Are You Marketing Right?

Mondays are usually reserved for “marketing,” so I have to ask you this important question – are you working with your ideal clients?

Discovering your ideal clients should be your number one goal, if you are looking to be in business for the long haul.

The craft or technique of photography can be learned and practiced as it should be. Most photographers, though, falter at growing and sustaining their business. Why? Because they haven't focused their attention and energy in building a client base that fosters their future success.

The Youngrens are wedding photographers based in San Diego, with clients from all over the world. They also are actively involved in Bauman Photographers, a company dedicated to serving their commercial clients.

Discover Your Ideal Clients

But Erin and her husband Jeff Youngren are more than just photographers. They are on a mission to educate other photographers on such topics as working with the very best clients; the ones you were meant to serve with all your heart.

They have a popular course on their website called Discover Your Ideal Client. Use the code: Tiffinbox20 to get 20% off. In fact, I spoke with Erin & Jeff about this very idea of finding and nurturing your best clients some time ago.

However, if you would rather learn from them in person, here's my invitation to you to register for the Inspire Photo Retreats taking place in just a few days. Erin and Jeff will be there to walk you through the steps in discovering your ideal clients – wedding or portrait.

The Interview

Earlier in the year, I spoke with Erin about her presentation at Inspire Photo Retreats and why they chose to trek all the way from San Diego to Newport, Rhode Island for the conference:

Connecting With Your Clients

One of the things that has helped The Youngrens understand and anticipate their client's deepest desires is through blogging. The Youngrens also offer a free course called “Six Weeks To Effective Blogging” that I would highly recommend.

Why Are You In Business?

If you are in business, you should be making money at some point, right?

Jamie Swanson of The Moderntog has it dialed in when it comes to teaching photographers how to market their business – to move from mere passion into the sphere of profit.

If you are dedicated to your craft, you would have noticed how you have progressed due to your discipline and focus. The business side of the equation is no different. It too needs your constant attention. Ignore it at your peril and in a short time you will have nothing more than a hobby to call your own.

That might just be the ticket for a lot of people currently in the industry. Nothing wrong with being a hobbyist or a weekend photographer, while you still have your day job. For some photographers, the grass is always greener on the other side anyway and you living that life might mean a more comfortable and stress-free existence.

That said, if you are going all in, and you are going to spend the next 20+ years as a professional photographer, you are going to need to market your photography business and do so really well.

The Marketog Course

Back in 2014, I spoke with Jamie about Marketog and since then she has made a few additions to her tried-and-tested course.

Here are the six steps she covers in Marketog:

How to get more of the right kinds of clients
How to turn inquiries into clients: 6 game-changing strategies
How to turn your website into an inquiry-generating machine
How to get repeat clients and more word-of-mouth advertising
How to get other business owners to send you their best clients
Your marketing toolkit for effective marketing

Open Enrollment … Now!

Jamie is about to open enrollment for the course again, for a limited time (today through January 24th). Despite her busy schedule (look, she has five kids and home-schools them all), I managed to convince her to spend a little time with me being interviewed about the six-week commitment you are about to make for yourself.

The Free Sample

Grab this FREE sample lesson to get a sense of what you will learn from the Marketog course.

Follow Along At Your Pace

One other thing, while the course runs for six weeks, you have access to all the course materials for life. So, if you don't get to it as the course starts on January 25th, relax! Just log in when your schedule permits it, and walk through the modules step-by-step at your own pace. Jamie makes it super easy to follow along, but there is a good deal amount of work to be done. If you are spinning your wheels, pop into the Facebook group Jamie has set up for you to ask questions or share your successes.

Ready To Sign Up?

Are you ready to jump-start your photography business with a solid plan for marketing it? Will you enroll for Marketog now that you a little bit more about the course? Do you still have questions? What would get you off the fence? Tell me below in the comments section and I will do my best to help you out. You see, like you, I am enrolled in this course as well and honestly, I am lingering on module 3 right now. Come join and inspire me to complete all six modules of Marketog with you!

This is a guest blog post by Rosie Suerdick, photographer and author of Show & Tell Selling: Making In-Person Selling Kindergarten-Easy.

Every year, I tend to sit down and come up with our loftiest goals, or resolutions, for the year to come.  If you are reading this, chances are, you probably did, too.  Everyone wants to improve on SOMETHING, and the start of a new year is a perfect time to do it.  

