Learn how Industry Partnerships and Third-Party Marketing can become the lifeline of your photography business!

As the old saying goes “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”, and that absolutely applies here. Everyone knows that referrals are the strongest type of advertising, so in this post we are going to discuss the tips and tricks to get other businesses in your industry to refer brides/customers to you!

So, this post is going to be focused around the wedding industry, but the strategy can be applied to any area of photography or industry for that matter.

To get an idea of how best to attack this third-party marketing strategy, we need to break down the planning process of a wedding into all the steps that happen leading up to the big day!

• Groom buys an engagement ring.
• Groom books a hotel, resort, dinner, boat ride etc etc and proposes to the bride!!

The bride and groom are now engaged and the bride takes over the rest of the booking process!! Then they need to choose a date, and they can’t do that until they:

• Book a reception venue
• Book a ceremony venue (if it’s not at the same as their reception)

Now that they have a date booked in and a venue, it’s time to organise the following suppliers, not necessarily in this order:

• Book a photographer
• Book a videographer
• Choose a dress
• Find a florist
• Find the perfect cake
• Choose a celebrant
• Book in the entertainment, for example, band, DJ and/or MC
• Get the wedding cars booked in
• Send out invites

After they have done all of the above they still need to plan and organise all the little bits and pieces but for the sake of this post, let’s not worry about any of that stuff for now.

Our mission: Get as many of the businesses in the list above to refer couples to us! But how do we do that I hear you say??!

In my opinion there are mainly 4 ways to create third-party marketing partnerships with complimentary industry professionals and get on their preferred supplier list:

1. Networking and making new friends

The easier way to create these partnerships is to get to know people in your industry and become friends, it’s as simple as that! There are plenty of ways to do this, below are just a few to get you started:

• Join wedding industry Facebook groups: Get involved and make sure you participate in the conversations. Slowly get to know the people and build trust. After a while you will see relationships forming and eventually people will start recommending you as their preferred supplier.

• Go to industry events and mingle: The biggest and most obvious one are wedding expos. We exhibit once a year just to top up our bookings, and while we are there we meet some amazing vendors. Buy them a coffee, have a chat, get to know them. We have created tonnes of partnerships and new friendships this way. Another good one is to attend industry nights put on by wedding directories or even printing labs. Wedding directories for example want to shmooze their advertisers, so they put on industry nights to bring suppliers together for fun or to educate them on sales and marketing. We recently attended one by EasyWeddings.com.au, it was a fantastic way to meet new vendors and create friendships, big win!

• Join an industry networking group: Sometimes this will cost money, but they are worth it! If you are part of a networking group, the whole purpose of the group is to refer clients to each other (after they have reference checked you to make sure you are worth referring too, which is fair enough).

• Or just reach out to people: Simply do it the old fashioned way. Find a supplier that you would love to partner with and offer to buy them a coffee and have a chat. I’ve done this with makeup artists and florists in the past. Their website looked amazing, so I just emailed them and offered to buy them a coffee. After an hour of chatting and laughing about this crazy industry that we are in, we became friends and now refer customers to each other, easy!

2. Offer them something in return

Sometimes it’s all business, so in order to get your foot in the door with some of the big dogs you’ll have to shmooze a little. There are a couple of tactics I have used in the past that worked really well:

• Offer them real wedding photos: Every time I’m out shooting a wedding, I’m always thinking in the back of my mind, which suppliers would like to receive these photos…? So, I shoot beautiful portraits of the bride and then send the hair and makeup artist photos so they can use it on their website to help them with marketing. I shoot beautiful photos of the bouquet and the flowers and then send them to the florist so they can use them on their website. I always try and get as many beautiful photos of the venue and details and then send the photos to the reception afterwards, so they can use the shots on their website. This is a REALLY good way to help out other suppliers while at the same time building relationships and hopefully get on their preferred supplier list.

• Offer them a photo shoot: Every year I offer a bunch of wedding dress designers and wedding magazines a free shoot. Sure, I know shooting for free sucks, but a dress designer might create 300 dresses a year for brides and if you can get a dress designer to personally recommend you to their brides, you will be set! I also shoot for magazines in exchange for free advertising which is also a good trade in my opinion. One day of shooting, honing my skills and getting some amazing folio pieces in exchange for free advertising works for me!

3. Offer their brides/customers an awesome deal

I’ve used this tactic a few times with reception venues and a few other suppliers and it worked really well. For example, I would try and offer a supplier photos every time after I photographed a wedding there but it just never seemed to be enough to get them to refer me. So I decided to do one of the following two things:

• Give their brides a discount: So now when a venue refers brides to me, I offer those brides 10% off which is a massive discount. So the result is I get more volume, the venue looks great because their customers are getting an awesome deal and the brides love it because they are saving money, win – win for everyone!

• Give them a gift: Think outside the square! For example, I have also partnered with jewelers, so every time a groom buys an engagement ring he will also receive a ‘gift’ from the jeweler which is a free engagement shoot for him and his new fiance! The groom loves it, the jeweler is happy because he/she is adding more value to their customer experience and I get put in front of newly engaged couples who will ‘hopefully’ book me for their wedding too!

4. Refer your customers to them!

The last thing I have done to create business relationships with other suppliers is refer my couples to them first! For example, there is a band that I love working with and whenever we are at a wedding together we have an awesome time. We joke over dinner and just work really well together.

So, whenever a couple asks me if I know any good bands, they are the first company that I think of and refer my couples to them. The couple is grateful because it saves them shopping around and it looks good for me because it proves that I know my stuff and have been around long enough to have my own list of preferred suppliers. Of course I always tell the couple to let them know that Chris from Epic Photography sent them, and after 3 times the band contacted me and said they would like to add me to their preferred supplier list!

[optinform]

THANKS so much for reading!

Thanks everyone for reading, I hope this information was useful and is something you can apply to your business to help you create more partnerships in the industry! If you have any questions or better yet, if you have can let me know if I missed anything, then I would love to hear from you 🙂

Stay tuned for the next post…