What's been your best marketing move ever?

I'm at the cusp of beginning my wedding photography career, after my second wedding went quite well. But things are slow and I'm looking for solutions that will work. Don't need/want to reinvent the wheel. What's been the best marketing move you've made besides "word of mouth" referrals?

I've no studio. And in general, I'd rather not work for one.

Detailed answers welcome. Or are we wedding photographers really quite poor overall?

Those of you who are doing well... how are you doing it?

Word of mouth *IS* the best way... sorry, I know you said solutions 'besides' that.
I've tried wedding fairs, magazine ads, promotions, etc.... all the results were quite poor.

for your next wedding, bring a laptop and process about 25-50 of the best photos so far. Run a slideshow during the reception. Put up a slideshow the next day. Wait for the phone to ring or the inbox to fill. It does.

Read up on the David Jay threads. I learned this all from him. It totally works.

From my experience I get many people searching on-line for wedding photography. I've got a nice simple website that people can look at my portfolio and get them to fill in a quote request on-line form. Nothing too fancy, but well designed. Ken burns styled slideshow and people just love it!! I get on average 10 leads every week.
For an $250 investment I already made over $10,000 in revenue.

Raising my prices.

Thanks for all the replies thus far.

Do any of you reading this use GoogleAds? And most importantly, has it worked well for you? I'm looking to do that.

Picturecrazy, I was thinking about those avenues like fairs etc that you mentioned. Appreciate your comment since I get the same gut feeling about them, even though I haven't first hand experience.

Most my brides don't live in the region, about 60% is "outsiders" coming to their hometown to get married, but lives elsewhere. I have no ads, I don't want more than max 10 weddings a year and that's what I'm getting right now (7 booked so far). I haven't actually asked how brides have found me, but some seem to search for "wedding photo" in my region and my homepage comes up on the 1st page (somewhere in the middle if I'm not mistaken - haven't checked lately) but most importantly, word of mouth from happy brides.

Tim Wee wrote in post #2534026
Do any of you reading this use GoogleAds? And most importantly, has it worked well for you? I'm looking to do that.

I have been using Google ads for awhile. It works really really well for the maternity/baby side of my business, but not really for weddings. There are more wedding photographers in Vancouver per capita than any other place in Canada, so competition is high. If you go the Google ad route, be sure to use highly specific targeting keywords and not just a bunch of random keywords - you want your ad to come up less often, but really high on the list, otherwise forget it.

Websites are the way to go - try to swap links with other vendors. Get your link out there - do a google search for "wedding photography" in your area and see what comes up. There may be "pay per click" sites or free advertising site where you can post.

Put a lot of time into your website - if you are not savvy, and can afford it, get someone to build it for you - it'll be worth the investment (web designer is very high on my wish list ).

Short Answer = search engine optimsiation and google adwords

Long answer below.

Referals business is obviosuly the holy grail of most wedding photographers because its free (unless you want to give thankyou's out) and having a previous customer refer you to a friend or colleague is a great feeling to have and vindication of your work, but when your new and dont have any/many existing clients or when you have moved to a new area then thats not really possible is it.

Myself and my buddy decided we would start shooting weddings in the middle of last year so missed out on all the 2006 business so spent our time getting business for 2007 which we are calling our portfolio and client building year.

We came up with a very cheap package that we were happy to shoot at, made a website, worked a lot on search engine optimisation and then added adwords so that when people search in google (or quite a few other partners they provide adverts to) we have a double chance of a click through via either organic search results or paid ads via adwords.

Were upto a dozen bookings now for this year and have had 5 enquiries this week (is it always silly season for enquiries this time of year in the UK ?) and are well on the way to our target of 20 for this year.

SEO and Adwords have been far and away the best investments we have made.

I did SEO (search engine optimization) of my web site. I tried google adword, but ended up spending more money on it than it brought me clients. I don't recommend it.

kiwinvan wrote in post #2534293
I have been using Google ads for awhile. It works really really well for the maternity/baby side of my business, but not really for weddings. There are more wedding photographers in Vancouver per capita than any other place in Canada, so competition is high. If you go the Google ad route, be sure to use highly specific targeting keywords and not just a bunch of random keywords - you want your ad to come up less often, but really high on the list, otherwise forget it.

Websites are the way to go - try to swap links with other vendors. Get your link out there - do a google search for "wedding photography" in your area and see what comes up. There may be "pay per click" sites or free advertising site where you can post.

Put a lot of time into your website - if you are not savvy, and can afford it, get someone to build it for you - it'll be worth the investment (web designer is very high on my wish list ).

Thanks Kiwinvan. Will take your advice about targeting words for GoogleAds. I have a maternity section to my business too, and my website is almost ready. I agree about the website design. I'm using Photium.com, although my wife is a graphic designer!!! Go figure! She'll be helping me out later.

In your experience, is it more or less key words that work? Putting up keywords for misspellings can mount up quickly....

Banbert wrote in post #2534677
Short Answer = search engine optimsiation and google adwords

We came up with a very cheap package that we were happy to shoot at, made a website, worked a lot on search engine optimisation and then added adwords so that when people search in google (or quite a few other partners they provide adverts to) we have a double chance of a click through via either organic search results or paid ads via adwords.

SEO and Adwords have been far and away the best investments we have made.

Thanks Banbert. How do you "work on optimisation?" Do you mean using very precise keywords? Kindly give me the details... thanks very much.

I suppose you've noticed now that much of the emphasis has been the WEBSITE.

I totally forgot about that part... LOL *smacks forehead*

Get a killer website that makes clients go WOW! I had about a group of 25 people (mostly girls) who I'd show my designs to over and over until just about all of them said it was really good. My website went through many LOUSY and pathetic revisions before it became something that was half decent. Since your wife is a graphic designer, I'm sure this will help out a lot. Either that or hire someone REALLY good to do it. Even if it costs you $10,000. It's not an expense but an investment. You may be losing brides with a mediocre site.

adwords and search engine optimization means nothing if your visitors aren't impressed when they get there.

Hi Tim Wee: Just sent you a message to your e-mail address...

I get perhaps 50% of my weddings through google, I haven't broken down whether it's through the paid ads or standard listings. I come up as position 8 in google for the phrase I target (wellington wedding photographers), and position 1 for adwords usually. I recommend it.

I've had a run of calls in the past week or so, I think everyone's just getting on to it after xmas.

tim wrote in post #2536165
I get perhaps 50% of my weddings through google, I haven't broken down whether it's through the paid ads or standard listings. I come up as position 8 in google for the phrase I target (wellington wedding photographers), and position 1 for adwords usually. I recommend it.

I've had a run of calls in the past week or so, I think everyone's just getting on to it after xmas.

Same, 5 fresh enquiries just this week

Ive looked at how many are from organic and how many are from click throughs from google ads and i reckon mine are about 50 50 split .... because we are new we have only picked up 2 that were referals so far but they are very nice to get and its something were working hard to get more of.

When I look at what we spend on google adwords to a few other advertising things weve tried its peanuts compared to the others and its actually worked wheras some of the others we have zip from. First go at a wedding fayre tomorrow, last minute jobbie and I dont feel like we have that much to show as of yet but its a small one so nice to learn when the crowds not too big