Custom, professional photos will elevate your brand, communicate clearly with your customers, and help take your already incredible business to the next level! So how do you make sure you have a successful shoot? From working with clients, I have learned that successful shoots all have a handful of things in common, and I’ve developed my process for brand shoots to include the following steps:

Determine what success looks like

What do you want to get out of this shoot? How many different types of images do you need? What will make it successful in your mind? Stephen Covey taught us that one of the habits of successful people is to “Begin With the End in Mind” and it’s so true! Know what you want to get out of it before you go into it. Have a vision and be ready to express that clearly.

Hire the right photographer

In order to hire the right photographer, you must take a few things into account. First, do they have experience shooting brands? Do they know what they’re doing with their camera? Have you looked at their work and like what you see? Second, do you like them? Do they have a personality you know you can work with? Collaboration and communication is a key factor in a successful brand shoot and personalities play a role in that! You can follow along on their social media, and then book a consultation with them to get to know them better.

Make a plan

How many outfits are you going to wear? What locations will you go to? Work with your photographer to come up with a game plan. Showing up unprepared and just winging it will get you images, but are they the images you need? With a plan, you will get more images that are on-brand, and that actually elevate your business and speak to your ideal customers.

Be Prepared

Pack anything you need to the day before. Send anything you need to ship ahead of time so there is wiggle room if something gets held up in shipping. Make sure you fill out anything your photographer sends you ahead of time and take the time to really think about your brand and your messaging.  The better the information your photographer has, the better your photos will be!

Use those images!

Your shoot is over, your images have been edited and delivered. Now what? Use those images! Of course you’ll use them for social media, and product listings. But there are many other ways to use these on-brand, custom images, from product packaging, to newsletter footers, to website headers. For more ideas on where to use your images, see my blog post: Where to use brand photos.

For IG use, I highly recommend using a scheduler. You can simply upload your entire shoot into your scheduler, then each month plan out the ones you’ll use. I currently love and use Tailwind (get a month free with this link). I love Tailwind because it will also post to Facebook, and I already use it for Pinterest (it’s amazing at Pinterest!). In the past I have used Planoly (they have a free basic account option), and hear good things about Plann, too.

Book a consultation for your next brand session here: