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Making a great image is just the beginning of building your photography company. The competitive landscape in our industry is fierce, so building your brand and having a great marketing effort is paramount! I have likened marketing in a vacuum to walking up a down escalator, as soon as you stop you are already moving backwards. You need to concentrate on building out a great network and then make sure you are delivering for them in a timely manner!
“Couples come and go, but the industry will always be there.”
Imagine if you had a marketing team working for your small business, 10, 20 or 100 people who knew the wedding industry inside-and-out, who were constantly talking to your ideal couples and loved promoting your business. Sounds amazing, but this kind of marketing team would be unthinkably expensive!
Actually, it’s completely free.
If you build a strong network and give back to the other wedding professionals in your area – you’ll naturally build this dream team and see huge growth in your business. We are lucky to work in an industry that is community oriented and regional. It takes a village to host a gorgeous wedding. We have to rely on each other to grow as professionals the same way we need to trust each other to be the best at our craft, whether we take photos, bake cakes, plan weddings or host them.
Referrals and relationships are your best marketing tools, and creating good biz karma can be the one thing that helps your business grow exponentially.
The best part of this, is that referrals and relationships don’t cost money to start. It might cost as much as a coffee, but can start with a (free) handshake and a smile.
Here are tips for jump starting your good biz karma and growing your business through referrals, relationships and #vendorlove.
Plan your network
It’s not how many people you know, it’s WHO you know. This is simply the truth. As a wedding pro, you will get more referrals from venue owners than you will from a cake maker simply because they are often the first to be booked by couples. Do your homework on these high referral people so when you run into them at networking events or the grocery store, you can skip the long formal intro and make an authentic connection. The area of networking is often left to chance, but like any other part of your business, you should be prepared and strategic. Before going to a networking event, scan the list of attendees and write down the top 3 people you’d like to shake hands with. Show up prepared and make every event work for you!
Be selective
As a solopreneur or small business owner, your time is more than precious, it’s a rare commodity. Creating valuable connections takes time, so be judicious about how you are spending it. Are your digital marketing efforts turning into hours of personal Facebooking? Are events, conferences and online training programs worth your time, or distractions? Figure out what works best for you and do more of that. Networking one-on-one can be enormously beneficial for introverts, and a one hour coffee date with a local vendor could solidify a lifelong referral partnership, but if a relationship begins taking up more time than it’s worth, politely decline an invitation. Similarly, for people who love to work a room, cultivating a strong relationship-based group of vendors could be the one thing that helps you get more referral business. But don’t get distracted. stay committed to a single group if it’s working for you.
Other vendors aren’t competition, even in your category
Some people see all other vendors in a 50 mile radius as “the competition”. They refuse to “like” them on Facebook and see their success as a personal loss. This is the opposite of good biz karma. Competition is an illusion. There are 2 kinds of businesses in your category: ones that are similar to you (in price and style) and ones that are different than you. They are both vital to your referral growth.
{This bullet point is built off of the assumption that you’ve taken our #1 advice about building a wedding business and chosen a very specific business niche and identified your ideal client. This is especially important when it comes to referrals.}
Other professionals that share your niche and ideal client may seem like competition, but when a qualified lead inquires about a weekend they are booked, you will be the one they recommend. For businesses that are very different, when another vendor in your area has a lead that doesn’t match their price point or style, your business will be at the top of their list. Make friends with other vendors and REFER REFER REFER. That is good biz karma.
Show #VENDORLOVE
We recommend all photographers take advantage of the off-season by offering their high-referral vendors like venues, caterers, florists and other photographers a “Vendor Tour Feature” on their blog. Go to their location and take photos that show off their personality and staff. Even venues who have professional photographers on their property constantly will jump at the chance to get professional images of their facility. While the gazebo and lawn might be well photographed during weddings, having great images of their kitchen, bridal suites and “behind-the-scenes” photos will be incredibly useful to their marketing team. Email them ahead of time with a short list of 5-8 questions and add their answers to the post along with images from your visit. Keep the photo session short and sweet. Watermark all your images and share them for free. We know that seems counterintuitive, but these relationships are vital to the growth of your business and will pay off as you grow your partnership.
