[00:00:00] 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 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 here? It's right at your fingertips waiting to be used today. I'm going to be talking about gathering social proof. So what is social proof? This, these are reviews. These are testimonials. These are case studies. Just like Amazon is going to ask you to review products after you buy them.
We need to do the same thing with our clients. We have to ask our clients to leave testimonials for our own creative business. Welcome to the creative biz launch podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale it to six figures, whether you're a photographer, 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 any client. When I first [00:01:00] started, I had very few clients that were willing to work with me. And the ones that did, they didn't pay me much. I know a lot of photographers struggle with the same issue because my Instagram DMS are just.
Filled with creatives asking me to help them to get clients. But what if we could land more clients? What if we can make more money per client and have fun doing it? Well, the secret to all this lies in gathering social proof, gathering client testimonials, help you helps you build immediate trust with a potential client.
When that potential client 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 a highly rated restaurant than a low rated one or one with no reviews. Are you going to eat at the restaurant that has 3 stars on Google or the one with 4.
5 stars, the restaurant with 1, 000 reviews, or the one with 10? Obviously, we choose the 4. 5 star restaurant and the restaurant with more reviews every time. The same thing happens and the same thing applies with our own business. And the best part [00:02:00] is, creatives,
creatives usually don't bother to collect testimonials. So if you do this, it's going to put you miles ahead of everyone else. I've got some really cool stuff saved for the end of this episode. But I have to be honest with you first. When I was starting out, I didn't collect any reviews because why would I need to?
I have a great portfolio. The work should speak for itself. My website was awesome. It was beautiful. And I clearly showed clients what I was capable of. But still very few clients actually want to work with me. And around this time I was working with a creative business coach. He told me I should start a Google review page so that my past clients could leave reviews for me.
Well, this was the first time I heard of a product photographer even doing this. And that both excited me and it scared me. I went over to Google to set up my business page and started collecting reviews from my past clients. After we would finish a project, I would just send them a follow up email. I thank them for working with me.
And then I asked them if they could please leave a review on Google for me. And let me be honest with you. [00:03:00] I was scared to get those first reviews and I had to figure out why I was scared. I knew that I did good work for my clients, but I still had this fear of 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? Did the final photos I deliver actually help their business? There were all these questions and doubts in my head, and I had no idea what to expect. 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.
I was blown away when I saw these reviews. You can't imagine how good I felt when a review popped up on Google. I was blown away. Pumped up about it. So I wanted more and more of these. The first ones were so positive that I just wanted as many as I could. Cause at this point I was starting to learn that, Hey, I already know I do good work, but clients felt the same way about the work I did.
So I emailed everyone I've worked with and more reviews kept coming [00:04:00] in now around the same time. I heard about this term perceived likelihood of achievement. This was the next step here. The perceived 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 actually deliver the results that you promise. Testimonials on your website increase your credibility. Credibility is super important when you're doing any sort of outreach to new clients.
Having past clients talk about your services helps validate your claims and adds to your reputation. It builds up your brand here. These past clients help you attract new clients. Each positive review that you get can make a prospective client way more comfortable choosing your services. Now, an unexpected side effect of all of this is that your current clients will actually feel more loyal to return to you for your services.
If they just wrote a great review for you, they're more likely to remember how great [00:05:00] that experience was, and they're going to want to work with you again. But most photographers and videographers. Don't do any of this. And this boggles my mind. You get outsized returns on gathering testimonials. In my previous episodes, I've talked about leverage and how you can grow your business to multiple six figures a year.
And gathering social proof is a form of leverage here. It takes us very little time to do this, but it provides our business with way more clients and more revenue. Not collecting testimonials is a huge missed opportunity. And not only that. But photographers and videographers that don't collect testimonials actually lose to the competition.
Photography is a tough market to get clients already, and anything you can do that will increase your chances of getting clients is a good thing. Those who collect testimonials have a competitive advantage. When they're marketing themselves. All right, guys, real quick. Do you remember how you first found this podcast?
Maybe it was some post post on Instagram, maybe a tweet, maybe a friend sent it to you, or maybe you saw it on someone's Instagram story while this [00:06:00] podcast only grows through word of mouth. I don't run ads. I don't have sponsorships, so I'm not making money from sponsors here. So my ask of you is this, please pass it on to another creative or freelancer out there, a podcast review, a post on your social media page.
