84: Marketing Q+A

We answer your most-asked questions on booking through the slow season, defining marketing, building an email list that converts, navigating comparison, and adapting to AI-era SEO. The throughline: pick one offer, build proof, show up often, and make it easy to book.

• splitting the year into seasonal offers for steady income
• building runway with model calls and BTS content
• redefining marketing as visibility that converts
• choosing outreach that fits your personality
• creating engaging, useful email formats that people want
• ignoring saturation and protecting your attention
• adapting local SEO for AI overview outcomes
• time-boxing, templates and content systems for momentum
• reducing analysis paralysis by committing to one offer

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Transcript

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Q&A Setup And Goals

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hello everybody. Okay, so this episode is going to be a QA. On Instagram, I have a broadcast channel, and so I asked for some questions there, and then I just gathered some other questions that I commonly get, and we're just gonna be answering these, and I think it'll be pretty helpful.

Solving The Off-Season Booking Slump

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Okay, so the first one was how do I create consistent bookings year-round? So I think this is a common problem, especially coming off of fall. Majority of family photographers will have just a massive drop-off, and your business may feel completely invisible. And when I first started in the industry, that invisibility lasted from December, like all the way through the summer. So that's really a lot of time with limited income if you are trying to rely on your business. Um, and what I would try to do in those early years is save up as much money as I could in fall and then try to spread the money out through the year. But that's not really what I wanted. I wanted to feel like I had a consistent income coming in. So basically, you need to go back and take stock of what you could do during that those slower months, and unfortunately, you're gonna have to actually market it. So that's the piece that's tricky because your brain will hold you back for two reasons. One, you're doing something new, which your brain hates, and two, you don't often have the content. So it's like you're building up from a basement because you don't, the things you want to do, you may not have done before. So it feels like you are drudging something out of nothing, which can feel very frustrating. So if you have, if you don't need the income for this 2026 season that will be slower for the majority of people, like January through April, then what I would do is spend that entire time focusing on one, figuring out what you want to do and what you could do, and two, gathering up a lot of content and data for those types of sessions. So let's say it was um milestone sessions in a studio. For half the year you switched to specializing in that. For half the year you switched to specializing in newborn, for half the year you switched to specialized specializing in branding. So those would be like examples of what you could do. So you could split your year in half where summer and fall you do outdoor family work, and then in the winter and spring you do something else. So the first question of this problem is what is it that you can do? What has demand and what fits your capacity? Like building a, you know, if you were like, okay, well, I don't have anything booked for early 2026, and I never shot a wedding before, but I'm gonna go ahead and shoot some weddings, like that is very, very tricky. You probably don't have the capacity to build a wedding brand in the next month. So it's about being realistic. A lot of times too, like the studios in the area, they are often offering deals for the beginning part of the year. So if you can't do outdoor work, could you work out a deal with a studio where you're like, hey, I'm gonna rent your studio one Saturday a month, January, February, March, April. And then what you have, so you have that laid out, then you have the marketing work. So a lot of it is like breaking the overwhelm of such a big question

