SCALING SERIES PT 3: How to Scale your Marketing

Summary

In this episode, Christa discusses the essential elements of marketing for business scaling, emphasizing the importance of having a solid structure in place before diving into marketing efforts. She highlights the significance of mindset, consistency, and understanding your audience, as well as the need for effective marketing strategies that nurture relationships and leverage data. Christa encourages business owners to focus on doing fewer things well rather than spreading themselves too thin, ultimately leading to sustainable growth without relying solely on paid advertising.

Takeaways

• You need the right structure before marketing.
• Mindset can derail your marketing efforts.
• Consistency in marketing is crucial for success.
• Understanding your audience is key to effective marketing.
• Data analysis helps identify what works in your business.
• Nurturing relationships leads to more opportunities.
• It's better to do fewer marketing strategies well.
• Successful marketing strategies take time to pay off.
• Don't let external factors affect your mindset.
• You can scale your business without relying on paid ads.

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Transcript

Christa (00:00.663)
This is part three of our scaling series and this is going to be on marketing, which a lot of people want to skip too, but you have to watch the, go back and listen to the first other episodes first, because if we don't have the right structure in place, if we don't have a good grasp on outsourcing in place, it's going to be really, really, really hard to start wanting to get, I know you're eager and just say, I just want to get more more and more and more people in. Yes, I understand. I always do too, right? That's how our business stays afloat and stay sustainable. But there's going to be a point.

where it levels out and we can't market because we won't have the time or we won't have the space or we won't have the energy or we see, my gosh, I was working on all of these things over here on the back end. I didn't actually have time to market. And I've seen this happen. And this happened for me too, where I had a really, really big, busy, beautiful month. And on paper, was like, holy cow, Christ has reached the pinnacle of success in the photo world. I'm just kidding, y'all, okay? So, but then what happened the next month? I hadn't planned for what was next because I was so wrapped up over here.

that I didn't set aside CEO time to plan ahead of what I wanted things to move towards. And I see this happen a lot. I see this happen a lot in like December, January, February photographers come off of their high from fall and aren't really planning as to like, what is next? How am I gonna make money in this next first quarter? Even though this last quarter was so huge and momentous. And I even see it where even it can affect us emotionally, right? Like our personal lives.

and how we feel personally definitely affects our business. I would definitely not say the two can be separated. But what often what can happen is we think we just need more marketing when it's actually more about consistent marketing that works. And so I want to break that down in this episode. And this is going to differ per business owner, somewhat an exact marketing plan. Now I have a marketing playbook for photographers. If you DM me the word booked, I can help you and show you

how I filled my calendar of paying photo clients, paying four figures and multi four figures without paid Facebook and Google ads. I use them now for my coaching business. I didn't use them at the height of my photo business. And there's actually a lot of coaches that will go as far to say, you know, it's actually better to know you can sell something organically before you start paying for ads. And you can take that either way. But I have that resource for you. If you give me the word bucked, I'll send it to you. It's a little mini course.

Christa (02:26.064)
But the point of this is going to be looking at how do you market strategically to scale? Okay, keep going back to the word scale. So the biggest thing that I see missed is consistency. And what do I mean by that? We put an offer out there and it's crickets. So we just debunk it and say, well, that was stupid. I don't know why I tried to launch a mini session day or this coaching offer or this mini course. No one wants it. And we base.

the entire offer on how a couple posted. Only had this many likes, Krista, no one's out there. No one wants this. And a lot of that actually comes to marketing, where we have really like a lot of inconsistencies and you want something more steady where it's like, great, I'm glad I can book out a fall calendar, but like I can't make any money during the off season. What needs to happen? Well, our marketing might have to shift. That's why it's not a one size fits all. But momentum.

builds magnetism, and so what happens is a lot of photographers become invisible with marketing between inquiries. Things become feast or famine, or they stop the moment something doesn't working. And there's two pieces to this, we're gonna break down this episode. One is mindset, and one is strategy. And I wanna start actually with the mindset, because this actually derails people much quicker than an actual strategy. So let's talk about this. How can you have a really strong marketing mindset?

