Partnertizing… Book more weddings by helping your friends

How do you make sure that your favorite wedding vendors, including the venues you love, tell every bride they see about you? You Partnertize with them of course!

Ours is a visual industry. Every wedding vendor has to have nice, current images of whatever they do if they hope to reach new clients. We, as photographers, are in a position to provide those images to our vendor partners so they can advertise their services… We like to call this “Partnertizing”. We spend a good deal of our advertising time and budget doing it and the return on investment is great — if you do it right…

We recently delivered a large canvas wrap to a venue we want to work more with, and heard something very interesting during our meeting with the Catering Director: “We need images from the weddings we do here, but even when I ask, photographers never get back to me. You are the only ones who, without my asking, shared an online gallery with us, asked us to select our favorites, and actually had a canvas made and personally delivered it to me”.

This is nothing new. Most, if not all of us, have delivered framed images, an album, or sent digital files to venues, coordinators, etc. But, do you share an online gallery of every wedding with every vendor, every time? And do you provide every vendor with at least the digital files they request every time? If you think doing this is as important as showing up to shoot the wedding, you’re absolutely right!

These are images that we sent Friar Tux, a formal wear company we often work with, and they used the images for a blog post. It’s very important to always include your watermark in every image you give your vendor partners, and we always ask for a clickable link to our website.

There are many partnertizing ideas, some more cost effective than others. For many vendors, we simply provide the images they requested for their blogs and sites, fully retouched and watermarked of course. We often help a vendor select and organize a number of images from a wedding for a magazine or wedding blog submission. With our help, their offering will have a better chance of being selected, and our studio credit goes along with it.

These are some of the images we gave wedding planner, Kerrie Underhill of Platinum Weddings by Kerrie, and she submitted them to Carats & Cake, a popular wedding blog that is viewed by many brides planning their wedding.

For others partners we make albums and wall canvases. One of the most popular items we provide our vendor partners is custom designed, double sided press printed 5.5 x 8.5 cards from weddings we’ve done together. They love to have these on hand to give their prospective clients. We make about 50 of them from a wedding. These cards not only have the vendor’s logo and several images from the wedding, but our logo and information as well.

We designed this card (front & back) for the bridal shop, Mon Amie, using several images of brides wearing their gowns.

We designed this card for the St. Regis Monarch Beach, using images from a wedding we photographed there. It’s important to include a model release in your contract, so when it comes time to use their images for advertising or share images with vendors, everyone is covered.

All these ideas involve images from weddings we’ve photographed, but what about offering our services to our partners? We often photograph special tables for our florists’ magazine ads. Not only will you have great decor images for your site and blog, but you’ll have photo credit on their ad and the magazine will know you do good work. We also offer to photograph and retouch portraits for our vendor friends. Everyone needs a photo for their blog, website and social media.

We photographed this beautiful table for Nisie’s Enchanted Florist, at Rancho Las Lomas, one of our favorite venues, for an ad in Ceremony Magazine. This magazine also used the images in a blog post. We do these shoots for free, but given the exposure we get, and the referrals from our vendor friends, it is well worth our time and efforts.

The bottom line is that consistently (that’s the key word), working with our vendor partners by helping them attract clients with our images, gets us a great deal of inexpensive exposure and a ton of priceless good will!

A very wealthy and successful man was once asked “What is the one thing you credit most for your success, what’s your secret?” His response was “The secret is that there is no secret, success comes from doing a handful of things we all know we should do, and doing them consistently”.