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Lesson Info

Creating a Marketing Calendar

it's what is where you're gonna build, just like the salsa box yesterday. This is where you're going to create a marketing structure. Now, if you're a member of Sandy puts University or if you bought the book, you may not realize you just got five millions memberships to hang out with me. This is pretty much done for you. The rest of you. The first time I did this, I did it with paper and pencil. We're going to be. All the tools are pulled out in a minute. We did it manually. To this day, we still every year do it manually, and I'll explain that process as well. So the idea of creating a working calendar we want to understand our marketing structure. We're gonna use color codes to stay on track. In fact, I'm gonna need to borrow some pens because I don't have mine. And then we're going to develop a system that works for each of you. This, in addition to the salsa box, to me is revolutionary. This is something that it's something that I have used for years, and it's something that I thi...

nk will really change it now for those of you who need to get your supplies. I'm just gonna go ahead and bring this up if you have this ready. If you had your download and you got your desk calendar, your colored markers, your list of marketing campaigns that you would like to implement. So I'm hoping that some of you guys have that ready to go because it's gonna make it easier to you guys kind of know some marketing campaigns you want to work on because we're gonna try to get through this exercise and have you kind of participate a little bit with it as well. All right, so first thing we're gonna dio we're going to take a look at this calendar here. Now for a lot of you, I know that some of you everybody in this room. By the way, if you're not in s few member, you are now. Because if you got the book, you're good to go. So you have half. You're going to be forced to hang out with me for five months. I'm gonna be forced to do your marketing for you for five months and and your social media. So that's a good thing because we're gonna get it done. Everything you're about to see you're gonna have done for you. I'm This calendar was created by me about eight or nine. Maybe 10 years ago, to get my life organized, I realized this was in the last bad economy. I realized that I that my marketing was managing me. I was not managing my marketing pretty much. I was just doing emergency marketing all the time. I was watching my numbers, and when they got low, I was giving things away to get people in the door, and I realized that it was a big problem. So the first calendar I ever did looks just like this one here. This is what I honestly recommend. This is what we worked from every year we start a new one, it seems very labor intensive. Look, the markers magically appeared like magic things. Now for my audience that we have here, we tried to find some of the I try to find you one smaller Nobody. It's the middle of the years, so they don't really have calendars right now. So we didn't find you this awesome. I don't want to show it cause it's not well actually ran out and shot all this last night on made you a calendar. Okay, That might not be the truth, but I couldn't find anything but that. So we're gonna work from those today. Tonight, when you do your exercise, your homework, you can use that. I would say it will get you through the day. And once you get home, you might want to switch to something like this. Now, the reason that we do this and we use this big monster calendars, we're gonna be manually going back through it constantly. I like the big boxes because I can write a lot of information. All of this will be transferred to our computer. We use this calendar here. This is s few calendar. So this is my company's calendar as well as thousands of students who are SPU members. We all work off of the same calendar. We produce campaigns for every genre. And then, of course, people can add their own campaigns to their personal calendars as well. So I want to break it down. The key is color coding. We use blue, orange and red as our design as our colors. I'm sorry. The colors are the most important part. I told you everything in my life is color coded. This is how we start to recognize where we're going and what we're doing and makes visually looking at a calendar very easy, because if I see certain colors, I know exactly what that color means. So just for the sake of doing it, we're gonna pretend like we're going to start a calendar Now, my calendar and my students Calendars, SP, students calendar looks just like this. So we all work out this calendar, you can see the multiple colors. In this case, we're gonna start with a blank canvas here. Let's pretend like we're gonna want to start a baby model search. So I want to do something to get business in the door tomorrow. I think we mentioned the baby. I taught the baby program here, but I have to go through because it is my bread and butter. So I do a lot of baby model searches. That's how I am about my business in the slow time. April is a great time for me to be getting these baby models searches does. So if I were going to do that I would swing to April and you guys don't have to do this with me. But I would swing to April because I want to photograph these sessions in April and I pick a day my session date is going to be It looks like the 15th. So the 15th of April is when I want to start photographing these baby models. It might be a one day session. It might be a five day session that I don't put on the counter. I just and I don't even write this on the calendar. I just start there and I say OK, April 15th I want to do a baby model Shoot. Now I'm gonna back it up four months, so we take it back for months. Now, the reason we back it up for months and this is the whole point of this calendar is we're going to teach you to market in advance. We're gonna have you four months ahead of the curve. So what we're gonna be teaching you right now would be