← Book More Photography Clients Podcast | Photography Business, Photography Leads, Marketing
Book More Photography Clients Podcast | Photography Business, Photography Leads, Marketing
Feeling the Pressure to ‘Do It All’? Here’s What Actually Moves the Needle
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Are you feeling the pressure to do it all? Here's what actually moves the needle in your photography business. This back to school season has brought a lot of pressure on me, and I'm assuming it's brought a lot of pressure on you because it feels like we are just juggling all the things and jumping from one thing to another. And that's not even including just our business. That's literally just everything that's personal life, business life, all the things. And it can cause this overwhelm to where just want to do the bare minimum. And I'm going to be the first to tell you, I get it. I absolutely get it. As a recap on my own personal life of what's been going on this summer. We ended up moving to a new town. Kids are transferred into new schools. My husband started a new job. I started a new marketing job, which is like my dream marketing job. I work three days a week currently. And then on top of that, I have, you know, technically two other parts of my business. I have the photography side, just like you. And I have the educating side and coaching side, which is what I'm doing right now with you. It's a lot. Okay, It's a lot. And it took us a solid four to five weeks to finally feel like we could have our head above water. When we moved into our house, we actually had to move right back out due to a sewer line issue. And it's just been a lot. So I'm here to say that I can tell you like never before that I understand this pressure of feeling like you cannot keep up with your business. And so I hope that this episode will do a couple of things, but really if anything, just encourage you that you're not alone and to give you a roadmap and permission that you don't have to do everything that you see everyone else doing and how you can just do the essential things and still thrive in your business. So let's get into it. 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 and 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. Okay, so you are probably thinking in your own business, not even including all the personal things like we just talked about, but just think about in your own business. There's so much to do. Right? Most of you are a solo business owner, meaning that you are everything. You know those reels on Instagram, that little trend that went around where it was like, let me introduce you to the team over here at Brooke Janae Photography. And then it was the photographer would literally be in every. Would be all the whole team, from the custodian to the admin assistant to the owner. You know what I mean? Okay. That is literally us. That is me too. I am a. I do not have a single team member at this time. I have for the last 10 years and I pretty much had to cut it all and go back to scratch when we moved and started the job and just all the things. So I am doing it all. I am doing my own marketing. I am the. I'm obviously the photographer. I edit my own images. I am the administrative assistant. I do it all just like you. And it is a lot. And specifically, let's zoom in to just talking about the marketing overwhelm that is so real. And I bet you are feeling it right now, especially if you don't have a good rhythm of batching anything or pre planning post or if you took the summer off and you kind of hit pause on a lot of the marketing you were doing for your business so you could pour back into your family and spend time with your kids and go on the vacations and all the things. And I love that for you. But now we have to get back on the bus and we have got to steer our business in the right direction, especially when it comes to marketing. So you could do all the things. You could do the reels and the email and the blogging and the Pinterest and the local collaborations and all of it. And I want you to eventually get to a place where you can have seven different marketing avenues. But I know if I asked that of you right now, you would literally throw your hands up and you would walk away from this podcast. And so I'm not going to ask you to do that. What I want to remind you of today are things that are essential and are the backbone of your business. The things that I would pour my time and attention into right now in this season, and then when you circle back around to a slower season, then you can pick up some other ways to market your business and you can redo your back end and you can do all these things that you probably need to do anyway. So let's talk about your three most powerful tools in your business. And you're. It's not going to be what you think it is. Okay, here it is. Number one, it is your face. You are the face of your business. And if you're not showing your face in any of your marketing avenues, if you do anything else, this is the one. People want to know who you are. They want to know if they can relate to you. They want to know what your personality is like. And like, we don't have yellow pages anymore. People don't just look up a photographer and usually just blindly go into it. They usually are looking for a photographer and they'll follow a couple that they're considering hiring and then one of them will eventually push them off the edge and they will go with that one. I want you to show your face because you essentially are your own brand and you are what people are going to use as their determining factor to hire you. So if that makes you nervous, go back and listen to