← Book More Photography Clients Podcast | Photography Business, Photography Leads, Marketing
Book More Photography Clients Podcast | Photography Business, Photography Leads, Marketing
The #1 Marketing Strategy Most Photographers Overlook
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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. Hey friend. Welcome back to the show. I'm so glad you pressed Play Play. Today we're going to be diving into something that could completely shift how you think about marketing your business. So often when we think marketing, we immediately think Instagram, TikTok ads, SEO. There's a million different ways that you can market and yes, every single one of those do matter and they do play a role. But there is one marketing strategy that is more powerful than all of those combined. And, and honestly, most photographers are overlooking it. That strategy is leveraging your past and current clients, AKA word of mouth. And I know what you're thinking, probably rolling your eyes, like how many times have we heard this before? Or you might even be thinking, oh wow, I was like really hoping this was going to be like marketing strategy that I could, you know, run off with and implement into my business. And good news is it is where I see photographers really overlook this is they think it's too simple or they think it's just asking for a review. But really, all of your other marketing strategies without this one are only going to take you so far. Here is why this is so huge. Word of mouth is directly tied to your leads and bookings. People trust their friends and family way more than they do, you know, an Instagram post or way more than they do when they see a sponsored ad come through. More than anything else, they're going to go to the people that they know, like and trust, ask for their recommendation and and 9 out of 10 times they're going to go with that. If you've ever had someone tell you, oh my gosh, my friend recommended you and I just had to book that's the power of Word of mouth in action. Now, how you boost word of mouth, how you get your past and current clients talking, goes all the way back to your client experience. And so I'M going to link a couple of client experience episodes and in the show notes so that after this, if you want to go, you know, do a refresher, make sure that you are confident in your client experience just to make sure you've got all of those boxes checked, you'll be able to do that quickly and easily. So those will be in the show notes. But specifically for today, I want to point out a couple of things. Your client experience really is the make or break in everything that you do. If you're not wowing a client for from the time they become a lead to the time they book with you all the way through until they have their their gallery and even beyond that, then you're going to have a really hard time getting them to even open their mouth and tell anybody about you. If you are not meeting their expectations, if you are, you know, not sticking to what your contract says, if you are not trying to be proactive in objections, hesitations and issues that might pop up throughout the entire experience, that is where you are going to be really hung up and you're not going to see as much word of mouth. Okay? So that is really important and that is why I want to redirect you back to listening to some older episodes about client experience because I break it down step by step for you as well. This is another thing that we go really deep on in the fully booked method and also I'm just going to plug it right here if you haven't heard. You can now take the fully booked method at your leisure. So anytime you are ready to go all in for eight weeks, get my personalized feedback. In your business you can do that. It's basically a one on one coaching package is kind of what it looks like. But there's no zoom calls. So you will get to complete your homework and go through the modules just like every other student did before you. And then you're going to submit that to me and then I'm going to create a video that is personalized to your business going over your homework and I'm going to send it back to you week by week for eight weeks. So if that is something that you are interested in getting the full A to Z on running a really profitable photography business, then go check that out. BrookeJefferson.com Fully booked. Okay, so back to word of mouth. Here's what I want to say and really highlight for you. It's not just about asking for a review or saying hey, if you know anyone looking for a photography session, send them my way, that's only scratching the surface. Word of mouth, like I said, it is fueled by that client experience that your clients have with you. But it also matters for how you are reaching back out to them, how you are marketing through all those other channels we talked about. You need to be bringing your client experience into your marketing because that ultimately is going to be how you encourage word of mouth. So think about it. From the second that they inquire to how you communicate with them, to how comfortable you make them during their session, all the way through gallery delivery and how you are marketing and spotlighting those people, which means showing off their session. Whether you're sharing sneak peeks or you're sharing a full post and showing some of your favorite pictures you took, or all of that is either building trust or it's breaking trust. That's why I say your client experience is the backbone of your word of mouth marketing. So how can you take your client