Community demand and advertising

[Derek Neustaeter]

My wife and I have owned our wedding videography business for a year and a half now. We haven't done a lot in the way of advertising other then a wedding show here or there. We live in a community of approx. 16,000 people, quite small. Unfortunately we live in a climate which pushes wedding season into 2 months, July and August. We do get some in spring and fall but not like summer. We are constantly turning down weddings in those 2 months as we are already fully booked and its frustrating! We love what we do and would love to make it a full time venture but can't see it being sustainable in our location, even pulling from surrounding of 2-3 hour radius. We haven't done much in the sense of advertising, most has been done by word of mouth and social media.

Is advertising something that would help? What is the best source of advertisement in wedding videography? We are starting to warm ourselves up to the idea of moving, hopefully to a warmer climate where winters don't dip below -30'C!

If anyone has any suggestions or past experiences feel free to share!

[Chris Harding]

Hi Derek

If you are fully booked and turning away clients then why advertise? Then again if you are thinking of moving to a sunnier state then you might have to. I find that just a good website and an ad on an online wedding directory ...something like the one I'm on Weddings Australia, Wedding Dresses Invitations Gowns Cakes Venues - Easy Weddings works for me and I get more than enough business to make the advertising pay for itself in the first month.

Basically for only 2 months the best you can achieve consistently would be 8 weekends and even doing back-to-back weddings Friday/Saturday/Sunday (which is a real killer!!) only gives you 24 per season. Depending on what price you can achieve (with a tiny community it's likely to be lower than what the big cities charge) it will be tough to make it a feasible full time income source. I do two weddings at the most each weekend over a 9 month season which makes a decent income but if I only had two months to shoot it wouldn't be enough!

Can you not get some commercial work for the week days too??

Chris

[Christian Nachtrieb]

Derek,

If you're getting filled up and having to turn down clients, you need bump those prices my friend. You're leaving so much money on the table. As your bookings increase and you get closer and closer to your capacity, keep inching them up little by little.

[Noa Put]

If all your weddingwork is in such a small timeperiod I'd first consider hiring people to shoot those double bookings for you, problem is probably to find competent people in your town. I get asked now and them by my own "competitors" to shoot for them if they are not able to, so maybe you can work something out with the local competition? Since you have so many double bookings you'd have many weeks of extra work editing, you'd loose some to pay the videoguy but at least get payed to do the editing part in slow periods.

[Kyle Root]

I'd raise rates.. the whole supply demand thing.

Of course, it does seem like your physical location does not help things.

As far as advertising that is a very tricky thing in my opinion because it's hard to get a good return on your cash outlay sometimes.

Now, I don't do this full time, so my advice isn't worth a lot here, but for me, I find that

(1) making good friends with other reputable wedding vendors helps... particularly if you can get in with some higher end photographers and coordinators etc.

(2) You can really leverage Facebook, G+, Twitter etc to your advantage. One thing I just found this past Saturday is DO NOT underestimate the power of community work... I filmed our city's Mardi Gras parade Saturday night and as of this morning my Facebook MG Parade video post had been seen by over 15,000 people and been shared over 150 times!! (our city pop is about 50,000 people). I was the official hired videographer for the event, so that helped me get a good location and what not. The video was pretty simple, but as of today, I already had an inquiry to film a wedding based off that video!

(3) I will occasionally spend like $50 in very targeted advertising on FB just for fun... and I've probably spent $200 over the past 18 months on it... and it hasn't gotten me any work... but has increased my likes locally which I guess isn't bad. It at least gets my name out there.

(4) I'd be very careful about advertising on radio or tv or print even. We did some print ads back in the day in the newspaper... didn't really get us anything.

(5) Bridal fairs can be good if you are good at sales and talking. I helped some friends of mine with one in Tennessee 2 weekends ago and it was awesome. It was smaller with about 300 brides, but we were swamped with brides wanting videos.

In the end, the best thing I've found is Item 1 above. It's free and how I get most of my work.