Designing Winter Offers And Capacity

SPEAKER_00 3:23

down into achievable tasks. So going from consistent bookings every year is like, again, I've said this metaphor before, but it's sort of like steering a massive cargo ship. You're not gonna be able to just turn on a dime and start offering something new. The best way to do it is to set one year up for figuring out exactly what it looks like and then marketing it. And then you have runway because the runway part is what's difficult. Now, for the people who have a lot of marketing energy and excitement, you can do it in six weeks. There's no reason that you can't. Like you could create, let's say, and I didn't write any of this down. I'm just thinking about what I would do if I was in this position. So let's say you did contact those studios and you decided you were gonna offer milestone sessions. So it would be like portraits at three, six, nine, twelve months from the from the months of January, February, March, April, it could be an offering that you have, right? So in six weeks, you could create a whole marketing series around that, very, very hyper-locally based. And I'm I bet if you put the energy into that correctly, you would start to get clients for those. And even if you had to get a model call right now in a studio, just whenever they had time, let's say it's a white-walled studio in your town, you say, Hey, do you have a slot on a Wednesday when no one's gonna be in there? You find a baby that fits in the milestone category and you do some content with that baby. And the behind the scenes and the little fun footage that you get becomes the foundation of your marketing for that. What will happen to the majority of people is that they'll be like, ooh, like you could be listening to me say that right now and be like, oh my gosh, that's what I should do. You'll fall off when the work actually needs to be done. And I don't say that to be rude, I just say that to be like realistic. You have to consistently fight against complacency, overwhelm, and comparison because you will want to just give up the second that you don't get bookings the first time you talk about it. So that's the hard thing is like marketing is a runway and it needs multiple touch points in order to work. The human brain hates multiple touch points because what it equals is multiple places to fail. And that's very terrifying. So that it would the ideal scenario for the ideal for the for the average human, the ideal scenario for the average photographer who isn't someone who can just come up with like really compelling marketing campaigns on the fly would be that you're a year out right now from having a booked out, consistent 2027. That would be like a realistic mindset. And then whatever bookings you get while you're building up the content and the data about how this would work, what it would look like, you would get more bookings as we're rolling through 2026. But it wouldn't be something that you could count on as consistent until probably 2027. If you are in the rarer category, someone who's going to get that model call next week, get behind the

Six-Week Sprint Versus One-Year Runway

SPEAKER_00 6:31

scenes footage. Maybe you do a couple model calls, maybe you do one for each age, and then you're creating educational content, inspirational content. You've committed that for the next six weeks, you're you're only going until the end of the year, you're only going to be talking about these this milestone offering. That would be a different story. But like, is that a within your true capacity? So what happens when I teach marketing so often is there's like the aspirational you, and then there's the realistic you, and those two are constantly letting each other down, which is difficult because it's overwhelming. It's a lot of work. Marketing is work. And that was the funny thing is another question, another question to came in and it said, What even is marketing? And I think that's like so perfect to talk about because I feel like there's a lot of confusion about what it is. And there's you could ask Google like to define it. People get marketing and branding very intermixed, is like branding often is seen as like the elements of your brand, the colors, the feel, the logo, and then marketing is the visibility. And what I see as marketing is visibility. You can build the most beautiful brand in the world, but if no one sees it, it doesn't matter. You have to have visibility. So that's all marketing is. And there's no one perfect way to do it, and and there's no perfect path. Everyone's path is going to look different. You may be someone who has a massive social circle. So when you're building out your business, relying on friends and family is something that you can do. Or you could be someone who is a solo rider and you don't know that many people. And all the visibility that you get, you have to conjure up from the people in your town. What do what do those methods look like? What fits within your personality? Are you someone who would go to networking events? Are you someone who would go to local coffee shops? Are you someone who would reach out to other businesses in your town and form relationships? These are all the questions. If you're not that person, then you're gonna be relying on quieter, less personal forms of marketing, like ads or series, social media series or print ads, those sorts of things. So it's there is no one perfect way, but at the end of the day, marketing is visibility. And of course, it's two part because again, you could have all the visibility in the world. Like I could be the most

What Marketing Really Is: Visibility

SPEAKER_00 8:51

visible brand, I could be famous. But if you can't book me and it's impossible to figure out how my website works or get on my calendar or pay me money, I failed again. So it's visibility and income is like the visibility results in income. That is successful marketing at its very baseline.

Matching Visibility To Your Personality

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Okay, the third question is how can I nurture my email list so people actually book? So I think email lists again, I did a whole episode on email lists, I'm pretty sure, or it was just a huge rant in another part of a of an episode. But I feel like people are misusing their email lists and they're and they're not providing much value for anyone at all. Um, so if you want people to get on your email list and actively engage, you need to be engaging. Like that's just the bottom line. And the way I think it would be if I had a newer photographer

Visibility Must Convert To Income

SPEAKER_00 9:45

in my marketing class or something, and they're like, Yeah, I love writing. I love writing email, so I really want to build my whole marketing around email lists, then my advice, which I've said in this

