The Complete Wedding Photography Marketing To Do List

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Key takeaway for Wedding Photography Marketing ideas

With this list of wedding photography marketing ideas, I want to get your creative juices flowing. I want you to see you can do marketing in a plethora of ways. The trick is to find the ideas that match with your personality, character, and brand. The Complete Wedding Photography Marketing To Do List filled with all the marketing tasks that are explained here is available as a free download.

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First, find out what works for you

I have a photographer friend who doesn’t have a website or social media account. He makes over 200k a year by shooting Bar Mitzvahs. His marketing techniques are networking and providing a perfect, consistent experience.

With All my lovin’ as my wedding photography business, I focus mainly on SEO, blogging, getting published through a stock photo catalog, doing vendor marketing & providing a perfect, consistent experience to get my calendar fully booked.

I love being online and doing my business online. He loves talking to people and helping them in whatever way he can. We are both different, so we focus on different marketing techniques that work for us.

Find out what gives you energy, what makes you happy and see what marketing techniques work best with that. Focus on 3, to begin with, and master them! As soon as you master them, create a system for them so you can do the same amount of work in less time. Then focus on other techniques if necessary or raise your prices if you are already fully booked ;-).

SEO & Blogging & Social Media

If you are looking for your clients online and want to build a long-term asset for your business, a great start is to blog and build your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) skills. If you blog today with a strategic keyword phrase, your blog will still be found with that keyword search 5-10 years from now. Especially when you update your blogs from time to time. When we started our wedding photography business, we blogged strategically for six months and were number 1 for one of the best keywords in the Netherlands. It may take you longer or shorter depending on the competitiveness of your keyword and your skills.

Some great practical places to start:

• Get the Yoast plugin if you have a WordPress website so you’ll learn to optimize your blogs for SEO while you create them.
• Start your SEO journey here. Don’t overeat but slowly digest bits of learning over time and climb the search engine ranks.

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• Ask the client for permission for publication (after booking or include it in the contract)
• Share a preview on social media (asap after the wedding)
• blog the story of the day, optimize for SEO (a few days after the sales session or 1/2 weeks after the wedding)
• promote the blog on social media (a few days after the sales session or 1/2 weeks after the wedding)

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A workflow is a handy tool that will help you:

• Stay organized, even when you have 10 shoots in progress
• Keep track of all your clients
• Never forget ‘the little things’ – the marketing & upsell tasks, the tasks that make the experience for your client unexpectedly delightful!
• Save time. You don’t have to think about what to do next. Just check your workflow and you know what to do.

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Useful information: Photography workflow chart [Free Download]

Vendor marketing

Vendor marketing means you want to meet your clients through the relationships you build with your vendors. For example, you can build a great relationship with a wedding venue in your area. One way to do that is to offer to do a complimentary shoot of their venue and create a beautiful album for their wedding clients. Brides and grooms usually book a venue before they book a photographer. When they see your album at the venue, you are already a step ahead of the competition.

Vendor marketing improves your SEO

Another great tip which also helps with your SEO is to ask your clients which vendors will be working with you during the wedding day. You can contact them ahead of time, share a few words during the day, and send them pictures of their work after the wedding day. I always offered them for free as long as they tagged our business page on Facebook or added a link to our website if they used them online. This way we got a lot of backlinks to our website in a short time, which helps the search engine ranking.

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• Ask the client for vendors (8 weeks before the wedding)
• Send email to vendors (1 week before the wedding)
• Take great detail & overview photos of vendors & their work (during wedding day) Note: we were shooting together, so we had time for this. If you are a single shooter make sure you don’t miss important moments because you were shooting details.
• Send images to vendors (depending on your workflow – after delivery to clients)

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Getting Published

Getting published is cool. You get to see your work in print or online, and it will be seen by a lot of people who want to get married. If you want to get published, you need to pay attention to the details and the vendors. The magazines/blogs usually want to know the vendors on each photo.
Every blog or magazine has its requirements for getting published on their site. Check their ‘admissions’ section for their terms.
There is a software called 2BrightLights that makes it even easier to get published. If you consider this strategy, the software might be worth the investment.

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• Ask the client for permission for publication (after booking or include it in a contract)
• Create subfolder with detail-heavy highlights of the day (after wedding day)
• Submit images to 2BrightLights (after delivery to the client)
• Check on publication or re-submit (14 days after the previous task)
• Update client with publication details (after publication is scheduled)

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Published through offering a catalog

One idea we picked up many years ago from Mr. Lovegrove is to keep an online stock photo database of all the details of the weddings that you captured. Give access to a couple of curated editors of wedding blogs & magazines. They love having a repository of original wedding stock photos so they can find the perfect image for every blog post they create. Since they link to your site when they use your image, this technique provides a lot of backlinks which is helpful for the SEO rankings.

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• Ask the client for permission for publication (after booking or include it in a contract)
• Tag images with detail category, e.g., shoes, couple, bride, veil, venue, table, rings (after editing the photos)
• Export images to a stock gallery (after delivery to the client) make sure they can be sorted by detail category so the editors can quickly find the right image
• Send email to editors about new images in database (after the previous task)

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Strategic Facebook tagging

When you share your images on Facebook, you might as well be more thoughtful about how it can help grow your business. One way is to tag your clients in the images and ask them to share them on their timelines. This way their friends will see the images and the compliments they make to their friends are direct compliments to your work. It’s easy for their friends to book you too. They don’t even have to ask their friends: “Who was your photographer?”.

