We're Ron & Jess, marketing experts for wedding photographers. We're excited you're here & can't wait to get to know you more.
As a wedding photographer, marketing is the most important part of your business. Without a clear marketing plan, you will likely not receive any bookings which will lead to going out of business.
As marketing professionals who exclusively work with wedding photographers, we know exactly what you need to do to market your business.
In this article, we’re going to tell you the 7 steps of marketing for wedding photographers plus other valuable information so you’ll walk away with concrete advice on how to spend your time to help your business grow.
The first step in marketing your wedding photography business is to attract couples to your business.
There are many different ways of doing this, but we’re going to give you a great list of how ways to get your business in front of couples who are looking for a wedding photographer.
Social media is an incredibly powerful tool for wedding photographers. Many photographers run their entire business off of social media alone. Doing so can be a very time-consuming way to run a business, so we suggest utilizing other aspects we highlight in this article as well so you don’t get burnt out.
We suggest picking 1 or 2 platforms and sticking with a consistent posting schedule. However, it is very important to have your other social media platforms look active. The last thing you want is a couple stumbling across your Facebook page and thinking you’re not in business any longer because you haven’t posted on there in 3 years.
To keep this as simple as possible, we recommend using a social media scheduler where you can cross-post to different platforms. Our favorite is Hootsuite but you can also use Business Suite as a free alternative (but we warned, it can be very glitchy!)
Social Media like Instagram is a great place to showcase your work and is often used as a second portfolio. We suggest filling your feed with your best work and saving the personal, behind-the-scenes stuff for your stories.
Pinterest is a great, often overlooked tool for attracting couples to your business. Pinterest is over mistaken for a social media platform but it’s actually another form of a search engine.
And what do most couples use when planning a wedding for inspiration? Pinterest! That means if they are searching “engagement session spots near _____” or “best wedding venues in ______” they can and will stumble across your website!
Keep in mind that you will want to use a form of SEO when posting on Pinterest so your work can be found for the right keywords. You’ll also want to write posts specifically for Pinterest keywords, but it won’t hurt you to create pins and pin all of your blog posts on Pinterest!
Blogging with SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the most powerful ways you can get your business in front of couples getting married.
SEO can seem complicated, but it is actually fairly simple once you learn it. We have an email newsletter where we send out a weekly email with super valuable marketing tips. We often talk about SEO and how to write blog posts with SEO, you can sign up for that here.
Blogging with SEO vs. blogging for your portfolio are two different things. Many photographers blog for their portfolio by posting a collection of their best photos from a specific wedding. In these types of blog posts, they often write a few sentences or paragraphs about the couple/wedding and the rest of the post is just photos.
When you write SEO-optimized blog posts, they are often informational posts to help couples in your area who are planning a wedding. Some examples of this can be, the best wedding venues near ______, a guide to getting married at _______, and the best wedding dress boutiques in ______.
Getting featured on other websites is a great way to build your authority but it should also be part of your SEO strategy. Getting featured on popular wedding blogs and websites can significantly boost your visibility and credibility.
There are multiple reasons for wanting to get featured on other websites. One is to get noticed and create buzz around your business. Next is to build your authority, which in turn you can put on your website to let people know you are a recognized photographer and have authority in this space.
The final reason is to get a backlink, which is a link from another website to your website. This is part of building your Domain Authority on Google, which just means you look authentic and that you know what you’re talking about. Google uses backlinks to distinguish between websites that are spammy from websites that aren’t.
Running paid ads on social media is one of our favorite ways to market a wedding photography business. In 2024, social media is extremely over saturated making it difficult to stand out and find couples interested in your work.
On top of that, the algorithms are changing constantly making it even more difficult to figure out how to organically be seen on these platforms.
Running paid ads is the best way to circumvent these issues and get your business directly in front of couples looking to book a wedding photographer!
The most powerful part of running ads is being able to target your exact clientele. I’m also sure you’ve heard ‘the marketing rule of seven’ which means a customer needs to see your message at least 7 times before making a purchase.
This concept is true now more than ever! With so many incredible photographers out there and people’s attention constantly being pulled in different directions, using ads to stay top of mind with couples who’ve shown interest in your photography is, in our opinion, the most important marketing strategy in 2024.
There are plenty of different directory-like websites nowadays that you can list your business on. The two most popular are WeddingWire and The Knot.
Over the years, we’ve seen the quality of these websites diminish and the price to be featured on them exponentially rise.
Since these sites are essentially a list of vendors all in one place, many couples are going through them and just submitting aimlessly submitting inquiries. A lot of couples are ‘price shopping’ and are just starting in their quest to find the perfect photographer for them.
Most photographers will find they can receive lots of bookings from sites like these if they are priced at a certain budget.
Whether you want to pay to be featured on one of these sites or not, it’s still 100% essential to have a professional profile and build up reviews on them.
Doing this is for a few different reasons, one is to have a 3rd party website that hosts reviews for people to read. These websites also come up when you Google search your business, and it’s like an extension of your portfolio.
Remember us talking about backlinks earlier? This is an easy way to build up your domain authority as well. So spend some time creating nice profiles on as many different directory sites as you can find, and make sure to always put your website URL on them to get that backlink!
Networking with other vendors is a great way to market your business and build relationships with others in the same community as you.
Whenever you go to a wedding, make sure you spend some time chatting with the other vendors there. Of course, make sure you are genuinely wanting to get to know them and not just expecting something out of them!
You could also spend some time chatting with the venue owners and asking if they ever host venue open nights that you could attend. You could also offer to photograph their venue so they can use the photos for their website/social media.
Don’t forget to use social media to network with other vendors as well! Make sure to tag/link to other vendors in your posts/blog posts. You could also check out any Facebook groups for wedding vendors in your area!