But, if you are like 92% of the population (according to the University of Scranton), you probably won’t be keeping those resolutions (and, depending on what side of this fence you fall on, you will either find this statistic comforting or sad).  

As a self-professed “goal getter”, I find this statistic alarming.  I mean, IMAGINE how amazing this world could be if people just held themselves accountable to achieving their goals?
Seriously.  Our lives, and our businesses, could be EPIC if we had the determination to achieve even one resolution to the end.  

Here are 5 ways to help you stick with your resolutions in 2016 so that you can have the best (most profitable, or most growth, or whatever you want to do!) year ever.  

1. Write it down, and put it somewhere very visible.

My whole family did this in 2013 by putting it on a giant white board right of our kitchen.  You would be surprised at how many people walked by it, looked, and then asked about our goals.  By constantly engaging in conversation about our goals, we were much more driven to complete them. It was almost like we added a level of peer pressure that actually worked for us! This year, we did the same thing, but in our new house: we wrote our family goals down, broken down person by person, and hung them up in our dining room.  We had some friends come over on New Years Day for ribs and sauerkraut (a German family tradition); and guess what? Our guests asked us about them!

Putting your goals front and center in your life is amazing, especially for long-range goals. For short-range goals (like getting your bookkeeping ready for your accountant), write or enter those into a calendar so you have a mental deadline. Also, keep your timeframes smart and attainable (for example, you should not start getting your books ready for your accountant on April 1st. Maybe you should start that process now, so that you are totally filed by April 1st).  

2. Have an accountability buddy

(I am not talking about a spouse or a significant other here)

An accountability buddy is someone who is in the same, or similar, industry that you are in. This person understands the busy-ness of your business, and can relate to you when you complain about something that only someone in your industry will understand.  

This accountability buddy is someone who is on the same level, experience- and quality-wise, so that neither one of you ends up feeling drained for resources/brainpower in the end. This person will know your resolutions, and will help to push, pull or prod you to achieve them, because he/she is counting on you to do the same for them.  

The key to an accountability buddy is consistency. I have two buddies this year- each pushing me to do different major goals- and we have already calendared our phone calls/meetings for the year. We need a “no-excuses” existence to our relationship so that we can keep the momentum going.  

3. Offer yourself rewards

Yeah, this is one that my husband would roll his eyes at; but it works for me!  

I am very rewards-driven, so I set incentives for each goal I achieve. When I trained for, and ran, a half-marathon, I rewarded myself with an expensive pedicure. When I woke up early to start this blog post, I rewarded myself with coffee (hey, it works!).  

Rewards help you drive toward the goal, almost like bonus check keeps employees happy during the holiday season. It’s like a little “thank you” along the way.  

4. Understand that a resolution is WORK.

If you want to lose 15 pounds, you can rest assured that it won’t fall off of your body overnight, with no work. You will have to change your diet, exercise, and practice discipline for it to happen. Likewise, with business resolutions, they are work as well. You will need dedication, and you will probably have to do things that make you uncomfortable (such as waking up at crazy early hours of the morning). BUT, just like with losing weight, when you start to see results, it is SO worth it.
 
If you want to blog more and increase your SEO, you will need to….guess what…blog more and learn more about SEO! But, if you do achieve this particular goal, you will see the benefits in your inquiries and, most likely, in your income as well. Worth the work, right? 

5. Break your goal down into smaller goals

Do you want to make $30,000 more this year than you did last year? Well. If you only made $10,000 or $15,000 this year, then you have some work to do. 

If you only made $10,000 or $15,000 last year, then whatever you are doing isn’t really working (sorry, but it’s true) if you want to make $30,000 more this year. You have to change things up, such as your pricing, your marketing and your sales approach. 

In order to make a goal like this less overwhelming, think about what you have to do first, and write it down in an outline form, from smallest to biggest. Remember that old saying that the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time?  

Well, this is your elephant.  

For a goal such as this, I would suggest making changing your pricing a priority (and if you want an AMAZING guide on how to do do this in a simple way, check out Alicia Caine’s Profit First Photography. She will be re-releasing her e-book, Easy As Pie Pricing Guide, this year. Buy it.). Ahead of actually changing your prices, I would take an ideal client out (one who can afford the new prices- you probably know someone offhand!) and have him/her look at your new packages. Ask them how you can better market to them, and get solid feedback (really listen here!). This will help you be confident in doing the next step: updating your marketing.  

