How to Become a Photographer

With the large amount of content produced every day by photographers, it can be overwhelming to know how to produce content that will be seen. Additionally, it can be even more challenging to produce valuable content that can attract your ideal clients and help you book more weddings. Since you have more free time after outsourcing your images to a post wedding photography service, you can spend that extra time gathering information and writing your content!

So how do you know if you are creating successful content? Whether the content you produce is placed on your blog, social platforms, or in emails, you need to measure it’s results. By doing this, you can learn what your target market is interested in and what you should produce more of. Here are 4 tools you can use to measure your content’s success!

Blog Posts: Google Analytics

Blogging can be a great gateway for potential clients to get to know you and your brand. If you have worked to create a blogging schedule and are posting 1-2 times a week, you need to know which content readers are finding valuable. Google Analytics is a great (and free) resource for you to determine how well content on your blog is performing. Through Google Analytics, you can measure items such as page views, unique visitors, popular posts, and bounce rates. It can be a bit overwhelming to know where to start, so begin by looking at how many page views each blog posts is receiving. This will give you a good starting point to know which posts your audience is drawn to. [···]

As a wedding photographer, properly managing your clients’ expectations is crucial to the growth and success of your wedding photography business, especially when it comes to timeframes. Leading up to the wedding day, you most likely had to follow the clients’ schedule – they selected the wedding date, the time the ceremony would be, and how many hours they wanted to book you for. You may have helped plan out the wedding day timeline to ensure there was enough time to take photos throughout the day and to ease the stress of your clients.

Everything you do to help your couples prepare for their special day is great and helps build trust, but after the wedding day is when you can really manage expectations in regards to turnaround time. By properly setting realistic turnaround times for your clients, you can exceed their expectations and turn the trust they have for you and your business into loyalty.

Explain the Process

After the wedding is an exciting time because not only are your clients eager to see one of the most important events in their lives memorialized forever, you are also excited to see the stunning images that you captured and add your Signature Style to them. This is not a phase that you should rush through or spend any less time on. You know how long it takes to get all the images cleaned up and ready for viewing, so it is important that the timeframe you give your couples is accurate and doable on your end. [···]

As a wedding photographer, you are a specialist in creating memories that will last a lifetime for your clients. After you provide your couples with a great experience, they have the opportunity to share how great these moments were with their friends and family members. This is great to have this kind of word-of-mouth reputation. However, it is even better when couples can share their experience of working with you with other couples that have, too—it establishes a unique and special bond between them that you helped form!

One of the best things you can do to achieve this is to bring brides together that have experienced your professionalism and creativity first-hand. This fosters a strong community of brides and continues to build their trust and loyalty with you and your brand, making them lifelong clients. With that in mind, here are 3 ways you can establish a community for your past brides.

1. Organize Events for Your Brides

People love to get together over shared interests or mutual experiences. Simply put, there is nothing like the energy of a room full of people who are all excited to be right where they are. As a wedding photographer, you can help to create a special community of your past brides and organize exclusive events for them. You want to find unique and fun ways for your brides to connect! For example, maybe you are interested in creating a guide like, “10 Things Every Bride Should Know before the Wedding Day.” This would be an excellent time to organize a get together with past brides, so they can share their own stories, and contribute to the success of other brides. [···]

We hope that you’ve enjoyed our blog series with The Youngrens so far – if you have missed the first two posts in the series, you can access them here:

Part 1: The 5 Steps to Discovering your Ideal Client

Part 2: ROH: The Secret to Truly Effective Marketing

Today we’re excited to present the third blog post in the series: The Two Most Common Mistakes About the Ideal Client. In this post, The Youngrens cover a couple of the myths photographers may hear when looking for their ideal client. Enjoy the post and think of ways you can change the way about you think about your ideal client from their tips!

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Creating an effective profile of your ideal clients is not an easy task, my friends, but it’s an important one. Knowing who you’re trying to attract to your photography business becomes the foundation of your decision-making process as a business owner, so if you’ve ever felt like your marketing plan is less of a ‘strategy’  and more like wadding up wet paper towels and throwing them against a wall to see what sticks, then I’m here to help. I’ve helped a lot of wedding and portrait photographers build profiles of their dream clients over the years, and the more I teach and research the topic of the ideal client, the more I learn about the common myths and mistakes of this complicated subject – mistakes that I have definitely been guilty of making over the years.

Here are the two most common mistakes that I see photographers making when they begin the process of discovering their ideal client.

Mistake #1: My Ideal Client is ME

I think that a lot of us are guilty of this – at least, I know I am. It’s not a stretch to assume that the couples that I love working with the most are a lot like me. I start to believe that they think like me, act like me, and buy like me. It makes sense to cross-check a decision based on my own personal preferences, asking myself “what would I want to hear if I were getting married?” or “what do I think about this particular photo?” [···]

As a wedding photographer, creating valuable relationships with your local vendors is a way to ensure that you have a trusted group of professionals that will help you grow your business. Vendors are a large part of the wedding day – from the florist to the baker to the coordinator, each vendor plays such an important role, and these are all people you can develop long-term relationships with.

