099: Paula Brennan: Diversifying Your Income & Done-For-You Marketing Campaigns

She is the host of the podcast The Business of Personal Brand Photography – and is passionate about spreading the good word throughout the photography industry about how highly lucrative this emerging sector of the industry is. She shares the tools to incorporate lifestyle branding photography into their businesses with helpful, inspiring and insightful content in her weekly show and within her online education platform.

She sees her growing success due to the fact that she engages her clients to come back again and again with subscription-style packages and multi-person shoot experiences unlike anything her competitors offer, and brings back many of her clients 1-3 times per year, making sure their content buckets for their website and social media are full and fresh.

Yeah, well I think that, here’s the thing, like, I always like to say to people not to try and jump ship, do, you know, like utilize what you’ve got. But the great thing about personal branding right now is that different to maybe some other genres, particularly that ones that were maybe considered a luxury item. You know, like those, the we, and we all know, I’m not gonna sort of label anything. There is definitely sectors of the photography industry that would be considered luxury and maybe other first to go or they might skip a year or that kind of thing. I think that with this, it can stay, it can be really helpful to stay buoyant, you know? So you might not necessarily go all in, but it’s definitely something that you can offer to your existing clients without necessarily needing to go and reinvent the wheel and find new people.

You can simply ring some clients or send out an email to your database and go, Hey, this is what I’m doing. I’m also offering this as a service. Because I guarantee you, no matter whether you’re shooting weddings or babies or families, probably 30 or 40% of your current database would want some sort of branding done. Whether it be a couple of headshots or whether it be an entire collection for a year’s worth of content. They’re, they’re gonna, they’re already there inside of your, you know, inside of your world. And we all know gonna find a new client. That’s the hardest part, right?

Look, to be honest with you, I think that, you know, I, I think layering in personal branding for one is great because as I said, even in this tough financial climate, small businesses are starting to recognize really the necessity to have professional marketing. Mm-hmm. Um, I can’t tell you how many realtors are coming to me right now. They weren’t coming two years ago when the housing prices were zooming up. But now that the water started to settle in the Australian market, they’re all looking around and going, we all look the same. We need to look different. You know? And so I think that if you can sort of, um, offer packages that make it really easy for your clients to say yes to as well. The thing with, with personal Brady in particular is that the, the money for it comes out of a different market in people’s businesses.

It’s a marketing budget. So the spend is done with a little bit of a different intention, I guess. Do you know, like it’s, there’s sort of a more pragmatic way of them sort of justifying the spend, I guess you could say. And so the thing with these sort of, when we’re in these sorts of times, I think that it’s simply just making it easier for your clients to say yes to working with you mm-hmm. Um, we do this in a really clever way by offering subscription packages for our clients so that they can just pay by the month and they can have one or two or even three shoots a year mm-hmm, but it means that the spend is smaller, it’s more consistent, but it’s spread out over the course of the year instead of sort of having to think about this massive chunk of cash coming out of the business in one month. Oh. And that I think is gonna be amazing for other photographers to take on, whether it be with your portraits or anything like that, because people are so used to subscriptions now. We’re so used to the Netflix coming out every month and the, the Adobe Suite thing coming out of our budget. You know, it’s sort of like what people are conditioned and used to. So I think that’s a really clever way to sort of be able to project cash flow in your business.

Okay, well basically this is where I’ve taken the hard work out of it for my clients, you know, for people who wanna learn from me. So, um, I have literally got years of experience of running different sorts of marketing campaigns because I know that it’s the marketing machine that helps people’s businesses go round, right? It’s different in when you’re in weddings cuz you can kind of move into a referral click. But particularly in personal branding, you do need to keep inviting people into your world. And same in portraits, you know, you’re constantly needing to find new clients and I find that a lot of photographers are leaving things to the last minute and then they’re just shooting from the hip. Oh, it’s, it’s Father’s Day this weekend. I better just put something up and it’s sort of like this desperate thing and they put up one post and then they get upset because it doesn’t sell.

And it’s like, marketing campaigns actually are a multi-pronged approach. Do you know? So you need to sort of have the thing, the event or the the offer. You need to have the emails to go out to your database. You need to follow up. If people don’t take action, you need to have a sales page in Paste so that they can actually do the thing, book it to a calendarly sys a calendar system like the Studio Ninjas just introduced, have the workflows afterwards to help them to get to the booking and then have the email and the social media posts. So I’ve done all taken all of my best performing campaigns and whacked them into ca into step by step tutorials and everything and given everything to the, to people so that they can go and implement it, plug and play it into their business. So Wow, that’s pretty, pretty good product. Yeah, my clients have had some excellent results and really good sales, which is always really good for me to, to know about, like, you know, to get that feedback.

Do you know? What I would say is you have to position yourself in the market where you wanna be cuz no one else can do it for you. I think that so many of us sort of spend so much of our careers going, oh when I get here then I can do that. Or then I can call myself that. If you don’t walk into it and sort of own it and dress yourself in it every day and say, I am the go-to photographer, I am a leading photographer, I am this, you know, if you are not the one that can own that label, no one else can do it for you cuz there’s no PR team sitting around the corner waiting to do it for you, right? Yeah. You have to do it yourself. So I think that’s what I would say to people.