Building Your Know, Like & Trust Factors

Not only am I a photographer, but I also teach a marketing class that I created for emerging businesses or those looking for a refresher.

In that class, I talk about the Customer Purchase Journey (also known as the Purchase Decision Cycle). You can watch a couple of videos I created about this here: The Customer Purchase Journey. While the videos were designed for photographers, the concept applies to just about any business.

Why is understanding the Customer Purchase Journey important? It helps you as a marketer to better put yourself in the shoes of your prospects so you can continue to look for ways to improve your marketing.

In this article, I want to talk about the Consideration Phase of that journey. This is where you educate and create a preference for your company and what you offer. Professional photography images are a powerful way to reinforce your efforts in this phase.

If you are a service business, your goal in this phase is to increase how much a prospect KNOWS, LIKES, AND TRUSTS your company. I know I'm biased but how could images not help support these efforts? We need to see it to understand it better and to feel it. If you've been in your marketing role for a while now, you know that no matter how technical what you offer is, it's still about relationships when it comes to sales.

So what types of images make sense when marketing during this phase? While I create a custom list of images for my clients after going through a Discovery Process with them, here are some of the basics that fit most service businesses:

• Who the team is. Who are the people a prospect and client might work directly with from the sales people, to the development team, and even the receptionist and billing team? Also who are the people behind the company? Who are the leaders?

• What does your workspace look like? It may or may not, be exciting to you but people find it interesting and it will draw them in. It helps build more familiarity with your company which leads to trust.
• What does it look like to work with you? Are you friendly, serious, fast-paced, or collaborative? Are you detail-oriented or big picture? Are you easy to get a hold of? Likely you are the right combination of many things. Reinforce this by stating them and showing them. What they hear and see from you is what they remember.

• What does what you offer look like? For a service business, that could be meetings, presentations, collaboration, networking, documents, plans, ongoing training, and behind-the-scenes work.
• How are you unique and why should they hire you instead of someone else? Put a spotlight on those differentiators and repeat them frequently. Remember, it's not about features, it's about benefits.
• Who else do you work with? From past and present clients to community leaders, vendors, collaborators, and charity work your company does.

Creating your own library of custom stock photographs, that show your actual team, in your actual environment, goes a long way in developing relationships. It's what you'd do in person in a service business. You'd want to invite the prospect over to your offices, have them meet the team and hear more about why you are the right solution. I'm not suggesting that photography and social media marketing will replace this, absolutely not! But it can help reinforce, build upon, and stay-top-of-mind with those jobs you want to land. And that is a great strategy when you're trying to stay ahead of the competition.

If you could create your dream stock library of images, what would you want to be included in it?