You are listening to take it personally, a podcast for photographers about the personal side of business and the art of standing out. Here. I'll help you build a business and a brand that is uniquely you if you want to attract dream clients and stop looking at the competition to decide your next move. If you are ready to show up as a confident branding authority to help you serve your clients and consider your goals and priorities too. If you want to make your mark in a new, underserved niche of photography, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Maddie Ashong, South Dakota brand photographer and educator. I'm a straight shooting Instagram obsessed. Diehard Swifty who has built a multi-six figure business on the back of brand photography all while raising a family, and I know you can do the same. Let's get ready to take it personally. Have you ever been in a phase where you are absolutely slammed with work so slammed? That posting to Instagram just falls straight to the bottom of your list and you tell yourself, well, that's fine because I'm booked. I don't need to post. Right now I have clients. My clients are my priority. And then two or three months later, you're staring at an empty inbox wondering. Um, where did everybody go? I've been there. Unfortunately, my students in rebrand have also been there. Honestly, most photographers I know have been there, and there is a name for this. I call it the vicious visibility cycle, and it is not a place where you want to be. So here's how the cycle works. First, you get busy, you're fully booked, your head is down in your client work, and so your social media goes silent because you think, well, this isn't a priority. I don't need this right now. I need to focus on my current clients. And you are half right, but when busy season reps up, suddenly your inquiries. Are slowing down too sometimes to a complete step. Sometimes you're like, I haven't had an inquiry all week, or I haven't had an inquiry in a full month. What the heck is going on? So q scramble mode, right? You post like crazy, hoping to fill your calendar again, and then eventually you maybe start to see traction bookings start to come in, and then you get busy and you disappear again. Sound familiar. The tricky part here and with marketing in general is that the gap in your inquiries doesn't happen immediately. It happens months after you stop showing up, and so it's really easy to miss this connection. By the same token, it usually takes a couple of months of you being consistent and actually doing your marketing. For your inquiries to start up again. So we're looking at like pretty significant gaps on either end of this, which can make it really difficult to understand. Oh, because I am not marketing, I am not getting inquiries. 'cause there's like a two to three month lag time in that connection. This happens because photographers don't see marketing as necessary. They're still looking at Instagram as a fun place to watch viral videos, and not a place where they can grow their brand and grow their visibility. But it's both. Marketing is a non-negotiable. If you want your business to be here five years from now, it is not a nice to have. That is the first mindset shift that you need to make. You do not have the luxury of not having time for marketing. As photographers when we get started, our business can be almost fully sustained with the power of a really good referral and that is magical. I am not knocking referrals. Some of my very best clients come from referrals. But referrals are not consistent. Referrals don't create consistency in the inquiries and the leads that you're getting in your business. So referrals can't exist on their own or perhaps they can for a while, which I think is how a lot of photographers get into this situation is. They are able to grow their business to a certain place based on mostly referrals. And then they get to a point whether they have raised their prices or they're attracting a different level of client, or they've just been in business for a while and they have served the people in their immediate circle already. They get to this place where referrals are not going to cut it anymore, at least as like the only thing driving inquiries in their business. There needs to be something else, and that's where marketing really needs to step up, because marketing can create so much consistency in the leads and inquiries that you're getting in your business. And marketing is Instagram for most photographers. Marketing is making sure that you are posting consistently, that you're showing up on stories. But unfortunately, so many photographers see this. As a nice to have and not a non-negotiable. I wish that more photographers understood that booked out photographers. Are marketing consistently, and not just marketing consistently, but marketing thoughtfully. They are aware of what their ideal client needs to hear and the process that that ideal client needs to go through before they ever book, and that's what their content is leading them through on a consistent basis. Marketing is probably 90% of what I do and what I work on, like when I am working on my business, I'm working on marketing, I'm working on messaging. I'm looking at like past clients and saying like, okay, I really wanna work with more clients like this. What were some things that she said that I could potentially infuse into my website or my sales page, or my social media content, whatever it might be. I am constantly working on marketing because on the services side, I've got it. I'm