In this podcast episode, I break down the strategies that help photographers stop spinning their wheels and start running a business that’s efficient, profitable, and sustainable. One of the biggest mistakes I see photographers make is not being intentional about the client experience. Instead of attracting dream clients who value your work, many photographers find themselves stuck working with clients who book based on convenience or price.
If you’re ready to start booking incredible clients who rave about you and send endless referrals your way, this episode is for you.
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Are you ready to start booking those kind of clients who rave about you to every single one of their friends that they know? Well, if so, you’ve come to the right place. Because today we’re kicking off part one of our three part series, the Incredible Photo Client Series. And on this episode, we’re going to dive into why getting great clients starts with this one thing.
Creating an incredible client experience. And after all, you attract what you put out there. And without a seller, client experience, without.
Well, you’re never going to attract those amazing clients that you’re after. So if that’s something you’re looking to add into your photo business, you’re in the right place. Let’s do this.
Hi, I’m Sean Brown, and if you had told me years ago that I would be a professional photographer today, I would have said that you were crazy. Since then, I’ve been able to grow my photography business to six figures per year and haven’t looked back. Now, with over eight years of experience of figuring out what to do, and more importantly, what not to do, I help photographers build a thriving photography business that they’ve always dreamed of so that they can have more time, flexibility and freedom to do what they truly want to do.
And you want to know the best part? I’m showing you how to make that happen for yourself in this audio series. This is Shoot for Success. Hey there, photography friends.
Sean Brown here. Excited to have you for this episode of the Shoot for Success Photography podcast. Podcast and kind of teased this in the last episode that we are going to be doing a new series.
We’re going to be calling it the Get Incredible Photo Client Series. And it was kind of inspired because one of the things that we have is a lot of conversations, whether it’s with my Inner Circle crew or members of the Mastermind or anything like that, a lot of clients, or a lot of, I should say, students are looking for all these answers on how do you attract those clients that we all kind of hear these stories about where they spend $5,000 with you and are just so grateful for their experience that you’ve given them or who don’t give you a ton of headaches along the line and are just grateful for being a part of your experience. How do you attract those types of clients? And so I thought it would be kind of cool to do a little series on, well, how do you get more of those clients? And so we’re going to dive into that in today’s episode.
So first off, if you haven’t already had a chance to head over to itunes and leave a written review. I encourage you to do so. All you gotta do is head over to itunes, leave a written review and then send me a screenshot over at senior photo education on Instagram.
And we do some cool things. We do like giveaways for, from the senior photography education store. We do other giveaways for things like one on one trainings or free months into the senior photography mastermind, like all these cool things and all you got to do is just send me a screenshot so that way I can match up your itunes name and make sure that we get credit for, for leaving a review.
It’s just kind of our way of saying thank you for listening to the show, helping others find it as well. So we’re going to get started in this three part series. We’re going to break this into three kind of sections of our business.
Because one of the things and I talk about this a lot with, if you’ve ever been through one of our launches or really have been a part of any of our coaching calls is it’s very rare that we ever have like a one kind of point solution. Right? And what I mean by that is it’s very rare that there’s ever something in business where doing one thing is going to fix all of your problems. There’s no, there’s no real like magic bullet in business.
And if you’ve been in business long enough to have problems and solve a problem, you’ve likely also figured that out that it’s not just doing one thing that’s going to make the entire difference in your business. And getting incredible photo clients really isn’t any different. And as I was kind of figuring out, what are these different parts that actually go into it? What have I done in my business that that has allowed me to have amazing clients year in and year out? What have my students done? We really dialed this into like three categories.
And the first really does start with the client experience. And without an incredible client experience, you’re not going to attract incredible clients. And it’s kind of like we kind of use this term of like law of attraction where what you put out is what you then attract.
Right? And we see this in, in all aspects of, of your life, of the, of your business and what you put out into the world attracts like. It’s the law of attraction states that like, like attracts like. And so as we want to attract amazing clients, well, what is it that our amazing clients are, are attracted to? And it’s the incredible experience that’s what they are after.
And we did a whole episode on client experience, so hopefully you had a chance to check that out. And what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna dive into kind of like 4ish sections for what really make for an incredible client experience. So let’s get into this.
