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Contacting Planners/Coordinators for new business
Hello to all,
I just finished my website (just plan Jane) and I am wanting to contact the wedding planners/coordinators in my area. I am curious of how to best word the email.
The obvious thing that I would want to get out of this email campaign is of course to spread my name out there, generate some leads, and yes, get more business to lead to more money. Now, I read a post a couple weeks ago on the Business/Marketing forum, and I company wrote about how if you are going to do this, you need to concentrate on:
Not what the Planner/Coordinators (ie production company, ad agency, etc) can do for you (wedding videographer, or freelance editor, etc)
But focus more on how I can help the improve how the Planners do their business. And this is how I want this email to be about. How I can help Planners solve some problems that they are running into.
My company has just finished its first year and we have done about 5 weddings. I got a long term freelance editing gig that helped me pay bills for a year, but took away my time from my wedding videography. But I feel like I have some good demos that show my experience and style.
Since my company is newer, my target market focus is on brides on a budget. Basically the brides that are on the fence on rather or not they can afford a videographer. I am wanting to feel my books and work a bunch of weddings. I offer fully customizable packages, but my main three are from $499 to $1899. These being ceremony only to 10hours, HD, Photomontage, Love Story, everything there is except a Same Day Edit. Also, all of my packages offer Super8mm film coverage.
So, the only thing I can really thing of how I can help the Coordinators is that I can offer them a high quality wedding video for an extremely low price. This will help them out pay being able to fit more vendors into the brides budget than they thought possible. I have also thought that I can put their contact info and link to their website from my site. Although, at this point, that isn’t a big selling point since I’m not well known yet.
So the reason for this post is to ask everyone out there on the COW is, what else can we as videographers do to help Coordinators. Besides our price, what can we do for them that will help them either make more money, or save more money?
Thanks for your help in advance,
Beau Brotherton
Macbook Pro 2.4GHz, Intel Core 2Duo, 4GB
FCP6
HVX200 -
2 Replies
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I think you are under pricing yourself, and arent going to help your business. Stop aiming for a low budget type of wedding. Remember that you are providing a service (assuming you can deliver) that records a special event. Make it important to the couple and people will pay. Make yourself look cheap, and not only are you not going to attract customers who really value the service and memories that you are providing, but you are going to earn little money for alot of work. Even in the most streamlined wedding videography business, you are looking at anywhere from 6-10hrs of shooting, followed by another 3-5 hrs of editing and fine tuning, followed by another 2-6hrs of compressing, and making the dvds. Approx. 22hrs of work, not to mention the sales part, and if you charge $1500 average, so between $40-70 per hr. Ok, but add in the cost of your cameras, lights, mikes, tripods, computer system, software and you have anywhere from $15-20,000 investment, which usually needs to be maintained and upgraded. Most people who are doing this seriously invest much more, because they have multiple systems, several cameras, wireless mikes, mixing boards, monitoring equipment etc… So the average investment is actually around $40-50,000.00 if not more.
Can you do it with less, of course, but you may run into problems. Cameras do fail, so you need a spare, so does mikes. Actually the computer you are using, especially macs are the most reliable of the bunch. Add in storage etc.. so you might want to rethink, thinking cheap, and concentrate on building a quality product, delivering quality service, at a reasonable price. People will pay for quality, dependability, and excellent service.
Also be careful of how you network, and who you recommend, and recommends you…many businesses in the Wedding and Event business fail, and sometimes they can you with them. Especially if you give them any controlling interest. If not, when they fail, people will turn to you when they cant turn to them. so build your business on your own.You are better off..Just a thought, from someone who has been in the business for almost 22yrs now.
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One mistake I made when I started doing weddings was thinking that I could start off by offering elaberate wedding packages for a little money to build up a big client base, and then charge more when I start getting all the referals. The only problem was, the referals still want the cheap prices I originally offered and I wouldn’t get the jobs. Get used to hearing, “Well you did it for my friend for only this much”.
Plus, most people using a wedding planner aren’t on a tight budget so marketing yourself as the cheap guy to the wedding planner my not get you too much business.
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