good. I'm very confident in the service that I'm offering, and you probably are too if you listen to this podcast, right? Like you know how to deliver a brand session that your clients rave about, you know how to deliver a brand session that your clients post all over their social media, like you know how to do that. But now you need to know how to market your business so you have those clients consistently coming into your business. When you are inconsistent in your marketing, this creates both a trust and a visibility problem. When you disappear for long stretches, a couple things happen. One, you fall off people's radar, so when they're ready to book, they don't even think of you. So much of marketing is just staying top of mind. Not every single post needs to say book. Now, limited availability, like actually. Don't say that. That's not what your marketing should consist of. Your marketing should simply be being top of mind. And yes, sometimes those posts are gonna be more strategic than others, but sometimes those posts are gonna be like a trending audio or a trending meme or just like posting to your stories, talking about what you're doing that day. Like it doesn't have to be super deep every single day for it to work because the point is that we're staying top of mind. And I wanna be clear, that doesn't mean that you can put in zero effort when it comes to your marketing. There does need to be a strategy behind it. It can also happen where you are consistently posting and nothing is happening. And in that case we need to look at your strategy and like what you are actually saying. But if your last post was four weeks ago, we gotta start there. That's where we're starting. We're starting with consistency with your visibility. So when you're not being consistent, they're not even thinking about you when it's time to book, and that's gonna create a problem. The next thing that happens is that your feed stops reflecting your best work or your current availability. I even would argue that if it stops reflecting the current season of your life and business, that's a problem. If you are a dual positioned photographer, so someone who's offering brand photography and wedding photography or seniors. If we are at the end of summer heading into fall, and the last post on your feed is from a spring wedding, like that's a problem. We need to make sure that what you're currently posting is reflective of what's happening and also what you want to be booking. So your feed stops reflecting your best work or your current availability. Often, when you stop posting for long enough, you start to deal with this like paralyzation about what you are posting and this perfectionism that kind of seeps in. It tends to happen when it's been a while when you've posted and all of a sudden now it feels like everything in your business is riding on this next social media post. You're like, okay, whatever this next post is it's gonna change everything and it's, it has to communicate everything that I've ever wanted to communicate in my marketing. And so maybe you have like five or six sessions that you're sitting on shooting, which you likely do if you're coming out of a busy season. But you feel like you can't post any of them, or you don't know which one to post. And so then you just don't post anything. So that's a real thing that can happen too. And then all of a sudden your very best work and your most recent work is nowhere near your feed. And then the last thing that happens is that people assume that you are either too busy or not in business anymore or not taking new clients. And both of these are equally dangerous. If they are looking at your social media, your digital home, and it looks like no one's home, they're probably not going to inquire with you. They're probably just going to jump to a conclusion in their mind, whether it's right or not, that you either don't have time for them or you're not doing this anymore. When you are consistent in your content and you are consistently working on your visibility, even if it's not like super curated and super planned, it works. We talked about this on a recent rebrand call. We just wrapped up our rebrand retreat and a lot of my students left with this really fresh energy. They were given two, three days to really just think about and talk about and work on their business, which is really magical. And so, so many of them went home with this excitement to get back to work. And my student, Roxanne. Recently shared that after she went home from retreat, and as I'm recording this retreat was a week and a half, it was like 10 days ago, so this was very recently, but she was consistently posting at retreat, and again, it wasn't like these super curated posts. She was very much just like documenting what was happening at the retreat. She was sharing what was going on and relating it back to her business and to her clients and something that they could care about. So she stayed really, really visible and then sent. Then she's been using the work that we worked on at retreat, the sessions that we shot and the portfolio building that we did. She has been posting that to her feed and within 10 days, she's now booked through October, and it's currently mid August. That is not a coincidence. That is visibility at work. And it goes to show you that so much of visibility is literally just being visible. It's not necessarily creating content that's like going to go viral and get all of these likes and like, yeah, that, that's great. That is super great if that happens to you. But