Email Lists That Actually Book

SPEAKER_00 9:56

podcast before, would basically to create an extremely helpful monthly or by bi-weekly email that's focused on family activities, fun things to do, highlighting your town. It's basically like the email list becomes the emails in the email list become one part information about booking with you, two part super shareable information about your town for families. That would be an example of an email list that's worth going on. So that's how I would think about it. And you could do it a different way. Like I I had another photographer in my marketing um one-on-one or group or something, I can't remember, but she did like her email list was date night ideas. That's all it was. It was like date night ideas for families, and they went out once a month. And so it was like, I've compiled the best February dates for you to do here, and she just listed out a bunch of fun stuff, and then at the bottom was information about her booking. That would be an example of an email list that's engaging. You can also create an email list that's all about your own business, and that's the sole focus. If you are a good copywriter and you have a handle on sort of sales-driven, scarcity-driven um wording. So you're able to draw people into your limited offering and get them excited about it every single X number of times that you send the email list. What most people are doing is they're having an annoying pop-up pop up on their homepage that just says, join my email list for whatever reason no one knows, and no one's gonna join it if they don't have an incentive to do so. And then you're sending out an email to them when you have something to book. And that's not like horrible, but I'd say even more than that, a lot of people have an email list that they don't communicate with at all. And there's a million ways to strategize an email list. And again, it's one of those situations where you could ask in Chat GPT, create an email list strategy for a family photographer booking out spring, and it'll give you a jumping off point. Or you could research it and find blog posts that other people have done. The ability to gather information to implement something like that is not the problem. We know what the problem is. The problem is you, the problem is you actually implementing it because it's very scary. You're actually communicating with people. You know what people could do if you send them an email? They could unsubscribe. And then what happens is you explode, and that's the

Stand Out Without Dropping Prices

SPEAKER_00 12:17

end of your life. So we have to keep that in mind that sending emails is very, very dangerous, right? Obviously not. But that's what your brain tells you. That's what your brain tells you something's that that's gonna happen, that you're gonna fail, that someone's gonna actually click a button that says, Do not speak to me ever again. You are so annoying. That's what the end of subscribe button means. So that's what your brain is doing to you. So overcoming that and realizing that someone can get on your email list and then get off your email list and not hate you is true. Okay, the fourth question is how do I stand out in a saturated local market without lowering my prices? So the saturation of my market is none of my business. And the saturation of your market is none of your business. It doesn't matter. Because what are you gonna do? Are you gonna go around to every photographer and interview them like you're part of the FBI to see if they truly belong in business? Are you going to go to their sessions and take notes on them and film them and give them feedback? Are you going to run their numbers for them and send them a detailed breakdown of how their lower prices aren't actually making them any money? If are you gonna reach out to them and offer them free mentoring through coffee sessions once a quarter? If you're not gonna do any of those things, then you're just literally wasting your energy. And I wish I could like shake everyone who is so worried about this and just be like, you are in a zero barrier to entry field. If you want exclusivity, be a doctor. I've said this a million times. Anyone who has a pulse can buy a camera, get a business license, and do this work. You're never going to stop them, you're never going to convince them to change unless you spend your precious energy pouring that energy into their business. Which why would you do that? So the first thing I'm gonna say is put your blinders on. It literally doesn't matter what anyone else is doing unless they're personally attacking you. Unless they're and even like I've had photographers steal everything that I've ever done. They've stole they've stolen my exact session types and changed them to minis. My locations, my times, the day they were having, they took it and they made it minis. That's happened to me before. I've had people take my about me and just insert their name. Super weird. That's literally about me. I've had people steal my website, I've had people everything. At the end of the day, have I taken any of those people to court? No, because I know it's not worth it. It's not worth my energy. I just kept my blinders on and roving forward with building my own business. So if you are like at all concerned about what other photographers are doing in your town, mute them immediately. Mute them. You can't handle it. It's okay. It's not, you're not meant to handle that. That's a lot. That's like, that's like insane to create something and then immediately compare it to other people. I remember my first like foray into education was a course that I did on comparison through Unraveled Academy. And one of the things I said in there is like, if you think about creating art, it's very emotional, right? It's like you're you're putting yourself out there, you're creating art with this family. And then basically what you're doing is you're going to your town center with your prints and you're putting up on the putting them up on the wall with every other photographer. And then everyone's staring at them. That's basically what social media is. The average heart can't handle that. It's painful. It's it's too much. Like you would have to be rock solid in your own