Or a mention to a friend. It would mean a lot to me and it might help another entrepreneur out there. Thank you. All right. So there's one big bonus of testimonials that I haven't talked about yet. I'll get into that at the end of this video, this episode here. But first I want to give you a simple three step framework to actually start collecting this social proof.
This is going to be the easiest way you can collect social proof and earn credibility with potential clients. So step one actually starts with you before we can even ask for a testimonial. We need to ensure that 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 that we promise and the results that they're after. And if we don't do that, we don't deserve a [00:07:00] testimonial, a good testimonial. Now, once we do deliver those really good assets and results, we move on to step two. We ask for the testimonial. Yeah, I know.
Simple. I know for me asking for testimonials was a little scary, but I knew that no one was going to leave them for me unless I actually asked. Just like Amazon emails you asking for a review, or DoorDash pops up asking you to review your meal after you've eaten it, you're going to be doing the same thing here.
After a project is over, With a client, simply send them a kind email asking for a testimonial. There's actually a right way and wrong way to do this. And depending on how you word this email, the client will either give you a great review or no review at all. Uh, this is beyond the scope of this podcast, but if you want those templates and script, that's the stuff I teach inside of creative biz launch, my full creative business system.
Okay, so when we ask for testimonials, it's important to give them a link to either our Google review page or a Trustpilot page. Trustpilot is pretty awesome because it keeps things way more authentic. They have a, they have [00:08:00] certain measures in place on the website to ensure that only real and legit reviews get posted.
Their rating system is also kind of interesting because it makes it almost impossible to get A five star average, even if you only have five star reviews. So TrustPilot is a good option if you want to really build that credibility. Now TrustPilot is actually what I personally use to gather my reviews for my program, Creative Biz Launch.
So after students go through the system and get the results from the program, they can leave a review there talking about. How they were able to build up their business land, multi thousand dollar deals based on what they learn in that system. This way, when potential students go and visit my page, they see all the results that creative business launch students have gotten.
So it makes it a no brainer to actually enroll in this program. Now you need it to be doing the same exact thing for your business. These reviews for my education company for creative is launch are on trust pilot, but I have my photography business reviews on Google. And the reason for that is I didn't really know about trust pilot [00:09:00] until later on in my career.
And I already had so many Google reviews. So I just stuck with that. Now, once we gather testimonials, we need to share them. That's going to be step three, the easiest way to share them. And what I think is best is to just screenshot the review and put it on your website. That's what I do. And let me explain why we obviously want to share these reviews on our website so that clients can see them and build up our credibility.
But why do I choose to use these crappy screenshots over a nice design? Well, it's to further build up my credibility. If I were to just copy and paste the reviews and make them look pretty on my website. Well, there might be some doubts in the client's mind. Are those reviews real? Did I edit the text somehow?
These types of reviews are a little less authentic than just screenshots. Screenshots of my Google page make me look more credible and 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 about pretty reviews here.
We're concerned about our credibility. Now there's one last thing I need to talk about here at the end for just a second or two, [00:10:00] our three step framework is one. Deliver great results to ask for testimonials and three shared testimonials. It's a very simple framework and one that we can all start doing today.
Now there's one big fear that law 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 here.
Gathering social proof forces you to deliver better work. And when you deliver better work, your business grows and your income goes up. Not only do testimonials help your business grow because it gets easier to get clients. Your business grows because the service you offer. We'll be better since more is at stake here.
You're now being forced to deliver better work so that the testimonials you receive are great. The expectation of client feedback pushes you to provide top notch services. Now, not only is this continual improvement [00:11:00] driven by client feedback, this is going to lead to business success. Your reputation is also on the line.
And when this is the case, you want to deliver the best results so that you stay on top.
And when you do get a negative review. That's fine. You can just use that information to improve your service. It's feedback. Hopefully it's constructive and you can actually implement what they're saying. Now, there's actually one thing that's way more powerful than testimonials, and those are case studies.
I don't have time for those in this episode today. But case studies have helped me a lot in getting more clients, probably way more than testimonials here. We don't have time to talk about case studies right now, but if you're a photographer, videographer, there's a free workshop and the show notes that's going to walk you through the basics of landing clients and charging more per client.
I'm recording this in January, 2024. And at this point, we've had 2000 plus students go through that free training. Check it out in the show notes. My name is Chris Pieta. Thank you so much for your time today. I'll catch you in the next one.
