LEARN ABOUT WORK PLAY BRANDING HERE
Today we’re talking about a topic that nearly gave me hives for the first 7 years of my online business: BRAND PHOTOS. Well, branding in general. Which is a really broad and vague term but is essentially how your business looks and feels. The visuals.
The colors, fonts, logos, photos, videos, layout of your website, if you’re on social media that includes your social media feed. All of it. Branding. And if you’re like me you have a strong preference on what you DON’T like but it’s hard to articulate what you DO like.
Why You Need to Think About Branding Your Wellness Business
Honestly, this keeps so many health and wellness business owners stuck because they don’t feel like their brand looks professional or “right” and they don’t want to promote it to the world until it does. I see the error of that thinking but I also get it. I don’t want guests coming over to my house when it’s not clean and decorated and inviting, nor do I want virtual guests popping into my website when it’s feeling cluttered and messy.
When your brand isn’t well thought out, meaning it’s a little of this and a little of that, the result is like a college apartment where all the furniture is hand-me-downs collected from family members and nothing goes together. It gets the job done but it feels “off”. Best news of the day? You can make a lot of money with a brand that feels “off.” You really can. So don’t make this a problem if it’s not a problem right now.
But know there are some tweaks you can make to your brand visuals to really uplevel them either DIY or using a professional service like the one I’m going to tell you about today to make everything look more polished immediately.
First of all, show your face. You sell more and your people feel more connected to you when they see your face. If I go to your website and the first thing I see is a stock photo of an avocado or a lemon instead of your face, that’s a problem. Fix it by doing a DIY photo shoot immediately. Even not-the-best photos of you are better than no photos of you, and you can very inexpensively hire someone on Upwork.com or Fiverr.com to edit your photos and take off the background and put it on a solid color banner or something if needed.
So if you don’t know how to do that, hire someone for $5 or $10 to take 3-5 photos of you and make them useable for what you need and check it off the list. Secondly, commit to 1-2 brand colors and 1-2 fonts maximum if you’re DIYing your branding. Any more than that and your stuff starts to look like that college apartment because if you aren’t a graphic designer you probably don’t know how to make an eclectic mix look good together. I sure don’t.
To prevent the flea market branding look, pick one heading font and one body font that’s really easy to read, you can look on Pinterest for font pairings that look great together to get ideas for this, and commit. Then do the same Pinterest search for brand color palettes and decide. Boom. Done. Now these are the only colors and fonts you use and everything matches and looks cohesive. In the first 3-4 years of my business I didn’t do a great job of this because the tech wasn’t as easy to edit photos and make them look the way I wanted combined with the belief I had that I had to DIY everything.
I didn’t have anyone telling me “save yourself time and spend a little bit of money instead.” I wish I had had that person. So I’ll be that voice for you, my friend. What I did years 4-7 is have photos taken 3 separate times and I used those photos to death. The first brand shoot I did I didn’t give the photographer much direction and hoped she knew what she was doing. The results were mediocre but I used the 2-5 favorite photos from that shoot on my website for years and made hundreds of thousands of dollars. The second photo shoot I did in 2021 was in preparation of launching The Profitable Nutritionist® Podcast and I had a better idea of what shots I needed to get and what I wanted the aesthetic to look like.
The photographer I hired took me through a really comprehensive intake before the shoot where I created a Pinterest board for her with things I liked and inspiration, and she created the shot list and executed. I loved those photos and they have lived on my website for 2.5 years and also made over a million dollars. What I’m trying to say is you’ve gotta get your face on your website and anywhere else you’re showing up online.
Do it imperfectly, do it yourself, do it with a professional photographer but just do it. You’ll be so grateful that you did, and you can continually uplevel those photos over time so don’t stress about them not being perfect. Instead of messing around in Canva every week making social media graphics or website banner images you can hire a graphic designer on Upwork to put together your existing photos and assets like I just recommended or you can hire an all-in-one photography and branding company like I recently did that will do all of it for you and completely blow your mind.
Either way, stop doing this yourself. Even if you can, you shouldn’t. Because your time and energy is so much better spent serving your clients, networking with potential clients and referral partners, and doing the things in your business that ONLY you can do.
At the end of last year I took my own advice to uplevel the branding here at The Profitable Nutritionist and instead of piecing together graphic design from one person, and photography from another person, and what to wear in these photos from yet another person… I opted for an all-in-one solution called Work Play Branding. And it was one of the best investments I’ve ever made in my business in the last 7+ years.
