Photography Marketing: How To Make Your Clients Fall In Love With You

Nobody becomes successful by hiding in the crowd… the lesson to be learned from this simple statement is that, in order for you to be successful in the photography business, you must be able to differentiate yourself from the local competition.

Doing what everyone else is doing will not make you stand out, and you may end up making the same mistakes that everyone else is making!

This post is an extract from my latest eBook: “What Makes You Different? How You Can Make Your Clients Fall In Love With You!“

You can get a complete copy by subscribing to my mailing list (over to the right in the sidebar).

Also, if you want to take action to actually make your clients fall in love with you for real, you’ll want to know about my NEW mini-coaching program to help identify these elusive unique factors for yourself.

Full details of this program can be found at:

Mini-Coaching Program:

What Makes You Different? How To Make Your Clients Fall In Love With You!

Do you find yourself wondering why a potential client didn’t hire you?

Do you feel let down and depressed when you get off the phone after hearing yet another prospect tell you, “we’ll think about it“?

Do you find yourself worrying that it could be your prices that’s scaring people away?

Aren’t you tired of being stressed out from client enquiries that go nowhere?

Do you wish your prospects just “got it” about you and your photography business?

A little while ago, I wrote a post on the blog called “5 Photography Website Blunders To Avoid“, outlining some of the basic issues that I see on many photographers’ websites today. These mistakes can be costly, and are sending people away who should be working with you!

Of the five blunders I listed in the article the most dangerous one, by far, is the “Generic Artist Statement“. The reason I say this is because your artist statement (which is actually NOT a single statement, by the way, but we’ll get to that later) is supposed to be one of the most powerful weapons in your marketing arsenal, yet it’s being squandered and wasted through ineffective communication at persuading your prospects to take action NOW.

Having blurred or poorly defined unique selling propositions (USPs) is one of the major reasons why so many photographers are struggling today.

Not only are these unique factors not being clearly communicated through the photographers’ websites, those same photographers are also unable to give potential clients an undeniable and irresistible reason to hire them when talking on the telephone, or during sales consultations.

This inevitably leads to a lack of suitably enthused clients, poor sales, and a depressing financial situation for the photographer.

As a professional photographer and business owner, I’m sure you are fully and painfully aware of this simple truth:

But I’m here to tell you that this can be stopped!

To do that, we need to go back to basics for a moment…

Here’s a brief summary and recap of what I said in the blog post I mentioned at the beginning of this article:

It’s a given fact that photographers need to communicate to their prospective clients that they care about what they do.

However, the problem lies in just how photographers are achieving that. On so many websites, I see a very generic artist statement, which is clearly intended to let the visitor know that the photographer is a professional who values what they do.

Unfortunately, these generic statements are very ineffective, partly because they’re so overused, but also because they really don’t say very much that the visitor doesn’t already know or expect from the photographer.

This is part of a bigger problem – the fact that many photographers experience acute difficulty in articulating the factors that differentiate them from the others in their community.

For example, we see phrases like this:

• “I have a passion for photography…”
• “I have a great eye…”
• “I approach photography from the perspective of an artist…”
• “I take great care and attention over every detail…”
• “I create the highest quality portraits you can treasure for a lifetime…”
• “I believe that photographs are memories, not just snapshots…”

Unfortunately, all of these are actually required in order to be in business as a photographer in the first place!

One thing is certain and very clear to me. If I were a prospective client, I would not hire a photographer that was missing any one of these attributes.

Would you?

Who wants to hire a photographer that doesn’t have an eye for it, or a passion for what they do? Who would knowingly hire anyone that did not care about the quality of the finished product? Nobody, right?

Therefore, it makes little sense for us to try to hoodwink our prospects into thinking that these are what set us apart from everyone else with a camera.

I honestly feel for these hard-working individuals, because they are doing their very best, and genuinely care for their clients. These photographers deserve to have peace of mind in their business, but are worried sick instead!

Unfortunately, for many photographers, coming up with something better is very difficult for them, so they settle on these in the hope that the prospect will buy into them.

But there is a way, as I’ll explain shortly, to literally make your prospects and clients fall in love with you…

But first, let’s take a more in-depth look at the current situation…

Think back to the last telephone conversation you had with a potential client. Perhaps she called to ask about wedding photography, or her child’s senior portraits, or the creation of a family portrait…

If you answered “yes” to any of these, don’t worry: You are truly not alone!

Now, I’m betting that she did not come right out, and ask you: “Can you tell me what makes you different? Why should I hire you and not the guy across the street from you?“

The truth, though, is that these are the questions she most wants the answers to. Most likely, she’s not even consciously aware of it, but it’s true nonetheless.

So, unless you can give her a satisfactory and compelling answer, she’s walking off to the next photographer in line.

It’s that simple.

She would not be saying to herself that you couldn’t show her how you were different, or complaining that you weren’t unique. Instead, she’ll make up excuses in her mind such as, “the price wasn’t right“, “I need to think about it“, “I’m just shopping around anyway“, “I’ll talk to some more photographers” etc. The closest she’ll probably come to the truth is something like, “I just can’t seem to find the right person“.

I’ve even tested this out on many clients by asking, “How will you know when you’ve found the right photographer for you?” This, more often than not, confuses her completely, and she’ll answer in a very non-committal way that really doesn’t mean very much.

For example, this is an actual response I heard just the other day: “Well, I don’t know, but I’m looking for a photographer who will make nice pictures…” She even acknowledged that she called me because she liked the photographs on the website, but I still had a hard time with her. In the end, I had to let her go because she wasn’t part of my target market, and she did not have the necessary budget.

But what if she had have been a good prospect?

So you see how difficult a challenge this dilemma can be?

One of the reasons for this is that we’re dealing with the emotional part of the prospect’s brain, not the logical part. Our limbic brain is the part that deals with emotions and feelings. It has no capacity for reasoning, logic, or language, and therefore cannot communicate to us through words. Instead, we just have what many of us call “gut reactions” or “hunches” that something is, or isn’t, right for us.

Sometimes, we’ll see images in our mind, little movies that play out in our head of what might happen if you take a certain course of action. That’s your emotional brain communicating with you through your subconscious mind, in the only way it knows how.

So, it’s important to understand that it’s this part of the brain we need to speak to when we communicate our unique differentiators to our prospects and clients.

By appealing to the emotional side of the brain, we are much more able to communicate to our client the reasons why they should hire us, and not someone else.

It’s also important to realize that most people are brought up without a good understanding of all this, so it’s no wonder we struggle when it comes to marketing and sales!

But, I know you’re wondering the same thing I did…

if the emotional brain has no capacity for language, how can we communicate with it?

I would love to go on, but the book is simply too long to fit into one post like this. The answers to these important questions are contained in the rest of my eBook: “What Makes You Different? How To Make Your Clients Fall In Love With You!“

As I mentioned at the beginning, you can get your own full copy by subscribing to the mailing list, and you’ll be sent the download link, together with some other goodies too!

Alternatively, if you want to take action to actually make your clients fall in love with you for real, you’ll want to know about my NEW mini-coaching program to help identify these elusive unique factors for yourself.

Full details of this program can be found at:

Mini-Coaching Program:

What Makes You Different? How To Make Your Clients Fall In Love With You!

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Sales & Marketing client attraction, photography business, photography marketing, unique selling proposition