Hey guys! Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you’re having a great week! If you’re new around here, come on in. You can always sit with me. For the ones who’ve been around for a while, let me tell you what has been going on.

Life update #1: We just got back from Texas. We spent a few days in Waco, TX, which is now one of my new favorite places. And I know we will be back! If you haven’t been to Magnolia, do yourself a favor and go there. We arrived the evening before. We knew it would be closed, but I wanted to see it anyway. So, we made the 5 minute drive to the gates to watch the sunset there & see all the twinkling lights draped between the buildings. It was beautiful!

Early the next morning, we got there right when the gates opened. Insider tip - be there first thing! Nobody was there. We had the place just about to ourselves, so we got some really fun pictures without a lot of people in the background.

We spent the day there walking around the shops & the garden, talking about life & dreams. We had the best conversations ever! I was so inspired there & felt completely at home. Joanna knows what she is doing! Talk about a client experience! This was an amazing one! The attention to details was incredible. I was blown away by the friendliness & hospitality of everyone we met on staff.

Why am I going into so much detail here? For a few reasons, I am completely re-evaluating my client experience based on what I experienced there. And two, I want to encourage you to start if you haven’t already, living into your dreams right now. Ed Mylett calls this “touching your dreams”. He says “if you continue to live unfamiliar with your dream, you’ll die unfamiliar with it.”

This year Brian & I are getting familiar with the life we want to live. We aren’t waiting anymore. We are LIVING! And we are living into our dreams.

We may not get to go all in yet, but the more familiar we get with how our dreams feel, we are more & more motivated to make them come true.

We are putting ourselves in rooms we are uncomfortable with, spending a little bit more for the experience, taking a day off in the middle of the week just because, working from a laptop anywhere we choose (even if it’s just for a day or two) . . . we are getting real familiar with our dreams.

I hope you will begin to do that too.

Life update #2: While we had a great time in Waco, that’s not the real reason we were there. Our last stop was San Antonio, TX for our life coach certification graduation. We had a great workshop & then got our diplomas that we were incredibly proud to receive. Brian & I went through a pretty intensive life coaching certification program with Josh Coats earlier this year & now we are taking it a step further & doing his Master Life Coach Certification Program. We just thought the first one was tough. Oh my goodness, this one is amazing & gives us so many more tools to help people that we work with, whether that be with business or in life.

If you have no idea what a life coach really is, the easiest way to explain it is that a life coach will help you get yourself unstuck, make you aware of things (thoughts) that you don’t even know exist that are holding you back. When we are aware of these thoughts, we can process them & change them to pretty much retrain your brain to think about things differently, which will ultimately get you the results you want.

Here’s an example that I’ve had to coach myself on & you’ve probably heard me talk about here on the podcast. I was notorious for saying “there’s never enough time to get it all done”. That kept me in a state of stress. When I’m stressed, I am not productive. My brain is spinning constantly & I can’t see solutions easily. So, that thought or story of “there’s never enough time” would keep me stuck.

Once I figured out that story that I was choosing to believe, I was able to start changing the way I looked at both my time and my to do list. It’s taken me a long time to create a new story that I fully believe in & that is that “there’s plenty of time for the most important things”. That new belief calms me down, makes me feel more confident, and helps me to see things clearly. And guess what that produces? A lot more stuff is getting done!

So, that is the simple way of explaining what a life coach does. It’s a little more involved than that, but essentially it’s helping you get out of your own durn way!

Anyway, we are crazy proud of this accomplishment & excited about what we can offer the world moving forward.

Life update #3: Our flip house went on the market last week & we got an offer 3 days later! We are officially under contract!

If you want to see what it looks like, you can take a look at the highlights on our brian and jena instagram account.

Ok, let’s get down to business.

We’ve talked about niching down, about how marketing is so much easier when you do niche down. Today let’s go another step deeper - actually marketing to your #1 client.

The very first thing I’m going to ask you is do you know who your #1 client is? Well, if you haven’t niched down, you probably don’t know.

And that’s ok. This will come in time. Maybe you have an idea of who you want that to be, and that works just the same. So, hold onto the idea of that person in your head throughout this episode.

Next question - Is the way you are marketing to her (or him) attracting that person to your business? What are you putting out into the world? Does it speak to them? Does it make them feel anything? Does it drive them into action? Does it build trust?

What does your marketing say to the #1 person you want to attract into your business?