things that you would do four months from now. For instance, those June downloads You saw the sq member downloads. There was a campaign called the Orchard fan or turn family special. It's a false special. That's when Apple's air out. Why would we be working on a false special now? Because fall is three months away. We want to be ahead of the curve so that our marketing is ready to go out. So that's the fun part about this. So we back it up four months and we go to around the 15th and in blue, we would mark our calendars, we would mark them. And I will tell you this the first thing you're gonna want to do this in pencil. I think we've provided you all pencils because this is going to change. This is a an evolution of you're gonna get laid it all out there. You're gonna say, Oh, I've got two specials and I gotta move one that's got to go a week forward in a week back and you're gonna play with this A little bit of pencil. Once you feel like this is it, That's what I do. Then we're gonna go back through and permanent marker everything. So I would start with a pencil and I would, of course, backing up four months and I would say, OK, baby special 15th and it would be penciled in and it would be hopefully going to turn into blue. Now we're going to move forward. So we know Blue means the design phase blue means that we need to pull this campaign. We need to first write the campaign. Remember, we have to have a description of the campaign. What we're doing, what we hope to expect out of this campaign. After we write the description, we have to actually work on the campaign. Now s few members. We provide the campaign for you, so you just have to customize it. If you were not a member and you were just doing your own thing well, of course you would start designing or buying a template or something to work on a baby campaign. So that's step number one Blue is designed, So that means you have four weeks to design, create and finish a project. Now we move forward one months and around the 15th of the month we're going to put baby model search. Only this time it's gonna be an orange and again you're using pencil right now. But you can maybe put a little orange dot by just so you know what phase it's in. And now, of course, we're gonna put baby model search. So we've moved for We have four weeks to work on the design, and now we are in the proof and press stage. So this, by the way, orange on our calendar is the most critical color. Because to me this if you miss this deadline, it kind of negates the whole purpose of the calendar. Because if that day rolls around and you're like, Oh, I'm supposed to get that done and I didn't and I'll do it next week. Well, guess what? Next week comes and goes and you forget. And then all the sudden you're a week behind you Just move your whole calendar off by a week or two. It's gonna mess you up. So in our studio, we have a rule for a graphic artist. If you hit an orange date and we're not done, nobody gets to go home until it's done. And I know that sounds harsh, but by doing that, it instigates this. You know what? I don't want to be here five a tonight. Realizing that I have to complete something. Let's just get it done. Events. So we stay ahead of the curve. So orange is the critical color. This is the one that you're gonna tell yourself no matter what. I'm not even gonna get close to that date. But if I do, I'm not leaving until I get it done. So orange is the proof and press phase. What that means is you have until that date to complete it. Now, you have four weeks to get it. Proof That means you're gonna have somebody read it and check it. Get depressed. If it's a postcard or something that has to be printed, it's gonna get to press. You're gonna have it back. You're also going to stamp it. You're gonna label it. You're gonna get it ready to go out to be mailed. So you've got four weeks to do that. You have from basically February 14th february 15th to March 15th. That gives you four weeks to make that happen. This is our critical dead deadline. Can truly the one that I want you to remember most. Now we're on our February date. We're gonna move forward for weeks. We're gonna go to March March, everything is in red. On red is the final color code red means send to client. So you've had four weeks to send it to proof. You've had four weeks to get it to press, to get it back, to stamp, to label, to get it ready. And now it has to be a sent out to the clients. And if you guys are doing the math, you know that this is the final flag and this is almost four. This is exactly four weeks before you want to do those sessions. Correct. So what you've done is you've created a map for yourself. And if you create a target map like this and you follow it, all of a sudden you're marketing becomes very visual. And I know most photographers are very visual people. That's why when I look at that first calendar and I could see all those pretty colors, I don't have to know what they are. All I have to do is go look for the orange ones, and if it's close to an orange date, I'm in trouble. I need to get that done. And that's kind of how we teach people that the the calendar system has been one of the biggest components of our of our university. Because people get into this mode. Once you start with one campaign, then you're going to go through and you're going to map out your entire list of campaigns. What you're gonna do first is you're gonna take a piece of paper and for the sake of keeping this reasonable here, normally I would spend an entire week. We shut down our whole studio. That's that marketing week and management week. We shut down the entire studio and build this calendar takes almost a week. Technically, it takes a full day and 1/2 2 marked map it out and then somebody has to put it in the computer. But we assume it's about a week. So technically, you're gonna have to give it more time because you want every single thing you're doing to be on this calendar. But for the sake of giving you just the idea and concept, we're gonna pick five things that you want