With Laura Esmond

Speaker: There is a version of working on your business in a slow season that feels really productive, but might not be, and most photographers know exactly what I'm talking about. You open Instagram, you spend an hour trying to figure out what to post. You post something you feel vaguely behind and yet vaguely accomplished at the same time, and by the end of the day, you're honestly not sure anything moved forward.

That's what I wanna talk about today. Not because any of us are necessarily doing it wrong, but because I think we might be solving the wrong problem entirely. Welcome back to the podcast you are with Laura Esmond. Here's something I come back to a lot with photographers, especially when we're in a growth phase.

You are a photographer. That is true. That's actually your secondary role right now. Your primary role is acting as the CMO of your own business, the chief marketing officer, which means when you're not shooting, you should be thinking about how to grow your business, how to get in front of people, how to fill the calendar.

That part. Most photographers get market the business. Sure. That's pretty obvious. What we forget about is how to actually stand out inside that marketing. So what ends up happening is we scroll, we get inspired by what someone else is doing. We borrow the format or the caption style, or the type of reel.

And slowly without meaning to, we all start to look the same, which is a real problem because if everyone in your market is posting the same kinds of things, more posting doesn't help you, it just adds to the noise for your potential client. So what if we came at this from a completely different angle?

Instead of starting with, I need to market my business, what if we started one step earlier? What if the question was, what about me is actually different so I can market that? Because that's a different exercise entirely, and I think it's the one worth doing this season.

Here's what I mean. When a potential client is trying to decide between you and the photographer down the street, what is she actually deciding between? Because if the only difference is that your work is a little different and your prices are a little different than every marketing effort you make is just putting more fuel into that comparison.

You're not getting chosen, you're getting evaluated and posting more, having a better website, running more reels. None of it fixes that. It just means more people find you and then compare you to someone else. The question worth asking is not, how do I get more people to see me?

The first question is, what would they be choosing me for? And is that thing actually clear? All right, let's dig into that. So this all makes more sense. Here's the exercise I wanna walk you through. Think about your best client. I don't want you to think about your easiest client and also not necessarily your highest spending client. Your best one. Your favorite one, the one you loved working with, the one who is genuinely happy. The one you would clone if you could, if she were describing working with you to a friend right now, like sitting over coffee, sitting in their kitchen together, what would she say?

What would she say about what it felt like to work with you? What did you come up with?

Because I wanna walk through a few of the most common answers that I've heard to that question, because some of them sound right, but they're not quite the point. And knowing the difference is actually the whole solve to this issue. The first answer a lot of photographers land on is something like she'd say, my photos are beautiful, and I believe you, they probably are, but so are the photos of the photographer down the street and the one two towns over, and the 15 photographers your client found before she found you beautiful.

Photos are the baseline. They're expected, the reason someone considers hiring you. As a photographer at all. They're not the reason someone specifically hires you. If beautiful work were enough to differentiate you, pricing would never come up in a consultation, and for most photographers, unfortunately, it still does.

The second one sounds a little more personal, she'd say. I was really warm and really easy to work with, that she felt comfortable in front of my camera, that I was really good with her kids, and warmth does genuinely matter. I am not dismissing that a bad experience from someone who's cold or distracted is memorable in a really bad way.

But a good experience with someone who is warm and professional is just what clients expect from a service business. It keeps them from regretting the hire. It doesn't make them pull out their phone and tell a friend that they have to use you.

The third one is the logistics answer. She'd say, I was responsive. I delivered fast. I communicated really well throughout the whole experience. That's the absence of a frustrating experience, which is obviously very valuable as well. There's a difference between a client thinking that went smoothly and a client thinking, I have to tell someone about this person.

Here's the thread. Running through all three of those answers, they describe you, your talent, your personality, your process, and none of them describe what happened to her, what she felt, what she walked away with, what she experienced, that she couldn't have gotten somewhere else. There's one more answer I want to address before we move on because I think it's the one that feels like the most differentiation, but it's actually the trickiest, A lot of photographers would say, my style is what sets me apart, my editing, my aesthetic, the way I see light, the feel of my images, and I understand why that feels true.

It's the most visible thing about your work, and it's the thing you've invested the most time in developing. But If your style is your differentiator, what happens when the style shifts? Because right now, for instance. If you've been on Instagram for more than 10 minutes, you know there's a movement happening in motherhood photography.

We have been living in a beige and pastel world for a long time, and that's starting to shift More color, more saturation, a bit more boldness, more life in the frame. And I think for a lot of photographers, the instinct is to look at that and think, okay, is this my moment?

Do I make this shift? Is this how I stand out? maybe. But be really careful here because there is a difference between a differentiator and a trend. A trend is something the market is moving toward. A differentiator is something that is genuinely, specifically yours, and those two things are not the same.

If you jump on a trend because you think it will help you stand out, what you're actually doing is joining a crowd that is forming in a slightly different direction. You're not standing apart from the photographers around you. You're just moving with a different group of them, and more than that. Kind of an aside about this, before you start chasing what's working for someone else's feed, take an honest look at your own eye.

