4 Simple Tips For Growing Your Business Faster in 2024

So many wedding photographers struggle to grow their business as fast as they would like, whether it's increasing their pricing, filling their calendar, or just booking better weddings, it can take years to get to where you want to be if you're not deliberate in your actions.

Because of the long booking times of the wedding industry and the fact that it's so seasonal, it can feel like if we don't make the changes fast enough, we can lose an entire year. So we've created a group coaching program that's going to help you grow your business faster, whether that is increasing your prices, taking on more bookings, developing your brand in a way that you can book better weddings, higher budget weddings.

For this coaching program, we've created a four call curriculum that will help you get clear on your goals and give you step-by-step actions you can take to achieve those goals. We want to help you to make 2024 your year, the year that your business finally sees the success that you've been dreaming of.

To give you a taste of what this coaching's gonna look like, we've given you a short training video that covers some of the areas that we're gonna cover in this coaching.

So without further ado, I'll give you our four top tips for growing your business faster this year.

Tip #1 Get clear on your ideal client

It's so easy as wedding photographers to show a huge array of weddings on your website. We get so excited by the weddings that we shoot, and we love being able to share our work from all different kinds of clients. The problem with this is we have a cluttered brand and it's not clear exactly who we're supposed to be serving. So when a potential client lands on our website, they're seeing a huge array of different weddings, and honestly, they just don't know if we are the perfect photographer for them.

It wasn't until we started showing a really clear brand and really telling our clients exactly who we were and who we serve best that we started to feel that every client we booked was the right client for us, and we were the right photographer for them.

Tip #2 Nail your sales process

This is an area that's so overlooked by so many wedding photographers and wedding creatives in general. We were so guilty of this early on, we absolutely ignored our sales process. We actively didn't want to be salespeople. We thought that our work would do the selling for us and we thought that we could just put it out there and people would appreciate how good we were, but we didn't understand what a good sales process actually does.

You need to have a sales process that just gives the client information that they need to make the decision. We didn't realize that we weren't being clear on exactly what we're offering, and that's not just how many photos they get or what's included in their package, but it's letting the client know how you're actually gonna impact their day. What are your strongest skills? Are you a great problem solver? Are you great with people? Will you be really kind? Will you be really reassuring? Or will you be really high energy? Are you going to be really energetic, confident and fun to suit those party style weddings? There's so much more to the service that we're offering that we are not conveying to the client effectively.

And a lot of the time we can't just convey it on the website. We have to have a good sales process that lets the client discover everything they need to know about us and our service, the actual service that they're paying for, not just the photos in a natural way that doesn't feel like pressured sales, doesn't feel like us just telling them things.

You have to have a sales process that showcases not just your work, but showcases you and showcases your brand as a whole. The best way to do this consistently is to have an actual formalized sales process for your business. If you get clear on exactly what you're trying to convey to the client, the information you're trying to get across to them, then you can work out a process that takes all of that decision making away that we waste so much time on, especially in summer when we're busy. When you get an email that comes in and you go ‘I don’t know how to answer this email’ or ‘I'm not sure’ then you end up not replying to that email as quickly as you should and or just not replying to it at all.

If you have a good sales process in place, you can make sure that you can handle all of your inquiries effectively, conveying all the information that you need to, and basically it does the selling for you. So you don't have to feel like you are selling your brand to someone. Your process does it for you.

Tip #3 Build better connections with your clients

By building a better connection with clients, usually through meetings and calls, will help you deliver the results. If you've got a great connection with your client, you can have better conversations. There'll be more compliance on the day. We know how tough it is as wedding photographers, you need people to do things for you, but you also don't want to be pushy. You don't want to be stern. But at the same time, we have this pressure where we know if we don't capture something that they'll really wish we did on the day, they're gonna be really upset. So building a good connection with your client and building that relationship from the start is so key to getting the results you want for your client on the day.

By building that relationship with the client, you're more likely to have a great relationship after the wedding, get great feedback and even better, they're much more likely to recommend you to other couples.

Tip #4 Overdeliver for your clients

We want to massively overdeliver for our clients. This doesn't mean giving them more photos or giving them photos quicker. It just means over-delivering a little bit in every way. So we want to make sure that we capture as many of those in-between moments as we can, that they have the best possible portraits that they can have, that we've captured every guest in a great way. If it's possible, we wanna be doing our absolute best in terms of the photography, but we also wanna give them the best experience on the day.

You should go above and beyond. We want to help everyone we can on the wedding day, if we see that their family or some of their guests need help with something they don't know where they're going next or what's happening next in the day, just a quick five second conversation can make a difference. We want be a really positive presence on the wedding day because that's going to reflect really well on the couple, not just us. We want the couple getting compliments from all their family and friends about what a great photographer they chose. We also want to make sure that we know what their actual vision for the wedding day is. So not only do we want to overdeliver, we want to overdeliver the right results. We want to make sure that if there was particular things they're worried about, do we really address those things?

When it comes to delivering the photos and delivering the galleries, we also want make sure we do over-deliver there. We're not saying give them thousands of images they don't want, but make sure that gallery is expansive. Make sure it captures loads of moments. Don't be afraid to include a couple of the same moments, give them something that they can really look through and find those perfect moments. When it comes to the preview, make sure you deliver your preview quickly. Edit it to a good standard, but make sure that you get it to them so they can share it with friends and family.

Get them out of that stage of the iPhone photos that their friends have taken, probably after a few drinks, to some good quality photos that they can share that they're proud of sharing. One way that we always overdeliver for our clients is offering a big preview, and we make sure we include nice photos of all of their core family members in that preview gallery. It's not just photos of them. We want them to have a great photo of their mum and dad or great photo of their siblings, or great photo of auntie and uncle or close friends and groomsmen and bridesmaids. Make sure that those people really close to them in the wedding process, the people who've helped them out the most, have an instant reward that they get a couple of great photos that they can share and they're proud of sharing. Through Instagram we get to see the power of having good photos to share quickly.

So these are just a few ways that you can overdeliver for your client, but we want our clients to be happy. We want them to be ecstatic with the work that we've produced for them, and in return, they'll give us glowing testimonials and they'll refer us to their family and friends.