Here’s a fun fact for you – if you are a wedding photographer, chances are that you are currently doing more marketing than anyone else that you know (excluding your industry pals).
Think about the people close to you, what do they do for a living? Within their role, could they update a webpage if they needed to? Do they know how to rank well in search engines? Do they regularly show up on social media to promote their company? Do they know how to use Pinterest for business or how to encourage customers to leave Google reviews?
In many companies, those roles are fulfilled by multiple people. But if you are a wedding photographer in 2023, chances are that you are doing most of these marketing techniques all by yourself, as well as taking care of the admin, the accounts, the production, and logistics, then every now and then actually taking photos.
We are multi-level marketers, yet despite this, a lot of the people that find their way to Photography Farm, think that it’s their marketing that isn’t good enough. They want to learn how to market even more.
Here’s the news, constantly working on marketing is exhausting. That’s a one-way ticket to Burn-Out Town. So I want to help you to market much more effectively, do it strategically instead of throwing everything you can think of at a brick wall and hoping some of it sticks.
For this reason, I created an online course called Book More Weddings. I’ve broken it down into three classes that each cover a different part of the client journey.
- Boost Your Enquiries – for the cold stage when potential customers are strangers.
- Famous For A Fortnight – For the warm stage when potential customers have reached out to you.
- Stop Sucking At Selling – For the hot stage when potential customers have shortlisted you.
These have been some of my favourite classes to produce because I believe that photographers just need to apply proper sales strategies to get better results. Many of my mentoring students say that they are ‘bad at selling’ and I would have said the same until I did some training and now it’s a part of my business that I enjoy.
Of the three stages above, my favourite has to be the Famous For A Fortnight. This is a sequence of marketing that can kick in after you have a client enquiry. My estimation is that most couples will spend around two weeks in ‘wedding photographer shopping mode’. When they gather a bunch of quotes, look into each of them and then decide on their shortlist.
Now we could just sit passively and think ‘pick me, pick me’, or we could action some methods that mean they see us in multiple places over that two weeks. Not only does this keep pushing us to the front of their minds but it also stands us out as elevated within our industry. They start thinking that this person must be a big deal because we are seeing them all over the place.
Now I know what you are thinking – ‘I’ve not got time to show up this much for every single enquiry.’ The good news is that you do not have to. A lot of my system is automated and you just need to set it up once. Plus you might only apply this much effort to the customers that float your boat the most. These ones get a VIP response as you are most keen on securing their booking. Maybe it’s a venue that you have been wanting to shoot at for some time or a style of wedding that fires you up the most.
So how does it work?
This method works best if you have an enquiry form on your website. Whether you display your prices or not, you need some kind of bridge between you and the customer. Yes, you could just have a simple ‘Get In Touch’ prompt but these days we can harness the power of a CRM – a Customer Relationship Management system. I use one called Studio Ninja which was developed by an Australian wedding photographer. It allows me to have a customised contact form on my site that automatically creates a client profile.
It also enables a redirect page. This is a webpage where someone is automatically sent when they hit submit on the form. By installing the Facebook Pixel – a small piece of code – on our websites we can easily employ retargeting technology. You know when you look at something in an online store and then it follows you around the internet? The technology that makes that happen is just as available to you as it is to big retailers. If you chose to only target people that land on your redirect page, then you are only showing up to your most interested customers.
As part of Famous For A Fortnight, I suggest setting this up and allowing it to tick away in the background. You could make a nice ad for Instagram and/or Facebook that only gets shown to the people who have filled out your form. This costs pennies as it’s always a very limited number of people.
This isn’t the only way that you can be ‘Insta Famous’ to someone interested in booking you. If I get an enquiry that I like the sound of, I will directly try to appeal to that person via my Social Channels. I will post a similar wedding on my grid and talk about why I love shooting that style of wedding or at that venue. I’ve been known to DM people who have enquired with me, chatting directly often gets faster results than email. When people open their inbox they might be in ‘work mode’ but when they are scrolling social media, they are in ‘fun mode’.
This is also a great time to boost some posts, this gives you a better chance of appearing in the feeds of people that are engaging with your account and again this is a very cost-effective method of marketing. If you know that a lead has come via Instagram, then you know that you can harness that platform to reach them again.
In marketing, there is something called The Rule Of Seven – this states that a person needs an average of 7 interactions with a brand before purchasing. There’s plenty that you can do to action most of those 7 times if you know how. When the result is a calendar full of the right kind of bookings for you, then it is very much worth it.
You will find Famous For A Fortnight here and if you sign up for Studio Ninja with the code FARM, you can get 50% off your first 12 months.