and using Facebook ads to reach your ideal clients effectively
This is the first couple that hired us. We didn’t even have a website when they booked us but they were inspired by our work in the climbing industry and believed in us as wedding photographers. We are so incredibly thankful for their trust and vision in us.
After shooting their wedding, we used this image for almost all of our Facebook ads for the following year. We refer to this image as “the photo that launched our career”.
And how we turned a 1k investment into 30k+ worth of booking in 1 year
One of the topics we see come up a lot amongst photographers is if advertising is worth the money and with which company are ad dollars most effective? There are so many places to advertise your wedding and elopement photography business; booking websites like The Knot and Wedding Wire, review-based websites like Yelp, wedding blogs like Junebug Weddings and Green Wedding Shoes, and social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. With a strong focus on adventure in the great outdoors, our photography and brand caters to a certain type of couple, so we didn’t want to spend our ad dollars reaching a ton of couples that don’t share our passion for adventure. Instead, we decided to reach our ideal clients directly through target marketing with Facebook ads.
It was our very first year as full time wedding photographers and in January we started our first Facebook ad campaign. We spent a total of $909 in four months. We targeted our ads to be served up to outdoorsy couples (more on this, and target markets, later) and from that Facebook ad we booked 10 weddings at an average of $3,600 per wedding. Everyone that booked us was our ideal client and all of them had outdoorsy weddings. We made a 3,900% return on our investment. Because of the portfolio we built from those bookings we started receiving so many inquiries through organic google searches, referrals, and instagram, that we no longer needed to run another ad campaign. Our first ever Facebook ad campaign was such a success, we didn’t have to run another one again.
Now, we should preface this article with an important note: Facebook ads aren’t some magical solution to booking clients. A lot of wedding and elopement photographers use Facebook to advertise and the competition is real. Couples see these ads all the time and for the most part, they scroll right past them without a second thought. But the goal of this article is to share how we found success creating ads in the hope that it helps others who are interested in trying it out. When executed well, Facebook advertising can be a great resource for up and coming photographers. Before finding photography, Brandon graduated from CU Boulder with a degree in advertising and worked as a copywriter at a major advertising firm in Boston, Arnold Worldwide. However, you don’t need to be a marketing major to find success through Facebook! The biggest thing he learned at Arnold wasn’t how to write the perfect ad, but that writing many ads and trying out different things usually leads to the best results.
These are two other photos that we cycled into our Facebook ads and on our website. This is the second couple to hire us to photograph their wedding. They also saw the potential in our climbing work and put their complete trust in us. We ended up making a strong connection with their bridal party and shot one of their friend’s wedding a year later!
In essence, target marketing is directing your advertisements to a specific demographic of clientele whose interests align with your services. So, for example, if I’m creating a Facebook advertisement about my elopement photography, I want to make sure that Facebook is only serving my ad to people who are engaged. Why waste my ad dollars serving an ad about wedding photography to people who aren’t getting married? Facebook actually lets you target people who are newly engaged, which is great because those are the couples that are most likely still looking for a photographer. Even better yet, you can further narrow your market down to people who have specific interests or hobbies, like hiking or rock climbing, for instance.
OUR TARGET MARKET: Newly engaged couples that have a passion for the outdoors.
This is the difference between advertising with Facebook vs. The Knot. Through Target Marketing and Facebook ads, you can spend your ad dollars on just the type of couples you want to be working with. If you advertise with a generic blog or service, like The Knot, your ad dollars are being wasted on couples that might not care about the type of photography you specialize in.
First of all, when you create a Facebook ad you want to have users clicking through to your website – not your Facebook page. Why? The main reason is clients are more likely to contact you from your website than from your Facebook page. Your portfolio, info, about page, and social media accounts are easier to find and digest from your website. Plus, your website probably has a lot more personality than your Facebook page! And a bonus reason is that driving more users to your website helps boost your SEO (Search Engine Optimization AKA presence on Google).
However, you don’t want to drive users to your home page. You want to drive them to a landing page. A landing page is a webpage made specifically for your click through users from a particular ad you’re running and it has one main goal – to convert views into inquiries. This is done by displaying your most compelling work and information on one page with a strong call to action that makes it easy for couples to get in touch. It takes time and effort for a user to read through your advertisement. If they end up clicking through then you want to make the page they land on as simple and eye catching for them as possible. You also want to limit the options to click away from the page. The goal is to have all your important information and contact form right there, so consider removing your menu from the landing page.
*Disclaimer: the screen shots here are a little old. While setting up your ad in Facebook might look slightly different these days, the concepts are all the same*
TO BEGIN setting up your Facebook ad, you need to have a business page for your company. Head to your “Ad Manager” by selecting “Manage Ads” from the drop down arrow on the top right of your home page. From there you can begin to create your campaign. Facebook will ask you what your objective is. Make sure you select “Traffic”. You want to be driving traffic from your ad to your landing page.
PLACEMENTS
Some of the different ad variations we tried out during the course of our ad campaign.
After officially launching your ad, check back in once a day to monitor your stats and make changes based on how well it’s performing. If a lot of people are clicking through but no one is filling out your contact form, maybe your landing page needs to be spruced up. If you have a lot of impressions but no one is clicking through, change up your ad images or text. If you’re advertising to Washington, California, Arizona, and Utah, consider making 1 ad for Washington and California, and 1 ad for Arizona and Utah. It’s honestly just a lot of trial and error until you figure out what is best for your brand and your market.
We ran our ads January through April to book our first year of weddings. Since running those ads, we haven’t had the need to run any more. Every once in a while we’ll boost a post to drive traffic to a new blog post we just shared, but that’s the extent of our paid advertising. For us, our goal was to book our first year with ads so we could build our portfolio, learn, grow as photographers, and really work on our SEO. Now we book all of our adventure weddings and elopements from Google and a little bit from Instagram.
Hope you're enjoying all these nuggets of knowledge.
The Foxes Photography, LLC © // Desert portraits by Emily Klarer