Do you want to make more money filming weddings? Over the years, as I’ve talked to and coached a lot of wedding filmmakers, one theme comes up constantly, and it’s the desire to make more money. So here are three things you can do in your wedding filmmaking business to start doing exactly that.
Money Making Technique 1: Raise Your Prices
We’ll begin with what may be the most obvious one, but I have to say it. If you want to make more money filming weddings, one way to do that is to raise your prices.
And you’re probably thinking, duh Matt, of course if I charge more money I will make more money. But the number of wedding filmmakers I’ve talked to who have not touched their prices in many months, or even years, tells me there are a lot of people out there who have not raised them. Maybe that’s you. Maybe you feel stuck at your current price point. Maybe you feel like you’ve hit a ceiling for what you can charge, or too many couples are telling you your prices are too high, so you feel like you can’t increase them.
Let me take a second and encourage you, because I think the work you’re making is most likely worth significantly more than what you’re charging for it. Whenever I was starting out I felt like I’d hit a point where I couldn’t charge more, that I had peaked, and that I would never charge more than a couple thousand dollars for a wedding. I was wrong. And if you have that voice in your head telling you you’ve peaked, ignore it, because that voice is wrong too. I promise you there are couples out there willing to pay you more for a wedding film, if you just raise your prices.
How To Raise Your Prices
I’m not going to just tell you to raise your prices and then not tell you how.
To start, take some time and look at what your competition is charging for a wedding film, then look at what you charged on average over the past year. Pay attention to which of your packages couples were booking most often. And then ask yourself, honestly, do you think those couples would have been willing to pay a bit more?
Here’s where a lot of videographers get in their own heads. You may think you have to raise your prices by some big amount, something like “next year I’ll be charging $1,000 more than I am right now.” I want you to stop thinking about it in chunks that big, and I also want you to stop thinking about it as a yearly thing.
Instead, reframe it. Raise your pricing a smaller amount, more often. The thought of charging $1,000 more next year sounds really intimidating. But what if instead you raised your prices by $250 every few months?
I have never once had a couple tell me they didn’t want to book me because I charged $250 more for something. In the grand scale of what a wedding film costs, and the much bigger scale of what a wedding costs, $250 isn’t much at all. If you’re charging $2,000 for a wedding film, try charging $2,250 for the next couple that asks you about their date. That’s not some massive increase. But it is an increase.
And what’s great is that if you try it once and it works, you can do it again a few months later, and again after that. Do that a few times in a year and you’ll find yourself charging about $1,000 more twelve months from now. The only difference is that instead of announcing “alright couples, pay me $1,000 more,” you built up to it gradually. Psychologically you are far less likely to freak out doing it this way.
Here’s more good news. If you do start to freak out and get nervous that you’re charging too much, there’s nothing stopping you from dropping your prices back down $250 to a level you know couples will book you at.
Money Making Technique 2: Sell More Add Ons
Add ons are anything you add on to your wedding film packages that a couple can purchase from you. Popular ones that a lot of wedding filmmakers offer include a full ceremony edit or a full toasts edit from the wedding day.
If you don’t commonly sell the full ceremony to a couple, offering it as an add on is a fantastic way to make an extra 300 to 500 bucks or more from a single couple.
Now you may be thinking, I already give my couples a full ceremony edit with their wedding film, so I can’t sell it as an add on. And that’s okay. If you want to give that to your couples, you can. But I want you to ask yourself why you do it. Is it because you want to? Or is it because you saw other videographers doing it and figured you needed to as well?
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with giving a couple a full ceremony along with their film. But in my experience, having filmed a lot of weddings over the years, there’s a significant number of couples out there who do not want and have no interest in watching their full wedding ceremony again. All they really want is the creatively edited wedding film you’re going to give them.
So give your couples a choice and let them tell you what they want. If they want a full ceremony edit, they can purchase the add on. If they don’t, you don’t have to make it. That way you get compensated for your editing time and the couple gets exactly what they actually wanted. Do this with ceremony edits, toast edits and anything else, and you have the potential to dramatically increase what you make from a couple, and both of you end up happier.
Money Making Technique 3: Offer Raw Footage
This last one is a bit controversial, but it’s also by far one of the easiest and lowest effort ways to do it. You can make more money by offering your couples the raw footage from their wedding day.
The reason I say it’s controversial is that there are videographers out there who think you’re compromising your creative integrity by handing couples raw footage, or that you’re exposing your flaws and shortcomings as a filmmaker. I don’t really agree with that, and I don’t think those reasons are good enough not to offer it.
If you want to go deeper, I’ve also got The Tamron 28-75 Is All That You Need For Filming Weddings!.
Because just like there are couples who want the full ceremony edit and the full toasts, a portion of those same couples also want the option to relive every single moment of their wedding day. Some of them are going to sit down and watch every single clip you filmed, and even if you think it’s incredibly boring, they’re going to love it. Others just want an archive, so they know they’ll always have everything from that day. They still want the film you edited, by all means, but they want everything else too.
Whatever their reasoning, the fact remains that if a couple wants to pay you for it, this is an incredibly easy way to make some extra money.
So how do you offer it? Here’s where you need to be careful.
First, depending on what kind of wedding videographer you are and how talkative you are on a wedding day, which could be a lot if you’re like me, you need to make sure there isn’t any colorful language or anything offensive in the audio. If you curse occasionally, go through your footage and check. And even if you never curse, film weddings long enough and you are going to have a day where someone or something gets on your nerves. The photographer steps into your shot and you aren’t getting along. The schedule is falling apart and it’s stressing you out. Anything negative you might have said out loud, make sure that audio doesn’t end up in the couple’s hands, because they will hear it, and they will not be happy to hear you trashing their wedding or one of their vendors.
The second thing to be careful about is not charging too little. You do not want to end up in a situation where a couple books your cheapest package, looks over and says oh wow, they’re offering raw footage for $300 extra, so instead of upgrading to a bigger package to get more of the wedding day, I’ll just pay 300 bucks for the raw footage. That’s a bummer.
To avoid getting played that way, make sure you charge more for your raw footage than it costs to upgrade to one of your larger packages. That way a couple is more likely to spend the money on the upgrade instead. So if your next package up is $500 more, charge $600 or $700 more for the raw footage.
Regardless of how you price it, the reason raw footage is such a great way to make more money is how little effort it takes on your part. Whenever you’re editing you’re already going through all of the footage, so you already know if there’s anything in there you don’t want to include. And delivering it is as simple as copying the clips to a hard drive and handing it over with their wedding film, or heck, just sending them a Dropbox or Google Drive link to download it straight to their computer. However you do it, you’re making a lot more money without having to do much at all.
Level Up Your Wedding Films!
So those are three ways you can make more money as a wedding filmmaker. Raise your prices. Offer and charge for add ons like a full ceremony edit. And offer your couples raw footage. All three give your couples exactly what they want while also making you more money in the process. It’s all win.
I want to leave you with one more thing, and that’s a guide I put together to help you level up your wedding films. If you want to improve the quality of your work and potentially get more bookings out of it, I’d love it if you’d grab it for free right here.
I’d also love to know what you think of these. Have you tried any of them? Do you need to raise your prices? Leave me a comment and let me know, and tell me if you want more videos like this in the future.
The footage here is graded with my own color presets, which live at whoismatt.com/luts. My full gear list is on kit.co, and I have filmmaking courses if you want to go deeper on any of this.
Thanks so much for reading, and have a great day!