that happens to me very rarely and I'm still as booked as I want to be. You know what I mean? So like it doesn't need to be this like crazy content strategy where you're. Thinking of something super original and like creating these graphics in Canva that are taking you hours and hours to put these posts together. It's just staying consistent. It's just staying visible. So why do photographers stay stuck in this cycle? One, we believe that marketing takes too much time when we are busy, and that's just not true. It can be true. I have seen it be true. It has been true in my business. I have had to like slap my hand and be like, put Canva down. It doesn't have to be that complicated, but I have also seen it be very simple. In these busy seasons, we gotta lean into simple. We also have this all or nothing mindset. If I can't do five amazing posts every single week, I might as well just not post it all. Or maybe that's not even what you're thinking, but you're thinking like what I said earlier about that paralyzation. Well, it's been so long since I have posted that this next post has to communicate everything I've ever wanted to communicate in my entire business, and that's so much pressure. So I'm just not going to post. We also way over complicate content creation. Instead of leaning into documentation marketing, which I'm gonna talk about in a second, this is what Roxanne did very well, and she's booked through October. We also think that every single post has to be portfolio perfect. My friends, we don't, social media is one of those things where like, honestly, I, this is perhaps an unpopular opinion, I guess, I don't know. But when it comes to social media. Quantity is better than quality. Now there's like a million asterisks and like caveats to that because you can't just be putting out shit content, like that's not what I'm talking about. But I see specifically photographers because we are creative and we want our feeds to look pretty, put so much pressure on every single individual post because they wanted to communicate. Everything, and I have fallen trapped to this time and time again, and I have to consistently remind myself no one post has to do everything. No one paragraph on my website has to do everything. It's all part of my positioning. It's all part of my online reputation. Very rarely are people consuming one piece of content, right? Yes, they might scroll past a piece of content in their feed, but most of the time they have context from previous content. They've seen your stories. They've maybe even gone to your Instagram profile and looked at a couple of posts to see if they want to follow you. People are smart. Not one single post has to do everything. In fact, a single post should communicate a single idea to a single person. That's it. That's what a post should do. It should be a micro topic within your business. If more photographers approached social media, like a giant science experiment, we would be better off because the reality is in order to figure out what works and what doesn't and what your audience connects with and what content format does best on your profile. And like all of those things, in order to figure that out, you have to try it all. So that's what I mean when I say quantity over quality. It's not that the quality doesn't matter, it's that in order to get to quality, you have to go through a lot of quantity. Like you gotta go through some stuff that sucks a little bit. You have to have posts that don't do well. I've been working with a social media manager for the past couple of months to take some stuff off my plate and the first thing that we do at the top of every meeting that we have is talk about what worked last month and what didn't work last month. Every single month I have posts that flop that is from somebody who has been doing this for 15 years. I have a background in social media and digital media. That is literally what my job was before I went full-time in my own business. I have worked in social media since Twitter, literally launched, like I've been doing this for a long time, and every single month. I have a post that gets 15 likes, like I have 14,000 followers. Okay? 15 likes is a little sad, but it happens. It happens, and that's okay because we learn from it every single month. We're learning from it, and we're saying, okay, we're not gonna do that again, or we're gonna tweak it a tiny bit and see if that resonates more. It is a giant science experiment. You don't need to be perfect in what you're posting, but you do need presence. You do need to be there figuring it out. So how do you break the vicious visibility cycle? This is what I teach my students in rebrand, and this is what I want for you too. I want you to have a visibility, safety net, a plan that is so simple that you can stick with it no matter how busy you are. Step one. And the biggest thing, is to shift to documentation marketing. Documentation. Marketing is exactly what it sounds like. It is. Documenting what you are doing. You have maybe heard the phrase document don't create. That's That is what we are doing. We are documenting. We are not getting into Canva and using a template and spending all of this time. No. Like we are finding a photo on our phone. We are putting some text on it via the Instagram editor. And we are like posting a carousel or we are turning our camera on and doing a talking head reel, which I know probably scares the shit out of you. But here's the thing, that's a really effective use of your time when it comes to creating content. you are a