CIA Framework for Wedding Photography Success

Wedding photographers collect advice the way they do fridge magnets, until there's no room left to breathe. It's a constant barrage of contradictions. Buy the lens, post at prime time, double your rates, slash your prices, shoot light and airy, edit dark and moody, then pivot back to the start because everything that was old is now new again.

Most of it is just noise. After 11 years or so and over 1,000 weddings and events that I've shot and edited and delivered, I've boiled what actually moves the needle down to three pillars, three things you can hold in your head and focus on daily. Whenever you sit down at your desk and think, "What am I gonna do next?"

Think of the CIA framework. The first pillar of the CIA framework is curate. Now, nothing books more weddings than improving your public wedding portfolio. So if you only fix one thing, fix the end product. Couples do not book you because of your Instagram grid strategy, your email funnel, all the sentimental stuff on your website, which I call fluff.

They book you because they looked at your photos and thought, "Yeah, that's how I want to be remembered on my wedding day. That's how we want to remember the day." Everything else is just plumbing that carries people to the work and if the work isn't there, if the quality of the portfolio isn't there, then better plumbing, it just delivers more people to a no.

So be ruthless with it That set you love because the day was fun and you enjoyed yourself, but the light was flat, it's costing you bookings. Just cut it out of your portfolio. The rule I use is basically every image in your public portfolio should be able to book a wedding on its own. It should stand on its own.

If it can't, it's simply bringing the other ones down. It's diluting the ones that can. So 20 photos, let's say, that all make someone catch their breath, that beats 60 photos that are flat any day of the week. And improving the portfolio doesn't only mean shooting better. It does mean that, but it means curating harder, showing the kind of weddings you want more of, and quietly getting rid of the ones you don't.

So if you want more beachside or coastal weddings, then lead with them. If you want more weddings at Roma Street Parklands, which is what I want because that's one of my favorite spots here in Brisbane, that's what I lead with, and I get more inquiries, a lot of inquiries for Roma Street Parklands weddings for that reason.

You'll find that it will attract the sort of client that you want to attract, because a portfolio is a magnet, and of course, it attracts whatever you show in it.

You're probably the worst person in the world to curate it do involve other people, your nearest and dearest, someone else who's got some experience in photography comes from a design background

get them to look at it and get them to be brutal about it. Curation is about what's in and what's out, and be brutal about it. Delete the filler images. Go through your website and remove any photo that isn't amazing. Prioritize that tight gallery of 20 amazing images.

So if the aesthetic doesn't match your goals, just remove it from your portfolio.

It's diluting your work. Update it constantly. After every wedding, sit down. Don't treat it as an annual spring cleaning task. Sit down after every wedding and go, " Is there one photo from the wedding I just shot, that I've just delivered, that I can now insert into my portfolio? And is there a photo I can take out of my portfolio which is inferior to this photo?"

So what I do, I maintain my portfolio in, in Dropbox, so it's always there, because you'll always need it when you're updating your online presence. Maintain it in one centralized place in the cloud

Keep it consistent. Don't change your editing presets every season, or ever. Decide what your presets are gonna be for your wedding photos from day one, and keep every portfolio photo looking the same. Now, if you've broken this rule already, if you're guilty of this, and a lot of wedding photographers are, do you have your raw photos somewhere on an external drive that you can pull out and re-edit them?

If so, it's worth the edit effort. Go back, re-edit those photos using the raw photos to your current presets. And that's why, if you're just starting out, it's just so important to put a lot of time into deciding what your presets are gonna be. Make sure you're happy with them.

You can't drastically change the colors between your portfolio. It's going to confuse someone looking at your portfolio, because they're gonna see photos which look different in terms of the colors. And then they'll be asking themselves, " if I hire this - photographer, what are my photos gonna look like? Are they gonna look like photo A or photo B?

I'm confused." It's so important to curate and keep your portfolio consistent

Number two of the CIA framework is iterate. Business growth comes from incremental improvements, and these are compounded over time. That sounds like boring corporate talk, but it's true. And nobody wants to hear this because it isn't a hack.

There's no single decision that doubles your bookings overnight. There's not one thing you can do today that's gonna double your bookings overnight. What actually happens is quieter. You get one percent better at 50 small things, or you improve 50 things, and one year later you suddenly find you're getting more inquiries.

You're running a different business. So think about what one percent looks like in practice. You might tighten your inquiry reply, so it goes out in five minutes instead of two days. You can do that using systems like 1pm.app or Dubsado, HoneyBook, et cetera. Those type of CRM products, can help you reply with templates.

You can use Google Templates in Gmail, but you've got to actually activate it. However, it doesn't allow you to send attachments, and it will take longer to do it that way, but at least you're not typing out the emails each time. Because if you imagine someone is browsing through a website and they're choosing photographers, you want to be the first photographer, first wedding photographer to reply to that inquiry.

So yes, seconds count when it comes to replying to inquiries. It's important. Now, that's one thing that you can iterate on. Now, it might take you half a day just to build that system to be able to reply quickly to inquiries, but once you've built that, then that's gonna deliver for you and, return value for you over time in a compounding way.

But try not to chase the big move. What I mean by that is don't chase the new website, the new brand, please don't chase the new camera system all at once, all this month . At least pick the most valuable thing. Websites are important Branding is important, camera's not so much. It may feel like progress because you're spending money on new equipment, but a photographer who improves one thing every week will quietly overtake the one who reinvents everything twice a year and then burns out.

