The Ownership Asset: Most creative business owners default to identical self-promotion strategies, turning their digital presence into an interchangeable sea of portfolios and triggering inevitable price wars.
- In this session, we dissect the psychology of high-stakes positioning to reveal how to pull your business out of the race to the bottom.
- We examine the absolute reality of consumer authenticity and what it actually takes to make a corporate buyer choose you over a cheaper competitor.
- Tom breaks down how top-tier professionals use specialised authority and strategic relationships to stand out from the crowd. We look at how a headshot photography specialist successfully dominated a regional territory by creating unique brand assets instead of just relying on standard social media feeds.
- You’ll also learn the tactical scheduling tricks that catch high-end corporate clients exactly when they are in a buying mindset.
- Finally, we tackle the massive shift in how modern firms use AI and data to streamline their operations. Tom shares how tracking simple metrics can transform your backend, allowing you to stop chasing single transactions and start engineering an inbound lead machine that attracts premium brand photography clients on your own terms.
00:01.40
Sam Hollis
Hello listeners, welcome to the Commercial Photography Podcast and this week I have with me Tom Stansfield, marketer extraordinaire, man of a million ideas in 10 seconds. Hi Tom, welcome to the podcast.
00:15.45
Tom Stansfield
Hi Sam, great to be here. Thanks for the invite
00:18.19
Sam Hollis
That’s right and and we’ve known each other I think Tom for hate to say a long time now haven’t no we and and regularly chatting about marketing and
00:23.44
Tom Stansfield
invite.
00:27.00
Sam Hollis
So we’re going to dig into your expert advice um for our photographer listeners.
00:32.08
Tom Stansfield
Let’s do that.
00:33.37
Sam Hollis
Perfect. So me and Tom were chatting ideas for the show and Tom said what he really thought would be interesting to talk about is positioning and photographers positioning themselves. So my question straight away is, can you define positioning? What do we mean by positioning?
00:48.18
Tom Stansfield
Yeah, no problem whatsoever. So um the way that I see things as ah as a generalist marketer, so we deal with all sorts of different marketing from implementation of systems, websites, you you you name it. But the one thing that we see is that, and it’s not specific to photography in general, but that most photographers will market themselves um and in almost identical ways, and which makes competing on price almost inevitable.
01:13.75
Tom Stansfield
So from a positioning perspective, they’d written they need to stand out.
01:13.77
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
01:17.24
Tom Stansfield
but If somebody’s going to a photographer to purchase their services, they don’t know what the difference in different photography styles might be before they’ve done either deep research or unless it’s perfectly clear when they come to make that purchase decision.
01:30.65
Tom Stansfield
So the the positioning piece basically means that people need to stand out to be able to be um purchased from.
01:37.72
Sam Hollis
That makes sense. Because that’s interesting. We talk about that a lot on the show. The fact, you know, a lot of photographers end up mixed at the bottom competing on price and you need to move away from that. And so you’re straight away going to say the big way to do that is to be different and not just your website is the same as everybody else is. And it’s all much of a muchness.
01:57.40
Tom Stansfield
Yeah, there was a statistic, Sam, that was released, and I will find it by the end of the podcast, I’m sure. um But but it it said that almost 90% of consumers say that authenticity is one of the key factors that they use when when deciding which brands to purchase from.
02:12.44
Sam Hollis
Okay, so we…
02:13.02
Tom Stansfield
So that authenticity foot fits into that positioning piece really nicely.
02:16.57
Sam Hollis
Right, so it’s got to be, you’ve got to stand out and you’ve got to be authentic. um But a photographer kind of, and I think being authentic a photographer doesn’t mean I love photography and I got a camera when I was 12 because that’s the same on the about page of every single other photographer.
02:30.83
Sam Hollis
It’s, it’s yeah, it’s that i So how do you get that authenticity with that unique positioning?
02:31.18
Tom Stansfield
right.
02:37.86
Tom Stansfield
It’s a tough one.
02:38.26
Sam Hollis
hey
02:38.50
Tom Stansfield
And I don’t know. I don’t know. Everybody will have their own way of being authentic, right?
02:41.98
Sam Hollis
Yes, of course.
02:42.78
Tom Stansfield
and My philosophy is just like, what can you do to stand out? So when I launched and one of our our marketing agencies, Lincolnshire Marketing, I had no audience here in Lincolnshire.
02:53.43
Tom Stansfield
um So my view was, how do I get in front of as many people as I possibly can and start to build relationships? And I did that by going to a photographer who had a better black book than I did.
03:04.98
Tom Stansfield
And that but that photographer was present on social media all the time. They were showing that they’ve got relationships with all these people. And that, to me, built trust. So that was there was a bit of authenticity there that made made me make a decision to bring them in on a project that we were working on.
03:14.14
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
03:19.90
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
03:20.44
Tom Stansfield
but That’s one way you could do it.