to do actual marketing campaigns that you want to work on and we're gonna map them out. So that's your homework. Tonight is each of your gonna take a calendar. The first thing you're gonna dio is you're going to write a list of every campaign you can think of. I break mine into genres, so I do every baby campaign, every Children's campaign, every family campaign, etcetera. That's the way I start. And then once I have that, then I start mapping them out. Yes, ma'am. What would you suggest for a mainly wedding photographer? What kind of campaign would you view on the university, Which you are now going to be a member of? Cause you're not right now, right, You're now we're gonna provide you one every month. They're based on times. So there are certain times in the spring we're doing campaigns like bridal fairs in the winter. We're doing Winter Bride Campaign, so I'm gonna help you later through SPU. You're gonna be provided those. However, with weddings, it's things like making a commitment to get a display up. So one campaign and I was just about to go into that, so I'll explain it now. There are two types of campaigns. There are specials, and then there are continuous campaigns. Continuous campaigns like the baby program every single month we have the same marketing literature that goes out for the baby program month after month after month. A special would be something like a ferry because that's once, once a year that we do that does not make sense. So weddings to me would fall in there personally, they fall into a genre category where each month you're gonna find one thing a minimum of one thing you're going to do to market your weddings and map it out this way. So let's say for you it's gonna be get a display in a bridal store, so you know that you're going to be putting that display up four months from now. You want it within 3 to 4 months. You wanna have that up? So you're going to map it out and say, Okay, what is the first thing I need to do? I need to. Your designs part would be contact them, have a meeting with them, sit down there and map out the plan. And then you might do something like we're gonna shoot, gets a model. Brides were photographed. Those brides were gonna so that would be your proof stage, so to speak that you're gonna photograph those, and then the third month would be we're gonna hang the prince. Does that make sense? I don't ever walk into a display going home because you want to get a display up today. Let's shoot it. Tomorrow I tell the people and we're gonna go and displays a probably 1/3 of the program today. I tell the decline of the person I'm working with. This is a three month processor, hospitals, a six month process for us because I'm not gonna do it halfway. We're gonna put a lot of effort in every market, and you're gonna see today every marketing, poll or niche that I can pull out of that. I'm gonna make it happen. So so, weddings. You will have a campaign every single month provided for you. But I started thinking out of the box. Don't think paper like it's a postcard every month. Think, marketing, think, displays, think network marketing, getting in a creating a relationship with somebody. All of that is gonna go on here. So your calendar there's probably gonna be a day that you don't have something to do, but you're gonna feel it's like it's either that conveyor belt or the elephant? Whichever one you want to think about it. A conveyor About one day at a time. I could do this. Elephant is holy cow. I am an awesome marketer. All of this is filled up. I got lots. Lots of my plate. This is money. This is success. What this really is this time this is a map it out now and save yourself the hours of frustrations later. Does that make sense? Cool. So just to give you an idea, all of you guys, this is June. We are gonna get you signed up for June. If you're not already all of these campaigns and you can see that there's every genre covered weddings. We do every like there's a wedding. Not sure what was this month? Sometimes there aren't products, sometimes their albums, things like that. But each Each campaign covers each genre. We have seniors, babies, Children on. In this case, the bonus one was the military deployment. So cool. So you guys have your homework? You guys understand your homework? Eso for certain markets, like seniors that we're getting ready, like four months for now would be like probably close to the peak of that seemed the senior market is something that I had been kind of wanting to get into. Is that something that maybe it's too late now to start that or we know we do a seat in your campaign every single month, we provide one end. And if you're not, if you're not a member, you should be doing a senior campaign every month. So what are we gonna hit? Is that August that we hit for my area, like October is a big fall. Is that what they're for my photographed or when their yearbooks or do I'm not sure when your your books or do for that haven't looked into that. But I know a lot of seniors October's like that. That's when they get photographed and it trails off at what point? Around the middle of November. Okay, you know what I'll do. I'll just explain what we dio. I'm gonna just really quickly. We cover seniors tomorrow. This is gonna come again. But I just want to make sure you guys understand that every genre gets in my calendar every month. If that's my If I photographed those things like weddings, I don't do in my calendar cause I don't do them every month. Their specialty but seniors is a perfect example because, let's say in January it's winter in Colorado. So in January we do what's called spirit sessions. We get our you've heard ambassador programs. We call them spirit sessions. We get our ambassador, so to speak, to get their friends, and we do spirit sessions January, February By March, we do a 40% off sale, its, ah, one time special. Not a lot of people book it, but it's just to get our name out there to keep our name out in the community. By April. We are starting our regular marketing, which April we