Sharing images with vendors immediately after the wedding day is also an important part of creating a seamless working relationship. Not only can your vendors share your images with potential clients, they will continue to be an active referral source. The better your relationship with your vendors, the easier it will be for you to work together to help one another gain more clients. To help you get started creating meaningful connections, we’ve put together 4 ways for you to effectively share images with vendors.

1. Share Your Digital Files

As a photographer, your professional images are very valuable to vendors. On the wedding day, vendors may be able to take images of their work on their smartphones, but having access to your stunning images is crucial! After the wedding, make it part of your post-shoot workflow to send images to each vendor that you worked with. Just like there are several photo editing companies to use for color correction, there are several options when it comes to hosting and sharing your photos with vendors online. [···]

The business of wedding photography is not getting any easier. With how quickly technology is evolving and the affordability of top-notch cameras, it is simple for anyone to pick up a camera and become a “photographer.” In conjunction with social media, new photographers are able to post to Facebook and Instagram and gain new followers with the click of a button.  With the ease of becoming a wedding photographer, what can you do to set your business apart and make it stand out?

As a wedding photographer, you want to attract your ideal couple, and Content Marketing is the key to your success. With Content Marketing, you can use your library of images to create a unique and optimized marketing plan for your business. Learning effective ways to use Content Marketing in your business will allow you to grow your business and connect with more of your ideal clients. It is vital to the success of your business and because of this, we’ve put together 3 new marketing techniques for the 2015 photographer.

1. Generate Content that builds trust and value

For you to have an effective Content Marketing plan, it is imperative that you create content that is specifically tailored for your target audience that helps you build trust. Once trust is established, you can work on converting that trust into loyalty and life-long clients. Content Marketing allows you to build content that is relevant, useful, and helpful to your potential clients. When you offer them valuable content, you begin to build the relationship that leads to trust. [···]

We’re continuing our 4-part series with Jeff and Erin Youngren. In their second post, they dive into how you can effectively market your business and brand to attract your ideal client! If you missed out on the the first blog of this series, access that here. Happy reading!

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Businesses and corporations make decisions based on ROI – Return on Investment. They ask themselves questions like, ‘How much return will I receive if I invest some money in more equipment? If I build a new factory? If I hire a new employee?’

Consumers, on the other hand, make decisions based on what I like to call ROH or ‘Return on Happiness.’ If you are a wedding photographer, then your clients are consumers – not businesses or corporations – so they don’t make decisions the same way that corporations do.

As a consumer, I don’t walk into an Anthropologie store to buy a dress because I will receive a bigger financial return on my investment than if I bought a dress elsewhere. No, I buy the relatively expensive dress from Anthropologie because I believe that it will make me happier than other dresses. Are they quality? Yes. Do they look fantastic? Yep. Are there other less expensive dresses in the world that will look just as nice? Of course.

When I shop at Anthropologie, I have a picture in my head of what will make me happy, and through their branding, marketing, and email campaigns, Anthropologie has inserted themselves into my ‘picture of happiness’ and helped me feel that their clothes are the solution.

Anthropologie is an example of an effective marketing machine (as least as it applies to me), and I believe this to be true: Truly effective marketing is when your clients’ picture of happiness and your services intersect.

Related: 5 Ways to Create a Win with Client Referrals

Fulfill your Ideal Client’s Picture of Happiness

Guess what? As a wedding photographer, your ideal clients are consumers, and consumers have pictures of happiness in their heads that they are trying to fulfill with ideal vendors. Your goal, then, is to actively insert your services into your clients’ pictures of happiness. But you don’t want to intersect with just any picture of happiness out there. The ultimate WIN for your marketing strategy is for your business to fulfill the picture of happiness for your ideal client. [···]

No matter where you are in your photography business (whether you are at the beginning or you are a seasoned professional wedding photographer), planning for your success is key. With a wedding photography business plan, you ensure that you are ready to handle the challenges that come as you grow your photography business. Starting a photography business is fun and exciting, but as you book more weddings and fill your calendar, what once was your dream job can turn stressful and unmanageable. Having a photography business plan will ensure you can handle your growth and scale.

Within the competitive wedding photography industry, there are thousands of photographers who want to book clients who match their brand and message. As a photographer, you spend much of your time working on your business to reflect a certain message that will reach out to like-minded clients. In order to be successful in attracting ideal couples, there are a few steps you need to take to stand out as a photography business owner from others in the industry.

Since finding your ideal client is key to growing your business, we brought in photography duo Jeff and Erin Youngren of The Youngrens, to share some of her insight into finding couples you want to work with. This is the first installment of our 4-part series discussing how to find your ideal client written by Erin, so let’s get to it!

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Are you tired of shooting weddings that aren’t your style? Or working with clients that you don’t enjoy? There’s nothing more difficult than feeling dragged down by your business or dreading your shoots because you don’t connect with your clients or they don’t connect with you. It’s hard feeling unknown, unappreciated, or simply disconnected from your clientele and your art.

I strongly believe that every photographer has a unique client type that is perfectly suited for them. We talk about it all the time in the wedding and portrait photography industry – your target audience, your perfect bride, the right clientele. All different ways to talk about the same thing – your ideal client. [···]