Creating a Successful Photography or Creative-Service Business by Refining Your Brand and Client Experience
Creating a Successful Photography or Creative-Service Business by Refining Your Brand and Client Experience
- High-End Sales Expert for Unconventional Photographers and Creative Entrepreneurs.
Refining Your Brand and Client Experience: The Key to Success
Branding is more than just a logo or a catchy tagline; it is the core identity of your business. It represents who you are, what you stand for, and how you differentiate yourself from competitors.
Refining your brand means taking a closer look at every aspect of your brand identity and ensuring it aligns with your business goals and resonates with your target audience.
This blog post was inspired by a meme that I recently shared and also from my coaching a photographer through aligning her business, brand, marketing, and selling to fit with who she is as a person from what she values, the energetics that she holds, and where the misalignment was.
The biggest point of contention in her photography business seemed to be the marketing strategy that was being used and why it felt so hard.
So I shared a meme that said:
To all the neurodivergent people who have wildly impressive talents that they could monetize and who simply cannot market themselves or motivate themselves to do all of those boring admin tasks required to sell themselves, putting yourself out there is hard with RSD.
That's what the meme said and so I wanted to talk about a few points and to also share why, if that resonates with you, your marketing could feel so hard. When your brand is refined, it brings several benefits to your business.
Firstly, it helps establish a clear and consistent brand message across all touchpoints, ensuring that your target audience understands what you offer and why your high-end service is the best choice.
Secondly, a refined brand creates a strong emotional connection with your aligned clients. When your brand evokes positive emotions and resonates with your client's values, it fosters loyalty and increases customer engagement.
So, let’s take for example the photographer I recently spent time coaching through her marketing offers and brand misalignment and why it felt so hard to her. She was following a common strategy in the online business world, in this case, creating a big free Facebook group as the top of her sales funnel. With this type of strategy, all you need to do is post in there, get engagement, and then sell! Bam, you have a client! Whilst this strategy may work for a very specific subset of people, like, really high energy and high charisma types, it doesn't work for everyone.
What you need for it to really work is a solid mission and a solid brand identity.
You need to be able to build really solid relationships with a ‘lot’ of people quite effectively, and you need to offer a service or a product that people truly find value in. It's very hard to create sustainable income when it’s coming from people who aren't right fit clients and who are only buying on your discounts or on a model that you need to later upsell them after their initial buy-in. I see this a lot with Facebook groups, along with a few other different platforms as well.
The reason I don’t recommend this kind of business strategy is because it really is so hard to get going, and a lot of people are not meant for the energy and effort required to get something like this going.
Also, it doesn't work well for those who are not the kind of person to rely on sales via discounts or seasonal sales or pay a little now and I’ll upsell you later kind of thing, especially if you're trying to get into the high-end pricing world, the high-end experience world, it just is a misalignment because the type of client that is attracted only to discounts is not really a high-end aligned client.
Another thing to add is that this doesn't work for all of the buyer types that make up the majority of the population of buyer types.
This brings me to why this type of marketing strategy was not working for the particular person I was recently coaching. She didn't naturally possess all of those things that you need for that kind of strategy to work! I'm one of these people as well, so I totally get it. So if you resonate with this too, and if you are doing something similar that feels hard and very much not you, and you find yourself sitting down and asking yourself, “What am I going to market’ or “I need to try to market something”, and it feels really forced, that right there is a really good indication that your marketing is actually not right for you.
This is where you really need to hone in on what needs to happen for your marketing strategy to feel natural and successful, and dare I say, exciting sometimes ( because if you are marketing in an authentic way to you and your values, it’s actually kind of amazing ). When you do this, you’ll see it feels kinda fun because you're truly expressing yourself.
In order for all you creative business owners to market your high-end service and have the results that you ultimately are after, which is bringing potential aligned clients into your sales process, there are a few key points that need to be solid.
The first thing you need to have is a solid brand identity and something unique that would give somebody ‘the want’ to hire you.
This is a big one- people will not buy things that they don't want.
That's just, like, psychology 101. Right?
You need to have something so unique that it makes somebody really want to hire you. The more unique that it is ( meaning they can't get what you’re offering anywhere else ) the more desire you end up creating for this specific thing. So your brand identity really does have a ‘big play’ here, in order for your marketing to build the momentum and the success that you're ultimately looking for.
a successful photography or creative business is all about establishing genuine connections through your marketing and in doing so offering a high-end client experience.
this is really hard to do if you don't have that solid brand identity part figured out. I say this because the second part is knowing exactly who your aligned clients are, so you know what to say and do when talking to them. This is also key!
