How to Generate Wedding Photography Referrals from Your Vendors

hen you are marketing your wedding photography business, Instagram posts, wedding trade shows, and blogging can take precedence over other potential referral avenues. These are fabulous places to market your wedding photography business, but referrals from vendors is one of the BEST ways to book new wedding work and is often overlooked. Today, we’re reviewing how you can generate wedding photography referrals from your wedding vendor and creative partners.

Creative vendors work with wedding photographers they find easy to work with and with whom they can get along. Our friends and CloudSpot Ambassadors, Shauna and Jordon Cooney, are here to break down how you can maximize your wedding vendor relationships using the tools you have at your disposal. 

Shauna and Jordon are husband and wife destination wedding photographers and photography educators. They also photograph a select number of anniversary and maternity sessions each year when their schedules allow. Shauna and Jordon are both former educators who met each other as teachers before pursuing photography. While they currently call Florida home, their favorite locations they’ve photographed their couples are Positano, Italy and Paris, France! 

We’re handing it over to them from here as they share more about how to capitalize on your best relationships in wedding and creative vendors to book more referral work with ideal wedding photography clients.

Make a Consistent Photography Workflow Your Priority 

Do you have a consistent wedding photography workflow that you stick to for every couple? If not, it’s time to get on that, stat! Your wedding workflow should be something you can stick to for each wedding, even when life and business get busy. Booking clients, photoshoots, culling, editing, gallery sending, and ongoing client relationships calls for a seamless workflow. 

We recommend incorporating workflow steps to ensure you share your images with your creative vendor partners for each wedding— this can be a step that is often forgotten in busier seasons. When your fellow vendors have beautiful images of their work, they’ll want to work with you again— keeping you top-of-mind when their couples ask for photographer recommendations.  

Individualize Galleries for Wedding Vendor Partners

We use CloudSpot to deliver images to our clients and wedding and creative vendors. There are so many features that make our post-wedding workflow so much easier and smoother. With easy image downloads and Mobile Apps that our clients love, our wedding vendor partners also love the same features for the same reasons! We suggest creating vendor-specific folders for easy access to relevant images, keeping your business top of mind for referrals and your images at the top of the pile for sourcing vendor marketing content. Think about what folders a wedding venue may want versus a floral vendor.

With CloudSpot, you can create specific folders for individual vendors that either contain all of the images from a client’s wedding day or just images that are relevant to their work from the SAME collection of images that you use to send to your clients. We’ll touch on this in a moment, but creating email templates to use when sending galleries to fellow vendors makes this process easy to keep up with and consistent every time. 

With CloudSpot, you can also send a zip file of images with the online gallery link to ensure your wedding vendors can easily download and back up their images. You can set an expiration date on both the gallery and the zip file download to create urgency and incentive for wedding vendors to download their images. 

If you are interested in learning more or are looking for a new image delivery gallery system, grab 20% off your first 12 months with CloudSpot.

Take Time to Create Your Photography Workflow

Take the time to write out your workflow and the email templates that will be part of your workflow. We suggest having email templates pre-made for each type of wedding vendor. When it comes time to send your gallery out, templates like this make your workflow that much faster. Fast and efficient workflows are a great way to set yourself up for success, especially as you work through busier seasons. You’ll be more likely to follow through with your workflow with templates that help you avoid reinventing the wheel for every wedding. As a bonus, you can add gallery delivery templates right within CloudSpot to make sending galleries to clients and wedding photography and creative vendors a breeze. 

Yes, creating your photography workflow and email templates process is time consuming, but it is necessary and absolutely worth it. If this task is daunting to you (We’ve been there!) and you’re looking for a shortcut to help clean up your workflow systems, we have the perfect resource for you. We offer our entire wedding workflow bundle, including the emails we send, timeline samples, and questionnaires to help you develop your system from inquiry to image delivery. Learn more and grab our Shauna and Jordon Wedding Workflow by clicking here! 

Going above and beyond for the wedding and creative vendors you enjoy working with will help you build quality relationships leading to more client referrals! While it may require some time on your end as the wedding photographer, the time will pay off tremendously over time. We’re cheering you on!

We can’t wait to connect with you! You can find us on social media below! 

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‍If you are interested in learning more or are wanting to snag one of our upcoming photography coaching spots, click here!