Recently I did a small survey and contacted many wedding photographers across different cities in India, asking two simple questions.
“If they ever bought wedding leads or wedding packages from wedding planning websites?”
and
“Did they search or asked fellow wedding photographers if these packages work or did they work for them?”
A surprising answer was a resounding “NO!”
Well astonishing! not one wedding photographer did some homework to find out if buying client leads and wedding packages work in reality.
Everyone agreed they had the perception that most of the established wedding photographers get a lot of leads from such wedding portals and apps. No one bothered to cross-check or just call a few photographers.
A few months back I did a video about the reality of wedding planning websites and how they work here in India. They work to an extent for certain kinds of wedding photographers.
Are you one of them?
Go check out this video and make sure you watch it till the end.
And earlier this month, I saw Navin’s Facebook post on his timeline where he shared his experience. He bought a package of Rs.50,000 from the WedMeGood portal and he had zero conversions.
He even got convinced to reduce his price by almost 40% and still, he was not able to convert a single lead.
According to his experience, most of the clients were willing to pay around Rs.20,000/day approx which was way less than what he was charging.
The sole reasons to buy wedding leads were to get access to more clients and increase the business and revenue. But working at such a low price meant compromising on quality and catering low to the budget segment.
He was not the only one with a similar experience with WedMeGood. Such incidents are common across the majority of wedding portals. Check these screenshots from the comments from the video and some wedding photographers sending DM to me.
Here is a video of the entire experience of Navin from buying to 6 months of dealing with the WedMeGood team.
If you want to skip or revisit particular questions I asked Navin, a Delhi-based wedding photographer. You can follow the below timeline and click the link in front of each segment.
- Navins’ Journey: 0:52
- Navin’s First Wedding & How he got Clients: 2:40
- First Experience with a Wedding Planning Website: 6:00
- Typical Sales Pitch by Wedding Website Sales Person: 9:00
- Buying Package from WedMeGood: 10:10
- First Month Experience with WedMeGood: 11:30
- The overall count of Leads: 16:00
- Navin reduces the price by ~40%: 19:00
- How LISTINGS work in reality: 21:50
- Signed any Formal Contract? : 28:30
- ROI ( Return of Investment )/Profit/Loss: 29:57
- Problem was not in Packages/ What Navin Learnt: 33:00
- Free Plan Advantage/ Test the Waters: 37:16
- What Wedding Apps can do? : 40:00
Confusion and Transparency by Wedding Planning Portals
So what exactly these portals are missing?
I think it is the transparency of educating the wedding photographers.
In any business or industry, the company caters to a certain segment of clients. Either they are not keen on working out things for their clients (in this case wedding photographers) or are mere directories of lists of wedding vendors in a city.
They charge a premium to push you up on the top and expect you to convert by convincing the client to raise their budget or by wedding photographers reducing their price.
Both scenarios are not feasible.
Wedding portals are hurting their own business and slowly increasing the number of disappointed wedding vendors. They are slowly marketing the lack of actual penetration into the segment of clients they want to work with as wedding photographers.
The mere listing of vendors and charging a premium on the listing is a decade-old business idea that is not working in any industry.
Wedding photographers like any other consumer needs to make an informed choice of what they are buying and need to do thorough research before investing in any product or service.
The research we do before buying any camera or gear.
Fear of getting Blacklisted by Wedding Portals – Is this real?
I was surprised to hear that many newbie photographers did not want to speak in the open about their bad experiences because they felt they will be blacked-listed by the wedding portal they bought leads.
Did these portals threaten directly them?
No, but they’re still there is a fear among photographers in some sort of indirect way.
The important question is how this fear cropped into their minds and what is the logic.
A portal that has not been a help even when you paid them a heft fee than how bad the things can go if you are removed or blacklisted from the portal.
Navdeep Soni
Think about it 🙂
WedMeGood Traffic Statistics and Data
Here is some interesting data to check what kind of data Wedmegood gets. It will help photographers and makeup artists understand if that traffic is useful for them. Most sales teams project the overall traffic numbers to convince vendors to buy packages. If the majority of traffic is from articles related to designs, dresses, or poses, then that audience is looking for inspiration and ideas.
We as wedding photographers have remote chances of attracting that audience to our websites or social media handles. That traffic won’t even remember who clicked those beautiful pictures.
The harsh truth is that wedding websites are generating millions of traffic from the pictures clicked by photographers. They collect leads from that traffic and sell them to vendors including photographers who clicked those pictures. Additionally, most of these wedding websites also run ads and earn additional revenue 🙂
I have also shared their top advertisements or paid data to understand what kind of vendors they target through ads.
Here is an overview of the monthly stats.
- Overall Monthly Traffic: 5.5M
- Monthly Traffic from India: 5.2M
- 94% of Traffic is from India.
- 47.29% of traffic from the top 10 pages is about designs, dresses, and poses.
- The top 10 paid keywords are about wedding photography.
- The majority of organic growth happened after Jan 2020.
Subscribe to my YouTube Channel for more such informative Videos.
I just bought a popular package from WMG, Hope I don’t get scammed.
Do you know if I can cancel the package and get a refund from Wedmegood?
Paid 85K.
As per my experience, not every lead is a unique and important lead, it is up to our understanding power and sales skill to find a potential person and dump all the less important leads away. Thanks Navdeep for all these important topic. Subscribed your blog.