Your Own Wedding Video Business

This page includes some tips on how to start your own wedding video business.

Reality Check

First of all you need to understand one thing: Weddings are not easy money! They can be good money, just not easy. Here are some things to be aware of:

• Wedding video is a unique genre and there are many things which can catch you out, even if you are an experienced video maker.
• The wedding production environment can be very difficult. You will be shooting on a tight schedule in places which are not camera-friendly.
• Many clients have difficult or unrealistic expectations.
• You can charge a lot of money but you will work hard for it. Wedding days are grueling and the editing is time-consuming.

Even if you have lots of skills and experience in video production, it is very important to start slowly and carefully when venturing into weddings. At the very least, do your first wedding for cheap or free to get a feel for it. It will probably take a number of weddings before you encounter all of the most common issues for wedding videographers.

Competition

Evaluate your competition. Find out how busy they are, how much they charge and what standard of work they produce.

Production Plan

Like all video production, good wedding videos rely on having a good plan. See our separate wedding video tutorial for information about how to plan and produce videos.

Pricing

You need to have a price structure which provides maximum benefit. Our advice is to ignore the lower end of the market and only work for high-paying clients. Why do three $600 jobs when you could do one $1800 job? In fact you will probably find that doing budget jobs is uneconomical anyway.

Obviously you need to be good if you want to charge top dollar.

• Be very strict on yourself—compare your work to the best examples you can find and make sure you measure up. If you don't, learn how to improve.
• Spend enough money to get high-quality equipment. It will pay for itself by allowing you to charge more.
• Solicit feedback from your clients. Take suggestions and complaints seriously.

Promotion

There are many ways to promote your business. You will probably need to spend money initially, but there is a good chance that word-of-mouth referrals will increase over time and allow you to reduce your advertising budget.

• Get a website for the business. Do it properly—an amateur-looking website will do you more harm than good.
• Make professional-looking brochures which include useful information, not just pretty images. Prospective clients want an easy way to compare prices and features with other videographers.
• Get a stand at wedding expos and trade shows.
• Develop good relationships with other wedding professionals, e.g. photographers, celebrants, wedding planners, etc. They can refer a lot of work.

The best promotional tool you have is the standard of your work. If you make good wedding videos, you will find that people seek you out. Make sure you include your contact details on the end credits and DVD cover!

Summary

Quality = money. Produce the best possible weddings videos and charge whatever it takes to make a good profit (don't be greedy though—it will backfire). Wedding videography is a very quality-sensitive market and those who make the best videos make the most money.