Angie McPherson is a wedding and personal branding photographer based in Virginia. Before she started Angie McPherson Photography she waa s marketing manager at a concert venue. She was working in the marketing department spending hundreds of thousands of other people’s dollars to put butts in seats, as they say.

Behind the Brand and Plan of Angie McPherson Photography

So when went to create Angie McPherson Photography, a lot of the things she’d learned through her education and working experience came into play for her business. She went from having $100,000 in the budget to promote a Beyonce concert, to $0 on her own. She had to really transform some things and lean upon personal branding side. She didn’t have to spend so much money reaching people, but using her personality and photos to reach people.

Finding Your Ideal Client

In her marketing position, she had a venue where thousands of different shows would come through from a circus to a concert, a comedy show, and we had to make sure that our, that our messaging attracted those people. So we would survey those people. If we had Beyonce coming through, we would survey those people. What type of music do you listen to? To what type of shows do you watch? And so we know when we started marketing, this is the type of thing, so they need to be targeting because these are the type of people that like any other type of entry. So for her business, she had a Facebook group for her brides and she posted there.

She really wanted to make sure that she was speaking her ideal client. She would ask for her past clients to fill out a survey. And so the survey was just like ‘who’s your celebrity crush?’ ‘What TV shows are you watching?’ ‘What do you like to do on weekends?’ And I made it a Facebook thread [inside a private group] so they could engage with each other. Because once you log into a survey you just kind of hinder yourself. But I wanted people to copy or to comment on others. It’s just like, it’s like those boards in the police department where they’re like trying to find the suspect and all the lines are crossing and stuff.

And so now when Angie’s creating Facebook ads she knows exactly what to target, what celebrities, what shows what, what stores, where they grocery shop. But in her messaging, she’s talking about these specific things. Even if she can’t relate, even if she knows she wants to talk about TV — ‘it’s fall, premiere week, what TV shows are you watching’ And she knows that some people are going to say certain shows. It’s just finding those little nuggets of comparisons and really diving into that to connect with your audience on a deeper level.

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