The very first thing is you commit to how you wanna show up and how many times you wanna show up, how frequently you want to show up before you start showing up. Why? We're not gonna base if I'm gonna show up on results. We're gonna base it on I'm gonna be consistent at this because the most successful marketing strategies take time to pay off. I'm gonna say that again. The most successful marketing strategies in any business take some time to pay off.

I have seen it in my photo business, I have seen it in my coaching business, I have seen it for myself as a consumer. Yes, there are some strategies that focus on the impulse buy, but often those who are actually paying more, they need to be nurtured. And that's why I like to start with very strong organic marketing with multiple touch points instead of just paying ads, hoping people book on the spot. So I have signed on multi-thousand dollar,

Christa (04:47.531)
clients who were watching me for a bit, both in the photo and the coaching space. I'm gonna use the coaching space as an example, because I hope people are listening to this other, you if you're a photographer, that's great, but if you want to spin into other offers, this works for you too. I can't tell you how many students I've had who I might even talk to about uncapped and how they need it, and they say, yes, I need it, and then they don't do it, and then they come knocking on the door six months later, like, I'm ready now, I have to do this, right? And it's...

If I had just dropped off the face of the earth and stopped marketing myself when they had told me no, I would have missed out on that. I would have missed out on that sale and that opportunity to serve them. So the same thing can happen with photography, where someone is interested in working with us, they knock on the door, they talk to us a bit, and then you're like, well, they just ghosted and they're gone forever. And I'm super bummed because I really want to do more families. But the last two families I talked to said no.

So maybe I just wasn't meant to do families and I'm just gonna stop posting and sharing about it when they are interested, but maybe they had some life events. Maybe it just wasn't a good time for them. Maybe they just needed more time to think on it. guys, I have had people save up to work with me for photography wise. Maybe there's something like that going on where they know they wanna work with you, but they just know this isn't the best time with what they wanna spend and they're gonna come back later and spend more. But in order to do that, we have to keep showing up. We have to keep nurturing.

And we have, in our day and age, we are competing with more noise than ever. So it's improving that we have to see something, anything from seven times to a couple hundred times before it resonates with us and before we book it. And I don't say that to discourage you. I say it to say, you have to be showing up. That is the biggest shift. It's not even a shift. It's always been there, but it's more important than ever is you have to show up consistently and you have to show up well. Now you might have a team that helps you in that way. I have that. That really helps me show up in those different avenues.

but you have to show up to keep building up that momentum. And I refer to marketing like a choo-choo train, it's a choo-choo train, I have a one and a half year old where it is a lot of work to get things moving and get things going. It's a lot of mindset work, it's a lot of leg work, but once you get it up and moving and going, it does pay off. And often photographers and business owners stop right before they were about to see the train like really pick up momentum and it's like, this lead found me through here, this lead found me through here, finally blogging is paying off, oh.

Christa (07:07.178)
This word of mouth referral panned out. Even if I hadn't booked that client, they referred their friend. That's awesome. Okay, this business to business connection worked out. They wanna collaborate with me on something because of the things I was building along here. So I have a really good colleague who actually helps me coach now in our containers who books 20 to $40,000 weddings and most of her referrals are from the word of mouth space and maybe social media. It's not paid ads because she's

built these connections where, yes, it's a wedding, it's a one-time thing, you're not gonna book, the same client's not gonna book her every year for a wedding, right? But because she built up the momentum of these other spaces, she can have this regular string of clients come in that are dropping a lot of money with her. So when it comes to mindset, right when you want to quit is often when you keep going and you have to decide beforehand, what am I gonna do when this happens? Because we all feel in funks, we all get in that way.