Does this trend, that one in particular, or really any other trend actually fit the way you see this color feel natural to you? Or does it feel like a costume or does a certain type of dress feel like a costume or does. Feel like the right way for most of your clients to show up because clients can feel the difference between a photographer who has found her thing that resonant, and a photographer who is performing someone else's one reads as confidence and aligned, and the other just reads as possibly noise and distraction style evolves, and it should.

But the photographers who stand out aren't the ones who caught the right trend at the right time. They're the ones who know what's theirs and keep going deeper into it. Which brings me to what I actually think differentiation looks like, and the moment I understood it for myself.

Here's just an example. A few years ago I was sitting in a doctor's waiting room a. Nothing, no big deal. I was just waiting to go see the doctor and as I was waiting, I was going through my phone. I was going through videos from a family trip that we had taken to Europe. I was kind of reliving this whole trip and my kids obviously were in them and they were younger and their faces were rounder and they just acted different.

They were more childlike and. I sat there and teared up just watching my own kids on the, on my phone screen being exactly who they were at that age and their mannerisms. In those moments, I almost forgot we'd had to be honest, and something clicked for me in that waiting room that I hadn't been able to put together before.

At the same time, I had been looking for a while for something I could bring to my ordering meeting. Something that would make the experience feel genuinely different that I hadn't been doing. And I just wanted something fresh and new, something a client wouldn't expect. And honestly, something that maybe not everybody was doing.

I had been looking at products, you know, what's new and interesting and special, But I hadn't been thinking about moments about what actually makes someone feel something when they're sitting across from you at an ordering meeting. But video does that. Video does it in a way that nothing else does because it moves and it breathes, and you can see the way a kid runs toward the camera.

You can't replicate that in a print and you can't replicate it in a digital gallery. And most photographers. Aren't making it, not because they don't see the value, but because learning something new in the middle of running a business feels like a pretty heavy lift. I had actually already purchased a course on creating session videos, but I just wasn't doing it quite yet.

But in this moment, I decided, you know what? I'm gonna go back to that course and I'm going to commit, and I started adding video to my sessions. I didn't tell my clients I was just practicing. I was building that skill. took a handful of sessions, just figuring out what worked.

After a while, I had enough footage from this one session to start cutting a real short film. I brought that to my ordering meeting the first time I played this for a client. I don't mean to be dramatic here, but maybe I am. It went completely silent and she cried and she was stunned, genuinely stunned because she wasn't prepared for what it would feel like to watch her family move and the laughter and the way she was holding her daughter's hand, and she had just never seen that preserved before.

There's two moments here that I'm talking about. One is creating something that was fresh and new for her that she had never seen done before. Something that was rare enough that she could feel how special it was to see her family in this moment set to music. It was really beautiful. And then there was also this moment that I had created for her of bringing her together with me, of being willing to sit with her, to go through the images.

The entire moment was just very, very special. I.

I knew that most photographers were not offering video and they weren't sitting down with their clients for an ordering meeting 'cause they just didn't wanna take the time. But here I was, I had created something beautiful for her. And I was willing to sit with her in this moment, and she felt it.

Here's where I want to leave you this week, and it's really just one question worth sitting with. Go back to thinking about your best client. What would she say? And this time when you answer it, ask yourself whether you were describing yourself or describing what she experienced.

Because the work here isn't figuring out what to post or which trend to chase. It's figuring out. What you're building for your clients that nobody else in your market is willing to build. What's the thing that would make someone sitting in a waiting room or a carpool line or a conversation with a friend say, you have to use her, not just because she's good, but because of what happened when they work with you.

That's the question. Not how do I get more visible, but what am I building that's actually worth being visible for?

And this all actually stems from a conversation that I had with Katie Lamb. We started talking about what we were each seeing in our clients and in this industry, and we realized pretty quickly that we were circling the same idea from two different directions. What does it actually look like to create an experience for your clients that nobody else in your market is offering?

We got into it and somewhere in that conversation something really clicked and we ended up building something together and we're calling it the Create and Sell bundle. I don't wanna get too far ahead of everything because there's a lot more coming this week, but what I will say is that we built this specifically for the photographer.

Who heard today's episode and thought, okay, I'm ready to actually do this differently. I don't wanna do this in a trendy way. I don't wanna just post more and have that go into the void, but in a way that your clients actually feel the kind of different, that makes someone stunned in an ordering meeting.

That's what we're going for with this. Keep an eye on my Instagram, which by the way, I have changed from Re and Co Portraits, which is my portrait brand to Laura Esmond education. So that is now where you'll find me on Instagram. It was a long time in coming. I am still working as a photographer, but I have built that brand and that portrait business almost entirely off Instagram.

So I felt it was a good time for me to go ahead and shift that entirely into the education work that I do. Katie is actually gonna join me on the podcast next week, and we are going to get into all of it together. So we hope you'll join us there.

Until next time, I will see you next week.