3 Tips to Setting (and Hitting) Your New Year Photography Business Goals

Have you had a chance to nail down your 2023 photography business goals yet?

It can be a fun process that can build a lot of excitement. Or it may be a tad overwhelming if you have big dreams of a fully booked photography business but are a bit unsure how to get there.

Regardless of where you fall in that process, here are 3 tips to ensure that you not only set amazing goals, but that you achieve them!

Tip #1 when planning out 2023 is to look back on the previous year and take an assessment what worked, what didn't, what was fun to do as well as what you hated and want to avoid doing again!

This small task of looking back before planning the future can be so eye opening.

For example, you can take an assessment of which marketing efforts led to the bulk of your bookings.

When I did this, I discovered that the majority of my leads and bookings came through one particular promotion, which knowing this, I'll plan on doing a lot more of in 2023!

Likewise, I also discovered that one of my marketing strategies was simply not working as well as I thought. It was barely brining in any leads. That happens from time to time. So my options are to spend extra time refining it or to let it go completely and focus my attention on the strategies that are actually working.

Regardless, it was very eye opening to see where my leads, bookings and income actually came from in 2022. Knowing, and not just assuming, has given me a lot more confidence as I plan the next 12 months.

Tip #2 is to pick a yearly income goal.

Similarly tip #3 is to pick a booking goal.

When you know these two numbers: your income goal and your booking goal, you are able to work backwards to figure out what you will need to do on a monthly, weekly, daily basis to hit that goal.

Let's run through a simple example together.

Let's say you want to make $100k in photography in 2023 and you really only have the time to photograph 55 sessions in total.

Now, we do math.

$100k divided by 12 months is $8,333 per month.

55 sessions divided by 12 months is 4.5 (I'm going to round up to 5 sessions for simplicity sake).

And in order to figure out how much to charge per client, we'll divide $8333 by 5 and we get $1670. Again, I'm rounding up.

So this little exercise tells us that in order to meet our $100K goal for 2023, we must photograph 5 clients a month with an average sale of $1670 each.

This is a completely doable goal too, especially when you have the marketing, pricing and selling strategies.

On that note, if you're reading this and you want help in achieving you photography income and booking goals, grab our ebook: The Become Booked Method: A Photographer's Guide to a Fully Booked Calendar and a Profitable Business. You can learn more about it right here.

Cheering you on,

Heather