[00:00:00] Real quick here. Do you remember how you first found this podcast? Maybe it was a tweet, an Instagram story, whatever it was, if you can please pay it forward and show this to another creative so we can help more people start and scale their businesses. Thank you. Are you struggling to get clients in photography or videography?
Do you wonder what could finally give your creative business that competitive edge? Well, there's actually one strategy that's shockingly simple and often overlooked by most photographers, even the pros. It's something that not only builds trust with your clients. But also forces you to deliver better work.
And the best part, it's right at your fingertips waiting to be used. We're talking about gathering social proof. Now, what is social proof? I'm talking about reviews, testimonials, and case studies here. Just like Amazon asks you to review products after you buy them. We need to ask our clients to leave testimonials for our photography businesses.
Welcome to the creative biz lunch podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale it to six figures, whether you're a photographer, [00:01:00] filmmaker, or designer, you'll find something of value here. I know how hard it is to get clients because I used to struggle to land them. When I first started, I had very few clients that were willing to work with me.
And the ones that did didn't pay me much. I knew a lot of photographers struggle with this because my DMS are. Filled with creatives asking me to help them solve this problem.
By the way, if you need personalized help, just send me a DM on Instagram. I'm Chris Pieta on there.
So what if we can land more clients, make more money per client and have fun doing it? Well, the secret to all this lies in gathering social proof. Gathering client testimonials helps you build immediate trust with a prospect. When that prospect goes to your website and sees all those reviews, they know that you actually do what you say you do.
Just like when you're going out to eat, you're more likely to choose that highly rated restaurant. Are you going to go eat at a restaurant with three stars on Google or the one with 4. 5? Obviously we choose the 4. 5 restaurant every time here. The same exact thing applies to your [00:02:00] business when clients are shopping around.
Not only do they look at your portfolio, they look at your testimonials and spoiler most creatives don't have testimonials. So if you have any testimonials on your website, clients are way, way more likely to go with you. I've got some special stuff safe for the end of this video. But I have to be honest with you.
When I was starting out, I didn't collect any reviews. Why would I need to? I have a great portfolio. The work should speak for itself. My website was beautifully designed. I clearly showed clients what I was capable of, but still. Very few clients actually wanted to work with me around this time. I was actually working with a creative business coach.
He told me that I should start a Google review page so that my past clients could leave reviews while I was paying him money. So I was going to take his advice, right? Well, this was the first time I heard of a product photographer doing this, and that both excited me and scared me. I went over to Google.
Set up my business page and I started collecting reviews for my past clients. After we [00:03:00] finished a project, I would go and send them a follow up email. I would thank them for working with me and ask them if they could please leave a review on Google for me. And let me be honest with you, I was scared to get those first reviews.
I knew that I did good work for my clients, but I was still scared to see what they would say. Would they give me a five star review? Do they think working with me was easy or did I make it hard for them? Do the final assets I deliver actually help their business? There were all these questions and doubts in my head.
I had no idea what to expect. And after about a week, the first review came in. And it was amazing. They loved the photos. They said the process of working with me was a breeze. And they highly recommended me.
Now you can't imagine how good I felt when that review popped up on Google. I was pumped about it. So I wanted more reviews, so I emailed everyone I've worked with and more reviews kept coming in around the same time I heard about this term perceived likelihood of achievement. This was the next step here.
The perceived [00:04:00] likelihood of achievement is a term used to describe how likely it is that clients will actually get the result that you're advertising. Seeing a great portfolio is fine, but seeing a great portfolio and reviews on your website. Well, that makes potential clients think that you're going to deliver the results that you promise.
Testimonials on your website increase your credibility. Having past clients talk about your services helps validate your claims and it adds to your reputation. It builds up your brand. These past clients help you attract new clients. Each positive review that you get can make the prospective clients way more comfortable in choosing your services.
An unexpected side effect of this is that your current clients will actually feel more loyal to return for your services. If they just wrote a great review for you, they're more likely to remember how great that experience was, and they'll ask to want to work with you again and again and again. But the sad truth is that...
Most photographers and videographers don't do this. And this boggles my mind. You get outsized returns on gathering testimonials. [00:05:00] In my last YouTube video that I posted, I talked about leverage and how you can use it to grow your business to 200k a year. If you haven't seen that video yet. Go check out my YouTube channel.
It's a game changer. Gathering social proof is actually a form of leverage. It takes so little time to do, but provides your business with more clients and more revenue. Not collecting testimonials is a missed opportunity. And by not doing this, you're leaving thousands of dollars on the table.