LEARN ABOUT WORK PLAY BRANDING HERE
What Is Work Play Branding?
To steal copy directly from Work Play’s website, it’s “the missing piece you didn’t know existed.” I echo this sentiment 1000%. Work Play Branding is an all-in-one branding and photography company that plugs you as the business owner into their tried and true method for producing beautiful, branded and high-converting visuals for your business so you can focus on what YOU do best and stop messing around in Canva.
I heard about Work Play through a friend of mine that was using them and decided to check them out…and I’m so glad I did. Instead of ME having to figure out what fonts, colors, photos, outfits, backgrounds or videos would look good for my brand visuals, Work Play Branding did it all for me and it was honestly one of the most enjoyable and simple processes I’ve ever experienced as the business owner.
Work Play Branding is a team of specialized personal brand photographers and content creators that fly to you, execute an efficient and fun quarterly photo shoot that produces 600-1000 photos each time, and then curates 365 days of branded and beautiful content using those updated photos and gorgeous, branded graphics in your social media feeds free of charge. See video below of what this looks like.
Why Did I Decide To Hire Them And How Does Their Process Work?
When you hire Work Play Branding, you get complete branding for your business if you don’t have it already. That means the colors, the fonts, everything.
The professional designers at Work Play have a ninja onboarding process where you download what you like and don’t like from your brain into their intake forms and they create your brand board.
If you already have these assets, you’ll skip this step. But I recommend letting the WPB team polish everything up for you so it’s uber professional and cohesive. The time investment for this part of the process is roughly 1-2 days.
Next you schedule your first brand photo shoot with their content team and this is where your mind will really be blown. Since your contract with Work Play is for a one year term, you’ll now be thinking in terms of quarterly brand refreshes and photo shoots. Quarterly photo shoot?! Yes, my friend. And you’re going to be so glad about this part because you’re not putting all the pressure for every single photo you need in one shoot and then kicking yourself when you miss something.
Instead, the WPB team is going to create a photo shoot experience for you based on what you uncovered in the onboarding process that you need. Their trained photographers will fly to you anywhere in North America, South America or Europe so your physical location doesn’t matter. In fact, you can meet your photographer on site at a destination like I have done and the Work Play Branding team will find AirBnb rental options within your budget and brand aesthetic to do the photos in.
I don’t know about you but I do not want to spend one minute of my life planning the location or logistics of a photo shoot. That is not why I got into business.
In fact, the pressure of that had me putting off updated brand photos for years in my business. That’s ultimately why I wanted to hire Work Play Branding for a year to test out their process.
My friend that referred me told me it’s completely seamless – their content planning team scouts locations for one long day of shooting every quarter (10am-5pm) based on the types of shots needed and all I have to do is show up with 10-15 outfits and my hair and makeup done ready to go.
I decided to hire the in house stylist at Work Play to plan my outfits for the first shoot that I did which was a great decision. (Note: This was at an added cost and was not included in the one year contract.) She took my brand guidelines created and solidified by their designers and compared it to the brand shoot agenda the content planning team had created and figured out exactly what I needed to wear in each shot.
She and I met a few times to go through what was already in my closet and what new items I needed, and she sent me a fully linked shopping list where I just had to click and purchase. Not only did I get great clothes to wear in the shoot, I upgraded my wardrobe with some basics that were missing and it was kind of a two birds with one stone situation without hiring a personal stylist.
If you don’t hire a stylist for your brand photo shoot, stick to bright solid color clothing in or close to your brand colors if possible. Those options will pop visually in your photos so much more than neutrals or distracting prints. Think bright blazer or bright, collared shirt with jeans versus a plain black sweater. When I showed up to my first quarterly brand photo shoot in Charleston, South Carolina I had flown there with two suitcases of clothes and about 100 pairs of shoes. I was ready.
The really great thing about this setup was that I was already planning to travel to Charleston for an event so I just flew in one day early and planned my photo shoot for that day. The Work Play content team had already scouted 3 great AirBnb options that fit my brand “look” and would be great for photos so I chose the one I liked best and booked it. They also arranged for the (very inexpensive Jetblue) flight and accommodations of my photographer who came in and out of town on the same day to save costs.
Note: If your photographer is traveling to you, you pay their travel costs but their booking team somehow keeps those very minimal. I was amazed. The day of the shoot we quickly went through every location in the AirBnb and off-site including every outfit change by following the detailed schedule and shot list provided by the content team in advance. It was incredibly efficient and my photographer was simultaneously taking B-roll video as well as thousands of photos. We had so much fun.