other marketing episodes and branding episodes where we talk about this. But I'm telling you, your number one tool in your own business is your face. The second thing is your words. It's what you're saying, how you're saying it, and how often you're saying it too. So think about your post and your captions. Specifically, what is it that you are saying? Are you just typing things into Chat GPT, copying and pasting and throwing it up as your caption? Or are you taking the time to personalize and really get captions and videos and reels that actually sound like you and your brand? Everybody is using chatbots and I'm not knocking it again if you've been here long enough. You know, I have Chat GPT episodes and I teach in the Fully Booked method. I teach how to utilize Chat GPT in the right way for your business prompts and all because it is an amazing tool and I probably use it every single day. Where I want you to be careful is I don't want you just taking exactly what it spits out at you and using that because everyone is doing that and you're blending in. And I'm sorry, but we can smell Chat GPT a mile away if you don't know how to use it correctly. So your words and the way that you're speaking, whether you're on your stories and you're talking out loud or whether you're typing it, however you're using your words, they matter. They absolutely matter. And it is a powerful tool that you have because nobody can speak or write like you can. Now, the third most powerful tool is in your business that you're probably underutilizing Are your past clients. Those that have already said, yes, I want to use or yes, I love or yes, I had an incredible experience, or him Shout out to the guys listening, utilize those past clients. Utilize their testimonials. Utilize the things that they send you. Utilize them for bringing you referrals and new clients. Absolutely. Utilize your past clients. So now let's talk about the difference between optional versus essential. This little phrase right here is what I want you to burn into your brain this entire season. Okay, optional versus essential. What are the optional things that you could be doing in your business versus what are the bare bone essentials that you need to be doing so that you can be consistent, cohesive, and serving people to the best of your ability? There's going to be a marketing tool somewhere in here that is going to be essential. And this is going to be the primary method of marketing that you choose. For some of you, it is going to be social media, but for some of you, it's going to be something different. So pick what's essential to you. What are the things that you absolutely have to have? Now, spoiler. In the next episode that I'm going to record for you, I'm actually going to give you guys a checklist. Just like a quick little checklist for you to just say, yes, I have that. Oop, I need to fix that. Oh, I need to put that somewhere. You're going to get a checklist and I think it's really going to help you because these are going to be the essential things you have to have. Let me give you a couple of optional things. A YouTube channel is completely optional. Marketing on Pinterest is completely optional unless you've already cracked the code and it is your number one source of your leads and your clients. That's the difference. What do you need to be doing in this season that is an absolute necessity versus what is something that you want to eventually do, but you need to put that on the shelf until a later season. I want you to take some time today and really think about that. What's bare bones and essential for you to survive, for you to be consistent, cohesive, and serve to the best of your ability to Versus what are some things that you could put on A list that you could pick up when things slow down. And the last thing that I want to remind you of here is to give yourself permission to just be imperfect. Not lazy, not sloppy. That's not what we're talking about. But you do not have to wait until everything is perfect in your business. You're never going to have the perfect logo, the perfect branding, the perfect editing. It's never going to happen because we are creative people, first of all. But some of us are even competitive, okay? We will always have a drive to get better and better and better. Most people don't want to stay the same year after year after year after year. And if you're listening to this, I know you don't want to stay the same because you listen to this podcast to give you that inspiration, give you the tools, give you the advice. So I want you to be very careful to not get caught up in perfection, because all it does is it causes you to pause and shut down. And I'm speaking from experience. So give yourself permission to be imperfect, to market imperfectly, to edit imperfectly. Again, not lazy, not sloppy, not incorrect. But you're. Again, you don't have to have this perfection standard because you're never going to meet it. So if you're feeling the pressure of doing it all, I hope after this episode, you're able to just take a deep breath, let it out, let your shoulders drop. You're going to feel better, because you're going to make you a list of things in your business that are essential, and you're going to throw in those three most powerful tools. Your face, your words, and your past clients. And you are going to do it to the best of your ability. Not perfectly. You're going to do it imperfectly. But as long as you are showing up and you're putting one foot in front of the other, you are that much closer to the profit and the booking goals that you have for yourself. I hope it encouraged you today, and I will see you on the next episode. It.