Justin & Mary Marantz on How to Market with Love

One of the most valuable topics that ShootDotEdit and WPPI recently chose to tackle in their monthly webinar series is Marketing. Webinar host Jared Bauman, President of ShootDotEdit, says, “It is overwhelming to know where to start when it comes to marketing your photography business. Justin and Mary are experts at breaking that down.” 

Justin and Mary Marantz—the wedding photography duo who travel the globe shooting weddings, teaching workshops, and inspiring business owners to succeed—outline some simple marketing strategies here that you can implement immediately to increase your bookings. (Here’s access to the full presentation. The duo will also present “10 Ways to Make Your Work Worth More” at WPPI on March 2 at 4 p.m. in Las Vegas.)

Photo © Justin & Mary Marantz

1. Take Care of Your Clients
If you want people talking about you, give them something good to say. To cultivate that, we send out a series of gifts, including the Williams-Sonoma Bride & Groom Cookbook; a fluffy, cozy blanket in our favorite color (silver sage) from Restoration Hardware; or a holiday frame ornament with the couple’s wedding picture in it. We’re looking for things that we love ourselves to keep it personal, things that they will keep for a long time so it continues to remind them of us, and things that they’ll want to put on Facebook and Instagram (like “hanging our first married ornament from the #bestphotographersever”). And sending them out at the holidays, when a lot of our clients’ friends are getting engaged, is an extra added bonus!

2. Take Care of Vendors
Do something for other vendors without expecting anything in return. We take a photo that shows off their work—such as a floral arrangement from the last wedding we shot—and create a card for them with their contact info, colors and logo. We print it on pearl card stock from WHCC and present it to them as a gift. (We also make sure our contact info isn’t anywhere on it, just our photo credit. This makes it a gift with no strings attached and gives vendors a great reason to talk about us.)

3. Leave a Sample Album at a Location
By leaving just one book at one of our favorite locations a few years ago, we have been able to track back over $50,000 worth of new bookings from that $500 investment. It’s been a real game-changer. The key is to make sure your book looks different and stands out, and to feature parts of the venue that the coordinator can talk about, like “rain plan” ceremony setups or distinctive table layouts.

4. Become Allies With Photographers
It’s good to have friends you can reach out to whose work you trust and whose business approach you believe in. We’re big believers that “all of us are stronger than one of us,” so find three to four fellow photographers you connect with and start a private Facebook page with a shared Google calendar. Make a plan to refer each other when you’re booked, and I guarantee you that all four of you will be able to get each other booked faster than any one of you going it alone.

5. Run a Blog Comment Contest
For every engagement and wedding we post, we send an email to our brides telling them they are being featured on our site and then we send a link for them to forward to friends and family. We also ask them to have those friends leave comments on our site. For 50 comments, the couple gets a free 8 x 10 print; for 75 comments, a free 11 x 14; and for 100 comments or more, a gallery wrap.

6. Present Your Best Portfolio
If you would be embarrassed for us to look through your website right now because all of the work is “old stuff,” then just remember that’s what brides are looking at, too. One of the fastest ways to up your inquiries is to just make sure you aren’t losing them at the website stage. Go through your website with a machete and cut everything that doesn’t fit with your best work and the style you’re going for. Don’t show anything you wouldn’t want to shoot again and again. And cut the number of images way down, too. If several pictures look too similar, only show the best one. The rest will just water down the impact.

7. Connection, Trust, Scarcity
Our website strategy is two fold: 1) Establish connection and trust; 2) Cultivate scarcity. The first wave of our approach is to give a potential bride every reason in the world to know exactly who we are and exactly what our work stands for to see if she connects with that. The second wave is to make sure she knows that we don’t actually take every wedding that comes to us. We put this right on our inquiry page. This creates a feeling of “I love it and I might not be able to have it” and that usually equals “Now I REALLY have to have it!”

8. Meet On Your Own Turf
We started out in a two-bedroom apartment living room and now we have a really nice, dedicated meeting space in our new house. The key is that when we’re in our own space, we come across as more confident, we can control the variables (unlike in a loud, crowded coffee shop), and we can create an experience right out of the gate by serving our clients Champagne, chocolate and fresh berries. Meeting in our own space gives that couple one more chance to connect with us.

9. Try à La Carte Pricing
In 2006, we had set packages that started at $6,000 and went up to $10,000. But at that time in our market in Connecticut, people couldn’t wrap their heads around starting at $6,000, so we were never getting them in the door. Then we switched to À La Carte pricing (basically just taking the products out of our $6,000 package), which brought us down to a number ($4,500) that was a stretch for people, but something they could see making happen. Once we got them in the door and gave them that chance to connect with us on our own turf, not only did our number of bookings go up by 400 percent, but clients also started adding things on after they had booked us to end up back at our original prices. It was just a matter of getting them in the door first!

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