03:21.27
Sam Hollis
ah that not Is that Toby?
03:24.06
Tom Stansfield
It wasn’t Toby. It was a guy called David Harrison.
03:25.43
Sam Hollis
Okay. Oh, David Housen. Yeah, yeah. He’s been on the show chatting about, um he’s been on the show chatting about safaris if people want to listen back quite a while back.
03:33.75
Tom Stansfield
Yeah, so date David was doing commercial photography at the time.
03:33.84
Sam Hollis
In fact, was talking to him yesterday about that.
03:38.78
Tom Stansfield
And so we brought him in on a number of projects. We also use Toby. And there’s another photographer does the…
03:42.84
Sam Hollis
So I’m sorry, just for listeners, Toby’s headshot photographer. And yeah, also he’s done a couple of shows as well. Have a listen to them.
03:48.99
Tom Stansfield
Yeah, amazing. And then there’s another photographer here in Lincoln that we use for some projects. And it depends exactly what we’re looking for or what the client is looking for. But Chris Vaughan, who does the photography for Lincoln City Football Club.
04:00.38
Sam Hollis
Okay, cool.
04:01.08
Tom Stansfield
So we bring him him in on some projects, but all of those are authentic. They’ve each got their own strengths and we we know exactly what that looks like because of the way that they market themselves.
04:10.52
Sam Hollis
Okay, and so they kind of stood out to you, you could kind of see them standing out from the crowd?
04:15.64
Tom Stansfield
Yeah, so if you look at Chris, we know that chris’s service like Chris is trusted by some of the biggest brands in Lincolnshire, like Lincoln Big, he works on all of the the big awards dues.
04:21.21
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
04:24.12
Tom Stansfield
So it’s easy decision for us to bring him in on our awards that we run. um We also know that with Chris, we’re going to get photographs on the night that we can post straight onto social media. So speed and and delivery of that service is fantastic for us. and With Toby, Toby’s got a dedicated studio in Lincoln. So if we want people to have headshots done, we send them to Toby, they get done. And we know that the quality of the photos are always fantastic.
04:48.28
Sam Hollis
Perfect. And then you also said you were working with them because of their online presence, because they were everywhere. So, I mean, did that help you? And is that something photographers could do in reverse, try and find people they want to work with who are already established, already got an earth already authentic and have an authority that they can kind of almost pick up on there pick up on their branding with and kind of, you know, grow, use them to help them grow?
05:11.03
Tom Stansfield
Yeah, absolutely. So there’s um there’s ah a quote, and again, this will be a theme for the podcast, I think. I can’t remember who said it or I can’t remember where where the source came from. But there’s a quote that says, you are the sum of the five people you most closely surround yourself with.
05:23.10
Tom Stansfield
And so i so when I launched and and I went to David Harrison, I said,
05:23.10
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
05:27.22
Tom Stansfield
Ultimately, he he’s got a better network than I have, but I’ve got some ideas that I’d like to share and I’ve got some ideas I’d like to bring him in on. So commercially, it was going to work for him. it was going to make sense. and And I wanted to own an asset to create an asset.
05:35.48
Sam Hollis
yeah
05:38.18
Tom Stansfield
And that’s exactly what we did. I think I’ve gone slightly off piece on your question you don’t mind.
05:41.74
Sam Hollis
That’s right.
05:42.46
Tom Stansfield
i
05:42.50
Sam Hollis
don’t know.
05:43.77
Tom Stansfield
But yes, standing out and being being authentic, there’s a few things that people can do. So obviously being present and being visible is one of the is one of the easiest what things. And certainly it shouldn’t be particularly difficult for a yeah for a photographer to be visible.
05:57.85
Tom Stansfield
They’ve got the ability to ah to capture themselves, so to speak, um and then creating those assets, owning those assets, and then creating an audience.
06:02.52
Sam Hollis
They do. If I can jump in that. So online, sorry, online visibility. Yeah. I think the only thing is though, in like in person event visibility, sometimes a photographer’s job, and then they end up doing this at other events, is to go into the background.
06:17.89
Sam Hollis
You know, they’re doing the event photography. So in some ways, the photographer’s native mode is to be slightly in the background. yeah And sometimes ah events cannot be against them because they’re trying to also promote their business.
06:27.97
Sam Hollis
Maybe they’re there’re just to do that, but their kind of natural thing is, oh, I’ll wear black and white.
06:33.51
Tom Stansfield
It’s the default, isn’t it? But ah but there’s there’s ways that they can still capture themselves.
06:35.09
Sam Hollis
That’s it.
06:38.19
Tom Stansfield
So um with David Harrison, for example, one thing we did was when he was doing a shoot for some of our team, it would have been… maybe three years ago, four years ago now, um we just got somebody to take some photographs of him.
06:47.51
Sam Hollis
Okay. Okay.
