Hey photographer friends! Welcome back to our Photography Blog, Mastering the Wedding Photography Biz with Hunter and Sarah! As you may have noticed, we took a few months away from YouTube to focus on our fall weddings. But we are SO excited to be back to posting new video content each week alongside our blogs! This week, we’re discussing Facebook/Instagram ads for photographers.

 

Specifically, we’re going to help photographers STOP throwing money away on social media ads that don’t work. We’re not saying that social media ads don’t work at all — because trust us, they definitely do! But we’ve seen way too many photographers just throw their money away on really bad Facebook and Instagram ads. So today, we’re going to explain why those ads aren’t working. And we’re giving you a few options that will work better than those money-wasting social media ads!

 

 

We’ve Seen Some BAD Facebook/Instagram Ads for Photographers…

What inspired us to write this blog is all the terrible photographer ads we’ve seen in our own SM feeds. The first and most obvious flaw with all of these ads is that WE are seeing them! We’ve been married for almost six-and-a-half-years. If WE are seeing your ads for wedding photography, you’re targeting wrong!

 

The most powerful part of Facebook/Instagram ads for photographers (and for anyone!) is how specifically they can be targeted. That’s why everyone on the internet is constantly collecting data about you. Because more data makes for more targeted ads. And ads that are tailored specifically for you are more likely to encourage you to buy. So if we’re seeing your ads promoting your wedding photography services, you’re already doing it wrong.

 

Not only are we being targeted for wedding services even though we’re already married. But sometimes we’ll see ads for photographers who are working thousands of miles from us! And trust us: we didn’t Google “Destination Wedding Photographers” anytime recently. So this means that this photographer is probably spending money to target people ALL over the United States. This is NOT a good strategy, even if they are a destination wedding photographer.

 

 

Why Social Media Ads for Wedding Photographers Don’t Always Work

But it isn’t just poor targeting. When ads for wedding photographers pop up in our feed, we typically stop and read the ads with a critical eye. After all, we’ve booked more than $160,000 in weddings from social media ads. We had to learn (sometimes the hard way) what makes an ad good, and what makes it a total flop.

 

And mostly… we’re seeing flops. The most common mistake we see is people not actually creating an ad, but just paying to “boost” one of their regular Instagram posts or Facebook posts. This is a BIG mistake.
You wouldn’t rip a page out of a Harry Potter novel and submit it to a poetry contest. And you wouldn’t copy the words from a legal brief and put it inside a recipe book. Why? Because you write in completely different styles depending on what the purpose of your writing is.

 

This is the mistake people make when they pay Facebook or Instagram to just show one of their regular posts to non-followers. Writing a caption that will encourage your social media followers to engage with your content is completely different than writing ad copy that encourages a total stranger to click on your post and follow you or visit your website.

 

There are hundreds of books written just on the subject of writing ad copy. You could probably spend weeks or even years mastering the art of writing copy for social media ads! So when you’re paying to put one of your images in front of total strangers — even a really beautiful image — and the caption is just describing the image or the wedding day or the couple… that’s a recipe to spend hundreds of dollars to get just one or two taps, and NO new leads.

 

 

How to Make Effective Facebook/Instagram Ads for Photographers

Here’s where it really gets tricky. There’s a bigger problem than just writing good copy when it comes to Facebook/Instagram ads for photographers. Even if you wrote the ads perfectly and selected images that were ideal to get people to stop scrolling… Unless that ad took your potential clients into a “SALES FUNNEL”, it probably won’t book you many weddings.

 

Social media ads are like meeting someone on a blind date. You can’t jump right from, “Hello my name is Hunter” right to “Will you marry me?”. And yet that’s exactly what photographers are doing when they’re expecting a social media ad to book them a wedding. In dating, there are a LOT of steps between the first interaction, and saying “I do.” In the same way, there’s usually a LOT of steps between an engaged couple seeing your name for the first time, and putting down a multi-thousand dollar deposit with you for their wedding.

 

People don’t want to feel like they’re being sold to, and they’re definitely not going to book a consultation call off of a single social media ad. At least, not very often. If you’re spending hundreds of dollars a month on Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads in the hope that someone books a consultation call right from that ad, you’re sort of like someone who hopes that their dating app profile is enough to convince a stranger to come home with them for Thanksgiving. Sure, it might happen every now and then. But it isn’t a great business strategy.

 

 

Why We Don’t Recommend Social Media Ads to Our Photography Students

For all of these reasons (plus constantly-changing algorithms and all the huge corporations who are driving up prices for social media advertising) it’s easy to get “upside-down” on a social media ad.

 

That’s where you spend more to actually book a job than you’ll profit from that job in the end. It would be like paying Facebook $4,000 over the course of several months, and only booking one $3,000 wedding. In this example, you actually lost $1,000 to shoot that wedding. The only one who made any money was Facebook!

 

Because of that, we never encourage our photography business students to use social media ads. Unless they commit to setting up an entire sales funnel, and learning the art of copywriting. Instead, we recommend they use social media in a few other ways.

 

 

A Better Way to Use Social Media for a Photography Business

However, we know that there’s a better way to use Facebook and Instagram to grow a photography business. Really simply, we encourage our students to use social media to stay in front of the friends and family they already have. For newer portrait or wedding photographers, your own network is usually where the majority of your first jobs come from!

 

In our first 4 years in business, we booked 40 weddings and brought in over $100,000 in jobs from our own personal network alone, without spending a dollar to market to them! More on how we did that in the next section.

 

Social media can also be a great avenue to target people directly who are already in your network, and are likely going to start searching for a photographer. The beauty of social media is when people make big life-milestone announcements like getting engaged, announcing a pregnancy, or celebrating a birthday or graduation, it often gets pushed to the top of your feed. We’ve used social media to reach out to those people directly, and be the first people they think of when it comes time to photograph that milestone!

 

 

Want ALL Our Marketing/Advertising Methods?

And how do we actually use social media to stay in front of our personal network and book more clients? Well, you know we can’t give away ALL of our secrets in just one blog post or a single 10-minute YouTube video. In fact, we have more than two hours of content JUST on marketing and advertising for portrait and wedding photographers!

 

If you’re interested in learning more about how we use not just social media, but also local networking, blogging, website SEO, plus word-of-mouth referrals to book more clients — all without spending a single dollar — then you should absolutely check out our for-Photographers workshop: “How to Get More Photography Clients: A Simple Guide to Free AND Paid Marketing and Advertising.”

 

In addition to all of the free methods, there’s an entire section on paid methods that are not Facebook/Instagram ads that we’ve found to be more profitable and effective for our photography students. This workshop is available RIGHT NOW to purchase on our website, and you can start streaming the content right this minute. So use the link in the description to learn more, or to get access to the course!