The first one is, as part of your incredible client experience, what you must be very, very clear on is, is defining what your ideal client journey looks like. And for a lot of photographers, one of the things that we hear is like, they want to create an experience. They want their clients to rave about the experience with them, but they’re not really sure what that experience is that they, that they offer.
And where. I’m going to kind of give you a little bit of homework throughout this episode, and it’s going to kind of take some introspection of like, looking within of like, what are you doing in your business? Or what would you hope to offer as part of your photography experience? Is what will your experience that they eventually will have? And it doesn’t have to be like, what are you doing now, but what will your clients have as a result of working with you? Once this is all ironed out, what is it that that experience will look like? And it really comes from the first part of it all, which is you got to map it out. You have to know what is it that your client journey looks like for all of your prospective clients, your actual clients.
And then first of all, we also have to communicate that as well. And that’s how do we get the incredible clients before they. They’ve booked with us? And this is kind of like a little bit of a tangent, but it kind of goes into the idea of, like, if you hear that a lot of clients are like, oh my gosh, we didn’t know how amazing this experience was going to be prior to working with you.
That’s a sign that your marketing isn’t telling the whole story. Where we need to make sure that we’re communicating and showcasing what this client journey is that the clients actually go through once they’re in your sphere, once they’ve actually booked a session. We need to learn how to communicate that with clients prior to them booking.
That’s how we get more people knowing, like, how amazing it is to work with you. And so when you start mapping out your, your client journey or each touch point, basically, where in the process are, are you going to then be helping your clients through their senior photography session with you? The first thing is you gotta be. You gotta be great.
At your inquiry process. And this is, this is something where I see a lot of photographers with room for improvement. And if you have room for improvement, that’s great because that shows, hey, there’s a lot of room that you can then work up and make sure that you are optimizing this aspect because this is where a lot of photographers are actually losing clients.
And one of the things that you want to really get clear on is when you have an incredible client experience, what does that inquiry process look like for your clients and for all of my, my mastermind students, if you’re not in the mastermind, you can just send me a DM with the word mastermind and we’ll get you the info for how you can get added to the wait list for when doors open back up. One of the things that we teach inside of this, inside of the mastermind is that the inquiry process is really handled in one of three ways and there aren’t any real deviations to this. Maybe you do like kind of a hybrid model, but you will in your business follow one of these three inquiry methods.
And the one, first one is an email inquiry method where you’re responding to prospective inquiries or clients with an email. The second is a phone consultation or a phone call where you’re then getting on the phone with that client prior to booking them, getting them more information, answering questions, overcoming objections, all that stuff. And then the third one would be like an in person consultation, maybe you’re bringing them into the studio or meeting them for coffee.
Again, what we do is we see that each of these is a great model for different types of business where if you have a high volume of inquiries, an email method might be better versus if you have a lower volume of inquiries and you really want to make sure that you’re pre qualifying your clients, maybe you’re at a higher price point. Maybe a phone consultation or an in person consultation is going to be better. Better for you.
And what, when I bring this up, it really comes about because as you define what your client experience is going to be, think of it as you being, I don’t know, let’s just say like booking a hotel experience or something like that. Maybe you’re traveling to an international destination and, and what is it that you’re experience might look like with them? Right. Whereas if it’s a more like a chain hotel, you can just book it online very easily versus like a more high end boutique hotel.
Maybe what you’re doing is you’re, you’re getting on the phone with the hotel themselves or something like that, or using a travel agent of sorts that kind of knows the ins and the outs. Right? Your experience might look a little bit different from the very onset. And when we, we go into this, we also have to think of what will your experience for the client be like when you’re actually going to implement these things.
Like the inquiry method matters a lot, where if you don’t have the bandwidth or the capacity to take on a ton of phone consultations or do a bunch of in person meetings with, with prospective clients, well, your experience with them from the very onset isn’t going to be that great. You’re gonna find fall short simply because guess what, you don’t have the time and the availability to make sure that you’re doing this in a way that’s quick and seamless for your clients versus emails where yeah, you could set up an autoresponder, get them all the info, get them into some sort of workflow sequence that Automate automatically does follow up emails, all those types of things through like a CRM system like Iris Works or a studio management system system. And now all of a sudden your client experience from the very start is going to be a lot better than somebody who’s a little bit more cumbersome.