06:51.48
Tom Stansfield
So we were adding value to the partnership.
06:51.83
Sam Hollis
Yeah. Okay.
06:53.78
Tom Stansfield
um
06:53.78
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
06:54.71
Tom Stansfield
And then we gave him those photos that he could then use of him behind the camera taking photos. So doing what he do but does best. But it also gave people an opportunity to see what his client journey looks like his client experience looks like.
07:06.49
Tom Stansfield
um So there are ways and means around it, but ultimately we ought to be posting about our business, about what we do, about the people that we serve all the time.
07:06.74
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
07:09.14
Sam Hollis
Okay, perfect.
07:14.53
Tom Stansfield
And and these are ways that we will be able to stand out.
07:15.26
Sam Hollis
Yeah. Okay, perfect. And then talking about posting as well. um So what’s your thoughts about that? Because I think a lot of photographers instantly go to Instagram, but I always wonder if they’re just really talking to more photographers.
07:29.69
Tom Stansfield
ah Yeah, perhaps. I guess it depends on the audience that they’re building, right? So it used to be the case on Instagram that if you follow two people, one of them typically would follow you back.
07:33.28
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
07:37.01
Tom Stansfield
That doesn’t work anymore. And the algorithm changes all the time. Instead, what I would do is I would engage with the businesses that you want to work with. So you find like a buyer persona, we call it a brand avatar in marketing.
07:48.77
Tom Stansfield
You find the sort of business that you want to work with, and then you start to follow their content, and then you’ll comment on it and you’ll engage with it. um And then they’ll start to see you and then there’s a ah marketing strategy called the six touch strategy, which basically suggests that for somebody to know you, like you and trust you enough to part with their hard earned cash on your product or service, they need to have been exposed to your brand six times.
08:09.85
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
08:12.34
Sam Hollis
Only six. I mean, we get so everyone who comes on has their own number, don’t they? But six, six is quite a low one.
08:16.28
Tom Stansfield
Yeah.
08:17.42
Sam Hollis
So that’s interesting.
08:18.46
Tom Stansfield
I think I think it depends on those touches, right? Those two points.
08:20.95
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
08:21.66
Tom Stansfield
So if we talk about social media, likelihood is you’ll need more than six touches. And American marketeers suggest, and like you, I’ve seen lots of different stats on this.
08:25.34
Sam Hollis
OK.
08:29.02
Tom Stansfield
I’ve seen stats where it suggests it could be as as many as 20 touches.
08:32.12
Sam Hollis
Yeah. Wow.
08:33.24
Tom Stansfield
um but it happens and and and it’s it’s just psychology basically so we just need to have been exposed to that brand to be able to trust it i bought a new rucksack a travel rucksack the other day on instagram based on the fact that this ad kept popping up and i must have seen it six times and i thought you know what i now trust this brand i went and i did what everybody else did i looked i looked at the um the social proof so i went and checked out their reviews i looked at their website
08:37.24
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
08:43.60
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
08:48.60
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
08:58.01
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
08:58.26
Tom Stansfield
And then I made a purchase decision. But yeah, we need to be able to be present for that. And on Instagram, yeah, the default, that’s the default for most photographers. I’d be posting organically. I’d be engaging organically.
09:09.50
Tom Stansfield
But if you’re a commercial photographer, LinkedIn is obviously going to be the platform that you want to start looking at.
09:14.17
Sam Hollis
yeah
09:14.97
Tom Stansfield
um If you’ve got the time, there are platforms out there like Hootsuite or Buffer these days, which enable us to schedule our content out across multiple social media platforms. And typically speaking, when we’re talking about photography, we might be showing off or showcasing some of our work, in which case we can schedule it across multiple platforms.
09:32.82
Sam Hollis
Okay.
09:33.32
Tom Stansfield
It’s a no-brainer.
09:33.50
Sam Hollis
So you you don’t think you need, if it’s just images, it’s not too much of an issue kind of tailoring it for the different audience in the different platforms.
09:40.70
Tom Stansfield
Absolutely. And we’ve got AI at our fingertips, right? So we can then start to create a a specific post for specific platforms.
09:43.29
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
09:48.28
Tom Stansfield
And then you’ve got considerations like we use a platform for called Metrical for our clients. It’s a scheduling tool, much like Buffer or or Hoopsuite, but it tells us the exact time that we need to be posting out to be able to reach the audience on the specific channels.
09:54.84
Sam Hollis
Yeah. Yeah.
10:01.43
Sam Hollis
Okay.
10:01.56
Tom Stansfield
So…
10:02.10
Sam Hollis
That’s interesting.
10:02.74
Tom Stansfield
If we had a photography client, it might say that LinkedIn, the best time to post out is at 11 o’clock and the best day is a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. It might say that Instagram, the best time is between five and seven at night as people are finishing work, getting home and having the tea.
