Welcome back for another episode in the Amplify Your Wedding series! Today’s episode is all about how you can showcase wedding vendors as a way to grow genuine connections while building awareness of your business in the process. As a wedding photographer, you are the glue that ties all of the vendors together – let’s make the most of that role, babe! 

Today’s episode is brought to you by The Greenhouse, my resource garden for creatives to plant their dreams and grow money trees! These easy-to-use guides and templates will help you AMPLIFY your heart online and in real life to get dream clients begging to work with you year after year!

What Is A Vendor? (2:00)

Your “Why” For Connecting With Vendors (4:02) 

Other Vendors Can Be Your Best Friends (5:18)

Your Checklist For Showcasing Other Vendors (6:19)

Before The Wedding (6:31)

During The Wedding (8:12)

After The Wedding (11:46)

Get your free trial of Honeybook + 50% off >>

Review the Transcript:

Welcome to Quianna Marie weekly, a podcast for creatives who love to celebrate wins big or small by dancing in the kitchen photographers who are excited to serve their clients and friends who are ready to chase really, really big dreams. You can find all of the resources mentioned in this episode at quiannamarie.com/podcast. Join me as I share weekly motivation, chat about growing pains, finding genuine connections and celebrating your wins through the lens of a photographer at heart. Come join me for a dance party. Ready? Let’s go.

Good morning. Beautiful. Hope you’re enjoying this series so far. If you’re just jumping onto this episode, welcome. I’m so happy you’re here. Recently, I’ve been sharing lots of conversations about growing your wedding photography business organically. I love sharing secrets, telling wedding stories and empowering you to turn your passion for weddings into profit. When we put people first the money will always follow. This is why I’m passionate about sharing the importance of genuine friendships, serving your clients well, and sharing my own experiences about generational connections. For me, the more income I make, the more impact I can make on this world.

As wedding photographers, small business owners, adults in charge of driving this struggle bus of life, parents, dog moms, and every other title we probably answer to life is crazy. And we don’t always have extra time to market our business. If you’re new here, I’m a big fan of maximizing our time taking action and finding shortcuts without cutting corners. So to me, that means trying to always do the right thing even when people aren’t watching or busy on the go, and absolutely need to strategize how we can maximize our efforts to boost brand awareness. Let’s start digging into today’s topic showcasing vendors to amplify your weddings. What exactly is a vendor? Okay, let’s start there. wedding vendors are anyone or any business providing a service for wedding days. photographers, videographers wedding planners, florists, hair and makeup stylists, venues, caterers DJs cake bakers and rentals are the heavy hitters that most weddings need to come to life, photo booths, bar services, Arbor rentals, calligraphers, lighting companies alive painters, oh my gosh, there are so many.

When working together, wedding vendors can easily be the dream team for our couples. Okay, so there are so many vendors that I can’t even list them all. As photographers, we truly are the glue that ties all of these vendors together. Yes, it could be the coordinator or wedding planner, but they’re not always the first to arrive. And sometimes coordinators only arrived to organize a ceremony missing the entire first chunk of the wedding day, photographers will have a touchpoint with every single vendor throughout the day. Now, this may seem overwhelming. But here’s how it’s a blessing. We have the opportunity to not only photograph every detail, but to make genuine connections and start friendships with each vendor. I take the approach on wedding day is to be team captain.

Think of yourself as the vendor team captain, it’s totally just my personality. But I love supporting my couples. And if that means I kind of have to step up and take the lead, I’m willing to do it. Now. That doesn’t mean that I’m in charge, or I’m calling the shots throughout the day. It’s more important for me to work as a team support the vendors and capture their work come to life before eyes. If this sounds intimidating, I want to ensure you that you can still be shy. You can be super introverted and quiet, but still leave an incredible impact on wedding days before we dive into Action List tips and tricks and how to connect well with vendors.