Facebook strategy tips

For this to work, you need to be okay with becoming ‘online’ friends with your clients. Not everyone likes that so make sure you only do it when it feels natural.
What to share on Facebook: I always made sure to add great portraits for bride and groom and a super happy emotional, candid picture of them both. They usually change their profile image in seconds when they see that.

When you want to take this approach to the next level also include some images of the guests and encourage them to tag themselves in it, so your reach increases exponentially. Whatever you share, make sure it fits your style and overall brand and what you want others to book you for. e.g., don’t share formals if you hate shooting them, or consider hiring someone just for the formals.

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• Ask the client for permission for publication on Facebook (after booking or include it in the contract)
• When they book you, connect with them on Facebook (after the booking)
• Share some fun wedding blogs, useful tips, a kind note, etc. with them on Facebook (every month before the wedding day)
• Share strategic preview on Facebook (as soon as possible after the wedding day)
• Be online to reply to comments or questions on Facebook (after the previous task is done) – Facebook appreciates if you engage in your post comments and will reward you by sharing your update with more people.
• Share your blog about the wedding day on Facebook and tag the clients (When you blogged)

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Side tip: keep a folder with useful tips and funny wedding movies (you can use the ‘save this post’ feature of Facebook for this), so you always have something fresh and relevant to share.

More Facebook Marketing Tips for Wedding Photographers

• Create an album named ‘weddings 20XX’ in which you upload all your previews. The individual images will be seen by your clients and their friends because you tagged them in the post and images, but everyone during the year will like the full album, and it will soon have more likes than you can imagine. This is social proof for your fabulousness as a photographer.
• Create an album named ‘best of 20XX’ at the end of each year and upload one image of every wedding. Tag your clients in the appropriate images, thank them for a fantastic job, the trust they gave you and wish them a happy new year.

Referral strategy

You can just ask for referrals. That’s it. So don’t forget it! Make sure your clients love you and make sure they know that you love them. Ask them if they know any friends ‘similar to them’ that might be in need of a photographer. You want to work with more clients like them. That is the message.
And then make it easy for them to refer you. Create cards that they can share, write emails that they can easily forward, think of rewards for them and their friends (dinner coupon for 4?), etc.

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• When they book, send the client a referral email that they can forward to their friends. Make the message about them. (a few days after the booking)
• After the wedding, send the client your favorites as small cards to give away to their friends. Make it about their day. (few weeks after the wedding)
• A year after the wedding, congratulate them with a personalized postcard and check if they have any friends getting married. (one year after the wedding)

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Winning Awards

There are countless awards these days if you want to know more about them check this blog:

10 Tips to win a wedding photography award

Winning an award or getting nominated is social proof for your potential clients. Some customers have no idea how to decide if you are any good at your job and having won an award gives you instant credibility. The winning of the award itself is an excellent promotion moment. Get to know the different award organizations, so you get a feel for what image works best in each contest that you want to submit to.

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• Tag your potential winners in Lightroom or your image catalog software (directly after culling)
• Export them in the right dimensions for the different contests to a file on your desktop, so your images are ready to go (directly after the previous task)

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To do

• Set the different dates for submitting your images in your calendar so you will not forget to send them.
• When the submission date is due, select the best images from your awards folder and submit them.

Same day slideshows

Doing a slideshow at the wedding is a great way to make your clients happy and having high exposure with their guests. Here is a blog with all the details and tasks for your workflow:

The best marketing tool for your wedding photography business without the hassle

A perfect, consistent experience is the best wedding photography marketing

Giving your clients the perfect experience every time is the best marketing you can get. All your clients will refer you to new ones, and you don’t have to spend a dime on advertisements.

To make the experience perfect, you have to exceed their expectations. Everyone expects that you will deliver excellent images, so that is a given. Ask yourself, what can I do to make the experience surprising? What can I do to exceed their expectations? What will make them extra happy?

Consistency is key

Big note: this works when you do it consistently for every client. Since these tasks are not urgent and not important, they are usually the first ones to disappear from your list when life is busy. However, these are the tasks that make the difference!! Use a paper workflow to check all the steps, or ShootZilla to keep track of things, automate and batch. This way you can create an extraordinary experience for your clients with ease and joy!

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• Bring your camera to the sales consultation and shoot a cute engagement portrait on the fly (at the sales consultation)
• Send an unexpected gift (a few weeks after the booking)
• Send an unexpected card or gift (a few weeks before the wedding)
• Offer them extra’s that were not mentioned before like the same day slideshow (few weeks after the booking)
• Bring a nice framed print of their engagement shoot to their wedding (wedding day)

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Troubleshooting

For some people, it can be hard to stay consistent with their wedding photography marketing techniques. They are eager to start with something and are blinded by another shiny object a few weeks later. And that shiny object will make you forget the first thing you started. After a few years, it can lead to discouragement since none of your strategies are fully matured. You risk being drained of all energy. Since you only tried everything for a short time, your confidence may reach a depressing low.

So when in doubt, remember that it sometimes takes a bit of time before the results appear. Don’t give up too soon, keep at it. Most of all, try to pick the strategy that is aligned with YOU.

I didn’t choose networking basically because it never crossed my mind. I chose to create a wedding stock catalog because I liked organizing my images. Not every strategy works for everyone. It helps immensely to pick something that you like to do or like to learn!

Make it easy

With ShootZilla adding tasks to your workflow is as easy as counting 1,2,3.

Sign up for ShootZilla today and get access to wedding photography workflow and email templates.

We listed all the workflow tasks of this post in a chronological task list, so you have your complete wedding photography marketing to-do list for every wedding you do from now on! Download it below.

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