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Ok, I’ll say it. Anesha Collins is a marketing genius. She’s my video guru. She’s here to show us how we can use video marketing to sell more wedding albums — brilliant!!
Anesha here, professional wedding photographer and cinematographer that also specializes in video-marketing and the founder of LEARNWITHAC. You already know how passionate I am about video-marketing, but today I want to talk about using it to help you sell more wedding albums. More importantly, it’s about connecting with your clients and sharing how wedding albums are truly worth having.
It’s common to hear that your clients should have a tangible experience by letting them hold a sample album and look through the pages, but the experience you give to your clients needs to be more than that. Think about the last time you looked through a magazine. Yes, captivating images will catch your attention but are you really engaged with the content or just simply browsing through. This is where video-marketing really changes this experience.
I want to bring in a different perspective to help you connect to what I am sharing here. Let’s switch gears and talk about the music industry for a moment. I guess it’s easy for me to switch because I worked in this industry as a visual artist and really learned a lot from it. In the music industry, on average, “150 streams of a song equals one paid download, and ten paid downloads equates to an album download.” – Forbes. This seems crazy right? Well, it’s the truth. When I was younger, physical album sales were huge. Artists focus on the visual aspect (graphics, colors, song layout, etc.) of their albums because they knew they wanted the buyer to have a certain experience once purchased.
Fast forward to 2013, and let’s talk about Beyonce‘s album Lemonade. Yes, one of the digital albums that really changed the game. This digital album made such an impact that she literally “stopped the world”- while also motivating other artists to be different and level-up. Artists thereafter copied Beyonce’s method and saw success with that.
Sharing this backstory and Beyonce’s amazing marketing strategy is not about “going digital,” but moreso about everything else she did to have success with her digital album sales. Yes, this is the part that a lot of people miss. As business owners, we can learn a lot from Beyonce’s tactic, and the key element that helped to make her Lemonade album a success with the video album (visual-album). This is where video-marketing comes in.
Like Beyonce, you need to invite your customer into your experience. This is what helps you to stand out and to also communicate the value of the wedding albums you sell. Creating a visual to showcase your products doesn’t have to break the bank. If you want to sell albums, you need to show them! There is great power in showcasing your wedding albums by using video-marketing. Beyonce created a trailer video that teased her audience by giving them a taste of what they could expect. This trailer video received 4,694,163 views and 13,000 views. Now, before you say, well I’m not Beyonce (guess what, neither am I, and I use video-marketing everyday). The point is that, she developed a piece of content that sparked curiosity, want, and need in her audience.
Here are some video-marketing tips to use within your own photography business that have proven to be successful in getting clients to see the value of purchasing a wedding album:
1. Connect With Your Clients
Connecting with your clients is so important. It not only shows that you care about them but it also helps to build a trust factor and you don’t have to be fake. You get to know them as you would any other friend, and build from there. You can start by having a questionnaire that focuses on your wedding album to see what they like, how much they value memories, and also gather additional data like where they might showcase their wedding in their homes.
2. Show Them A Real Album
While most will tell you to show them a “sample album”, I slightly disagree. Yes, it won’t be an album that they can keep, but there is nothing wrong with showing them a real album in a video. Why? Because it’s real and it showcases what you can with your photography skills in addition to how you can curate a real wedding for an amazing album.
People want to see what others have experienced with you. Showing a real album helps to facilitate that.
3. Keep Them Engaged
Keeping them engaged starts with showcasing the value of a wedding album from the very beginning; this starts in your marketing plan, continues on your website, continues in your email marketing, and so on. Yes, it doesn’t stop. You want to constantly show them why this product really holds value.
A 3-minute short-film showcasing how wedding albums really matter, or a 60-90 second promotional video showcasing the product alone can really help. I created this short video on my iPhone that has increased album sales in my business. I share this video with my couples and they love it.
4. Share Your Why & The Investment
Sharing your why should start with a story. Share why your couples choose to purchase wedding albums from you, but also share why you value them. For me, I talk about the death of my Grandmother and how I was able to look back on her life by watching old videos she had and looking through thousands of photographs she saved over the years. It still warms my heart to see them and I’m glad I have them.
This also makes sharing the investment part of this experience easier. Why, because when they really want what you have, they will get it and it’s not because of the “Italian leather cover,” but how you made them feel.
In this day and age, digital is prominent, but people still enjoy a tangible product. To date, when my clients receive their wedding album, canvases, and other tangible items, they never say, “Oh no…I don’t want that.” They absolutely love it! They know that I’ve taken the time to curate their album for their wedding album to best reflect their wedding celebration, but more importantly their marriage.
From the very beginning, you need to share why wedding albums hold value and using video can help to do this with ease.