The Pricing Series – Part Two

For Business Owners, For Photographers

August 19, 2015

So you’ve got your pricing all set up and ready to go. You’re pretty much done, right? HAHA. Yeah, right. In the world of wedding photography (and other wedding vendor-y type gigs) your pricing is never going to be 100 percent set. Successful businesses will always be evolving and pricing will have to evolve with it.

Notice how I didn’t use the word “growing” there? I chose “evolve” because I believe that all businesses change to some degree but that can mean different things to each business owner. You may continue to grow your business yearly by taking on more and more clients or you may decide you want to scale back based on your life situation at the time. Your pricing is going to need to adapt to the situation.

Today we’re going to chat a little bit about raising your prices!

Pricing for Wedding Photographers

Here are some reasons you might want to raise your prices:

1. You’re booking a ton of weddings
If this is you, yay! This is the dream right?? To have clients beating down your door? If you are getting tons of inquiries and having to turn people away, that’s a great indicator that you might want to raise your prices. Demand is one of the biggest factors in being able to raise your prices. My thought is that it doesn’t really matter what we THINK we are worth…it matters more what people are willing to pay for us. So if a lot of people are willing to pay your rates, then it stands to reason you’re doing pretty well for the quality of your portfolio, and the demand for your services.

2. You’re burnt out
This goes along with number 1. Let’s say you booked 40 weddings last year but you feel so overwhelmed and just can’t even anymore, you might want to consider raising your prices and taking on less for more money. I personally only take 20-25 weddings each year.

3. You are pretty comfortable with your bookings and you’ve still got a lot of time left to meet your goal for the year.
This is usually most people’s indicator of when it might be time to re-examine pricing. If you’re where you want to be with your bookings and you have some time to meet your goal you are in a prime spot to try raising your pricing a bit because you have time to wait out the booking “slump” that can sometimes happen right after you raise your prices.

4. You are hoping to break into a new market
This one is a little tricky because it’s not as cut and dry. There’s a lot of psychology that goes into choosing how to price yourself, but one thing I’ve noticed from clients is this: if you’re priced too low, higher budget brides may overlook you because they assume something must be wrong with you. You might also be priced a little too high for low budget brides and stuck in a weird twilight zone type spot. If this is where you think you are, I would highly suggest 1. Comparing your rates with those of comparable photographer friends who service the same area as you (this is where a referral group is invaluable! You can always go to that group to chat about things like this too!) 2. Test out a price increase BUT make sure that you are adding value and increasing the quality of your web presence, portfolio, etc. If you don’t have a high quality, professional website and you try to break out into a higher price range, you might struggle a bit.

Whew! That of course is not an exhaustive list of ALL of the reasons you might raise your pricing, but it’s a good idea to consider each of them when you’re making a jump in pricing. The next installment in the pricing series will be on deciding when you should or shouldn’t LOWER pricing!

For the first installment in the pricing series go here

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