Communicating Your Value

From Nothing to Profit

Today, Matt and Kia, talk about how to communicate your value to your potential clients. Kia suggests starting with yourself. Reflect on why you value photography. To Kia, it’s a matter of life and death. Photographers are often the first call when someone loses a loved one. We produce art. Digital files should have a printed counterpart because in the long run, who knows if the digital images will be accessible. Listen in to hear Matt’s advice about dealing with head trash and price conversations versus value conversations. Build that relationship with your client and be the expert so they know, like and trust you. This is a list of the things we suggest to do: Value it yourself Have confidence Have examples Start the conversation a different way Say the hard things Relationship Read Full Transcript 00:00 Welcome to from nothing to profit a photographer's podcast with Matt and Kayak where each week they talk to photographers about what is working in their business now so you can swipe those ideas and grow your business faster. Okay. Hey, 00:16 good morning everyone, or good afternoon or good evening I guess depending on when you're listening to this. Welcome to the podcast. Today we are talking about how to communicate your value to your customers or how to let them see your value. And Matt and I have some different strategies that we want to share with you today. And my first thought on this is it okay if I start off Matt? Yeah, no, go right ahead. Jump right in. My first thought on this is that sometimes you need to start with yourself and figure out how to communicate to yourself the value of what you do. And having been in this 20 years and seen all the changes throughout the industry and you know, kind of my own journey, I've come to some times when I have had to rethink things and had to really reevaluate how I view photography. 01:09 And so starting out, I had never been to a professional photographer before, so obviously we didn't necessarily see the value in it and we didn't really understand what a professional photographer could do. So I learned the value of professional photography by actually doing it. And by being a customer of know, by being a photographer, because you came, you know, from your family business, I was, it was my family business. And so I didn't know about photography except that when I looked back on any professional photographs that we'd had taken as a child, they were all film and color and they were all fading. And so we didn't have beautiful portraits of us as children. My mom started dabbling in photography when I was in sixth grade. And so from sixth grade on is when I actually had any, you know, photographs that weren't just fading and we're creative or something like that. 02:02 And so I think first off, you have to think of why you value photography and why it's important to you. And then it's a lot easier to communicate to your clients. So as a mom with four kids, I have a hallway that I walked down every time I leave my bedroom to go to any other part of the House that is full of pictures of my kids have diff at different points in their lives. All of them and when they're seven or eight months old naked crawling around two when they're all four or five years old. And uh, the first ones are black and white and then I have sepia head shots of their profiles and then I have them all dressed as angels. And so, which reminds me that they are actually angels. When I'm leaving my room to go, y'all, I leave my room to go yell at someone. 02:47 But for me photography is not just a luxury and it's not just something that's like a piece of furniture or some kind of fun thing. It's really a matter of life or death in my opinion. Because if when something happens to a loved one, the first person that they call a lot of times is us to find out if they can get the files, if we can print something for them.