So compounding is boring, but it's the only thing that reliably works. So concentrate on optimizing over time your entire overall online presence, branding, and messaging. It even has a name. It's called conversion rate optimization in the digital marketing world, it ties in with SEO, search engine optimization, but they are two different animals.

And sure, you need to work on both, but there are so many little facets to both those things that you can work on and make incremental improvements to, you can iterate. So your SEO, your CRO, which is your conversion rate optimization, and just increasing your organic traffic, those are the three things which are the holy trinity of digital marketing for wedding photographers.

But there's a problem most wedding photographers aren't prepared to face. All this takes time. A lot of it's technical, a lot of it requires perseverance and patience and trial and error. And it's also the reason that it really doesn't matter what gear you have, providing you know how to use it and providing it covers all the contingencies for failure, and things will fail, trust me.

So here are just a few other iterations you might consider implementing today. Post to social feeds every few weeks. Every prospective client is probably going to check you out on social before they inquire.

What they don't want to see is your personal Facebook profile linked from your business website. They want to see a business profile which shows you're busy, and if you are busy And you have to reminisce about past weddings or events just to fill your feed. That's better than a feed not updated for six months.

It shows you're keen and engaged and available and current. So yeah, make sure at least your Facebook and Instagram feeds have recent posts all the time. It doesn't have to be daily, once every few weeks is enough. It just sends a signal to clients that you're active and you're here and you're available.

Grab your phone and test your website. This is another way you can iterate. Lie down on the bed, lie down on a couch, , go to a cafe, go somewhere a little bit different that puts you in a different headspace, grab your phone and test every page of your website for mobile responsiveness and clarity and messaging.

Do elements appear where they should be? Can you easily complete the forms? And when you send those forms, do you actually receive the inquiry? Because that's something you should test every few weeks as well. The problem with platforms like Squarespace, for example, is that a small kind of innocent edit to a webpage, a small edit can immediately render your mobile view out of whack.

It only takes one small edit of your desktop version on a lot of these platforms to screw things up from a mobile perspective. So you can switch between the desktop and mobile views on Squarespace, for example. When was the last time you actually went through your entire marketing website on your phone to test it?

Do it whenever you get a spare minute. Stuck in line at Starbucks? Test your website out for usability and make notes to make changes later when you get back to your desktop computer. And that's what iteration is all about, constant improvement of the small things. So step three or pillar three of the CIA framework is what I call anticipate.

So we started with curate, curate your portfolio incessantly, obsessively, and we had iterate, iterate on all the small things over time, and the third pillar is anticipate. And this comes down to one of my favorite sayings, which is, "Wedding photography is not an art form. It's an exercise in disaster mitigation."

And anticipate is about avoiding disaster. In short, wedding photography is a craft, and at best, on a really good day, you do make art, but it's not really self-expression. It's more about walking into a chaotic one-take, no reshoot event and coming out the other side with the photos no matter what happens.

And you thrive by surviving, and surviving means mitigating disasters. And the wedding photographers who thrive and survive and don't burn out aren't the most artistic ones or the most talented ones.

They're the ones who saw the problems coming and had plans and were able to deal with all these problems layered upon each other. So mitigating disasters is about better preparation, better planning, and anticipating what gear is gonna be needed throughout the day. How do you anticipate that? You ensure that your pre-wedding consultation is exhaustive, and you make plenty of notes, and you know exactly what you're gonna be shooting.

You know that the couple has a sentimental pendant with their grandmother on it that they want a close-up shot of, and you'll need your macro lens you've looked at the weather forecast, and you note that there is a 70% chance of rain during portraits, so you make sure you have your light stand to backlight the rain, and you make sure you have your rain cover in your back pocket from when you get ready in the morning.

It's all boring stuff, but it really matters, a lot of which the client never sees, I might add, And a lot of which you will never get credit for.

Make sure you've got two bodies, so a failed camera is not a catastrophe. Have more spare batteries than you could possibly need.

I take roughly three days worth of batteries to a one-day event. I used to take twice as many batteries as I needed. Now I take three times as many, and I've got a great strategy for that actually, which I'll talk about on another podcast. If you get the anticipation right, if you can anticipate disaster, if you can anticipate all these things that are gonna go wrong, if you can anticipate exactly what gear you're gonna require and bring that gear and only that gear, so you're not burdened with too much gear, the art shows up anyway, 'cause you're not panicking about things.

You're ready for anything. You're calm. You can see the moment, and it's survival first. And beauty is what's left over basically when nothing else has gone wrong and there's no disasters. You will create artwork, you will create beauty if you take care of the detail and you anticipate things. So what is the whole thing in one breath?

Essentially, curate your portfolio constantly and obsessively, not just once a year. Iterate everything all the time, every day, rather than focusing on one thing alone. And anticipate challenges and disasters ahead of time, so you can deal with them.

I'll be doing other podcasts on all the preparations that I take for weddings and all the things that I try to anticipate. We could easily just do a podcast on anticipate, because I see it as a huge thing. It makes my job so much easier.

Thanks very much for listening. You've been listening to the Wiser Wedding Photography Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Jack. I'm also the founder of 1PM.app, which is event management software for event professionals like wedding photographers, caterers, celebrants, and also venues. So check out 1PM at 1PM.app.

Get your 30-day free trial, and we'll see you on the next one.