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10 Online Marketing Essentials Part 2

We figured out, we filled out that customer profile. I really do encourage all of you to do that exercise. And then you'll also see if you're struggling, maybe that you should focus. Like you'll be able to see that. But we figured that out. We figured out where they are online. Where we can find them. We filled out that last part of the profile, and then number six is figuring out what to do when the terms of social media. Yeah, so you know we talk about the important social network, and finding your audience and where they hang out. So this is where you're going to laser target your efforts. Once you know that your expected mother is probably pinning all sorts of stuff on Pinterest for you know baby clothes nursery And nurseries, and decorating and things like that, then it's like alright well I'm gonna go there. This is where I'm gonna focus my efforts. So that again, just reinforces why the customer avatar and why you're doing this whole exercise in the first place becomes mul...

tilayered and important. Yeah so my recommendation to you guys is you really, if you really active and really successful on one network, that's all you need. You don't need to be on everything, and active on everything. Personally I'm going to recommend probably about three. Like pick the three places that they're active. I think that it's giving you a little bit more opportunity to cast a slightly wider net, but still a focused but wider net, right. Instead of just going, alright everybody come here. So when you figure out who your customer is, then you can actually figure out what one, two, or three networks they're on. So don't spread yourself too thin, because then this all seems overwhelming and you don't want to do it. And one little note on Pinterest, a lot of people think that it's just another social network, but it's actually a search engine. So there's actual SEO that goes into being found on Pinterest, you show up in the feed if you do things differently, and it has been a very tremendous driver of sales for certain people. We're actually gonna show a slide later that talks about that. That it's not just you know people well are just pinning stuff how are they coming back to my site, but using things like rich pins to- when people click on that it goes back to your site instead of just repinning it to your own board. There's a lot of power in using Pinterest, especially as creatives, that and Instagram, pretty powerful. I- do you know the Haagen Dazs image I had in the beginning, with the girl whatever, I- That was licensed by Haagen Dazs in Shanghai, I got paid good money, they found it on Pinterest. They found that photo, said we like this, and they contacted me and hired me. The biggest job I ever bid on. And I didn't get it, but it was for over 100,000 dollars, we bid a two day shoot, over- it was 130. They found me because they were planning their concept for this commercial shoot, they were pinning my images on, or pinning images on Pinterest for their inspiration board said, this looks like kinda what we want, who shot this? So let's just call her. Like you don't think of quite what it could be. Now of course the nursery example, and the wedding example that makes sense. But for someone like me, I do commercial and fashion photography, you gotta think of the art buyers for example, that might be pinning those images. So it really depends on who your target audience is, and where they're online. So in my example of the bride in central New York, she's most likely on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook. Those are gonna be the three things, the three places that I would place my efforts. I will say in the example, one of the examples that we'll look at later for the cosplay photography, they're very, very successful on YouTube. Because maybe it was a younger demographic, a little bit more tech savy, learns a lot on, I mean the Cosplay community and making their costumes learn a lot on YouTube, so that's where they were present. Makes perfect sense. I mean it's photography. And you might have just thought these, but no like you have to actually get inside the customers head. So get- it answers a lot of questions. Okay so let's talk about a schedule Robert. So you know that's one of the biggest things that everybody complains about, is that they- I don't have the time to write content or I don't have the time for social media. And it's understandable, everybody's busy, they're- you know you're wearing multiple hats, but so you pick your key networks, you kinda at least start there. You know focus on a few of them, don't always feel like oh well I'm not using these so I'm at a disadvantage. Just focus on a few at a time. Get to a schedule a couple times a week. And this is where using tools like Edgar or Buffer or Hootsweet come into play because. Show you these later. Yeah you'll be able to automate things, you'll be able to put things on a schedule. You can sit down spend 30 minutes a day doing your entire weeks worth of posts. And while automation is good, you know there are times when it's not good. You know there's been plenty of times in the new of social media brands have during tragic events have automated things and it looks pretty, looks pretty bad. But you know you should keep an eye on it and you can always go in and stop something once it's been scheduled. But you know once you get yourself to a schedule, it becomes a lot less daunting of you having to go I have to be on this, I have to spend 30 minutes to an hour every day doing this, you know. It's beneficial in the end because this is where our customers typically hang out. But there's ways to make it easier so. Alright, so one of the things that used to scare me about this whole schedule and always having to share and always having to create. 