10:09.10
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
10:14.88
Tom Stansfield
like these These are things that we we ought to be considering.
10:15.43
Sam Hollis
Okay.
10:17.76
Tom Stansfield
But all of these things will help us get in front of our ideal audience as we as we progress.
10:21.72
Sam Hollis
Yeah. Okay. and then so And then it’s not just images, is it? Because if we’re doing images, like we’ve said, for most people, if the photographers are good, and most of them are, there’s the odd exception, but most photographers are good if they’re just posting images. Let’s be honest, Joe Public or people who need their services can’t tell the slight subtle differences in quality between the photographers.
10:41.56
Sam Hollis
So what else do they need to be talking about doing apart from putting the photos there?
10:41.85
Tom Stansfield
Absolutely. Yeah, good photography is no longer enough to stand out, is it? Everybody is a good photographer. um app So what what else do you need to doing?
10:52.05
Sam Hollis
Most people. right
10:54.34
Tom Stansfield
Most of your audience, are absolutely.
10:54.36
Sam Hollis
Yeah. Yeah.
10:56.14
Tom Stansfield
and Let’s use Toby as an example. So Toby Lee, headshot photography, he did photography work with actors down in London. He was doing headshots and then he moved up north back back to Lincoln where his family are from, which is where we re-engaged.
11:04.64
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
11:11.00
Tom Stansfield
um And ah he said that I’m going to start doing business photography and and specifically market myself as a headshot specialist. Well, he’s niched down into into headshot as ah as a ah type of photography.
11:23.99
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
11:24.70
Tom Stansfield
And then on top of that, he chose platforms that were specific. So he chose LinkedIn because he wanted to get into the commercial elements. But the work that he does and the way that he showcases his work is incredible. So we first met, but when he was launching his business and launching into Lincoln, we met and had a a conversation and he said, I’ve got this idea to run a magazine called The Marketing Companion.
11:45.78
Tom Stansfield
So he would go out to businesses, use their headshots or the headshots that he’s taken, sorry, within this this magazine and then showcase their businesses and publish this. So all of the photography within this magazine is his work.
11:57.36
Sam Hollis
Yep.
11:57.61
Tom Stansfield
That’s a great asset to have, ah to be able to showcase his work.
12:00.04
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
12:02.04
Tom Stansfield
whilst whilst also helping helping his clients. I think that’s a fantastic way to to own an asset and to promote your work. On top of that, he launched a podcast called The Brand You Podcast with and another marketer called Kaz.
12:17.44
Sam Hollis
Yeah. We’ll i’ feed on that.
12:18.94
Tom Stansfield
And um that’s, again, another asset where he can showcase his expertise. And those two things alone, with the work that he’s doing, help him stand out.
12:27.35
Sam Hollis
Yeah, I mean, that really different. Where you were talking about authenticity and standing out, that that’s really different, isn’t it? How many, any business have I had for dogs, you know, who from creating a magazine for people?
12:38.59
Tom Stansfield
Absolutely. And it’s no wonder he’s busy, right? Because he’s doing these things.
12:40.31
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
12:41.26
Tom Stansfield
He’s also a really likeable person and he it does he does great photography.
12:44.98
Sam Hollis
yeah. So that, yeah, but he’s doing a lot, isn’t he?
12:45.88
Tom Stansfield
So it’s easy for to stand out.
12:49.25
Sam Hollis
He’s busy, he’s spending a lot of time on this stuff.
12:51.99
Tom Stansfield
ah Yeah, it does.
12:52.31
Sam Hollis
And it does take that commitment.
12:54.43
Tom Stansfield
my ah My dad always used to say to me, so if you want something, you’ll go out and get it. You’ll go out and make it happen.
12:59.35
Sam Hollis
yeah
12:59.54
Tom Stansfield
and So… Seven days in a week and there’s 24 hours in a day. I don’t believe I don’t believe that you’ll get anything easily. Like we can be we can work smart, but quite often we have to work hard to make things work.
13:09.58
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
13:12.70
Sam Hollis
Yeah, interesting. Okay, lots of things to think about there. And ah the other thing to talk about, I think, is AI in marketing, and that can be linked to the positioning as well and you’ve kind of talked about it already. So there’s all sorts of views on this, isn’t there, from the person that says, AI could do my marketing, I tell Claudine it does everything, to the people who oh, no, it’s thoroughly authentic, I mustn’t touch it, um to people who think it’s a good tool, but maybe not creative.
13:34.71
Sam Hollis
What are your thoughts on kind of AI in marketing and where it’s good, where it’s bad, what to do?
13:40.15
Tom Stansfield
so this’ a great That’s a great question. and There’s a lot to unpack there, I think.
13:42.40
Sam Hollis
Yeah. Yeah.
