Brand positioning 101: what it actually means for solopreneurs
I’m a brand photographer, not a marketing strategist. I’m not going to give you a 12-step framework for finding your market position but what I can tell you is what I notice when I look at a business through a camera.
I notice when someone’s website tells me they’re confident and experienced, but their photographs make them look hesitant. I notice when a business is selling a premium service but the images feel thrown together without careful thought. And mostly, I notice when someone has built a genuinely distinctive business, but you’d never know it from looking at their website.
That’s where brand positioning gets interesting to me because positioning is something people pick up from everything they see, including your photographs. If you’re a solopreneur, that matters more than you might think.
What is brand positioning?
In simple terms, brand positioning is the place your business occupies in someone’s mind. It’s not your job title, your niche or the sentence you’ve carefully crafted for your homepage. It’s the impression someone is left with when they encounter your business.
When potential clients are scrolling through your website and socials, they are constantly asking themselves if you are you the person they’d trust with something complicated or if you seem approachable, experienced, straight-talking, creative, meticulous, premium or practical?
I am not highlighting this because you get to necessarily get to choose the answer because people make their own minds up, and they start doing that very quickly.
For example, someone finds you via a Google search, clicks through to your website, or comes across your Instagram account. Before they’ve read your services page or looked at your testimonials, they’ve already taken in the photographs.
That doesn’t mean someone makes a fully formed decision about your business in three seconds based on your photos. It does, however, mean they’re gathering information before they consciously start analysing it. Your photographs are a large part of that information.
Mismatched photos
This is one of the things clients talk to me about and seek my expertise on.
Their website may have a few key words such as:
Experienced. Strategic. Trusted. Premium. Personal.
However, their photographs show a disconnect and may be from a few years ago outside a venue of a networking event, slightly blurry with someone cut off beside them to make it a singular shot.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with an informal photograph. Sometimes that’s exactly the right image. The issue is when it’s accidental and not aligned to how you want to position yourself and it has somehow made it to the homepage of your website.
Also, if the way you want to be perceived has changed but your photographs haven't changed with it, there can be a disconnect between the business you’ve built and the business people think they’re looking at. That can be particularly noticeable when you’re the business.
Why this matters for solopreneurs
A larger company has more things contributing to its identity. There might be a team, an office, a physical product, packaging, signage, a recognisable visual identity and years of accumulated reputation.
For a one-person business, there’s often much less between the potential client and you. You are the brand. They relate to you, how you present yourself and your website. They see the way you work, represented through the images you've chosen to put in front of them.
I think the most effective personal brand photography usually happens when someone stops trying to look like the sort of person they think their industry expects them to be and presents themselves as they are.
Your photographs don't need to look a certain way
There’s a tendency to think that “professional” photography has a particular look.
You’ve seen it before, a neutral background with no colour to match your brand, a forced confident smile, a power suit and highly unconfortable stool!
That style can work if you work in corporate and the images are required to have some uniformity. But, that doesn’t mean it is automatically the right fit for you!
A female founder running a brownie business probably shouldn't have photographs that make her look like she’s about to present at a board meeting. A designer might want the photographs to feel considered and creative and a business coach might want them to feel energetic and direct.
There isn't one correct version of professional. There’s only whether the photographs feel believable for you and your business.
What do you want people to feel?
Before deciding what to wear for a shoot or where to take the photographs, I think it’s more useful to ask a different question:
What do I want someone to understand about me before they meet me?
It could range from:
“She knows exactly what she's doing” or “I could talk to her about this” or “She isn't going to give me the same generic advice I've heard everywhere else” or “ She gets it”
Those are very varied reactions and therefore they lead to very different photographs being captured.
A photograph can show how you work
This is something I think gets missed when people talk about headshots. You don't always need to be looking directly into the camera. Sometimes the most useful photograph is you doing something.
Talking
Writing
Showing a process
Working with a client
Making a decision
Standing in the environment where you actually spend your time
Those images give people a little more context about you than a traditional headshot can. I believe the aim is to give people a sense of what it might actually be like to work with you. This can be particularly useful for service-based businesses where the person buying from you is also buying into the relationship.
The problem with having one “good” headshot
Most people don't actually need hundreds of brand photographs. But they usually need more than one.
A single headshot might work perfectly for LinkedIn. It doesn't necessarily give you anything useful for your website banner, an Instagram post, a speaking announcement, a blog article or a sales page. If every photograph you use is basically the same photograph with a slightly different crop, your visual identity starts to feel very limited. A useful brand photography session should give you a range.
Some photographs where you're looking at the camera and some where you are not. You should walk away with different cropped styles and expressions and images that work well horizontally and vertically.
Most importantly, photographs that give you something to work with rather than leaving you with 30 versions of the same headshot.
Ready for a refresh
Another issue I see regularly is the five-year-old headshot. At the time, it was probably great. As time goes on and your business grows, you change. Your confidence changes, your offer changes and your clients change. As post-COVID times have shown us, sometimes even the way you dress and work changes.
There's a point where an old photograph stops being a useful representation of your business. I don't necessarily think you need new branding photography every year, however, if you look at your current images and think, ”I don’t look like that any more,” it’s probably worth booking in a shoot to update your branding photos.
What I look for when I'm photographing a brand
When I'm planning a shoot, I'm thinking about:
Does it look like this person?
Does it fit the business they've actually built?
Does it give their potential clients something useful to understand?
Does it feel natural rather than overly constructed?
…and how will they actually be able to use it?
Those questions tend to produce much better photographs than asking, “How can we make this look professional?” This is because matching the photography to your brand is important.
If your business is warm, the photographs should have room for warmth.
If your business is creative, the photographs should represent this. It’s about drawing on what you do and how you do it and representing this with clarity.
A note for female founders
I work with a lot of women who are trying to find the balance between looking credible and still feeling like themselves.
There can be a strange pressure around personal brand photography for women. I see conflicts between feeling too polished with a distant or overly corporate feel contrasted with photos that are too relaxed and suddenly it doesn't feel “professional” enough and finally, too posed and it doesn't feel authentic.
I don't think you need to choose between being credible and being yourself. You can look experienced without looking serious and you can look successful without looking unapproachable.
If your business has changed, your photographs probably have too
I believe your photographs should tell your story. The story of the person who has built the brand with the what, why, when and how.
If you've become more established, moved into a different type of work, raised your prices, changed your audience, or grown your business, it's worth looking at your images with fresh eyes.
Ask yourself:
Do these photographs look like the business I run now?
Do they give people a realistic sense of what it’s like to work with me?
Do they reflect the clients I actually want to attract?
Am I using the same two or three images because they're the only ones I have?
If someone saw my photographs without reading my website, would they get roughly the right impression?
You might find that your positioning is actually much clearer than you thought. It might be that it’s just not showing up in the photographs yet.
As a brand photographer female founders come to when their images no longer feel like an accurate reflection of their business, and this is often where I start supporting them.
Do your photos feel not very you? Let's talk about what you actually need from your next shoot.
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