experience, your really exceptional client experience and get clients to talk? And how can we show all of that in a marketing strategy? So bringing it back to social media, putting it in email marketing, like how do we take this and actually weave it into other marketing channels? The first way is to share more of your client stories. So talk about what happened at a session or take us behind the scenes and show us, you know, in real time. What does it look like to work with you? Did you have an upset kid as a family photographer and and were you able to overcome that and actually get really precious images? Share all of these behind the scenes moments because this is what is going to build trust. Not only are you telling us that you are a professional, amazing family photographer, but now we can see it. And this is going to work for your cold market and it's going to be a great reminder for your past and current clients of your abilities and it's going to trigger in their brains the experience that they had with you. Right. So when you pair these two things together, you have a higher likelihood that you are going to get a review or a referral from this type of marketing strategy. The second way is to highlight your testimonials and your reviews everywhere. This is not just going on your Google business, copying and pasting word for word what what a client said about you taking it into Canva, slapping it on a graphic and then posting it. Like that is the bare minimum way for you to share a testimonial. Yes, put them in Instagram posts, but like let's do more than just slapping what they said on a graphic and moving on, tell a story with it or talk about something that they were hesitant about that you helped them overcome and find peace with. And then also include pieces of their testimonial in it so you can sprinkle these into your captions. Definitely be putting them on your website. Share them in every single email you ever send out. This is something that I've recently started doing to where at the bottom, or maybe it's intertwined in the email, especially if I am trying to book out my calendar or I think I just recently did this for my Christmas mini marketing, I put in testimonials. So let your clients do the selling for you. Okay? So highlight their testimonials everywhere and then show the experience in action. So we don't just want to see the pretty final photos. We want you to share everything. We, we want to hear about the nerves, we want to hear about the grumpy dad. And this doesn't mean that you're putting your clients down. You're just, you're kind of in a generic way bringing something that is a common issue. So here's an example. And this is not for all men, okay? But as photographers and moms, I think we can agree that 99% of the time the dads are really not looking forward to the photo session. Does that mean he has to be a prick the whole time? Absolutely not. But I'm just saying, like when you have a dad coming to this photo session, I can promise you they can think of five better places they'd rather be. But with that being said, like that is a commonality to where you could talk about that situation without calling a specific client out, if that makes sense. So talking about things like that, showing the fun moments, let people see what it feels like to work with you and how you made your clients feel. So this is how we're going to take that client experience and we're taking the word of mouth and we're now putting it on social media. And anytime you can tag your clients, tag your clients because they are way more likely to share it. Whether it's share it to their story, reshare it to their feed, tag a friend. If they see it and they get that notification, there's a higher likelihood that they will share it. And then that is going to be shown to the people, those family, the friends, the coworkers that already like know and trust your client and you're going to get more people like that client. So this is how we are constantly generating this word of mouth marketing strategy. So here's my challenge to you. I want you to take a look at your client journey from start to finish. Where could you add a little extra something, right? What can you redo? I've really been working on this myself, especially with my automated workflows. You know, it had been a couple years since I had even changed the confirmation email. And so with the help of Chat GPT, right, you're able to like plug in what you have, ask ChatGPT to help you make it better, tell it exactly how you want, like the tone of the email, all the things. And so think about where could you communicate better, where can you make things simpler or easier? What is missing? What can you remove? Every single one of these touch points matter because it all is again, it's helping you build the trust rather than break it. And that is what is going to ultimately result in you constantly getting this word of mouth when you wow your clients. Word of mouth takes care of itself and it is the number one marketing strategy that you are probably overlooking. So I really want to encourage you lean all the way into word of mouth marketing. And again, if you want to take this so much deeper and you don't just want to scratch the surface here, you want to go all the way, learn every strategy and everything you could possibly ever need, then come sign up for the fully booked method and let's work on your photography business together. Let's make it the best it's ever been, the most profitable it's ever been, and the most peaceful business you've ever experienced. I will catch you on the next episode.