Brand Marketing and Brand awareness is key to any business.  This, I learnt during my marketing sessions at university and later, whilst running my own businesses.

When I first entered the wedding photography business I took time out to try and identify what my brand could be – or at least, what I would like it to evolve into over the forthcoming years.

My style of wedding photography dictates that my clients must be fully aware of the type of wedding coverage they will get when employing me as their wedding photographer. For that reason, I have lent heavily on the photojournalism/reportage wedding phrases throughout my branding. As with all businesses, your brand reputation is one of the primary selling tools you have. If your brand is strong, it can do much of the marketing on your behalf. For example, Jeff Ascough is synonymous with the documentary wedding photography genre, and most people in the “wedding bubble” are aware of that – because of the strength of his brand (built on the strength of his great photography of course).  People like Barrie Downie have a wonderfully strong brand too – creating gorgeously artistic and stylised wedding portraiture.

I try to permeate my brand through to my clients at all times. The website is very self explanatory and I have lots of sections backing up my preferred style of wedding photography. This is replicated throughout every “point of contact” with the client. All emails have brand awareness messages, whether that is subtly it the content, or slogans in the signatures of the email themselves.

This is very important not only for me, but also for the client. I really don’t want to spend time discussing with clients if they clearly do not want a documentary style photographer. And likewise, I don’t want them to waste their time on me. It works both ways and by ingraining the style in my branding in all communications it means that any contact that I get from potential clients, I already know that they are at least interested in my “style”.

One of the take-away points I got from all the lectures at university was the power of “Calls to action”. A call to action can be many things, but essentially they all achieve the same result; encouraging the potential client to take some positive steps. By simply adding three buttons at the bottom of all my pages on my website (one for Newsletter, one for Facebook and one for Contact Me) I immediately noticed an increase in Facebook traffic, along with more people stepping through the website and contacting me. Additionally, each email has a call to action – often that may be a simple “Have you seen my latest blog post?” or a more direct call such as “Call the studio now to secure your wedding date”. The marketing experts tell us that this form of physiological marketing works, and I believe it does. [Read more…]