First, I want to share why this is so important. As photographers, we don’t have a typical office. We don’t really have co workers even if we’re outsourcing which I’m really proud of you if you’re outsourcing and building an associate team. Like we’re often working remotely and we typically don’t always work with the same people daily in our home office. In fact, it’s really lonely. I may be speaking for myself here, but I’m definitely alone most of the time. So, making connection with vendors helps you connect on a deeper level of entrepreneurship.

Share your small business wins and struggles and let’s be honest, if we click well and work well together, we can help blast referrals and fill each other’s calendars. Making Friends with vendors and supporting their business naturally helps boost our brand awareness and burst through our own network. Working walls. Having a small but mighty group of vendor friends is literally like having your own marketing team. I don’t want to say for free, but when we are all sharing about each other’s businesses, booking dream couples and sharing the referrals, it all works out to be mutually beneficial. I also want to make a point to share it before we really dig into this, that picking vendor friends should feel like picking new real life best friends, you’re going to meet vendors on wedding days that you will naturally vibe with, and others that just aren’t your cup of tea.

And that’s totally normal babe, I don’t want you to run to your next wedding, trying to push friendships and connections with people that don’t share the same values as you that don’t make you laugh or feel a genuine friendship with. I’m more concerned with investing in people that are passionate about their jobs, our kind and love our couples, the wedding party, their families and guests and other wedding vendors just as much as I do. So let’s start this dance on a wedding day that blends taking photos showing up as a leader building genuine friendships with vendors and amplifying your weddings in person. Because like I mentioned earlier, we don’t got time to market our business. We don’t have time, we need to take action while this is unfolding naturally. I love a good checklist. So let’s break this down into three parts.

Things to do before the wedding, things to do during the wedding and things to do after the wedding. Alright, let’s start with before before the wedding even starts weeks before I send out a questionnaire to my couples and request their vendor list. I asked them to include their emails. This way prior to the wedding I can shoot an introduction email. This gives us a head start so have vendors do post behind the scenes online. They already have a done for you checklist for who to tag throughout the day, already implementing marketing strategy for each other before the wedding day. Now, I use honey book to send over the questionnaire if you’re interested in starting a free trial with 50% off. I have a link for you over in the show notes. They say honey book is the answer to all of my prayers as far as staying organized with my couples as well as vendors. Also before the wedding, I take some time to jump onto Instagram and start following the vendors for that wedding.

Now, please take note okay, this is so important. I’m not just jumping on Instagram and onto social media and following every local wedding plan or florist or cake lady. I’m strategically following them right before I get the chance to work with them. And I even signed into their DMS to let them know I’m looking forward to working with them for so and so’s wedding coming up that Saturday. This is way more natural and organic without feeling spammy or annoying. I encourage you not to slide into those DMS for just random vendors in your neighborhood or maybe at a local venue that you want to work with. Like it’s totally my comfort level but like that’s just kind of not my thing. However, if you know you’re going to be working with them in the near future, that is a great way to slide into those DMS, make an introduction and let them know that you’re excited to meet them.

Alright, let’s jump to some action items to capture during the wedding. Upon arrival, I’m super aware of my surroundings. If I see anyone that even sort of looks like a vendor, I always smile and make eye contact as I stolen. If I obviously see a florist unloading the van or the videography team starting to set up I always introduce myself first. When you take action and introduce yourself first with a smile. It sets the tone for the day by saying hi and letting each vendor know that I’m there to help support them capture their magic and offer a hand if needed. There’s an instant trust right away.

Making it clear from the get go that we’re all on the same team is like a breath of fresh air. During the wedding. I’m often caught bringing water or sneaking in appetizer for the deejay placing bridesmaids bouquets on the cake table, photographing the wedding coordinators in the reception space and even taking quick headshots of the officiant before the ceremony. Most vendors don’t have legit photos of themselves working and rely on the professional photos for their final work. So having behind the scenes professional photos for their website, social media and marketing is gold for them. They’re gonna love you making a point to love on vendors by photographing them and snapping behind the scenes videos of them. Even if they’re a bit reluctant, because don’t get me wrong, you’re going to get pushback, they’re gonna say no, no, no, I’m sweaty and gross and work in please take photos of the flowers. I don’t want to be in any pictures. I’m honestly kind of pushy about it. And I say I know I know. But let me just pose you real quick. I know you’re gonna love us like this is you working your magic and I want to capture that. And typically with a little bit of nudging, they’re usually on board as I just tell them what to do.