Not only that, but those photographers that don't collect testimonials, Actually lose to the competition. I teach all of my students inside creative biz launch to do this and they beat the competition because of what we teach inside of my program. Photography is a tough market to get clients and anything that you can do that will increase your chances of actually getting clients is a good thing.
Those who collect testimonials have a competitive edge when they're marketing themselves. There is also a big bonus of testimonials that I haven't talked about yet. And I'll get into that in just a second here. [00:06:00] First, I want to give you a simple three step framework to start collecting the social proof yourself.
So you can start landing more clients. This is the easiest way to get social proof that actually delivers. Step one actually starts with you. Before we even ask for a testimonial, we need to ensure we deliver a great customer experience and great results to the client. If we don't do our best, we don't deserve to get a great testimonial from a client.
The goal here is to get our clients the results they want. And if we don't do that. We don't deserve a great testimonial. Simple as that. Once we deliver those amazing results and assets, we'd move on to step two. Step two is we ask for the testimonial. Yeah, I know really big one here. I know for me, asking for testimonials was a little scary, but I knew that no one was just going to go leave them for me.
Unless I asked just like Amazon emails, you asking for a review. Or DoorDash pops up after you get your food to review your meal. You're going to be doing the same thing with your client projects here. So after a client project is over, you want to simply send [00:07:00] them a kind of email asking for a testimonial.
There's actually a right and wrong way to do this. And depending on how you were this email, the client's either going to give you a great review or no review at all. This is actually the stuff I teach inside of creative biz launch. You can get the exact scripts of what to say when you enroll in the program.
Okay. So we asked for these testimonials. It's important to give them a link to either your Google page or a Trustpilot page. Trustpilot is actually pretty awesome because it keeps things way more authentic. They have measures in place so that on the website, they ensure that only real and legit reviews get posted.
Google reviews are also great to use because it's the most common review system out there. So more people just know Google reviews. Personally for me, I use Trustpilot to gather my reviews for my program. Create biz launch. So after students work with me and get all the results they want, they post those are those reviews, those testimonials on trust pilot so that future students can see how real photographers are landing those multi thousand dollar deals based on why I teach in my program [00:08:00] for my photography business.
I use Google reviews and that's where I send my clients to leave how the project went, how the assets performed all the great stuff. You can check that out. If you look up piano productions on Google and you'll see all those reviews there. And you need to be doing the exact same thing for your business.
Now, once we gather those testimonials, we need to share them. The easiest way to share them and what I think is the best way is to just take a screenshot of the review and put it up on your website. That's what I do. And let me explain why I just take the screenshot approach. We obviously want to put our reviews on our website so that clients can see them.
And it builds up our credibility. But why do I choose these crappy screenshots over a nicely designed review? Well, this falls in line with what I was talking earlier. I want to build up my credibility. Let me explain. If I were to just copy and paste the reviews and make them look pretty on my website.
There might be some doubt in the client's minds. Are those real reviews? Did I edit their text somehow? These types of reviews are just a little less [00:09:00] authentic than just the screenshots. Screenshots on my, on my website are just the Google page screenshots. And those make me look credible because it's way harder to fake a screenshot than to fake some text.
So clients instantly trust me when they see these. Sure, they're not as pretty, but we're not concerned with that here. We're concerned about our credibility. Our goal is to land clients and make money, not to have a pretty website. There's one last thing I need to talk about at the end here,
but remember, our three step framework is this one deliver great results to ask for testimonials and three share testimonials. This is a very simple framework and one that we can all start doing. There's one big fear that a lot of photographers have when it comes to getting testimonials and it's this.
What if I get negative reviews? What if the clients don't have anything good to say about me? And that's fair. That's something we all think about. What if we get negative reviews? This brings me to my final point. Gathering social proof [00:10:00] forces you to deliver better work. And when you deliver better work, your business grows and your income goes up.
So not only do testimonials help your business grow because you get more clients, testimonials actually help your business grow because you're being Forced to deliver better work.
The service that you offer will get better over time because you're being forced to do it better for these testimonials. The expectation of client feedback pushes you to provide top notch services. Not only is this continual improvement driven by client feedback that leads to success, your reputation is on the line here.
And when that's the case, you want to deliver the best results so you stay on top. Now there's actually one thing that's more powerful than testimonials and those are case studies. I don't have time to talk about those today, but case studies have helped me a lot in getting more clients. That's all I got today.
If you have an extra five seconds here, please, please rate the show and let's help another creative out with testimonials. Thank you.
