← Book More Photography Clients Podcast | Photography Business, Photography Leads, Marketing
Book More Photography Clients Podcast | Photography Business, Photography Leads, Marketing
Don't Make This Mistake This Summer With Your Photography Business
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With summer in the air, your brain might already feel like it's on vacation. I want to encourage you in this episode not to make this crucial mistake in your photography business. This mistake we're talking about is the difference between those with fully booked calendars and those who are scrambling for bookings. I am so excited for this episode because it is going to change your business this summer. Here we go. 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 in 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. If you're a photographer that struggles with the feast or famine cycles already in your photography bookings, so what that means is you feel like you have seasons where you are doing really, really good with your leads and bookings, and you have other months or seasons where it feels like you're getting nothing or it's very little. That is called a feast or famine cycle. And one of the missions that I'm on and I've been on forever is to help you figure out how can I get more of a consistent cycle year round. I promise you, it's possible. It may not be possible all 12 months out of the year, but you can absolutely get out of this feast or famine cycle and get it to where you have more predictable and consistent income. So with that being said, here's the fatal mistake that I see photographers make. And this is a lot of business owners, but specifically for us photographers, we tend to slow down in the summer and take our foot off the gas. What that means is you stop showing up, you stop marketing. You kind of let everything fall to the wayside because you want to go have fun, you want to enjoy more of your life. And you know what? You should. But what if I told you that you could have the best of both worlds? Okay, you can have this wonderful photography business where you actually see bookings in the summer and you can enjoy all the summer activities with your family, with your kids, and have all of the downtime that you want you just have to find this balance and you have to continue to show up in your business. So I am going to walk you through step by step. How can you work part time hours in the summer, still have bookings, still be showing up for your business while you're having downtime and enjoying the sunshine? That's what we're talking about. Before I give you those strategies and all the practical things that you need to make this happen for you, I really want to explain why this is so important. When you choose to slow down or take your foot off the gas. And in your photography business, because of the summer, this is where you will see a delayed impact and you will be hurting for bookings the rest of the year. Now, a lot of you think that because the fall season, it means everyone is automatically going to be fully booked. I want to remind you that that is not necessarily the case. I know some photographers in the fall, it feels like you have an automatically booked calendar. It's super busy, it seems to be easier to get bookings and I would agree with that. But have you ever experienced being fully booked out for the fall on September 1st? That's where I want to get you to. And that's why if you can continue to show up, you can see bookings pop in even in the summertime before your fall season kicks off. You can even see winter bookings before the fall has even kicked off too, which I think is incredible. So I want to remind you of one of my favorite quotes out there, and I have probably botched this so many times, so I am just going to paraphrase. But the efforts that you take right now, you will feel it and see it in 90 days. So if you choose to slow down and take your foot off the gas in your photography business, then in three months when summer's over and you're ready for the bookings to come in, you're going to feel the quiet, you're going to feel the slowdown. And so while I do want you to sit back and enjoy your summer, I want you to get prepared for that first. Okay? So I am going to walk you through some amazing strategies that can help you continue to show up, get your name out there and really keep that top of the funnel full. So if you've never heard my funnel analogy, I want you to picture literally a funnel so you know it's big up, it's like an upside down triangle, okay? So it's larger at the top and it gets skinnier until you get to the bottom. Right? And so at the top of that funnel, what you're pouring in, right, what we're dumping into the top of that funnel, that's people. And the very first phase that people go through is awareness. They have to know that you exist. And so the minute that you stop showing up and you stop getting your name out there is the minute that now you have no one in your funnel. And if you have no one at the top, then you can't have clients at the bottom. So I'm hoping that's making sense. That is why you don't want to take your foot off the gas in the summer. But it doesn't mean that you have to work as many hours as you normally do to make that happen. So let me introduce you to your best friend for the summer, and that is batching. Batching is simply you doing, like, tasks in one setting and you're pumping a lot out of the same thing and you're getting a lot done. So, for example, this is you batching all of your emails to go out during the summer. You sit down for two hours, you write all the emails, you schedule all the emails, your hands off until September. Isn't that amazing? Is anyone like, oh, my gosh, I've never thought about that. That is so awesome. So I'm going to walk you through a couple things that you can batch that I want you to write down. Make this a note, get it on your calendar, and I want you to try to knock all of this out next week, if you can. Okay? It'll be the first week of June at the time that you're hearing this for you next week, right? Next week will be June. I want you to try to pump all this out so you can really sit back, relax and enjoy all of June, July, and August. So here's what I want you to focus on batching. The first one I already told you was your emails. If you send a monthly newsletter out, this is simply you batching three emails, scheduling them, and your hands off. Okay? If you want to do a little bit more in the summertime, since you're batching these, like, let's say you want to show up in people's inboxes every other Monday throughout the summer, then that is what you can sit down, draft up, schedule them, and you don't have to worry about it again, the second thing that you can batch is your social media content. And before you freak out and you're like, man, that's such a chore, I want to remind you a lot of people spend more time offline in the summer because they want to do what you're doing and that is they want to go on vacation, they want to scroll less, they want to be present with the people that they love and so they're not spending as much time on social media. Interrupting today's episode to tell you about our incredible podcast sponsor, the Contract Shop. 