Marketing Monday: Knowing and Caring About Your Customers

© Michail Petrov

Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Damon Richards

Intro by Skip Cohen

Looking through the SCU archives, I came across this post from four years ago by my good buddy, Scott Bourne. It's a short read loaded with a lot to think about and perfect to kick off the week.

Your greatest marketing tool is relationship building. Advertising, publicity, promotions, community involvement, a great skill set, etc. all play important roles. However, when it comes down to pure success, it's the relationship you build with your clients and target audience.

To Scott's point about caring about your customers - you can't truly care about them if you don't know them! All the answers on how to build a successful business are out there - you just need to listen to your target audience and understand what's most important to them!

---

by Scott Bourne

If you want to sell photography (or anything else) you should spend more time caring about what your customers care about and less about everything else. 

Your customers don't care what your Klout score is, which of your lenses is the sharpest or which brand you shoot with. Your customers care about having photographs that make them (and their families) look good. That's it. That's all.

The online camera forums are full of discussions about photography but, not the people who buy photography. Want to stand out? Want to get ahead of your peers, including those with nicer gear and more experience than you? Simply start caring about your customers. Put all your focus (pun intended) on them and their needs. This is NOT about you. This IS about them. The sooner you realize that - the sooner you'll start to thrive as a professional photographer.

Let the nerds in the photo forums duke it out about which lens is sharper. You go out and make your customers happy by paying attention to their needs and making them look their best. You'll win every time.