ll likely be sending quite a few emails in the weeks and months leading up to your event, and hiring a photographer will be the quickest way to provide you with a stock of images specific to your event.
You’ll also need photos to promote your event on social media, from the Event Page on Facebook, regular posts on your Instagram account, to ad campaigns on LinkedIn. Use images to tell a story of the experience, like the fun past attendees had, previous winners of a recurring award, or how your supporters made an impact on their community.
2. Create a promo package for event sponsors and attendees to share.
You don’t have to carry the burden of promoting your event alone. Mobilize your event sponsors and attendees to encourage their friends and followers through sharing online.
While it can be hard to persuade others to share, you can eliminate one barrier by creating shareable content with your event photos and providing it to your fans to post on social media. Upload your promo package to a cloud storage service and pass out a link to download the whole package at once, or post it piece by piece online with a call to action to share it.
3. Celebrate your awardees and speakers!
You know how much work it is to book quality speakers and to find the best people to give your event awards to, and the most gratifying moment of the night is hearing them speak and presenting that award.
You can continue the appreciation you began at the event through photos of each moment of celebration. Show your followers pictures of the VIPs and share why they were there and what makes each one of them special. Showcasing your appreciation of them at your upcoming event will help attract future speakers and increase the prestige of the awards you give.
4. Celebrate your community!
You didn’t plan and host your event just to hang out by yourself in a big, empty room, did you? You want to fill the room with your community, your supporters, fans, and friends. Encourage them to come by promoting your event with pictures of people like them having fun, and set up your event with photo-worthy stations like photo booths, brag walls, or unique art or decor. Get extra mileage out of those photos by ensuring your logo is prominently displayed. Give your audience the opportunity to have fun, professional photos taken of themselves.
And don’t forget to encourage attendees to tag and share pictures of themselves on social media as well. You’ll increase the exposure of your event online just by making the ask on-stage or in the pre-event slideshow. You can even take this idea a step further by asking attendees to follow your organization on your primary social platform like your Facebook page.
5. Use the images from your event to illustrate web content all year long.
One great advantage of hiring a professional photographer for your event is the opportunity to capture images you can use all year long in your emails, blog posts, social media posts, and web pages.
One company using their event photos to great effect on Instagram throughout the year is Social Media Examiner. They find creative ways to connect each image with their message, even messages not directly related to their annual Social Media Marketing World event. They ask their audience questions to increase engagement or illustrate the point of their caption visually with that image.
You can also use your event photos to bring your message to life for many different ideas outside the event itself. If you’re promoting a new product launch, use photos of people looking excited. If you’re telling a funny story, find a picture of a group of people laughing and having a good time. If your organization’s leader is beginning a speaking tour, post pictures of them onstage. There are many ways you can use the images your photographer captures at your event.
6. Grow your relationships with keynote speakers and event sponsors by sharing photos of them at your event with them.
It’s a lot harder to develop new speaker and sponsor relationships than it to continue cultivating existing ones. One easy way to keep the conversation going is by sending your speakers, awardees, sponsors, and VIPs the pictures taken of them at your event.
There are two important items to keep in mind with this strategy: make sure you have permission in your contract with your photographer to send the photos. When you hire a photographer, you’re generally paying them a license to use the photos within certain limitations. Let your photographer know that you will want to send certain pictures to others and that this usage is covered by your contract.
The other important point is to create a list for your photographer of the people and things you want to make sure you have pictures of. Professional photographers have a general shot list that they work from, but they can’t read your mind and know all the VIPs or important details you have planned. It’s especially helpful to send the photographer with an event staff member who knows the VIPs by sight to assist.
7. Recap the event afterwards on social media, blog posts, and email to encourage non-attendees to come next time.
The photos from your event will never be more valuable to you than immediately after the event is over. Your guests are still buzzing with excitement and they want to see themselves in professional photos and anything else they may have missed.
A professional event photographer will send you a selection of edited highlight photos within 24 hours of the end of the event so that you will be able to use them immediately in emails and social media posts thanking your guests for attending. Prep those emails and posts ahead of time so you can release them quickly – the sooner you can send them out, the more your guests will feel appreciated.
The rest of the photos will usually be delivered within two weeks; the exact amount of time depends on the length of your event and how much there was to take photos of. Your photographer should be able to give you an estimate at the event, and certainly ask for that estimate with the understanding that it may change.
The bottom line is that the uses for professional event photos are only limited by your imagination. Think of them as your organization’s personal stock of custom images you can use year round to promote your brand and your mission.
If you’re hosting an event in the Grand Rapids, Michigan area, I would love to work with you by capturing your professional event photos. Please fill out a bit of info below to get started.
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