Pausing photographing them in flattery imposes also helps that’s really important too. I also want to share some ways that you can shine and make instant friendships with vendors that have nothing to do with pictures. If the hair and makeup team is running late with something out of their control, Don’t roll your eyes and complain that they’re late.

Try to be proactive by photographing as much as you can with the bridesmaids that are already ready to go. Before you guys sneak away for sunset portraits, make sure to grab their videography team so they don’t miss it. When you approach the day, as if the vendor team are already your friends, and have their back. I know they’ll be appreciative and sincerely want to work with you again. In an upcoming episode, I’ll be sharing a ton more about grabbing quick behind the scenes videos. But it’s important to include it in this conversation too. I challenge you to whip out your phone and record three to five second videos throughout the day. So you can share on social media later, vendors will be so grateful to see their work come to life, and will most likely share on their stories as well. This is huge for creating an impact from marketing to our local network with very little effort. Now remember, I mentioned before how I try to be like the team leader on wedding days, just like a leader you often do things that people may not give you credit for.

Okay, so by setting up your vendors for success to share on their own feeds by making their life so easy that all they have to share is add to story. Like they get tagged in a video or they get tagged in a photo and they can just share it. Yes, you’re being the answer to their prayers. But ultimately, you’re also doing it for yourself as well to gain and boost that brand awareness. Okay, so now let’s roll into how to showcase vendors after the wedding. within 24 hours, I love to share a wedding story on Instagram. That’s like a mini recap of the day, I noticed a huge impact once I started behind the scenes, and sharing those instead of just my pretty wedding photography. It’s like people would rather see the real instead of the really pretty.

Following the wedding. I love sharing the vendor galleries, they have access to their photos as well. You’ll be amazed by how many photographers don’t do this, your vendors will be so, so grateful. Another key tip after the wedding is to leave them reviews. Okay, I’m not even joking right now, I want you to think about this. When is the last time that you have left a review for a wedding venue? And I mean, like, think of your top two, top two to three favorite wedding venues. Have you even left a review for them? No, I don’t think so. So I challenge you to do that. Okay, when you leave reviews for these vendors, think about that you have tons of upcoming recently engaged couples that are also searching for the florist and makeup artists and DJs in your area. And if they are happen to be looking at those reviews and they see your name pop up, they may not think right away, oh, she must be or he must be a professional photographer. But you’re going to create that brand awareness and people are going to familiarize themselves with your name.

Okay, this is so huge. If I could sum up this entire episode, I would encourage you to do your job well. You got to be really good at what you do. Okay, your work really does have to speak for itself. Offer a hand to vendors. Be supportive. And remember that every vendor is uniting to help your couples wedding dreams come true. The sooner you can make friends with vendors connect with venues and continue to deliver solid work, the more dream wedding job block that’s just tried and true. This episode is sponsored by the greenhouse, the resource garden where photographers and creatives gather to plant dreams and grow money trees. Just like a garden your business will experience season’s growing pains and tons of opportunities of growth, even when it feels muddy. Head on over to Kiana marie.com/shop to grab bundles of affordable templates, guides, workshops, and education to help your business bloom. If you found this episode helpful, please please share with a friend. It’s truly a joy to share my experiences and help support your business. I can’t wait to see you shine online. Keep dancing baby. I’m always cheering for you.

That’s a wrap on another episode of Quianna Marie weekly. Thank you so much for your listenership and support. You can find the resources and show notes for this episode and more at quiannamarie.com/podcast. I’d be honored if you’d show your support by leaving a review and rating on your favorite podcast app. Until next time, keep on dancing.