How To Use Email Marketing To Land Corporate Clients As a Photographer | With Daniel Clark Cunningham

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 176

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're an audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood, and this week I'm not with my big, bald, beautiful co-host, Chris Graham. He is out on this interview. But today's interview, we have an incredible conversation we're going to have with our guest, Mr. Daniel Clark Cunningham, who's a photographer based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. He was actually connected with me through our past guest and past substitute co-host, Mark Eckert, who we've had on the podcast multiple times now. Daniel was actually also the guy who married Mark and his wife, Shira. So when I was at the wedding, he was the... What would you call yourself, Daniel, in that wedding?

Daniel Clark Cunningham (0:58)

Probably just the officiant.

Brian Hood (1:00)

The officiant, yeah, yeah. So I've met you before sort of kind of through that sort of situation. But Daniel is not here just because he's a wedding officiant. He's here because he's a photographer, a successful photographer who has worked with the likes of Goodyear, Discovery, TLC, the TV channel with all the good stuff, Belk. He's worked with the city of Charlotte, which is, I would have guessed, is a pretty big deal if you live in Charlotte. Victory Records, which is a hilarious throwback to my old days back in the hardcore and metal world. It's like a predominantly heavy music record label, Chevy. And then the world's largest CRM, Salesforce. I really want like a very big hodgepodge, I'd say, of client lists. So I kind of want to get into that. But I thought it'd be cool to bring Daniel on to talk about what it takes to make it as a photographer and getting up to these bigger and bigger projects. Because I would say the average photographer is not working with that sort of client list. So first of all, I just wanted to say thank you for coming on the podcast, Daniel. I'm looking forward to chatting with you.

Daniel Clark Cunningham (1:51)

Yeah, me too. You're welcome. I'm super excited about this.

Brian Hood (1:54)

Really? Like I kind of give you a little rough introduction there. But I think it's probably easier for you to just say, like, give our audience an idea of what you do and who you work with.

Daniel Clark Cunningham (2:02)

So I'm a commercial portrait photographer at my core. That's like the niche. I like making photos of people.

So if I'm like Goodyear, for example, was to photograph Dale Earnhardt Jr. Because they were doing a giveaway. So like, win two free tickets to the next race and meet Dale and get some autographed stuff, as well as him standing with tires for standees that would go in Goodyear stores. And getting into that kind of work, Charlotte's NASCAR city, as far as like Concorde with the Hall of Fame is here. So it was just kind of a gradual progression. I used to assist on all these jobs. I've assisted photographers from all over the world. Been to Brazil twice to work with a good buddy of mine in LA. And it just sort of gave me a good look into this other world of photography because I don't like shooting weddings and I don't really want to photograph children portraits.

Not that it's, there's a lot of great people who do it, but they're passionate about doing that. And it's not something I'm passionate about.

Brian Hood (3:02)

Yeah. So, so your website, you actually, it's buried on your site. So shame on you for that, but you have a really good line on your about page that says, we create high quality portraits for use in marketing and advertising.

I feel like that's a really good kind of value proposition because it seems like while you're, you don't seem to have so much of a niche as far as who you work with, because all those people are wildly different industries. It seems like you've, you've, you've narrowed down that one thing is creating high quality portraits to use in marketing and advertising. So I think really like I would love to kind of get into your story about how you got into photography in the first place and how you've gradually worked up to that. How did you get your start in photography? Let's start there.