Necessary Evil
I think that a lot of people think of wedding photography as being kind of a "normie" genre of photography. To an extent that can be true. Search Instagram for "Wedding Photographers" and you'll find a bunch of Christian Moms in Indiana sharing their "wedding photo hacks". Big snooze. What is also true is that wedding photography can be one of the least commercial, least corporate, least soul stealing creative industries you can get into. I basically spend a few weeks in my off season making targeted promotional material, and beyond that I just do basic maintenance to portfolios and profiles on a few wedding-centric platforms. Beyond that there's no soul-sapping selling of myself. No bosses. No stylists. No marketing teams. No input from anyone besides my direct clients who are just regular people. This allows me to live a surprisingly free and easy, borderline bohemian lifestyle. It doesn't feel very normie. It feels great. I could never work in E-Commerce photography. Even photojournalists have to spend a ton of time pitching and doing song-and-dances for editors. Fine art photographers have to schmooze themselves to death. I feel pretty lucky.
That being said, I usually start thinking about doing a tiny little marketing push around Thanksgiving. A lot of future wedding clients spend the holidays discussing the gritty (financial) details of their weddings with their families. Some couples wait for the holidays to actually look at vendors with their parents. Most weddings are paid for by parents so a lot of nice couples (who end up being nice, easy to work with clients) involve their parents in selecting vendors and gauging prices. I've been getting an average of six leads a day since New Years. This is BOOKING SEASON.
Around Thanksgiving, since it's nearing the end of the year and most of my shoots are done, I'll go through all my weddings and select images that highlight the venues and vendors that I've worked with. Then I go on Google and Facebook and write as many GLOWING reviews as I can, including my high quality photos. The reviews stand out because the photos look better than normal customer cell phone pictures on the review pages. This leaves a good impression with the other vendors, creates good vibes, and sometimes results in referrals. What is even more beneficial is that THOUSANDS of people see these reviews. I posted about 20 reviews at the end of 2022 that already have over 17000 views. I know it doesn't mean that all of those people have read the reviews or clicked through the photos. But that's still a ton of eyeballs seeing my work.
Then things get a little bit grosser. I have to tackle social media. It's part of the game. I hate "content" and "content creators." I hate that Instagram is about reels instead of still images now. Honestly, I rarely get inquiries or bookings from Instagram or Facebook. I don't even know if potential clients I could book through those platforms are worth my time. As it stands now, the people who do contact me and book me are WONDERFUL. I never encounter drama. No "bridezillas" (I hate the term). I don't want to mess with a good thing. BUT to be totally honest, I did shoot fewer weddings in 2022 than I shot the year before. Part of that is because I shot almost exclusively full-blown weddings instead of the pandemic-era microweddings and elopements of 2021 and 2020. I shot fewer but I shot bigger (and $$$er). Anyway, there is room to shoot more weddings so I'm looking to grow things a little bit.
I created some end of the year slideshows, one of which I shared in the newsletter a few weeks ago. I turned another one, a "One Picture From Each Wedding" slideshow into a "REEL" and a "STORY" and BOOSTED them on Instagram and Facebook respectively. It is cool that you can target your ads to areas and interests and make the ads target people searching for wedding stuff.
Other than that I have profiles on three wedding vendor platforms - The Knot, Wedding Wire, and Zola. These are expensive but low maintenance and I get a boat-load of leads from them. Not so much Zola but Zola leads are usually higher quality than leads from the other platforms. I have about an 80% success rate with booking the few Zola leads I get. I have about 40% success on The Knot and 20% on Wedding Wire. Wedding Wire has more scammers and more couples who are VERY budget conscious. When I get a lead from WW it's usually clear that the person contacting me has contacted 20 other people and is just trying to get the best deal. I don't blame anyone for not having the budget to drop thousands of dollars on wedding vendors or for not having photography as their budgetary priority. If you don't want to spend much money on a photographer then hire someone who isn't relying on wedding photography to feed their kids. The best leads are leads I get through direct email. These are the mystery leads. If they email me directly they could have been referred by a friend, from a vendor, from a review I wrote, or they found me on one of the platforms and were intrigued enough to click through to my website and beyond to contact me directly with a personalized email. They are invested. These clients are basically ready to book by the time they write to me. It's the best.
That's the extent of my marketing. I hope I never feel compelled to go to trade shows or anything else that feels icky. I'm content to just sit back and let cool couples come to me and say "We love your work! Here's some money!" I don't know if I can expect my current methods to be sustainable but it's great for now and doesn't seem to be slowing down. If it stops being easy maybe next year at this time you'll see me on TikTok making a damned fool of myself lip syncing to the "My money don't jiggle-jiggle" song begging for people to book me.
That's all for business stuff. I'm sure it's super boring for most people but if there are other photographers or creatives out there looking for guidance or just want to wallow in marketing misery with me then hit me up.
***Most photos in this post are irrelevant to the text. They are from test rolls I shot this week on the Mamiya RB67 Pro S I just bought and will discuss more next week.