Why Your Homepage is Dead – And What To Do About It
A lot of photography businesses are seeing the same problem emerge over and over: they’re getting traffic on their company homepage, but very little of that traffic is converting to leads.
If that sounds anything like you, rest assured that you’re not alone. This is a problem that not only a ton of photographers face, but also business owners in general too.
It seems like folks everywhere are investing tons of time and energy into making beautiful sites, but new clients aren’t being booked.
So what do you do? You have a few options.
Keep Tinkering
You can keep redesigning and rebranding your page, adding things like the latest pop-up or widget, in hopes that it’ll magically draw in new clients. But the reality is, that’s a gamble that isn’t likely to pay off. And it’s one that’s costly to your budget and your time.
Pare-Back Your Services
If you think people are getting overwhelmed by all that you offer, you can try paring down everything you do and focusing on one service — one call to action, one shoot. But it’d be a shame to do that, given how long you’ve worked to diversify your skill set. Plus, there’s no guarantee it’ll bring in more clients; it might even alienate more than it draws.
Create Purpose-Built Landing Pages
A photography landing page is more than likely your best bet when it comes to generating new leads.
If you’re not familiar with it, a landing page is essentially a one-page website with a singular purpose. That purpose can change depending on your needs and offerings at the moment.
For example, it could be a landing page solely meant to promote a mini session, or perhaps it’s a page for a special event or promotion you’re running. One of the great things about landing pages is that they’re temporary, and easy to switch and swap depending on where you are in your photography business.
But beyond being awesome for being fully customizable to you and your goals, landing pages are killer when it comes to generating leads for photographers.
That’s because they make it as easy as possible for a potential client to act.
Your homepage likely has a wide range of information about you, your business, your services, testimonials, etc. There’s nothing wrong with that — you want that information to be there for folks who are looking for it — but when it comes to booking, it can be overwhelming for a visitor to be flooded with all that info.
A landing page keeps things sweet and simple, and is designed to make action on the client’s part easy and straightforward.
Think of it this way: Would you marry someone you’ve never dated? Probably not.
Landing pages are like dates for your clients. They can dip their toe in the water of your services and discover whether your style and approach will work for them, which will make them much more comfortable investing in your services.
Again, I definitely don’t want to discourage you from having a nice homepage; they’re important for getting your information out there. But they’re not going to get you the action your business needs to thrive.
That said, you still want to make sure your site is polished, accessible, and especially mobile friendly, but once you’ve ticked off those boxes, refocus your efforts on the things that’ll really expand your business — like a landing page.
So stop wasting time, energy, and money on tweaking your homepage, when creating new landing pages is how you’ll really build your business.
In the next post, we’ll talk about what type of landing page photographers should create first and what they need to contain.
