EPISODE 60 | Targeting Your Message to Reach the Clients You Want

Time: Tuesday 3:00pm PST (Note the Special Time)

Special Guest: Mike Colon

Hear Mike Colon talk about messaging yourself right in order to reach your ideal client.  Mike is a expert at doing this, come and listen to him share his insights.

To get the answers to any of your questions, simply send a Twitter with @danesanders in the text. If you didn’t catch the Coaching Event *LIVE*, you can always catch the Replay later here.

See you soon!
- Dane

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• Dane’s Killer Apps Page – because so many requested it, my absolute favorite apps, products and services (along with a little bonus at the bottom). I hope they help!

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Copyright Scott Bourne 2010 - All Rights Reserved

Everyone – and I mean everyone has a camera. So what can you do to stand out from the crowd? Here are five tips.

1. Develop your own style

Ever seen an Ansel Adams photograph and known it was by Ansel before you saw his signature? That’s because he had a certain style to his work that was immediately recognizable. If you develop a personal style, chances are it will set you apart as long as you’re consistent with it.

2. Photograph a niche

I photograph lots of things but primarily, I photograph birds. Before that I spent years primarily photographing wolves. While picking a niche may keep you from getting known by everyone, it will help you stand out amongst people interested in that type of imagery.

3. Shoot often and show the work

The photographers who shoot all the time and who post their work everywhere tend to get noticed. In fact, showing the work might seem like the most rudimentary advice here, but you’d probably be surprised to find out how many people don’t follow through with that. Show the work – show the work – show the work. If you are prolific (or at least appear to be) your photography will rise to the top.

4. Know your audience

If you’ve followed my advice to develop a style and fill a niche, you should have a pretty good idea who your audience is. This is key to standing out above the crowd and here’s why. If you know who your audience is you can shoot for them – NOT for the folks who will never see your work. Trying to please everyone is a recipe for failure. You can’t do it and you shouldn’t try. Try to please the people who like your work and stop shooting for the people who dislike it.

5. Be an original

It’s easy to think this means do something new. In fact that is the lazy person’s way of being original. What ends up happening is that people sacrifice quality in return for something new. It’s important to understand that being original doesn’t mean being new – it means being you! Be yourself. Show us what’s inside YOU. Don’t just copy the other shooters in your camera club. Ask yourself what really matters to you and go shoot that.

It’s not easy to stand out in a crowded field. And that is potentially a good thing. It helps to make sure that the best have earned their way to the top. If you apply these five tips you can rise with the rest of the best too.
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This post sponsored by Ray Flash – Ring Flash Adapter

Many freelance designers fail to realize that marketing their small businesses takes time. Essentially, marketing is like a building a long-term relationship—rather than a one-night stand!

If you market your services to prospective clients one time and then quit, you’re not building relationships, you’re not thinking long-term. By sending your marketing message out once and expecting results, you’re marketing yourself via one-night stands.

read more

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• Marketing materials
• Holiday cards
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Special introductory price of only $45…will be $55 next week so buy yours today! (Thanks to Michelle Moore for her beautiful senior images.)

Simply Beautiful

Make a stunning statement with this glamorous yet understated 8-page brochure from Design Aglow. This pretty, classic template takes the stress and mystery out of making a fabulous first impression and includes pages for everything, from FAQ’s, to customer raves, to pricing, to services, all on 8 professionally designed pages, beautiful backgrounds and elegant elements. With plenty of room for gorgeous images of brides and grooms, family portraits, and more, your new brochures will be perfectly pleasing for vendors, clients and potential clients. A full tutorial is included!

This beautiful template includes:
• 8 professionally designed pages complete with patterned backgrounds, design elements, and space to insert own images, packages, faq, and letters from clients
• A full tutorial and our own professional printer recommendation

See it here. And, the coordinating marketing set here.

5 Questions You Should Ask Every Customer

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Constantly seeking feedback from your customers is a great way to learn how to market your business more effectively. If you’ve never done this before, do it immediately as it is one of the best ways to discover what you do that actually differentiates you from your competition.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with a small business that had no idea what its competitive advantage was until we heard it right from the mouths of happy customers. Seeking feedback is also a great way to get better and plug gaps. I can tell you that if you’re not receiving a large amount of your business by way of referral or word of mouth, you’ve probably got some gaps in your processes.

Below are five questions I like to pose to customers as they can provide a great discussion base for getting at what’s truly important to you and your customers. Create a form and get in the habit of surveying a handful of customers every month. I think you’ll be rewarded with tremendous insight and you’ll also find that your customers enjoy being asked what they think. One word of caution, don’t accept vague answers like “you provide good service.” While that may be true and good to hear, you can’t work with that. Push a bit and ask what good service looks like and maybe even if they can tell you about a specific instance in which they felt they got good service.