Don't beat yourself up when you're like, I'm just, Krista, I'm just not feeling with it today. There's nothing wrong with you. But we can't stay there. You can acknowledge it and say, I don't feel like myself. Maybe that's not the time to map out like a new offer or website or something like that. But maybe it's the time to go ahead and decide what am I gonna start doing when I start feeling this way? And what standards am I gonna hold myself to that I still will show up for in my business? Okay, the other piece to marketing, okay? You hear the economy a lot.

and I call it out as it is. I believe you can be successful as a business owner no matter the economy. And I can say it because I did it myself. I've watched others do it. And my business doubled the year COVID happened when a lot of photographers were shutting down. Now, where I lived, I still was able to shoot and able to serve clients. That wasn't the case everywhere. But where I lived, that was still an option for me to work.

And what I didn't do is I didn't sit around saying, well, it was me, I can't market, no one's going to book, no one has money to spend anymore. That really didn't even cross my mind. And I see business owners give so much weight to that. And it's basically just kind of making excuses. Now, if there's actual trajectory, I want my students to see actual trends in their bookings, okay?

Christa (09:28.712)
So I'm not saying that of like, okay, I always book more in October versus January. Okay, that makes sense. We can know that, we can plan for it. That's making an empowered observation, not an excuse. Now, if we get to January and say, whoa, it's me, I wanna make money, but I can't because it's not my booking time, that's different. That's the mindset versus, hey, I'm gonna go ahead and plan for this. I wanna take January slow anyway. It's not my biggest shooting time, so I'm gonna take a fiesta, so I'm not gonna beat myself up when I'm not booking as much. Okay, so two very different things. I assumed...

that there were plenty of people out there ready for me. And I assume that now that there are thousands and tens of thousands of people still waiting for me that I can serve, especially now in the online digital space. In photography, I assumed when I was in restaurants and would look around that that family might need a photographer, that the business owner I was talking to at that store might need a photographer. And why not me? Because I can serve her so well. That is the mindset that I went and approached things with.

And I'm spending so much time on this because this is the part that I see derail business owners and photographers the most over the strategy. And I see photographers say, saw this recently, I'm so burnt out, I just wanna throw in the towel with my business. I'm working so hard just for the next inquiry and booking. And it's like, okay, well, what are you doing to do that? Because I went over onto your Instagram and you haven't posted in three weeks. So that doesn't look like to me, like you are actively marketing and doing.

what you know needs to be required of you to get to the next step. It is hard work. So let's talk about the strategy. You have to work at it. It's not just we sit in the mirror and repeat mantras to ourself and hope that magically helps. Mindset is huge and it's bigger even the bigger you get. It doesn't go away, okay? It actually becomes more important. And I'm not a wee-wee person, so I used to kind of push it on the back burner and now I actually have a mindset coach come in and speak to my students who's in the similar photo space that I was in. So let's talk about strategy.

What we wanna do though is identify what is working for us in our business and then you ask yourself, can I do extra 10X sets? So you need to know where your people are coming from. And let's not just look at leads, let's look at top leads. So go ahead if you don't have it written down and write down the top clients that you loved serving the most and maybe it was spend, but maybe it was like, they didn't spend a lot, but I know this was my ideal client. So I had this happen where it was a session and I know they would have bought more if they wanted more.

Christa (11:49.65)
They just were really set with this and they were a very empowered buyer, it was a very quick sale. That to me is still an ideal client, okay? That really enjoyed this experience with me. So then you need to look up where did they come from and how did they find you? We need to know where are the best quality leads being funneled from. Is it from SEO? Is it from word of mouth? Is it there's a couple people referring you out the wazoo that I need to make sure I keep facilitating that connection? And then we look at, okay, now that I know where these top people are coming from,

Those pieces of my marketing go to the top. Those don't get overlooked because I wanna stay up late and edit. We gotta get that outsourced, okay? Those don't get overlooked because I'm like, I might spend some extra time over here on Instagram scrolling instead of actually nurturing the things that are bringing in money regularly. And then you can look at, is it possible to 2X to 5X to 10X? What is happening over here? Well, I might need some help doing that, Krista.

Like Instagram's going, well for me, whenever I post I get leads, but I get so busy and I get too busy to post. Okay, we gotta change that. We can't be too busy to do what is actually bringing in business and keeping it running. That's how businesses go into the ground because they weren't focused on what the key tasks were that were bringing in the income and bringing in the leads. And so we wanna go ahead and identify where these coming from. If you're at a point and you're like, I don't know what this looks like yet, I'm gonna give you some tips here in just a second. Okay, so hang with me.

