As a business owner, there’s nothing more tantalizing than a wedding show: hundreds of qualified clientele looking for the services you’re offering. Here’s the thing: shows are for marketing. And marketing doesn’t mean just showing up, it also means following up.
Our economy is booming, and for wedding photographers, The Knot and WeddingWire are predicting the highest number of engagements since they started tracking those statistics. There is no better time to start planning than right now. Here are some strategies that you will want to adopt to crush it in 2020 and beyond.
Creating a blog that people actually want to read is really the main goal. Create content that is informative, interesting, helpful, sharable and/or entertaining. If people find that your content provides value, they will be much more likely to come back, inquire and eventually convert.
The world of social media can be daunting. There are so many platforms to choose from and to post on, and different things seem to be working for different people. It can be overwhelming trying to figure out what to post, when to post it, where to post it, and what to do after you’ve posted it.
To many, the thought of putting yourselves out there can be daunting, especially if you are by nature an introvert. Face-to-Face Marketing often will require you to shed that dynamic if it is part of your personality.
You read that title right. All other things equal, marketing is the reason I see most businesses fail. They ether don’t do it at all or, quite frankly, they suck at it. And no, running a Facebook Ad is not marketing. There are time-worn strategies that go into marketing. You don’t just do something and magic happens. You need a plan. You then must execute that plan. You then evaluate the results, make adjustments and re-execute your plan. Rinse and repeat.
For a long time I despised marketing because I did not have a strategy for our B2B video and photo company. Anything that I had tried, like posting on Facebook and Instagram or email marketing, did not seem to work for me. These strategies work when done well, but I did not figure them out and was getting frustrated. A mentor told me to look at my best clients—the 80/20 rule—and figure out the commonality between all of them. Were they all the same type of business? Did they all have the same product or service? Did they all find us through Google?
As a wedding photographer, social media is one of the strongest marketing and branding tools at our disposal. It’s also the most time-consuming task, taking us away from our passion of running our own photography business. It’s the end of engagement season, so marketing is a top priority for wedding photography businesses. Social media is where most newly engaged couples hang out digitally these days, but that’s not the only way to get in front of them. How can you make sure you’re doing your best job at marketing when everything keeps changing?
How many times have you heard “You gotta fake it until you make it”? Want more clients? Simply tell the new client you are targeting that you’ve already worked with dozens of clients just like them. It’s been tossed around in my neck of the woods since the beginning of our business many years ago. And I’ve hated it since the first time I heard it.
You may have tried Facebook ads before with little success. If so, you probably just skipped one or two of these easy-to-miss (but important) steps. Let’s review the steps now, and at the end I will show you how to get your photography studio’s engine roaring with yet another very powerful tool.