My most common topic in my mentorship calls are Marketing tips for Wedding Videographers. And thankfully, this is one of my favorite topics to teach! Wedding videographers today in 2023 are being gifted with social media algorithms pushing for short videos now more than ever. From just one wedding, we can create so many short clips of the best moments and get a ton of free marketing from the social media apps.
In this blog, we’ll talk about focusing your niche to target your ideal wedding client, Google SEO tips, Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube Shorts and Vendor referrals. Altogether, keep an eye out for the highlighted quick tips and remember that the tips we share today, could be outdated tomorrow. It’s important to utilize these now and check in with us next year for our 2024 updates.
Hi there!
My name is Alesia and I’m a Destination Luxury Wedding Videographer who specializes in Super 8mm film. I started my own entrepreneur journey in 2018 and got a degree in Psychology and Education from Oregon State University. I’ve been educating other videographers with running their businesses and taking their films to the next level since 2020. I’m so excited you’re here. Let’s talk about marketing for wedding videographers!
Discovering your Ideal Client
This is a huge topic. In fact, we’ve made a whole course on our entire start to finish Wedding Client Experience if you’re interested in truly deep diving into who your ideal client is. Here, we’ll walk you through your basics. Read this section to learn about the different type of wedding clients out there. Whichever one you resonate with the most, is your ideal client. Aka, the type of wedding or couple you want to film every time.
Photo credit in order: Jackie Rangel Photo, Henry’s Diary, and Maccoy Dean.
Traditional Weddings
This is a broad ideal client and where most wedding videographers start their business filming. These couples get married at local venues, have around 100-200 people in attendance, full wedding parties, the cake cutting, the dance floor, the whole shi-bang.
You can find traditional wedding clients on Facebook groups the most and through basic level marketing. Thus, we find these couples to be the easiest to market to. If you’re closeby to their venue, extra brownie points. If you’re in a high end area like Southern California or New York, you could get luxury traditional weddings through strategic vendor referral marketing.
Adventure Elopements
These couples are true outdoors lovers. They’re all about hiking and saying their vows in a private, intimate setting with a gorgeous backdrop to set the scene. These couples range from National Park weddings to helicopter tours in Alaska. Comparatively, you can expect to have a full blown outdoor driven adventure experience where you’ll hike up a mountain, see some wildlife, and do something unique like canoe up a river or do astrophotography in the desert. Surprisingly, or not, the possibilities are endless with these couples, and that’s why we love them! Adventure Elopement marketing involves a lot of strategic branding to market yourself as the expert in certain areas/travel and blogging.
Luxury Weddings
Thirdly, another broad ideal client that can range from high society celebrity weddings being featured in Vogue to weddings just labeled to have a 6 figure budget and above. Luxury weddings used to only happen at big, high-end venues with top plan and design teams, but ever since the pandemic, we’ve seen more and more luxury weddings happen at the micro wedding size of less than 100 guests in perhaps a destination in another country. Or even on the property of someone’s house (or should I say mansion?) or Airbnb.
The Luxury Wedding market can be a tough one to break into. Therefore, it requires experience and a tight knit vendor referral marketing strategy as well as magazine publications and awards.
Moving forward, you’ll want to keep your ideal client in mind as we talk about different marketing strategies and how you can apply that towards them. Of course, if you’re still stuck with how to target this audience, you can reach out to us in a mentorship call!
Google SEO Marketing
Before we dive into social media marketing, you need to start with your website and branding.
Good marketing begins with establishing “Brand Trust”. Brand trust is how well you’ve connected with your audience and have given them ideas, solutions and other valuable information that’s honest and genuine. Brand trust leads your ideal client to see you as a credible business.
How you portray yourself on your website is so important to connect with who’s there and establish this brand trust. You want to make sure all of the headlines of each page are clearly indicating what you do and that you are presenting their problems and offering solutions – all while making sure your website is SEO optimized. GOOGLE IS KING for marketing. Therefore, this is where we’ll begin. After you have this down, then start focusing on your social media marketing.
Social media should drive traffic to your website, your website is where you convert them to a booked client!
