[00:00:00] Real quick here. If you've ever gotten value from the show so far and you have an extra 30 seconds right now, please go ahead and give the show a rating on whatever platform you're streaming on. It really helps me spread the message to more cribs out there. Thank you. How do we build a brand as a photographer?
By building a brand, we can actually begin to get clients to approach us to work together. We increase our perceived value, appear more professional, and stand out from a sea of competition. But building a brand isn't easy when there are dozens of other things that we need to be doing as photographers. I actually have a controversial opinion on photography branding.
If you're a beginner, it's not something you should actually focus on. If your goal is to get clients and to make money, that might seem like I'm contradicting myself here, but I'm going to explain exactly what I mean and teach you the best way to build a brand as a photographer or a filmmaker.
Welcome to the Creative Biz Launch Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale to six figures. Whether you're a photographer, filmmaker, or designer, you'll find something of value here. All right, let's talk about [00:01:00] photography, branding. Let's start by defining what branding is.
What does a brand mean to. When I say Apple, you automatically think expensive, premium, great phones. When I say Toyota, you probably think reliable. Good value. When I say Amazon, you think fast delivery and good customer service. These companies have spent decades and millions of dollars building their brands, building their reputation, building up this idea of what they are and what their values represent.
Simply put a brand is your reput. It's what people think of your company when they hear it. It's the perception of your company. Now that being said, a creative business isn't going to become a household name like Amazon, but maybe you'll be known in a smaller circle in a more specific niche like the jewelry space or the Chicago wedding space.
Right? When most photographers start out on their journey of trying to get clients and make money, they have a list of things they think that they need to do in their heads. Most of us, when we start getting into this business side of photography, we feel lost. We're creatives first. That's what we know we're not business experts [00:02:00] with.
This comes a lot of room for mistakes, and one of the first mistakes that we make is approaching photography, branding the wrong way. If you resonate with the things I'm about to say next, please know I'm not here to criticize anyone or make anyone feel bad. My mission is to provide creative business education, and by giving you the right knowledge, it's my hope that you'll apply it to your own business and you'll be able to live your dream life.
Okay, so how do photographers mess up branding? Well, first, lemme tell you the definition of branding. Again, it's a reputation. That's the simplest way to. But what do photographers do to build up their brand? Well, they hire someone to design the perfect logo. They spend weeks or months trying to think of the perfect name.
They create an incredible website with beautiful photography. And while this stuff is important, nowhere did we address our reputation here. People hire photographers for the results they want, and a pretty logo and a nice name doesn't tell anyone what we actually have provided or any results that we've shown for clients.
It's really important to convey the results that we've [00:03:00] actually provided to clients. Any tangible ROI or case studies do a lot for us here. I'll get into what we should focus on in a second here, but let's talk about what this misconception stems from. This misconception of needing a logo and beautiful branding comes from beginner photographers looking at pro photographers and trying to re.
What the pros are doing, and while a lot of the time this is a good practice, a photographer that's had 50 clients under their belt operates their business differently than someone with zero clients or maybe just a handful of clients. We're looking at what those pros are currently doing and not what they did to get to where they are.
Let me say that again. When we look up the pro photographers, we see what they're currently doing, not where it took them to get to where they are. An example that we can use for this that makes more sense is flying private or first class millionaires tend to fly private. If we wanna become millionaires, should we fly private too?
No, of course not. Our time is not as valuable. We need to focus on the things they did to become [00:04:00] millionaires, not what they're currently doing. So how does this all tie back to photography branding. Let's zoom out here for just a second. Why do photographers think that they need a brand to begin with? Is it to have a great looking website portfolio, logo, name, and social media present?
Yeah, I'm sure it is, but is that just it? No. There's a deeper meaning behind why photographers think they need branding. Why do photographers want these things? Ultimately, it's going to because they want clients. They want to make money, and they want to get the time freedom to do what they love Every single.
So if this is our goal, our ultimate goal, we need to change our approach to meet this goal. I'm going to present you with two approaches. Approach. Number one, we start by building a brand right at the start. Our goal is to create a beautiful logo, a website, social media presence, and help a reputation. We spend all our time building our company from within and make it into what we think will be amazing.
This could work, but if we don't seek feedback and actually prove that people want what we're selling, then we'll [00:05:00] spend all this time building a company and we'll have zero clients to show for it. We all spent years and we'll have nothing to show. Approach. Number two, we don't start with brand. We start with solutions to problems.
What do I mean by this? Well, the only way someone will pay you for a photography service. Is if you can solve a specific problem for them. A problem could be that they aren't getting swipes on Tinder, so you take great photos of them. Another problem is that a restaurant isn't getting DoorDash orders, so you improve their online photography presence.