Mindset, Comparison, And Boundaries

SPEAKER_00 15:56

lack of comparison to be able to handle that. And the photographers I know who have that are like very, very rare. And even I, who work really, really hard on my mindset and I love my own work and I love my own business, and I and there's a couple people I've talked about before. The freaking Scottish people, the Scottish people with the hills and the dresses and the wind and the they get me. All you Australian ladies, what happens is because of the switch in the seasons, all of your warm, buttery, like summer work is showing up at a time when I'm sitting in a rain puddle crying. And so that is a that's a major trigger for me. Love you guys. I love Australia. I've been there. Love Australia, New Zealand, want to go back there again sometime. It draws up those feelings. So the Scottish people and the and the Australian people, they still get me. Like they make me feel like poo, and I can't stop it. So I have to be really careful about when I decide to go on a warm, like Australian, flowy beach session deep dive on Instagram. It's not helpful for me, it's not good for my brain, right? I still love those photographers, and some of them are my friends, and I think they do amazing work, but I still have to protect my own brain. So if I, someone who is taught a class on comparison, are struggling with willowing into a little ball of sadness when I see the damn green Scottish hills with the flowing flowy's, then who no one is really gonna beat this. So again, the answer to the question is what's happening in your local market is none of your business. No one is asking you to lower your prices. You just need a better marketing strategy. You just need to pour all that energy back into your own business and it won't matter. Truly. Okay. One, two, three, four. Fifth

Local SEO In The AI Overview Era

SPEAKER_00 17:50

question: What local SEO strategies actually move the needle? So SEO is in a transitional period. I was just talking about this in the membership on our Monday morning call about how someone was saying, like, should I pay for Facebook ads or Google ads? That's like a question that happens. And right now, because of the AI overview, and even like within um, you know, Chat GPT and the AI overview, there's a browser called Atlas that every that it's suggesting people use instead of Google and it pulls up results, right? So the answer is right now with SEO, we are still in a transitional period because the average some people, when they search, like um your town family photographers, they're getting an AI overview at the top, and the chances of most people just staying within that AI overview are high. There's other people who search results still show um paid results at the top and then native SEO at the bottom. And I think the res I think what the difference between those two, I don't know this for sure, but this is like my guess, is that if you're in a bigger city and you type that and there's paid results that are coming up, you will get the paid results over the AI overview. There's also eventually going to be a way, if there isn't already, a way to pay for your result to show up in the AI overview. So you can see how like old methods of SEO are hard to teach right now because of the transitional space that is search. When I did a class in the marketing membership about how to show up in the AI overview, it's all about designing and writing your blog posts and your website in a completely different way that's kind of a 180 from what was suggested even two years ago, how to how to actually show up in search. Because now the question isn't becoming how do I show up in search? It's how do I show up in the AI overview. So if you're considering paying someone to help you with SEO strategies, those are the types of questions you need to be asking them and you need to make sure that they are helping guide you towards that type of search result instead of the same old, here's how you name your H1 headings, your H2 headings, here's how you name your blog post of this many words. I mean, like those types of um suggestions, there's a small percentage of p of the Google user experience where that will still help you. But then there's we're moving towards a space where from the research and when I taught the class inside the membership about the AI overview, it's a completely different methodology. So right now, probably isn't a good time to pay someone to help you with SEO unless they're helping you show up in the AI overview. Do I hate that? Yeah, it's super annoying because, like, I mean, it's good and bad, right? So, like the AI overview can be great and I use it. Like, if I ask Google a question, if I say, like, what was the last thing? My girls and I always Googling the most random things. What how far are we from the moon or whatever? If I Google that, it's the the answer in the AI overview. Very rarely do I question that. And that's what I take. That's the answer that I give. And that's where the majority of human um experience is going when it relates to search. So that's what I would say for that. Okay, the fifth question was about comparison and self-doubt, but I feel like we kind of already covered that. Oh, I can't count. One, two, three, five, five, six, six, seven, seventh question was time management.

