I got an email today from my friend and business management instructor Jim Turley that I thought would be helpful for my blog readers. Turley tipped me and several of his students off about The Wedding Report, a site that features statistics and market research for the wedding industry. I quickly joined the site and receive regular updates and news such as this report on Colorado wedding statistics. You need to join and login if you want similar access.
Turley says wedding photographers have to consider the fact that all of us will be working harder to attract the attention of a shrinking number of brides while the numbers of new photogs entering the field keep growing.
"Not quite as bad as GM selling SUV's to a shrinking market, but the
same factors are involved," says Jim. "Good marketing will be even more important
in the coming years so you get more than your share of the market because the market size will decrease."
Jim pinpointed this report on wedding trends completed in September prior to the start of the economic crunch.
"The contents are not encouraging; less being spent on photographers,
increasingly popular to have friend/family shoot the wedding, etc."
The Wedding Report just released the results from their most recent online report, which can be purchased for $129. Competition is frightening in the $60 billion wedding industry, so this report might be worth the cost of having a leg up.
It covers:
What the future online wedding market holds for your business
What tools brides want to see on your website
How social plays a role and what it means for you
What future web trends you should plan for now
How important your web presence is
When you should spend your online marketing dollars
What key SEO trends you should focus your content on
Who the top Internet players are and why
It's food for thought definitely, and I'm starting to considering more options for marketing my company as well. I finally have enough money to get pay for having someone create my business logo. That's an important step I should have taken a long time ago, but I never saw the importance of it until now. I have to start making my business stand out from the hundreds of other photographers working in Colorado now.
