How To Find The Best Shopify Themes in 2020

Marketing a wedding business is one of our specialties here at Nordello. We have marketed many wedding businesses in the past, included wedding photography studios, planners & floral décor companies. We know this industry very well, and we thought we’d share some tips and tricks for all the future photographers who are just starting their business. Let’s get started. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SPECIALIZE IN? One of the most important things you need to figure out as a photographer is what do you want to specialize in. There are many different types of photography services you can offer such as wedding photography, corporate photography, fashion photography, baby photography, real estate, commercial and many more. Chances are, you already know what you want to specialize in by now. The first thing you should do is make your website specific to what you want to specialize in. For example, if you're going to do wedding photography. Make a site that is designed to focus more on this service. GET A GREAT LOOKING WEBSITE, DON’T CHEAP OUT! You need to have a great website in order to make a great first impression in the digital world. How you present yourself online will make a difference in how customers perceive you and the way they value your services. Make sure your website is beautiful and elegant so that customers treat you like a high-end brand. If you have a website design background, by all means, designed it yourself and make sure it looks top notch, if not, definitely contact us, and we can design a beautiful website for your brand. Put in a lot of time and effort working on your site. Make it beautiful because as you enter the market you will have established competitors and you want to put your best foot forward. When newly engaged couples start shopping around for wedding photographers, they are going to come across 3 studios and compare and contrast the differences between them. Having a gorgeous website will definitely help you stand out, because it lets them know that you care about your image and you have great taste in design and it makes you look like a professional. Think about it; if you are shopping for a wedding photographer, and you come across a website that looks like it was built when the internet first came out, chances are you’re going to click the back button and visit another website. Your website is going to be the most important investment you make in your business and its also the only asset that is going to bring you customers and keep your business going, make sure you don’t cheap out and get this right the first time. HAVE A GREAT LOOKING LOGO AND BRAND NAME This section is super important and make sure you get everything right or else it will hurt you in the long run. Make sure you come up with a name that isn't being used by someone else. Reason being, if customers go to Google and type in your website name, they may end up on the other website belonging to another person with the same domain name. Make sure your domain name is so unique that no one else is using it online. You can check this by going to Google and searching for the name, if no other website pops up you are good to go. For a more in-depth explanation on the business naming process, check out our other blog post titled “How to choose a domain name for your business” we go further in-depth on the process of coming up with a name along with tips to get yourself protected. HOW TO PRICE YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY SERVICES This is probably the top question most photographers ask themselves, what should I charge. You want to position yourself in a way that you're going to win a majority of the contracts. The first step, go on Google and type in “wedding photographers (your city name)” have a look at the first two pages of all the photographers that show up, go through every single website and make a note of what they are charging. The photographers on the first five position on Google, they are probably going to be the premium photography studios but make sure you go through each studio website to get an idea of what they are offering regarding packages and what they are charging. If you are just getting started, it may be wise to start off with entry-level pricing. But if you are highly skilled and you have a large portfolio of beautiful weddings to show off, go ahead and boost up those prices. The reason why the top 3 ranking photography websites in your city are charging a premium for their services is simply that they have a lot of demand and limited staff to accommodate them. What we mean is, they are already investing a lot of money into their Google advertising campaigns and their SEO campaigns. Which means they are getting over 100-500 inquiries per month. They charge a lot more, but this means they only book a small percentage of weddings, work less, but make more revenue. The downside is they are turning down a lot of business because of their higher prices. The best strategy for this scenario is to have tier-based pricing. Let’s say you work with our agency, and we do a lot of Google ads for you along with SEO, and you are now in a position where you are getting hundreds of leads per month. You need to organize your staff into tiers. Master level and professional level. Change up the names however you like. So at the master level package, you can charge as much as the top 3 competitors in your industry. Some of your clients will be able to afford this package. Make sure you assign them the most experienced photographers in your studio, this could include you and your founders. For the vast majority of your customers who want to go for something affordable in the mid-range, you can have another team in your “professional tier package” to accommodate this clientele. We see a lot of studios and businesses use this pricing model. Even salons use this pricing model as well. Even though your selling affordable packages in your “professional tier pricing” make sure that the photographers you have on staff are still excellent at what they do and can still deliver professional results to your clients. Reserve your high-end package for the lead photographers in your studio. You will reach to a point where you have multiple weddings per weekend and you cant be at multiple places at the same time. This package structure could be very useful to your studio. HOW TO GET PHOTOGRAPHY CLIENTS - GOOGLE ADVERTISING

When it comes to online marketing and just overall leadgeneration you will most likely hear people say do Google Ads first or do SEOfirst and as a new business owner your probably scared and not sure which routeyou should take. In this blog post, I’m going to talk about just that. I’ll coversome of the pros and cons of each so that you can make a better decision foryour business. In my own personal opinion based on my many years of doingonline marketing for small businesses, I personally believe that if given thetwo options, you should always start with Google Ads first, for at least 4-5months before considering investing in SEO. The reason being is that with Google Ads, you can pay perclick and show up for all the keywords that you want within a week and startgetting clients immediately. Over the next few months, you’ll get real data onwhich keywords are actually bringing you revenue for your business because youcan track all these things inside of your dashboard. You’ll see which of yourlanding pages or sales pages work well with each individual keyword that youare spending money on and you’ll see which keywords bring you the most revenuefor your business. With Google Ads you can target anywhere around the world andhave your ads show up in another continent, assuming you are able to servicesclients in that region. With SEO you have to wait several months and build tonsof content and backlinks in order to rank for that spot. Not to mention youhave other competitors in that region that you have to compete with for thatspot on Google. It's just better to spend the money and get traffic.

