Last Updated: February 15th, 2020
We previously wrote a post for photography business beginners answering the question…”How do photographers get clients?” This post pulled on our own experience over the past several years growing our wedding + portrait photography business as we’ve learned a lot about how to bring new clients into the fold.
Of course, we know that sometimes what works for one person, won’t always work for others.
So while we may have amazing success using Instagram to get more wedding inquiries, another wedding photographer just trying to get on their feet might find it to be an absolute waste of time.
To help share with you how wedding photographers get clients in a more objective way, we decided to go out and research what other wedding photographers are doing to bring in their clients. We talked to photographers in our personal network, and reached out to other wedding photographers for input through Reddit and social media channels to help showcase the best areas to focus energy for getting new clients.
While some of the things made perfect sense (like word of mouth referrals being the most valuable source for new work), there were quite a few surprises as well!
The Hard Facts – Our Data on How Wedding Photographers are Getting Their Clients
For this little study, we got feedback from 20 wedding photographers who responded to our posts on Reddit and other social media platforms.
We specifically asked these photographers where they got their wedding photography bookings from – so did not count people who mentioned having a Wedding Wire page that never brought in a booking (as an example).
To understand the figures below, they should be viewed like this: For the category “Client Referrals”, 14 of 20 wedding photographers reported receiving leads from this source that converted into an actual booking. Some photographers received leads that converted into bookings from multiple sources – and these are all counted in the data set.
In the next section of this post, we elaborate a little bit more about our data collection process.
| Referral Source | Successful Lead-to-Booking |
|---|---|
| Client Referrals | 14 |
| Vendor Referrals | 5 |
| Instagram (hashtag searches) | 6 |
| Instagram ads | 1 |
| Online Search (SEO) | 6 |
| Facebook ads | 5 |
| Facebook groups | 2 |
| Google ads | 3 |
| Wedding directory listings (Wedding Wire, The Knot, etc.) | 3 |
| Wedding expo | 2 |
| Other Websites (Reddit, Thumbtack, Craigslist, etc.) | 2 |
How We Approached Collecting This Data
In order to get a good sense of what approaches worked best for the average wedding photographer, we simply asked one open ended question: how are you getting your wedding photography clients?
Some photographers would respond with just a single source (“client referrals!”), while others would provide multiple sources that were working for them (“Instagram ads and vendor referrals!”).
We broke out our stats into multiple categories that we then attributed numbers representing how many times they were mentioned by the people we polled.
While we could have gone deeper and asked for more information such as…
- How long have you been in the wedding photography industry?
- Where are you located?
- How much are you charging for your services?
We ultimately felt that would have made the scope for this particular article way too vast. If these are things you are interested in seeing added to a future case study, be sure to let us know.
As such – our collected data is pretty informal, but considering we got responses from 20 wedding photographers, we think it can give you a good idea of what works best for finding new clients of your own.
Our Insights – What Works vs. What Doesn’t for Marketing Your Photography Service
The great thing about the wedding industry is that a whole lot of people get married every year. In the USA, according to the CDC, there are 2,236,496 marriages every year. That is over 2 million couples deciding to tie the knot!
As a wedding photographer just trying to break into the industry (or trying to grow your already established client base!), it should be reassuring to see that with so many people getting married, finding a handful that want to book your wedding photography service will be absolutely doable with a little determination.
Now – we want to talk about the specific categories covered in our stats and give some insight on why we think certain things work, other things don’t, and more. Obviously – this section goes into some personal opinions on the way things work, but we hope you can trust our thoughts considering we’ve managed to grow our own business successfully in the past few years.
Related post: 135 Wedding Photography Tips for Beginners
Client Referrals
Client referrals brought in bookings for 70% of wedding photographers we got feedback from. That is HUGE!
As experienced wedding photographers, it’s easy for us to understand why client referrals are so valuable.
“Word of mouth” really is the best “business fuel” out there.
If you serve the few clients you can get really well, they will go on to tell their family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances about you!
We like to keep hard data on where we get our own bookings from. This is really easy to track and view reporting on in Honeybook (our CRM platform). You can read our review of Honeybook for more details!
What is very interesting is that our first 2 years in business only saw client referrals adding up to about 10% of our bookings, but by year 3 this shot up to around 25%. We expect to continue seeing more and more client referrals as we grow our business!
