I don’t think marketing has ever been as difficult for wedding photographers as it is right now.
Everyone has a really nice website and it’s pretty easy to do at least the basics of SEO.
Social media is a level playing field, visually speaking. And we’ve got online schedulers to post our content.
We’ve got apps that make cool reels and now AI that can write our words for us.
Being award winning has become meaningless because we simply have too many awards bodies giving out too many awards.
And at the same time with camera phones being so good, society is beginning to place less and less value on the concept of ‘photography’.
The time when we could do the basics and wait for the work to roll in are possibly over.
Let’s not confuse marketing and sales.
Marketing is everything that gets you found and makes someone to want to enquire with you, and sales is everything you do to convince an enquiry to book you.
The better your marketing, the easier the sale becomes. Being a great salesperson is useless if you’ve got nobody to sell to.
The more saturated the market, the harder it is to make your marketing voice heard.
I made a career really out of ONLY doing SEO for a long time.
I do more work on SEO than I’ve ever done, but it doesn’t work anywhere near as well as it once did.
So I personally have to broaden my own skillset, swallow my pride, and find other ways of getting found.
Yeah, Instagram is the melting pot of photography these days.
And chances are if you’re like most photographers that’s really the only place you put your work. Me too.
We put it there, and we hope. We hope it gets found, and we hope it gets likes, and we hope it gets comments, and we hope we get followers.
And we hope, somehow, that this translates into actual bookings. Actual money in the bank bookings.
But does it? Not for my business. Clever businesses don’t put time, effort or money into things that don’t actually put money in the bank.
Imagine two rooms.
One has 500 engaged couples in.
The other has 3 engaged couples in it.
Which room do you go into? The one with 500? No brainer.
Now imagine that room also has 10,000 photographers in it. Some very shouty and some even with megaphones. There’s a fight to get in the door let alone on stage.
The other room has no photographers in it.
Now which room do you go into?
In my mind, the best marketing strategies mean finding a few of the rooms with 3 couples in and no other photographers, rather than going into the room with hundreds of couples and thousands of photographers and just trying to shout louder, or standing in the corner frowning because it’s not fair.
Marketing is also about finding the channels and media which work best for you, your brand, your personality and your work.
I’ve seen marketing channels come and go over the years.
Facebook was amazing for a short time, but then photographers were incredulous that we might have to actually pay to advertise.
Instagram was amazing for a while, but then photographers were incredulous that we might have to actually pay to advertise.
I know it’s great when a new channel pops up and it’s free advertising. But we aren’t entitled to free advertising just because we’re photographers who make people happy.
One sure fire way to beat the so-called algorithms on these platforms – any platform, google included – is to pay them. That’s how advertising and marketing works.
But there’s a world outside Instagram and Google. There are a whole myriad of wedding suppliers we can network with to build long term relationships that will bring referrals. There are direct marketing opportunities like mailing lists we can purchase. We can place paid online adverts on blogs or other wedding related sites. Wedding fairs still exist and will work for you if they suit your personality and if you invest time and thought into standing out. There are loads of other smaller, much less competitive rooms to walk into.
So don’t be the person who sits blaming the algorithms while your business dwindles. Businesses spend money on advertising. Coca Cola spend 200 million dollars every single year just to hold onto its marketing share over Pepsi.
So set yourself a marketing budget. Experiment. Use your imagination. Track the results. Do more of what works. And repeat. That’s the only algorithm I know that works.
Thanks for reading.
Adam
