If you’re into photography and have decided to go on the path of wedding photography after some thoughts, now is the time you start thinking about the marketing aspect of your photography career. No matter how skilled you are, it’s very important to understand how you can sell your expertise and to whom you should target. And it will show you the path of how to advertise wedding photography business to your targeted audience.
There are many ways you can attract your clients nowadays. You can be old school by printing leaflets or you could advertise your photography business online. You could even try and advertise through word of mouth among family and friends without even costing anything!
There are a lot of strategies that can be used to successfully run your wedding photography business and we will try to make your life easier by breaking everything down to two sections i.e the FREE and the Paid. The parts are self-explanatory meaning the first section will consist of all the strategies that are free of cost while the latter is paid.
How To Advertise Wedding Photography Business With Free Strategies?
1. Free Trial
One way of advertising your own wedding photography business is by giving out free trial photography to soon-to-be brides. You can hang around wedding dress shops and offer free trials by taking their photos while they are trying out new wedding dresses.
Showcase your photography skills and start a conversation, connect with them on a personal level, exchange your business card, connect her to your website and portfolio, get their email address and send in their free trial images to bag clients!
2. Create your Own Blog
Having your own blog will enable you to drive more traffic to your website and also clients can get more ideas about your work. You can also write contents about wedding ideas, planning etc which will gather more clients from the search engines. This works by having a few contents about the customer’s FAQs. What questions do they have? When it comes to weddings, you have experience and expertise that they don’t! So, answer their questions.
3. Connect with Other Vendors and Event Planners
Include a list of recommended local vendors and event planners on your website and blogs and, in return, ask to be included on the websites and socials of other vendors. People booking with you are more likely to take your recommendations about where else to look, so this is a helpful way to build credibility and increase your reach.
4. Satisfy and Delight Your Clients
Happy clients are a huge resource! If your clients love you, they will open up a whole new pool of work to you as they refer you to their friends. Not only do you want the whole experience of working with you to be stress-free and enjoyable for them, but you should create opportunities for them to rave about you. Create an email list and send them newsletters and discounts. Create teasers and videos before delivering the final product. Make sure to wow them and make your clients feel very important to you.
5. Create a Brochure
A brochure saves you time on answering the same frequently asked questions over and over again via emails and social media. It gives your future clients an overview of your works and recommendations.
You can also gather your client’s mailing address by exchanging your client guide online with their email addresses.
6. Keep Accounts
Keep track of your business by forming numeric goals and try to stick to them. They need to be realistic and measurable. This will help you analyze your marketing efforts, the success of various campaigns as well as ROI on new software or tools. Make it a habit, every month or quarter go back and look at the numbers, identify growth patterns to enforce certain actions and strategies or cut loose ends if something does not work out.
Online Presence To Promote Your Wedding Photography
In today’s world it is a must to have a presence online as well as on social media. From creating your website to interacting and attending social media events is a great way to advertise and promote your business. You can do this on various platforms such as:
- Google My Business (GMB): Now known as Google Business Profile is a way of making sure that your business shows up in searches. It’s very easy to do and all you need is a Google account. You will be able to personalize and add your best photos as well as other details to help your customer. This will be shown to users when they search around on google for wedding photographers.
- Facebook: Facebook has become a mainstream media where people engage constantly and are expected to have a significant presence through the use of Facebook business pages. Here you can show off your work to a broader audience, facilitate conversations and recommendations in the comment section, as well as in your inbox. Your clients can also share your page to their friends easily as most people are amid Facebook users these days.
- Tumblr: The goal here is to get your posts reblogged in order to reach as many eyes as possible. One way to do this? Make sure to use hashtags. Hashtags help group your posts with similar content, and make them easier to find. Tumblr will allow you to target a younger, image-obsessed audience.
- Instagram: Of all the social media platforms, Instagram is specifically designed for sharing photographs. Instagram is another way to expose your brand – share only the best pictures you have, and look to create a uniform image feed so when someone stumbles upon your work, they can get an immediate sense of your photography style.
- Pinterest: Pinterest is huge in the wedding industry—making it the perfect platform for you to advertise your wedding photography. Pinterest actually gives you the option to set up a business account. The benefit of this is that it allows you to keep a close eye on your performance through Pinterest Analytics. This gives insight into which of your pins are most popular and which ones have the highest amount of engagement.
Automate Your Social Media
When it comes to social media, consistency is key. At the same time, getting distracted, pausing all your tasks to go and post on Facebook or Instagram can harm your overall workflow and it’s not very time efficient. Try automation tools. Take half of the day if you need to and plan out all your posts and images. Schedule them all, and voila, your day is freed for more complex tasks that require concentration.
Paid Strategies To Advertise Wedding Photography Business
1. Social Media Giveaways
Every once in a while launch social media giveaway campaigns. Offer promotional prices for your services in exchange for likes, shares, comments, invites and user generated contents. This will help boost your business’ credibility and rev up your brand value in the eyes of your potential clients.
2. Feature in Niche Publications
Getting your work featured on wedding blogs and in magazines is a fantastic way to reach people who would otherwise never have heard of you. This can feel overwhelming but start with local publications first. The keys here are persistence and creativity – and you’ve started your own wedding photography business, so you have both!
3. Create Your Own Website
Creating your website will require you to invest a little unless you can make your own website and make sure this website is as impressive and engaging as possible. When it comes to how to market your wedding photography business, your website is your calling card, so make sure that it shows your style clearly and showcases your best work. Keep it up-to-date, beautiful, and easy to navigate.
4. Invest Money on Branded Products
If you’re sending them a selection of prints & a USB flash drive with the entire gallery consider getting some nicely branded packaging for it. Those branded packaging won’t leave anyone indifferent, but rather inspire a strong desire to share it online with their social media friends, as well as offline with anyone who comes to visit their house. Encourage your clients to film their “unboxing” process – their happy reactions, the fun comments & tears of joy.
5. SEO
Most likely you’re already doing at least some basic SEO for your website. You’re probably choosing keywords more accurately for various sections on your homepage and website. SEO is a long term, continuous process. It’s not this thing you do once and then forget about it for the next 10 years. If you want to increase your chances of being found by clients on Google (and other search engines), there’s a whole list of steps you need to take & implement on your site. find out about new trends and changes to Google’s Algorithms, get tips, recommendations and help from SEO experts within the photography industry.
6. Paid Advertising
There are many platforms that you can try paid advertising on. Social media channels, which are more kind to your budget, or Google Ads, which require larger spending & a certified specialist.
To decide which platform to pick, start with analyzing your website traffic in Google Analytics. Where do most of your users come from? Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest? or perhaps organic and direct search? This will give you a hint on which channel needs to be nourished and exploited more.
Other Ways of Advertising Your Wedding Photography Business
- Streamline your content marketing efforts to build marketing campaigns to target your local audience.
- Every once in a while, introduce special offers/discounts.
- Approach wedding directories such as The Knot, Wedding Maps, and Fearless Photographers to diversify your brand’s reach.
- Use holiday cards to grow your wedding photography business
- Consider outsourcing some of your responsibilities, the ones that you don’t enjoy doing that take too much energy to be completed, or the ones that you aren’t an expert in, hence hiring a professional could help your business and workflow. Some photographers also prefer to outsource their photo editing, to either save up time, or get rid of a process they don’t particularly enjoy.
Conclusion
These tips on how to advertise wedding photography business will help you through the journey as a wedding photographer. Improve your marketing with better techniques and efficient workflows and let your photography skills flourish around you to build a successful business in photography.
And lastly, have faith in yourself. All the best for starting out your professional wedding photography business!