This makes a lot of sense when you think about it. A beginner wedding photographer doesn’t have a list of clients who can send people their way. Without giving some customers a positive experience, there just aren’t client referrals at all.
In the wedding photography industry, we often book weddings a year (or longer) in advance. This means that even if we manage to get a couple of bookings under our belt, it will be a year until we get to actually do the work and deliver a gallery our client will love.
It’s only after the delivery of our service that people will really start to hype us up.
So – for established photographers, client referrals are the #1 source of leads.
Vendor Referrals
Vendor referrals are just as powerful as client referrals, if only a little less common to the average wedding photographer.
Let’s face it – people like to hire trustworthy vendors for their wedding days. If a client books their wedding venue, they will likely ask if they have any recommended photographers they can suggest. If an established golf club can trust you enough to produce high quality work to recommend you to their clients, that seems like an easy “in” to new clientele.
The trick to increasing your vendor referrals is actually working together and networking after the fact.
Over the years, we’ve produced a recommended vendor list where we have added DJs, florists, videographers, etc. who we have worked with and loved. Every time a client books with us, we send them this list, and often enough we end up working with people we already know and trust to create good work (and be easy to work with!). As we like to say…”Teamwork makes the dream work!”
We have built relationships with other wedding vendors and receive leads from, not just venues, but all types of vendors. When you get a lead from a catering company, you know the client is going to be having good food at the wedding!
Instagram (Hashtag Searches)
The single best social media platform (based on our personal experience and that of many wedding photographers as we’ve covered in this case study) is Instagram.
Thinking about it – this just makes sense!
Instagram is centered around photography.
Wedding photographers have an ability to attract clients by creating curated feeds showcasing their best work. It’s a snippet of work that potential clients have direct and easy access to in a platform they are already using.
The area of hashtags is particularly important to any wedding photographers marketing approach. This is for a few simple reasons. Hashtags are…
- Free
- Easy to use
- Able to be selected based on location & theme
We regularly tag our images with hashtags that are a mix of theme (like “#moodyphotographers”) and location (like “PAWeddingPhotographers”). You should select hashtags that make sense for your own location and style.
Pro tip: the best hashtags have a reasonable amount of posts being added to them, but not too little or too much. We tend to get the best results with semi-popular hashtags that might have a couple hundred (or thousand) images already in them vs. hashtags with just a few (or millions).
Instagram (Ads)
Wedding photographers either love or hate ads. When they work, they really work. And when they don’t work – they just feel like a waste of money and time.
We have only ever taken out about $100 worth of ads in our 3 years as a business – and didn’t care for the results.
With that said – it seems many wedding photographers are having success in this area. We can see this making sense with a well targeted ad because it puts your content in front of people’s eyes. As with any advertising, nailing your target audience down is 100% the key to winning in this way.
If you want to learn more about how you can make Instagram ads (and so much more) work for you, we HIGHLY recommend checking out Signature Edit’s Photography Marketing School. It’s an incredible value that packages marketing courses & materials + a load of presets and other goodies that would help any photographer get a good foothold on their market fast.
Online Search (SEO)
Search engine optimization (or SEO as it’s called) is an excellent way to bring in organic, unsolicited traffic to your web presence. This is a massive topic that requires a lot of in depth content to properly educate you to get it right!
As a very small scale explanation – SEO can connect people’s search queries with your brand.
For example, if someone were to type into Google “Italy Destination Wedding Photographer”, it would be an amazing thing for an Italian destination wedding photographer to show up on the first page of the search engine results page (SERPs). This is because most people who type this into Google are probably interested in hiring a destination wedding photographer in Italy (or for a wedding to be held in Italy).
But how do you get your brand on the first page?
This is exactly the goal of SEO.
At times, it can feel like an art form in itself since there is room for being creative in your approach, but there are plenty of hard-and-fast rules that can help you along the way. You can find some great starter guides on the topic like this video by Income School:
We know we already mentioned it just above, but if you want to better understand how to take control over your photography businesses web presence, we really do HIGHLY recommend Signature Edit’s Photography Business Marketing School. This is an immense collection of digital products including custom courses on SEO, Facebook advertising, and so much more that would be invaluable to someone just starting a photography business or needing to get a quick boost to their current performance.
