Wedding Photography Business Update | Key Lessons from 2020

Today in our wedding photography business update find out what the key lessons we learned in 2020 are and how we’re looking forward to 2021 and beyond. As part of our Tips for Wedding Photographers blog post series we thought that it’s only fair to let you know what we’ve been up to and how we’re surviving.

I’m able to write this post today because it’s a good day. A day when we’re feeling optimistic about our business in the days ahead. One of the hardest parts, for me, of being self-employed is the unknown.

You can never plan, prepare, or prevent a worldwide pandemic from taking out your business. But we can try to think about how to keep our business breathing during the feast and famine years. Keep reading or watch the YouTube video below, be sure to subscribe to our channel.

Wedding Photography Business Lesson 1: Niches and specialties versus diversification

In the wedding photography industry, you’ll hear a lot about the importance of specialization. You need to form a brand and find your niche. While this is generally true, 2020 favored the diversified wedding businesses.

If you specialized in elopement photography, chances are you had a better 2020 wedding season than if you specialize in big weddings. For us, and many like us, we lost a lot of work in 2020. We had to turn to other aspects of our business for income.

Yes, specializing in a certain type of photograph is a good overall marketing strategy. People want the best “wedding photographer” or “portrait photographer” or “commercial photographer.” Specializing helps brand you as the go to person in an industry.

However, never have I been more convinced that we do our businesses a disservice when we don’t think about diversifying our income. If you shoot weddings in the summer, what are you doing in the winter? The more income streams we have the more our business has a chance of surviving something like a pandemic.

income diversification

If you are familiar with our work, you know that while we have a brand and a specialty we do a variety of things to make money. We shoot weddings, portraits, commercial and editorial work. Additionally, we both write for a few blogs or publications.

We sell prints and other products, such as our new kids book ABCs of Adventure.

I think going forward you are likely to find us diversifying our business even more so that we aren’t reliant on one income stream. 2020 was scary and we don’t want another year like that.

Wedding Photography Business Lesson 2: Treating your clients well will treat you well

We’ve always prioritized making our couples happy and treating them well. It’s customer service 101 but somehow many business don’t really care about their clients. Never before has this paid off quite like 2020.

Depsite their own stress and frustration with the pandemic, our couples (for the most part) were kind and considerate about rescheduling with us and understanding the financial strain the year put on all of us. It was an affirming year for us that people, relationships, and communication matter and make a difference.

You better believe that we will continue to make this one of our top priorities in how we work. It makes our work more fun, it results in referrals and reviews, and our couples care about us in the midst of a challenging year.

Wedding Photography Business Lesson 3: Be flexible, be adaptable, and have you heard of the “pivot”

Lastly, as if we didn’t already know, being a business owner requires you to be flexible and adaptable. You have to be on your toes and ready to adjust to what’s going on in the world around you. In 2020 everyone was talking about pivoting, how are we going to pivot our business for a pandemic.

For some, that meant focusing on something else until weddings come back. For others, that meant shooting elopements and small COVID weddings. Regardless, it’s important to stay flexible and adaptable.

Photographers already have to constantly adapt to new camera technology, editing software, styles and trends in the marketplace, and more. Marketing is constantly changing, social media algorithms keep us on our toes, there’s nothing predictable about business and 2020 proved how little control we have.

Stay tuned for more wedding photography advice!

Next, we’re going to dive into some marketing tips taking into account some of the lessons learned from 2020.

More posts and videos dropping soon! Let us know if there’s anything specific you’re looking to learn like how to capture moments.

Next, make sure to get our free Build Your Life e-guide. And you might enjoy checking out our recommended reading list.

Recent Building a Life and Tips for Wedding Photographers you might enjoy are below.

stay in touch with more tips

We are Marc and Brenda Bergreen, a husband and wife photography team specializing in outdoor weddings and other adventures. Capturing people in nature and the mountain lifestyle is a passion that became a dream that became a life.

We don’t link to a lot of things but when there are books or gear we love we’ll share it and links to Amazon are affiliate links.

Based in Evergreen, CO we travel throughout the state as Colorado wedding photographers and videographers. Don’t hesitate to contact us and let us know how we can help! Be sure to follow us (weddings instagram & adventures instagram) and/or like us (facebook) to stay tuned.

In the meantime, remember to…