There are thousands of problems you can solve. You pick a niche, find a problem, create an offer, and then you pitch that offer to see if there's actually a need for what you're offering. You identify early on whether there's actually money in the service you want to provide. This is called identifying product market fit.
Maybe you've heard this term before, but it's one of the hardest things to do in business, but once you identify that product market fit, you can build your company on top of that. You can do this within months, not years. Approach number one [00:06:00] focuses on us. We think we know what people want, so we risk it all and build a company around that.
I don't know about you, but I'm not the smartest guy in the room. I don't really know what people want until they tell me. And in business they tell me with their money. Approach number two focuses on other people with approach. Number two, we propose solutions to problems. We see what sticks, and then once we know while other people want, we build a business on top of that.
So at this point, you're nodding along because you know approach number two is the easiest, least risky and fastest way to build a creative business. Now, I mentioned that we propose solutions to problems and find clients through that. That is much easier said than done. What I teach all of my Creative Biz launch students is a systemized sales process.
This very much means that if my students put in X amount of time, they'll get Y clients out. This is the dream. Now this podcast is not about building out a sales system. It's about branding. But to give you an idea of what a sales system is, first we find our niche, then we build out an offer. Then we use cold outreach cigar offer in front of [00:07:00] people.
This means finding businesses or people that we think can benefit from our offer. Then with we tell them about the offer, and we can do this through cold dms, Instagram, Twitter, or cold email. Or if you work with local businesses, cold approaching them is another great way to. If you wanna learn more about the system and how I run my business, join the wait list for Creative Biz Launch down below.
We already have dozen students following along. I'd love for you to be a part of that. Okay, so we have clients and we know our offer actually makes us money. How do we build a business on top of that? Where does branding come in? Well, I mentioned earlier that branding is the reputation that you have, and when it comes to working with clients, reputation usually means an incredible customer experience.
As photographers, an incredible customer experience obviously means delivering the best photos possible, but there's so much more than just that. An incredible customer experience starts from the minute you make contact with the. Every message, every phone call you have has to be professional. You want them to feel heard, you want to be respectful of them [00:08:00] throughout the entire process of working together.
You need to do everything in your power to provide the best customer experience. Why does customer experience matter? Yes, we said we're building a brand, but how exactly? Well, a good customer experience will get you better testimonials that you can put on your website. A good customer experience will get you better case studies that you can add to your website as.
When the customer experience is good, your referral rate is going to go up. When you past clients talk about you to their friends or their peers, they'll only have good things to say about you. If you deliver photos in a matter of days rather than weeks, this does a lot for your customer experience enters a lot for your brand.
Let's do a little thought experiment right here. If you were hiring a photographer, what would you want them to do so that the customer experience was truly world? This is how we build our brand. We provide the best customer experience possible, and through that word of mouth begins to become a thing for our business.
We have an amazing offer and an amazing customer experience. Now our past clients are telling their friends about us through word of mouth. Now at [00:09:00] this point, let's start talking about the minor details, which really don't matter at the start, but now beginning to. These are gonna be things like your logo, your website, and maybe even your name.
We know that people are willing to pay us, so we've built up a solid foundation. It's time to really bring it all together. We now have the money coming in the door so we can actually afford to pay a great designer for an incredible website and logo. We can create an amazing brand aesthetic. We can begin to use this across all of our.
We can now pretty up everything. When I think brand for my own photography company, I first prioritize that customer experience I talked about. I mastered it. I had turnaround times in three to five days. A very streamlined pre-production process and everything was uniform. Client to client. I even have a money back guarantee after I mastered all these things.
What are the things I can devote my time to? Well, number one, a logo. I hired a. I went through that process and I really nailed that logo down. Then we can go ahead and talk about uniform website and social media presence. This is everything from the same fonts to the same copywriting style throughout the [00:10:00] website.
It's important to make sure that we have the same color palette that we use across the board. From this, we can create assets that we share across social media and any ads that we run, and make sure that these are beautiful and uniform across the board. This is a stage where you can work with a designer to pretty everything.
Remember we've created something incredible here, and then we wrapped it in pretty paper. We have our core business that is amazing, and the design is just added as a cherry on top. We're not taking a pile of crap and putting a bow on it. We figured out what people want. We built it and then we made it pretty.
If you don't want to go through the steps of figuring out yourself, we teach all this stuff inside of Create a Biz Launch Wait list for that is down below. Hope to see you in there. Now, at this point, we've reached the level of that pro photographer I was talking about. We did it in less time because we focused on the fundamentals first rather than the superfluous details that don't really matter that much.
If you want any success at the creative space, that should be your takeaway from today's podcast. Focus on the big picture things, not the tiny details that don't matter. That's [00:11:00] all I got today. My name is Chris Pata. Thank you for listening.