13:44.43
Tom Stansfield
um my My views, um i use AI on a day-to-day basis. So I’ve created my own AI agent, which reads my emails, it creates responses and um gets them in my drafting box ready to send.
13:50.64
Sam Hollis
Yep.
13:53.28
Sam Hollis
OK.
14:00.32
Tom Stansfield
That saved me some time, which means that I can then work on the business. From a marketing perspective,
14:04.22
Sam Hollis
Okay, perfect. So that just interesting. So that literally responds and then you just get, you it doesn’t quite send it. You just get a load of, are these okay? Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no sort of thing.
14:13.98
Tom Stansfield
Absolutely. And my business partner, Tommy and I have built Tompilot, which is our own operating system.
14:14.65
Sam Hollis
Amazing.
14:19.98
Tom Stansfield
It’s something we’re going to take to market soon.
14:20.09
Sam Hollis
Okay.
14:22.49
Tom Stansfield
But um every morning using this using Slack as a Slack channel, it gives me to-do list of things that are priorities for me based on due dates, based on and emails and the urgency, rate that the how urgent an email looks, those sorts of things.
14:26.34
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
14:29.50
Sam Hollis
Okay.
14:37.37
Sam Hollis
Okay. And just interesting, just very briefly, the platform you for an agent you’re using?
14:38.58
Tom Stansfield
no
14:42.46
Tom Stansfield
ah to build it, so it’s custom built HTML, but we’ve we’ve used,
14:43.61
Sam Hollis
Yeah. Okay. now you Sorry, the the ai the AI agent is up.
14:49.40
Tom Stansfield
yeah, so we’ve used Claude and Claude Code.
14:51.35
Sam Hollis
Okay. Perfect. Thanks.
14:52.73
Tom Stansfield
um Yeah, so Claude is an absolutely incredible tool, isn’t it?
14:53.88
Sam Hollis
Okay.
14:57.05
Tom Stansfield
So there’s obviously you’ve got co-work, you’ve got skills within Claude.
14:57.69
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
15:01.37
Sam Hollis
Cool.
15:01.91
Tom Stansfield
We we explore every LNM, so we’ve got we’re running Gemini, we’re running ChatGPT, we’re running Claude.
15:07.64
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
15:08.82
Tom Stansfield
i
15:08.79
Sam Hollis
Okay, perfect. So I interrupted you just use you were about to talk about marketing and AI. Sorry.
15:12.69
Tom Stansfield
No, it’s all right. not Not a problem.
15:13.53
Sam Hollis
okay
15:13.76
Tom Stansfield
so If we take this back to how photographers can benefit from AI specifically, like it doesn’t have to be around ah their photography work.
15:16.58
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
15:20.26
Tom Stansfield
It just has to be about how they can make life easier for themselves as a as a business owner. So I’ve given you an example of how I do that.
15:25.60
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
15:27.37
Tom Stansfield
Every day I spend two hours on business development. So no matter how busy we are, I’m never going to stop marketing on the basis that, number one, I want to be able to pick and choose who we work with.
15:30.46
Sam Hollis
Right. Yeah.
15:36.65
Tom Stansfield
That’s a nice position to be in, right?
15:38.23
Sam Hollis
Yeah, of course.
15:38.81
Tom Stansfield
So we’ll use AI now to work smarter on that. So we use it for lead management. So when a website lead comes in, I’ve built a small piece of code which basically scores the lead.
15:50.46
Tom Stansfield
If it doesn’t score particularly highly, and perhaps there’s some gaps in the ah in the request for our services, it fires an email back to the client to say, can we have more information about how we might be able to support you on this, on X, Y, and
15:50.50
Sam Hollis
OK.
16:03.95
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
16:04.70
Tom Stansfield
and Your CRM system will be vital. and I’m biased, of course, because we’ve got Tom’s CRM, our own CRM system. and But there’s AI built into that. So it helps people to, again, manage leads, build out um either website copy or email marketing copy.
16:13.18
Sam Hollis
Okay.
16:20.06
Tom Stansfield
All of these things AI can help you with these days.
16:22.52
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
16:24.34
Tom Stansfield
And there’s a few people. So if we, if we were in a room of a hundred people and we asked people to put their hands up, if they didn’t fully trust AI, I think we’d be 50, 50, perhaps maybe more than 50, 50 for people that don’t fully trust AI yet.
16:33.88
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
16:35.77
Tom Stansfield
But if we look at that and the amount of people that are using AI, um I would say that 70% of people are now using it, if not more. So it’s just the level at which they, they’re using it.
16:44.60
Sam Hollis
Yeah. Yeah.
16:47.26
Tom Stansfield
So I did a LinkedIn post not so long ago about the levels of which people are using AI. Um,
16:52.54
Sam Hollis
Yeah, interesting.
16:53.50
Tom Stansfield
And i can share i can share some of that with you if you like. um So you’ve got you’ve got different users.