Once you have your prices and marketing down, you will have to anticipate a “lull” as your prices go up (and that’s OKAY! It happens, even to the best of us!) and build in a game plan for that. This may be a great time to consider in-person selling, if you want to really up your game. If you want to start doing that, but don’t know where to even begin, my e-book, Show and Tell Selling: Making In-Person Selling Kindergarten Easy, walks you through all of those steps as well.

Finally, as you start getting clients booked under your new prices, be sure to have a plan to actually MAKE that $30,000, as opposed to spending it on all new gear. Plan to meet with your accountant to come up with a solid budget.  

Boom.  Goal met!!  

If taken one step at a time, with a solid plan and with a support system in place, a resolution can be an amazing thing to have on your side. Charge at it, friends, and I can’t wait to see what you can achieve!

Bryan Caporicci is clear about who he is. Yes, he is a wedding and portrait photographer. But he is also a businessman. And with that comes the clarity that to run an efficient business, one must have streamlined workflows that gets the job done, using the least amount of resources while the output remains consistently high.

Not only does Bryan run an active and successful business, he is also the brains behind Sprouting Photographer (a blog, I worship) and Sprout Studio, a newly launched web application for photographers to run their businesses more efficiently and productively.

Teaming up with ShootDotEdit, Bryan is offering a free webinar on December 16th on this very topic. Register for “10 Must-Know Business Workflow Hacks Webinar” now.

I spoke with Bryan a couple of weeks back about this webinar and teased out of him one or two of these hacks for you. Take a listen and if you have any questions, list them out in the comments section.

If you have a hack or two you would recommend, mention those too below! Join Bryan and I as we collectively redefine “busy” and run photography businesses like pros.

Melissa Welsh is a lot more than a photographer. She is a problem solver. Especially, if it is a problem photographers are having.

One major topic of contention among photographers is how to respond to clients who ask for digital files. If you are reading this post, I know you have had a client who has asked or demanded for “their” digital files. And, you have struggled to find the right words that will satisfy both them and you.

Am I right?

Most of the wedding industry now “gives” the files to the couple. Some portrait photographers sell the files. Some photographers bundle it with other products. There isn't one industry standard that makes everyone happy. Either the clients are miffed because they were expecting or assuming the files would be included in the fee, or the photographer is upset because she or he is now having to deliver more value with no or a negligible monetary return.

Something had to be done and Melissa Welsh, a Victoria, British Columbia photographer with 20 years of experience as a photographer set out to find a solution that will be a win-win for all. Information about the Pixel Cents app is available here.

So what is this elixir? It's called Pixel Cents. It's both an ebook and a iOS application. The ebook is smartly bundled together with a few other tools you will find useful.

Photographers can use our industry standard cents per pixel (cpp) rates and calculate the value of their photos for all types of personal, commercial, editorial and advertising photo use.

A few weeks back, when Melissa was about to launch Pixel Cents, she emailed a bunch of her friends to introduce the idea to us. Some of us received the Pixel Cents ebook to read in advance and to possibly review.

Most often, I download an ebook, I let it sit for a few days before reading it. Pixel Cents was different. I dove in and couldn't stop reading it. If you could have seen me then, I was nodding in agreement to what Melissa has written. It's a well-crafted, lucidly written alternative to the craziness that is currently our lives. I quickly wrote back to her and asked if she would spend a few minutes speaking to us about her big idea – Pixel Cents. So click the video below and watch the interview:

Pixel Cents is bringing both efficiency and profitability to my family portrait photography business. And, I am no longer struggling to explain whether digital files are or are not included. Who wins? Everyone. Clients receive their files and I am compensated fairly. Hand wringing is history.

Need more convincing? Here in a nutshell is Melissa's solution.

The Pixel Cents Formula is the simple, easy way to value your photographs for personal, advertising, editorial and corporate use.

I trust this post will stir a pot a bit and we are all open to having a healthy dialogue here. So, comment below. We would love to hear from you. If you buy Pixel Cents, let us know what you think. Could this business model be the new industry standard? I really think so.

So, let me ask you again, do you have any Pixel Cents?