I see this a lot, where creatives aren't fully understanding who it is they're talking to. They don't really understand what it is that they actually do for people or what it is that their offers actually help people with. I notice that they are also on platforms where their potentially aligned clients are not even on or if and when they are on there, it is not with the intention of buying anything. This is another BIG thing here and why, potentially, if you see people that have gone viral on for example TikTok or something like that where they have a ton of views, a ton of engagement, but they don't have a lot of actual sales that come off of that, it’s because they're probably catching people when they're just scrolling, and not actually looking to buy. The intent for buying isn't there. So if your marketing strategy feels really hard, that could also be part of it.
The next thing that is super important is knowing how to position your service and your offers or your packages in a way that shows you are helping someone with a problem or helping someone get what they want, which in the way that I teach it comes directly from piecing together ‘who you are’ and the ‘magic’ that you offer the world that's ‘unique to you’, who your aligned clients are that fit that ( kind of like a puzzle piece ) and then craft packages or offers that they want to buy and that they feel excited to buy.
So for your marketing strategy to be successful, you need to be bridging all of these things and walking your target audience and aligned clients into reaching out to you ( which I call bridging the confidence gap). These things must happen if you want your client experience to be the kind of high-end service you’re aiming for.
Let’s focus on this for a minute because in the ‘act of marketing’, which might be; putting copy somewhere and/or making a video; actually sitting down to type something; sitting down to record something; publishing something; whatever it is, it will not be successful if those things don't happen first.
You're essentially just showing the world you're here and this is what you have to offer them, and how it can help them.
It's communication! It's a conversation!
So, the first thing to nail down when refining your Brand and Client Experience for a successful photography or creative business is all in the ‘act of marketing’.
If you don't have any of that in place, then your marketing will most certainly feel hard. It'll feel like you're screaming into a void because you kind of are. Right? If you're not actually talking to anybody in particular and instead, just screaming into a crowd, nobody is really listening to you. It’s like you’re the one standing on a street corner with a microphone. We've all walked past people like that, especially if you live in New York. There are lots of people with speakers, preaching things on corners sometimes, and you just kind of walk on by, right? Because they're not talking to you. They're just talking to a bunch of people but nobody in particular. So if you don't have that sorted in your marketing strategy, that might be what it sometimes feels like.
So if your marketing feels hard right now, or it just feels off or not right ( which is how a lot of my clients also describe it to me ) the ‘act of marketing’ is the first thing I would recommend looking at. It must be the ‘right strategy’ for you!
Marketing strategies are also unique to the entrepreneur or business identity because I fully believe that each business has its own identity and its own unique stamp in the world. Your marketing strategy is just as unique as ‘who you are’ running the company.
If for example, you’re using the wrong strategy, such as the Facebook one I described ( again, yes it does work for some creatives, just not the majority ), you more than likely are way overcomplicating things for you, ie the strategy isn't right for you. You're probably adding on a bunch of shit, and then you're like, well, none of this is working and you're just working harder and harder and harder. A prime example of not using a strategy that's right for you!
The marketing strategy that I most often see creatives using is a wide-net approach, which means posting in as many places as possible and posting as often as possible. For people like me and for people like the creative I was recently coaching, if you're not the kind of person that has those endless energy taps, this will not feel good to you.
The other strategy I see is that they do a single post to get a client approach. With this strategy ( I see this a lot with wedding photographers ) they think that by posting once, something along the lines of ‘I have this many spots left’ or ‘Now booking for next year’, their books will fill up but alas, nobody books them and it’s because they're taking this single post to client approach, expecting to post once and that will create a client. When it doesn't they inevitably feel discouraged, feeling nothing's working and it’s only not working because they have this single post-to-client approach mindset in their head.
Another marketing strategy that I see a lot ( mainly with social media ) is the single-egg approach.
Usually with this approach, I will see some blogging going on but with no particular strategy behind it and no specific target audience in mind.
It tends to be a case of, ‘Here's my past work and hope for the best’ or ‘I've seen what blogs work for other people, so I'm going to essentially copy the keywords, make a very similar blog, and then hope that that works.’ I see creatives using this single-egg approach with the intention of getting all of their clientele from this social media top funnel in this one way and then trying to convert them from there to a client with this one egg and that is not helpful at all. You should never put all of your marketing into a single basket, especially if it's a basket that you don't own.
I've seen this a lot with those using the group funnel strategy, and then the group gets shut down or the algorithm changes and nobody is seeing your posts anymore, and then suddenly, your booking rate has gone through the floor. TikTok is another example I’ve seen whereby all of a sudden, TikTok tells you ‘you’ve breached our terms and conditions’, and you're like, ‘no, I didn't!’