Facebook (Ads)
Next up – Facebook.
Let us talk about Facebook in general for a second. We all know Facebook is one of the top established social networking sites – one that grew from simple beginnings to topple older sites like MySpace. In it’s early stages, it was a great platform for businesses to get a foothold on their audiences for free – but over the years has been constricted to the point where business pages, even those that post regularly, hardly reach most of their audiences.
This means that even huge corporations with tons of followers on Facebook are only reaching a very small set of these people when they post.
Facebook has turned regularly posted content into something where you need to pay to have people see the content. This is called “Boosting” a post in FB’s terms.
In addition to this, you can also take out more traditional ads on Facebook – where you produce a virtual billboard of sorts and can target specific user groups.
While there are plenty of discussions online about privacy when it comes to this sort of targeted advertising because we could literally (and have) take out an ad that targets women in relationships, aged 18-35 (“marriage age”), in a specific geographic region, and that have specific interests (like weddings, photography, or Cake Boss the TV show), the reality is that this is a goldmine for a wedding photographer looking to find an audience of potential clients.
No doubt – some photographers have great success. It just makes sense when you think about it!
In our experience, though, we thought taking out an ad on Facebook was a clunky and confusing thing. We got a few leads – but ultimately we felt like we were throwing our own advertising dollars at people who ultimately were price shoppers. After all – most ads (for anything – food, cars, etc.) tend to promote an offer or discount to help entice people to purchase that thing. If you want to be paid a living wage, using FB ads can be a much more trickier thing for sure.
How do you feel about Facebook ads as a marketing platform for wedding photographers?
Facebook Groups
While we may sort of despise what Facebook has become on the whole, the one saving grace of the platform are it’s groups.
In fact – when we started our wedding photography business, needed help getting our first clients lined up, wanted second shooting gigs, and just generally wanted photography tips and business advice – we found online groups that helped us achieve all of these things.
Through Facebook, we’ve networked with many other professional photographers at different points in their careers. We’ve come to work with (and be friends with) others who helped us jump start our own business. That is an incredible thing!
How do you make Facebook Groups work for you business-wise? The truth is – you get what you put into it. You need to take time to find groups that work for you (start by typing in “your location + wedding photographers”). From there, you need to engage with the group – leave comments on posts, ask questions, go to meet ups, PM others, etc.
Unlike FB ads which are a source of revenue for the company, these groups are still free to join and be an active part of. It can be the best part about social media!
Google (Ads)
We already talked about SEO, how it’s this free thing that takes a bit of effort, but can help bring visitors to your brand when done correctly.
Google Ads basically allow you to take the key concepts of SEO (like picking a keyword your audience might be searching) and pay to show up for those searches.
We talked earlier about how an Italian destination wedding photographer would probably want to show up on the 1st page of Google when someone types in “Italy Destination Wedding Photographer.” This can be achieved organically (and freely) through good quality content that targets this keyword, but you can also pay Google money to appear at the top of the search results for this phrase.
As you can see – paying for Google ads can pay off big time for a wedding photographer if you are able to get seen by visitors that are genuinely interested in hiring. The question is whether the expense to bid on a certain keyword (it can range from really cheap to really expensive depending on the word – check Google Adwords for more information) is worth it.
Not to mention, will your brand hold up when compared with even a couple other listings on the same page?
Wedding Directory Listings (Wedding Wire, The Knot, etc.)
We believe you need 3 major online presences to be an established business in the modern world. These would be:
- Your own branded website
- Social media pages (set them up for as many networks as you will actively use)
- Online wedding vendor directories
While everything on this list comes with pros & cons, we feel these online directories have particularly dramatic issues (and benefits).
The Cons of Wedding Directories:
Let’s get the downsides out of the way first…
Many wedding vendor directory websites can be “pay-to-play” and even predatory in their sales techniques.
We’ve experienced this with both Wedding Wire and The Knot (companies that just recently merged together!). They charge photographers upwards of thousands of dollars to show in the search results. This is the #1 reason why we don’t like many of these platforms (and why we refuse to pay to be on their sites).
Beyond costs, wedding vendor directories often attract “price shoppers” and “budget brides” – ie: clients who care more about their budget than the art form.