But what we can also do is look at our business very objectively. So I was coaching one of my intensive students and we were looking at her goal for the year and she was a bit financially behind her goal. And she was like, I don't know how this is happening. And it's like, okay, well need to identify, we need to identify how this is happening. And then she realized she was ahead of her goal. I don't know what happened here. Okay, we need to stop and we need to identify the data on what did happen here. Did we book more sessions? Did your sales average grow? Like it can't just be caution to the wind, emotional. Like we are a pendulum swinging back and forth.

We have to look at the facts to our business. And as a coach, that's why we look at both the mindset and the strategy. So even if you had a launch, let's say you did a mini session launch and it completely flopped, or you launched a coaching offer and it flopped. My coach has to walk me through this because I very get emotionally like, that was awesome. And I have to look at why did that work? Or guys, I have had launches with $0 signups. Do know what that means? That means I lost money, right? Cause I poured time and energy into my team, into a launch. And you would never know that cause I kept showing up.

Christa (14:13.681)
but I need to look at not the mindset of like, boo is me, okay, it's fine to sit there for second, but why did that flop? One time I was working through this with an intensive student and she did a mini session day and everyone she reached out to when she was personally inviting people in said that's just not a good time for me. That time of day, that weekday, that weekday evening, that's not great. And so we had to identify, hey, that day and time.

isn't working well for your ideal client since now multiple have said, there's a problem here. Another student has said, very successful mini session days. Again, one did not go as planned. And she said, Krista, a lot of people that would normally book were out of town that day. So that's data that we need to collect and we need to know works and doesn't work. Maybe you try to shift your offer a bit and it doesn't mean it didn't work, but maybe it was, my messaging must not have been on par.

I know these people would have booked it and if they had loved it, I missed the mark somehow. They weren't clear on it. Maybe it was an exposure issue. I know they would have loved it. They're telling me they just didn't see it. They didn't see my offer or they didn't see enough times to book or they went to come back to it and they didn't. Maybe there wasn't an incentive, right? There has to be a why now. Why should they purchase from you now? Well, I didn't think through that and there was no incentive. Things were open-ended.

and they saw I had 50 spots open, so they knew they could book at midnight the night before and I'd be available versus, hey, we have this limited time special, we have limited time spots. This is the only time of year we do it. We're showing the best of our best work with it, right? Like those are two different marketing strategies. But we wanna take data from what happened and get clear on why did it not work, okay? So sometimes this happens when we're not in front of the right audience.

or we're not really sharing our offer effectively. Those are like two of the biggest things that I've seen as a coach, but I can't make the next one better if I don't have that data. So then I can pull that data and know, okay, great. I'm gonna try launching this again and I'm gonna do it over here. And it's how I had a student in the heirloom portrait space. So think like big, let see what's behind me. If you're watching on video, it's like this beautiful heirloom vignette portrait. And she, now that is a huge part of her business. That's her main.

Christa (16:26.903)
income generator and she had months with very, very low bookings. And we could then get scrappy about different ways to make cash injections because she realized the clients who really love this the most, these are the months that my ideal client is really resonating with them so we can plan for that. We wouldn't have known that had we not pulled the data. So we wanna get clear on that as we're scaling. Okay, and then we want to make sure that we're speaking to who we want to serve regularly.

So we can't just let everyone sit in crickets until we're about to launch something. There's nurturing involved, even if we're not selling, we need to be showing up in front of them. And I would always have something you can sell, okay? So if someone's dying to get in with me, I don't really want them to have to wait. So I like to find a way I can work with them. marketing only matters if the backend can deliver and if it can scale. So let's talk about some really key ways to market the biggest things in this.

photo space that I'm in, and then this also overlaps obviously with coaching, social media, why? Well, first of all, it's free. And it's meant to be social and it's media. And if you're listening to this and are a photographer, perfect, we're checking your boxes. So we have to show up really well there. That's how you can create a brand. The other one is SEO and websites presence. Why? So when people are Googling me and Googling for photographers, I'm able to show up for them as another way, right? And what's another one? Word of mouth.

