Photography Marketing Like Henry Ford, Target And Tiffany

Photography Marketing in 2014

Yes, you read that right.  As photographers know, the weddings you book today, you won’t be fully paid for until a year from now (usually).  Therefore, it’s very important to think about the direction you want to take your business in the next two years.  You don’t want to be thinking a year from now you wish you would have increased your prices more!

As Henry Ford said:  “Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.”

We as wedding photographers are creatives and usually just do more of whatever we have done in the past to accelerate our business.  For example, do you advertise?  Maybe that led to a couple of weddings.  Do you try and build a relationship with bridesmaids for referrals?  Maybe that led to a couple of weddings.

There’s nothing wrong initially with this strategy.  However, eventually you will find that these strategies die out and you need something more.  This assumes you are trying to increase your prices significantly!  If you just want to keep shooting as many weddings as you can, the please stop reading.

If you want to increase your prices significantly and take your business to another level, you have to do what the large successful brands do!  They invest in technology to scale their presence!  Williams-Sonoma was just a small cooking store in Napa, California.  However, there business exploded when they added a registry.  This caused an influx of people into their store buying for the new bride and groom.  This increased sales and increased their brand marketing.  Within a decade of this launch they had stores across the country, plus they had a successful catalog operation (this was the early 1980s).

Kathy David, general manager of Target.com, said 30 percent of the Web site’s sales came from its registry business. “It’s been absolutely huge for us.”

So don’t trust me – trust Target, Williams-Sonoma, Tiffany & Co.  If they are investing heavily in the registry business why aren’t you?

Don’t find fault, find a remedy. – Henry Ford

p.s. Can you tell I recently read Henry Ford’s autobiography

Jimmy Moncrief is a wedding photographer with with wife Brittany at Moncrief Photography and the co-founder of Ciderr, a wedding registry for wedding vendors.

Try Ciderr for one month free. Pick the Spiced Cider plan and use the discount code, photocrati (a $10 value)