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Marketing Hack #12: Compliments are meant to be shared 

 July 13, 2015

By  Pascal Depuhl

Share the compliments your business gets with the world

Referrals are a great source of new business. If my friend tells me that you’re good, his recommendation place a bigger role in my decision to hire you, than pretty much anything else. When the person compliments your brand , by writing a recommendation or giving you a referral, that’s huge!

So perfect it had to be photoshopped But there are only a few places online, that let people write these compliments online, I’m thinking primarily LinkedIn (for B2B) and Google (for clients that find you though search) and not so much Yelp – I love Yelp when I’m looking for a restaurant, but I have not seen anyone pull their website up to find a commercial or advertising photographer (that’s why I think it makes no sense for you to advertise on Yelp.)

In the B2B world it’s reviews, referrals and recommendations and the more of an expert the person that’s making the compliment about your brand is, the more worth that comment will have. How do you let people know about these positive comments though, if people don’t leave them on LinkedIn or Google?

Well, I’m glad you asked – here’s what happened to me last week and what I’m doing with that compliment: I’m working on a printed piece to mail to my clients that use me as their product photographer. I’ve shot some basic product photography for them, but we haven’t done any shots, that tell their product’s story. So a few days ago, I contacted a couple art director friends of mine and asked them which tagline went best with this image for the target audience I just described – you can help me as well, by answering the same question:

An unexpected compliment

A short time later I get the responses from my friends, but one of them totally surprises me. He tells me his favorite tagline, but then he starts talking about the photograph itself:

Bob compliments my brand As I’m chatting on Facebook with my Chicago art director friend Bob, he asks me if I did the final retouching/composition of the image. Nope, I say it’s only run through Capture One (the best RAW image processor I know) and I removed a stray hair in photoshop. Other than that it’s exactly the image I saw in my mind as my camera was recording it.

His response? “Well color me IMPRESSED! It’s so perfect, I thought it had to be ‘photoshopped’.” Well gosh darn it Bob, you’re making me *blush*.

Well a compliment from an expert is worth a lot to me and Bob is an expert. He’s been an art director for decades, seen hundreds of thousands of images and thought that this one was so perfect, it had to be photoshopped. That’s saying something, unfortunately…[nextpage title=”next”]

… unfortunately this compliment was given to me on a private Facebook chat. How do you let other people know that Bob compliments my brand?

Talk about compliments experts make your brand

How do you share this compliment? Check out my social media pages, I’ve been talking about this compliment a lot–I’m even bumped this weeks scheduled MarketingHack to make room for this one (and you’re reading about what Bob said, right?) Involve them in the process – you answered the question of the best tagline, I hope.

I just heard Lisa Sparks (@LisaDSparks) talk about repurposing content on Social Media day South Florida. Now she was speaking about how to repurpose blog post content – she’s a very cool lady and a terrific freelance writer in case you’re looking for one – but the same principle of using your content (in this case your compliments) applies here as well.

Bob’s compliment is all over my social media channels, it’s here on the blog, I’m talking about it on other online places, but it ties into my blog series on creating killer advertising photography, where I share how I estimate a job, scout for the perfect location and create the image. Create content around great images and let everyone know what compliments people, who are experts, give you.

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Pascal Depuhl


Miami product photographer, video producer, cinematographer and chief mindchanger at Photography by Depuhl

I love to share the knowledge I've gained over the past two decades. Catching light in motion.

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