014: Find Your Focus with Tiffany Farley

Episodes The Bearded Tog

February 10, 2017

How are you working to find your focus? Are you an expert in doing one type of photography, or do you consider yourself a jack of all trades? Most photographers have tried doing a little bit of everything. Weddings, families, babies, seniors, events, etc. And while it’s good to test the waters, it’s hard to grow and be recognized as an expert if you haven’t found your focus in photography.

Today’s guest on The Bearded Tog Podcast is Tiffany Farley. She is a motherhood photographer, and the founder of The Fount Collective, a community of photographers devoted to capturing the art of being a mother. In this episode, she shares her journey to specializing in a specific niche that means so much to her personally, and how she has gained clients who trust her and are excited for her to capture the precious moments between them and their children.

Find Your Focus

At the beginning of your business, it’s easy to find anybody who will be in front of your camera, and it’s a good learning experience to try lots of different subjects. Because of this, you may get burnt out and exhausted because you aren’t a brand yet, and your business isn’t known for anything specific.
When you’re ready to grow and find your focus, get a mentor because someone else with experience can look at what you do with outside eyes and see your strengths and weaknesses.
Look at your portfolio and ask yourself “What would you be okay with if you were doing only one thing?” For Tiffany, the photographs that jumped out at her were those of connection between people, especially children and parents.
When you want a certain type of food, you’ll go to the restaurant that specializes in it, right? The same is true for clients looking for a photographer.
Being an entrepreneur is not an easy job. You have to love what you are doing to survive it. If the work doesn’t mean anything to Tiffany, she couldn’t keep doing it.
Showing only what you want to book more of is important as you brand yourself in a niche.

Action Items to Find Your Focus

If you are a specialist, you will probably be asked to travel for clients. Before you respond, decide if you want to travel. If you don’t, make it clear. If you do, make sure it’s easy for your clients to hire you for destination sessions. In order to do this more often, Tiffany helps spread out the cost of travel by advertising sessions when she’s traveling to a location. This way, the costs get spread out among multiple clients.
While word of mouth referrals are best, it’s still important to continually show up on social media, to show potential clients that you are still in business.
If you are in a season where the crickets are chirping in your inbox, do this exercise: Image 20 of your ideal dream clients sending you an inquiry this week. Is every step of your process, from onboarding to delivery, ready and set to go? Does it match your brand? Because branding is so important, use the slow time to lay out your client experience.
Consistency helps in growing as an artist. You want someone to see your work online, and know it belongs to you even without a tag or watermark.
Tiffany focuses on using email marketing to create a conversation, and not just more emails.
Helpful quote from Gary Vaynerchuk: “Don’t feel romantic about stuff that’s no longer working.” In other words, if there’s something you are doing in your business marketing that’s not working for you, let it go, because that will help you find something else that works!
DO what works for you and your personality. Find what you are passionate about, and in turn, find your focus!