Bridal shows are another great way to connect with couples and other vendors in person. One of the most valuable parts of going to a bridal show is receiving the email list of all the couples attending.
We’ll talk about it further down in this article, but email marketing should be part of your marketing plan to book more weddings.
If you already have an awesome drip email sequence built out, you can just add the email addresses you received from the bridal show!
Google My Business has become another great way to market. Essentially, a profile on Google My Business is what shows up when you use Google Maps. But it also shows up when you google search key phrases like “wedding photographer in Miami.”
The key to showing up as one of the top people on Google My Business is to get as many 5-star reviews as you can. Use incentives to get past couples to leave you a review and build up your review karma by leaving other businesses reviews as well.
The next step after attracting couples to your business is to engage. This works mostly on social media by creating content that people are interested in engaging with.
For wedding photographers, this means creating content that couples can relate to, like funny reels about planning a wedding, beautiful examples of your work, examples of what it would be like working with you, etc.
It’s also important to use the 80-20 rule here, 80% is helpful/engaging content and 20% is you selling your services.
Many people don’t ever actually do the 20% selling their services part! This is for many reasons, but mostly because they don’t want to come across as pushy or salesy.
But it’s SO important that you get in a habit of talking about your services and how couples can book you or find out more about your packages.
If you don’t, people might think you aren’t booking weddings right now or be swept up by another photographer who is properly selling their services (without being pushy or sales-y.)
We also recommend connecting with people on a personal level by letting your personality shine through so people can get to know the real you!
Overall, couples are booking a photographer, not photography, and they want to feel comfortable and have fun on their wedding day. The best way to do this is to show couples who you really are and what it would be like working with you as a person.
It’s best to save the personal/behind-the-scenes stuff for your stories and use your feed as an extension of your portfolio.
The next step in a marketing plan for wedding photographers is connection.
This is the part where a couple becomes a lead or inquiry. How this will happen depends on where they found you originally and how they are engaging with your content.
Here are a few ways we recommend moving people to the next step in your funnel:
The next step in marketing for wedding photographers is nurture. This step is similar to the engage step but looks a little bit different because it’s after a couple has already become an inquiry/lead.
There are really two steps to the nurture part, your follow-up system and email marketing.
Let’s talk about email marketing first. Email marketing is very similar to the engage step in that you want to send people 80% helpful content and 20% marketing your services.
Email marketing is the best way to stay top of mind with couples who have learned about your services but aren’t quite ready to book. And if you’re providing helpful information, they will look forward to reading your content and reach out when they’re ready.
If you have received an inquiry and they ended up “ghosting you” putting them in your email drip sequence is a great idea.
Now this leads us to your follow-up system. How many times, how, and how often you follow up with an inquiry is a rather controversial topic.
We believe that you should only stop following up with an inquiry after one of these 3 things have happened:
Having a CRM in place to help you keep track of your inquiries and where they’re at in your follow-up system is a great idea.
And we know this is also controversial, but texting is the new emailing. Gen Z and millennial couples prefer texting over emailing and it is the best way to truly capture someone’s attention!
The next step in marketing for wedding photographers is the most exciting step- the booking!
Once you have gotten an inquiry to schedule a Zoom chat, phone call, or in-person meeting, it’s time to shine!
This is where your sales process is super important. Remember, conducting sales and being sales-y are two different things.
As a business owner, you must conduct sales, there’s just no way around it! We could write a whole other article about the best way to conduct sales, but here are the two most important things to keep in mind:
After the booking, your job is obviously not over! This is where you go above and beyond to create an incredible client experience,
We want your business to stand out among the crowd and truly be the best, so going above and beyond to provide that is important here.
You can create systems to help you do this; have a checklist in place of things you send your couples as time goes on closer to their wedding. You can create a FB group where you encourage your couples to ask questions and connect with other people planning their wedding.
One of the biggest reasons for creating this incredible client experience is you get back what you put in. So if you’re giving your clients positive energy and a 5-star experience, you are guaranteed to get amazing referrals from them! And of course, awesome reviews you can use to continue booking more weddings in the future.
The above is just your marketing funnel, but all the other areas of your business need to be on point so that when couples check you out, they love what they see and feel connected to you!
The days of having a clunky, thrown-together website are over. If you really want to stand out among your competition, you have to have a beautiful, professional website.
Use your personal preference in branding to draw in your ideal couples. If you are an editorial photographer, make sure your website reflects that. If you want to
Your branding will mostly shine on your website. This is where you can really make it your own, but it needs to be very professional.
Having a beautiful website and branding to match/support this is a given. But where you will truly capture a couple’s attention is through your messaging.
This is where you call out the type of couple you serve, whether they are adventurous, glamorous, down-to-earth, classic, etc. you’ll want to make sure the words you write on your website and other places online reflect this.
You also need to help your couples see you are the photographer for them through your messaging. A great way to do this is by calling out pain points and positioning yourself as the solution.
Some other questions to think about: How are you the best photographer for them? What makes you different? What is your photography niche? What is your specialty? Where are you located? Who do you serve?
Your internet presence as a whole (directory websites like The Knot and Wedding Wire, all your social media profiles, and any materials you send to couples) also needs to be filled out, active, and professional-looking.
Make sure that if a couple were deep-diving into your brand, they would stumble across consistent messaging, amazing reviews, and active, up-to-date profiles showcasing your best work.
We hope these 6 steps in marketing your wedding photography business truly help you put together a plan you can implement to see results!
Before you go, make sure to join our Monday Marketing Challenge series where we send out 1x/week marketing tips just for wedding photographers.
Or if you’re looking for more help in marketing your photography business and booking more weddings, check out our services here.
June 21, 2024