Frame a new Marketing View with One Word
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Marketing is often the scary cousin that appears when you decide to start a photography business. You hear the word everywhere and need to do something with it to advance. We must market to find clients. We must market on FB groups, in IG feeds, on Pinterest posts. But it scares the pants off of us because we struggle to know what it truly means and how to use it.
The scariest part is that we feel and believe that marketing is very personal. We are selling our art and we tie it so heavily to our self-worth that we feel we are selling ourselves — our insides — and a poor job at that because we aren’t really equipped to even know how to do that. And when we feel uncertain with our art and don’t feel worthy, our efforts will reflect that and we don’t manifest what we want. It feels that it’s just you putting yourself out there, vulnerable, for all to see, and trying to convince people to pretty-please book with you and give you some money for it.
Marketing is an established field and discipline
Yes, we are involved in our efforts to build a business and get booked, but marketing is a discipline taught at schools to the highest levels of education. I googled the number of marketing agencies in Canada and the US and the number is close to 28,000 combined (around 14k in the US and just less than that in Canada). There are even PhD marketing programs! It’s not just you. It’s an industry. A teachable industry complete with concepts and theories, case-studies, best practices, measurement, research and development. I worked a 15-year career in a marketing agency (and now still do, just for myself!) and thousands make it a lifetime career. It’s not personal, it’s business. And anyone can learn it, even if they don’t go for the PhD level!
Re-frame your marketing view
I am going to give you another word to pair with marketing, to re-frame your view. Similar to this one-word swap that can transform your view on starting a business, this word modifies and clarifies the definition of marketing and allows you a new, or at least expanded perspective. It can motivate you to adjust the trajectory of your business, remove the fears, beat back the impostor and get to work on a plan. What is the word?
System.
Here is the American Marketing Association’s (yes, there are large marketing associations too!) definition: “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
In other words, marketing is a system. A system that has inputs, processes, outputs, measurable results. Systems can be implemented, automated, scaled and replicated. You can create a system for 100 people and scale it for 100 thousand people.
Your camera is a photographic system. Once you learn how to set up and manipulate the system, you apply it in the field to achieve good imagery. Marketing is a system. Once you learn how to set up and manipulate the system, you can use it in the field to achieve clients. If you are capable of learning your camera system, then there is absolutely ZERO REASON that you cannot learn a marketing system to support what you want to do with your camera.
Marketing system set-up for photographers
As with any system, you must define the inputs, processes, outputs and measurable results. For us it goes something like this:
People need to know we exist
We show people the value of our products and services
People book to receive those products and services
We evaluate what worked and what didn’t, and adjust
Awareness moves to desire which moves to booking, then you evaluate and do it again. This describes a system of 4 parts. So now, for each of those parts, you design strategies to fulfill them.
Awareness: websites, social media platforms, advertising, etc.
Desire: Brand messaging, content, communication, education, etc.
Booking: Calls to action, closing, etc.
Evaluation: How many people saw or entered your system? How many booked? What was the most popular product or service? How much was the average transaction? Was there upsells? Did people return for more services?
If you were hired at a marketing agency then you would do these things with personal flair perhaps, but from a professional standpoint and not a personal one. You would do it objectively for whomever needed and was paying for these services. You would be paid by an employer to design the systems and then work on executing them.
Marketing is scary because we throw the word around in an overly general way that lacks specificity. A marketing system is much more grounded and accessible and implies there are objective parts that you can identify, create and maintain. Ask yourself: what is my marketing system to build awareness? What is my system for imparting the value of my services? What is my system for booking? What is my system for evaluating success? This should help lead the way to creating a marketing plan that gets you where you need to be!
If you need help designing and building your system, book a one-on-one call today and we work through it together.
Can you “see” my system?
Often when speaking to photographers in a group setting, I hear that the frustration is learning concepts but not being taught how to translate theory into practice. That’s the bridge many of us can’t cross. So if you didn’t glean it already, I’m going to reveal the marketing system I am using at this very moment:
Awareness:
Creating this blog post is an awareness tool. It has keywords so that it would come up in search results when someone like you googles search terms around the topic of marketing for photographers. I send an email notification to my email list every time a blog post is published, to raise awareness that there is new content. I create pin on Pinterest for anyone using their search function or to increase odds of appearing in Google searches. I will likely do an add-on video for my Youtube channel so people can find me there too and in my private Facebook group of over 6,000 photographers.
Desire:
Within the body of this blog, I have provided valuable content around marketing, to help those who sought and found it through my awareness efforts. I do it with my brand voice (the ShineSparkL voice is an uplifting, positive, and down-to-earth one), and through education. You are learning and perhaps feeling hopeful that you actually understand marketing a bit better!
Booking:
I ended the last section of the main content of this post, with a call to action of booking a one-on-one call with me if you need help. If you found the body of the blog helpful, it may spur a desire to amplify your education by investing in a service. I linked the text directly to my one-on-one product in my product page (and did it right here too to avoid having an interested buyer having to scroll back up this page to find the link I’m referring to).
I also have a product feature on the blog, of my Little Luxuries Handbook. It adds a secondary product of potential interest so that if someone isn’t ready to book a call, they can explore another helpful product to their business.
Evaluation:
I can view statistics on how my blog post performs. How many views on this blog post? How many people clicked through from my email list? What keywords actually worked to create clicks from Google? Did I sell any one-on-one mentorship calls after this post was published?
Happy system creating!
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