I'd like to advertise my wedding photography, where should I go?

[Tiffany Lynn]

I'm a college student whom has photographed wedding's professional for 4 years now. I am recently engaged and have of course, been buying wedding magazines I see from time to time local adds for venders, and am wondering how I could publish my services also. Or even have my photography featured in one of these magazines would I think look highly on my resume.

[Jaguar]

Hi Tiffany. In terms of advertising your self and your services, the first thing you can make to make it happen is to make a website where you can publish your portfolio. Next thing to do is promoting your photography in local place. Meaning, you will be creating online visibility and you can do social networking afterwards. I would be glad to help you for free. Just send me an email using the contact form below.

[Carl]

Hi,

I am Carl, one of the owners of http://lolasprophoto.com . Although we are a fairly new photography company, we have had the pleasure of working in collaboration with two larger studios to get our start. My specialty is business and marketing while my wife Lola holds the talent. In my year and a half in the industry this is what I have learned.

#1 Wedding Shows - Many people goto wedding show to find vendors. However, there has been a transition of qualified leads coming from the shows. The reason for this is that the shows are now much larger than years past and customers often become overwhelmed. They see 25-50 photographers, take the information and go home to do more research on the internet.

#2 Magazine Ads - We have ran many promotional ads in the local area with a limited response. These ads are expensive and if you are not going to be featured as a full page or back cover then what is the point. We have stopped running these ads as the qualified leads from the ads simply only pay for the ad. However, it is possible to incorporate your business as a filler ad, utilizing your photographs. However, with the flood of royalty free photographs at a very cheap rate this task is now more difficult. I offered free cover images for one of the publications and was denied, they wanted to try and sell the cover to me rather than save the $5 that they paid for the stock photo.

#3 The Knot - This site is one of the largest marketers of wedding photographers around. To be listed on their site and in their catalog it costs about $280 / month. When they first started this was a great deal. However, now anybody who is in the wedding photography business is listed. Your business now becomes lost in the mix. Website traffic analysis shows an average of 100 visits from the knot per month (data from 3 different companies), or $2.80 / click. Out of that 100 visits 90 bounce from the site leaving 10 qualified leads or $28.00 / lead out of which a 5-10% conversion ratio or less can be achieved. However, average google cost per click is only around $1.25-$1.80 with a 80% bounce generating over six times the traffic from the local area. This comes out to be around $9 per lead.

So the winner is, Internet Marketing.

Build a website, and generate traffic by SEO, and other online marketing campaigns. And more importantly generate word of mouth.

[Tim]

Generally speaking wedding magazines only feature their advertisers. Advertising in wedding magazines isn't cheap either. For instance an ad in wedding style costs about $40,000. Advertise in the Knot and you can pay $20,000. And that is just for one issue. For most people starting out, that is out of their budgets.


Until you have the kinds of savings that will allow you to do that here are some tips for getting started on marketing.


Free Things:

-Facebook Pages. This is separate from your profile and are a must have for any business.
-Twitter
-blogs

Cheap things:
-Website: You can host a website for $5 per month and design one fairly cheap using Wordpress. This is a must have.
-SEO: your site only works if people visit it. Learn how SEO works and what you can do to maximize visibility, incoming links, and page rank
-Business cards and brochures
-Toll free phone number: 800 numbers are cheap and make you look more professional

Moderately priced things:
-Facebook Ads: Use targeted advertisements (i.e. only have you add appear to engaged women in your area) $100 per month
-Google Adwords: Create a CPC click campaign $150 per month.
-Advertise on local wedding sites usually less than $1,000 per year. This can lead to being featured in their blogs

Expensive things:
-Magazine ads. These can easily cost you $10,000 to $100,000 per year per magazine.
-Private parties for past clients. Every few years I will have a party for my past wedding clients.