By the end of the shoot day I was exhausted but excited because I knew there were going to be so many fresh photos for my team to use on our new website, for rebranding the podcast, and anywhere else we wanted to use them.
Because of how many outfit changes and different settings we did it looked like the photos were all taken at different times and places. Less than a week after the shoot I had the edited and beautiful photos back for review with about 1200 to choose from. I spent an hour going through and choosing a few hundred favorites which my team then started putting to work on some of our marketing materials while the Work Play Branding team created an entire quarter of social media posts.
Since my business is not on Facebook or Instagram, this part of the process wasn’t a huge selling point to me but pay attention if you ARE actively creating any content on social media: Work Play Branding will take your branded photos and (optional) branded graphics created by their team and schedule them on your social media feed free of charge.
Your only commitment for that process is to approve the feed and add your captions before they do final scheduling each month. brain actually explodes I wanted to test that process so I could give you an honest review of the experience so I had the content team plan out an entire quarter of posts for my LinkedIn feed and it blew my mind.
Not only was this a role I wouldn’t have to hire for in the future, I now had hundreds of the highest converting images possible at my disposal: of MY FACE. Remember, you need to show your face as much as possible. We’re humans and we’re programmed to look at other humans’ faces. We read expressions, we’re curious about what they’re doing and thinking and we cannot help but stop the scroll to check out a face.
So if you are on social media, get your face in your posts. Asap. You’ll see so much higher engagement and the algorithm will reward you for that scroll stopping by showing your content to more people. I know this has been the case with my experimental LinkedIn content that has now been posted for 3 months and mostly includes my face in every post.
When I choose to post an infographic or other type of graphic which Work Play has created, even though they’re beautiful they don’t get anywhere near the engagement that posts with my face do. Good thing I have hundreds to choose from now, because I would never have entertained posting content to any social media platform if I had to scramble every week to figure out what would look good or get my audience’s attention. No one has time for that. And although I will soon be outsourcing the LinkedIn posting to someone on my team very soon with me just batch-writing the captions once a month, I know it will all look cohesive and professional because every quarter we’re generating hundreds more photo options. That takes so much pressure off trying to get every photo shoot perfect. Huge sigh of relief. Anything we miss this quarter we can do at the next one.
Also noteworthy is you don’t have to do photo shoots quarterly if there’s a different cadence you want to use. You can schedule your 4 shoots at any time during the year. Next week I’m doing my second shoot at a live event I’m hosing in Miami with some of my clients. I wanted to have photos of me teaching, presenting, and workshopping with my actual clients so my photographer is flying in and taking photos and B-roll video for two full days including one on one photos of me AND bonus mini-branding sessions with each of my clients. (Shameless plug for The Profitable Nutritionist® Program and The Mastermind – clients in both of those programs get private invitations for retreats and workshops that you will never hear about if you aren’t inside so get in there.)
LEARN ABOUT WORK PLAY BRANDING HERE
What The Results Have Been So Far And Would I Recommend Using Work Play Branding?
I’m only 3 months into my 12 month contract with Work Play, but it’s been phenomenal and I would absolutely recommend it for a certain type of person.
At the time I’m doing this review the investment is $497 a month for 12 months to get started with Work Play Branding. That investment includes your brand creation or revision, 4 quarterly photo shoots with thousands of edited, branded photos that you retain all the rights to, along with 365 days of curated and beautifully branded social media posts created by expert designers in your exact brand aesthetic.
The person I would recommend this service to is a business owner that knows they will make that $6000 investment back in the next year by upleveling their brand visuals. Plain and simple. I sell a $3000 program so it was a very quick “Hell Yes” for me to invest with Work Play when I asked myself if I believed I would sign 2 extra students in the next 12 months because of the visual assets they were going to create. It was a no brainer decision.
If you’re not sure you’ll be making more offers or reaching more ideal clients or customers as a direct result of upleveling your branding and having more photos to use in your marketing, I would say skip it for now. I made well over $1M without having an endless supply of beautifully branded marketing assets, so I know it’s not necessary.
With that being said, had I known about Work Play Branding sooner I would have jumped at the opportunity to polish up my brand visuals a long time ago.
If you’re going to DIY your branding for now, remember to show your face as much as possible and limit yourself to 1-2 brand colors and 1-2 fonts maximum so your stuff doesn’t look like that cluttered college apartment, ok?
