Print ads, featured listings on wedding sites or search engines, and portfolios placed at popular wedding reception sites are some of the ways that wedding photographers can spend their marketing dollars. Yet these methods require photographers to sit back and wait for clients to get in touch with them. For photographers who want to take a more active role in marketing themselves, lead generating Web sites can help put them in touch with potential clients.
Lead generators are probably not for you if by March you’ve booked your entire year with jobs for couples who are happy to pay whatever you ask. “Lead generation programs, the [customers] have a tendency of looking for bargains,” says Vlad Fridlyand, who owns Garden State Photo in New Jersey, a company that uses several lead generators as well as traditional print and Web advertising.
Lead generating sites let brides- or grooms-to-be request quotes from photographers based on several criteria: style of photography they want, date and location of their wedding, and how much they want to spend on photography. Once clients fill out an online form, the sites deliver these leads to photographers who can then contact the client, make their pitch and, hopefully, book a job. How each photographer handles their leads is up to them, however, and photographers who use lead generators regularly say that investigating leads and selling themselves to clients can be difficult and time consuming.
Princeton, New Jersey-based photographer Joel Simpson began using lead generators in 2006 and currently uses several of them, including three of the four discussed in this article. It took him a while to learn how to sell himself and make the most of the leads he got, a process he says he is still working on. “The galling part of the business,” he says, is “leads I pay for that I can never reach.” Now he makes a phone call immediately after getting a lead, and he estimates that 70 percent of the people he gets on the phone agree to a meeting. He notes, however, that agreeing to a meeting doesn’t always mean a potential client will show up.
Eau Claire, Wisconsin-based Jeff Thompson, a former newspaper photographer who has been shooting weddings in a journalistic style for about five years, says he gets 15-20 leads per week from the lead generator OurWeddingDay.com. He follows leads up with an introductory e-mail, and estimates that one in 15 call him back. He’s only booked two jobs in his five months using the service, but he’s been happy that when he sends a batch of e-mails to leads, he sees a spike in traffic on his Web site. “I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t be better served by being a little more aggressive with the calling, but at this point that seems like a little bit of overkill,” says Thompson.
No matter what you hope to get from a lead generating service, no two are created equal. How they handle both clients and vendors is a key distinction between them. To better understand how wedding photographers can make the most of lead generators, we chose to examine four services with different operating plans, and spoke with photographers who use lead generators about the pros and cons.
The Lead
Prospective clients create leads on AllWedding.com, JustWeddings.com, OurWeddingDay.com and Respond.com by filling out a form that requests quotes from photographers in their geographic area. Each Web site’s form differs slightly, but dates, locations, budgets and style of photography can be included, and clients are also asked for their contact information.
A major point of differentiation between each lead generator is how it handles this information once a client submits it. AllWedding.com, Respond.com and JustWeddings.com have staff members who call each potential client after a request comes in.
Fridlyand, whose Garden State Photo books jobs for 12 wedding photographers including him, says, “One of the biggest problems in general with the lead generating services is validation of those leads.” Fridlyand, who uses several lead generating services, has two people on staff who work full time to follow up on the hundreds of leads they receive per day.
Star Sargenti, who owns Harmony Wedding Photography in the Los Angeles area, says that she had problems in the past with bad leads; she would pay for a potential client’s information and not be able to get in touch with them. She declines to mention which lead generator she was working with, but says, “It seemed like they were [giving me] bum leads. We book a fair amount of weddings per month through [advertising on] Google and Yahoo, and I just thought there must be something wrong.” Sargenti says she has been using AllWedding.com for a little over a year, and she feels the quality of their leads has been high. Joe Rossano, co-founder and president of AllWedding.com says his company verifies each bride’s request by phone.
JustWeddings.com either e-mails or calls potential clients to verify their contact details and get further information about what they’re looking for. “Then we match up that particular bride to the photographers in our network that best fit that bride,” says Ken Wisnefski, the owner of the six-month-old wedding site. “We’re doing a lot of the weeding out and matching on the back end.”
Joel Simpson, a Princeton, New Jersey-based photographer who uses a few different lead generators, says of JustWeddings, “They give you very few leads but they are all high quality.”
Respond.com director Brian Menhert says his company, which generates leads for all types of businesses, uses an automated system to catch problems with leads. As of about a year ago, they also started following up with each lead over the phone to verify it.
OurWeddingDay.com favors flat-fee pricing and high lead volume over lead verification. Their automated system does identify bad e-mail addresses and phone numbers, however, and vendors can report false leads to the site, says Alexis Lamster, VP of vendor relations at OurWeddingDay.com.
Who Gets the Lead? Once a lead is created and verified, generators decide which photographers in a given area receive it. The sites don’t want to overwhelm clients by giving their contact information to a huge number of photographers, and photographers don’t want to compete for jobs with 20 other local shooters.
All of the four sites
PDN spoke with allow photographers to set filters for leads based on details like date, location and pricing. This means that a photographer who does not shoot a wedding for less than $2,500 will not be given a lead to a couple who only want to spend $1,500. What photographers pay for a lead that does fit their requirements varies depending on the policy of the lead generator.
On AllWedding.com, photographers have to bid for new leads, and the lead is awarded only to the top five bidders. Rossano says this “limits the competition,” and he adds that there is no cap on the bid amount.