The result ends up being that you never get your account back, and you’re forced to re-build it again, but then it doesn't work the same because the algorithm’s changed a lot since you first built it. Back then, it was still a new app, which here's a little fun fact, most Apps, when they first come out are totally geared for your success! It wants you to stay on it. It wants you to tell other people about it. And then after it's built a bunch of people on there and gotten a lot of users, it’s then that they change the algorithm!
This is of course when all of your views go down, your likes go down, your engagement goes down, and your reach shoots through the floor, leaving you wondering ‘What the fuck happened?’ And there it is, those emails and messages start showing up saying, ‘You should pay us to advertise to get more reach’. That's literally what every app does. This is why I truly don’t believe that using this single-egg approach ( the attraction part of your marketing ) at the top of your funnel and trying to only sell to those groups of people is a good idea.
If in your photography or creative business, you’re using only this marketing strategy, it will feel so very hard, simply because all you will really be succeeding at is spreading yourself too thin. You're trying to do this wide-net approach and you’re not even reaching your target audience.
This will only put stress on you for not expressing yourself as you want to. When you're trying to make reels for example with the purpose of selling, it's really hard to connect to your potential aligned clients, which is expressing yourself in a way that they want to know you before they feel confident in reaching out.
Marketing is a means to walk people through to your offer, which along the way should be either having someone say yes or no. You absolutely want people who are not a good fit for you, bouncing out and saying, “This is not the person for me”, that is good marketing, and prequalifying them in that way as well. There are a lot of other ways to prequalify people besides them simply not vibing with your vibe.
Marketing is not about getting people to buy from you by using false claims and scarcity or urgency tactics. Nor does it have a single mechanism of client attraction, which is what we just covered with the single-egg approach. A successful marketing strategy doesn't go from stranger to buyer in a straight line single step. It goes from attracting a stranger to building a relationship based on trust to building confidence in your solution for the problem they want help with.
I call this the confidence gap of moving people (who are of course your perfectly aligned clients and not just anybody - this is key ), effortlessly through to your offer, whilst engaging and connecting with them all the way, resulting in a quality high-end client experience.
Last but certainly not least, the third reason you might find marketing so hard is because you have a mindset of thinking that it’s all about selling yourself and/or has a possibility for rejection. This is also in direct reference to that meme I referred to earlier and a lot of people saying, yes, this is me! That's not what making content for marketing is. If you're using content marketing as part of your overall strategy, it's not, ‘selling yourself’. That's also not what marketing yourself in person is if you're using, offline marketing as part of your strategy. Technically, in marketing, no one can reject you. Take that in. And, technically, in sales, no one can reject you either. Take that in too. I know, I know, now that might have brought up a little flush of anger in you, but let me explain.
I have ADHD. I have RSD, and I also have PDA, which is pervasive demand avoidance.
So trust me. I totally get it when it comes to sales and how that can trigger your RSD. And, basically, anything you do in life or business can trigger an RSD response, and a demand-avoidant response as well. Even if the demand you’re trying to avoid and rebel against is a demand you've put on yourself, like for example business tasks and things that you ‘need to do’. Right? So, fun!
It was a fun realization for me when I realized I had PDA and that I wasn't just a total jerk sometimes. Anyway, my point is that marketing is just a conversation, where no one can reject you for expressing yourself.
The point of marketing isn't to get approval from the entire world. The point of marketing is to be a beacon of light where you get to offer your high-end service to the right people who fit you and your vibe resulting in a quality client experience.
We love and seem addicted to focusing on the people who are not all in on us and we change our marketing messaging and copy to more or less convince these people why we are worth it. Why we are worth our prices, why they should want what it is that we have to offer, but that's just not the way.
The way for all you creative business owners to really shine is to speak to those who like you already, so there is no rejection there. There is no selling yourself either if you are marketing in this way. Your perfectly aligned clients are sold on your magic already!
You should not be trying to sell to everyone, and you should not be trying to always close or get a yes. The act of Selling is offering someone a solution that they do not feel forced to take. Someone saying ‘no’ is not a rejection of you, it's just them saying ‘no, not right now’ to a service or just ‘no’ plain and simple. I know from experience as a creative artist myself that the creativity in our art is a direct representation of who we are as people and so it can feel like our creations are us, but they aren't. This all basically reemphasizes that someone can't reject you if they say no. It just means that they aren't right for you.
It's actually an active service on both sides to get a no!
So if your marketing is an act of you ‘trying to sell yourself’ by way of trying to convince people to be your people and not an act of you creating a connection that's another reason why marketing feels so hard to you.
Marketing and sales are just conversations with people who already like you!