I had a student who had an overbooking problem and her main traffic driver is word of mouth. And she would tell me, I'm not even that strong on social media. And we still worked on ramping it up, it's still important. We'll talk about that in a sec. But word of mouth is really important. Getting in with people, having people share about you. No matter how many ads you get, your best friend looking at you saying, you have to buy XYZ is going to be so much more powerful. Okay, business to business. This is really awesome. And if you're a photographer,

there's ways that you can collaborate and create with other businesses and you can make it a win for them and it can also be a win for you. And in that marketing playbook that I mentioned, if you DM me the word booked, I give examples of that, of how you can collaborate with local businesses and be then on their radar and their clients' radar, but it has to be the right ones. I'm not talking about just knocking on every door going down the street. We're gonna get hyper-focused and clear on where else are my ideal clients going in my area. Okay.

Christa (18:50.209)
then you also can do paid advertising. I would do that after I did these other things and like made sure I had a solid brand and a solid offer and was able to have somewhere online for them to go, okay? But that is a play that you can do that I used to scale my coaching offer. Now I'm playing with some stuff with ads in the photo space, but that is not how I scaled things to the max. And if you're listening to this and you're like, Krista, this is so many things, so many things. I can't, I won't be able to do all of it. Here's the deal.

It would be so much better if you do less of these really, really well and consistently than all of them. So if you're overwhelmed, pick one, maybe two things that you're going to focus on. I didn't even put email marketing on there, but that's one of them too. But the leads have to have a place to come from, which it would come from one of those avenues. Okay. So that could be a sub point of an offer, but it would be better to do part of these than all of them. Okay. It'd be better to do one or two really well.

than all of them, okay? And then what you can do as you grow, as you scale, you can see, there gaps here that I can add these in while 10Xing this? Now, here's why, okay? You might say, Krista, no one finds me on social media, so I don't think it's worth posting on there. But what you're not seeing is while someone might reach out and say, it was a word of mouth referral, they still popped over to your Instagram to affirm if you were a good choice or not. They might have found you on Instagram.

but they popped over to your website to really look at your offers and see if it was speaking to them. So then they start feeding into each other and you start finding that people actually have multiple touch points before they're reaching out to build that trust, which is really, really important. So even if they found you from a Facebook ad, they're gonna be perusing on your Instagram, they're gonna hop over to your website so they all work together. And that's why when I say if something's not working, don't spend time on it, I'm not saying ditch.

marketing because it doesn't it doesn't work for you it's just only word of mouth that's fine that's the way to run a business but i personally don't want to just build a business that's sustainable on only one marketing platform especially if it's a paid platform and not word of mouth i would say if you're if you're running from one platform i would want it like one one one gosh y'all i can't even talk

Christa (21:10.162)
one referral place, it would need to be word of mouth, right? I don't want to bank everything on just paid ads. What if meta locks out my account or something goes down? I don't want to base everything just on SEO. Someone was just a business owner was just telling me yesterday that their website got hacked and their domain got stolen. They have to start SEO from square one. But just to get going, just start with one or two of them. Okay. So what do you do from here? You're like, this makes sense.

This sounds good Krista, I want to scale and I want to scale well. What can happen? The sky is the limit. If you're running things like a CEO and have clarity on what you're doing and you might find, and maybe you're sitting here thinking I had an offer and maybe it just was a marketing issue. Maybe it was a really strong offer and I'm really passionate about it and I hate that it didn't work. Maybe we can pull it back up and look at the data and make it even stronger.

If you want to explore more on scaling your photo business with marketing without paid ads, I have that little marketing playbook for you that you can have access to if you DM me the word booked. So what we're going to look at next time is those who are really ready to take this to the next level, what that can look like and how we can work together intensively. But I hope that this marketing video, this marketing podcast episode was really helpful as you work on marketing to scale.