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Social Media - Facebook

Lesson 12 from: Master the Business of Photography

Sal Cincotta

Social Media - Facebook

Lesson 12 from: Master the Business of Photography

Sal Cincotta

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Lesson Info

12. Social Media - Facebook

Lessons

Class Trailer

Day 1

1

Class Introduction

19:49
2

The Agenda

24:35
3

Why You Will Fail

39:49
4

The Changing World We Live In

18:57
5

Biggest Competitors For Weddings and Portraits

42:41

Day 2

6

Defining, Understanding, and Connecting to Your Clients

56:15

Day 3

7

Legal Issues

1:09:43

Day 4

8

Shoot and Share vs Shoot and Sell

56:18

Day 5

9

Pricing Your Work Part 1

57:12

Day 6

10

Pricing Your Work Part 2

1:10:02

Day 7

11

The New World of SEO

40:58

Day 8

12

Social Media - Facebook

48:42

Day 9

13

Social Media - Instagram & Pinterest

36:23

Day 10

14

Building a Better Portfolio & Attracting the Right Clients

1:04:59

Day 11

15

Proactively Developing Vendor Relationships

35:41

Day 12

16

Get More Publicity

47:28

Day 13

17

Booking More Portrait Sessions

37:23

Day 14

18

Booking More Weddings

52:39

Day 15

19

Understanding the Initial Sales Consultation (In-person vs Skype)

46:25

Day 16

20

The Engagement Shoot - Shoot To Make Money.

48:46

Day 17

21

Engagement Pricing and Sales

47:13

Day 18

22

Destination Shoots

47:46

Day 19

23

Working With & Training Second Shooters

1:04:10

Day 20

24

Growing An Alternate Brand

58:07

Day 21

25

The Wedding Day Timeline

42:00

Day 22

26

Managing The Wedding Day

54:03

Day 23

27

Post Wedding Sales and Pricing

36:07

Day 24

28

Post Production - A Real World Workflow

54:21

Day 25

29

Wedding Albums - Their Importance, New trends & Selling Them

31:22

Day 26

30

Ways Not To Suck At Customer Service

58:34

Day 27

31

Video - The Future of Story Telling for the Photographer

47:15

Day 28

32

Packaging & Final Delivery To Your Clients

47:20

Day 29

33

Lessons Learned - Where I Have Failed Over The Last 8 Years

35:10

Day 30

34

The Journey Of You

16:24
35

The Journey Of You: 30 Day Plan

25:00
36

The Journey Of You: 60 Day Plan

27:11
37

The Journey Of You: 90 Day Plan

24:49
38

Student Examples

14:31
39

Interview with Warren McCormack

26:16
40

Interview with Lenny and Melissa Volturo

19:24
41

General Q&A

26:26

Lesson Info

Social Media - Facebook

You can't ignore facebook anymore I don't know I'm hoping everybody has a facebook site uh or facebook page at this point you'd be surprised how many people I run into or like I just refused to do uh facebook so I'm not even ask for a show of hands in here because if you're not using it, I'm gonna murder you guys but you can't ignore it anymore so the reality is facebook has become part of our everyday lives and one former fashion whether you like it or not was there and more importantly, who our clients are. So when your clients are seniors, families, babies, weddings, that's where they are and all I want to do is be wherever my clients are. So this segment I really want to dig into how we're using facebook in our business and it's so much more than just posting pictures, right? So if you're just posting pictures to facebook, you're losing out on all the power that's there you would be blown away by the amount of demographic data that's sitting right there in your facebook dashboard a...