'cause I'm real busy and I'm real tired. Like you know like I'm doing a lot of things all at once and I'm thinking man if I've got to constantly create. But you start to get creative about what you are sharing. So for example, one of the things I see photographers forgetting about all the time is you can have content produced by your customers. Like people say oh man I don't know what to blog, well have a customer pick their favorite image and tell you why it was their favorite image and write about what, what is so touching them. Like it makes a lot of sense, and I don't have to write anything, and I already shot it so I don't have to do any more work. Or for example the Cosplay photographer person. Let's say like man I don't know you know I haven't shot in a little bit and I want to update my Facebook, but I haven't done it in quite some time. Well you don't need to always share your photos. Think of it like this, you just wanna share anything that's useful to that target audience. So maybe you see a great YouTube video on how to make this fantastic Cosplay outfit, whatever it may be, and you know your audience is going to find that interesting so you share it on Facebook. It's called adjacent content. It's like, it's not necessarily just your images, or like other photographer's images, it's not saying you need to show your competition, but things your target audience would find useful. It doesn't always have to be all you. It's just well what would my audience like. They would like this, so I'm gonna share it with them and guess what, they're going to appreciate me because I'm giving to them, we're forming a community, they're looking to me as a resource. It's actually recommended to do this a little more, I mean we're guilty of it ourselves, you know you do a lot of self promotion, you get in the habit of just promoting your own images, your own work, but if you're a wedding photographer sharing tips on you know certain wedding venues, or certain blog posts from wedding wire, or brides dot com, or something like that. That becomes helpful and then we share our partners and other people that we you know blog posts that we like. And that creates conversation on our own Facebook page, and that's showing up in other peoples feeds because the more people are comment on it, the more it goes up on their feed and then we jump in on that conversation because oh yeah we saw this was really cool, this was interesting. So you know think more about sharing things that are in your industry, not just everything you know related to yourself. So I think it's about being real with yourself because if you look and you look. I read this today and I laughed out loud. It says the recommended number of times you're supposed to tweet everyday is five. There's no way I tweet five times. There's no way I've ever tweet five times. Like it's just not in my flow of how I work. Although I do probably update Instagram stories five times a day. Like it kinda depends on what you're- so my point is, it's being real with yourself, I'm not gonna be like oh yeah I'm gonna do five times a day on twitter. I barely do like once a week. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna do once a day. Like give yourself a place to start and a place to build, and be realistic. And you know Robert says that you're aiming for 30 minutes a day towards marketing. I say an hour because I'm not as good as him. Well not just marketing we're kinda you know Marketing, social media The social media and And that whole realm Yeah and it can get a little crazy, but if you set the time apart and to try and automate it and do it ahead of time then you feel like I checked it off your list. Okay I'm done kinda for the week. And then in between, maybe you can jump in and have more of a personalized conversation with certain things. And I'm gonna be real fancy. So last week I went gorilla tracking, okay. I really did though so yeah. But while I was gone, I'm like oh gosh I don't want my social media to go dead, so I scheduled it ahead of time and I wrote my post and I planned it out. And I planned out, I was gone for eight days, and I planned out the week. And it took me about an hour and 10 minutes. To get my entire post for the next eight days scheduled out for that week. So I don't know if you think that's a lot or a little, but I got that part. But if you do this normally like you set- it's a Sunday, it's a Monday you plan out your posts for the week. On the other days you're devoting that time more towards marketing research, which we'll talk about what you should be researching. Or responding to the people that are engaging with you on these posts that you have created. So I usually, like if I can, I get some stuff scheduled. And then I don't feel like oh crap I missed my ideal time to post. My ideal time to post was 11:19 and it's one o'Clock is it even worth it? Like just do it ahead of time. I do that all the time. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. There's actually programs that tell you the ideal times to post. The scheduler that I use, I can say in each day just post it whenever is best and it decides for me so I don't even have to worry about it and it will post it. So this does exist. Kay. Alright so the next three sections I have here, eight, nine, and ten. These next three parts of the ten part essentials we're gonna gloss over because this is what we focus on intensely. This is what the rest of the day is all about. But I wanted you to know how it fits into that bigger picture. So number eight is planning for SEO. Can you give us a brief- Like Lindsay said we're gonna really touch on this but it should be top of mind that SEO is something that you should be focusing on. So SEO is search engine optimization. I'm sure we've all heard of it, I'm sure we've played with it or dealt with it, or you know went nuts over it. So there's a lot to it and we're gonna get to that in the