do. A postcard that has the best offer. May is the second best offer. June is the third best offer, and by August, which is are kind of your October or November is our August. That's when the kids were They should have it done by then. By August were doing last chance. Last minute you get in here, so that's our August. And then from there you think OK, well, they've been photographed. It's over. No, no, no. Then we go into, um we go right back into graduation announcements. So we do a graduation wallet reminder to buy more wallets. Then we go into looking for spirit models. So by the wintertime, we're putting it out there that we're looking for new ambassadors. We want to get new ones, and then we're doing by January. We're doing graduation announcements reminding them. And then I skipped one in May. When they graduate, we have an entire campaign. It's just a piece that we send out to congratulate them on graduating, so it has nothing to do with selling anything. It's, you know, they've been through this whole process way were there photographer. It's just a big thank you Some of the things that we do to instigate some of this, for instance, with our senior, when seniors come into order. Portrait's, our senior sales averages are pretty high there a couple $1000. But when clients hit a certain price point like $1500 it includes five graduation announcements. Now you all know that to buy them from the lab have to buy 25 so it's free. It's complimentary, is a bonus side of whatever you want to say. It's in there. So now when a client comes in to place their order, we tell them, Hey, we're gonna contact you later for your five free graduation announcements. That's what is it? Five or six months later in May that we'd actually contact them in February. So you kind of see where that's going. So our marketing approaches. You're getting these free. Well, guess what that means we're gonna contact you later. We're going to say, Hey, we need to get these done. We need his information for the school and all that stuff. We create a graduation announcement. What? Mom is only gonna want five. So because it was free earlier, it she's going to say, Well, can I get more Hominy or 25? Guess what? I had to order 25 anyway. Didn't cost me anything more. But now she's paying for 25. Most are going to say I need 50 to 100. I just guaranteed an order in January or February because it was in my marketing structure, because I had preplanned that we're gonna It goes into sales to that. We're gonna give you these here because I can market them to you here so does that kind of makes sense. So, basically, for seniors every single month I have a campaign and you will now be on SPU. You will also have a campaign so you can see this month the seniors got a news yet newsletter in a yearbook ad for us, our yearbook ads, or do in the end of the year towards the end of the season because they'll be going into the final year books. So you can kind of see that seems weird to be giving an ad or to be working on an ad four months in advance, but it's going to be done on time. So we're gonna get We're gonna help you with that great question. All right, let's keep going. So in addition, Teoh your marketing calendar in addition to your physical marketing pieces, which would be printed pieces, postcards, all of that's gonna go in here, you're gonna have other marketing, which are the displays and things to get. You know, you could add that stuff on your market account. That's why we get the really big one is each day. You could have a lot on there. In addition to that, you cannot negate the social media calendar. It's also really important. Social media is huge, and it's something that we have to consider, so we will be adding your social media onto this calendar as well. We like to teacher s few students to write their social media the first day or within the first few days of the month. Unlike the other part of the calendar, where your four months out with social media, it's more relative to the here and now. It's more relative to If your marketing this month a let's say, what was their military campaign? Your social media that month is going to be the military campaign. Does that make sense? So for those of you who are provided that we write this for you, your download this month would include a social media structure for the campaigns that you got four months ago. Hopefully, that's there's a little clarity for the rest of you. This is the little green boxes are what we're talking about here. We recommend that by the first or second day of the month, you are riding your social media outline. I'm gonna walk you through what goes in the social media outline, then the way it's structured is you will post you're gonna have a week number one, post week number 234 and five. If there's five weeks and then it becomes a matter of cutting and pasting them in so weak Number one, you might be talking about a senior campaign. It's already pre written. Either we wrote it for you or you're gonna take the time to write it. They're all customizable, so you'd make it your own, and then you're going to just cut and paste it into your social media. So what's happening here is we're gonna write it, and then those days, the Wednesdays are the days that we're gonna post it. There is a reason, and we're gonna go heavy into social media today on why Wednesday's is the very best data post. I'm going to show you exactly what days are good, better and best Wednesday being the very best day for, um, posting content. Also gonna tell you what times are the best times. You're gonna be surprised they're not at work. They're not work times. So we're gonna cover that a little bit later. But just look at that green box. And that is your day that if you were only gonna post one thing on Social Media Week, that would be the day. I really want you to do it. So on your social media outline you're going to include we're gonna say six different topics. There are six things that each month we want you to kind of think about ladies, You don't have to write