nd so many people don't even know it's there for you to use for you even exports you can even export some of this data that's sitting there so let's kind of dig into that may be alright, so facebook stop resisting you've gotta embrace it uh, if you're watching at home and you're like, nope not going to do it. No facebook, I just refused to absolutely do it, man, you're you're living in a fog, and I'm I'm telling you this when I say there's, people won't use facebook, I'm telling you this from experience shutter behind the shutter, our photography training site behind the shutter dot com used to offer like free downloads if you went and liked our facebook page, right? We're trying to drive traffic to our facebook page, I would get I don't know at least five emails a month from people telling me, is there any other way to get this? Refused to create a facebook account, and I would just laugh because I cannot believe that people would not create a facebook account a tte this point this day and age, I mean there's just there's no way around it. That is where your client is, so unless they're dying and on their eighth marriage more than likely, your client is sitting on facebook and who knows, even from their deathbed, maybe they're still there on facebook. Personal and business should absolutely be kept separate that that to me is a really big part off facebook and it's it's so so very hard to keep those things separate and by personal I don't mean you're not sharing a personal part of your life that's not practical I mean there's a personal part of what we do as artists right that's always going to be there by personal I mean you shouldn't be talking about politics, you shouldn't be talking about religion, you shouldn't be talking about your clients on there you know, when I had this uh, this situation where my client stole my copyright on printed those images that I told you about right in the previous segment, I didn't post that on my personal page not even even posted on my business page actually just posted it to a private shutter fast group, right? It was just one of those things where I was sharing with my peers maybe even venting with my peers aboutthe situation is nothing wrong with that we're all revolving in those situations where we're pissed off in our clients people do dumb things and we just want to vent but yes use common sense once again once you put it out there for the world to see man, that thing kind of lives on forever, so we have to we have to somewhat aware of that. So what I'd like to see is you keeping pisit business and personal completely separate and like I said, like common sense prevail, I would even take it a step further we have ah page for salvatore conte photography which is really mostly our weddings and then we have one for salvador, some kind of tar for seniors and so we've got them for the different lines of business so I would keep those separate as well and here's my mindset with all that there's no hard and fast rule it's just my own common sense my brides don't care what my seniors air doing my seniors don't care what my brides are doing right? I mean it's really that simple, that that's kind of my thought process, so I try to keep them some, uh separate now so where do I put the you know, one baby shoot I do every three months where does that go? Well, that just ends up going on my salvadore singh kana page okay, but seniors and wedding stay separate for the for the most part, so religion politics got to keep it out of it. People are very passionate about both. I just don't understand that there's no place for it in business, so you would have a really hard time I'm having that conversation with me that really is common sense one on one kind of stuff that the minute on I've told this story before, so I'll tell it again we have a very high end clients in right no fallon where I am she we only go to her every a couple of years, but when we go it's a two, three thousand dollars sale she updates are family portrait she's a very old er ah, woman lots of money. Very nice people, by the way. So when obama was first running for office, okay, when obama was first running for office, we shed this giant obama sign out front, right? And I mean, look, I'm not I'm a business owner, I'm republican by nature, I don't consider myself a right wing fanatical I don't consider myself a left wing person, I'm a moderate, probably like most of the country, right? I sit in the middle, I'm liberal on something's conservative on others, all that being said, she has no idea what my political stances on anything, because I don't talk about it, we walk up to her house she's his giant vote for obama signed there. I mean, it's the size of this wall, it's just enormous honor long, and I'm just being a smart ass. I'm like, uh, guys like obama and she's like, oh, I knew you were smart the minute I met you, I knew you would vote you're a democrat would vote for obama. I'm like, oh, my god, okay, so I couldn't say anything, right? I just had the by my tongue, I wasn't getting into a political debate with my client about what my political stance was on any given thing, but it's just interesting, right? Because so many of us want to have that conversation over and over again, and you might think to yourself, pal, I'm not buying into what you're saying you're saying I shouldn't, I shouldn't speak my mind, I shouldn't say what's on my mind to a certain scent I am because at the end of the day, I really don't care if she's democrat, republican, independent she's from mars at the end of the day, her money's green, she wants to buy pictures from me, I want to sell her pictures. Why would I let anything get in between those two things? I think that's bad business and so that's kind of what I'm advocating to you is right. This is where we've got to just like common sense prevail, I could go home, talk about politics to my wife, I could go and go hang out with friends and talk about politics all day long, but why introduce it into into the business world unless you're taking advantage of that, right? So, for example, let's say, you're ah, you're doing work for your church. Nothing wrong with that it's great talk church all day long to church people right let's say you're doing it for the you know in action committee for politics right? Talk politics all day long bash whoever you want a batch but just as a rule shouldn't be out there um facebook you've gotta learn how to develop a brand albeit a limited brand right facebook is controlling the look and feel of everything so how do you really develop a brand on facebook? It is really challenging is it about likes? Is it about engagement there's so many different messages that have come from facebook over the years on what we should be focusing on on the site and it's not just facebook it's everybody for that matter the messaging that they're they're pushing out right it's about engagement the more people are engaged in your post the higher your rank is on facebook the more your post will show up well that's not true anymore either okay and so there's all these things are changing around facebook just in the last two years and so we've gotta work um to develop that brand now the question you have to ask yourself are you clients there where your clients what are they doing uh right these are the things where we have to understand that our clients are absolutely there on we're going to see the power of the marketing on facebook so how do we maximize it first we have to understand that your reach is changed right there used to be the same called organic reach meaning you would make a post okay it would show up in your friend's feeds and the more people engaged with it your ranking would rise meaning more and more people would see it well guess what? Facebook went public one day and they realized that that model doesn't work they're never going to raise money how do you justify its valuation being worth billions of dollars that's not gonna work so now this concept of organic reach is disappearing it's all but gone and so today that number is roughly about six to ten percent and so on a site where you have a thousand people following you less than a hundred we'll see that post sixty people see that post those air not good numbers what does this encourage you to do? You've got to pay to boost that post now and we do that. We do that with a lot of stuff when we're marketing to photographers when we're doing stuff for behind the shutter were shutter magazine we're paying to boost that post because ten percent is no good six percent is no good I mean help you get a better direct mail response and so this doesn't make any any sense right? So you've gotta adapt to what's happening here there is no other way but to advertise on facebook