In this podcast episode, I wrap up the Get Incredible Photo Clients series by discussing the bigger picture of building a thriving photography business. One of the biggest challenges photographers face is maintaining a steady stream of ideal clients—those who appreciate their work, invest in their services, and spread the word about their experience. Too often, photographers focus solely on the photoshoot itself, overlooking the essential steps that create lasting relationships and repeat business. The truth is, success in photography goes beyond the camera. It’s about creating a seamless client experience, nurturing connections, and leveraging the right strategies to grow your business.

What You’ll Hear In This Episode:

• The importance of building genuine client relationships.
• Why referral and loyalty programs matter.
• How to leverage testimonials and social proof to attract more clients.
• The power of a long-term vision in business growth.

Click HERE To Listen to This On Apple Podcast!

Don’t Forget To Rate and Follow Over On Apple Podcast!

If you resonate with the Shoot for Success Photography Podcast hosted by Sean Brown, please take a moment to rate and review the show. It would mean the world to us! Your feedback helps other aspiring photographers find this podcast and help them along their journey. Click the link, go to the bottom, give it a five-star rating, and choose ‘Write a Review.’ Don’t forget to share your favorite aspects of the episode!

When you’re done, make sure to tag us on Instagram @SeniorPhotoEducation and we’ll get you entered to win a one-on-one mini-coaching call with Sean to help you have your biggest business breakthrough yet!

Review the Podcast!

Podcast Transcript

On today’s episode of the Shoot for Success Photography podcast, we’re wrapping up the Get Incredible Photo Clients series. And we’re talking all about the big picture and how you can put the finishing bow on every aspect of your business to get you incredible photo clients consistently. So stay tuned.

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 and excited to wrap up this episode with y’all as we finish up our three part series on the Get Incredible Photo Clients. And on today’s episode, we’re talking all things big picture. How do you make sure that you are consistently bringing in amazing photo clients day after day? One of the things too, by the way.

Some behind the scenes things are swirling to say the least. And one of the things is that we might be shifting how we’re delivering content. But I want to hear from you as a loyal podcast listener.

Maybe it’s your first time listening to this. Well, welcome. We’re excited to have you here.

We’d love to hear your thoughts as we kind of make some changes to make sure that we’re serving photographers just like you, to the best of my ability. And one of those things is how we are going to be delivering our educational content moving forward. And behind the scenes.

There’s been a lot of toying around with the idea of moving this over to YouTube and maybe keeping the podcast. If you like the podcast, let us know. But we’re thinking about maybe changing it up a little bit.

How that looks, we’re not really sure yet, but we’re gonna figure that out. And I would love for you to send me a dm, hit me up over at Senior Photo Education and let us know. Do you prefer YouTube? Do you like the podcast? Is there a preferred method that you like getting your educational content? So as we kind of shift our plans for 25, we’re also shifting a little bit of what works best for you and it would be really helpful if you sent us a DM over on Instagram.

Let me know if you like YouTube, if you like that idea. It’ll be a little bit more short form content. So if you like the long form content, the 20, 30 minute podcasts, maybe what we’ll do is we’ll also shift those over to YouTube.

But I’m not gonna make any decisions without first hearing from you all. So let me know what you think, what works best for you, how you like to consume your content and all that stuff. It’ll be similar types of content.

If we move forward with the YouTube stuff, we’re kind of getting the studio ready for filming some stuff. Maybe that’ll be like our trial run and see if you guys like it. Or maybe it’ll just flop and we’ll come back here to the podcast full time again.

But we’re still going to be doing the podcast. In the meantime, we just might also be putting it over on YouTube. But let us know your thoughts.

I want to hear from you. Also hit us up at Senior Photo Education over on Instagram and we’ll, we’ll start the discussion there. But I want to hear from you.

So please send me a dm. I’m not just going to, you know, do what I want. I really want to do what, what serves you all.

So with that said, we’re going to wrap up this series, the Get Incredible Photo Client series. And today we’re talking all things big picture. How is it that you are making sure that you are providing for your clients the absolute best experience possible that gets them raving about you, who they get some working with you.

And what we’re going to do is we’re really going to break this into four or five, we’ll call them tiers. And how you can make sure that you’re implementing each of these tiers kind of on a bigger picture level. And think of it from like a bird’s eye view, right where you’re flying over your business from a bird’s eye view and you, you can see how all the pieces go together.

That’s really what today’s episode is all about. And the first of these tiers that we’re going to talk about is it ties in to when, when we talked about client experience. And part of that client experience is the tier of building genuine client relationships.

