Featured Personal Branding Session with Meadow Merry

So maybe you’ve heard the term “Personal Branding” and wondered, what exactly does that even mean?

To put it in a nutshell, the days of just handing out a glossy business card are over! With the advent of social media profiles, and websites, business owners have had to up their game a few notches to catch the attention of prospective clients. Personal branding is about having a solidly clear vision on what your company represents, your values, your vision and knowing how you want your followers to perceive you. Achieving a solid personal brand requires CONSISTENCY! Maintaining a consistent message across all of your social media platforms is a required step towards building trust with your clients; you can confuse people if your message runs in different directions or is changing all of the time!

One step towards developing a consistent look and feel for your brand, once you are clear on your message and values is to hire a design team that can help you achieve your vision. A dream design team will consist of a web designer, a graphic designer and a skilled photographer, all of which are working together to coordinate your brand. Business owners who are just starting out will often try the “do it yourself” method of popping up a WIX, or Squarespace account with some of their best photos that their friends took of them and pray for the best. About a year or so later, they’ll contact me when they realize that they need an actual professional headshot for a big conference they’re about to attend, or a large corporate job. I’ll take the headshots, and then they’ll contact me again when they see a copycat business pop up in town and have the same stock photos on their website! Yes, this happens to my clients, and is yet another testament to the importance of developing unique content that reflects your business values. This is where personal branding photography comes into play! By creating imagery that is personally customized to your business values, you eliminate the problem of looking cookie cutter, and you STAND OUT from your competition! When your clients see that you’re investing in creating a cohesive brand, complete with consistent high-quality photographic imagery, your legitimacy SKY ROCKETS to the limitless cosmos and you’ll start attracting those high end clients that you dream of.

Here is a case example. I received a phone call from Business Coach, Meadow Biondolillo, from MeadowMerry.com. She was interested in working with me to create a collection of images that would tell the story of her business. She had very clear key words that represented her brand, but no idea what that would “look like” visually. The words she gave me were: confidence, success , freedom, and inspired action. I came up with a very clear vision of how that would look in conjunction with her business coaching services. I spent some time getting to understand her mission, learn her values, her personality, and we planned a photo session for the following week.

We started the day outdoors~ and it was COLD!! About 14 degrees to be exact! Meadow is an adventurous soul with a whole lot of straight talk mixed in. This is a lady who isn’t afraid to take on anything, and that needed to be reflected in the images.

Helping women entrepreneurs own their self-confidence is also part of her mission statement. Exuding her own self confidence was paramount. Truth be told, even the most amazing women who SCREAAAM self-confidence can become camera shy during their photo sessions (myself included).  I mean it’s a camera, and it’s pointing at YOU…and no matter how bright your inner star is shining, it can be a seriously awkward thing to work through initially. Despite all of this, we nailed these portraits! I mean look at this woman, she is gorgeous, and she’s owning it!!!

Freedom~ Personal freedom to live the life of your dreams, is another important mission in her business model. She teaches women business owners to how to free themselves from their own personal limitations. So here is Meadow owning her namesake and dancing freely in a meadow, because this girl knows how to ENJOY LIFE!

Success! What does success look like to you? What does it feel like? These are things we thought through together. For Meadow, wearing her beloved black dress gets her feeling like a million bucks, and hanging out in a classy hotel lobby with said fancy dress was the perfect location to communicate her success. This is a woman who can dance freely in an open field and slay a seriously amazing dress!~ I’d say thats pretty successful!

Inspired action~ Action is fire, and it’s not so surprising that RED is a favorite color of Meadow’s. That, combined with her bold approach to life, called for vibrant splashes of color all over her website. How much fun are we having here!? Seriously so much fun!

These are just a few examples from the image library that I created for her to work from, but it gives you an idea of what is possible. Personal branding photography is an investment that can reap monumental rewards for your business and help the rest of your design team with keeping your website and social media accounts consistent. I work in conjunction with a number of local web and graphic designers- together we have helped many local entrepreneurs create stand-out content and thus gain the trust of their clients. If you’d like to set up a personal consultation call to discuss the possibilities for your creative business, I’d love to learn more about your goals and visions.