and in another segment we're gonna talk about some ideas on how to maximize advertising on facebook it is a very very powerful tool but not many people are using it and I got a bunch of ideas just like the one we talked about in the last segment where I'm like here's something we're doing here's something that's working that's going to help you dr business when we talk about cost of acquisition I'm going talk point to you for a real world case study where somebody spent thirty eight dollars and booked a wedding okay just based on an idea we're going to share with you so these are real world scenarios advertising on facebook we can ignore it but before we can advertise there we have to really understand it uh we got to use impactful images on the header use your logo for the icon I don't particularly care for using ah picture like maybe your headshot or maybe one of your brides or something like that because there's no identity there's no brand awareness there I like when my post show up in the feed that icon they start recognizing the brands all about branding about brand awareness not some you know one day it's you know high school senior next day it's a bride they lose that brand awareness because I don't know about you but think about it when I see something show up on my feet, all of you actually a lot of you in his group when something shows up in my feet I know exactly who it was just a soon as I see the icon right it's the same thing from a business perspective we want that icon to show up there in their feet so they know who's done that post probably saying thing for me if I make a post, you see my facebook picture, a profile picture or our logo you know exactly it was me and you might be more inclined to take a look at something like that so we want to build that brand awareness there we have to have a strategy, so when we're using facebook we can'tjust post for the sake of posting the minute you start posting for the sake of posting everything just starts going downhill means you don't know what you're doing anymore right again, there has to be a reason for everything we're doing. Why are we taking this energy and posting there? We're trying to build social brand social equity nothing wrong with that that's fine songs actually strategy we trying to drive traffic back to our site nothing wrong with that as always, that's your strategy? Are we just trying to get likes and clicks? But we're trying to run a campaign on facebook and maybe ah you know, twenty four hour sale flash sale kind of deal all those ideas are great ideas there's always that's what you're doing if you're just doing it for the sake of doing it that's when it's a bad idea because now you're not really paying attention to what you're doing well I definitely want to drive traffic back to my sight so I'm going to show you how we're using facebook there's some things I just post a picture to facebook get a couple of lives and get people engaged there's a lot of times I want to take that traffic and drive it back to my south and kata dot com I want that that to grow I want that to flourish I want people to know when they look at that one image oh wow he does high school seniors oh wow I never knew he did babies oh wow I never knew he even did video that becomes really really important so if we don't drive that traffic back that's what that's where the challenge becomes there because now they're just seeing one part of our brand one image of our brand and I want them to see everything and so this is our for salvador cincotti photography this is our main landing page don't notice the banner is impact image very, very much a staple of what we do that's my kind of shooting that's my signature style you know we're showing what who we are that's what I recommend you do, whoever you are, show that kind of image there on that landing page and then that s e p icon that has been there for a couple of years now, so it's probably time for refresh, but when that icon shows up, people know that it's our icon because it's been there so long, we've built that brand brand identity there. What I hate about it, I can critique my own work. It doesn't match my salvador some kind of logo. The problem is you can't get the salvador's and caught a logo well in that little square, right? Because of the way the name is written out. So my designer had a nightmare trying to come up with something. We came up with this almost two years ago. It's been there ever since, but it's probably time for refresh no here's here's a recent post, right? So we did this november november first here's how we're doing it there's times where I'll post one image, then there's times where outpost five six ten images to sew this is melissa altero she's there are wedding photographer. Her and her husband shutter fast attendees. They've turned out to be really good friends. I've known them for several years help them do their business, so I was honored when they called me to do their to do their wedding. I thought that was really cool that they trusted me to do that. Needless to say, it was ah lot of pressure to perform when you're photographing another photographer. I don't know how you guys feel about it, but I do what I do. I don't think twice about it and then all of a sudden there's another retired from like they're looking at me, they're judging me, right? You know what I feel like they're gonna ask me what my settings are like just just go get married, do your thing and so this was really cool there's a story behind the chute, which makes it all the more fun right? For me this is what I love most about. Photography is not necessarily always the shot. It's the story behind the shot and I don't know what it is maybe I just attract crazy but tends to be it seems like almost every place we go there is some level of madness that ensues on the shoot, so she's laying down here. Ah now I know in the audience it's not really that big of a picture but she's being lit with video light so taylor's down there over her lighting her with little video lights we have we're about two or three stories up me and lennie her husband stayed standing right next to me and we're just leaning down taking the picture is woman who works at the courthouse this is in the san francisco courthouse uh older lady she comes up to me she cried like sixty five seventy years old taps me on the shoulder she's like you know you can't be doing that right and I'm like doing what she's like well that's extremely dangerous very dangerous I'd like you start laughing I'm like it is and she's like yeah I go what's dangerous about it she's well she goes it's illegal it's extremely illegal it is I go what's illegal about it she goes in ways I don't have to tell you I go what she goes you're not going to tell me what's dangerous or illegal about it and she's she said well I can tell you or I can go get the sheriff I'm like all right, I'm gonna I'm going to keep taking pictures you have a great day and I just kept going about doing my thing right but to this day it's still something that from their perspective it's a memory it's something we laugh about it uh, you know, and thank god I had a witness there to see that it actually happened or else nobody would believe me, and he was just like one of these quirky things where everybody wanted to yell at us for what we were doing here and to get this shot, I mean, we were maybe they're like, sixty seconds, it wasn't like we were stopping traffic or doing anything major, but this is the kind of stuff I love posting on my site because what ends up happening is everybody starts seeing that start seeing the story starts seeing the voice, if you will, right? Because when you write for your block and facebook there's your personality behind your writing, so I mean, I don't know if everybody realizes this I do all my own social media are few, so let go of that right everybody wanted like, how do you have time to do all this stuff? I don't know, I don't know how I have time I make time, but ultimately this is written in my voice when I write in the magazine, when I do my block post there's, nobody else behind the curtain doing it it's me, it's, literally me, which is why, when you see somebody say something stupid they get dumped by me, right? Because it's actually me writing so I'm not just I'm I'm in the mindset in my career where I'm done with stupid and so, you know, when we run into those people in our lives all the time, we're right it's, just like you just shake your head, and so maybe I should mature and grow up and just not say anything, but I can't take it anymore, man, I just gotta just gotta thump out dumb in the world, one dummy at a time. All right, so stuff like this, this is what we post the facebook impact images, ok? I want to make