← Book More Photography Clients Podcast | Photography Business, Photography Leads, Marketing
Book More Photography Clients Podcast | Photography Business, Photography Leads, Marketing
Booked Out by October? Here’s What to Promote Right Now
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Ready to be booked out by October. In this episode I am going to walk you through some key points on what you want to be promoting, when and how so that you can achieve a fully booked calendar for the rest of 2025. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Book More Clients Photography Podcast. You can stop spending hours on Google and YouTube because you just found your number one resource for growing a profitable and sustainable photography business. Hi, I'm Brooke Jefferson. I'm a believer wife, mama to two and Oklahoma family photographer. I left the classroom in 2018 to pursue my photography career full time. Now I'm here to help you do the same. In this podcast we're covering the most asked about topics including pricing, marketing, client experience, and all things systems and workflows. You won't find any fluff or BS here. Just tried and true strategy. Are you ready? Grab your kids some snacks and charge those camera batteries. It's time to jump in. Photographers often wait too long to market certain types of sessions, especially mini sessions. This is something that I see a lot of times a photographer client of mine will come up with an idea for a mini session, but it will be from two or three weeks from the time they think of it to the time that they want to do it. And unfortunately to two to three weeks is just not going to be enough time to fully book something out. You want to have well thought out plans and well thought out runways in order to hit your booking goal. And this doesn't just apply to mini sessions, this is regular sessions as well. So I want to go through a couple of key points for you. Today's episode is going to be super short and sweet because I just want it to be a reminder for you and I also want it to light a fire under you to actually go take action in your business so you can have the bookings and the profit that you want. So the first thing that I really want to instill into you is that promoting early matters and it's because people need enough time to one see what you are promoting, see what you are marketing and make a decision. And also in order for you to have a really amazing client experience where that client is going to fall in love with you as a photographer and your experience, they need enough time to have that experience with you. So if you're trying to really create these loyal clients and get them to book you at full price, you need to give plenty of time for marketing, planning and then for the session to actually happen. So you want to have a pretty large Runway. This is why? I'm a huge cheerleader on planning out your year. And not just your whole year. It's more like a year at a glance. So in January, it is totally normal for you to not know every little thing that you're going to do this year. For some of you, that's very unrealistic for you to plan 12 months in advance. And I understand that. It's more like you're setting yourself up for success by jotting down ideas that you want to see happen. That way, you're not constantly coming up with these ideas and having to market at the last minute. Now, as you move forward in the year, you're able to plan 90 days in advance, which is really the sweet spot you want to be in. So when you're trying to book up your fall calendar, you really want to start hitting that Runway at the very beginning of July. Now, I know when you're hearing this, it's already August, and I don't want you to panic. This is more to give you that reminder and give you that push that it's still possible for you. And that's why we're talking about October giving you two months, rather than, you know, me putting this right before October and you feeling like you're having to scramble and that this is like an unrealistic checklist. So all of that being said, if you want to do Christmas sessions or Christmas minis or anything like that around November and December, right now, you need to start coming up with this Runway. So this is letting your audience know you know and asking them, polling them, seeing if this is something that they want. You don't have to have signups ready right now, but you want to start priming your audience and your past clients. You want to start letting them know what's coming right now, because you've got to plant that seed, and then you're going to continue to water that seed through all of your marketing avenues all the way up until it actually happens. So think of this idea as planting a seed and watering a seed. That is really how you are going to set yourself up for success. So my whole point on point number one, is I want you to promote early enough. You want to give them enough time so that you can market, you can warm them up, you can get them to sign up, and you can help them with the planning before their session. The second point, if you are wanting to really fill up your calendar, whatever that means to you, you know, for me, that could be eight to 10 sessions, and for you, it could just be four it doesn't mean that we're any any better than the other, less valuable than the other person. You have goals, and I have goals. So whatever fully booked is to you, one of the best ways to make that happen is by building urgency into your marketing. We've talked about this before, especially if you're a longtime listener, urgency does not have to be false marketing, and I never want you to do that. What I'm saying is, how can you plan for urgency in what you are offering? For example, if you have a limited amount of sessions you can take this fall. Now, whether that is six sessions total or 45 sessions total, that doesn't matter. You know that you have a limited number of sessions that you can take on, and that in and of itself is urgency. So you need to talk about that. What I like to do when I'm talking about fall specifically, is I like to talk about how everybody knows it's the most popular time of the year. Everybody is racing to get their family session in, or they're, you know, whatever your niche is, they're. They're racing to get it in. And so for me, I have to tell them, like, yes, this is the most. Like, this is my busiest time of the year. And so if you want a spot, I'm only taking X amount of sessions this month and X amount of sessions this month. That way they can go, oh, okay, she only has six sessions for October. Well, that's when I'm wanting to do our family photo, so I need to go ahead and get on her calendar. So that is building urgency. Urgency can be limited amount of spots. It could be countdowns. So maybe you have a cutoff time. You know, if you're wanting a September session, you have to have it booked by, let's say, August 10, for example. That's an example of urgency as well. And then, of course, you can get as fancy as you want. You can throw in extras. And so let me give you an example. You could say for the first three people that book, you know, your session for the fall, I'm gonna throw in X, Y, or Z. That could be. I'm gonna throw in, you know, a free photo box of prints, or I'm gonna throw in 10 extra edited photos, whatever that is. You can get fancy with it if you want to. You don't have to by any means. A lot of times, a countdown and limited spots is all the urgency people need to get off the fence and make a decision to book with you. So build urgency into your marketing. What can you say? Or what? That's going to give someone that fomo, right? That's going to go, man, if I don't book this, I'm going to miss out. So think about what you can be doing to build urgency now when it comes to marketing. And actually in the next episode that I'm going to record for you, we're going to talk a little bit about the marketing overwhelm and how to make it sustainable and all the things. But really quickly, I just want to touch on this. When you're marketing, when I say that you're marketing, I'm not just talking about social media. And that's where I really need you to get out of your head and out of your comfort zone. And I need you to commit to other ways of marketing because I'm going to tell you right now, based on everything that I've seen in my own over a decade of owning a photography business, marketing changes the most out of anything else. But specifically social media marketing is what changes me. Posting something on my Facebook photography page is very different than what it used to be 10 years ago. I used to be able to post something and everybody would see it and I would be booked out within like the first couple of days of that post going out. Now I'm lucky to have, you know, a select handful actually see it and do something with that post. So we have to get creative in other ways of marketing. So I want you to really think about how can I stretch myself outside of just using social media? What are two other things that I can do to try to warm my audience up and get them to sign up for my fall sessions? Okay, so to recap, we talked about you need to be promoting early enough that you're going to give people enough time to see it and give them enough time to give them an incredible experience with you. The second thing is to build in that urgency and the third thing is to really challenge yourself to do more than just marketing on social media. I believe in you and I know you can book out your calendar. And I'm going to give you one little bonus tip. If you've made it this far, you get the bonus tip. My bonus tip for you is be very careful that you are only marketing one specific thing at a time. You don't want to sound like a ping pong ball on Monday talking about a mini session on Tuesday, talking about book your family session on Wednesday talking about booking a wedding with you. You don't want to be that person because you're going to confuse your people. So think about what is my number one goal for August, what's my number one goal for September, and what is my number one goal for October? And go all in and only talk about that for three to four weeks to really drive that urgency and really get somebody off the fence. And again, it does not have to be just social media posts. Okay? That's the bonus tip. On the next episode, we're going to talk a little bit about marketing and feeling the pressure of having to do it all. So I'll see you on the next episode.