A (4:12)
There's a classic, you know, saying in marketing that goes something like when everyone else is zigging you zag. And like I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, back in 2010, when I started my business, the way to zag was to create a beautiful website and start a blog and show up on social media. But that is now. The zig content is not novel. And with the rise of AI, content's authenticity is under more and more scrutiny. Right? It's less trustworthy than ever. So at some point I feel like we have to get off the hamster wheel and ask ourselves, do I have a photography business where part of the job is marketing, or do I have a marketing business where every once in a while I get to go take photos? And if you feel trapped in this particular catch 22, you are not alone. I think that our entire society is coming to this tipping point where we are all burning out on the content machine. Not just those of us who are being told to create content, but everyone out there who is being forced to constantly consume it. Now, don't get me wrong, I am not saying that content is dead. I don't think the need to create content is going to disappear anytime soon. And I'm not suggesting that you should close your social media accounts and chuck your computer into the leak. But I do think that there is a way to zag in your marketing that doesn't involve trying to go viral. Right? As photographers, our marketing goals are finite. We are not in the business of selling to as many people as possible. Our availability is fixed if by Nothing other than the number of hours in the day. So even the busiest full time photographers generally aren't shooting more than a couple hundred clients a year. And most of us have goals that are much smaller than that. 80 family clients a year completely paid all of my bills and did everything I needed it to do in an amount of time that was manageable. So your numbers are your numbers, but they are not infinite. And most of us are booking local clients, right? People who live nearby or are visiting nearby. So our reach doesn't need to be global. It's not that we are trying to sell to everyone, we are just trying to find a certain number of people in a certain place. And in the wide world of marketing, those are very achievable goals. And despite what you know, Mark Zuckerberg would have you believe those goals, meeting those Goals doesn't require 10,000 followers or a million views on the last reel that you made. What it does require is trust. And the good news is that truly the best way to establish trust with a small number of people in a, you know, generally small area geographically is to do the thing that we have been told isn't marketing. That doesn't feel like marketing, which is to show up in real life. And I'm not just talking about, you know, hosting mini sessions or other photography events or going to networking meetings to hand out business cards. Obviously those things can be great, they certainly count. But I am talking about living your life in your local community. Volunteering to read at story time, coaching your kids soccer team, joining a local running group or a book club, attending community board meetings or town hall open houses, starting a local creative mornings meetup for artists, designers and photographers. I mean, the list can go on and on. And those things aren't marketing with a capital M, but they are activities that put you out in your community and allow you to build trust organically. Because they give people a chance to see who you are as a person. They see how you show up, they see how you listen, how you support your community. They recognize what your values are. What, without you having to come up with like a clever carousel that talks about your values, they see them in practice and they see you potentially as someone that they like spending time with, someone they trust. Now every marketing guru in the world can agree on the fact that people hire people they trust. And the only reason that they're not encouraging you to go join the PTA is because there's no marketable, sellable goal there, right? They're not going to make money on you joining the pta. But I really, truly believe that in just about any business, but certainly in our business, trust is one of the biggest barriers to booking. It's not how much you charge, it's not what you include in your packages all on its own. Being photographed is this vulnerable place for most people. They look forward to it. They like. They look forward to going to the dentist, right? Never mind the added vulnerability of spending a lot of money, inviting someone to spend their wedding day with them or hold their newborn or come into their house or whatever the case may be. People want to believe that they are going to get photos they love and that doing so isn't going to be painful. But actually believing that truly requires a lot of trust. So hopefully you're out there nodding your head and saying, yes, screw the system. This is the year that I'm going to unplug from the matrix and go live my life and grow that organic referral network out there that everybody's talking about. But here's the catch. You still have to check the content box. Not create an endless amount of it like Zuckerberg is selling, but enough so that when that organic referral network does its job and serves up your name to a new potential client, when the first thing they do is look up your website or your Instagram, your online presence has to meet some kind of standard, right? They need to be able to peruse your blog posts and see the answers to the questions that they've been wondering about. They need to be able to open up your social media feed and see that you are busy and. And that other people are hiring you so that they know that you know their cousin Monica isn't the only person who trusts you and recommends you. They need to be able to see, in other words, that you are legit. But it doesn't have to be content for days, and it doesn't need to be 10,000 followers, and it doesn't need to be viral reels. So this is the crux of today's episode. How do you create enough content day after day, year after year? Because you're going to have to keep doing this from the day you open your business until the day that you stop taking clients. How do you continue to do that without spending all of your time and creative energy and without burning yourself out? And the way that you do that is to create this marketing system, right? A system that defines exactly what you need to create and then gives you a simple, repeatable way to get that done so that you can do it in every season of Your business busy season, slow season, six season, vacation season. Your marketing job is like laundry. It will never be done, but you can put a