Last Updated: February 15th, 2020

One of the most amazing aspects of photography is being able to put your artistic eye to use in the service of others.

That probably sounds pretty corny, and we’ll be the first to admit – it sort of is. But what we’re trying to convey in this jumble of words is simple…all photographers that are looking to make money, whether through just selling some prints or doing full scale photo work for clients (weddings, corporate events, portraits, etc.) need to know their product is, through and through, a service that people rely on.

Over the years, we have shot weddings, personal portraits, family and couple portraits, newborn and maternity shots, and even more recently have started to take on landscape commissions for big businesses. While our drive and focus is geared towards couples and photographing their weddings, it’s useful to see the idea of our industry – the photography industry – being less about the specific photographs, and more about the people we serve.

Why this matters

It’s a novice mistake to think that people want to work with you just because you take good photographs. We learned this early on, and as a result of a lot of different work and artistic experiences over the years before we even set up our own photography business. From the get go, we knew that if we wanted to take photos for a living, and actually attract new clients, that we had to get right the customer service aspect of our job.

Fortunately for us, this comes naturally. We don’t have to put on some facade, and it’s pretty evident that the people we work for appreciate this.

Getting out of the mindset that good photos sell your work will help you to grow your business. This isn’t to say that people don’t look at your portfolio of images (they do), but the real selling point comes from them being able to connect with your brand personality. Let’s talk about this in more depth right now:

What your brand says about you

As photographers, our branding is specifically designed to showcase aspects of our personality and work that we want to put a spotlight on.

We designed our Hand and Arrow Photography brand with ourselves in mind – ie: we didn’t have to really stretch our imaginations to far, we just made something we were comfortable representing because it represents us perfectly. Formed From Light is an extension of this brand – just specifically geared towards educating photographers instead of attracting new clients to have their photos taken by us.

One thing to keep in mind about your brand personality is that, even if it is an accurate representation of who you are and the type of people you’d like to attract, you don’t typically include aspects of yourself that are undesirable or boring.

From time to time when looking at other photographers popping up, sometimes specifically in website critique threads we might find on Reddit or in a Facebook group, this is actually an area where many people could use refining.

Few people really want to read about the mundane – connecting with a brand allows people to embed themselves into a bit of a fantasy at times.

There is a reason why advertising so often takes us to distant and beautiful fantasy worlds. We don’t normally want to drink a Coke at the North Pole, but when we see those ads with the polar bears having a dance off, we sort of get in the mood.

While the current trend of wedding photography in particular is geared towards capturing authentic and natural moments as they occur, photographers (like ourselves) have brands that showcase stylized storytelling. It is in this artistic judgment that you begin to sow the seeds of your brand image – what your product will look like for people who are buying.

In our own experience, we highlight who we are in many ways as a brand.

From the moment someone opens our website, they either connect or disconnect based on a number of factors such as – the layout, the color scheme, the title, etc. If they stick around, they’ll probably check out our portfolio of images and our pricing page. If they dig us enough, they’ll check out our About Us page for more detail about the people offering this service, and send us a message.

Because so much of this process is done online, and we are being judged by people anonymously looking into us behind their computer screens – having a strong brand image is especially important.

The most interesting thing in all this is that most of the people who contact us via email end up booking with us. We don’t receive a crazy number of inquiries like we once did, but since refining our brand image, we have limited the number of people who reach out to just those who are really serious. Those are the people that really excite us to work with, too!!

In all this, we represent ourselves as working professionals, and list out traits we often share with our clients. From little things we like (like Game of Thrones) to our adventurous personalities (our journey to Iceland is a big feature!) and so on.

We are not highlighting the more boring components of our lives like the amount of time we spend glued to a computer screening writing content, editing photos, doing accounting…this is not thrilling for prospective clients to read or hear about, and not the aspect of our individual selves or personalities we want to be associated with in the minds of our prospective clients.

7 Signs of a Strong Brand

Making sense of how to serve people – you know, be in the people business instead of the photography business – begins with having a strong brand. We just discussed some of our thoughts about the importance of branding, and a few of the things we do and don’t do as a part of our photography brand. We want to build off of this and showcase some of the telling signs of a strong brand that people will be attracted to, and stick behind for years to come.