these down there all in your book, your also SPU members. So you'll get you actually get this downloaded every month. But what you want to make sure you include. For those of you who are writing every month, you should at least include two business updates, business updates or things about your company, a product of a new session type we're doing. Valentine's agent got these new frames and products are things that you're selling, but you don't want to be selling things all the time. It gets really annoying. People could see right through that. So a minimum of two, but even a maximum of two planned that selling things. The next thing you want to do is include two personal reflections. This is how people get to know you. This is how they relate to you. So something about yourself. So it could be something like even this class. I'm a creative, live learning building. My business. Your clients actually like to know that they like to know that you care about your company and that you're growing. So whether you win an award or you you know you've done something educational. Be careful. You don't want to brag or boast. You don't wanna be obnoxious. But you know what? People want to know the good things you're doing. I will tell you this. People want to work with good people and people who are doing good things are good people. So you're going to create that natural need toe want to get to know you? Then you also need to include each month to interesting facts. Now, these have nothing to do with photography. You want to be human. This could be stories, community events. It could be something like, you know, there's a carnival that came into town or circa. Here's unexamined. All the circus came into town. I found these coupons for $30 off a link to something like that. Because if you specialize in kids. They're gonna love that. They're going to say, Oh, that's awesome. I'm gonna take my kids. You know, we do things like there's a farmer's market and I'll say, Oh, there's a farmer's market That's my favorite farmers market. I'm usually there around 10. I can tell you how many clients actually were there. It's kind of, you know, it is weird when they show up and you're like, You totally took me serious, are they? But they're interested in you. Your interesting. You're a photographer, you're an artist, you're cool. And a lot of these moms in their minds or stay at home moms that are just trying to be, you know, trying to get the best they can. And you're kind of somebody they'd like to relate to you and your interesting so little post like that. Give them little tidbits on why they should get to know you. And that works as well. Now, speaking of tidbits, each month we want you to include something informational, almost educational. This could be we use these a lot for clients spotlights. We have a lot of Children because of the work I do. For now, I lay me down to sleep. That and work we also do for Children's foundations, Children's hospital, etcetera. We often work with terminally ill Children, probably more than I would ever want Teoh through the work. And now I lay me down to sleep. All of those Children will pass away, so that work is is a little separate. It's not something that I promote or post constantly. However. There are beautiful stories of Children that are going through terminal illnesses, and for us, it's about telling their story about letting people I know about them because to a parent who's losing a child and having worked with hundreds and hundreds of them, I can honestly say that no parent would wish that on. There you go sing it. The wheels on the bus go right, thank you. We have another one. Asparagus, say the word asparagus. It makes me smile. You could figure it out. So, um, the one thing I can say is parents who are going to lose a child who cannot stop, There's nothing they could do. This child will pass. If anything, if they can't stop it from happening, which would be there one wish they would want it, not toe happen to somebody else. That's their number two. So by educating my clients by educating the world by saying this little girl has leukemia and this is her story, this is who she is. First of all, you're giving a mom and opportunity to brag about a child they won't have forever. You also are giving the opportunity to share a little bit about that disease and what could be done. You can create links to donations or how you can sport. Or maybe they're doing an event that you know, fundraisers, something that's your opportunity to give back a little bit and to share that message. And if there's a tremendous power that comes with that and the parents are forever grateful When we posted this one, the mom I can't even I couldn't read it if I tried, wrote me a note. We photographed this little girls, she was born, and to see a parent going through something like this and have to t go through that every day, I photographed perfectly healthy, great little happy kids, and here's this little girl That's life was completely intersected by this this disease, and it's you know it, czar opportunity to rally around her and fight with her. So it's It's very powerful stuff. So sharing that, knowing that you're touching 100 people, I don't care if you have one fan or 10,000 fans. You're touching somebody who might then in turn touch somebody else is very important. So something share your life, share other people's lives as well, Then the Final one is my little soap box speech, and some of you have heard this before. Session highlights. Uh, you should share session highlights, however, And here comes the disclaimer. Never, ever, ever Never, ever, ever promised me out there never, ever, ever share a session that has not been sold period ever, because if you do, you are absolutely taking away from your cell period. It's so important in our industry, when Internet on, especially social media, started getting really powerful. People get really excited about what they call a sneak peek. I'm gonna have a qualifier in here. If you're a wedding photographer, it's a little