Hey photographer! Are you new to Honeybook and aren’t sure where to begin when it comes to getting everything set up behind the scenes? This video is for you! In this video, I’m going to provide you all of you photographers with three steps you can take to get started with Honeybook and how you can begin implementing them today.
Did you know that I actually started out as a photographer myself? I deeply understand the photography world and all the pain points that can come with being a photography business owner behind the scenes. So if you’re new to the photography space or if you are ready to get your business more organized and streamlined, this video is going to be a great first step!
1. Setup Your Company Settings
The very first thing you want to do when getting started with Honeybook is setup your company settings. This means getting your branding, logos, fonts, colors, etc in place because that will allow you to create consistent templates behind the scenes in your account. In doing this, everything will look branded, consistent, polished, and professional.
To do this, go into your Honeybook account settings, and click on “Company Settings”. Personal settings will be more of your personal account details and company settings will be specific to your business. First things first, add in your company brand color and your primary and secondary logo. Make sure to include a default heading image too for your projects because anytime you’re sending a file out you can see this default header image. And you can also just change that on the project side too, if you want, if it doesn’t have to stay forever.
After that, if you come down here you want to make sure you go to your company’s smart file theme too. Click on customize company theme and you’ll want to pick out whatever fonts you want. You can also upload specific fonts too if you like. Finally, you’ll add in your colors to your company theme so that can be consistent for Smart Files too.
From here, you’ll scroll to the bottom and create an email signature for yourself that you can just put in the bottom of your email templates. After that, you can keep going down and you have some social icons down here that you can add link your social media profiles in.
Lastly, you can go in and adjust your company preferences and integrate any tools like Zoom, Calendly, Quickbooks, etc into your company settings side. If you find that there’s a platform you’d like to integrate but don’t see it on the Honeybook side, try it in Zapier. There’s a video tutorial on that HERE.
2. Build Your Templates
The second thing you want to do when getting started as a photographer in Honeybook is set up your templates. I always say that templates are the foundations to every great system, and it makes building workflows and automations a breeze.
Now, when I say templates, I’m referring to email templates, contracts, packages invoices, proposals, etc. My biggest encouragement is to take things one template at a time. So if you’re writing the same email over and over again, copy and paste it and build it as a template in HoneyBook. Oftentimes, we overthink templates too much, if you’re doing the same thing over and over again, simply build a template out of it.
So when you’re ready to get started with templates, what you want do is you come into “Tools” and you want to go to my templates. Now again, as I mentioned in the video, templates are the foundations to every greet system. There’s a fun feature in HoneyBook called Smart Files. A lot of what I use smart files for is proposals services, questionnaires, and things like that. But really where I would start is your email templates. Your email templates will drive a lot of your workflows and automations.
I would take some time to do some email templates, get those all ready to go and if you already have some, like in a Gmail account or on another platform, you can just copy and paste them right into HoneyBook and get those ready to go.
Then, I would move into Smart Files. But again, take it one template at a time. You can easily move down the list of templates that Honeybook offers and take it template by template. It may take some time to get in place but it’ll be so worth it.
Build Out A Schedule
The final way to get started with Honeybook as a photographer is to actually build a scheduler out for yourself. The scheduler tool in HoneyBook can allow you to build multiple schedulers in one. You can also sync up your Gmail, Apple, or Outlook calendar so everything shows up both on your email calendar side and your Honeybook side.
In order to get your scheduler setup, go into “Tools” and click on “Scheduler”. This will allow you to create a new session and get all of the settings in place. Make sure to set your time zone, whether it’s a video call, phone call, in person, etc, and then include your availability as well. Once you have all your settings completed, click “Save and Finish” and you’ll now have a new scheduler that you can share with clients or link onto your website or in an email template.
New CRMs can feel so incredibly overwhelming, but they’re vitally important to not only our business growth but success. Utilize these three tips to get started with Honeybook and slowly begin to acclimate to the platform. If you’d like to dabble into Honeybook, you can take 35% off your first year HERE, or if you’re already an avid Honeybook user and want to dive in deeper, check out my Honeybook Essentials Course HERE.
Leave a comment below to let me know what your next steps will be to get started with Honeybook as a photographer and if you have any questions, of course, let me know that too!
+ view comments . . .