container around it so that it doesn't become your entire world. Now, there are a million ways that you can build a marketing system, but the last thing that I want after listening to this episode is for you to get lost trying to crack that code. So if you don't have a system that is currently serving up plenty of clients for you in a way that feels manageable year round, I want to share with you the system that I've been more or less using for my 15 plus years as a photographer and that I have now been teaching for six plus years as an educator. I have seen so many marketing trends come and go in my time in this industry and I have truly come to believe that when you are looking to market a photography business, the content piece of that really comes down to three things. So let me walk you through this system because it's the one that I use, the one that I teach, and the one that I recommend to basically everyone. The first piece of that system is blog content. Blog posts, right? Blog posts were in for a while at the beginning of my career and then they went out for a while. But that was when they went out. It actually wasn't that they disappeared. It was that the strategy behind blog posts totally changed. They went from being something that you wrote for humans to being something that you wrote kind of for Google. And then I feel like what's happened is that that has come back around and now when you create long form content like blog posts or podcasts, actually this is a great example of long form content that does a lot of marketing work in my business. It's just that most photographers don't need a podcast because it's a lot more work than a blog post. But a blog post serves two purposes. Not only does it live on your website and position you as a thoughtful expert in your field. To anybody who comes to your website and wants to do some poking around, right? It's there to answer questions. It shows off photos with a little bit more storytelling context around it. It can really build trust. But it also does improve your SEO, so your reach on Google and other search engines. But it's now also being used by large language model AI, so ChatGPT and Claude and all that sort of thing to find information about how photography works. So when people go into those and they're asking questions about how do I, you know, choose my outfit for an upcoming family session? Chatgpt doesn't know the answer to that question. It's going out and looking for content. And the vast majority of the content that it's looking for is a good blog post that gives good information. You are an expert. And by creating good blog content, you are serving not just the potential clients who are visiting your website, but also the search engines that are out there that are going to deliver your website or your social media up to the people who are looking for that content. So blog posts are a lot of work, but they are evergreen in a way that short form content like social media just cannot achieve. So I think that that is a non negotiable piece of your marketing strategy and your content creation strategy. The second piece is email, and I hate calling this the second piece because you all know that I am a huge fan of email marketing. It's a free, more or less free, direct line to people who have already said yes. You know, they've already invited you into their inbox. So it's permission based, it doesn't rely on algorithms, it's more personal, it's more intimate. You can have conversations there and it builds loyalty in a way that just about anything else outside of being in person can't. Plus, every study out there shows that it is the highest converting tool that that basically any marketer has in their inbox. So even just sending a monthly newsletter or a seasonal promo can be a game changer. The reason that I put it second after blog posts is because it is smaller. It takes less effort to create an email than it does a blog post. And so if you start with the blog post, then elements from that blog post can then be used to build your email. So I guess I'm not putting them in order of importance so much as I am putting them in order of effort. First, create a blog post, put all that work into it, and then break that down into a couple of emails. And then after you've written your emails, the third step is your social media. Social media is where I take these ideas that I've already developed for my blog and my emails and I break them down even further into these smaller, bite sized, shareable pieces that then feed back to, hey, go visit my blog, hey, sign up for my email newsletter. Because instead of reinventing the wheel every time that I need to post, I am using what's already working. And I'm keeping it light, I'm keeping it fast, I'm keeping it easy. So social media shouldn't be the heart of your system, it should just be a Part of your system. So you've got, let's say a blog post every month. Two is great if you can achieve it. But I think one quality blog post a month is a great place to start. You break that into two to three emails per month. So every other week you're sending out an email and then you're posting. And posting can be done anywhere from three to five times a week. But I really do feel like no matter what the algorithm is trying to force you to do, quality content beats quantity any day. It's better for trust, it's better for your business, and it is certainly better for your time and your mental well being. But even that I recognize is a lot, right? It is a lot of content. And depending on if you are particularly into creating content, if you're a naturally strong writer, these things can take more or less time. I love to write and I feel like I'm pretty good at it, but I'm not fast at it. And it can be a heavy lift, certainly during your busy seasons or when you're trying to get ready to go out of town for a couple of weeks to make sure all of that stuff is in place so that it can continue working for you in the background, which is how marketing needs to work. The good news, and maybe this is a little controversial, is that unlike before we, when you would have to spend a lot of money to get professional help with copywriting or social media strategy or anything like that to really speed the process up, we now have tools, thanks to AI, that can help basically for free. And I want to say just right out front, I love AI. I use it almost every day. But it has been a journey and a learning process. When I first started messing around with AI, like I'm sure a lot of you, I was pretty underwhelmed, right? I would ask it to write a blog post. I would even give it the whole prompt, song and dance, like you're a professional photographer and an expert copywriter, blah, blah, blah. And what came back was boring, inaccurate, felt