And not to say that you are not doing this, but one of the things that we really want to do is we want to think, are you going and are you putting your Full effort and energy into this. And this really goes beyond the shoot. This kind of comes down to are you communicating, Are you staying in touch with your clients? Well beyond just when they do the actual photo shoot with you? And many of us as photographers, what we do is we might do an email or two, or we might send a text here and there, but there’s no, like, consistent game plan.

There’s no actual recipe that we’re following, so to speak. And so what I’m going to do is I’m going to give you three actionable items. This is what, what we do in, in my own business to just kind of help get you started.

And the first of those is just a personalized holiday card. And these are really, really simple. One of the the ways that we do this and make it very easy on us is when we have our clients book with us.

We actually in their contracts have a field with their address. And this is for multiple reasons. First is, well, we need somewhere to send their physical welcome packet to.

So this is actually what we note on their contract. We say, hey, what we want to do is we want to send you a physical welcome packet with all your prep materials. What’s your address? It also serves, and I’m not saying, you know, going to take this episode in a different direction for a minute also serves as a legal purpose as well.

So for any reason, if you get into any sort of legal action that you are needing to take with a client, like they’re not paying or something happens one way or another, you’re going to need that address on file. And then the third is a better, better one, which is to send them a holiday card, to put them on a holiday email list. And what you can do is you can just write them a personal note.

So I love to print these through White House Custom Color. We just do them as five by sevens, leave the back blank, and you can just sign, sign a sign away. Or, you know, you can go through another printing service, but I like to support my own print lab, White House Custom Color, and make sure that the quality is there and all that stuff.

You can either put a photo of you on the front, maybe you do a collage of all your seniors with a little bit of a holiday flare. You know, the typography and graphics and all that. You figure it out, do what works for you.

But that’s one way that we can kind of keep in touch with them. The other as well is on their senior style questionnaires. One of the things that we do is we Ask hey, when’s your birthday? And with this, what you can do is you can then incorporate this into communicating beyond the shoot.

And this is kind of up to you on how you want to execute this. But one of the things that you can do is just send them a quick text or what I also like to do if I remember to do this, is to actually have a story posted and saying like, hey, Happy Birthday. Now this also makes it really easy because even if you’re not always on top of this and some CRMs, I believe Iris Works integrates it into their CRM and I’ve been in communication with them on seeing if there’s a way we can like auto trigger some sort of like birthday email that goes out.

I thought that would be really cool. But one of the things you could do is make sure that it’s in your CRM, set up as a reminder or just put it into your own calendar as well. Posting a story of just their favorite photo is a great way of doing this.

And it’s easy because all their friends are sharing about it on Instagram. Typically they’re sharing those stories. So it’s great word of mouth for you, but it also is just that reminder of saying, hey, we’re still here.

Thanks so much for being, being a client of ours. Now do you have to do this beyond their senior year? No, I would say you probably don’t. Unless it’s like a really good client that you, you want to make sure you’re, you’re keeping in touch with.

Maybe they’ve got siblings down the line or something like that. But for, for the most part it’s just during like their senior year, maybe into their first year of college, just because it’s still like fresh and they still, you know, are kind of like reminiscing about, about the end of senior year and all that stuff. And then the other thing too is even beyond the shoot.

One of the things that we tell our photography clients inside of our mastermind, our students of ours, is post those behind the scenes even after their shoot. And so one of the things we did last year as part of our social media strategy, when we actually had days in the calendar to execute on this, is we just did little behind the scenes sneak peeks of their, you know, a favorite image or two or we did like our senior features, which was like, I think like 10 different images that were in a carousel that people could swipe through. Just kind of a nice, just because kind of special surprise for, for your clients is something that’s that’s great.

Kind of akin to that are things like blog spotlights. Uh, we talk about this in our blog strategy inside of our academy of we actually don’t post blogs. The when they photograph their sessions, we do it months later.

We also do like, you could do like Instagram takeover of sorts or something like that if you so want. And this would be great for like slow season content. So again, we just want to keep them involved somewhere in your ecosystem.

First for name recognition, but also just to know that like, hey, we’re, we’re going beyond we care about you, all those types of things as well. Now this really ties into our second tier of content that you can start doing, which is some sort of referral or loyalty program. And the reason why I love to do this.

And if you’re not doing this, you’re missing out on a huge part of your business. When you ask your prospective, or I should say not prospective clients, but when you ask your existing clients, can you help me spread the word? They’re more likely to say absolutely than if you aren’t to ask them. Meaning that if you don’t ask them at all, there’s really no incentive for them to make sure they’re spreading the word.

So highly recommend doing this. The ways of doing this, you can do this multiple ways. Personally, for me, I just do it as like, hey, if you want to share the word, that would be great.

I do a little bit of a kickback for them. This can be either like a $50 Visa gift card, something. Something like that.