next segment, but this is just a preemptive slide. We're going to be talking about it, but it's something that you've gotta have as part of your marketing plan so. I'm just gonna say. Can I do a brag. I'm a page one, I'm fluctuating between like two, three, four, but page one for fashion photographer New York. That's what SEO, so if someone searches fashion photographer New York, page one! But that didn't happen by accident. So that's what you have to keep in mind. And so SEO is really about if somebody's searching to find a photographer and that photographer's supposed to be you, they're looking for you, but they don't realize they're looking for you. How you pop up and you're like oh yeah no I'm the person you were trying to find. Like that's what SEO is. But you actually have to work towards it. It doesn't happen by accident for the most part. And we'll give you all of those pieces. This is going to be Robert's big focus. 'cause this is something I really did not do before I met him and now I got that rank so I'm real happy. But for example, we'll talk about- you're going to learn and this is going to be on your to do list, you can write it down now, but we'll explain what it means. You're going to build your ideal or your target keyword list. What are the words or the phrases you want people to search and find you. And we're gonna tell you how to figure out what to think and because you have your customer profile, you get inside of their head and figure out what they would be thinking and guess what I didn't know this. There are a ton of places that tell you what people think. And what people search. I didn't know this. Like I thought you just had to guess. There actually are many researchers. So he'll take you through the places you can go look what people are searching. How many times they search, variations of it. So on and so forth. But for me in that wedding photography example, I've been focusing on this entire time, someone might search wedding photographer in and then the things I want them to find, these are the places that are more affluent. I want the rich people to find me. Like what my- like that's what that means, but then I also like I want them to- if they're searching for the best, I want to pop up and be like yeah you were looking for me. So best wedding photographer in those places. Maybe they're getting married in this place and they want to know somebody who is very familiar in creating beautiful images in this location, so the Genesse Grand Hotel, so maybe they'll be searching that. That's maybe one you didn't think of, like maybe when on opposite you just assume people search wedding photography, but maybe not photography in a specific place, or in a specific winery. But I know the people that go to these two places they're also the rich people. So I wanna optimize for those as well. Like you're getting inside kinda inside of my head. So this is the kind of key word list that we're going to build. And we're going to show you how to get more technical into figuring those out. Instead of just saying well hey what'd you search. We'll do a little bit more than that. Okay. This is going to be, this section that we'll touch on later is my baby. Like my specialty, what I love. And it's no matter who you are. No matter what type of photography you do, can you become a resource for your target audience. Meaning can you share things that are useful and relevant to them. Can you establish yourself as an authority. Or do- can they consider yourself part of the community. Keep going back to the Cosplay person. But they showed that they were part of that community. And they had a ton of resources for articles on making a costume. Or like here's a tip for one of them was holding, how to hold a gun in a Cosplay photo because I'm assuming they're saying if you've never held a gun you don't want to look ridiculous. But you're in your Cosplay how to do that. And I'm like wow that's like that's great. It's not just like here's my photos, what can I do that the audience would say. Yes that's really great, I'm gonna keep checking back, this person they're one of my people. So really what it is is can you create and share valuable content to potential customers because it builds that relationship. They see you as an expert and they keep coming back. And one of the things we'll talk about is driving traffic. Because then, you wrote this article about how to hold a gun in your cosplay photo, but then some big Cosplay website, like that has thousands and thousands of hits everyday says this is cool, we're gonna feature it. And then everybody there and it sends traffic and so on and so forth. Like it's picturing that. So what can I do to be useful, relevant, and helpful. And it's a generosity and reserprosity, coming back again. So no matter what type of photography you do, this is relevant. I struggled in the beginning. Like when I first kinda heard this. I'm gonna spill it out for you real specific, like here's something you could do as a baby photographer, here's something you could do as a boudoir photographer, here's something you could do at a headshot photographer. So if you're like yeah I have no idea, I got you, like we'll do that a little bit later. So that's my baby. But this next one is Robert's baby. Yeah so we'll touch on this later, but if there's one thing you take away from this, today, it's capturing emails. And that's very, very important, because you can continue the conversation off of the social networks which are constantly changing, constantly changing their feed, constantly changing how much information they share. And at least with email you have the ability to start talking to them more. Start getting an idea of what they're looking for and for the most part, out of other types of platforms, it has a higher conversion rate. Much higher. We'll get into that a little later. And we're not saying like you know