17:00.21
Sam Hollis
OK.
17:01.19
Tom Stansfield
You’ve got those that use it for like query and response. So I’ve had an email from so-and-so.
17:03.96
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
17:05.19
Tom Stansfield
This is the email. Help me with a response. There’s not a huge amount of context to it.
17:08.47
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
17:09.91
Tom Stansfield
and That’s one of the ways that people are using it. um You’ve also got then the next level up, so to speak, at at the bottom. um And those users, so sorry, in that first bracket, by the way, there’s about 45% of people are at that at that first stage, query and response.
17:21.18
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
17:24.09
Sam Hollis
Okay. Yeah.
17:25.15
Tom Stansfield
The next level up is the delegation stage. So people are starting to use AI. for delegation. So it absorbs some of the day-to-day work and grunt. So it might be that you post meeting summaries into AI to get, or your meeting notes to get summary. It might be that you’re doing a bit of deeper research. might be that you’re doing document drafts, admin tasks, et cetera. After that, you get into the embedding stage where you get more complex use of AI now.
17:48.56
Tom Stansfield
And that might be the tipping point. So this is where people stand out. So this is where 11% of people are at the minute, as I understand it.
17:53.02
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
17:56.57
Tom Stansfield
So these people are using it and it’s woven directly into core systems like the CRM, like website analysis. And it’s all about internal knowledge hubs. That’s maybe where I’m at in terms of some of the work that we’re doing.
18:06.06
Sam Hollis
Okay.
18:06.77
Tom Stansfield
And then my business partner, Tommy, who is a tech nerd, I’m sure he won’t mind me saying this.
18:06.97
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
18:11.08
Tom Stansfield
He’s at level four, which is basically reimagining. So this is the horizon where we want to get to when it comes to AI. And this is the people that are winning the racer here.
18:17.60
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
18:19.35
Tom Stansfield
So the business model evolves because we’re using AI within it it allow us to use it. It basically means that we can create teams. So multiple AI agents doing different functions within our team.
18:29.75
Tom Stansfield
Some might be business development, some might be administrative, some might be finance. But having agents that do each of these core functions, maybe having a dashboard that shows us what all of our staff, our AI staff, are using.
18:40.52
Sam Hollis
Yeah. That’s crazy, isn’t it?
18:42.84
Tom Stansfield
Sorry, that’s a bit of a tangent, but it gives your understanding as to what you could do with regards to using AI within your marketing.
18:44.30
Sam Hollis
Yeah, that’s you right. Yeah.
18:50.30
Sam Hollis
And then in terms of content itself, so what are your thoughts on that, on kind of that content creation side? How much do we need a human input? How much is it, it because it can be, it can be really powerful, but it can also, so you can end up with stuff that’s very same as everyone else because using the same agents and you’re asking the same things.
19:08.66
Tom Stansfield
Yeah, so I think that’s the point. If we’re asking the same things, we’ll get the same things that everybody else is getting, right? So we need there needs to be an element of that authenticity in there. So if you’re using ChatGPT, for example, you can create your own GPT.
19:19.26
Tom Stansfield
And then you can feed it information about you, ask it to interview you and get it can then start to create your own brand voice or you can give it your own brand voice so that when it does create content for you, it creates it to a specific specification.
19:24.21
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
19:33.72
Tom Stansfield
That’s incredibly important because that way you won’t get AI slop. You’ll get stuff that’s tailored.
19:37.94
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
19:39.22
Tom Stansfield
But at the same time, AI will still need prompts. the the The response that you get is only as good as the prompt that you put in. So if I just say, give me a post about AI,
19:46.26
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
19:49.46
Tom Stansfield
or give me a post about photography, that’s not a good enough prompt.
19:53.11
Sam Hollis
yeah
19:53.55
Tom Stansfield
you’ say so Your prompt will be better if it’s along the lines of, I’m looking to create my social media content for this week. On LinkedIn, my audience is primarily X, Y, and Z. The style of photography that I work with or that I specialize in is X, Y, and Z. And the people that I’m looking to attract or interact with my posts will be businesses that have this problem, insert problem here.
20:16.30
Tom Stansfield
You’ll get a better response then. And then you can say things like, I’d like to include statistics to help position myself as ah as an expert when it comes to photography style.
20:18.38
Sam Hollis
Yeah, yeah.
20:26.74
Tom Stansfield
All of those things will help and you’ll get better marketing as as a result. So I’m a huge believer in using AI. Let’s work smarter. Let’s not make things too difficult for ourselves. But what I will then do is I’ll take the copy and anybody who’s got Grammarly, there’s an AI detector within Grammarly. There are free AI detectors on the internet. You can then copy and paste that content into ah an AI detector and it will give you a percentage rate at which it thinks that that content or copy is created by AI.
20:53.59
Tom Stansfield
And then we just work to reduce it.
