If you’re not receiving emails that say “We love your work”, your ideal customers have a problem. They either can’t find you, don’t know how to search for you or haven’t yet realised what they want. And there’s a simple explanation for that.
About 12,000 wedding vendors operate in Australia today. All provide their own unique service, adding value to customers in different ways. But for customers, investing time & effort to become informed about all 12,000 services is an impractical proposition. And thats why many resort to price as a means of filtering their range of enquiries.
Price though, is rarely a determining factor in booking decisions. When we polled couples and asked what they were looking for in a wedding photographer, they indicated a style or quality of photography and a manner in which they hoped the service would be delivered. The further into the search process they were, the more specific they were able to be about the qualities they valued.
The Problem - Unregulated & fragmented market
The Solution - Increase transparency across the industry
Almost every couple we spoke to had emailed photographers requesting package information. They then used that info to estimate the average price of packages across the industry and created a budget based on that estimate. But when we asked the couples who they’d booked, all had chosen photographers that were either over or under that budget.
Customers use price as a starting point, to learn about the services available across the wedding industry. But price is proven to be an inefficient tool for finding the vendors that customers are most likely to book. Copious price-based enquiries put a heavy cost on lost productivity across the industry and affects both small business & customers alike. And that's why as an industry, we need to provide customers with aggregators other than price.
To empower customers to find goods & services they truly value, better search aggregators are required across the industry. Searching by skills & expertise, experience and personality traits for example, will make it quick & easy to find ideal vendors. If we can achieve this, vendors will find more emails in their inbox that start with "we love your work!"
Join the industry in discussion on our Facebook page or email us at info@wedlockers.com.au.