For reference, these signs were outlined in Cloud9 Marketing’s blog post on the same topic. We took the signs they put together, and put our own spin on it through a photography business lens.

Purpose – Why do you want to offer photography services? Is what you are offering different or unique compared to your competitors? Having a clear and concise answer to these questions will help be a motivator for you, and should be reflected in your marketing materials in the form of a Mission Statement.
Consistency – Being able to produce a consistent product is important. In the world of photography, with ever changing shooting environments, lighting, etc. this can be challenging. The more consistent your portfolio of images is, the more likely it will be to attract prospective clients.
Emotion – Photography is a unique product, especially when you are taking photos of someones wedding day as we do, because it provides an easy “in” to being emotionally resonate in the minds of your clients. Customers become more loyal to a brand when they have an emotional connection to that brand. For wedding photographers, do a good job at capturing the wedding photos and being personable (and professional) on the day of the wedding, and your clients will likely remember and respect you for it.
Flexibility – As photographers, we have many opportunities to be flexible in the name of making our clients happy. While you do need to have boundaries and self-respect in this process, you should identify areas where you are comfortable being flexible. A simple way in which we are fairly flexible is regarding our payment plan options. We know that our photography service is an investment for many people, especially those having us shoot their wedding day for several thousands of dollars. While we don’t bend on our prices, we are flexible to set up a payment plan that will make it so you don’t have to have trouble paying rent or for groceries this week.
Engagement – When people engage with your brand, it can have a lasting impression. One way to easily observe this engagement is through social media – are people commenting on your posts and liking them? Are they talking you up to their friends? These are simple representations for all businesses these days. For photographers, another way a client might engage with your work is by getting prints made to hang on their walls, or share with family and friends in real life. We tend to find this comes naturally when you make photographs people like!!
Loyalty – Clients that come back for more are your ideal clients. They love the work you did for them, and show themselves as loyal customers. Being people oriented instead of sales oriented has made it easier for us to connect with people, most of the time we walk away from sessions feeling more like friends than people they hired to do a job. We can deal with that. 🙂
External Awareness – Keeping yourself up to date on current things happening in the photography industry and larger climate of trends helps you to better adjust your brand as needed. Right now, you can probably pinpoint some things that are trending in the world of photography – and a good brand will implement the good things these trends bring that seem to have lasting power, and maybe put aside other aspects that could die out in a few years.

Customer Service 101 – Class is in Session

Just about every job that we do has us involved in serving other people – often people we would call “customers.” While thinking of people as customers can sometimes feel like it is dehumanizing, like we’re just thinking of them as prospective buyers, the reality is that making this distinction helps to set professional boundaries at the onset of doing business with one another.

This isn’t to say that, over time, through continued communication something more can grow out of the client-service professional relationship – such as a friendship – but it shouldn’t be the goal at the onset. So often when working with our clients, we feel these lines can blur as we are having a great time, filled with laughter through much of our sessions, and so on. It’s a part of our photo service – to be real human beings that offer genuine connections, and it’s a reason why people repeatedly tell us about how much they enjoy working with us.

The reality is…having your photo taken can feel pretty awkward for most people. Helping clients to resolve this feeling virtually requires a good personality that can help people feel comfortable AND know what they should do to look their best in the resulting images.

7 Ways to Provide Great Customer Service

Much of the time, having good customer service skill takes time and a good deal of thought to get right.

We remember jobs we held back in high school, working cash registers at grocery stores and restaurants. While pretty simple jobs, they had a lot of built in opportunities to keep customers happy and returning. Let’s talk about some of this and the applications to a photography service provider:

Remember why your customer is with you. Right out the gate, you need to keep in mind the reason why you were hired in the first place. As a photographer, while a good amount of what might influence someone to book with you as opposed to someone else might come down pretty heavily to your personality and brand, the reality is that, at the end of the day, your client wants to be able to walk away with beautiful images. For clients that have their wedding shot by you, they are going to want to see great wedding day photos. For corporate clients, they will want to see that you captured images they commissioned well and as expected. Keep this in clear view anytime you are interacting with (or about to interact with) your client(s).
Don’t be fake. If your brand doesn’t represent who you are, prospective customers will see right through this. While it might not impact a teenage cashier who is just at a job, as a photographer, having a personal connection and a sense that you can trust the person you are thinking about hiring will be real with you. Sometimes, this means letting down your guard (even just a little bit).

