How to Relaunch in 15 Days – Reopening after Covid-19
For today’s Marketing Monday slot, I wanted to talk about brands and brand recognition.
But most of all give you a plan, especially after Covid-19.
Lots of photographers are starting to kick start their marketing with a view to re-opening and gaining bookings for after lock-down restrictions are lifted.
So, as it’s the 1st June, you potentially have 15 days to get marketing your business to be back in front of peoples faces. BUT, heck, everyone else is doing it too.
Covid-19 Lockdown easing – How can you make the most of it?
Here is a simple plan to help you bring some life back into your marketing.
Think of this as a little challenge.
Work on just one social media platform if you are overwhelmed.
- Create the content and images for 21 days of social media posts. Generate these as a mix of ‘soft posts’ – images from previous sessions, with comments about the location, how much fun they had – they type of session. Light-hearted stuff. Add quotes (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes is perfect for ideas)
- Create some 800px square slides, with testimonials on them and add your logo subtly at the bottom. (If you have 21 days content, you need at least 7-14 quotes to intersperse)
- Create 7 blog posts of around 700-1000 words that are unique to you, your business, your ideal customer. 61% of people are more likely to buy from companies that deliver unique content. Think of them as helpful guides, tackle the obvious, how you will be social distancing etc. I’ll give you some ideas of other content below.
- Use a tool like to schedule the posts. Post the images at the time your clients are most likely to be on FB. (Your page stats will give you that info).
- Then schedule the testimonials on alternate days 2 hours after the image.
- Schedule the blog content again, on alternate days to the testimonials.
- Share each days posts and testimonials to your local facebook groups and mums groups that allow advertising, or on LinkedIn groups if you are of commercial bias.
Next steps.
- Record a ‘to camera’ video for your clients of you introducing yourself, your business and explaining how you will be re-opening, the precautions you will be taking and emphasise how the customers’ safety is the most important to you. Post this on days 1, 5, 10, 15 and 20
You can add branding to these videos with some easy free apps, or even in Photoshop.
Ever heard the expression….The fortune is in the followup.
A potential customer visits your website and then starts looking at other photographers…. everyone looks the same.
But if they see you and your brand all around the web, you will get recognition and influence their purchasing decision.
It’s called brand awareness.
Back in the 1980’s Ogilvy and Mather said your client needed to see your brand 5-7 times to establish brand recognition. The Chartered Institute of Marketing now suggests over 25 times.
This is where installing a tracking cookie into your website can make all the difference.
👉 Go install your Facebook Pixel if you haven’t already. This will collect valuable visitor data.
A beginners guide to starting a Facebook Advertisting campaign…
With your client avatar, select an Audience to run a Facebook advert to. Get your audience down to around 10-20,000 Create a small number of adverts, between 2 and 4. Think of the content you wish to create, create some posts for people to engage with, and set them as Ad’s aimed at engagement.
Also create Ad’s that are aimed at getting reach (the maximum number of people see your business name, having your brand seen, again to the same audience. The combination of these will drive traffic to your FB page and website.
Facebook Advertising is all about building up layers of adverts – some awareness, some targetted to drive traffic and then some targetted to get conversions.
Next.. You can run targetted Facebook Ad’s to your website visitors to establish your brand, your helpfulness and confidence in your work. Establishing you as a business and the go-to in your sector.
Run an Remarketing campaign, for a few pounds a day with each of the Blog posts as an advert just to your website visitors.
• Do the same with some of the other soft posts. A £5-£10 per day total Ad spend just focussed on people who have visited your site can work wonders with your enquiries and quickly.
This is a no-brainer for wedding photographers.
If you already have a Pixel installed you can advertise to anyone who has visited your site in the last 365 days.
👉 You could be guiding them on what to wear for a portrait session.
👉 You could be guiding them on how to prepare their horse for an equine shoot
👉 You could be suggesting beautiful local locations for an outdoor family portrait
👉 You could be telling them what’s hot and what’s not this season for fashions for family portraits
Marketing isn’t about selling the session, think of it as flirting with people to make them want to talk to you.
Plant the ideas of what they could do, and let the ideas run wild. Then they aren’t shopping on price, they’ve bought into you and the creative process.