OurWeddingDay.com’s pricing structure also helps determine who gets the lead. Their most basic service costs just under $20 per month; annual packages can cost as much as $1,600. Each of their annual packages allow vendors unlimited free leads, and their “Gold” ($480/year) and “Platinum” ($1,600/year) packages give leads to the vendors in these high-priced categories four hours before the lower-paying vendors in their area receive the same leads. (Where and how a photographer is listed on the site also factors into the cost of the package. See sidebar: "What Else Do I Get?")
“Depending on the membership type, they may have unrestricted access to leads,” says Lamster, “others may have to be one of the first five vendors to pursue it to get the information.”
JustWeddings.com gives leads to only three photographers, and they decide who gets the leads based on their conversations with the client, as well as algorithms that factor in proximity, budget and other details. They charge vendors $25 per month plus a per-lead charge, and they base lead pricing on how much a client wants to spend. Wisnefski says that brides who want to pay $1,000 to $3,000, which represent the majority on his site, generally are priced at $5 apiece; for leads to clients who want to spend over $5,000, photographers will pay as much as $15.
Respond.com delivers leads automatically to five photographers in a given area on a rotating basis, but what a photographer pays can also help him or her get a lead. Respond offers both an unlimited leads option, and a per-lead option says Menhert. The former is based on 3-, 6-s and 12-month terms, and prices are determined by historical data on the number of leads generated for photographers in a region. The minimum annual cost is $900. “We have some photographers, based on volume and exposure level, that would be at $1,800 [annually].”
The per-lead plan includes a $499 annual charge for a vendor’s listing on the site (see sidebar: “What Else Do I Get?”), plus a per-lead charge that Respond sets based on the market in a given locale. In more competitive markets like New York or Los Angeles, photographers operating on a per-lead basis can choose to bid over the market price for leads, which increases their chances of being one of the five photographers each lead is given to. “If you’re in a [less competitive] market, paying the market price is going to work out for you,” says Menhert.
How Are Leads Delivered?
Once a lead generator decides to give a lead to a photographer, the photographer will either automatically receive the lead via e-mail and be charged for it, or he or she will have an opportunity to preview certain details about the lead before paying for and/or pursuing it.
JustWeddings.com vendors can choose to receive all leads that fit their criteria for budget and geographical area, or they can preview a lead on a “lead board” before they pay for it.
Wisnefski says vendors pay “one and a half times more” for the latter option. In other words, a $5-dollar lead delivered automatically becomes a $7.50 lead if you want to preview it.
AllWedding.com offers their vendors what Rossano calls a “teaser.” Photographers get an e-mail with dates and information about what the client is looking for. (The teaser does not include budget details.) Based on that information, the photographer can choose to bid on the lead or move on to the next.
OurWeddingDay.com sends preview e-mails to vendors, and they can also log into the Web site to pick over a client’s details before they pursue a lead. With Respond.com, leads that fit a vendor’s criteria are delivered automatically via e-mail.
What’s the lead worth?
Respond.com’s Brian Menhert says that over a recent month, 64 percent of the clients looking for wedding shooters on Respond.com put their budget at $800-$1,300, and 23 percent identified their budget at $1,300-$1,800. Menhert says that in an average month, Respond.com generates 2,500 leads nationally.
“It’s definitely all over the board,” says Rossano of the amount AllWedding.com clients are looking to spend. The site does not measure how much the average bride requesting a quote has budgeted for photos, however, and he estimates that 35,000 of the 150,000 wedding services leads his company generates monthly are for photographers.
Wisnefski says that 80 percent of JustWeddings.com clients fall in the $1,000-$3,000 range, and he estimates 5,000-7,000 of the 25,000 leads his company generates per month are for photographers.
Although OurWeddingDay.com does not have data on how much their average bride wants to spend, Lamster estimates most fall in the $1,500-$5,000 range. Of the 70,000 wedding leads they generated in January 2009, 10,000 were for photographers, she says, adding that the lead numbers tend to increase through the spring and early summer months.
Of course, the amount potential customers want to spend matters little if they don’t choose to book you for a job.
“The most effective marketing tool is referrals,” says Garden State Photo’s Fridlyand. “Unfortunately it can take years before you can get any referrals.” Fridlyand started using lead generators when he opened his business. He and the photographers he works with shot 200 weddings last year.
What Else Do I Get?
Leads are only a part of what these four sites deliver to their vendors. Below are some details about what else these sites offer for your marketing dollar.
Respond.com, gives photographers complete control over their presence with a 3-4-page micro-site that includes an informational page, customer reviews (which are vetted by Respond), a calendar, and work samples. Respond.com also tracks click-through rates to the photographer’s Web site, and provides a tracked phone number to vendors as well.
OurWeddingDay.com utilizes its partnership with retailer David’s Bridal to create exposure for its vendors. Not only are there several options for premium placement on OurWeddingDay.com pages, vendors can pay for packages that include an ad on David’s Bridal, the country’s largest bridal retailer.
For $25 a month plus a per-lead charge, JustWeddings.com provides a micro-site to vendors that they can update “in Real Time,” although clients have to register with the site to see the listings. The company also emails sales collateral to clients they match vendors with.
AllWedding.com vendors receive a listing on the site, and can pay for upper-page placement. The site will also host a video about a vendor’s service, and provide a live chat option to those who elect their “Gold” package.
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