sure that what we're posting here now, this is a teaser, but this has nothing to do with what they bought or what they did. This is just a teaser. I get home, it's one of my image is that I'm in love with I want to share it. I want to get my current brides excited about looking at something like this because what is this is a bridal session, right? So when my bride says to me, right, michael well, I don't think we really need that ban I pop out something like this. Then they look at that they go oh hey you're not going to do this on your wedding day oh no no right? So now you start getting I'm thinking differently about that that's how I'm using social media so from a facebook perspective this is an interesting way to start using it it's the build momentum for things that are coming, everything we were doing we should be doing with some level of purpose on so that's one way we're doing it another way we're posting to facebook are pictures they've ordered and so if a client comes in after their engagement session, I might post a teaser, right? So from melissa's perspective, if we go back to that that's what I'd call a teaser I take one image my favorite image I posted up have fun with it get the client excited about it that's okay, but I'm not gonna post more for the client, right? We can't do that they've got to come in and buy pictures and so this is a client walker she came in every image she ordered got posted online, so she ordered nine images nine images got posted online, you know, are they you know I get asked all the time well, what if the client picks an image you don't like but it's not my choice anymore it's their choice so we try to post everything that they've picked online, right? If there's a really bad picture, I would make the argument why even showing it to him? It's not bad, you shouldn't be showing it to him. And so this ends up being what gets posted for them. I don't tag them, I can't tag them unless some friends with him, and so I'm not friends with all my clients and not personal friends with him. And so that's also a sticky situation if you're if you're friends with your clients. That's great that's, that's your call, I think there should be some level of separation. Some of my clients I am friends with, but the only way you're gonna tag them is to be friends with them. So we do is we posted on our page? We then send him an email hey it's posted to our page, they can then come and tag themselves in the picture. Hopefully, that makes that makes sense, and it will actually be seen by more people if they tag themselves right if I tag them in a picture. Facebook doesn't quite promote it as much as if they tag themselves right think about it logically, them tagging themselves, they're telling facebook yes, that is, in fact. Me and I want to be tagged there if I'm the one tagging them, I could be tagging them in span right for all facebook no so it's much better when they tag themselves we do the same thing for seniors same thing for families, babies, everybody we just post what they order to facebook they can then go on and tag themselves now this is something we sell well, look at engagement packages I think it's a few segments away, but we'll look at engagement packages but ultimately it's night I think it's ninety nine dollars allah card, but it can only be images you purchased because what I'm not going to do is if I show them two hundred pictures hundred fifty pictures I'm not posting one hundred fifty pictures to facebook that's ridiculous, okay instead, what I'm doing is I'm saying anything if you don't like it enough to order it, why would I post it? That's my mindset and so anything you order that's going to get posted to facebook again? It doesn't matter what nitch we're talking about families, baby seniors, weddings doesn't matter now we can see in the bottom here that there's been this has reached two thousand two hundred twenty seven people, okay it's good we're gonna explore that in a second that's good reach I'm happy with that and that's on boosted so I didn't boost that post I could have boosted and probably have been seen by more people but why why would I spend any money boosting this there's no call the action so don't ever busta post unless there's a call the action e family family fall sessions you know, sixty nine dollars book forty eight hour flash sales something like that something where there's a call action there's absolutely no purpose and boosting this post it's not going to drive business to me so I might as well just burn money at that point. Okay, so we got again think logically about what we're doing here's from the giles wedding, right? So this one notice what we're doing this absolutely no pictures posted here. What this is is the link you'll see it here. South dakota dot com child st louis wedding photographer do you remember that link when we're recovering? So what I do what I love facebook does I can take that link just put it in the post and it will actually go out and grab one of the images from the post that's a really cool feature. So here what I'm doing is this got posted the day after their wedding, okay, so the day after their wedding all the images were edited brian they're on my laptop because I did the slide show I go home that sunday or even that monday I upload I create thee an emotive slideshow I put it on my blogged I then take that link and I come right back here to facebook and I post that link I say check out some cool pictures facebook has now pulled back all of this down here where it says lauren and colin their day their ceremony where their reception was on dso facebook pulled all that back in I didn't have to write any of that what I'm looking to do is drive traffic and awareness back to my site is that making sense this is how you should be using it so I just showed you three ways that we're actually using it right? One is teaser another is what the clients ordered we could make the argument that this is a teaser but it's driving traffic and awareness back to my sight okay when they click on that and they go back to my site this is where they're landing and so this is that block post okay, you could see I'm not lying right there it says their date is nine thirteen and the block post is on nine fourteen so I'm I'm posting this stuff in a twenty four to forty eight hour window powerful powerful stuff I mean you want to talk about service don't make your clients wait waiting is the worst thing you can do now this is some interesting data that many people don't even realize they have access to on facebook okay, all this demographic data actually exists and lives there most people don't even realize they have it right it's called insights and so on your page you can actually control date range you could see how many people like your page how many people your post it has reached the level of engagement clicking, liking, commenting right all these things that you don't even realize why are you not checking out this data? This date is going to help you realize what's getting more traction than others what ads air getting more traction than others, right? So what's working what's not working maybe if you put a post a picture of a cute baby that gets more traction maybe if you post a picture of a cute puppy that gets more traction I don't know but you've gotta look at this data or else you're not gonna have any clue what's going on I mean to a certain extent this is better than google analytics to your site because you can get down to the nitty gritty like age group you can actually see what age group is looking at data on your site and so we'll go through this so the first green when you click on inside, so look at your page if you're watching online goto, facebook dot com and write in that top left hand corner. I think it says insights or somewhere in the middle when you get there, this is the first thing that's going to open up overview it's going to show you that you've got so for me, we've got fourteen thousand page likes on salvador cincotti photography seventy one our new likes looks like in this kind of last week windows without its seventy one new likes. Okay, that's cool post reach this week. We've reached three thousand people this week up fifteen hundred engagement, five hundred six people are engaged, he likes common shares and post clicks. The post cliques are when they're looking at the pictures, right? So when I post six or seven pictures, they're clicking on this picture's going in looking a picture after picture after picture that's awesome! That means they're engaged in my post. They're not just looking at it go through their news feed how many of us are guilty of that? You have your phone out, you just go through your feed and what are you picking and choosing what you're gonna