It’s been a tough bullet to bite, but as a professional event photography specialist, I dab my hands in a lot of pots to see what new business may rise. In 2017, I gave wedding.com a chance for my wedding business side of things, and unfortunately, the casting line had no bites. Here’s a few reasons why you should invest your marketing money elsewhere.
First and foremost, you would think with a site named, wedding.com that they would be the best of the best. This assumption lacks precedence to the vendors and leaves customers in shining light. It all comes down to format. Wedding.com makes vendors bid on couples, so you manually must reach out to couples who might not like your style. This also means you must be the fastest vendor to drop a bid or else, you snooze you lose. While this is a popular format (think Thumbtack) it doesn’t work here.
I think I spent $600 for the year or something and had zero return. I was on top of it. Everyday I signed in, I followed up on emails when couples were looking for photographers, and I messaged all the couples in my area. I even went beyond, I messaged couples in multiple cities in multiple states. Still, nothing. The worse part of wedding.com, you must manually check your messages to see if anyone responded back to you. Their system doesn’t even send you a text or email notification if you get a bite. Hard to believe in this technology-based age. It’s perhaps the biggest flaw in their system.
I still don’t get who the real target market is on the site, or what couples are even on their. Sometimes I think it’s just bots to make us vendors believe were making some type of progress. With other choices such as The Knot and Wedding Wire. Wedding.com should sell their domain to either of those behemoths and hang up their hat for trying. Take the money and walk I say, because there is absolutely no value or gain from this (just my experience I suppose).
If you’re any vendor, especially a photographer, there are better options out there to find leads for your money. It stinks because I really wanted wedding.com to be amazing, but it was a letdown. Competing sites have the couples contact vendors instead, the way it should be. If this hits even one set of eyes to save them money, I know all of this message will be worth it.
-Tavit