avoid social media or anything like that because that's part of the puzzle, but you use social media, you use SEO, all to attract and convert. And that's capturing the emails is part of the conversion process. And I think about it like this, let's say that there's, there's somebody that's interested in getting a family portrait. And it's a great gift for mother's day. Okay but let's say that they come to your site and you're a family portrait photographer and they're on your Facebook. And they see like oh this person's got nice photos they look around and then I can guarantee you the average person, the second they leave, they don't remember your business name, like they don't remember where you were. They saw it, it kinda registered there, and then they're gone. And like Mother's Day comes around, man it would be a perfect opportunity to have that person book you. And so you're putting out on social media hey Mother's Day, hire me, family portraits! But they're not there. Because you see how many people don't see your Facebook posts anymore. Like it's so little and you get so minimal engagement. But if you can do something, where they're on that Facebook page, that one time they're interested and you say oh hey, you find a way to get their email, it might just be like hey you know sign up for more information, and they'll be like oh yeah you know what that I want to eventually hire them, I'm gonna give them my email. Or maybe from the family photography, like the family portrait you say, here's a little guide that you can download for free, about let's say, I got a perfect example, my friends a family portrait photographer in Cape Maine, New Jersey. And it's what to wear to your beach photo shoot. It's just like you know give us your email and I'll send you a little list of what to wear. You're like oh yeah eventually I do want a beach family photo shoot, okay I'll give you my email. But then Mother's Day comes around and you say oh hey by the way, you were interested at one point, family portraits for Mother's Day and then they're actually going to remember you. There's a lot more to it then that. That is a very obvious example. Robert is gonna go much more in depth. Like that is the most obvious high level. But we use it so much more powerfully than that. And we'll talk more about the type of content for people who don't want to write content who don't have I- want ideas or write content, I'm not a writer I don't want to blog, I don't want to do any of that. So we talk about things that can still help get that interest level up for someone that you're talking to so you could eventually convert them into a customer. So there's little things that you can do and there's all sorts of ideas. And like Lindsay said, that's her baby she's gonna talk about the content marketing part and that all the different little ideas that you can help utilize. Yeah and so just think of it like this, we all know that no matter how many followers you have on Instagram or Facebook, hardly anybody's actually seeing anything. And it's great to be able to have conversations and engage and you still do it. But if you can find a way to be able to get them away from these platforms that are constantly changing and moving their algorithms and they never see your stuff, but they opt in and say yeah no I want to hear more. And then you build the community and the conversation. Or maybe that dad that you sent out the hey Mother's Day photos, he just asked about pricing, now you got a conversation going. And you don't need to talk about pricing right away, you warm them up, you have a conversation you engage with them, you become friends, you talk about your kids, you've got a relationship. And then they're hiring you as a person, not just a business that they don't know anything about. So it's, that's kinda what you're aiming towards. I know that Robert, we have tens, and tens, and tens of thousands on my email list. And sometimes we'll send out emails that ask people questions and when someone responds, or if somebody asks, we respond personally. Because we're- that's our chance to build a relationship. We got someone that's actually engaged because they wanna have a conversation with us. So what we did was this section we just gave you kind of our online marketing essentials. These are the 10 things. And like I said this is what the, a good portion of the rest of the day is about. Because there's a lot of intricacies in here. And Robert's the expert on this eight and ten, so he's gonna go all about that. So let's talk about what to do, immediately when you go home the things you need to do. So let's do the action steps. Yeah. So I think you should start, we've talked about thinking about how your brand can be unified and we've come across a couple different websites, you know there's actual like different versions of the site, like two or three different versions of the site in terms of what you click on it, it opens up another version of the site. You know you need, these things need to be kinda cohesive. And it's okay if you wanna use multiple systems. You know we talked about all the different systems you could use. Cause there's multiple purposes. So you might have your client section, or your client website where they can login and do something, but that doesn't have to be your whole site. That could just be a microsite, something that's used for client access, whereas using Wordpress or Photoshelter or any one of these other servers can be your portfolio or your main entrance point. So don't feel like you're locked into one thing. You can use multiple systems, multiple things, but the important take away is that your brand message and having everything cohesive across all these different platforms is up to par. I recommend everyone figure out what your timeline is for getting this in order. Like if you're gonna give yourself a month. Or if you're gonna