yapper. Like I am certified yapper reporting for duty. That is a really effective use of your time when it comes to creating content because all you have to do is talk and hit publish. That's it. If that feels really scary doing that on Instagram Stories. Instead, if you're like not a certified yapper, absolutely not. Then you're gonna take a photo of yourself, a cute little selfie, if you will, or a photo of your desk or a photo of a recent photo that you took because you're super talented and you're gonna put words on top of it. And you're going to type it instead of say it. Okay. You are documenting, not creating. This could look like sharing the coffee order that you picked up before you headed to a shoot or the fact that you picked up coffee. I've been talking about systems lately on the podcast and in my content because I did a webinar about systems with my friend Coley James. Shout out and. I started talking about how I pick up coffee for my clients on the way to a shoot, and the reason I'm able to do that is because of my CRM and I've gotten so much great feedback from photographers and not photographers who are like, that's a great idea. How do you do that? Just me sharing that, I'm picking up coffee. And here's how I'm able to do that is getting so much chatter. So it doesn't have to be complicated. It's just a part of what you're doing on the daily. This comes back to the importance of a little like FAFO, if you will, because I would've never known that me picking up coffee for my brand photography client was going to resonate. I was just sharing and that's what ended up resonating. So that's why sharing and maintaining that visibility is important. And just throwing spaghetti at the wall sometimes, because you never know what's going to resonate, this is part of figuring it out. Next we're gonna create a minimum viable posting plan. This is your baseline for when you're busy. So maybe this is like, I'm gonna do one post a week. Maybe it's, I'm gonna do an Instagram story five days a week, so like Monday through Friday, and it's just gonna be something like, I'm not gonna put guardrails around it. I'm just gonna be like, Hey, I'm still here. I, maybe, I maybe wouldn't say that, but it's like, it's proof of life, right? That's all it's going to be. Maybe it's two posts a week, three posts a week. I, I really don't care. It really does not matter to me like what the number is, especially if you are in a season where you're like, uh, okay, let's. Say it's August and now I'm booked through October, November because I've maintained my visibility. If I don't need clients now for a couple of months, then I can take my foot off the gas just a little bit, maintain visibility, maintain consistency, but I don't need to be posting five posts a week because I don't need a bunch of new clients right now. Now talk to me in 30 days, right? In 30 days I might put my foot back on the gas a little. Ramp it up because now I want those clients for November, December. You see what I mean? So if you are in more of a coasting state of your business where you don't need to be booking new clients right this moment, then your posting schedule can shift with that. Step three is repurpose your content. I am such a fan of repurposing content. So you're gonna go back through old popular content and share that again. Look at what you were posting at this time last year. I don't do this as often as I should. I've had seasons where I've done this more and. At the risk of sounding conceited, I will go back through old content and be like, damn, that girl really knew what she was talking about. And I think because I've been creating content for so long, sometimes I like forget the plot a little bit. Like I go back to old content and I'm like, gosh, that's great. Like that was said with such plain, simple language that was such a concise story. Like sometimes we forget the plot. And so to go back through old content that did really well and either repurpose it, so change up the copy or change up the photo that you share it with. Or if it was a carousel, turn it into a reel or whatever. Or literally just sharing the exact same piece of content. If it's been a while, certainly if it has been a year, but even if it's been a couple of months and maybe that piece of content you were like, you know what, that should have done really well and for whatever reason it just didn't like post it again. See what happens. Again, this is a science experiment. I also love the idea of building a slow season folder or a slow season like list of content ideas. And this can look however, is helpful for you. You could actually create the content and just have it loaded in your Instagram or in another app that you use and have that ready to go. Or you could just have a list of ideas in your notes app, that's fine too. But have some things that you can post when you don't have the ability to be using your brain to create content. So some examples of this are, as a brand photographer, you should always be talking about your process, right? What does it look like to work with you? How do you plan a brand? Shoot? How do you choose locations for a brand shoot? What prop should I bring to a brand shoot? How do I prepare for a brand shoot? Like those types of things you need to be answering in your content on a weekly basis. So have a couple of those locked and loaded so you can post them. If you're just feeling like you can't turn your brain on that day. You don't need to be creating new content during busy seasons. I want you to start thinking about