robotic, like all that sort of stuff. So initially I just wrote it off and was like, well, that's terrible. Back to writing everything myself, right? But over time I realized that the problem wasn't the tool, but rather the approach. You can't use a sledgehammer when you need a scalpel, right? And if you start with generic input, you are going to get generic output. So I then dove into learning how to do this better and have really come around on using AI, but taking a human first approach. So that means Instead of asking ChatGPT, like, what should I blog about this month, you start with your own stories, right? Your client questions, your little observations, your. The conversations that you've actually had that have sparked, sparked ideas. And hopefully you're jotting those down when they happen, right? You're keeping a notes app or an airtable or whatever to save those things for a rainy day when you need them. That's like the first step of the system, and that's the human part. That's the important part. Then ideally, you build a solid brand profile, something that teaches AI in a really comprehensive way. How you communicate, how you write, what you care about, what your voice is, your tone, your values, your sense of humor. Like, even things like your location and the types of sessions that you shoot so that it can be more effectively standing in as you, right? And once all of that is in place, then you've got a foundation so that you're not reinventing the wheel every time. You're not just saying, you know, write something for me. You're saying, here's what I want to talk about. Here are a couple of related stories. Help me draft this. And because it knows your voice and because it understands kind of a bigger context, that's when it actually starts to save you time. And honestly, once you get this working, it feels like magic. Like you just wave your AI wand and poof blog post. But if you have tried doing that on your own, certainly. But even, I mean, I have taken a lot of courses and, you know, gone through a lot of programs to try and figure out how to do this, and. And it's not simple. Maybe it will be at some point, but right now it still requires a lot of work to get it to a place where it's truly saving you time. I was joking with somebody the other day about how I feel like AI fits the same mold as that thing that people say about plastic surgery about you only notice the bad kind, right? Because when it's good, you don't even realize that it's there. It just blends in. It's the same with AI. You notice the cringy stuff, and because of that, you kind of assume that it's all bad. But the really good AI assisted writing, you just don't even know it's there. You didn't even realize it was AI assisted because it isn't creating it is just you on your best day. So again, I spent a lot of time figuring out how to do that in my own business. And when I got to a Place where it was actually working, where it felt like that magic wand. Obviously the next step in the process for me was like, how do I create this in a way that other photographers can use this to help them with their businesses? So that's what we did in the Consistency Club last summer. We built and rolled out the Blog Builder, which is a tool that basically walks you through creating that deep, detailed brand profile which you only do once. And then each month you choose from these curated blog topics that we do a bunch of research on, figuring out what people are actively searching for. You can choose one of those, you can pick your own. We're constantly updating the list and, and then depending on which topic you choose, you answer a few quick questions to give the AI tool your experience, your opinions, your recommendations, all that sort of stuff. And then all the Blog Builder is doing is taking your answers and your brand profile and creating a blog post. And those blog posts honestly sound like you wrote them from scratch because they're based on your ideas, your tone and your voice. We have run these posts through multiple AI detectors and most of them show a 0% AI generated text result. Sometimes it's like 5 or 8%, but usually it's zero. And even more importantly, our users love it. Right? This has been honestly like the biggest accelerator for the Consistency Club and for the people in the Consistency Club since we started. So if you are a member, hopefully you've already tried the Blog Builder and you know that this is an amazing tool. If you aren't in the Consistency Club, you know, find somebody who is, ask them how it's going. People have been blown away by the quality and I am sorry. I feel like I've rambled on about this a little bit, but I'm just so proud of what we built. But more than anything, I'm excited at what this means for those of us who are out here trying to create so much content and keep up with these ever growing needs. I feel like high quality tools that don't cost an arm and a leg are really hard to come by. So if you haven't checked it out yet, go to this can't bethard.com club sign up for a month, take it for a spin. It's very low risk and whether or not that's the right tool for you, right, Whether you use our tool, whether you find another one, whether you go all in on AI or keep it old school, the big picture goal here is the same. So this is where I want to leave you, right? Marketing your business isn't optional. Whether you like it or not, this is a task that every photographer has on their plate, but that doesn't mean that it has to consume your time, your creativity, and your sanity. The content race probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon, I'm sorry to say, but you don't have to run it the same way that everyone else does. By creating a well oiled content system, you will take back control and achieve your marketing goals while maintaining clear boundaries around the time and energy that you give to content. And that makes space for this thing that is so much more powerful, which is real human connection. So this year I want you to expand your definition of marketing to include coffee dates and community events and story time and school pickup and saying yes to that casual happy hour invite. Not because I want you to disappear from the online world, but because I want you to focus at least as much on being visible in the real world. So go build your system. Get clear on what needs to be created and what doesn't. Then find tools that help you speed up the process in a way that feels authentic and true to you. And most of all, do not let the content machine steal the joy from your business. If this is the year that you are able to cut your screen time, the screen time that you spend on your business in half, then I will consider my job as a podcaster complete. Have a great week.