If you can’t answer those questions or if your answers are all over the place, it’s time to do some research and some heavier thinking about this client of yours.

What will actually speak to this person? What will draw them in? What will make them so curious about you that they can’t help themselves but to want to know more?

Branding is . . . how you make them feel. It’s how they perceive you.

Marketing is . . . how you bring them in a little closer to that sale. It’s how they know when & how to move. It drives them into action.

Remember, when you sit down to think about how you want to go about marketing your business, that you aren’t marketing to yourself.

One of the main problems I see is photographers not sitting down and spending time coming up with a marketing plan. It looks a little more like scroll, scroll, scroll, oh I like that, copy / paste, post.

Guess what? That doesn’t work. It might work temporarily or you might catch some random luck, but that cannot be a long term strategy. You will exhaust yourself.

Now, back to who you are marketing to. Remember, it’s not for you. It’s not about how you like to be marketed to. You aren’t necessarily your client.

You might like a bargain, a sale, a deal. But do you want clients like that - only the ones who are looking for a discount?

Let’s say you like that sort of thing. So, you think “oh I’ll run a fun summer sale” or “I’ll do fall mini sessions”.

I absolutely HATE this concept for photographers. Because it isn’t thought all the way through. We are service providers. That means it takes our individual time and energy to follow through with a purchase - on sale or not. It takes the exact amount of time and energy to serve a client who booked you at full price as it does at a discounted price.

Sales like this work best for businesses with products, not services. Product based businesses are scalable. Just turn up the production line. You are not scalable. There is only one of you! We don’t have that much capacity. When you bring in a ton of clients (and cheap clients at that) all at one time from a sale, you have to fulfill those orders. It feels amazing to get all those bookings at one time. But that’s just that sweet dopamine hit. When reality hits, it’s another story. This is burnout. Why would you market to burnout? Over and over and over again.

What you put out into the world is what you will attract.

So, how are you doing business? Are you always looking for the coupon codes? The cheapest way of doing something or getting something? Are you only making your own moves when something is on sale? Or are you trusting yourself & moving from that trust towards the things you value?

If you want to attract clients who trust you enough to pay you the big dollars, then you need to trust yourself too. You can’t have duplicity here. It doesn’t work that way.

Let’s talk about getting visible.

Here’s the thing . . . an invisible business won’t attract new clients and it certainly can't make sales. If they don’t know about you, how will they book you?

So, how often are you showing up?

How often is your face in their social media feed and stories?

Are you consistently showing up like a business owner, not a creative, not a photographer? A business owner.

The owner of a business would be giving value, would be expanding her audience, would be meeting new people on a weekly basis, would be engaging with people online and in person, would be asking for the sale & converting those warm leads into clients.

Here’s what I get told all the time . . . “But I don’t know what to talk about.”

I’ve never really understood this statement. To me, it’s an excuse. If you don’t know what to talk about, then you don’t really know your client yet.

That excuse will hold you back. It will keep you stuck.

You’ve got to change the way you think about marketing and your clients. Thoughts like that do not serve you. And if they don’t serve you, do you want to keep believing them? You know the more you say it, the more it becomes your truth. So how about trying some new thoughts on?

“I am learning more & more about my clients.”

“I am getting to know my clients on a deeper level every day.”

“What I do is important and she needs to hear from me today.”

Stop thinking about instagram. Stop thinking about trending audio & going viral.

People don’t move from one post, not usually anyway.

Consistency wins. Continue building up a bank of valuable content so that you can earn their trust enough so that when it is time, they will call.

Get to know your client.

Do not market for the quick sale. It only devalues what you do & creates burnout.

Consistently show up & build trust with the ones you want to work with.

If you want to dive deeper into this topic, if you want to create a consistent flow of high quality clients instead of that mad fall rush, then you need to get into Booked Solid Without The Burnout. This is my new absolutely free training that I just created. It’s something I’ve been very passionate about & believe to my core that every photographer needs to hear what I’m sharing with you inside this training.

Here’s how you get it. Go follow me on instagram & DM me the word BOOKED. It’s as simple as that. And then let’s talk. I’m in my DMs daily for you.

I love giving back to you guys. I truly care about you & this industry. I hope you hear that in my voice every week. When I say I want to help you build a more profitable, productive & purposeful business so that you can spend more time doing what you love with the ones you love, I mean it. If you want to pay it forward, share this episode with somebody. It means the world to me when you do.

Have a great week!