TFN Together: April 2020
We’re kicking off a brand new series on the blog and have invited past TFN attendee and current TFN Together member Allison Busch Zulawski to share her experience learning from Annemie Tonken in April. Each month we’ll invite a member to share reflections on how they’ve learned and grown from the monthly goal. If you’re not currently a member of TFN Together, be sure to join our waitlist for next year!
The month of April kicked my butt. The weariness stage of sheltering-in-place set in, the home schooling at my house fell into disrepair, and I drank too much wine. That said, one of the shining lights of the month (and the one thing I feel like was a real accomplishment) was my TFN Together work. The work for the month of April, taught by TFN co-founder Annemie Tonken, was all about refining and clarifying the messaging we send to our clients. Messaging can sound like one of those nebulous, business-y words, but over the course of the month I came to appreciate it's vital importance in our business' success.
I learned how to think through and guide clients from their perceived or surface desire (of wanting family photos) toward their heart's deeper desires, beliefs, and values. Being able to speak to clients in a more intimate way not only cultivates better client relationships, it's the seed for creating more meaningful and personalized imagery for every family I work with. I want every client to have an active emotional experience beyond loving their pretty pictures. I want the client (aka the mom, 99% of the time) to FEEL the importance of her role in her family's story. I want her to BELIEVE that documenting her family is a worthy endeavor in which to invest. I want her to TRUST that she has chosen the best person to document her family. I want her to PRIORITIZE family photos as the heirlooms that they are.
We also worked on tangible ways to get this important messaging out to clients and ways to keep clients engaged with us. Annemie talked about the four stages of connecting with clients (Awareness, Engagement, Sale, and Service) and encouraged us to think through how our messaging shows up in each of these stages. This exercise felt incredibly useful and gave me the push to finally make some changes to my website and workflow. I added a "Join the Mailing List" marketing pop-up to my website, added "Schedule Phone Call" and "Book Now" buttons directly on my contact page, and created content folders for the different types of content I want to deliver to clients along various stages of the engagement process. These were all pretty easy and straightforward to do, but they had been on my to-do lists for far too long. I was positively giddy to finally check them off the list.
The structure of the TFN Together work for April, and what I anticipate will repeat each month moving forward, offers members a chance to have big, important ideas broken into bite-sized chunks with clear, actionable goals. Like so many, I have a tendency to attend conferences, fill my journal with a bunch of inspired ideas, and then have a really hard time following through with turning those inspired ideas into real change. One of the things I have valued most about attending The Family Narrative's annual conferences is their attention to helping family photographers run their businesses better. TFN Together takes that emphasis and delivers it in a way that really help members do the work. I'm so grateful I said yes to this year of learning!