And that partnership is a very public one. Your watermarked images will live on their website, telling the world that you are the photographer they trust to photograph their property and staff. You’ll also be constantly featured on their blog, facebook, pinterest, and twitter pages. That’s the best marketing you can get. If doing vendor tours is difficult, start small and work up to it. Email vendors to see if any of them would be interested in exchanging a few emails to do a Vendor Q&A. This will open the conversation and you can always follow up with offering to do a Vendor Tour with images in the future.
At the very least, take every opportunity to send social #vendorlove to other vendors. Congratulate them on being featured in a magazine, and like and comment as much as possible on social media.
Be a self-proclaimed “Connector”
There is one in every town. They host the neighborhood Superbowl party and when they make a quick run to the grocery store they might spend 45 minutes catching up with people in the deli section. How did these people become so connected?
They started calling themselves a connector.
By honing your ability to bring people together, you will set yourself up as the one person who other vendors and non-wedding industry people mention in conversation. This is great for business when a local magazine wants to do a wedding feature and needs a contact person, or a PR person for a local business wants to talk to a wedding expert. That’s you!
There are few words that ring as beautifully as. “Have you talked to Tom yet? He’s the person to ask about weddings.” You will be the regional expert which creates value for your business. This expertise along with skill and professionalism can help grow your business and allow you to charge clients your real worth.
Practice connection online
If you feel like you don’t have time to attend every networking event, or you enjoy traveling during the off-season, you can still be the leader of your referral network. Creating thoughtful relationships is just as easy online as it is in person. Sharing images of other vendors’ work on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest makes a world of difference. If you share an image on Facebook of a recent wedding, tag the venue where the picture was taken and the florist who made the bouquet that the bride is holding. That simple action keeps you on the top of mind with those vendors and it will come back to you as “likes”, pins, repins and eventually referrals or new business. That is good biz karma in action.
Establish yourself as an expert in your field
Trust is a marketing tool that can’t be bought. When hiring a photographer for a wedding, most couples are flying blind. They know a little about photography and style, but they are relying on your expertise to deliver photos they’ll love. This trust can be built from the ground up with a successful blog.
Becoming an expert in photography is a content decision you make. Along with the real wedding stories and personal posts, write opinion pieces that are helpful to the couples looking for an expert. Write blog posts about “How to choose the right photographer for your intimate wedding” “Why you should hire a second photographer” or “How to hire a photographer who your wedding planner will love” These expert opinion posts do double duty. First, those are often the questions couples are asking, and googling before they start looking for a photographer. The keywords in these blog posts will generate the highest SEO benefits for driving traffic to your blog and website. And of course, when a couple comes across your blog they will be well informed and feel like you have EARNED their trust. You gave them guidance and free advice before they even picked up the phone. That service is extremely valuable and builds trust.
As you develop your blog as a place people can find valuable information, you will benefit in so many other ways. The media will look to you when they need an expert in weddings, which will get you great PR. Other vendors will look to your blog for expert advice in an area that they aren’t as well versed. They will also refer clients to your blog when they have questions about photography.
After you’ve created a platform that positions yourself as an expert you can start to share your success with other vendors, because as you know by this point, building vendor relationships is the goal. The group of wedding experts in your area will start to be your group of vendor friends and you can take advantage of each other’s successful platforms as a means to grow your clientele. Offer other experts a chance to guest blog about the ways your businesses overlap or work together. Similarly, offer them a guest blog post written specifically for their business that they can post when they need a break from blogging or want to go on vacation.
LulaWed helps you pay it forward
We’ve seen the power of sharing photos online. It’s what drives wedding professionals to blog, be social and share. But we’ve also seen the lost opportunity of an image that doesn’t link back to the person who’s work is featured. You have little control of images on blogs, pinterest and social media. LulaWed harnesses the power of those images by making it easy for a photographer to share all of their professional images of your work with you quickly and automatically after the event.
Not only will it save you hours of emailing back and forth with the photographer, it gives you access to the images of your work when you need them for your blog or social media.
LulaWed makes sure you are tagged in images of your work so when they are shared around the web, they lead back to your listing on the LulaWed site with your contact information and proper branding. We want to get your work seen by prospective couples, but only if it leads back to growing your business. We make it easy to connect with your network and share images without disrupting your work flow. We are a platform for good biz karma that makes your life easy.