click on and engage, right? Usually it's picture based? Well, guess what? We're photographers. So how cool is that that we have pictures to get people that actually click on? You've got to start thinking about what your posting and how what kind of engagement you're looking to get from people very, very powerful stuff, but I mean, to see that three thousand were post click it is incredible to me just in that one week window that means when I'm posting those groups of foreign five pictures, they're engaging with those this is my favorite, my favorite data, by the way, you can check out your fan base, your people who like you so off those off those fourteen thousand people check this out sixty one percent are women, it doesn't surprise me who's my client, by the way, does anybody remember what we say? She wass twenty four to thirty five in that range look at this number right here of my audience, twenty five percent the largest single number are females twenty five to thirty four I'm writing my sweet spot, so this is helping me understand that my demographic fits right in there. Okay, now that's not a silver bullet or anything like that, it's just helping me merge my marketing strategies to understand who exactly my audiences but you look across this here's what's interesting across all of facebook forty six percent of female but my audience sixty one percent of female, so we're above average with females that are part of our audience across all of facebook fifty four percent r mail my audience thirty eight percent are our mail and those numbers don't add up so I think like maybe two percent of aliens I don't know where they fall into but you start seeing where we're going with this number right you've got your age break out and then it shows you what your audience is and what the averages across facebook this is powerful data it's right there at your fingertips have you ever gone and looked at it? You got to get out there, click on it and start start trying to understand what this data even fricking means what does what does this data mean for your business? Because this is the kind of stuff by the way, if this were flipped and sixty one percent of my audience was male I have I mean I have some serious soul searching to do on our business like why why are all these guys tuned into our site now if I were ah glamour photographer, boudoir photographer I bet your majority of my audience would be now right but then what's that going to do when we start running marketing campaigns? I'm not really marketing the dude's right? We're not doing dude war and so uh I'd be bad so how do I market if my audience is predominantly male? How would I market glamour photography right that's why understanding these data points is so important as you start putting together campaigns and we're gonna talk about facebook campaigns later on to market to your audience how do we market to them uh we don't know who they are then we can't market toe the next thing I want to talk about is creating ads this is one of those things where everybody will nod their head and say yeah, we know we can create ads on facebook but then as we dig into it nobody is doing it they're either not doing it or not doing it right and so if you know you can do it and you haven't done it yet that becomes part of the problem you have to start engaging so my goal and just these next few slides is to really kind of de mystify what? How complicated it is to create ads it's not now. Facebook has done a lot of changes here recently with their ads and their ad interface and creating ads and what a campaign ad said and add are these air turn terms you're probably not even familiar with? And honestly when I rewind toe where what I understood about facebook two years ago so what I've learned is I'm doing things now today it's incredible the changes they've made on that back end and so I think you're going to be really interested interested in all of this so top right hand corner you're going to see a little icon there that says build audience if you click on that you're going to see down below used adds manager that's where I want you to go and so open that up and just so you follow along and there's some things to understand here right campaign and add set in an ad he's determined this is terminology used by facebook campaign is an objective so what is your objective if you're gonna put a facebook campaign together? What is the objective off that actually campaign is a website clicks is a website is it facebook likes I would make the argument that if you're going to do anything with the campaign, it should not be a like campaign here's why we've already established that your audience only six to ten percent of your audience or seeing your promotions right six to ten percent so why would you want to pay for likes on your facebook page? If nobody is really going to see any ad you run that to me is a waste of time but I would be looking to do if I run any kind of campaign is I would be wanting to put a campaign together that is about getting them to my website okay, so website clicks and we'll tie this together in another segment, right? But I want to understand how to do this first I want to drive them to my site and get them to register for something why don't we just put it that way? I want to get them to register to win be with me she should win a free engagement session well, maybe we'll figure this out but that's where I want them they're not gonna do that on facebook and if I do that on my personal site registered a win let's say I'm going to collect their email address now we're talking when you get them to like your paige you don't have their email address, you have nothing actually you just have that they like you now you can do a post and only six uh six out of out of one hundred ok, we're going to see what your posting was. A horrible return numbers however, if you get their email address now that you can put them on your mailing list unless they opt out that's fine that's gonna happen now they're on your mailing list and you could actually market to them multiple times that's worth the investment that's worth the cost of acquisition and we'll start talking about some of those strategies. So a campaign is the objective. Okay, so when you get into the tool you're gonna understand there's a place for you to create an objective website clicks and add set okay is a group of ads so when ads set allows youto have multiple ads running at the same time towards that objective for example we did a little thing we did it for ah we did it for shutter fest and so for shutter fast we ran a campaign on facebook maybe some of you saw pop up in your feet or not and we used we created one ad set okay register we wanted them to register for shutter fast so one campaign I am a photographer we called it we had one ad set which had five different ads running we had a picture of a bridegroom we had a picture of a half naked model that we took a picture of in over in prague we had a picture of me we had a picture off one of my admin assistants and then we had one other picture so we had we had five pictures running of all those five pictures bridegroom half naked girl me, my admin assistant and whatever else forget that one let's just say for for this conversation which of those four do you think was that don't don't answer once I'm curious what you think though I'll start with you which do you think was the one clicked almost the half naked girl that's probably what everyone will guess here yeah anybody want to get something different everything's a picture of me um okay so it was neither of them the bridegroom the bridegroom was the number one collect image he's not crazy so we did a little experiment I'm so big on the experiments, right? Especially like on a situation like this where we can actually for ten, fifteen, twenty dollars, right? You don't have to spend a million dollars on these campaigns. You could say I only want to five dollars a day, okay, so we ran this campaign and all of us in the office had kind of these, like side bets on which one was going to get the most traction, and I mean, all of us were blown away because I thought I'd be the clicked on the most. Not really, but I thought for sure it was going to be naked, half naked models there's nothing showing she was just sitting there on a pose, she was topless, but everything was covered, right? So it's, very tasteful or I'm sure facebook wouldn't have allowed it to go through, but I would have bet money she would have been the most clicked on, and it was the bride and groom. And so what do you learn about your audience when you start doing for like this, right? So that allows you to start putting together better targeting can't better campaigns, tardes your audience, right? If