S14E10 | Turn your website into a high-ranking, conversion machine with Jeff Brown
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Our guest today, Jeff Brown started his photography career in the defence force which gave him many opportunities. One of which was photographing the queen which of course he used as part of his branding message on his website when he ran his own studio. Today he spends his time helping other photographers grow their business. In today’s episode, we dive deep into branding and websites, and if you are a premium member Jeff gave some really practical advice in the second half to help you improve your website conversion, and stay at the top of Google!
WE COVERED:
Jeff’s background
How Jeff spent a £7500 grant to start his photography business
What is a “brand”
The importance of an easy-to-navigate website
AND IN THE MEMBERS-ONLY EXTENDED EPISODE:
How to know what Google is ranking well
What is EEAT
The information that keeps people on your site, and actually helps convert them
Is blogging still essential in 2023
How to drive organise traffic to our site
MENTIONED LINKS:
Jeff Brown
Served with the Royal Navy as a Military Photographer before going on to run 5 very successful photography companies of his own. Jeff has shot over 750 weddings himself, but in 2015 turned his attention to developing an online photography business mentoring program, making it his mission to motivate and inspire photographers worldwide. He now mentors photographers in over 20 countries, helping them develop their brands to become the “Go-To Photographer” in their niche and achieve the success they deserve.
Jeff has written three No.1 best-selling photography business books, he is also well known for helping photographers and photography brands build their presence on LinkedIn, with over 50k followers himself on the platform he classes it as an untapped goldmine for the industry.
Transcript
Welcome to the Pet Photographers Club. Tune in as experts share their insights to help grow your business with higher sales, creative marketing, and kick ours business strategies now on to the show.
Hello and welcome back to the Pet Photographer's Club. I'm your host Kirsty McConnell, and today I'm chatting with Jeff Brown, who you may know. He is the photographer's mentor. We've spoken about him pretty recently on the club when Chris Miller was. On a few episodes ago he was mentioning that he did the LinkedIn course with Jeff.
And I'm sure a few of the listeners, you guys might know him from a few other thing, a few other places as well. But today I'm excited to get Jeff onto the show to dive into something new. So Jeff, welcome. Thank you for joining me.
It's my pleasure. It's great to be here.
So just for those who dunno, you just quick overview of how you ended up becoming the photographer's mentor, where you're based in the world, and then we'll go from there.
Great. Well so, so I'm a, a photographer myself, although not practicing. Commercially anymore, now just doing it from from my own enjoyment and my journey in photography started as a military photographer with Royal Navy. I then went on to work with the intelligence services for two years as an image analysis.
And when, when I was working for them, I started doing lots of portraits and, and weddings for people. And, and thought, this is really good. I can make some money for this. So I ended up leaving the military, but when I left the military, I got He get a decent size grant to spend on resettlement back into civilian life, and that was seven and a half thousand pound, which I spent on marketing.
And that really got me into the whole marketing and Brandenburg. And then my business partner or future business partner left six month after that, he was a military photographer and he got seven and a half thousand. So we spent all this money on the marketing and branding aspect, and that's what helped develop our business.
And we ended up having five businesses. Then fast forward to, to now, I've, I've come away from the actual photography. I've set up the, the, the, the mentoring program, which has been going now for about six or seven years. And I work with photographers in no less than 22 countries around the world. I've also written the three bestselling books, and I'm soon to become president of the British Institute of Professional Photographers.
I think that's gonna be announced in the next couple of weeks because I've made it my mission to really help photographers. Everywhere in the world understand the value of brand and marketing because images alone aren't gonna make us money. We've gotta have a premium brand. We've gotta market ourselves correctly and get the right message out there.
Wow, I didn't know about that. Jeff, congratulations on the on the appointment. When do you, thank you. When
do you take Well, it was, it was confirmed a couple of weeks ago, and they're gonna, I think it's the, the official release is gonna be in their magazine in the next week and a half. I've just had to write my sort of My little article to go in, but it, it's, it's gonna put me in a position where I can, I can really help more people and get that message across there.
And also I, I feel that for the B I P P, the b I P P, the itself needs, needs to change direction a bit more and be the professional association that helps photographers succeed. Because ultimately, if you're professional, that's what you want, you know? Mm-hmm. It, it's all about, it's all about building that brand and making money, because pretty pitches don't pay the mortgage.
But put your pictures with this strong brand and, and the right market into.
Mm-hmm. Well, that's really exciting. Times ahead. So, yeah. Great. Congratulations. Now you, thank you. You put something in your intro that definitely grabs my attention was that you spent your seven and a half thousand pounds on marketing.
So can we just, this was not where we were gonna go in the direction of the, the interview, but typical I know so, Let's not get stuck in the weeds too much, but can you give us an overview of where that money went?
So I didn't actually spend the seven and a half thousand on marketing itself. I spent the seven and a half thousand.
No, cuz, cuz I couldn't have done that with the, the, the, the grant that you get from the military, it has to be on training. So obviously we're, we're fairly well trained photographers. You know, the military does, it does have quite an intensive photography training program and support all the way through your career.
