3 Things You Need To Know to Make Money as a High-End Service (pt2)
3 Things You Need To Know to Make Money as a High-End Service - Part 2
- High-End Sales Expert for Unconventional Photographers and Creative Entrepreneurs.
Are you ready to dive straight into part 2? Are you still wanting to make more money and have a business you feel amazing in?
If you haven't caught part one yet, go ahead and check that out now to discover the first of my secret ingredients in making money as a high-end service!
Step two is all about ‘being seen’ by your aligned clients and five mistakes that I see creatives making at this stage. This has an incredible impact on and around having a photography or creative business they feel good in while making more money.
Let me begin with your ‘unique self’! Yes, your uniqueness is actually the most magical part of you, but those individual parts of you, the parts that stand out, although incredible can in some cases intimidate or upset others. Have you ever felt this?
Were you ever made fun of in school or did you find yourself with only a very small group of close friends because of your unique ways? If so, yeah that's actually so great!
As you read and begin to understand these three parts, you'll see why these best parts of you are the parts that will supercharge your photography or creative business growth.
Your Individuality is what makes you unique and what makes your aligned clients go ‘Yes, we want you!’
This is exactly what you need to be focusing on to book those higher-paying clients, who are looking for a high-end creative service, that suits all of their needs.
Sadly, by the time we’ve reached adulthood, we have learned to hide these unique parts of ourselves because growing up we were either told that we were too much, not enough, or to try this or stop doing that. As a result, all those negative experiences of simply expressing yourself as you have such a massive impact along the way!
In my own experience, as a high-end sales expert for unconventional (being unconventional myself) photographers and creative entrepreneurs, it took me a long time to find the courage to allow myself to be myself. It took me a long time to understand that all these little parts of me that I was hiding were actually really affecting my own photography business and not allowing it to grow and thrive into what it could be and what it was meant to be. It was stopping me from reaching my target audience and booking the clients that were meant to be booking me in the first place because I was masking myself more or less in my business.
I see this same thing happening with my clients, where they come to me fully masked in their own creative businesses. They are not talking how they want to talk in their copy. They are not communicating the way they should be to attract the people that they want to attract. I see many trying to run a generic business because it seems that’s the easiest way. It feels easier to do what everybody else is doing because we learn to do that as a survival tactic growing up, right?
Right here, right now, I'm here to remind you, just be you! stop hiding your unique, weird, and wonderful self and prove to your newly empowered self that in making this fundamental adjustment, this is how you will actually begin to those 5-figure booking clients because of the high-end creative service you offer. This is how to make more money in your photography or creative business. BE YOU!
So, now that you're a fully grown adult, in business, selling your art or creativity, or you have these epic, unique experiences that you want to give your clients, you can come out of this ‘hiding’ right now by honing in on your uniqueness in a way that your clients can connect with and really resonate with you.
It’s how it connects back to you and your unique, unconventional high-end service and the offers that you have. That's the gold, my friend! It's literally how photography and creative businesses become successful!
My personal business philosophy is ‘better, not more!’
The way to make enough profit in your creative business and to step into your dream life while also being able to have time off, travel, and enjoy yourself is by better, not more! Better means being more intentional in everything that you do:
A better-aligned brand! An incredible value-for-money high-end service! Better qualified leads and getting better at selling your creative services intentionally.
It's not burning out from casting the widest net for more and more leads, feeling exhausted by more and more sales calls, or wasting time pitching your services to more and more people who aren't right for you anyway.
If you want your brand to represent you better, you want to build a marketing ecosystem to be seen by your aligned clients.
You want to create better packages that are the ultimate, most amazing experience you can offer and then easily sell your offers and learn the skills of high-end sales.
Are you ready to begin welcoming those 5-figure bookings and become a high-end-price service with clients who love you and are perfectly aligned with your unique solution?
“Let me tell you, it feels so good when you get the clients who really do love you and who you really do love back”.
It feels SO good and it makes you just want to keep doing it!
In part 1, I shared the first of my three-part process, ‘brand alchemy’, which was all about honing in on your magic and incorporating all of your superpowers into your brand, so you can be yourself, because once you're actually yourself, then you can really call in the people that you're meant to be working with.
If you want to have a successful photography or creative business that is unique in the market and can offer high-end priced experiences to people you love working with, this is where step 2 of my three-step process, ‘being seen’ by your aligned clients comes into play.
There are five mistakes I see creatives making in this stage, which greatly impact their success around having a business they feel good in and making more money.
You can't make money if your clients don't know who you are and you can't be a high-end price service if the people you're getting in front of aren't your target audience.
This is where my personal business motto of ‘better, not more’, really is important.
You don't need more leads or more clients, you need better leads and better clients. And you want to call them in with a better marketing system, not more marketing.
The first of the five mistakes I see on a regular basis is throwing spaghetti at a wall and not creating content with intention, in a quantity over quality way.