And one of the things you could also do is if you want to get a little bit more tricky, a little bit more complicated, you could do some sort of like tiered loyalty. Like, hey, if you get like one or two, you earn, you know, like a quick mini session cap and gown shoot at the end of the year or something like that. The other thing too is anytime that you are opening up your calendar, what an amazing opportunity for you to leverage those existing clients that are already in your base and offer some sort of like, presale access either to them or to their friends.

So, for example, if you only have a limited number of dates, and hopefully you do because you’re at that premium pricing that we talk about all the time, maybe what you have is some sort of like presale access, where what you do is you open this up for a select, you know, select number of days a week or so before you open up your regular calendar, and this allows them to book those prime dates before the public, maybe what you do is you send out an email blast and what you’re doing is on that email blast saying hey, you can also share this access code and you don’t actually have to have like any access code. It can just be like a, I mean if you wanted to like password protect your contract or something, but I would like, I would just put it as like a hey, email, email us and share this code and then you know, we’ll get you manually added. It’s not actually any sort of code.

We just kind of know, hey, they’re inquiring from the all access event for, for our purposes and all that stuff as well is a great way of doing this. The other thing that you can also do and what I would encourage you all to do is to provide them some sort of like physical marketing cards. I love this idea.

This is an idea we’ve shared with our mastermind students. And what you do is you just give them like a four by five kind of rep size card, hand it to the mom and say hey, pass this to your friends. We personalize it so we actually put the client’s image on it and this is just kind of a great way of bringing in those extra bookings kind of in our tail end of our season.

So for us the fall when maybe it’s a little bit slower than like when we’re crazy busy in, in the summer as well. So those are just some, some ways that we can do like referral or loyalty programs. We also do this and we integrate, integrate this into our client studio management software where one of the emails that they get is actually an email that says hey, here’s your code if you want to share with your friends.

So very similar to kind of like the, the loyalty, the kickback. We let them know, hey, well you can either earn $50 cash or credit towards your senior session. A great way of making sure that you are again keeping in touch with your clients up until the actual shoot as well.

Now when we’re incorporating our clients, the other tier that we want to think about from the big picture is some sort of way of acquiring testimonials and social proof. And this really breaks into two different kind of mo methods of this one. One is which of is encouraging the reviews, actually getting them to submit their review and then the second part of it is actually like showing them off, right? It’s one thing to get the review, it’s another thing to actually want to make sure that you’re posting this on social media.

Now why would you want to do this, well, the first reason is that it’s going to help you and your business by showing that there are people that you’re photographing that are raving about you, who have a great experience with you and they want to spread the word. So what I personally do is I incorporate this into again my, my CRM. So you kind of hopefully are picking up on the trend that a lot of this is automated.

A lot of this is, hey, what we’re going to do is we’re going to make sure that we automate this so it takes the stress off of you. And we just put an email that goes out right after their session and we just link this to a Google review. Right to Google My Business.

And on Google My Business. The reason we do it there is because it helps with SEO. So now not only are they leaving a review, but now with more reviews, Google now sees your business as more reputable, more popular and they’re more likely to push your business up in the Google my business rankings.

And so this is a great way of making sure, saying hey, we’re not only going to get these reviews, we’re also going to make sure it helps with SEO for prospective clients to, to follow. I should say with prospective clients seeing you and maybe saying, hey, we, we love this photographer. Look at this great review.

And now what we can do is we can make sure that we’re also using these in our social media marketing. More on that in a minute. Now what I will say, and this is kind of like the little legal, legal disclaimer.

You can’t incentivize reviews so you can’t like, or I should say you can’t pay for reviews so you can’t like hey, say hey, we’re going to pay you for this. Now if you want to do like a giveaway or something like that, I believe that’s okay. Check a, check with your small business attorney, my very state to state it’s for honest feedback.

So you can’t just say hey, give us a five star review and you’re entered for this. It has to be honest and all that stuff. We stay out of that.

We, we want their honest, genuine reviews. So we don’t incentivize it in any, in any way just because we want like their full, raw, authentic, genuine reactions to us. We know we provide a great experience and we want our clients to share that as well.

The other thing that you can also do is a quick text goes a long way and especially if you’re getting longer form reviews written for say A magazine. Or maybe you do like a little carousel on social media of like, hey, what do past clients have to say about working with us? And you’re going to kind of repurpose this into a marketing carousel in your off season. Great way of doing this.

We just send them a text, have them text it right back to us. It’s nice and quick, it’s easy. You don’t have to worry about like submitting any forms or downloading anything.

And it’s just great. A great way of making sure that your clients can get those reviews to you nice and easily as well. Now if you have clients that are willing to go above and beyond, a video testimonial goes a huge, huge, long way.