different because they've already paid you. You you hope we hope, and so sharing a little bit of that is different, so I don't want the wedding photographers to go up in arms out there talking specifically about people that are portrait in Children's photographers, families, etcetera. Well, we do a session. There's an emotional excitement that happens. And the idea behind the sneak peek Was that Okay, Now I want to put one up and I want people. I want my client to see it and get excited about that session. And in theory, that's what you would think. But the reality is, you take the magic away from the sale from every level, emotionally, right on down to the bottom line. How much money you will get from that client if you give them that opportunity. So then how do we do this? How do we get a sneak peek if I'm telling you not to do sneak peek Well, the honest truth is, if you look at my site, we constantly are taking what we call BTS behind the scenes shots. So it's showing me photographing them etcetera. I had I saw one of my my non fans. Somebody who doesn't like me said you should hire a second photographer to take a picture of you taking pictures of people. It is not that all of it. I'll tell you right now I will back this up out of it because I can't tell you how many clients when I'm at a session. Now, we'll say, Are you gonna take a picture of us for Facebook? Because they love it. Even though it's not, It's nothing that could take this could not take away from my cell at all. They get very excited that there they can show this off. So if I had a choice, I'm OK with the BTS type stuff because it does not. It doesn't hurt my sail. It also happens the same day I'm shooting. So they're emotionally on that that session mode. They're not in that. I can't wait to see the pictures. So this is the most I'm gonna give you as faras posting in advance. Now, how do you post session highlights if you if I'm not, If I'm telling you not to do it during or right shortly after the session until after the sale. Well, we do it. It's exact same thing. The differences are clients come in, they place an order at the end of the session. We turn to them and we say? You know what? These are beautiful. Would you mind if I post one or two of these images? Just show them off. Would you mind if I do that? Of course. They're super excited. Their honor, their flattered. And we say, You know what? You've already signed a model release that says it's OK for us to do this, But if you don't mind signing the social media released just so that we have clarity, they sign a second release. We tell them this is great. Sometimes right there in the room will say, Can you go and friend me on Facebook so we can tag you? We just do that right in the sales room because then we have that connection there. Now, my friends, And if not, we tell them to go home and friend us, and then what we do is we Just after their sale, that order goes to be processed and sent to the lab. We've already collected our money. The person sending it to a lab takes those images posted on Facebook. If you were to go to my Facebook and look at any session that showcases actual images the way it's word it is. Oh, my goodness. Look at this darling little girl. She was so much fun to work with. From your standpoint, you would think I just shot it that day. The reality is it was shot 5 to 8 days before. It doesn't make a difference from a marketing standpoint, everybody virtually that, seeing that that's going Oh, my gosh, I love her work. I love what she does. They're loving it. I'm getting the marketing benefit, but I'm not taking away from the sale. I want to tell you why I'm so adamant about this. I knew from the get go that those sneak peeks were hurting people's sales. I knew it. I could just tell that it was taking away because I know the power of sitting a client down in a sales room with a projector and music and cookies and emotion. And it's just it's a very powerful experience, and I didn't want anything to take away from that. So we did. This was many years ago on the forum, the sq form the city put university. We did a test and I asked, There were there was this little debate going on and we're super friendly debaters. But I had just given a seminar teaching exactly that. And there were two people that insisted that the sneak peeks helped there. So there were three others that kind of sided with me that said No way it hurts. It hurts. So we went back and forth, you know, posting our thoughts and stuff. And then I finally said, All right, guys, we're gonna have a challenge here. I want all five of you to go into this honestly. And I want you to go, and I want you. Teoh, do a session. I want to be an amazing session. I want you to pick your favorite image from that session. It could be any type of session, but pick your favorite image. And then what I want you to do is I want you to post that image on social media and make sure that the client is tagged on it. Or that you alert them that it's there, OK? And then I want you to do yourselves, and I want you to tell me what the results are. So all of them went out. All five of them went out and they did this exercise, and they did their sales, and it took a couple months for everybody to get the sails in and get it done. So at the end of the day, how many of those images remember They were supposed to pick the best image, the one that they knew would be their biggest sale? The wall portrait? Whatever. How many of those five that were posted? How many did they sell? See Row. Not one sold one of the images. It floored me. I mean, nobody. Any client that had the ability to take that image or to see that image did not purchase that images of final product. Their sales were good, but the question is, Did you hurt your sell by showing the image that I know when I tell him we talked about artist suggestions yesterday and how I personally because I can't be in the cellar room, I personally select my favorites and mark them artist suggestions How many of my artist suggestions wouldn't be sold if I