Time Management And Marketing Flow

SPEAKER_00 21:14

How long does it take to make a reel? How long does it take to market? So everybody's gonna be different. And what'll what'll how I'll answer this question is deciding what sort of things are gonna completely take you out of marketing flow. So if you're an overthinker, then you need to set a time limit and literally force yourself to create the marketing within that time limit. And I was just talking to a person in the membership about this. I'll like, it's totally fine if you are like, I need to create, I think she was trying to create like some Black Friday stuff. I'm gonna spend the next hour creating Black Friday content for my website. And side note, the number of people who I would not be able to tell that you're having a Black Friday sale on your website, fix that immediately. Like, you need to, your your Black Friday sale needs to be on your homepage so people can know that it's happening and they get to it. The way I you can go on my website if you want an example of it. It's on my homepage and it goes to the blog post that's the Black Friday overview. So, anyway, beyond that, if you said, okay, I'm gonna spend the next hour doing this marketing work, literally reward yourself. I reward myself with little treats. Like I have this yogurt I really like. This sounds so silly, but this yogurt is like ice cream. It's called noosa. It is so good. It's like $2.75 a container. My husband is like, what are you like a queen? I'm like, look, I don't spend a lot of money on stuff. Let me just eat my crack yogurt in peace. So I will literally have my tart cherry noosa in the fridge. And then I'm just like, okay, girl, you get that. You get that when you do, and is this probably unhealthy to reward yourself with food? Probably. But that's where I am right now in terms of getting all this done. I will do the work and I will reward myself with the noosa. You could reward yourself with anything. You could rule one good way is to reward yourself with 10 minutes of scrolling on social media. What happens for a lot of people is they sit down to market and because their phone is right there, they start looking on social media and playing around with their phone, or they're like sitting there and then they look over and they're like, oh, I need to switch to laundry, or I need to do this. So part of it is setting yourself up for actual success and that will determine how long things are taking you. I always am a fan of creating templates so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. I'm a fan of getting footage and keeping it in folders on your phone where it's like behind the scenes fall, behind the scenes spring, behind the scenes winter, um, things I'm doing around my town, whatever it is, and having all those images, behind-the-scenes videos ready for yourself that's setting yourself up for success, all of that is gonna cut down on time management. If you are in build mode, marketing should be 20 hours a week, probably, honestly. Like it is a huge undertaking. And we've sort of got complacent because for a while, social media could carry our businesses to booking. And for many photographers, that's just not true anymore. So you need to be figuring out ways to get what is marketing, visibility and fixing your website and updating it with seasonal images and updating your Google business profile with seasonal images. There's excuse me, Edinburgh, there's a million activities that you can do for marketing. And slowly, as you start to pour into them, you can gather data about what actually moves the needle. So your time

