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Your Target Market & Brand Message

Lesson 14 from: FAST CLASS: How to Start a Photography Business

Pye Jirsa

Your Target Market & Brand Message

Lesson 14 from: FAST CLASS: How to Start a Photography Business

Pye Jirsa

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Lesson Info

14. Your Target Market & Brand Message

Next Lesson: Your Client 'Why'

Lesson Info

Your Target Market & Brand Message

Your target market and brand message. We're going to talk specifically about weddings just because that's our focus I want you guys to see how we approached it. There's a 2016 Brides American Wedding Study, you can look these things up online, they're very simple to find these different studies and different genres. If you're in niche area, it might be more difficult to get generalized information, so you're going to have to go off of like we talked about other photographers experiences and that type of stuff. So, brides/grooms are focused on making the entire planning and wedding process more meaningful. As of 2016, the millennial generation and younger, they want everything to have meaning, experiential purpose. They want, they want there to be a reason for why they need these products, probably becomes important in our brain messaging. It's bride focused but then more than ever, men are weighing in on weddings, like the guys are actually getting interested it's not the old days wher...

e you know guys would just like whatever, I'll just show up just tell me the date, tux whatever. No, a lot of our guys are the ones that are picking to go with Lin and Jirsa, like a lot of our guys are like Oh, we got to go with them, I love their work. Interesting. The average wedding cost is around $26,522 in 2016, and this is an interesting spot, part to kind of analyze, 35% spend more than intended, 58% are willing to increase their budget, and this is what I have to say to posting your price online. If 58% are willing to spend more, why would you ever show them your prices before you establish the value that you want them to have? 82% of brides are connecting with brands and vendors via social media, that shows that it is important. Pinterest is actually the most popular one. How many of you spend the majority of your time on Facebook? It's okay to raise your hands, because I was in that group too. I would spend a majority of my time Facebook looking for things until I learned. How many of you spend most of your time on Pinterest? One person, great. One person is doing it right. Great job Julie. (laughing) But if you see this and you're like oh man, what am I doing on this other place? Let me redirect some effort. Social media platform, so, Pinterest remains the most popular, for wedding brides. 72% of brides are using the platform. The biggest ticket item averages are engagement rings at 5000. Second on that list, this is literally a list of the biggest ticket items, photography is number two. And you know that if the average is 2000, the luxury market is a lot higher, and you know now that 60% of them are willing to spend more, now its just a matter of tallying your message, correct? Getting the right product and tallying the message for them. Are you guys like, oh yeah, okay, can we, like what Lee said, can we just like press pause so I can go do some stuff right now? (laughing) Engaged. Next steps, this is what we do as human beings right now in this age. As of 2016, we first tell our family members and close friends. That's probably like, hey mom, dad I'm engaged that's awesome, post to social media, that's number two. So, if that is the natural process is to, is for our clients to be posting this social media frequently, then shouldn't part of our focus be in creating images that they would want to post along with those messages that they're sharing? That's where our engagement shoot's come in. It's not so much an engagement shoot for the sake of the shoot itself, the shoot's themselves are not that profitable, until they come in and like buy more stuff. But, as a marketing tool, they're incredibly effective because every time they send another message out, every time they're like oh my gosh this, it's one of our photographs. Right there, every single time. Easiest marketing. Not to mention it gives you more portfolio stuff, it gets them in front of the camera, it gets you additional revenue. It does so much for you. So this is us, when we put together our brand and our look, this is what we wanted to convey. And this is where you guys are going to go back to your mind mapping. I want you to put together your little box, its going to say brand message, and you're going to branch out from there with what it is that you want to convey. We want our brand to appeal to women, but notice that we also want it to appeal to men, like we want to have kind of a neutral stance and that we have maybe a slightly feminine look without going over the top. We want refined and a luxury kind of look and feel to the site. An experiential meaning and purpose like, we want there to be something like a different experience that you get and we're going to walk through that experience in this segment. We want our brand to be traditional and neutral in perception. There's a big reason for that. We are not open online regarding political, religious beliefs, any of those things, because of our target markets. Okay, so we want that list. So, what I want from that mind map is your list, those words, these. The words that your brand message is attending to convey and if you don't yet know that, lets identify who you're target client actually is. So I have step number two, which is form client personas. Identify the actual clients that are going to buy your services and you're going to include basic information on each of these clients. You want their age, location, profession, their story, their bio, their needs. You're going to make these up, they're fictitious. I gave you a template for it, it's in your downloads, okay. So pause, go grab the template, come back this is what that template will look like for what I filled in for you. Personas are who the brand identity and message must be conveyed to. This goes back to do you think Mike Oloboxe personas are very different from ours? Absolutely. But your personas are a beautiful thing because there going to tell you where these people spend their time, what they buy, what they do, they're easy to put together and it gives you a clear vision of who your trying to market to. When you put together a little ad on Facebook, you know exactly how it should look, because you know the audience you're trying to appeal to. When you're trying to figure out what age group because Facebook ads, if you guys did take out a paid ad, it would ask you these questions. What is your demographic? What is the age group? What is their preferences? What are their keywords? What is the target income? And it will feed your ads to those people, so before you can even do that, you need to know who it is that you're trying to serve it to.

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