So I thought, well, we're fairly well trained. We don't need to go off and do more photography courses and, and we can adapt what we've done to weddings and portraits. But we don't know how to run a business so that that money was spent on. Marketing courses and business courses. The first course I ever did was by an American guy called Charles Lewis.
And that was back in 2002, I think, while I was still in the military. And that was funny enough, he, we used to get a, a parcel sent out with CDs in and you had to listen to the cd and then do your work books and stuff. But, and at that, at the time, that was quite expensive. I think it was about 4,000 pound and That completely.
It was like a, a wake up call. Because a lot of the stuff that was taught in there wasn't new. It wasn't like groundbreaking new sort of marketing. This is marketing and Brandon that has been around for about a hundred years, probably longer, you know? But as photographers, you don't think about it.
You as photographers, we. We think, right? We create a pretty picture. We put it on a, a website and people will come along and buy. That's it. But our consumers aren't other photographers. Our customers aren't other photographers. They're actually consumers who have been branded and marketed to for, for ever since they were, they were born.
And we need to communicate to them in the language of consumers, not in the language of photographers. And then that suddenly became relevant. And even though, There were much more experienced and much better skilled photographers out there than us at the time because we'd been photographing tanks and guns and people in military uniform and ships and stuff like that.
When we went into the wedding market, we became very successful very quickly with very little experience, but. Our customers were buying our brand, our perceived value and everything we, we wanted them to think, feel, and believe about us. They weren't buying the images because to them our images were the same as everybody else's, you know, 750 weddings, and most people would just say, oh, they look so clear.
Or Oh, it's just the way I imagined the day would be. It never had a bride say to me, Jeff, I really like the depth of field on that. And I love the leading lines on that picture because they can't see that, but they can see the outer, the outer brand, and that's what attracted them.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Makes sense.
I wanna get. Deep into you know, how we can do that today, how we can, you know, build that brand and everything shortly. But just before we do, quick question. Mm-hmm. Today, if I was starting a brand new business, let's pretend I have no experience at all. I'm starting a brand new photography business and I have seven and a half.
Okay. Let's. Make it 15 grand today. Yeah. I have 15 grand that's been handed to me that I can spend. Let's pretend I can spend on anything though. Where would you suggest that that money goes?
Well, first of all, I don't think you need to spend a lot of money. That's the funny, that's the the crazy thing.
You don't need to spend a lot of money. The first thing you need to do, and, and I think this is the most powerful, powerful part of branding and marketing that photographers skip is. Actual the brand itself. So brand is everything you want your customer to think, feel and believe about you in your photography.
Now brand comes from colors, fonts, the look, the feel and if you have a brand that is premium, so you know what, funny enough, you actually know what a premium brand is. Even if you've got no experience in marketing, you know what a premium brand is because you are attracted to them. You can walk down the high street and and see what is a premium restaurant and what is a.
A low end restaurant because of the way, what is called curbside appeal, how it looks to you from the outside because you've been educated that these certain collections of fonts and colors and feel and, and all these little bits give that sort of premium ooze to it. So if you can project that through your, your website, your marketing, Your social media and look very high end, the perceived value of what you have to offer is greater because people think, oh, that looks premium.
Premium means higher quality, better, better service. So they now start to have a higher p perceived value. If you go into a store and see, you know some standard candles and then these really nice, beautifully boxed candles that you know are handmade and they've got lovely fonts on, and you'll pay more for that because it just has that, it's that bespoke sort of high end feel.
So what you need to do within the first things is start a look at brands that your ideal clients love. And they're attracted to. So the, the brand research and the colors and fonts are so, so important because that can portray a message that if not right, can actually just drop the perceived value of your brand.
So Jeff,
when, when you say the brand, you are referring to colors and fonts quite a bit. So are you thinking. At the moment when you're saying this, only visuals in terms of like logo, font, colors, this kind of thing, or are you incorporating in brand also, you know, the, the bigger, the bigger picture that also incorporates You know, the language that you use and this kind of thing.
Yeah. So, so your brand is everything you want your customers to think, feel, and believe. So you need to ultimately get that across in the, in the message that you have on your, on your website text, and in your brochures and your social media. If you want them to think that you are a photo photographer who cares, who has their best interest at heart, who's, you know, who's a dog of a two, then you need to communicate that on our first ever website.
We didn't go into Yes. You know, we didn't say things like, you know, I first got a camera when I was 17 year old and we didn't talk about cameras. We didn't really talk much about photography. We talked about what we, how we wanted brides and grooms to feel when we were working with them, cuz with the first business was the wedding website.
And how that would completely put them at ease that. You know, we'd, we'd take over, we'd take care of the day so they didn't have to worry about anything. We'd bring them to the right place at the right time. All they had to worry about and care about was mixing and enjoying the day with their families and friends and people that love the most.