Please note, this doesn’t mean you have to broadcast every detail of your life to someone. Far from it, actually. But if you sell yourself as an adventurous lover of outdoors, if someone was to ask you about this, you should be able to support it with anecdotes of how you have been adventurous and what you enjoy doing outdoors that makes you love it. It’s a simple thing, really.
Don’t complain (even when things go wrong). Let’s talk about wedding days, and how photography during the day isn’t always the smoothest experience in the world. There are often a lot of things that go wrong that could give us reasons to complain such as: groom showing up late, hair & makeup taking much longer than expected, batteries dying quicker than expected, flash not firing, etc.

While these are a few common things we encounter ourselves, we make a concerted effort to never highlight them in front of our clients. When we converse with each other about these things, it’s never in a complaining fashion, but rather we aim to be productive and sort out the next steps we have to take to resolve them. If you dwell on the problems and complain about them too much, it’ll show. From the look on your face to the quality of your work.
Address any concerns clearly and concisely, and set expectations. This is one area that is hugely important as a creative. Sometimes, clients can have unrealistic expectations of what is possible to be photographed, or how the resulting images will look. While many people looking at our portfolio will see beautiful photos, they may not be observing some of the duds or less-than-stellar pictures we have taken. While we are consistent in our quality, if a bride is expecting dreamy images from their mid-July, high noon ceremony photos, you might want to talk with her to explain how the resulting images may not be exactly what she is expecting.

Normally, these conversations are highly beneficial and help people to reset their thinking back to normal. Of course, in an instance like this, we like to show how those photos can be captured. Consider moving the ceremony time, or notice how we’ll set up time for portraits during Golden Hour to have the ideal lighting conditions perfect for these types of moments.
Know when to say “no.” There is reasonable customer service, and then there is unreasonable customer service expectations. A good way to know when to say “no” to a client is by identifying areas where you want to firmly stand your ground. This can sometimes take time to figure out, we will admit.

A common area in the photography industry to consistently say “no” is when it comes to requests from clients to deliver images in RAW file format. While this doesn’t really bother us per say (we charge for it, though!), many photographers feel they are giving away too much freedom, exposure to unedited images that may be “bad” until touched up, and so on. If you’re one of these people, that’s cool – but if you’re asked to deliver RAW photos and you’re not comfortable with this, simply decline. If your prospective client decides to argue with you over it, maybe this isn’t the client for you.
Go above and beyond. While we are good at standing firm when needed, often customer service really boils down to just doing things to help our clients. With weddings, there are so many openings to do more than what is expected. From helping the guys figure out to pin on their boutonnieres, to maybe staying an extra 30 minutes because the timeline was thrown off due to another vendor, it is easy to do these little things to make their experience that much better.
Be responsive. The most important component of serving your clients is to be responsive to their needs in a timely manner. If they shoot you an email, text or voicemail – get back to them as soon as possible. We think it’s pretty well understood that people who are working can’t always respond immediately, but getting back within 24-48 hours (maximum) is generally a good rule.

On the day of your shoot with them, also be responsive to any questions or concerns they might have. We’ve had clients point out features about themselves they don’t like or that don’t photograph well (according to them, anyways) – and taking this into consideration while shooting is important, and shows a good deal of empathy and maturity.

How People Make You Successful

We’ve covered how your brand image should reflect who you are and the service you want to represent to your prospective clients, and how you can provide above-and-beyond levels of customer service. Now, reigning things in a little bit, let’s take a step back and think of some of the ways people make you successful.

If it isn’t obvious, people control your destiny in many ways. Whether someone decides to book you or another photographer directly impacts you in many ways. Not having a photography gig means less bills getting paid, or less money in reserve to put towards new photo gear, overhead business expenses, or personal pleasures like traveling. As someone who does photography as their main full time job, this is hugely problematic.

There are other ways people impact you as well. Every great client interaction has the potential to lead to word of mouth referrals, some of the strongest marketing your business can receive.

