It’s not just busy season right now for a lot of you, it’s crazy season (hang in there wedding photographers!), with some of you cramming 2 years of postponed business into one short summer season.
Others are super busy with bookings now that business confidence is returning. I know a lot of web designers who are flat out too.
It goes without saying that I hope you are all looking after yourselves.
Sometimes when you’re in the middle of a busy period, it’s all you can do to survive. You stop working on your business, marketing goes out the window and you’re simply focusing on what’s in front of you (which is totally fine by the way).
The irony is that your busy season nearly always represents your best opportunity to gather positive feedback from existing clients and get referrals for future business, but if you’re not set up to do that, those chances might just slip through your fingers.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that a few people still seem to be killing it on social media, maybe you’re seeing their promotions or new products launching and you’re wondering how on earth they are managing to stay so focused and productive when you’re barely able to keep up.
The answer is nearly always having an automated system.
In this post, I’m going to focus on quick wins that can make all the difference when it comes to impressing your current clients whilst also giving new prospects the VIP treatment.
Here’s what we’re going to be looking at.
- Automating your enquiry process, so that every prospective client gets the same experience.
- Documenting your process / wins so that you don’t miss the chance to compile case studies and testimonials about your best work when you have time.
- Making sure your social media has clear signposts & calls to action to key areas of your business.
- Creating bitesize social content to maintain visibility even when you’re super busy.
- Setting up an automated feedback/testimonial collection process.
Automating Your Enquiry Process
Making sure that every single enquiry gets the same slick VIP treatment is a serious no-brainer. And yet…so many people don’t have any kind of automation after an enquiry comes in.
If you’re relying on manually responding by email alone, this is you.
And it’s kind of crazy not to roll out the red carpet when you think about the enormous amount of effort you’ve gone through to get someone to the point of enquiry (SEO, word of mouth, attractive website, carefully curated portfolio etc).
When you’re at your busiest, you need to know that wherever an enquiry comes from, whether that’s in-person or in your Instagram DM, you can drop that enquiry into an automated sequence on the fly.
You might be using an email platform (MailerLite or ActiveCampaign, or a studio management service (eg. Dubsado or Plutio) to do this.
The key components you need are:
- the ability to redirect your contact form upon submission
- the ability to send a series of automated emails
The Contact success page is a game changer, because it means you can deepen the relationship immediately and signpost them to key pieces of content. Think about throwing in a quick welcome video to help them connect with you as a real person.
Your contact form submission should also trigger an automated email that gives them what they really want, which is likely to be a price list or the option to book a call with you. And don’t forget to tell them what’s going to happen next.
They are never going to be as excited to hear from you than they are in that moment, so you might as well give them exactly what they need.
The best thing of all is that you can drop their details into your own contact form to set the automation in motion.
Documenting your process and wins now for case studies and testimonials later
If you’re anything like me, you do some of your best work when you’re under pressure and don’t have any wiggle room for procrastination. But in the heat of the moment, it’s easy to forget to document what you’re creating.
- Take screenshots and make screencasts of your process. Time lapse logo design or photo editing videos are great for social media for example.
- Take before and after screengrabs before you dive into a website re-design.
- Note and screenshot current website visitor or social media stats to use later in case studies.
- Keep a ‘Favs’ folder handy on your computer when editing, for pulling out your favourite images to blog or schedule when you have more time.
Making sure your social media has clear signposts & calls to action
When you’re in the middle of a busy season, and you’re meeting a lot of people in real life (I’m looking at you, wedding photographers), you’re going to get tagged more frequently than usual on social media and people are going to come looking for you and a way to connect.
Take five minutes to review the call to action on all of your social profiles. I like to build out a landing page on my website, with links to all of the key content I know people will be looking for (shop, blog, freebies) to make sure that they can get where they need to be in just one click.
Here’s what mine looks like.
Creating bitesize social content to maintain visibility even when you’re super busy.
If the wheels come off your social media bus as soon as you get busy, don’t worry too much about it. Sometimes we just have to operate on the fly.
When I’m run off my feet, I switch to ‘microposting’. I choose a topic for the week and create a bullet-point list of 5 things to say about it. The captions I write might only be a sentence or two, but posting on the same subject over a week creates consistency in your feed.
Here are a few other ideas to try:
- Shoot behind-the-scenes video during photo shoots or projects and batch post to your social stories later
- Dive into your archives and create a list posts by choosing ‘5 of the same’ eg. Five contact pages, five images of kids jumping in puddles etc. This kind of content is quick and easy to set and forget at the beginning of a busy week
- Reshare past posts / blog posts into your stories
- Tag as many other suppliers and companies as possible in your social stories to boost mentions
Setting up an automated feedback/testimonial collection process
By the time you get to the end of a project, you often feel like you’ve already mentally moved on and the last thing you want to do is circle back to gather feedback from your clients.
This is another key part of your workflow to automate. At the very least, set up a simple survey (try Typeform or Google Forms) and send the link as you send your final invoice.
However, no one loves filling out forms and people tend to give you less when you’re asking them to do some typing. Instead, have a look at my favourite new toy, VideoAsk (from the makers of Typeform).
It’s not the only video feedback tool on the market but I think it’s the best one.
What I love about it, is that you can set up a series of video questions which effectively create a guided testimonial video interview. Cut it all together with some screenshots and you’ll have a beautiful video case study to embed on your website or share on social media.
Choose Just One Thing Now
If you’re right in the middle of overwhelm, choose just one thing from the list above and set it up now. Many can be set up in 5-10 minutes and will help you to feel proactive rather than reactive.
A little bit of automation is the gift that keeps on giving. You’ll also thank yourself later for having collected content to share when you finally get time to breathe.
If you’d like to join an inspiring online community, you can find out more about Melissa’s online membership, The Marketing Fix, at www.themarketingfix.co.
I admire you so much. Since Covid, it has been even more overwhelming. I started a WordPress site in conjunction with my already established squarespace site because I wanted to move to WordPress. I took your course and was completely inspired. I had to scale back, it was a bit of an overwhelm. Keep up the great work and posts.