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Do you remember last summer, maybe June, July and you thought your views had tanked? You thought that your content was performing awful? It's just because more people are outside living their lives rather than inside scrolling the phone. Okay, so keep that in mind. What that means for you is that you can create way less content and still have it to where you are showing up and you're being consistent. So if you normally post let's say four to five times a week, well now guess what, you can get away with two to three posts a week. So I want you to try that higher quality content. Less is more. The third thing that you can batch is is your follow up emails. So what I mean here is if you have clients that you want to check in on or you have review request emails that you like to go out, go batch all of these, get them scheduled. Even if this is an email where you want to send a one off email to just one client, let's say you did their newborn session in. I'm not even going to do the math. Let's say you did their newborn session earlier this year and they are getting closer to a milestone session like a six month session or you want to offer a family session as six months and you want to reach out to that client, go ahead and craft up an email and Schedule it for a specific day to send and you can be completely hands off. I'm telling you, scheduling and batching is your best friend. The next thing that you can batch is all of your back end systems. So if you want to make sure that your CRMs, like all the emails, the workflows, etc. Maybe you want to update those a little bit or you want to put some things that you normally do manually, you want to put that on auto. This is a great option for you. The other thing that I want you to have ready to go and this is kind of batching in a way because you are putting multiple dates on the calendar. Have a summer booking calendar to where it is just a link you have to send somebody and the rest is automated. This will change your life. You'll be laying poolside and you might get a text or an email from an inquiry and you need to send them your booking calendar link. Like they want to book a session and you don't want to sit there and go back and forth. You can just be like, hey, I'm so excited that you want to book a session. Here is the rest of my availability for the summer. Go through there, get a session that works or find a date that works for you and I can't wait to work with you. And then you copy paste the link and you hit send and. And then they pick it up and you come back, you know, an hour later and you see, oh my goodness, they booked. Everything was automated. That is a game changer. It is the best feeling ever. You guys, the last thing that I want you to batch and this is not going to be a set it and forget it thing, but I just want to show you how you can still batch in real time. When it comes to editing, I want you to block out on your calendar like two days out of the week where that is going to be dedicated to editing. Or let's say that you're home with your kids in the summertime or you just have a different schedule. And so let's say that they're going to sleep later or they're going to take a longer nap. Maybe then you could schedule in like a two hour block where you are doing nothing and you don't get up for anyone or anything. Obviously, unless your kids need you and you dedicated those two hours to editing, you will get so much more done. Rather than trying to like edit a little bit, go answer an email like you're trying to multitask. This is just, nope, two hours. I'm going to do this the entire time that they're napping or before they wake up or whatever that looks like for you. That is how you can batch editing. You will get so much more done in that amount of time. Or this will also ease your mind. So let's say that you choose Tuesdays and Thursdays. You're going to find a three hour block and those are going to be your times to edit. And so you know, you guys cannot commit to anything on Tuesdays and Thursdays for that set amount of time. That's going to ease your mind knowing, okay, it's two days out of the week and for the other five, it's like, game on. We can do whatever we want to. So that's going to help you as well. So that is batching. That is the idea of batching and scheduling and all the things. It will change your life. My last tip for you is to create an autoresponder in your email account for the summer with summer hours. So if you've ever emailed someone and you've gotten back maybe like an out of office email or thank you for your email, we're currently on vacation, we will be back on such and such date, right? You're going to create one of those for your photography business for the next three months for June, July and August. And all it's going to say on there is hi, I just wanted to let you know your email has landed safely in my inbox. I'm currently on summer hours so I'm working a little bit less. Or you could say like, here are my summer hours from this date to this date. You can expect a response from. Here's some helpful links if you're looking for it. And in that email you can put contact form link or you could put your booking calendar link or your Google Business review link. Like just links that people might be asking for. You can kind of go ahead and put in there for those people that email you and then that way they can see like, okay, I know my email has gotten to her and she said that she responds Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays. Between this time and this time I'm good. That's going to help you not freak out over, oh, I have to get in my inbox, I have to check my email. I have to let people know that's going to take the pressure off and again, just allow you to enjoy your summer. So I know saying all of this and you listening to all of it, you're probably like, my head is spinning. This sounds great, but I don't even know where to start. Just start with your emails. Literally go down the order that I said and just pick one to do. Pick one thing for each day for the next seven, and you will have everything batched out. I know you can do this. Okay? I know you can do this. If you will commit. If you want to see more bookings from June through December, this is how you do it. Okay? This is how you do it. And this is how we can be really present without burning out. And we can have an amazing, profitable business and have an amazing personal life, too. Because again, what is all of this for if we don't have a life that we love? So I hope you're encouraged. I hope you're fired up. And if you end up doing this, you have to come tell me. I want to hear your wins. Brock, I just batched all my emails or I just did everything on that list that you gave us. I am so, so fired up for the summer. Please come tell me over on Instagram at Brooke Jana photo and I will see you on the next episode.