visibility as part of your client experience, not just your marketing. When you stay active and present, you build trust before someone ever books you. You also show potential clients what it is like to work with you. You give your booked clients confidence when they tag you because they know that you're there. They know that you are showing up for your brand. They know that you are showing up for your brand. You also create excitement for the people who have hired you because you're sharing about their sessions, right? You're sharing behind the scenes and how you're planning and how you're editing. And again, this doesn't have to be super curated, but it just makes them feel special and it creates that excitement. Another thing that I want to mention is the importance of embodiment when it comes to personal branding and content creation. Our clients are hiring us so they have content to be able to stay visible on Instagram, on their website, in their brand. That's why they are hiring us. And so we have to show them what it looks like to embody our brand if we are telling them. It's really important that you stay visible online. The more visible you are, the more inquiries you have, the more that you can raise your prices, dah, dah, dah. If we are saying that to our clients and then we're like, but it's busy season right now, so I'm not gonna be visible. So you do that, but I'm gonna set this one out. That's not embodiment. That creates a lack of trust. So we also need to look at this from like, what is this saying about me and my brand when I ghost my social media? This is an extra. It is not. This is part of running a sustainable, profitable photography business. And again, marketing is a non-negotiable for booked out brand photographers. If this feels hard right now. That makes sense because if you have lacked consistency up until this point, or if marketing has been something that you have struggled with, it's going to feel difficult. It's not going to feel natural to make sure that you're posting some sort of visibility story every single day or five days a week to Instagram. That's not gonna feel natural, but it will over time. You have to practice. You think of your kid who like really wants to be a great baseball player, but struggles with wanting to go to practice. You don't tell your kid that they don't have to practice. You say, Hey, if you want to be better, if you want to be great, if you want to be known. You have to practice, and the more you practice, the easier it gets. You would give that advice to your kid, so now you need to take that advice for yourself. If you're listening to this and you are thinking, okay, Maddie, I have been stuck in this cycle. I need help getting out of it. I've got you. I'm so excited about this. I have never done this before. I'm hosting a 21 day Instagram challenge inside of a private Instagram chat. Here's how it works Every day for 21 days, I will give you a super simple. Totally doable, prompt. You will use it to show up, connect with your audience, and revive your Instagram without spending hours creating content. This is literally taking place in an Instagram chat. You don't need to sign up for anything, you don't need a different app. It's. On Instagram where you already are, and by the end, you will have built the habit of visibility so you can keep booking clients there. We're going to start on September 1st, but come into the chat, head to my Instagram profile, and come into the chat as soon as you're ready. Because we're actually going to start by cleaning up our Instagram bios because that is step one so when people see your content and come to your profile and they're like, should I follow this person? It's very clear who you are, what you do, and what you can offer them. So that's what we're gonna start with. You're gonna have a couple of weeks to get that done, and then the challenge officially starts on September 1st. You can also DM me the word challenge on Instagram, and I will send you an invite to the broadcast channel. Remember, the work that you are doing today on your visibility is what fills your calendar months from now. So if we are in mid-August right now, the work that you are doing is going to fill your calendar. For late fall, early winter. So if you don't have bookings yet for that time, then you need to be working on your marketing. Now, booking in November and December is not a problem to solve in October. It is too late in October. Work on it now. Don't wait until you're in scramble mode. Break the cycle now and thank yourself later. Okay. DM me the word challenge on Instagram and I will see you inside the 21 day Instagram challenge. Thank you so much for listening to take it personally. If you haven't already, would you head over to iTunes and leave us a review? This is the best way to let other photographers know about the show and help keep us creating content you crave. And if you want more tips and tools to build your personal photography brand, head over to my website, maddie pong.com. Here you can access my downloadable ultimate personal brand session shot list to get your clients singing your praises and browse my blog for more trade secrets to help you hone your craft and grow your business. Love to learn while you listen. Visit maddie peon.com and click on podcast for all things. Take it personally. From show notes to recent episodes and incredible guest profiles, remember friend, the most important part of any brand is the people behind it. Branding and business is personal, so let's take it personally.