046: Jeff Brown – The Best Kept Marketing Secrets & Why LinkedIn Is Going To Change Your Business

November 20, 20221

“Marketing isn’t an 8-hour thing every day – it’s a 10-20 minute thing every day. Little and often is the key.”

JEFF BROWN

Hey everyone! It’s Sally here, from Studio Ninja. Today’s episode is all about Jeff Brown!

Check out some of the biggest points from Jeff’s interview below:

What are your top tips for photographers that want to improve their marketing?

Well, one of the first things I always say is niche, the power of niche, a specialisation. So if you look at the photography industry as a whole, it’s never been as competitive. There’s more photographers now than there has ever been in the history of photography.

But what most photographers do is, they start off and go, “Right, I can do this, I can do babies, I can do pets, I can do headshots, I can do weddings,” because the thing is, they don’t want to turn any particular jobs down.

So they join this huge pool of millions of photographers from around the world where everybody else is doing the same thing. So everybody’s going in as the Jack of all trades. Nobody is specialist. And if you try to appeal to everyone, you become special to no one. And the only thing you can then do to make yourself stand out is discount your prices.

So what you have is at the very, very bottom end of the photography pool is all these photographers who are generalists, fighting over price, where you move away from that and you still specialise, so you become a head-shot photographer or a country-house wedding photographer, or an outdoor pet photographer, and you move away from them.

And then you start to serve your ideal clients and you become very special to your ideal clients. And because you’re a specialist, you can charge more money. The first biggest thing is concentrate on a particular niche.

Now you don’t have to say, “Right, I’m just going to do weddings and I can’t do headshots.” You just separate your two brands. So you have a wedding brand, which is maybe quite a feminine feel to it. It’s very emotionally-driven because it’s an emotional style of photography.

Then you have a headshot and personal branding brand, and that is what you call a solution because those people are buying for a solution to a need. And that need is usually to get more online publicity, make more money, grow their own business, where a bride is buying for an emotional reason.

So you can’t communicate those two messages through one website with one brand because both people are buying for different reasons and both people are looking for a different type and feel of brand.

Why should photographers be making use of Instagram?

I can give you some really interesting statistics.
So LinkedIn, the current user amount on LinkedIn is 775 million active users on LinkedIn.
There’s two new LinkedIn accounts created every second.
41% of millionaires use LinkedIn.
And the average wage earner on LinkedIn earns £77,000 a year.

So these are people with big money. So the age demographics is the highest population demographics 60% is from the 24 to 35 age group. So think weddings, think babies, think portraits, right?

But there’s also older generations on there whose kids are getting married, who have pets, who also want personal branding and headshot photography. So these people buy from people who they like and who they interact with, within the platform.

Now, this is the most powerful bit. Out of 775 million people, there’s only 30 million, what you call optimised profiles. And when I work with people, that’s one of the things we do, we fully optimise the profiles, so you start standing out.

But the next most important thing is the entire news feed content in LinkedIn, everything you see in LinkedIn is created by less than 1% of those 775 million people. So unlike Facebook and Instagram, you’re not struggling to get heard. All you’ve got to do is show up, post 16 times a month is what LinkedIn calls content creation. So your average post on LinkedIn can actually trend for anything up to about two weeks.

So it’s not a heavy work platform. You just need to be creating content maybe four times a week, five times a week and get yourself out there because only 1% of the people are doing it. Now, what happens is a lot of people create content on LinkedIn and they don’t get much engagement. And then they go, “Oh, well, that’s pretty crap.” Now what you want to do is, you want to have a look at the views. So you put a post out, the post might get 2000 views or 1500 views when you’re first starting off.

I get tens of thousands of views on mine. But the interaction is very, very small. You might get one like. Now a view means somebody’s clicked that post open and read it or looked at it. I get so many people message me and say, “Jeff, really interested in joining your program. I’ve been following you for about three months now on LinkedIn or six months.”

And I look at this person and think, “You’ve never liked a single one of my posts. You’ve never commented. I don’t know who you are.” I jump on the phone and they go, “Oh yeah, I follow everything you do.” I say, “Yeah? I’ve never seen you like anything or comment.”
“Oh, because I’m a bit frightened to,” and that’s the thing with LinkedIn. Lots of people have these accounts, but they’re scared to interact, because LinkedIn users are quite shy.

But what they’re doing is, they’re digesting and consuming your content in the background and you’re standing out. So don’t be disheartened by the likes, because likes is only vanity anyway. It’s the engagements and the views that potentially lead to the sales.

It’s keeping up that consistency. Four times a week, get used about it, and the results are tremendous. There are so many amazing client success stories just from LinkedIn across all niches. But I would say, probably about 80% of the photographers I work with, make most of their money from LinkedIn.

If you could add one final piece of advice, something that’s made a difference in your personal life or your business life, what would that piece of advice be?

I think the biggest thing is consistency. It is, and it doesn’t have to be massive. It’s just developing that routine. And I think for photographers, generally you only start to think about marketing when the work starts to dry up. Marketing doesn’t have to be huge, it’s not an eight hour thing. Just one task every single day. Now marketing can be as little as 15, 20 minutes every single day. But what I say is, let’s say you get up in the morning and before you open your emails, before you switch on Lightroom, do one little bit of marketing, right? 250 words towards a blog post. You’re going to publish it at the end of next week, get your social media posts out, go onto LinkedIn and connect with 30 potential clients. Just do those little things because these all add up. It’s like going to the gym. You don’t go to the gym and do a two-hour session, really beast yourself, and then come out full of muscles. You go 20 minutes, 20, 30 minutes a day with three or four times a week. So it’s just those little things, you know?

Thank you!

Thanks again to you all for joining us and a huge thanks to Jeff for joining us on the show!

If you have any suggestions, comments or questions about this episode, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post, and if you liked the episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post!

That’s it for me this week, I hope you all enjoyed this episode.

See you soon,

Sally