Naming your business is probably one of the most importantthings you can do for your business as this is something that you are going tostick with almost forever, so you want to make sure you name your companysomething that is going to last. One of the best strategies you can use is to take out anotepad and start writing down random words and name ideas that you alreadyhave floating around on your mind, just have them all on paper. Write down wordsthat relate to your business, products or services. Take a day off and referback to this list and go over each word, if you have more ideas add to it butchances are by looking at these words you’ll be able to come up with a newwords just by combining some of the keywords you already included in your listor by going over your existing list, you might get an idea for a new word. Othernaming strategies will involve taking 2 words and combining them together toform a new word, for example, Verizon is a combination of two words merged together.The famous YouTube channel ValueTainment is a combination of two words.

The strategy of how we approach advertising on Google & Facebook is totally different on each platform, and our recommendation can vary from industry to industry. The truth is, one will work better than the other. But if you have the opportunity and the resources, its great to do advertising on both simultaneously, so that you can give your customers the impression that you are literally everywhere, essentially we can manufacture fame in your local market using a combination of multilevel targeting. Coke and Pepsi do this as well, they have ads literally everywhere, but as a small business, you want to prioritize your ad placements and start from somewhere. First, let’s talk about how each of them are different. I’m going to use a wedding photography business as an example. Google Marketing Strategy Route On Google, the way we advertise businesses is fairly simple. We put ourselves in our customer's shoes and start thinking about what terms they would use to find our clients services. During our consultations with our new clients, we take a lot of notes and really dive deep, so that we can understand the various terminology used to describe our client's products and services. So if our client is a wedding photographer, we are going to ignore keywords like “real estate photographer” or “baby photographer” we may even avoid the term “photographer + client’s city name” because its not specific enough and can waste the clients marketing budget while giving them leads that they are not interested in servicing. So to be as accurate as possible, we are only going to target the terms that include the word “wedding” in the search phrase. For example, if anyone searches on Google for the terms “wedding photographers Toronto” we’ll create Google ad campaigns that help our client’s website show up at the top of the Google search results page. After we select relevant keywords, the next step, is, to create the most amazing page in existence so that when people click on our clients Google ad, they end up on a page that is specifically designed to convert them from a browser into a customer, via phone call or email. This is what we call a landing page. A landing page is a page specifically designed for a specific marketing campaign. The benefit of Google ads is that people are further down the buying cycle on their journey. If someone is Googling the term wedding photographers Toronto, we can assume that they are between the ages of 27-40, male & female, with a relationship status of “engaged.” What people Google and how they Google can tell us a lot about what stage they are at in their life. As marketers, we can use this info to connect the right customers with the right businesses, providing a win-win situation for all parties involved. The main focus of Google marketing is “keywords” and location. With Google ads, we can choose which cities we want to target and what specific keywords we want to show up for. We can even customize the ad copy in a way that filters out the people we want to avoid. For example, if you are a wedding photographer that is targeting couples who are more affluent, we could add prices in your ads so that the people that don’t want to pay that specific amount, don’t click on your ads. The downside of Google ads is that some niches are getting very competitive which in turn, drives up the average cost per click. However Its still one of the best advertising methods but you have to understand that it’s going to cost money to acquire clients, you better make sure your sales skills and presentation skills are at the highest level possible so that you are better positioned to close all these leads. Otherwise, you are going to burn through a lot of cash. Customers that find you on Google, they are almost ready to make a buying decision, after all, that’s what they searched for. All you have to do is be an intelligent salesperson and present your offerings in a way that makes them feel like you are the best choice out of everyone else in the marketplace. To go one step above, once people visit your website after finding you on Google, you could show them more ads from your brand once they leave your website and go back on Facebook. These days, people do like to shop around and do more in-depth research before they call or send that email to a business. As they are going about their day and shopping around, we could have ads on Facebook “follow them” with engaging content about the products or services they searched for, so that we can stay in their minds while they are making their final decision. You will see that travel agency companies do this best, you’ll visit their website, and after you leave, you will start seeing their ads follow you everywhere you go on the internet. You as a small business have the opportunity to do this same type of multi-channel marketing that synergistically works in your favour to deliver you results. Facebook Marketing Strategy Route Social media has a lot of ups and downs when it comes to advertising, one of the main benefits of social media advertising is the low cost per click, almost pennies per click. The bad news is that people are mainly on social media to hang out and be entertained. So the way we advertise on Social media is a lot more different. We want to come up with ways that creatively interrupt their day and turn their attention and focus to our ad, we only have a few precious seconds before they scroll past the ad, so every bit counts. One of the main differences with Facebook ads is that we can’t target keyword searches like on Google. Maybe in the future, they might add their own search engine, but for now, we can only target the ideal “audience” of people that are most likely to need your product or service. Let’s use the wedding photographer example. If we were to create Facebook ads to generate leads, these are the targeting methods we would use on Facebook. We would log in to our FB ad manager account and start choosing our perfect audience of who we want to show our ads to. Here is what some of those settings would look like. Target Audience Male & Female Ages: 28-40 Relationship status Engaged Location: 40km radius from clients store This is going to be as close as we get to our ideal audience for this specific example. As Facebook rolls out new targeting features, we may be able to provide richer targeting in the coming months, but this is pretty much as good as it gets for this specific niche. We’ve done campaigns for wedding businesses using both Facebook and Google ads; we find that Google has been great, Facebook has been great as well. If you are already dominating on Google, Facebook and Instagram is definitely the next best step. How We Can Use Google & Facebook Together Let’s say we advertise our wedding photographer client on Google and people visit the site, but they don’t necessarily convert on the first visit, what can we do about this? Well, we can actually create what I like to call “digital follow up” also known as remarketing campaigns. Basically, if you visit any website that does a lot of online advertising, you will start to notice that their ads follow you on Facebook or Instagram. This Is not an accident and is actually a legitimate advertising method used to re-capture peoples attention and bring them back to our client's website. Often customers will take a while to make an informed decision as to whom to buy from. They may check out lots of competitors, and when the finally decide, they might actually forget the company name they wanted to go with. This is why we have follow up campaigns so that if they do forget your business, we position you so that your brand is always just a click away, regardless of where they are on the internet. Both Google & Facebook marketing are very powerful tools that can help you reach an endless supply of new customers for your business; it’s important to know how to use them correctly to be profitable in your efforts. The benefit of working with an agency like ours is that we have spent tens of thousands on digital marketing across a wide range of industries and niches for our clients, we have greater insight as to what works for each type of industry. So if you are still on the fence as to which advertising strategy you should use for your specific business, fill out our contact form and let us know what industry you are in, we’ll be happy to give you our recommendation.