Every “like” on Facebook or Instagram, every shared tweet, every repinned post on Pinterest – all these little engagements and micro-engagements with what you are saying, thinking, or doing and sharing with the world – are all ways people will interact with you.

In the modern day, due to social media and highly optimized websites, new traffic of people can find out about you. And even if they are in some far away place and wouldn’t be able to book you to photograph them, they may still love the brand image you convey and the things you have to say. Even these people and the interactions you have with them (both directly and indirectly), can lead to continued success.

How to Help People Help You Become Successful (with 7 Tips!!)

Now that we can accept that it is people who have the power to make us successful – as photographers and business owners – we need to consider some of the ways that we can motivate them to help you along this path.

In our own experience, and from what we’ve seen and heard from many other photographers we interact with, sometimes the immediate response a client will have to receiving great photos isn’t to instantly send a return email – but rather to get super excited and keep that excitement to themselves. Add this with everyone being busy with other things in life, and it’s easy to see how this really happy client can get away from being able to positively impact your success.

Here are some ways that you can better help people help you become successful:

Ask for feedback. One of the simplest, but often hardest, things to do is ask for feedback. This one is challenging even for us – as opening a conversation for feedback has the potential to reveal some negatives for sure. While hearing comments of praise is really inspiring, sometimes having someone else provide some honest critique about some areas that you are lacking can help reveal areas you can make significant improvement. Often, this sort of improvement can come really quick, but we can often be blind to our own flaws.
Ask for reviews. Having social proof on your social media reviews, Yelp, The Knot, Wedding Wire, and other websites where clients might post reviews is extremely helpful for continuing to grow a reputable brand. Sometimes, the best way to make sure a client will write you a review is to just ask them to do it in the email you send out with their image gallery.
Engage in social media conversation. The easiest conversations to keep up with are often those occurring on social media – accessible right on our phones or computers. A lot of times when we post photos or blog posts on our Hand and Arrow Photography Facebook page, we’ll be met with a bunch of comments. Making an effort to respond to these, especially those that are unique in ways, really help to maintain a direct line of communication with people interaction with your posts (whether clients or otherwise). Of course, we also have personal messages on these platforms too, and when held with clients, it is especially important to keep up there, too!
Engage with people in your blog comments. Following the above thought, a great sign of a successful website is how active its users are in their blog comments – and maybe more important – the type of conversations going on. By responding to these comments, you are directly engaging with these commenting users – people who are probably more likely to bookmark and return to your site. By responding to these comments, no matter how small, you give that person a little personal slice of you.
Listen to your clients. One thing we really like to focus in on while shooting sessions and weddings are the things our clients are saying throughout the day. We are especially looking out for those comments relevant to us as photography professionals. Hearing how they react to other vendors, the things they highlight that are being done well (or not done well), and how they are reaction to what we are doing, too. Taking these sorts of comments, and all others that your clients might say during a consultation, meeting, etc. is all beneficial!
Offer freebies. People like free things. For photographers, it might be giving away a free session, free eBook to help prepare for a wedding, or something else (use your imagination). When done right, these types of things can be leveraged to entice people to connect with your brand. A great platform for hosting giveaways is Rafflecopter, and it integrates nicely with Facebook.
Be authentic. This is a point that can repeated again and again with good reason. In business, people are most attracted to authenticity. While we might find a lot of amusement in staged reality TV shows where you can tell people aren’t quite being themselves, but instead being a caricature for our entertainment, people aren’t typically into working with people who seem like actors. Our best interactions come from connecting with people, sometimes over the simplest things like things we enjoy doing. Maintain this through all of your interactions, and everything you do.

Keep People Your Focus

Through all the challenges running a photography business can bring to you, it is important to keep the people you serve in mind. Through and through, this is probably one of the single most important pieces of business advice you should learn and put into action.

As photographers, we interact so heavily with people – whether it be in our studios, at meetings, during sessions, during weddings and other events, through social media and email…the list goes on…All of these interactions are important, and will impact our growth over time and ability to become a self-sustaining force in the world.

Have any thoughts about the “people business”? What are some good tips you’ve learned to having great relationships with people around you (in business and otherwise)? We’d love to hear below!!

It’s Not the Photography Industry – It’s the People Business