posted them before I sold to the client? So keep in mind, the energy is the same. The effect is the same. The client is super excited that your post their work, they've also paid you so it doesn't hurt or take away from what you're doing. You know where your cell is. You've collected your money and you can go from there. So that's really, really important. So yes. Dio do highlight. Yes, poster images. You want the world to see work. Do not ever do it before that image is sold. And if you do that, that will change your bottom line. All right, so I'm gonna show you what your social media planner looks like and we'll break with this one. This is the S few social media planner. The six things you're supposed to poster on the top, you can see we have a broken down a week one week to these are spreadsheets that we provide you with SPU. If you don't have this view, you could just make one of these. It's not that hard. You just want to remember those six elements and trying to incorporate them in. You can see what we do. You have category one and category due to. So what we're trying to do is to do to post per week if possible. If you do this in advance. These become very simple cutting pace. Now for s few students. We actually write them for you because remember, they're tied into the campaigns that you're shooting that month. So in April, we have a baby campaign. One of those posts would be Don't forget, we have a baby model search, etcetera. So for you, it's just a cutting pace. We show you how to modify for everybody else. You would map these out based on what you're doing that month. And then guess what? Wednesday rolls around and your house is on fire and the dog has to go to the doctor and your Children. You can't find them. You at least can cut and paste before you get out of the building, right? I mean, that's something that if it is done for you, nothing and stand in the way of getting it done with social media. Now, most social media avenues have the ability to set up these in advance so you can actually set a time or so to speak, and they will actually post during the time that you want. Facebook is an example you can actually set it up to Hey, April 15th At this time, I want this post to come up. Imagine sitting on the first day of the month and pre selecting and getting all your social media done. So you're just doing your thing. And all of a sudden you're telling your clients what they need to be doing one day a month, you could set that up. So? So, how many times a week should you post on social media? They say a minimum of minimum of two more is better. to 5 a week would be ideal. But for most of us, that's not reasonable. So if you just knew for sure you're gonna be one or two, you would be good to go. So that's your homework for the moment, we want you to create a social media planner so either downloaded if you have access to it or write it out. And I would love to see you get at least two weeks worth of social media written out. So my suggestion is you start next Monday. What would you want? A post next Monday, obviously Wednesday. But that week and then the following week after their what would you be posting I would love to see some of your ideas on what you would post as well. Oh yeah, we'll ask a few questions. Do you have any questions in the studio audience to start with the four week planning for campaigns and what not to send it out? What? What's the question? What do you suggest for those of us who don't have a really strong or very large Mehlis? Because with with our marketing campaigns that we produce for my company for my students, we don't It's not just about a postcard. Everything we produced has a postcard has an e blast attached to it. It has a studio poster. It has fliers or brochures where appropriate. So here's the question I get asked all the time. What if you like? I don't have a database. That's kind of what you're saying. I don't have anybody to mail postcards to. Well, then we would talk to you about Okay. I didn't have a database when I started to so flyers or printing postcards and dropping them places. If I'm doing a baby campaign, I'm going to stop by daycares. I'm going to stop by places where I could say can I leave a few of these? And that's how I'm gonna do it. So physical printed pieces are really important. That's one thing that people for a while thought that it was like dinosaurs, you know, like there was no more printed piece is kind of a thing. It's now coming back because social media has been so overrun that it's nice to get a postcard every once in a while. We also include E blast, Facebook posts and your block post. So when I say send it out, it's all of those things go out at one time. We're gonna send on any blast. We're gonna send outpost car postcards. We're gonna put a studio open. Our poster were our studio. We're gonna put a studio in our poster poster in our studio. We're gonna put it up on Facebook, we're gonna tweet it out, and we're going to put it on our block. So those air six things, if its a charity event, we're going to send out a press release to which those air always included in your marketing as well. So So keep that in mind there six things that I would want you to consider postcard e blast, social media, which would be Twitter and Facebook, etcetera. Your blog's, which technically, is social media and, um, missed a press release of its charity, and I think that's it. It's five things social media being kind of all encompassing. So you want to do all those? Are we going to talk a little bit more about the newsletter later? Are you okay? Then I'll wait. That's in the top three. So that one surgical for business. Yes, definitely backtracking a little bit when you're talking about soccer teams and, like Greece, many schools and everything. What is your feeling on if you're if you do something like that? And the picture that the portrait's air discounted and then when they come to you later, you know, and they say, Oh, you know, Well, it's $15 for an eight by 10 you know, Now it's under 50. Do you think