And we even said cuz between us, we'd photograph most of the royal family in quite a lot of head to state as military photographers. And we said it's with the same care and attention. That we put into photographing the royalty that we will put into photographing you on your wedding day. So it was all about the service and because remember, customer service is a big, huge thing.
You know, if you go to a restaurant and have a, a, a brilliant meal, but the cus customer service is crap, you're not gonna go back. So your brand is more than just the visual aspect. It's all about that service and, you know, communicating. I'm gonna look after you and, and, and, and, and given that really nice feel about it and, and.
It's how do you want people to feel when they perceive you and, and, and interact with you?
Mm-hmm. Okay. Now, earlier on you, or just before you mentioned the example of a storefront. You know, you walk past a storefront and, and you immediately as a consumer understand where they sit in the market, if they're premium or, or entry level or, or whatever.
Now, as a photographer, most of us, especially I'd say most of our listeners, don't have a studio with a storefront or even maybe don't even have a studio. So, Like you with your weddings like I think I caught before our storefront, I guess is our website. Is that, is that what you're thinking?
Y yes. Yeah.
So your website is effectively your shop window to the world.
Yeah. All righty. So what can we do on our website that kind of helps with this this branding, making our client, you know, feel what we want 'em to feel, see what they want, we want 'em to see and all of this kind of thing.
Well, there's the, the, the very first important bit is to realize that behavior on websites have changed.
Now, you know, when, when I started out professionally after leaving the military back in 2004, everyone was visiting websites through, through laptops and through desktops. So you would go to a website the process was a lot slower. You would click on a website, you had all the navigation buttons across the top, and you'd probably take your time going through.
The navigation. Now people are faster moving. You know, reports are, it's, it's, it's between about three seconds. Three to 10 seconds is the maximum somebody will spend on your website if they're not engaged. Now, three seconds probably allows them just enough time to look at your initial. What you call the hero section, the banner, the first bit of your website, you need to grab their, their attention straight away.
So now you need a website that first of all is super fast loading a website that isn't complex. The navigation is stripped right back because if you create what I call and what Google is effectively looking for as well, cuz Google's s e o And what is important to Google now is what's on that homepage.
A and also for the clients as well, because of the client's behavior, clients are now landing on websites from mobile devices, and they're doing the same interaction as they do on Facebook and on LinkedIn and on Instagram. They're scrolling, they're, they're not going across navigation buttons. They want a website that is super fast, Lord, and connects with them.
Isn't complicated. They, they don't wanna be trying to find out, how do I find out the price? How do I find out what's included in this package? What do I do next? All of that needs to be communicated on one simple scrolling website, and that is what is called a scroll tool, wi sell website because Google knows the behavior has changed and that is how we like to, to.
Consume content. And ultimately what you gotta remember is your website should have a single purpose. So if you go to my website, my website, single purpose is to pre-qualify people who wanna work with me to a price, so that that's why my price is on there, on the website, and then direct them to take the next step.
And the next step with my website is to book a consultation call. You can only do four things when you land on someone's website. You can call them directly, you can make a direct purchase. You can leave your email address in exchange for something, or you can schedule a consultation call for the future.
That's, that is the on only four things you can actually do to get in touch with the photographer. The fifth thing you can do is hit the back button and go to the next search result where somebody prompt you. So your website must be a call to action to get people to do one of those four things, because if they don't do one of those four things, And they go, that's it.
They've gone. There is no point in having 4,000 unique views per month. If nobody's actually getting in touch with you.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that makes sense. Now Jeff, you mentioned a couple of times then the recent Google changes and I wanna get into those in a bit more detail because I think it's something that's quite overwhelming for, for many of us, myself included, actually, like try to keep up.
With like, I mean, it's bad enough that we have to keep up with the algorithms of like Instagram and Facebook and the changing things that they bring in. And now, like also with Google, you know, it feels like. Yeah, everything is changing really quickly and I, and I know you understand a lot of that pretty well, so I wanna get into the details of that, but I'm gonna save that for the second half of this interview for our members only.
So I think we might, what we might do is wrap up part one. Now, before we do that, how can the listener find out more about what it is and what you offer them?
So you can go along to my website, which is the photographers mentor.com, and I also have the photography website company that creates these scroll toil websites, which is called the photographers suite.com.
You can also find me on LinkedIn, the Jeff Brown, the photographer's mentor, and on Facebook, Jeff Brown, the photographer's mentor and, and do reach out, drop me a connection, drop me a friend request if you have any. Questions at all. Drop me a message. I always respond back. I, I'm here to help people in the industry you know, build their brand.
And, and so if I can, if I can help you, if I can answer your question, I will just leave you a little voice clip. You know, that, that it doesn't information and, and a little bit of advice doesn't cost i'll, I'm more than happy to do that.
Excellent. Thank you so much Jeff And I will pop the links to what you've just mentioned into the show notes.
That's it for part one of this episode. If you're a member of the club, you can continue listening to part two in the member zone. Or better yet, in your favorite podcast player with your private r s s feed. Don't forget, if you are not a member yet, you can join today.
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