What is Engagement Season?
Ahhh, Engagement Season. What is that I hear you ask! Of all the days of the year, the most popular for engagements all happen around the same few weeks. They are Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, and Valentine’s Day. 40% of all proposals take place in this time and so for any wedding supplier, it is a good plan to be prepared and to make the best of it. Here are some things you can do right now to make sure you’re in the best possible place to capture the flurry of interest after the festive engagements.
#1 – Update Your Pricing Page
If there are any improvements that you need to make anywhere on your website, please do so ASAP with particular attention paid to your all-important Pricing Page. This is the perfect time to review how you present your rates or packages. Are they nice and clear? This is not the page to make your potential customers do any work. I’m a big believer in simple, easy-to-understand pricing and you can see exactly how mine is delivered in my Three Magic Emails Class.
#2 – Check Your Enquiry Form Works
Just because it worked when you first set it up, do not assume that your enquiry or contact form is still working perfectly. Test it out regularly but in particular just before we enter Engagement Season. While you are there, could it be improved at all? Remember at this point you want to ramp up the charm offensive, and the personality. So many photographers lose that when they get to this part or revert to a tone that is more formal than the rest of their copy. Make your form fun to fill out, they are more likely to feel a connection with you if you do, and remember your form is one of many that they are potentially doing. That soon becomes boring.
#3 – Schedule Social Media Posts
Of course, Engagement Season coincides with when you might wish to be relaxing with your loved ones or celebrating the festive season too. So you might not feel like being as present in your business as normal. This doesn’t mean that you have to disappear from your socials as we have some incredible scheduling tools now. My favourite is Planoly as I can drop in content for Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest there. I do it all from my desktop, set up the images, captions, and tags from there, then I schedule everything for times when I think my potential customers will be on social media. You can choose to have content post automatically or get push alerts on your phone. I prefer to do this just so I can double-check the copy. Before setting up my Out Of Office and leaving my desk, I will drop a load of content into Planoly so that I don’t have to think about it later.
#4 – Set Up Ads
This is the perfect time of year to try some ads. I like to think of my ideal kind of client sitting down together and doing some wedding planning with a laptop over some homemade cocktails. Think about what spaces the couples that you want to work with might be going to for ideas on wedding planning and then look at ways to advertise there. Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest all allow paid ads. The beauty of these for us is that they don’t have to cost a fortune, and they will be showing up on those platforms whilst you are switching off.
#5 – Repurpose Your Content
Here’s what I hear from so many photographers as we approach the end of another year – “I don’t have time to blog”. Yes, in an ideal world you would be blogging every week, showing off your lovely work, and showing what an expert you are when it comes to weddings and photography. (For help with this, see my Blog A Wedding In 30 Minutes Class). But the good news is that even if you are not getting around to blogging anywhere near as often as you’d like, a wise strategy is to repurpose the content that you have already created. Think about it, you have an ever-refreshing potential market as customers move through your world. Past customers move on and newly engaged people enter. So it makes sense to create some evergreen content that you can refer to later down the line. Topics that might be good for Engagement Season could be Top Wedding Venues In (insert your preferred area); Wedding Planning Tips; Engagement Shoot Ideas.
Many of us need a proper break over the festive season so that we can relax and recharge. We give up enough precious time with loved ones in order to be out shooting at weekends. Doing some work in advance and setting up some or all of these tips, can ensure that you don’t miss out on bookings but that you still have plenty of time off.