Keep in mind – we don’t say this to be derogatory as when people are shopping around for a service (of any kind), price is usually going to be a big factor.
What this does mean, though, is that lower priced wedding photographers will tend to perform better than higher priced ones.
No – this doesn’t mean if you charge $4,000 for a wedding package that you won’t get any bookings, but it does suggest that if you charge $2,000 (in an area where people are normally spending $4,000 on average), you will probably get more bookings.
The last thing that comes to mind: most directories are very competitive.
There are so many wedding photographers out there that just putting up a listing will not guarantee you to get work. This is reflective of the wedding industry as a whole, but it’s important to keep in mind especially as you wade through the sales talk you’re bound to hear about how you’ll make “6 figures from paying for Wedding Wire Premium.”
The Pros of Wedding Directories:
For all the things that stink about directory sites like Wedding Wire, there are plenty of good things to consider. This is why, after all, we do recommend having a presence on these platforms – even if it’s the most basic and free option available.
At its core – these websites connect potential clients with vendors.
When a bride-to-be just gets an engagement ring and wants to start planning her wedding right now – they are an excellent starting point. Most of these sites have blog posts covering a lot of valuable things from an educational standpoint, as well as featuring the work of many wedding vendors (such as photo galleries).
We remember using The Knot regularly when we were searching for our vendors for our own wedding!
The other main benefit that can come from wedding directories actually comes from lesser known ones. It’s easy to be negative about the main ones that immediately come to mind, but seeking out smaller directories (and especially ones local to your operating area) can be a HUGE deal. In our area, one we refer to (and have been featured on) is Philly in Love – a directory for wedding vendors in and around Philadelphia, PA.
And obviously – if you manage to get leads that convert into bookings from these directories (whether using a paid or free plan), it makes it that much more worth it.
Wedding Expos
While wedding expos are still popular, we believe them to be a thing of the past.
The reason for this is because many wedding expos have been turned into essentially corporate affairs.
They can work well to attract clients – particularly if you have a more “generic” photography style (for a lack of better words). The problem for many photographers, especially those who are introverted or new to the industry, is that they really demand that you can put together an attractive booth setup and give a concise sales pitch to a large number of people.
In our experience, the average wedding expo is much more sales driven, and much less connection driven. This may work for you, but it does not work for us just due to our business approach and style in general.
With that said – there are unique wedding expos popping up. We participated in a more boutique expo called the Sage Bridal Expo as Gilbertsville Farmhouse (our favorite venue in upstate NY), and loved the atmosphere. We also had success in bringing in new clients that we could connect with thanks to how things were structured there.
Other Websites (Reddit, Thumbtack, Craigslist, etc.)
Last up, one area that is often under-discussed when talking about marketing your photography business are these websites that aren’t meant specifically for wedding photographers, but can be leveraged all the same.
Honestly, most websites that have some social element could fall into this category, but we’re just going to cover a few quickly.
Our favorite forum website is Reddit.
This is a massive website that features conversations on everything under the sun. There are forums to talk recipes, share memes of cats, and yes – even talk wedding photography.
Visiting Reddit sub-forums that make sense for this industry is a great opportunity for learning and (potentially) attracting clients. A few boards we regularly visit and contribute to include:
Thumbtack/Craigslist
We’re clumping these two together because they essentially function the same. You can post opportunities to take on work, and potential clients can get in touch.
These sites are, generally, not used by more established photographers because the clientele is notoriously on the cheaper end of the spectrum. But, as a beginner photographer just wanting to get some initial work for low pay, they can be a good resource. We booked our first couple of portrait sessions and weddings through these sites.
A note: while you should always use caution when doing business online or deciding to meet a person online, these types of websites have a tendency to really attract “the creeps.” As such, use caution, meet in public, and only do things you are comfortable doing. When it comes to the financial end of things, make sure you are requiring a retainer payment and having people sign a contract for any work you are doing. You’ll thank us later!
Conclusion
In this post, we wanted to take a smarter approach to covering the essentials you need to know to find clients as a wedding photographer. We did our own research and covered in detail where other photographers are getting their clients from so you can know where to focus your marketing efforts.
So, what do you think? Anything we can improve or build upon in future posts? Let us know in the comments!