you notice what I'm saying here, there's no, several bullet it's about being dedicated to being an entrepreneur about being committed to being a marketer that's really the way you have to think about it and this kind of stuff I don't know about you I don't know about people back home but it fascinates me I'm always curious about human behaviour and how they respond to different things different influencers and that's the way we have to we have to start thinking about that stuff you can't do the same thing today that you did a year ago you can't do the same thing next month that we did today have to keep changing things up and in this world of social media that that changes happening into such a rapid pace it sometimes it's over it's just daunting to try and keep up with it all um okay so do we understand the ad the ad said right so that ad is that individual image the ad set can have different so you can have five images each image can go to a different link one image can put play different video write things like that so you can really really find tune what you're doing and and measure the results in a very very measurable way so they do have a very powerful dashboard things that I don't think work um adds to click page ads to get likes ultimately at the end of the day okay we have to have a call to action and so that call the action okay, we're going we're going talk about ideas later that's what it's all about so I think I got confused in my idea here when I was putting the slide together ultimately I want to drive them to my website that's ultimately what I'm looking to do but I want them to register for something I want to collect their names I don't want them to click on my facebook page that's not what I'm looking to do right? So getting you having the ability to run these campaigns where you say click on your facebook page like your facebook page the minute they do that you're paying fifty cents a dollar whatever it cost to get them there but there's nothing you can do with that data you can't capture that data that's why it's so important to get them to a call the action wendy during the campaign that collects an email address for a sign up do you have some sort of um disclaimer saying that you're going to be using their email address for marketing? You're gonna have terms and conditions listed there right? And then ultimately you've got to follow the can spam act right? So if you email to them you have to give them that ability opt out is always you're giving them that ability to opt out you're gonna be fine right? So you can use tools like vertical response ah, constant contact or male chimp, those are the three that that come to mind, we use vertical response. I wouldn't say that anyone is better or worse than the other its rights, whatever price and get some of them. I actually think if you have a mailing list that's less than a certain amount of names might actually be free. Does anybody know rob you shaking your head? Yeah, and it's free, I think I have under I think it's under five hundred there's always you have under five hundred names it's free. And so you could create an account just to track those names that would come in from something like that and just market to them and that we'll talk about that those ideas because they work. So we've got a case study where we help the studio, put some ideas together and make this work so we're really excited to see it work. And so this is ultimately what that screen is looking like, right? So when you click on creating ad, this is the first screen you're going to come to top left, it says created campaign choose an objective I mean, they have dummy proved this process for us clicks for website website conversion paige post engagement paige likes these air, not things I want to see us do you do not want to waste your money on paige likes you do not want to waste your money on page post engagement which you weirdly want to do is get them to click to your website that's where we want to drive them to our website now when they get there it's a whole other conversation what are we doing with them we don't want him to just look around our website who cares that's not what we're looking to do we need to convert them right we need to get them the book a session uh maybe it's family portrait month maybe it's you know forty not forty eight hour sales something to that effect so there has to be a strong called action that we're not going to cover now we'll cover that another segment but I want you to see how easy this is t get there first so I would recommend we go click toe website now this is where the power comes in this is the part of the tool that is absolutely incredible so who do you want your ads to reach I just simply went in there and type st louis you can get very granular you could get down to your your city your zip code on whatever mile radius you want to go after so we just said st louis twenty five mile radius age twenty three to thirty could be whatever you want I said just women you can then pick what language they speak. Okay, obviously we want I want people probably speak english, but we just left it blank for this. I would bet money that if I change that, I probably wouldn't lose that many people in st louis. But here's, the key relationship status I can actually target their relationship status so I can target them is being engaged dot's super freakin powerful and so just in that area in my area and a twenty five mile radius there seventy, four hundred people that have a status of engaged what's that worth how much would it cost to be the bridal show? I'm not advocating. We stopped doing bridal shows. You know how I feel about broader shows? Some real big proponent of it. But marketing is never one silver bullet. It's bridal shows its facebook it's referrals it's direct mail, it's vendor relationships, it's all these things that create brand awareness is all these things that create brand loyalty. But I can now for pennies on the dollar, start targeting seventy, four hundred potential brides. Now we all know that of those seventy four hundred. Come on, they're not gonna all be my bride, I'm okay with that, but, man, I can sure put a targeted campaign together to go after them. What what's that number look like in your market I'd hate to see what new york city looked like that that number is going to be joy enormous right on dso what if I even expand that radius but if I go to a fifty mile race because the reality is in st louis twenty five mile radius is almost comical you drive from everywhere so I would probably bump that up to a fifty mile radius around st louis that's my potential target that I would want to go after now I don't know what that number is gonna look like but not only that I can select what interests they have I could in theory select females who are engaged who have an interest in photography back when it was going over the demographic so you could see like the ages and the you know the gender does facebook give you that feedback because when I was looking at my google analytics it actually told me you know, x amount of percentage of my my click throughs like sports and running like does can you get that information on facebook? I don't help with through facebook you khun see you mean in here yeah I have not seen it so I'd hate to say no great I mean even just knowing that from my google analytics to cross reference over to my facebook ads would be a great help but I want to say no but I'm not one hundred percent sure so I'm gonna check tonight but I've never I'm always poking around in here and I've never seen that ability to drill down to that level because I think it's because all the data that they do collect but that would be interesting to see that of that twenty five percent fifteen percent or engaged or or runners or in photography that's interesting I'm going to see I'm gonna check tonight and I do that when I when I've done ads like try to think of you know, things that my clients like what would they like? You know are they interested in children's clothing? Are they interested in whatever has faras interests exact behaviors? Yeah, yeah this is really really cool stuff it's powerful stuff to be going after and really really narrow it down and so then right you've got the ability to control how much you want to spend per day and spend five dollars a day one hundred dollars a day you can control whether you're paying for impression per click on then you can name this ad set so you can give it a name for what you're doing you can control all that stuff and then they're telling you your estimated daily reach and so this is telling me based on just five dollars a day I'm going to reach six hundred seventy two, eight hundred eighteen hundred people, okay that