As wedding photographers, we have to depend on constantly generating new leads. It’s a lot harder than focusing our efforts only on other portrait sessions… Of course we want new leads there too, but we’re also more likely to have families who return again and again! And while many of our wedding couples may return to us later for family portraits, they aren’t going to return to us for more weddings.

So how do we go about generating new leads year after year? And how do we consistently book more weddings from them? Is there a way we can do this that is highly successful while requiring less effort and less stress?

One of our favorite traditions and one of our best marketing strategies is our annual Lovebirds Contest. We hold this contest every New Year (or Valentine’s Day), and it has given us countless new leads, while also reaffirming our relationship with past couples!

So how does the Lovebirds Contest work?

The Announcement

• We first email couples from the past year and remind them of the excitement of their wedding. Doing this gives them a reason to re-share that excitement with others, especially if they got married near the beginning of the past year and everything has since died down.
• We then provide the couples with a way to share their excitement… we thank them for allowing us to play a role in capturing their history together, and we share that we’re hosting a contest that will will their home with beautiful and lasting artwork.
• We also email any guest emails that we’ve gathered from their weddings to tell them how exciting the contest is and how they can vote for their friends/family!
• Of course, we also send reminder emails before the contest deadline.

The Contest

• The contest itself is held on our blog. We list our couples from the past year, providing a beautiful image of them and a link to their wedding’s blog post. You can check out an example from a past year here.
• Friends and family vote for their favorite couple by leaving an encouraging note in the comments. We’ve listed the prizes we give below…

The Prizes

• The couple with the greatest number of comments receives a beautiful 16×20 gallery wrapped canvas, from our home to yours!
• Every couple who receives at least 25 votes will win a retouched print image,
• Every couple who receives at least 50 votes will win a mounted enlargement,
• Every voter is also entered to win a $25 Amazon Gift Certificate. 

The Sharing

• The blog post is shared first to our social media accounts, and then…
• We encourage our couples (through email) to share the social media post (which links to the blog) with their friends so that they can a) celebrate with their loved ones and b) get more votes!
• This exponentially increases our reach with us doing almost nothing at all! Now, any friends or family of the couples who may be getting married soon are seeing our work and the experience we provide!

The Winner

• Once the contest has ended and the votes have been tallied, we announce the winners! We email everyone who receives artwork with a link to their re-released gallery so they can pick their image. We also email the voter who won with an Amazon gift card.
• Following that, we post a blog announcement.

Bonus

• We make sure we get all of our voters’ emails so that we can notify who won the Amazon gift card. The added benefit of this though is that we now have an entire new email list who we can reach out to for future mini sessions! We know these people already value celebrating life with beautiful artwork, so it’s our chance to create an experience for them as well.

Ultimately, what we love so much about this contest is that it gets everyone involved…our couples, their families, and their friends! It’s a reaffirmation of the value of beautiful artwork, and it’s a chance for us to celebrate again the love and joy of our couples.

It’s amazing how many inquiries we get directly from this contest… and they’re exactly the sort of leads we want!

If you’re looking for more details on how our Lovebirds Contest works, be sure to check out our Up and At’Em episode from this morning. You can watch the video by clicking on the image below!