What I see people doing in their marketing is just creating content or whatever sorts of things they want to say or do and then hoping it works. Maybe if you're new to marketing and you're thinking ‘what are you talking about?’ Let me explain!
Marketing is just being able to communicate what you do, what your solution is to the right people.
That's really all marketing is!
Throwing spaghetti at a wall and just trying anything and everything and trying to make it work really ends up burning you out and it does not create actual success and/or make more money.
The second mistake I see is clients focusing only on seeing instant gratification and not looking at their ecosystem as a whole!
There is a long game and a short game in marketing and most creative entrepreneurs seem to only focus on the short term and try to get quick wins instead of building a sustainable and evergreen system. What we want to focus on here is the evergreen long life. ‘Let it kind of work for you’ type of marketing, with a little sprinkle of the short term, without focusing entirely on instant gratification.
You can either spend time growing your ecosystem, watering it, and letting it sprout and blossom, or you can focus your time on shiny objects and hopes of this instant gratification, in which case usually turns into a game of chase. The result of which only leaves you feeling confused and a little lost because you're trying all these things to try to fulfill the instant gratification part of your brain ( that little dopamine that's like, yes, I'm doing the right thing! ) instead of focusing on things that will really bloom and give you traction.
The third mistake I see is marketing without knowing, with absolute clarity who their aligned clients are.
Most people think marketing is kind of like yelling into the world who you are and why you're awesome, when in actual fact, effective marketing is centered around your clients, who they are, and what they need, not you.
When you don't know this, you're then trying to talk to everyone, which means you're resonating with no one.
The fourth mistake I see is creative business owners failing to know their brand and their positioning in the market.
For your marketing strategy to be effective in your photography or creative business, you need to know your magic and how you're positioned in the market alongside everyone else, so your aligned high-end clients clearly understand who you are and what you can do for them, which is why you need to know your target audience in the first place.
You must know these things in order to have effective marketing because marketing is not just creating content and screaming into the void for content’s sake, it's communicating to a very specific subset of people and letting them know you are the one for them!
Mistake Five. They either try to overcomplicate this or they don't even start.
For creatives who are not in the phase of their business to focus on scaling beyond what they can handle alone, you don't need to create complicated funnels, run ads, or try to put your focus into every single possible area you can.
For anyone in the creative world who doesn't know what a funnel is, a funnel is just a series of steps you create to move somebody from a lurker to a lead, and then a lead to a client in your business.
I’ve been seeing funnels starting to come into the wedding photography space now for the past two years, I would say and for most people, a complicated funnel of moving people through is 100% not necessary, especially for a service-based business where scaling means more of your time. Unlike if you were selling one digital product to many people, this is where a better, not more comes into play as well.
I know this is common advice to be everywhere all the time. The omnipresent marketing, if you will.
If however you don't have your brand fully alchemized and you don't have your aligned clients truly understood, or you are neurodivergent or a weirdy, then this strategy could leave you spread too thin. You’ll find that you’re not being effective anywhere and it’s a hundred percent not sustainable, which eventually leads to overwhelm and/or burnout. This inevitably then leads your actions into inaction, creating nothing, not doing anything, not marketing! In fact, you usually find yourself hiding at this point!
If you don't have at least one platform for your marketing locked in and working, then this advice is also not good for you. If you have all of these, that's a hundred percent not the advice for you!
It doesn't need to be complicated. You don't need to be everywhere all at once at one time, what you need to do is you need to know what works for you and where your aligned clients are, otherwise, your efforts will bring in clients not right for you, and you will not be effective anywhere. So it's a lot of wasted and unfocused energy and you aren’t actually creating any kind of community. You’ll have no ‘trust’ factor with anyone anywhere, which will directly impact step three of the process, which is ‘sell your unique solution’.
An example of this that I like to use as a success coach and sales expert for my wedding photographers is this:
For somebody like me, who is an introvert, who is neurodivergent, who has a very specific type of aligned client, my client would never, ever, ever be at a wedding trade show. I know without a shadow of a doubt that they would rather crawl out of their skin than go to something like that. And I too would rather crawl out of my skin than go to a trade show!
So my friend, If you are putting your efforts everywhere and following advice of being everywhere, your aligned clients aren't everywhere. So why do it? You don't need to do it!
The only way to make money as a high-end service and book higher paying clients in your photography or creative business is by mastering these three steps.
You literally can't make money if you don't sell your unique solution and create a paid client.
You can't sell the unique solution if you aren't being seen by your aligned clients, which is why going to a trade show if your aligned clients aren't at trade shows is futile! And, you can't be seen by your aligned clients if your brand isn't alchemized.
SO MY QUESTION TO YOU RIGHT NOW IS WHAT OF THESE MISTAKES MIGHT YOU BE MAKING?
Really reflect on your honest answers to yourself and don’t forget to check out part 3 of the process, coming shortly!