that's a bad marketing idea that they're gonna look at you? Definitely. But we had when I had we had divisions in our company, and one thing that a lot of people do that have that we did. The same thing is we had a separate company. You could. We call that expressions events at the time, And it was our event. Photography, dance, karate, studios, football, baseball, those kind of things. Absolutely not. In fact, those people we would put in their literature, we would put session coupons and information about our studio. Our thing is, it's all about a good consultation, and we can talk about this tomorrow. But when a client comes to us for, say, football Portrait's and they paid $14 But they saw our work and they love the family work. They're going to come in for a consultation before their session. We don't do any sessions without a consultation period. No way, no how they come in. They do a consultation. We sit down, we address pricing. It's pretty apparent pretty quickly if we're not the right studio for not in their budget and guess what, That's no problem. Then they know we've had that conversation and they don't choose us, and that's okay. I'd rather do it in consultation than have somebody come do an awesome session, pay for clothing, spent all that time and then realize that we were too expensive and they get hurt and we get hurt too. We have questions online. Did you have another question? Just real quick. Okay. You mentioned press releases. Is that something we're gonna go into as well? Not, Not deeply. But I can tell you about Yes, And like what avenues work best. Is that mainly newspaper local magazines? Years? Sure. I can give you that summary real quick press releases every single charity that we do. We provide a press release. So, uh, any of our Santa Cherries I'm gonna show you tomorrow? I think Santa Charity. Those marketing campaigns automatically come with a press release. And as far as who, we approach everybody. We spent a day every year researching local avenues. There's local papers. There are the best ones are like local journals. There's always like a little city journal, everything from those little penny papers all the way up to the regular newspaper. Depending on the event, you almost can. Conatel, who's gonna have interest in it? Big things Like our Santa charity event, our Halloween charity. We can get sometimes the news. They're getting the local news because these events have grown so much over the years and I'll talk about him later. So So it's a build. 13 years ago, 14 years ago, my first said to charity nobody. I had to pay people pretty much to show up and do this. Now it is so big that we turn away, just people, and I'll talk about it tomorrow. So So really and truly, press releases are the majority of the press releases like Creativelive. This would be a great time to give a press release because this is a big deal. This is a big company in a big organization providing big information. You guys should have a press release. In fact, I'm gonna send it out to the universe. And I'll see if my staff can come up with a quick press release that could say that you were on creativelive because that's something you could easily get into a local paper for sure so and their numbers would support it. So hopefully that works. Thank you. Okay, So many questions. Air coming in from the Internet for you. Of course, things are just rolling in, but a question from admit photography and also Christina Robson. They're wondering on your calendar ring how long do you wait in between the actual photography session and the viewing and sale session. That's a great Did you say, admit photography? That's a Zara's. How long for them to see the session is the question? Normally, we like to get clients, and pretty quick they're pretty excited. So we say 5 to 8 days, so within. It's usually the following week of their session with the legacy sessions. The majority of my work right now is legacy work. So I'm shooting 4 to 5 sessions a day, sometimes six days a week, because I have a lot. This is a very big project, so it's a lot for me. But, um, I really have emotionally connected to this, and I want to make it happen. Those people, it's a little longer because all of them include video work. So all of them include their story being told in video. So about 10 days out, let's take one more before we go to break. This is from glory. Who says I take photos at events and post proofs on Facebook to sell my images? Should I not do this? Am I hurting my sales? Is there a different way that I should be doing this. Oh, yeah, that's especially with Facebook. There's no control. It's just a matter of stealing those images. Even if you have no Mom cares about the big word proof written across their child's face, they just don't. And so, to me, Facebook would be the worst case scenario. There are great organizations out there, like SmugMug and places that you can have a shopping cart. Personally, I'm 100% believer that you have to do face to face sales. However, with event photography, it's a sort of a different animal because you if you're doing a big event with hundreds of people, you're not gonna have control over communicating with each person individually and making the cell. So the way we like to do event photographers as we do prepaid envelopes, they have to pre order a package, which might be the smallest package. It could be a 14 to $20 package. They have to pre pay that in order for us to photograph them. However, once they prepaid that, we also post them online so that they have it as if they want to buy more, they could have access. So for us, we want to collect the money up front. We frankly don't want to even photograph anybody that we don't think it's gonna commit. So that's something if you're going to do online sales and you cannot do that prepaid envelope at a minimum, find a company that has somewhat protection. Everybody can screen. Cap is. All I have to say is it's easy to steal those images and a low rez crappy J peg is good enough for most parents honestly.