August 23, 2021

02: The importance of building a magnetic personal brand for service based businesses with Becca Ellison

Episode #2 : Build The Business Podcast
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Today, I am interviewing Becca Ellison of Becca Ellison Creative and we’re going to be talking about the importance of building a magnetic personal brand. Becca is a brand coach and photographer who helps service-based businesses scale into an irresistible personal brand that has clients knocking down their door. Becca helps her clients by focusing on how to cultivate a brand experience with storytelling, content, messaging and strategy so that their marketing actually works and converts.

In this episode of the Build That Business podcast, we cover:

How to show up in your business and brand to connect with and gain trust with your ideal customer.
How to prepare for a personal brand photoshoot. What to wear, what to bring, how often to do a branding shoot. We’ve got you covered!
Why personal branding is so much more than a logo design.
The importance of storytelling in your business.
Why personal branding is not just for influencers. We ALL need to show our face in our business.

I’ll also dive into how I used personal branding to build, grow and scale my wedding stationery business. Sounds pretty fun right? Let’s dive in!

Becca’s Story – How focusing on her Personal Brand transformed her business

“I’m based in the greater Seattle area and I’ve been a full time photographer since 2006. I did weddings for a little over 12 years and in 2016 or so I started shifting away from wedding photography, because I have kids and I wanted to see them, and I didn’t see them at all in the summertime, as a wedding photographer.

I had built a really successful wedding photography business, but I constantly dealt with people that were like, ‘what’s your price, I want the lowest price’, and then I’d be ghosted by them. I didn’t understand what was going on and why this keeps happening to me. I decided to dive into understanding marketing and psychology of decisions and all of this stuff that actually leads quite a bit into branding.

And I realized that my clients love me and they think that the experience is amazing. But I was struggling with getting the people in the first place to actually say yes to hiring me because I wasn’t the cheapest option.

So I decided, you know what, I’m gonna put more of myself out there. I’m going to put more of my face on my website. I’m going to talk more about the experience. I’m going to give my perspective instead of just being like ‘here’s some pretty pictures, would you hire me?’ Because the pretty pictures aren’t working. Everyone’s got pretty pictures as a wedding photographer. So that’s like the lowest common denominator.

And this literally transformed my business. I started talking about, “I’m a little bit Goofy, and I love Oreos, and I have mismatched socks.”

I also explained that I had a very specific perspective about the experience of your wedding. It doesn’t have to be like this perfectly coordinated thing. It’s those moments in between that are so magical.

I went from people being like, what’s your price? I want the lowest price, I didn’t hire you because you weren’t the lowest price type of interactions in my inbox to people being like, “Oh my god, Becca, I also love Oreos. I have to hire you.”