Focus, Analysis Paralysis, And One Offer

SPEAKER_00 24:33

management is gonna depend on how well you set yourself up for success. And it's kind of like that idea that they tell authors that if I gave you three months to write a book or three years to write a book and you had to do it, you would do it in either of those time frames. It's the same way with marketing. If I gave you an hour and I said, write a bunch of Black Friday content, what you're offering, what the discount is, what sessions are included, all of that stuff. If I set gave you an hour to do that and we were in my studio and we had and we were working side by side, you would do it. You would get it done. It's just that at your home or wherever you are, you're sidetracking with a million other different things. So the time management comes down to how you actually set yourself up for success. Okay, the final question was basically this person feels pushed in too many directions and they're feeling analysis paralysis, right? So again, this is where you have to choose what you're what you're actually pouring into at this time. I went back and looked and I've done nine posts about my Black Friday sale since the first of September. So right now on my social media, it's Black Friday or my podcast. That's all I'm talking about on there. So for the majority of family photographers, what you should be talking about right now is what you're offering for 2026. And if you if you're struggling with actual ideas, that's all the ideas that I've been sending out every single Sunday night in the marketing membership. You get a thread that has a whole bunch of marketing ideas, and all of them right now are centered around 2026. So it's all sorts of really fun ideas. You just literally pick one of those and you go. It the thing about making a decision is that you never know what the other path looks like because you don't walk down that road. So part of it is getting to the place where you feel good about that. Like you're like, okay, I chose that for 2020 for this period of time, for November, what I'm gonna be talking about in my marketing, because there's still a lot of eyes on our businesses that will go away soon, I'm going to be talking about my wildflower sessions. So once you make that decision, you're walking down that path. Now everything you do has to do with that. Every marketing piece you do, every email that you send, every blog post that you write, you're just talking about wildflower minis, you're talking about wildflower sessions, you're talking about spring. So already you've made a decision, you're walking down the road. You don't know what the alternative would look like if you instead decided to focus on milestone uh minis in a studio. You don't know because you didn't go down the path. So you have to just keep walking forward, and that's how you avoid feeling pulled in too many directions. You can only get pulled in too many directions if you allow yourself to be pulled. You have to get really kind of crunched into this one idea and decide you're gonna stick to it. Like there's a million other things that I could have talked about on my social media. Like I shared almost none of my absolutely gorgeous fall shoots that I did. I'm actually gonna share one today because but the one I'm sharing today, the caption is gonna be about the fact that fall is not included in my Black Friday sale and that fall images like this session will actually release on July 9th. So again, it's only about my Black Friday sale and my 2026 offerings. It's not just me showcasing stuff to showcase stuff and being pulled in the ego of wanting to showcase a beautiful session. That's ego. That's not actually strategy. So that would be my answer there is like analysis, paralysis and being pulled in multiple directions is actually something that you're doing to yourself, not something that is happening to you, even though it feels like the latter, right? So choose the path of the thing you want to talk about. For most people, I would say one thing. Pick one thing and talk about that. Like I've said a million times, I'm so incredibly jealous of the family photographers who have one basic offering. I, my business always, my my issue with my business always is that it feels overcomplicated. I have my studio, I have my adventure work, I have my local work, I decide to do seniors and unfortunately really like them. I have a podcast, I talk about marketing. Like I sometimes I'm like, it would be so amazing if I when I look at other, I wouldn't do have no interest in giving up my family photography business anytime soon. But as a person who loves to talk about marketing, I'm incredibly jealous sometimes of the photographers who, and I feel like it makes them more out of touch, but they gave away their business and they're only talking about education just because it's one track and it's one thing to say. So I'm not, I don't want to be those people because I think keeping my hand in this business and being an active family photographer who just finished out October with 30 shoots, I'm in it with everybody. Like I am in it with everybody. I feel it. But like if you have one thing that you can market on, that's an amazing place to be. That's the other way to think about it. Protecting yourself from being pulled in multiple directions because you're just talking about your one offer for the next six weeks is incredibly freeing and clarifying. You can just be like, that's all I'm doing. And when you feel the pull to talk about something else, you've already made the rule internally that you're not going to be pulled in that direction. So if I like I have this happen to me all the time, I'm like, oh, it would be really fun. And then I have to be like, no, no more. Don't buy any more mother loving domains, Fiona. Those are the types of conversations that I have to

Closing Notes And Membership Invite

SPEAKER_00 29:55

have with myself. So, okay, I hope this QA episode was helpful and I I will be back next week with one more episode. Then I'm taking a break. And then I think there's two episodes or so. I might end up doing a series in December where because I really want to try to get, I secretly wanted to try to get to a hundred episodes by 2026. I think that was a goal I sent a long time ago. So I might, you might just hear a lot from me and you can just ignore me, but I kind of want to hit that goal. I think it'd be really fun. Or like have my 100th episode be in January of 2026. So we'll see. I might come up with a series or something to to rant about. I seem to have no um limit of things to rant about. So um, okay, hope you guys have a good week. And if you want more help, join the membership. It's super fun. You get to start off your Monday every morning on a live call with other family photographers, and you can ask me literally any question that you have. Okay, bye.