20:54.10
Sam Hollis
Okay.
20:55.31
Tom Stansfield
So we reimagine the content, we we refeed it back into an engine. If we’re looking at Gemini, Gemini is great for content creation and research. oh
21:02.77
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
21:03.61
Tom Stansfield
Maybe we put it through Gemini and we say, I’ve created this social media post. How can I make it sound more human or how can I make it sound more authentic? And then again, you can feed it your brand guidelines. That’s what I would be doing.
21:14.84
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
21:15.74
Tom Stansfield
Takes a little bit longer, but again, five or six years ago, we didn’t have AI or we didn’t have it the level that we had it now.
21:15.96
Sam Hollis
Okay.
21:19.77
Sam Hollis
Yeah, yeah.
21:21.26
Tom Stansfield
And therefore we were working just with our brains. We were creating content based on an idea.
21:26.61
Sam Hollis
Yeah. So now there’s all sorts of ways you can use it to help, but you’ve still got to monitor it. You’ve still got to keep an eye on it You’ve still got to refine it until you, you think it’s right.
21:35.83
Tom Stansfield
Absolutely. So you’re in the same game as me, right? Websites um and and and digital.
21:38.90
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
21:40.63
Tom Stansfield
and with the way that the algorithms are changing on Google, for example, there was a massive seismic shift with Google recently whereby it’s it’s looking now at authentic content um and it wants where it wants websites to have that authentic content um’s for it to be able to appear in a Gentic search, for example.
21:56.56
Tom Stansfield
So,
21:56.81
Sam Hollis
Okay.
21:57.78
Tom Stansfield
It’s no different social media content. What we’ve now done is we want to see, so we know that website traffic across the board is dropping slightly. What we’ve done is we’ve started to take screen grabs of Google Analytics and Google Search Console results.
22:09.46
Tom Stansfield
We put it back through, and in for for most of our clients, we’ll put it back through Claude and a specific project for their website. and we’ll say analyse this website analytics, look at whether it’s above the fold, below the fold and and tell me what what changes we can make to this website to reduce the bounce rate, increase and conversions, increase click click-through actions.
22:31.45
Tom Stansfield
and But we can do the same thing with social media, we can take screenshots of the interaction.
22:33.73
Sam Hollis
As I say, you could presumably do it with any part of your marketing, couldn’t you? As long as you have the stats.
22:37.28
Tom Stansfield
Absolutely. yeah Yeah, so data is the most important thing when it comes to marketing. Any marketing agency will get found out based on data. So
22:45.19
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
22:45.51
Tom Stansfield
they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, data will show it.
22:48.38
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
22:48.92
Tom Stansfield
And it’s the same when it comes to de marketing. If you take screenshots of your LinkedIn interactions on posts and then feed that back through when you’re doing your next round of social media content creation, say this post this page oh sorry this post resonated well with the audience, analyse why that might have been and let’s consider that on the next round of content creation.
23:08.06
Sam Hollis
Right. So you’re kind of, yeah, you’re using what you’ve you used to learn already wall of data to help you with that content creation.
23:15.48
Tom Stansfield
Absolutely. And if we want to be even smarter, we can go into, so it LinkedIn, there was um there was an AI update latter part of 2025, an algorithmic change, which was massive. And it changed the way that users interact.
23:27.24
Tom Stansfield
So let’s say I’ve got an audience of 7,000 people on LinkedIn at the moment. If I put a post out, it’s not going to go out to 7,000 people.
23:31.04
Sam Hollis
Yeah. Yeah.
23:33.75
Tom Stansfield
Typically speaking, it’ll go out to about two, between two and 5% of that audience.
23:36.63
Sam Hollis
Okay. Yep.
23:37.37
Tom Stansfield
And then depending on how well it it lands in that golden hour, with that first hour, will be how many people, how many more of my audience will then see it.
23:45.82
Sam Hollis
Okay.
23:46.17
Tom Stansfield
So we want it to land well, so therefore people have got to resonate with it or it’s got to touch up a pain point that people feel. So we can start to use that. So the next point of that site, social media content generation might be, we then say, take it into account LinkedIn and the algorithm on LinkedIn.
24:03.90
Tom Stansfield
what How should I tailor this post to make sure that it lands within within the golden hour?
24:09.05
Sam Hollis
Okay, perfect. And then I’m thinking going back with all of this feedback you’re going to AI, can you also give it your competitors, you’re saying, because we’re going back to the beginning, we’d want authenticity, we want to stand out.
24:19.39
Sam Hollis
Can you also kind of put lots of social posts, say, these are my competitors, what you know what can I do to stand out? and And kind of it can analyze what they’re putting out and how you could be different in some ways.
24:29.97
Tom Stansfield
Yeah, absolutely. So I borrowed an idea from LinkedIn recently, whereby on LinkedIn, it can you can put your who you believe is your competitor in, and and it will tell you what their audience growth looks like, how many part times they posted this week.
