In the world of wedding photography, a portfolio will only carry you so far — sure, it’s great for showcasing your work to new couples, but if you’re not directing people to it, how will they see your portfolio in the first place? 

The goal is to help couples find you and fall in love with your work before they’ve even met you. Your portfolio plays one part, but the marketing of your portfolio (and the rest of your business) is how you’ll get more wedding photography clients.

3 Ways to Get More Wedding Photography Clients (That Don’t Include Asking for Referrals)

If you’re reading this, you’re likely looking for two ways to bring in new clients: short-term strategies that bring in new couples and leads now—and long-term strategies that bring in new couples and leads over time.

Both require upfront effort, but one has a sooner payoff (the short-term), while the other has a payoff that accumulates over time (the long-term). Both are necessary to grow your photography business, but I prefer one over the other.

Still, I’ll be covering strategies to help with both to get you more wedding photography clients now AND later:

#1. Collaborations

Collaborations are one of the best ways to build backlinks, which helps with your SEO and connects with new couples quickly. Essentially, collaboration is where you partner with a service provider or small business that serves the same clients as you — in this case, soon-to-be-wed couples!

Your ideal collaborators will be wedding venues, bridal shops, florists, and others in the wedding industry. To collaborate with them, offer a newsletter swap (where you showcase them in your newsletter and them to yours) or ask to write a guest blog post on their website.

#2. Create an SEO Strategy

This is the long-form marketing and client attraction strategy I mentioned before. With SEO or search engine optimization, you’re optimizing your website so that Google (and other search engines) can accurately place you and your website in front of your dream couples. 

There are multiple aspects of SEO, but a good starting point is optimizing your main website pages (think your five core pages) and creating a content strategy, aka blogging, which you can get a few post ideas here. 

If you’re looking for a good place to start, download my free SEO Checklist, which includes seven strategies for getting discovered by more clients.

#3. Focus on Your Local Connections

Yes, I’m suggesting that you attend wedding industry markets near you! Set up a booth featuring your portfolio and more ways to connect with and follow you.

You can even make it easy to book with you immediately by setting up a payment processor, having your systems set up to ask for a deposit immediately after signing the contract, and connecting in person.

However, focusing on your local in-person events is one of many methods of making local connections. There’s even a specific sub-subsection or strategy of SEO where you focus on ranking for local keywords — aka when someone searches “wedding photographer near me,” local SEO is how they’ll find you!

How to Convert Connections to Clients

While using these strategies will help you attract more couples to your services, it’s also important to make sure you’re attracting the right couples to your website (and to you)! If a couple isn’t a good fit, they will likely not convert to clients.

So, before you start focusing on people coming into your world, make sure your website, offers, and branding are aligned with the couples you actually want to book!

Once it is, try to balance your short-term marketing with your long-term. Focusing solely on the long-term when you need clients now can feel frustrating, making it harder to keep consistent and maintain the effort needed for the strategy to succeed.

On the other hand, focusing on the short term is great for the moment when you have the energy and time to commit to it, but what about a month or two from now? Will you still have that same time and energy to sustain it? That’s where the long-term comes in!

And if you’re ready to tackle the short-term and want to hand-off the long-term, get in touch, and let’s see how I can help you!