1. What made you decide to hire us/buy from us in the first place?

This is a good baseline question for your marketing. It can get at how effective your advertising, message and lead conversion processes are working. I’ve also heard customers talk about the personal connection or culture that felt right in this question.

2. What’s one thing we do better than others you do business with?

In this question you are trying to discover something that you can work with as a true differentiator. This is probably the question you’ll need to work hardest at getting specifics. You want to look for words and phrases and actual experiences that keep coming up over and over again, no matter how insignificant they may seem to you. If your customers are explaining what they value about what you do, you may want to consider making that the core marketing message for your business.

3. What’s one thing we could do to create a better experience for you?

On the surface this question could be looked at as a customer service improvement question, and it may be, but the true gold in this question is when your customers can identify an innovation. Sometimes we go along doing what we’ve always done and then out of the blue a customer says something like, “I sure wish it came like this,” and all of a sudden it’s painfully clear how you can create a meaningful innovation to your products, services and processes. Push your customers to describe the perfect experience buying what you sell.

4. Do you refer us to other, and if so, why?

This is the ultimate question of satisfaction because a truthful answer means your customer likes the product and likes the experience of getting the product. (You can substitute service here of course.) There’s an entire consulting industry cropping up around helping people discover what Fred Reichheld called the Net Promoter Score in his book The Ultimate Question.

Small businesses can take this a step deeper and start understanding specifically why they get referrals and perhaps the exact words and phrases a customer might use when describing to a friend why your company is the best.

5. What would you Google to find a business like ours?

This is the new lead generation question, but understanding what it implies is very important. If you want to get very, very good at being found online, around the world or around the town, you have to know everything you can about the actual terms and phrases your customers use when they go looking for companies like yours.

Far too often businesses optimize their web sites around industry jargon and technical terms when people really search for “stuff to make my life better.”

Bonus: I’m a big fan of building strategic partnerships and networks. Another question I would suggest you get in the habit of asking your customer is – “What other companies do you love to refer?” If you can start building a list of “best of class” companies, based on your customer’s say so, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve got a list of folks you should be building strategic relationships with.

Image credit: Karen Elliot

Gina Miller shares her calendars with us today and scores a $75 gift certificate to the shop for doing so! She writes, “I know my clients are going to be super excited with these calendars we created from the Year of Marketing templates!  I will be shipping them this week to my top 50 clients from ‘09.  I decided to try to make it a repeat client/word-of-mouth marketing campaign. I had them printed as 10×15 and attached a ribbon to the back.  I made all of the calendars the same color and put a texture on them to personalize them a bit.” Fab-U-lous!! Want to make your own marketing campaign? We did all the hard work for ya…check it out right here~

Talking Linchpin with Seth Godin

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Seth Godin (Click to listen, right click and Save As to download – subscribe now via iTunes

I had the pleasure of visiting with Seth Godin for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Seth’s new book Linchpin is out today and, as we discussed in our time together, this is probably his most personal message and book to date.

The message of Linchpin, to workers everywhere, is pretty simple: “The only way to get what you’re worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care deeply about.” A Linchpin is someone who can walk into a room and create order out of chaos. They are special people who view the world differently and who may or may not have the title applicable to the value they bring.

Godin is telling you that you must become that indispensable linchpin in today’s world of work or you’ll become the drone easily replace by the mechanical drone. (In fact on page 15 of Linchpin he recounts an interaction that he and I had about a year ago that drives this very point home – The Law of the Mechanical Turk) In a way Godin is also telling those would be Linchpins, the people inside organizations that do view the world differently, to rise up and make your role as a leader tangible – to make a choice.

There is no instruction manual for becoming a linchpin, although in Godin’s words, if you have a job where you wait around for someone to tell you what to do next, you’re giving up the chance to create value. There is plenty of evidence, however, that creative workers, problem solvers, those who can lead customers and inspire staff are on the path to becoming linchpins.

In true Seth fashion he has made the launch of Linchpin, as with any book he writes, a lesson in marketing. He has an uncanny knack for tying the central message of his books to the promotional tactics of his launch. Linchpin is being reviewed not by the traditional media factory, but by a thousand you and we, linchpins in our own little world. You can read more reviews and interviews on the Linchpin Squidoo lens.

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GoToWebinar is the presenting sponsor of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast.

Even a simple business card can be a great new innovation.

Check out the Poofka – a business card that turns into an iPhone stand. Give it to folks and they will pay attention — and maybe keep it for months.

It only takes one idea to build a great business. Keep looking for yours (and don’t make it too complicated).

Anne Ruthmann is a lifestyle & wedding photographer from Boston, MA. She spent 10 years practicing marketing & management in corporate and non-profit businesses before pursuing her passion for photography as an independent small business. She loves helping others find creative and low-cost solutions to business problems. Follow her on Twitter to see her daily adventures and thoughts.

PHOTOLOVECAT.COM Helping photographers and small business owners achieve greater success.