Google SEO Tips: How to rank on the first page of Google!
- Make sure you have ONE Headline at the top of each page clearly stating what that page is about. This should have the text property of H1. We recommend having your home page H1 tag to be at the top and labeled with where you are. Example “Southern California Wedding Videographer”.
- Make the rest of your page VALUABLE to your ideal client. Get into their mindset and think about what they are there for. If your ideal clients are traditional weddings, maybe have a section on your homepage that links to a wedding venue directory in your state? If your ideal clients are adventure elopements, maybe have some links to “How to get married in a National Park” etc. Having STRONG INTERNAL & EXTERNAL LINKS on your homepage helps boost your SEO.
- The text on each page of your website should be broken down into headers and paragraph text. Each section should have an H2 tag, and if you start going off on a topic within that section, create a headline for it with an H3 tag, and so on. Simple body text should be labeled as paragraph text and should have the keywords you want to rank for every 100-150 words. This graphic might help!
- Start a blog if you haven’t already. Blogs do what social media does but BETTER. They drive traffic to your website, but they can rank and stay online for years whereas social media presence dies within a day or a couple weeks.
- Make sure you share the gallery with the other wedding vendors. If they end up making a blog of that wedding, they can tag your work and having a ton of backlinks from other websites to your website, shows Google that you are an active and informative website.
- Your ultimate goal with Google SEO is to land in magazines. They have the best SEO scores for our niche, and if you get into their online publication, they’ll backlink your website and it’ll majorly boost your SEO! Plus, that’s great marketing right there.
- Optimize all of the media on your website with compressed images. If your images are in full resolution and have large file sizes, it’ll take longer to load. The speed of your website is greatly affected by your image and graphic sizes. Therefore, you should use Jpeg Mini to compress all of your images before uploading them into your site builder and blogs.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Once you’re branding is on point, your website is SEO optimized for Google and you’re creating blogs that your ideal client will find useful, it’s time to focus on utilizing social media. We love social media marketing because it’s free and does so much of the leg work for you. You just have to keep up with all the new updates and play their different algorithm games.
Tip! We suggest committing to only 2-3 social medias! Trying to do it all can burn you out.
Tip! Don’t focus on just one social media. You don’t want all of your eggs in one basket!
Instagram Marketing Tips
- Instagram clients are typically younger and trendier. They can find you through Instagram reels using trendy audio or short form content from a similar wedding they’re having.
- To reach more ideal clients on Instagram, create short term value for them. Create REELS that will help them plan their wedding (good for adventure elopement couples) or something emotionally grabbing like a crying groom when he sees his bride or the best man’s best one-liner that made everyone laugh (good for traditional weddings).
- TAG nearby venues! People who have booked at that venue will stalk their tagged photos and find you that way pretty easily. Only do this if you shot at that venue or if you were closeby. For example, I wouldn’t do a styled shoot in a glacier lake and tag Hawaii venues.
- To increase your engagement on Instagram, always make your stories interactive by putting polls, questions or sliders for people to engage with. It’s always good to build your own community and comment often on people’s work you also love. People tend to return the favor when they someone consistent in their engagement.
- A good rule with Instagram is to not “post and ghost.” When you post, you need to stay online and stay social with everyone who’s interacting with you. Instagram will see your reciprocated engagement and will push your post to the top of everyone’s feeds.
How important is an aesthetic Instagram feed?
We think an aesthetic instagram feed is still relevant in 2023 because it’s a person’s first impression of your page. Certainly, it’ll determine whether or not they will follow you or even bother exploring more of your content. Our goal is to blow them away from the get go so if they see your page has an overall aesthetic, that’s a great connection to start building brand trust.
We use an app called “Feed Preview” to help us see our upcoming feed. We can drag and drop future posts where we want to see them and have an idea of what looks good next to what.
Tip! Add negative space images to your feed so you can develop a “cleaner” looking feed. It’ll look more eye catching and less busy this way.
Tip! If you’re going for a more “film” and “editorial” look like us, post more black and white thumbnails! And incorporate a lot of flash and detail shots to enhance that “luxury wedding” vibe.