doesn't mean they're going to engage that doesn't mean they're going to collect that just means it's showing up in their feet now the rest is up to you you got to put together a compelling add compelling message get them to click driving to your side and collect names and so we're going to talk about strategy's in another segment that take advantage of this easy to do uh and start driving real business and awareness to you and again it's gonna be seniors, families, babies um let's drive into some more data here okay, so is this making sense questions touch down in a little bit, but I'm curious when we look at doing add this way versus boost you find one works better than the other, this isn't even matter it doesn't matter the only reason I like doing it this way you can hit boost post on you're going to control the same kind of thing when you go into this though I feel like I get a little bit more control because I can actually control the naming the ad sets the campaigns and really control it that way because what ends up happening is when you hit boost you boost that post it's going to show up you're gonna control the demographic data but then when you go in to look at your dashboard and I don't have a snapshot of my dashboard here you're just going to see all these like random single post boost post what I like about this is if I say okay, I'm running a, uh, engagement campaign, okay, all these ads sets would sit under one campaign and then I would be able to look from a report perspective and say how did the the the engagement sign ups campaign go? I can not look in one spot and see all that all that data okay? I spent five hundred dollars over the course of three months I got one thousand clicks et cetera, et cetera, et cetera the way if you're on your timeline and just hit boost post each one shows up is its own campaign to now you're going through ten campaigns trying to figure out that that data set makes sense just a much cleaner way of keeping track of all that stuff and I learned that the hard way because I was trying to run a report on something and everything was it took me probably I'm embarrassed even say but probably about twenty different post to figure out that here's where you name the ad said like why does he keep saying it's st louis you know I could have these stupid names tied to it I couldn't figure out where it was and so after a s o I finally figured it out but yeah, so that's the way we do it one last thing I want to cover before wrap up on facebook is inside of insights here's something else that you have access to. So inside of insights you can actually drill into this thing, okay? And look up your data. So this was that post I showed you. Okay, now I can look how much more data I can actually see on this post twenty two twenty seven people were reached. We already knew that from the timeline. Got seventy six likes or comments and look at what it'll tell me now. Twenty seven on the post forty four in the shares. I'm guessing that on the shares came from her network because she shared it. Probably on her page. I'm guessing definitely more likely that's. What happened? Three comments to shares five thousand eight hundred thirty two clicks. Okay, four thousand three hundred eighty seven were photo views. So that's people clicking on these toe look at the pictures. What more can I ask for? This was an on boosted post. It costs me nothing but people were going in there and actually clicking and looking at the pictures. So this is how you start building that brand identity, that brand awareness, the referrals that's why my logo's on everything so nothing should be going up here without your logo on it. Please please please make sure you're putting your logo watermark and all this stuff I mean it's so easy light room does it on your export super super easy to do and so that's the part that off this tool that I absolutely love is not only do we see all this demographic inside on, you know, our age group and where they're coming from like you can even break it down by where in the country they're located. I just didn't even show you that you can see where in the united states all your fan base are from where they're consolidated, you can even target your marketing to that fan base in different parts of the country. So now not only can I see all that, but I can get that level of data from an actual post, so I convey take a look and see off the post boosted or not what kind of traction we're getting with that what kind of images are working, what kind of images air not working by powerful, powerful stuff so hopefully that that gets you start thinking about facebook a little differently. Yeah facebook I know they frown on you using your personal page for business hey stop when I'm out on a shoot I may have mom take a quick picture behind me like just getting a shot now posted on instagram and then it bruce over my personal facebook or when I get home and after I download all quick take up my phone shot of like maybe an image you don't wanna post a full I mean I'll do a sneak that way and I'll put it on my personal page hate had a great you know, this is right today I just had a girl and I posted just a phone shot I had like seventy eighty likes on that wow so after on my personal page because I tagged her and her mom after order in session that I posed a favorite on my business page, it was like crickets like for life and I tagged her mom and I'm like how do you get around that? I mean, so from my personal page I'm getting seventy eighty likes when I'm just posted on iphone picture then I come in with a fully edited I get nothing yeah so how do you get what? How do you go? I mean, you don't so it's a catch twenty two so first of all, doing what you're doing facebook's not goingto going to bother you with that right? So the only time they're really I've seen them shut down a page theirs when it really is you're running a full fledged seemingly business on your page and driving them traffic you posting a picture and a couple people like they're going to be fine so but the other thing is how do you get that transfer to your business page? And that is why if you're just starting out, I highly encourage you to set up that business page and start driving traffic there because there's so many people when facebook first came online, their businesses started from their personal page and now they're like inviting people like my business page and they can't convert him over so I think today in today's day and age it's much harder to get a like that is someone when facebook first came on the scene, people were just like in everything right? They were just like like like like like now it's like you could beg people to like your page if they don't see any inherent interest in it, they're not gonna like it. S oh, I don't know how to help you get them from your personal, but I would be curious about though and correct me if I'm wrong you don't have insights on your personal page, right? It's only on your business page and so you're losing out you don't even know who those people were for the most part now where they her friends, right? You know, posing on my senior page and then I'll go to my regular paid like hey sharing an image from a senior session, we just did, so I'm double yeah, posting it on my fear and my regular page and that's what? You know, I'm still not even comparing what I am, and I'm tagging them that's from having them tag. Um, but there are some pages it's like there's? No way I have no answer for you, except to keep doing what you're doing and try driving traffic that way. I mean, we face the same kind of thing I can post pictures on my personal page and it's incredible, we'll get crazy traction and then I go to like, you know, even from a photography perspective, my personal page, I'll post something like, hey, here's a shoot we ron with, um, you know, in brazil and I'll post a picture, lots of traffic, lots of engagement on my personal page I posted on behind the shutter, which has, like sixty five thousand uh likes on it, and there will be like twenty people like the picture rights, no engagement, no traction unless I boost the post if I pay to boost the post, more people are seeing it more people are engaging with it, so you just got to keep doing it double on, then just keep trying to build more and more people to work in this doesn't work that's right, running to a new wall all right, so next up. Hopefully, that helps you guys at least think about facebook a little differently. And at least see how easy running the ads are in that inside data, I think priceless.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Master the Business of Photography - Workbook
Master the Business of Photography Slides
5 Tips to Finding and Booking Your Client

