Lessons
Class Introduction
08:45 24 Reasons You're Failing
08:49 3Your Brand and Style
15:18 4Social Media
14:20 55 Keys to Social Media
23:34 6The Client Experience
26:15 7Keeping Clients Happy
08:51 8Effective Communication
19:10Lesson Info
Useful Tools
As far as streamlining things, these are some other useful tools. So on social media, we're talking about buffer. Buffer, if you're not familiar with buffer, it is just a system that lets you schedule your social media posts. And now Instagram finally released their API and made it okay for you to schedule your posts with a third-party app, so woo-hoo! Finally! Before you were using workarounds which would potentially get your account like suspended, so now we can do it and they're happy about it. So, buffer, Hootsuite, meetedgar is another one that a lot of people love. So there's a ton of them. Really important to do that. Also, because Instagram just recently released, or announced that they were about to release some new algorithm changes, where now Instagram is going to have a way to make your feed a little bit more chronological, which is yay, another yay for us. So it's even more important to post in certain times of the day. Again, go rewind to last week when social media week ...
was going on here at CreativeLive for more on that. But that's one way to streamline your social media. 'Cause the last thing I recommend you doing is logging onto Facebook and getting caught in that hole. Better third-party app. Video marketing, I mentioned I'm using Animoto. I love using Animoto. We talked about them a lot, so I'm not gonna talk about them much here, but that's who I used to make a ton of great videos and streamline that whole process. And then If This Then That. Have you guys heard of that? It's so fun. I use it for literally one thing. It does so much more. But instead of posting on Instagram and just hitting the little tab there that says Post to Twitter, and it goes straight to Twitter, I use If This Then That, and what it does it posts to Twitter every time I post to Instagram, but it does it so that it puts the actual picture in the Twitter feed rather than the link to Instagram. And now if you look at my Twitter, you will see it's all pictures, not all links to Instagram. 'Cause links to Instagram don't look that great, pictures do. As far as communicating with your clients, right now mostly I'm using 17hats for a lot of the stuff. The leads, the emails, the sequences of emails that I send, all through 17hats. But if you're not ready to get 17hats yet, Text Expander is a great one. Text Expander is a program that holds all of your templates for you. So when you get a lead in and you're available, you respond, and say whatever it is that you say, what you do is you have that email template in Text Expander and you assign it an acronym. So for me, lead available, or inquiry available. I have capital I, capital A. And all I do is I type in capital I, capital A, and it instantly pops in my template, so I don't have to go open anything, copy it, and then paste it. I just type in my little acronym. If I get an inquiry and I'm not available, I just type in in all caps too bad. Right, and it pops in like, oh, I'm so sorry, I'm unavailable for your wedding. I recommend you know, X, Y, Z. If you know, I need to follow up, I follow up with them and I'm gonna show you my little trick to do that if you don't have a client mention system. Just remember to do that by just typing capital F, capital U, and then send FU to them, or rather, follow-up, not really FU. So then it just sends it. So it's just a little way to streamline things, and it's free. They make you pay for it at some point, but for quite some time, it's free. Now, Boomerang! Have you heard Boomerang? I love Boomerang. So Boomerang does a few things for you. One, you can write emails and schedule them to send later. So let's just say you've given yourself business hours, but sometimes you write at 9 o'clock at night, get some emails done, but you don't want to send that email until 9 AM the next morning so your clients won't think they can communicate with you at all hours of the night. You can schedule your emails to send later. You can also clean up your inbox really nicely. So you can schedule messages that come in and you think, mm, I don't have to do that until like next week or next month, and you say, send that to me in a month, and then it'll disappear from your inbox, and then in a month it'll email back to you. So it's really nice way to just clean up the inbox. And then the other thing it does, 'cause Lord knows you send emails and you expect a reply, but sometimes you don't get it, and then you forget about it. Who knows how many opportunities you miss that way? You can send an email, and on the bottom click send this back to me if there's no reply in two days, four days, whenever it is. So really, really great tool for managing your inbox. So all of this stuff is connected to the bigger picture. Because being able to give more to the clients lead to better clients. When we're talking about how I give things to them, whether it's service or actual gifts. And when you get those better clients, then better clients lead to raising prices. And then when you can raise your prices, then you can outsource more, and then once you outsource more, it leads to more free time. So everything we've talked about today really is very much connected into getting you into that definition of success. It's very much a road map. So you need to plan out that road map for you. And I'm not huge propionate of that traditional business plan thing, but just having this in your mind, in the forefront of your mind that helps you organize your workflow is very, very powerful to what it can do for your business. So always think about that. Because ultimately, saying yes means saying no to everything else. When you say yes to photography, you're saying no to a lot. When you say yes to owning your own business, you're saying no to some of those weekends that you would've spent at you know, your friend's wedding. You're not doing it. You know, when you get married, you're not just saying yes to your spouse, you're saying no to everyone else. And no is a much harder thing to say, right? Saying yes is easy! We're all people-pleasers I think by nature. We love to say yes! We love to tell you, oh yeah, sure, I'll be there for you, I'll do that. But really, when you say yes, you don't need to think about the yes that you're saying. You need to think about the no that you're going to say in order to keep your promise to the yes. So the best advice I can give you is to learn when to say no. Always say no when it does not line up with your definition of success. The way that Dave Ramsey puts it. He's a financial guy and also a business guy in Tennessee. The way that he puts it with saying no and saying yes is that children just do what feels good, but adults, they define a plan and they stick to it. And that's what you have to do for your business. You have to say yes and stick to it by saying no to the things that don't line up with your yes.
Ratings and Reviews
Célia Gomes
I loved this class! So inspirational and useful tips! Congratulations Vanessa. Thank you so much for sharing your experience! And thank you Creative Live for opportunity of watch the class for free. Célia Gomes, Portugal.
angela warmington
Great course. Full of great business tips and practices that are adaptable to your own personal style of business. She has such a passion and love for her work and it comes across very clearly as she teaches. I am new to wedding photography and am so glad I purchased this course!!
Marleen
I loved this class and got some great new ideas and insights thanks to Vanessa, thank you so much! Love from Holland
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