This is actually a verypowerful strategy in digital marketing, andits purpose is to replicate a basic salestechnique that has been used since thesales world even began, and that is the art of “following up.” Remarketing is essentially the digitalequivalent of modern day following up.Except instead of you having to call your new clients and ask them if they wantto buy, we instead create remarketing campaigns that do all the heavy lifting for you. We all know by now that selling takes time, and I mean a lot of time. Could be weeks, could be daysand it could even be months depending on your industry, but following up isjust one of those things that you are going to have to do in business.According to recent studies, the average sale/conversion occurs between the 5th& 6th follow up attempt. Sometimes it could take longer; every industry is different. To explain this better I’m going to use a car dealership asan example. Let’s pretend that you are shopping around for a new sportscar. Your friend happens to mention that the new Subaru BRZ is a great car tobuy, so you go on Google and type in “Subarudealerships near me.” You have three dealerships in your area on the firstpage of Google, and you visit all of thesites to compare and contrast. Someone calls you on the phone, or someoneinterrupts you at work, and you have toleave, so you close your browser and go on with your day. You were interrupted while browsing for your next car. Now out of those threecar dealership websites you visited, let'spretend only one of them is doing something called a remarketing campaign. A few hours later, you return home, afterdinner you decide to check Facebook, as you are scrolling, right there you seean ad on your Facebook news feed fromthat car dealership, showing you content about the exact car you were lookingat, you click on the post and end up back at the original car dealershipwebsite. This is the power ofre-marketing. You essentially have asystem in place that digitally follows up with your website visitors for youuntil they are ready to make contact with your staff. Let’s say they get tiredand decide to go to bed, just before sleeping they decide to go on YouTube, after they watch a few videos, they see a video commercial on YouTube from the same car dealership. Now the customer is starting to become more and moreengaged with this one specific car dealership, while the other three cardealerships are starting to fade in this customers mind this one specific cardealership has creatively and digitally followed up with. Now that it’sthe end of the month the customer is going to see one more ad on their Facebooknewsfeed that asks the customer to schedule a free test drive at thedealership. By now this specific customer has engaged with the car dealershipscontent, trusts the dealership and has a pretty positive impression that this companymust be famous in the local area. This isthe power of online marketing, by the time the customer arrives at your store,they already know everything there is to know about the car they want, knoweverything about your company, and nowthey are looking to transact with your business. Leveraging online marketingcan make your sales team’s job much more easier. Instead of them having to chase aftercustomers and trying to close them, you as a business owner can leverage onlinemarketing and creatively “follow up” with them until they are ready to make abuying decision. Once they arrive at your store, they are much more likely tobe in a buying state of mind. Pay close attention the next time you are shopping aroundand notice how certain websites will “creatively follow up” with you onmultiple platforms. In conclusion, remarketing campaigns can help you make abetter impression on your future customers, help you stand out from thecompetition and drown out your competitor'smessage and help you re-capture leads/sales that you would have missed as aresult of not “digitally following up” with clients. If you are looking to have this type of marketing done foryour business, get in touch with us, we are always on the lookout for amazing businesses to work with.