How to Increase Productivity as a Wedding Photographer

As a wedding photographer, I know how important it is to remain productive. Especially with the busy wedding season coming up, managing your workflow can seem daunting. Are you wondering how you will stay on top of your social media presence, client communication, team management, editing, and wedding days? What if I told you that you could actually increase your productivity? I am going to show you how in this article. Let’s go over exactly how to increase productivity as a wedding photographer.

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Increase Productivity by Structure Your Time

Do you approach each day without a clear plan? As small business owners, we are all guilty of this! Structuring your time and establishing clear goals will help you accomplish more tasks. This ultimately keeps driving your business forward even when it gets busier. Here is a monthly, weekly, and daily guide to get started:

Monthly

Make sure all of your meetings and events for the month are added to your virtual calendar to begin. As wedding photographers, we book photo sessions and weddings well in advance so you can add these to your calendar as soon as dates are set. Then, establish 3-5 goals you want to achieve that month. For example, you might want to schedule out all of your social media posts, send a set number of finalized galleries to clients, and write a certain number of blog posts. Many of your goals will be reoccurring. Add at least one goal that focuses on active growth for your business. This could look like aiming to book a new client for the month!

Weekly

While you have broadly structured your month, it is helpful to go week by week as well. Sometimes meetings get rescheduled last minute or an important task comes up. Add in the smaller “to-dos” (such as cleaning out your inbox) to your weekly task assignments. ClickUp is a great tool to assign yourself and your team tasks! If you love a to-do list, think of this as an upgraded virtual version. 

Daily

Take a look at what is on your calendar and existing to-do list daily. This is where you really want to strive to make efforts to get the work done! Set specific times that you need to complete tasks, setting aside time for breaks and preparations for meetings. Make sure you are flexible. There is always the potential for a surprise, high-priority task. The structure is created to help you – not stress you out. 

Use Schedulers

We’ve talked about structuring your time, but how about saving your time? Say goodbye to the days of actively posting on social media daily and manually managing your client communication from start to finish. You need to invest in schedulers. I personally love Flodesk for easy email building and scheduling. For social media, you can use a scheduler like Tailwind or Planoly depending on your needs. Lastly, a client management software such as Honeybook can become a major time saver for your business. You can create automatic responders to client inquiries and set booked clients into communication workflows. This way, no important information or potential client is missed. 

Designate a couple of days to create then schedule all of your social media posts and email campaigns each month. After investing in your client management software, you will need to set aside some time to get to know the platform. Once you have everything set up, you will cut your communication time in half! The tools mentioned are just some of my favorite options. After reading this post, check out more of the business tools I use everyday to increase productivity. 

Work With a Team

As a wedding photographer, you already know how important a team is. Prioritize sourcing strong second shooters for your wedding days. You may also hire an editor to allow you to process more galleries and focus on the higher-level tasks as the CEO of your business. To keep the day-to-day tasks running smoothly, hiring “in-office” employees can be a game-changer. 

After an Editor, my next suggested hire would absolutely be a Virtual Assistant (or VA for short) to outsource day-to-day tasks that don’t need your expertise. You can outsource things like: email management, email list workflow creation, Dubsado workflow creation, social media creation and engagement, etc. Finding a VA that’s a good fit can be tough! I highly suggest interviewing a few people before deciding who your new team member will be. Maybe an agency is better for your needs? It depends! But taking some of those daily tasks off your plate will leave your brain power to do big work in your zone of genius.

What areas of your business do you need to outsource or hire an internal team? Since this is such an important topic, find out more information about hiring a team here.

Stay Organized

One simple way to boost your productivity is by staying organized. Since you are a wedding photographer, I know you might actually struggle with having too much content! It’s time to organize all of those galleries into your virtual office. Be sure to add all of the vendor information with each gallery to make things easy for you and your team. To help you remain efficient on wedding days, clean out your photography kit before the season begins. Additionally, going through your inbox, creating a clean office space, and reorganizing your workflows are great ways to organize your business.

Take Time Off

This might seem contradictory. In order to prevent burnout, you have to take time off. In the long run, a tired and overworked photographer isn’t the most productive. We talked about structuring your time earlier. Be sure to add at least one day off per week to your schedule. 

Find out more about setting boundaries in your business next!