And so this is really kind of the first step in attracting those amazing clients is like a quick inquiry response, but also one that allows them to understand who is it that you are, are they going to connect with you on a personal level as their photographer? And this is something again we teach inside the Mastermind, like how can we put a more personal emphasis? How can we put kind of a face to the brand? Even if you’re doing something via an email sequence, if you’re even not doing say a phone consultation or in person consultation, and just as a result of doing things like adding video into this process, we’ve actually seen our inquiry conversion percentage go up, meaning that for every inquiry we get, we’re more likely to book them as a client. And it’s all these like these small little things, small little tweaks. So the first thing is like what does that inquiry process look like? Is it quick? Is it easy, is it efficient for your clients as well as yourself? Are you able to do this in mass? And then the other question is, even if you don’t have a huge volume of clients right now, how does this then scale up? Right, we kind of want to do like a stress test where if you’re doing phone calls now, well, you might be able to do that with five inquiries.
But when you’re getting 50 inquiries, are you still able to do that? And these are kind of the questions that we want to start asking yourself as you map out what your client journey looks like. The second part of the client journey you also want to take into account is like the session day. What does the session day itself look like? And we’ll kind of talk about this a little bit more as well as we get a little bit later into the episode.
But what is it that you’re doing when they’re actually showing up for their senior photos that is a part of the client experience for them? Are you doing things like helping them with hair and makeup, booking the artists for them? Are you making sure that you’re pairing their locations with the perfect or pairing their outfits with the perfect locations? Are you making sure that you have like these little things on hand, like a bottle of water if it’s a hot day? Right. What is it that you’re going to be doing during that actual session day? And it’s kind of like the little things that make the biggest difference, which we’ll talk about in, in a minute as well, and then the other one too. And this is where a lot of photographers drop the ball.
But what’s happening after the session? What’s their post session experience with you look like? So once you’ve actually taken the photos, are they then just uploaded to a Dropbox folder and you’re sending them like this clunky interface via Dropbox? And by the way, nothing wrong if you’re doing Dropbox right. This is why we can always work and improve. But like, are you using something that’s like a little bit more of a branded gallery? Or maybe what you’re doing is what we recommend, which is sitting down with your clients and giving them that full boutique experience of actually ordering their products with them, designing their albums in front of them, showing them how wall art will fit in different spaces of their home.
And this is really like taking your experience to the very, very next level. And under all of this is really kind of the presumption that at the same time what you’re doing is once you’ve mapped out, hey, what are you going to be doing for every single client? In other words, what promise are you making to your prospective clients or your clients that book you saying, hey, we’re going to do this, this and this during your session? Well, the first thing is, have you then communicated and set your expectations early on of this is what we’re going to do? Here are what here’s what you can expect of me. And what this does over time when you do this consistently is it builds trust.
It avoids these misunderstandings that you might have if, if you weren’t, if you weren’t doing this. So once you have that done, what’s the next step? Well, that is how do you make sure that this is like a personalized experience for them. And this generation is really about personalization.
Every business, every personal brand, or I should say really every business or service based business that we work with can do speed, right? We’ve all gotten like an email autoresponder, we’ve all gotten like an email that was just automated or anything like that. But the real thing is like how do you then put the personal touches on, and this is what’s going to separate you from other photographers in, in your area. Uh, one of the ways that we personally do this or that I personally do this in my own client based business is that for every client that we get an inquiry from, we automatically send a personalized text message to them, to them and their parents.
And the reason why we do this is we want to make sure that they know that we can, we can be reached, that they have access to us. And one of the reasons why we started this is that we, we noticed that a lot of our clients were saying, hey, we want to connect with the photographer. And so what better way to do this? So in the past we’ve done things like voice message, um, you can do this if they have like an iPhone or say you get an inquiry via Instagram, even just sending them a quick like audio message of like, hey, thanks so much for reaching out.
