Marketing ideas for wedding photographers

In the Kick Ass Photographers membership group (join here!) the topic most wedding photographers struggle with is how to market themselves. Marketing is all about getting yourself out there and getting seen by your ideal client. You have a website, but how do you get people to find it? Here are some marketing ideas for wedding photographers that you can do today.

How do you know which ones to do?

You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket by just having one marketing method. If anything goes wrong, such as Facebook closes or Google changes the algorithm dramatically, then you’re stuffed. You also don’t want to do too many, or you’ll just spread yourself thin. Consider your ideal client – where are they, what do they respond to, what kind of person are they? This will help you decide where and how to market yourself to attract and book your ideal clients. Pick 2 or 3 marketing methods and do them properly.

SEO – getting found on Google

SEO means search engine optimisation (getting yourself found on Google, basically). It’s one of the best ways for wedding photographers to market themselves. Here are a few quick and easy things you can do:

Search terms: Think about what search terms you want people to find you for. You can research these using Semrush. For example, “London wedding photographer”, “Natural Kent wedding photographer”, “fine art wedding photographer in Devon”. Use these search terms on your site, but try to keep it to one page per search term and one search term per page. Write blog posts using different terms you want to rank for, use it in your tagline, write it on your homepage, use it in your image naming and your Google snippets.

User experience: The user experience is the MOST IMPORTANT thing for SEO. If someone is confused, lost or overwhelmed by your site, or it’s not what they were looking for, they’ll leave. And Google will rank you lower. If you want to know how to easily give your user a good experience, we do, check out the Kick Ass Course, which has helped hundreds of photographers improve their website dramatically and get loads more (ideal!) bookings. 

Links: Gather internal and external links – an external link means someone else is linking to your site. Create good, shareable content (like this blog post!) and other sites will want to share it. Internal links are links on your site to other relevant pages on your site. This gets the reader moving around, which tells Google you’re interesting and worthy of a high ranking.

Yoast: There’s a plugin you can install on your website called Yoast, which helps you with your SEO. This helps you with blogging, as it tells you how well that page will do.

Blogging: Blog consistently and regularly. Blog weddings, top 10s, reviews, ideas, anything that your clients would find useful. Here’s a list of some wedding photographer blog post ideas! You can also use this blog post generator for your wedding blog posts, which writes the post for you and has ALL the SEO goodness, so you don’t even have to think about any of this.

Fuel Your Photos is a cracking SEO course for photographers if you want to DIY your SEO – these guys specialise in SEO for photographers and they’re awesome.

SEO bonus tip: Content marketing

Think about what’s important to your ideal client, and write useful and informative pages/posts on that topic. Top 10 (or 11!) posts, how to posts, where to, why you should, mistakes other brides have made – the list is endless. Work out what people are searching and start there, or run the content as a Facebook ad. Top tip: Look at Buzzfeed or Medium for headlines and write something that will make the reader want to click.

Google adverts

Google adverts are a great way to market yourself when you’re starting out as a wedding photographer or moving locations, as you get to the top of Google with almost no effort! We have two Google Ad videos in the membership – with a full walkthrough of how to set up a successful ad.

Referrals from other wedding photographers

Join referral groups on Facebook (and post as many as you put your name down for – this gives you more chance of being referred) and genuinely befriend other wedding photographers of a similar style and price to you. Be useful in Facebook groups and get your name remembered. Send gifts if you get a booking from a fellow photographer.

Referrals from your wedding couples

This is a great one, because your existing ideal clients will have lots of friends like them! There are many ways to get referrals from your couples, but mainly you just have to do a great job and make sure they love you and their photos. Get in with a young couple who has lots of couple friends and you’ll be set for years. You can market to a young, popular client by using the right words and having appropriate branding.

Great ways to get referrals from your existing couples are:

• Next day sneak peeks on your blog – they’ll share them with everyone
• Instagram sneak peeks the same day or next day, tagging the couple and venue and suppliers
• Slideshows, embedded on your website (as a page, not a blog post, so your blog feed doesn’t get full of these)
• Gifts before the wedding – eg date night cinema tickets with your branding
• Welcome pack – create a useful magazine to plan their wedding, or a branded planner, and Instagrammable goodies
• Anniversary cards/gifts/posts

Vendor referrals

Think about the supply chain and work up – florists, bands and caterers are unlikely to recommend you as they’re usually (but not always) booked after the photographer. But venues and planners are often the first thing a couple will book, so they’re the best place to go for referrals. They get a million photographers asking to be recommended though, so if you’ve shot at the venue offer them to use your photos for free, or print an album or postcards with their branding and your photos (and your name, small) and send it to them to use in their marketing. Create a genuine relationship with them too. This will also help you get a spot in their wedding fairs if they hold them. If you haven’t shot at a venue, offer to do headshots for their staff and food and venue shots for them for free. You can also drop off an album of photos from that venue for them to use during their client meetings and to leave in their common area.

If you want to get booked up with dream clients and love your job, and be part of a cool membership of photographers, join the Kick Ass Photographers membership!