Do photos or videos do better on Instagram?
As of 2023, short length videos are Instagram’s favorite to push on the algorithm. Something eye catching and attention grabbing is what works best and has the most potential of going viral.
Tip! Make your videos 8 seconds or less with a trendy audio!
How often should you post on Instagram?
This answer varies, but we think you should create a carousel or reel post at least 3x a week and have a story up at least 5x a week. Our strategy is a post Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and stories up Monday-Friday, giving us a break on the weekends.
Tiktok Marketing Tips
In truth, we’ve all heard good and bad things from Tiktok. Your video could get 4 million views and the next could get 400.
As a result, Tiktok’s algorithm changes just as much as Instagram’s because of their rival competition.
Undoubtedly, we don’t do much with Tiktok as this is a social media app we don’t put a lot of energy into. Simply, we repost what we make on Instagram, but make it organically again in Tiktok if that makes sense. To reiterate, we don’t save the Instagram reel and have the floating logo on Tiktok. We try to make all of our social media videos organic within each app. This is easy to do if it was a piece of wedding content like an emotional first look because it has it’s own original audio. It’s harder to find the same trendy audio across all apps so if we’re making a trendy audio type of video, we’ll find something similar if we can’t find the exact match.
Therefore, our main tips are:
- Post every day on Tiktok if you can. The more the merrier.
- If your video has talking audio, add those same keywords to the caption and again in text on the video itself. If you don’t want the text on the video, you can hide it by pushing it off the screen. Tiktok will treat it the same and push it for those keywords.
- It’s okay and more acceptable to re-post the same video on Tiktok more than it is to repost the same video on Instagram. Therefore, if your video doesn’t go big on Tiktok, you can simply try again with a different trendy audio and get better luck on that one.
- It’s important to niche down on Tiktok and stick to one thing. Another key point, your engaged following will continue to comment and look forward to new posts when you post similar videos back to back.
How to start strategizing Youtube Shorts
Youtube has re-entered the chat! Youtube has always been and still is the highest paying creator channel for businesses and creators to post long-form content. Since last year though, they’ve been pushing for shorter video content called “Shorts.” Because, it’s still a new feature with new things being added, there isn’t a lot to teach.
Although, we’ve found it the most similar to Tiktok.
- Post 3-5 Youtube Shorts a week.
- Put hashtags in the title
- Keep it 10 seconds or less
- Put keyword text in the video
Youtube Shorts vs. Full length films?
Personally, our success still comes from full length highlight films on youtube and using Tube Buddy to help us create tags and a unique thumbnail from our competition.
In addition, we’ve found that using a clickbait title or a keyword title such as the wedding venue, will gather the most views on Youtube.
Vendor Marketing
Did you know, as a wedding videographer, you’re making the exact type of content that all the other vendors want and need? In conclusion, you have something very valuable to them. Footage of them in action or footage of their work. A lot of people can give you different advice with how to build vendor relationships, but I’m going to share my #1 tried and true tip.
Delivering video content to wedding vendors
Delivering the edited video content of the HMUA in action, or all the angles of the tablescape the planner and florist put together can do something huge for your business. If you deliver this content to these vendors (free of charge obviously), you’ll be doing something that 99% of videographers don’t do.
Therefore, I’m here to say, start getting into that habit!
Additionally, every time I’ve done this, I’ve become the top of mind videographer to refer to these vendors and their couples.
In conclusion, I don’t guarantee these videos, and I only make them if it can be a quick edit I can find the time for. Of course, my couple’s videos come first.
Unquestionably, you’ll get great industry wide reputation for being an outstanding vendor to other vendors and I promise you won’t have to put so much effort into all these social medias if you had people referring clients to you left and right. In the long run, it’ll help your business ten-fold!
Conclusion to Marketing Tips for Wedding Videographers
Finally, we made it to the end! How did you like this blog with marketing tips for wedding videographers? Did you find it useful? Helpful? Basically, a confirmation with what you’ve already learned through experience? We’d love to know! Leave a comment below and give us a follow on the socials @alesiafilms. We’ll see you there!
