Booking clients is one of the most important elements of growing your wedding photography business. Not only is it important for you to understand the basics involved in wedding photography marketing, it is important to also properly use your time to work with clients you love. Outsourcing your wedding photography color correction needs will ensure that you have extra time to spend marketing your business to your clients. When you have the time to do this, focusing your efforts on marketing will help to grow your photography business.
Wedding photographers and marketing pros Justin and Mary Marantz connected with us during our Online Training: Marketing with Love and shared 10 simple action items you can do to increase your bookings and grow your business. We selected the top 5 wedding photographer marketing tips you can work on to the market for your wedding photography business.
1. Take Care of Your Ideal Clients
As a wedding photographer, one of your goals is to book clients that are ideal for your business. Once you book those clients, you need to take care of them! A great way to do this is to give your past and present clients thoughtful gifts that are non-photography related. The photography duo loves to give past clients a William Sonoma Bride & Groom Cookbook. Remember to send gifts that your ideal clients will share on Facebook and Instagram because that can help drive traffic to your website. Taking care of clients is an important part of growing your business, as your ideal clients will refer you to their family and friends who may also be ideal clients for you.
Related: The Keys to Building a Successful Photography Business
2. Take Care of Your Vendors
Creating a positive relationship with your vendors is an essential part of growing your business.
When meeting with vendors, remember to be personable – while they are a business, they are people too! Reach out to your vendors about ways you can promote and support one another.
There are several ways you can show vendors some love. Offer to give free headshots or tag along to a wedding to document them in their element. You can also create vendor cards that feature one particular image that represents that vendor’s specialty. In your blog posts, link out to vendors that you worked with for each wedding so viewers can easily access their sites as well.
Tip: Host a networking night once a month to bring you and your vendors together outside of work. This is a fun way to get to know them and form stronger relationships!
3. Leave a Sample Album
Think about a sample album as a preview to your website, your images, and your business. The album you create represents your personal photography style and will intrigue clients to find out more about you and your business. Connect with your favorite venues and ask if you can provide them with a sample album to share with potential clients. By providing venues with an album, they can promote your photography work as well as showcase their venue. In turn, this can strengthen the relationship you have with that vendor. Instead of having to pay for wedding photography advertising, you are using the relationship you have built to bring in more clients for your photography business.
Justin and Mary are proof that this technique works:
“We left a 10×10 maroon album at a wedding venue about eight years ago. That one book that we left at that location eight years ago has brought us in just under $50,000 in bookings ever since.”
4. Meet On Your Own Turf
When you meet at a location that you are comfortable with, you are in control of all of the variables, including how you present yourself to potential clients. The photography duo uses their living room as a studio and meeting place, adding details that match their personal style and brand. Inviting clients to spend time in a place where you are comfortable at will increase your confidence and allow you to make decisions that help grow your business.
Tip: If you do not have room in your home, see if you can connect with another photographer or local vendor to rent out a space.
5. Try A La Carte Pricing
A La Carte pricing provides you with the opportunity to individually price each service you offer and allows clients to decide exactly which services they want. This allows clients to have customized packages, as well as know exactly what they are paying for. With this pricing model, clients can end up building custom packages that are more expensive than what your set package prices may have been.
Justin and Mary share their success with A La Carte pricing:
“Not only were we getting clients in the door, not only were we booking 90-95% of them, but once they had made the choice to book us, fell into this ‘may as well’ mentality. They figured if they were going to hire us, they may as well add on an album and extra hours of coverage. By the time they were done, they were building packages that were as big, or bigger, as when we had set packages.”
Related: The Keys to Selling A La Carte
If you’re nervous about making the jump to A La Carte, take a look at our post on building wedding photography packages.
These were 5 of our favorite tips for photography marketing tactics to help you book more weddings during the year. Discover how to continue to grow your business through marketing and more with our Free Guide: How to Grow Your Wedding Photography Business!
I love the sample album idea. We are a new company in the Miami market and have tried facebook, thumbtack, networking and consistently working our SEO. However, we need more clever ways to generate leads without robbing a bank to pay for it. We are going to implement the sample album idea into our marketing mix.
Thanks for sharing, much appreciated.
The sample album is a great idea! I will try this out. I’m just starting out in the Vancouver area!
Thanks alot, great article.
Paul Clarke.
In reference to a sample album…Do you find it beneficial to create specific albums with wedding photos taken only at that particular venue, or could it be a variety of photos from different venues? This may limit the album as far as showcasing different weddings if you have only worked at that particular venue once, but may be appealing to the venue?
Hey Kristy, you’ll want to create an album with pictures from that specific venue. The point of the album is to promote the venue and in return the venue promotes you. When the venue is trying to sell to a potential bride, they want to show off their venue with the album to show how gorgeous it is in picture form, and your goal is for the bride to say, “wow, who took these pictures! They’re beautiful! I’d love this person to shoot my wedding!”
very inspiring and educative
Thanks so much
I am absolutely going to use the sample album idea with a couple of my venues. I think this will definitely help me stand out when potential customers are touring the venue with the owners. Thanks!!