Ratings and Reviews

Brandon D
 

Sal isn't disgruntled and angry like someone below said, and he doesn't have time for people constantly whining about why their business isn't going good. He's from Brooklyn, so he can come across as harsh at first, but after watching several of his classes and even getting to meet him in person and talk a bit I can tell you he is a really nice guy who truly does want you to succeed. He was very encouraging to me after I thanked him for helping me and my business get to where it is now. Growing up, I can remember photographers grabbing us and posing how they wished. They are often in a hurry to get things right, such as at a wedding, so I am not sure why one reviewer stated he would dismiss them. Sounds like he is just looking for a reason to feel powerful. Anyway, this is a great class to get you on track with your business. Yes, its a bit wedding heavy, but the concepts are the same no matter what. Just apply them to your niche and you are good to go.

Sean
 

Amazing course. Sal is such a great photography educator. Terrific course. I'm not usually big on watching business courses, but this course as taught by Sal was terrific. Down to earth, entertaining, packed with real life experiences do's, don'ts and lessons learned. This courses business A to Z and Sal is very entertaining to watch/listen to. Thanks CreativeLive for getting Sal.

fbuser 0af5cf47
 

I have been a long time fan of Creative Live and have sat on the fence with all of Sal's classes because I already attend Shutterfest every year and get loaded with valuable information there, so it was hard to pull the trigger on a $300 course that was filmed 5 years ago. Also, in my earlier days of hearing about Sal, I'd heard a lot of negative opinions about how he comes across. Still, I'd heard he's a marketing guru, and my background is in marketing as well, so I really wanted to see what this class was all about. Now that I've finally gotten it, I'm completely blown away. There is just SO MUCH MATERIAL in this class that its actually difficult trying to decide what to implement first! It is good stuff too. It is all about marketing, sales, and workflow. If you're looking for a class teaching you how to take better photos, this one is not it. This is the class that teaches you how to get your work where everyone is seeing it and convincing people to book you and tell their friends about you! Now as far as others have already said... this class is definitely geared toward wedding photographers. Yes there are bits of information that work for other types of photography, but it is so heavily wedding oriented that there might be a better fit out there for another type of photographer. If you do weddings though, this is an amazing class! As far as Sal's personality goes.... he's a New Yorker transplanted to St. Louis. So expect that NYC no BS type of attitude. Susan Stripling is another one of my favorites and she is similar in attitude (and also extremely talented), so if you like her, you should like this. If you have a hard time with her, you might have a hard time with this. Regardless, its stuff y'all need to hear and implement to be successful. Obviously because the class is a bit older, you may have to make small tweaks to a few things (even though he says don't jack with the recipe), but the marketing principles are solid and timeless. Shoot this course is worth it for the SEO advice alone. Just buy it already!

Student Work

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