Like, I’m Sean, so great to meet you. Those types of things make a world of difference because it shows that you’ve taken the time to get to know them. We then take this a step further and it’s really about how are you then onboarding your clients to how are you putting like these personal touches that other photographers might be missing out on and how can you kind of stand above them? And one of the things that we do is that we actually send a physical welcome packet to every single one of our clients.
Handwritten note is huge in this. So if you’re not doing that, take notes, I would add that to your welcome packet process immediately. Because what this does is it again shows that you are, you are there, you are taking this to the next level for them, helping them prepare.
But ultimately like, you’re invested in this. It’s not just like a mass printed Note or anything like that. It’s like you’re actually, you’ve taken the time.
They’re not just another number. You actually, you care about them, right? You care about them as a client. And this is a really, really big piece of it.
And then what we also do as part of like, this personalization of like, making sure that we are, are working with our clients, that they know that we’re standing by them. Each step of the process is that we do things like questionnaires style. We call this our senior style questionnaire, where we get a feel for what is it, like, what does that client want out of their session? And when you’re clear on this now, what you can do is you can actually use these to pair it with your client journey or the client experience that you offer.
And the ways that we do this is like if they’re looking for a specific location or they have a certain vision for their photos. Well, now what we can do as the photographer, as the creative expert, we’re able to then step into the process of saying, okay, we can do it. We, this is our process.
This is, you know, kind of what we do for each of our clients. And then what we can do is we can use this to, to pair with what that client needs. Say, for example, if they’re looking for this particular location, making sure that it, it fits into the session itinerary that you’ve done, right? And these are the little things that make a huge difference.
And why we do this all in advance is we don’t want to get into a part of the process where we are letting our clients down. Because now what happens is, first of all, the clients that are coming to us, we’ve already connected with on a very personal level. And if we want to get more clients like them who value what it is that we do, who are invested in working with us, well, we want to make sure that we are living up to the promises that we made back in that original step of the process, which is, what’s that? Client journey? What is it that.
That promise we’ve made to them, how are we upholding it? And if we’re missing out on these little things, this is going to create some friction or some hesitancies of like, hey, is this actually the right photographer for me? And so this is why it’s really important to make sure that to get your incredible clients, you have to be doing all of these steps consistently. And so with this personalization, with this onboarding process, it’s really, how can we get to know the client so that we are pulling out any requests or really like their broader visions for what the shoot will be like and making sure that we’re, we’re able to bring that to life as kind of their creative director for, for their senior photography shoot. And hopefully that makes sense.
If not, send us a DM over on Instagram. We’ll get you sorted out the other thing too. And we, we talked about like the session day.
What does this include? This is going to be like the little wow factors. And one of the things that we’ve been doing for the last few years is every session day, what we do is we send, of course we do this like automatically through our CRM system as well. But one of the things that I personally do is the morning of their session, just send them a quick little text message of what they can expect for the day.
Just kind of like a recap. And the reason why we do this over over text because this kind of ties into like, just like the little wow factors is we want to make sure that they’re coming as prepared as possible. And so when we’re able to do this, first of all by sending a text message, it’s, it’s a medium that these seniors are quick to respond to, right? Maybe mom’s at work or something and they just want to fire a quick text message in between a meeting or what or whatnot.
We want to make sure that our clients felt, feel taken care of, that they are going to be comfortable showing up to the session, that they’ve brought everything that we need them to bring, the outfits, reminding them to bring water and refreshments and those types of things or even having those on hand yourself as well, reminding them of like, hey, we read this in your senior style questionnaire. Like make sure you bring your baseball bat, right? The little details that matter that make them feel taken care of. And when you take care of your clients, well, these are the clients that are then going to rave about you.
And if they value and have entrusted you with capturing their senior photos, well, chances are their friends are going to want to do the same. And so this is a great opportunity to make sure that we’re again taking care of our clients to the best of our of our abilities in that text message too. One of the things you might be saying is like, hey, that sounds like a lot is we actually just use iPhone autofill.
And what’s pretty cool about this is you can just text type into your text messages like senior text or session or some like a keyword of sorts and it will auto fill most of the message. Right? Because some of the things aren’t going to change. It’s like, hey, make sure you’re meeting at this location for hair and makeup or make sure you do this or that and, and that’s not going to change too much client to client.
