*Image Credit: Bryan Caporicci
Intro by Skip Cohen
Wandering through my good buddy Bryan Caporicci’s blog posts at SproutingPhotographer.com I came across these tips and loved the concept for several reasons. First, I love the way Bryan writes – always to the point and sharing great how-to content. Second, his tips for marketing, anything to anyone, set the stage for everything so many different aspects of building your business. Third, this was part of a longer post on building a destination wedding business, but this is what I love about working with Bryan…
He’s sharing the most important tips on ANYTHING you’re going to market to ANYONE!
So many of you just move ahead and build a promotional offer, never thinking about your target audience, the timing or even the value of the offer. And, when it’s less successful than you hoped you’re “doom and gloom,” failing to recognize what some good planning could have accomplished on the front end!
Everything you do to promote your business, services and special promotions can’t be successful if first, you don’t identify the who, what and where!
By Bryan Caporicci
My last post for Design Aglow on “25 Ways to Build a Local Following” was well-received in the photography community. One reader in specific asked for a similar article but geared towards destination wedding photography. I love writing topics that are explicitly asked for, so let’s dive right in! First I’ll step back from the specific topic of “destination wedding photography” for a moment and look at marketing as a whole and how you can create an effective marketing plan. Here is a proven 3-step approach to market anything to anyone:
- Who are you trying to reach?
- Where do they spend their time?
- What kind of message would they likely respond positively to?
Ready for it? All you have to do is #3 in #2 to book more of #1 – simple as that! Let’s apply this to the destination wedding photography market in one quick example:
- Who? We’re looking to reach brides planning a destination wedding.
- Where? They are having meetings with their travel agent (booking their wedding/trip), they are likely also spending a lot of time online on Facebook (socializing), Pinterest (looking for inspiration) and Google (researching).
- What? They’d appreciate and connect best with advice/education that revolves around their destination wedding. They also love finding new inspiration and ideas for their dream wedding. It’s important to also understand why they’re planning a destination wedding as this will help you define a message. It could be because they want a fun getaway trip with all of their friends, or it could be because they are busy professionals and want to make their wedding a special trip with their closest family members to be together in a place of tranquility, relaxation and warmth. Figure out their “why” and you can frame yours to match.
Once you can define the who you’re trying to reach, where you can reach them and what you can put in front of them, it’s a much easier process to determine a marketing plan for destination weddings. Here are 15 specific ideas for you:
All-in-all, while destination wedding photography has a slightly different approach in marketing to local wedding photography, the principles are still the same – it’s all about relationship, trust, education, and connection.