They can send a short clip sharing about their experience, what we’ve done. So we’ve either repurposed these as Instagram stories, we’ve put them at the tail end of our social media testimonial carousels or whatever you want to call those. Great way of doing that as well.

Now we got to show this off, right? So we kind of talked about some ways we can do this. I’m going to give you three simple ways. The first is incorporate this into your website.

So on your website, on any page that they’re going, that they’re thinking about booking you, your homepage, your about page, I should say the seniors page, like your, your informational page, have testimonials there. So the more testimonials the better. We love to just grab like a snippet, like a little quote, little quote snippet or whatever you want to call it.

And what we’ll do is we’ll highlight that as like the header. And then what we’ll do is we’ll put like the full review below. We try not to make these super wordy, so we might want to like cut or condense in some way, but we want to make sure it’s, it’s impactful that we’re getting to like the core objections, fears that prospective clients might have prior to working with you.

That’s, that’s the first place that they absolutely should be going. The second is have some sort of social proof highlight reel. Maybe you put this on your Instagram page.

Like, like we said, we’ve done this on our Instagram carousels. When it comes to booking season, when we want to show people that like, hey, these are what previous clients have to say. This is what their experience was prior to working with us.

Now this is their experience after working with us. It’s a great way of doing that. And then maybe especially if you have a newsletter, maybe the third way you’re doing this is doing a little segment and you’re doing like a testimonial of the month or something like that.

Or hey, 12 months of the year, you have hopefully 12 clients. Get a review from each of those, feature each client at least one month. We also incorporate this into our nurture sequence in our email newsletters.

And one of the things that we do is we literally have four or five quotes that people get sent over the course of. I think it’s about a month that they’re in our nurture sequence, give or take. And now what we can do is we can again start emphasizing and kind of building that trust factor that hey, these are real people that we’ve worked with here, have been their stories, hey, they didn’t feel like they could look like a model like that we work with prior to it and they saw themselves and change their confidence.

Like we want to hear those stories. Great place of putting those as well. And then the last thing that we want to do when we’re thinking of like our big picture for how do we get incredible photo clients? And hopefully you can see that like all of these lead into the main thing, which is when we’re getting incredible clients.

This all is because they resonate with the clients that are so great that we’ve worked with before. For the clients that work with us are going to share about, I should say the clients that you love, they’re going to share about you. The clients that you loved to work with, they’re going to bring friends that are very similar.

And the other thing too is the clients that genuinely had a great time are going to be the ones that more easily give you reviews, testimonials, sharing about you. So if you have an issue with clients not sharing about you from the beginning, it’s really time to analyze are you attracting the right type of clients from the very beginning? And if that’s not the case, well, then maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board and make sure that you are attracting the right types of clients. And then we’re going to end this episode with what is your long term vision? Where is it that you can improve? Is it these regular touch points that we talked about? Is it in your email list? Maybe what you’re doing is you’re segmenting your lists, ideally by class, by parent or senior.

And this way what we can do is we can send them more tailored content throughout the year and then with this as well. What’s working well in your business, what isn’t? And this is really where it comes down to, like, saying, hey, out of these three items that we really talked about, where is it in your pipeline of. In your progress or in your process? Is this working well? Where is there room for.

For improvement? And ultimately, how can you make sure that rather than completely changing it every year, how are you optimizing each year moving forward? So that’s all I’ve got for you guys on this episode today. Like I said at the top of this episode, send us a DM over on Instagram Senior Photo Education. That’s where.

That’s where you can find us. That’s the best place to let us know. Do you like this YouTube idea? Am I off my rocker? We would love to hear with you, hear from you is really just, how can we get more content to you that’s more accessible in a way that you like to see it? We’re going to keep the podcast.

Maybe it’s. It’s going to become a video podcast as well. But we want to know, like, where is it that you would be more likely.

Do you Want this on YouTube? Do you want to keep it just on Spotify? Uh, it’s going to be more work for us to do video. So maybe we’re just going to, you know, keep it here if that’s what works best for you. But we want to hear what you have to say.

So send us a dm. Let me know. Let’s connect over there.

And until next week, make sure you hit the like button, the subscribe button. We’re going to be putting out our next week’s podcast episode, and we’re pretty stoked. We’re going to change it up a little bit.

I got some tricks up my sleeve, that’s all I’ll say. It’s a little. There is a little foreshadowing in that last statement, Little trick up my sleeve.

So I’ll let you toy around with what that might possibly be. If you have any ideas, hit me up on Instagram and let me know if you know what’s coming up in future topics for the podcast. But we’ll leave you with hanging with that little Easter egg until next time.

We’ll see y’all later. See you next week, same place, same time, same podcast channel. And we’ll talk to you soon.

Take care. 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 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.