And so it’s a great way of saving time. And then you can just kind of, you know, adapt and change up the sections that you need to as. As needed.
So these are just kind of some ways that we put like kind of a wow, wow touch on it. The other thing too that we want to make sure that you’re doing during your session is we love to play like music during our shoots too. And one of the things is that like you might say that this is like it doesn’t mean that much or it doesn’t make a huge difference.
Makes a huge difference because it lets your clients loosen up a little bit. And the reason why we do this is we ask them a question on their senior style questionnaire of like what artists do they like? And we specifically put on those types of artists. We even like oh yeah, you know, you seem like a Taylor Swift kind of person or whatever.
And they’re like oh my gosh, like how did you know? Well, it’s cuz it’s in their style questionnaire. And now all of a sudden they’re like oh wow, this is like awesome. They even knew like my favorite type of music.
And so it’s just kind of like this next again taking it to, to the next level. It’s like the little things that, that mean the most to your clients. And this is really what gets them, gets them talking.
And when we’re able to do this consistently and effectively in your business, this is what again reinforces that you are the right decision. Gets your clients talking about you sharing on social media, the moms telling other moms like this particular aspect was so cool. This is what builds that word of mouth.
And when we think about all these steps, this is kind of like it all goes into making your clients feel taken care of. And we want to continue that even once that session has, has happened. And so one of the ways that we do this as well as I mentioned at the kind of the top of the episode that for this post session follow up process, this is kind of the last step of the process of making that client experience really special for them.
One of the things that I want to encourage you to do if you’re not doing this already is if you were looking to hit six figures this year, the quickest and most effective way to do this and make more money almost overnight is to switch to in person sales and selling photography products, offering these as part of your experience. And the reason why I say this and why I’m so like such a firm believer in this is especially when I go to conferences or have the opportunity to travel and speak to other photographers. There are nearly no photographers at the six figure level that do not offer products.
Meaning that if you want to hit six figures, it’s almost like every single business model is doing this with photography products. Are very few photographers where they’re making six figures and just doing it with digital file deliveries. And so when we look at this as well, we have to ask yourself, are there photographers in your area offering photography products? And chances are a majority of you are going to say that most photographers in your area don’t offer photography products.
And so what an incredible, amazing opportunity for you now to take the driver’s seat. Kind of be the one in your area who’s going to be known as, as the full service senior photographer or the full service photographer in your market. The reason why we want to make sure that you’re doing this is because this is that post session follow through that we really want to have with our clients of making sure that the session is not where it ends.
Because if it’s the session and that’s kind of the end all be all, every other photographer is doing that, there’s nothing that’s that special about your experience that you can still provide. But if you add this next level, this next step for many of your clients, or should I just, I should really say all of your clients. Now what we’re able to do is we’re able to serve them in a higher capacity where you’re able to take them step by step of designing that album, designing the wall art for them, making sure that they’re picking the right photos for them, being able to point out, yeah, you know, it was a beautiful dress, but you mentioned that this is, this wall portrait’s going to go into the hallway.
You mentioned you have a lot of neutral tones. It might, it might be a little bit conflicting with some of the decor that you already have in your home. Right.
We’re able to now use this as another way of serving your clients by having them sit down at something like an in person sales session where we’re now able to establish yourself as like the go to photographer, the upscale photographer in your area and make sure that you’re, you’re really kind of able to, to wrap up that session on a high note as well. The things with this too is we now think of like, what other aspects of the photography products now can we incorporate into this client experience? Little things like making sure that these are all wrapped up really, really nicely, making sure that you’re using the branded packaging, making sure you’re writing handwritten thank you notes, giving them updates on like, hey, your album just arrived. We’re looking through it right now, checking, making sure the quality is great, giving them, you know, delivery updates of when they can expect things.
We’re adding all these other touch points that make your clients feel taken care of. And while it might seem like a lot of work, that’s a whole nother topic of conversation. We’re actually working on a whole new free pricing training.