24:39.57
Sam Hollis
Yeah. Yeah.
24:45.18
Tom Stansfield
um Well, I built myself my own platform like that. So like you, I don’t necessarily see competition in the market, and I don’t think photographers should see competition in the market, right? We should be focused on collaboration, perhaps, or where we can stand out, where we can where we can improve our own business rather than worrying about competition.
25:01.43
Tom Stansfield
But that said, I still created a dashboard where I could see what other marketing agencies were up to so that I could borrow some of their best ideas. So if they’ve got an audience growth of X, Y, Z within in the last week, I want to know why.
25:09.43
Sam Hollis
Yeah.
25:13.29
Tom Stansfield
So I’ll then have a look through their posts. I will feed that back into the agent and I’ll say, what can we do to see audience growth like this over the next X number of days?
25:23.22
Sam Hollis
Wow. Yeah. Yeah, no, are we talk about that along ah ah a lot in the podcast too. Yeah, I think collaboration is definitely the way to go, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be looking on Google Maps and going, that photographer’s above me, what can I do better to to shift above that?
25:37.72
Tom Stansfield
Absolutely. Absolutely. We never want to stand still. Right. We always want to be taking steps towards whatever business objectives we’ve set ourselves. um and And our competition or I say competition in inverted commas, but our competition can help us and they could guide us and steer us to what they’re doing.
25:44.03
Sam Hollis
That’s it.
25:52.08
Tom Stansfield
Well, let’s borrow it. Let’s emulate it. And and what they’re not doing well, we know what to stay clear of.
25:57.98
Sam Hollis
That’s it. Perfect. Right. As usual, Tom, there’s about 500,000 things now to go and think about and unpack. And I think our brains will all kind of, over the course of the day and the week, start to unpack the the millions of ideas you have shared with us over quite a short space of time.
26:13.56
Sam Hollis
Anything else you think we’ve kind of not, in terms of that, going back to that authenticity, that standing out, is there anything else you think we ought to cover briefly?
26:22.97
Tom Stansfield
Yeah, the big one that we’ve not touched on, Sam, is personal brand. So when, as ah as a photographer, you might have a personal brand and you might have a business brand and you might trade under one of the two.
26:26.58
Sam Hollis
Okay. Okay.
26:33.27
Tom Stansfield
But I would suggest that for us and our businesses, um we can harness the audience that we’ve got on social media, for example, as a brand, as a business brand. But typically speaking, we’ll have larger audiences and individual than we will as a We use LinkedIn as an example here.
26:48.73
Tom Stansfield
So I’ve got 7,000 followers on our on my personal LinkedIn profile, but I’ve only got 1,000 page followers on the one of our agency pages. So I will use my personal brand to drive traffic to the business brand or any initiatives or projects that we’re working on within the business.
27:05.24
Tom Stansfield
So personal brand.
27:05.40
Sam Hollis
Okay, it it sounds like we could possibly have a whole other show on that as well at some stage in the future, that whole personal brand.
27:11.42
Tom Stansfield
Yeah, it’s a huge it’s a huge thing, absolutely.
27:14.46
Sam Hollis
Yeah, yeah, cool. Okay, that is amazing. um And I think finally we do, you were saying there’s a few quotes you’ve forgotten about. i think one of the quotes we have on the show regularly is from you, Tom, so which is which is, I often say, it’s fish where the fish are, which is my favorite quote from Tom, which we do say on the show quite a lot when you’re talking about marketing.
27:29.03
Tom Stansfield
I love that.
27:32.90
Tom Stansfield
I’m pleased, I’m pleased that, yeah, and that’s what I live by, as you as you know. So yeah, we we simply want to make sure that we make lives as easy as possible for ourselves. So if we fish, we fish where the fish are.
27:43.42
Tom Stansfield
I also use, so an extension to that, I always talk talk about, if we found the pond that we want to fish in, because that’s where our ideal clients are, let’s fish with a net rather than with a rod and reel.
27:50.55
Sam Hollis
Yeah, yeah.
27:53.59
Tom Stansfield
Because if we’re going after that next client and that next client is transactional, it’s hard work, Instead, put their net into the water and let’s bring out many fish. So we need to start thinking about working smarter when it comes to our marketing.
28:05.86
Tom Stansfield
So how can we attract multiple people from an inbound perspective rather than using the fish, the rod and reel and going after for one fish at a time?
28:13.99
Sam Hollis
Perfect. Amazing note to end on. Thank you for being with us so much, Tom. It has been amazing speaking with you.
28:21.24
Tom Stansfield
Sam, thanks for bringing me the podcast.
28:23.26
Sam Hollis
Brilliant. And listeners, I will see you next week.
28:28.79
Sam Hollis
There we go.