give yourself two months. And then pick the day that you're gonna do each one of these things. Like so you're gonna kinda, it'll pop up in your calendar and you'll go oh crap yeah today was fix my website day. Like you know something like that, cause otherwise it goes on and on and on and never happens. So figure out what's your timeline for these, getting your house in order. So one month, two months, so make sure you put on there determine your brand message. Give yourself that job for a day. You're figuring out, you're gonna focus, you're gonna try to narrow down. And then that next day, unifying your brand. If you're a mess or if it's not a clear message like give yourself a day where you're kinda working on it. And that might be your hour that day. I said spend an hour a day. Alright and then also, pop up on there, alright give yourself that day that you're gonna build your ideal customer profile. Fill out that piece of paper, fill out multiple if you need to. Have that pop up and then once you have that, I'd let it simmer for a few days, you don't need to do it instantly, you know. But then figure out okay where are 10 places I could find these people. Kinda get inside their head, pretend it's a real person so the next day imagine Amanda, or image whoever and be thinking oh yeah you know what, they probably go to this yoga place, you know whatever it may be. Cause you're thinking about them in your head and it starts to answer those questions. So give yourself a calendar and have all of these things pop up. By the way, just to close out this section, so we have a bonus material. And the bonus material it's a 25 page guide on content to create, so like blog posts that you should write and key words that you should be considering, and links that you should be getting for your site. So, but very specific too. For headshots, for wedding, for boudoir, so if you're someone who can't connect the dots and you want someone to kinda spell it out a bit more, or you need a little bit of inspiration, that is included. I wanted to ask you about identifying your customers, because I'm kinda in the process of changing my customer from being the person in front of my camera to being the person who's going to be paying for the people that are in front of my camera. Sure And I find a lot of problems in our, especially in Seattle, is the fashion photographers are trying to make money off the models, and the models are trying to make money off the photographers. And I'm like that's not your client. Sure. So kind of transitioning from that kind of mindset of who is your client, is it in front of your camera or this other entity. Totally, well I mean that's exactly what I have to do and what I do as a fashion photographer. So actually what we did, is we started in the beginning of the year, we had a meeting where we sat down and figured out who my target audience was. Now just to give you an idea, one of the things that I'm marketing towards is I've decided that as a fashion photographer my audience would be art buyers and then editors of magazines. So and this would be people that are in charge of the advertising for brands. And specifically I want to advertise my cinemagraphs. So I do living photographs. So I figured out my unique message to them. Because there's so many good fashion photographers out there. My unique message was going to be I have that special skill set. So what we sat down and we wrote down an individual, we did kinda that customer profile, and I figured out one of the places, there's a company called Agency Access. That provides the list of all of these art buyers and all of their contact information. So we started to build the brand message, what we had to offer, upgrades for them or things they might find interesting. So one of the things that I wanted to do is educate them on how cinemagraphs can help make their brand money and increase engagement on social media. Because that's what they're job is to do. So what I would encourage you to do is answer that question about what problem you're solving for them. Because then it's helping you figure out your messaging. And then fill out specifically, so it's, there's also actually Robert was telling me, we're working this out for our end of year strategy, you can so specifically on Facebook advertise, you could actually target specific companies, specific job titles through Facebook advertising. So it might be a way to think about it as well. Cool. Alright from Addy Farr online, similarly to that in terms of finding your target audience if it's not a person. When your client is a commercial entity. Business to business. Well it's I have two thoughts on this. Go ahead. I'll see if you agree with me No go ahead. Even if it's a business, there's still a person behind it. Is that, would you agree? No that's true because art- you have to think of art buyers, and I've worked in, you know I've worked for publications, and you need an art buyer. They're still on Instagram, they're still on Pinterest, they're still on these social networks, and they're on LinkedIn, and they're looking constantly for somebody for new work. They want to hire a photographer who will, who's a good food photographer, or who's a good lifestyle photographer. So still a person behind there, so you still have to kind of do the avatar a little bit. Where you're, where are they looking you know. And if it's a very niche commercial entity, you know if it's like a lifestyle magazine then you can kinda narrow that down a little bit more, you know, but it's not so much different than it is doing the same for a person. And then you're also asking where do they hang out. So for example in New York City, there's very specific organizations that they belong to and meetings that they go to. And so can you actually show up to those meetings, or can you be a member of that organization. So it's figuring out those questions as well.