But one of the things I’ll say to you is if you were able to 3-4x what you are currently making per session, would it be worth it to you to do these extra steps and also to have clients bragging about how amazing you are because you’ve gone above and beyond? Hopefully that answer is, is yes. Even if you’re not doing in person sales things like, even just like little sneak peeks or updates on editing when they can expect their galleries, these are the little things that are going to make a huge world of difference to your clients. And so I’d really recommend making sure that, that this is a part of, of your, your journey as well.
So to kind of wrap this episode up with this all said, the client experience from start to finish does play a huge role in attracting the clients that ultimately want to work with you, who are going to share about you, who are going to rave about you, who you love working with, who you actually want to see again. Right? Because, you know, if you get those clients where they don’t value you, where you feel like, you know, maybe they’re just, they picked you because you were the cheapest or the quickest option. We want to get past that because those clients aren’t the ones that are going to keep your business afloat.
It’s they picked you because you were convenient and because you were the quickest or the cheapest. And we want to make sure that we’re getting clients that value what it is that you do, who say, I absolutely want to work with this photographer, regardless of the price point. And when we get clear on what this client experience is going to be, and most importantly as well, how are we then communicating that this happens and we actually do this through specific marketing strategies.
Uh, so if you’re in the mastermind, we could direct you to some of those resources, some of those trainings for how do you then communicate all of this to your prospective clients ahead of time? One of the things that we want to make sure you’re doing is getting clear on this is the experience that we’re promising to you. And the experience is going to feel over the top for some clients and it’s going to feel just right for other clients and the photographers that it’s over the top, well, we repel them, they’re not going to work with us. And the clients that it feels just right, well, those are going to be your ideal fit clients.
That’s how we attract them, is by creating the experience. The experience attracts the people that ultimately are a best fit. And if we’re not communicating this, we get a lot of wrong fit clients, we get a lot of price shopping clients, we get a lot of clients that ghost you.
So if you’re experiencing clients that are saying you’re too expensive or ghost you after the inquiry, that’s actually a really good sign that you’re struggling to communicate that client experience to them prior to working with them or prior to working with you, I should say. So that’s going to wrap it for, for this episode. In the next episode, we’re going to talk a little bit about what goes into your second part of your client experience, or and I shouldn’t say your client experience, but what goes into attracting and getting those incredible photo clients.
We’re going to talk about how pretty much kind of like the outward facing parts of your brand, your online presence, how this all ties in. So not going to be an episode you’re going to want to miss. So hit the like button, hit the follow button.
We’ll have that out next week for y’all. So next Monday we’re getting better at dropping the episodes weekly. Sometimes we drop the ball a little bit, but we’re not going to drop the ball on this one because this is a series we’re really excited for.
So if that’s something that you’re wanting to make sure that you keep getting those incredible photo clients again, this is the first step of the process. So as you wait for that episode, go through an audit. Hey, what are you doing? Well, what can you do to improve? And start with just like one area to improve.
Maybe it’s the mapping out your ideal client journey. Maybe it’s a little bit more personalization. Maybe it’s adding some wow factors.
Maybe it’s making the jump to in person sales, offering photography products as a service, whatever that might be. Pick one of those, attack that for this week and when we hop into next week’s episode, all about the outward facing portions of your brand, well, that’s the next step in how you get incredible photo clients. So thanks so much for listening.
Again, hit the like button, subscribe button. We’ll have more episodes out for you and can’t wait to continue the Get Incredible Photo Clients series. So we’ll see you all next week.
One of the things I discovered early on in photography is that working harder isn’t what builds a successful business. In fact, after coaching hundreds of photographers in every market across the country, the number one trait that they all shared when they were struggling was working harder than ever in hopes that things would flip finally come together. It wasn’t until they figured out how to implement the proper frameworks and strategies that their business took off.
That’s why I’ve created this free on demand video training series, the Intro to Senior Photography Crash Course, to help photographers who want to start or grow their businesses without spending years struggling trying to figure it out on their own. In this free training, I will teach you the steps you need to take that people like myself, along with hundreds of other photographers, have used to build their thriving senior photography business and be able to live the life they want to live. All you have to do is click the link in the show notes to unlock how to make that happen for you and your business and say yes to being the successful senior photographer you’ve always dreamed of being.
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