If you film weddings, should you show your prices on your website?
Hey, my name is Matt Johnson, and over my years of filming weddings,
I've seen a lot of wedding filmmakers ask this question
and I've seen even more hot takes.
Some people saying you should absolutely put your prices on your website.
You have nothing to hide.
While other people say you should never put your prices on your website,
because then your couples will reach out and you have a chance to pitch your prices
to them and potentially make more money, in my experience.
The answer to this question is somewhere in the middle.
And so if you've been trying to figure out for your own business
whether you should put your pricing on your website or not.
I'm going to tell you when you should list your prices on your website,
when you should not list your prices on your website.
And I'm also going to give you an alternative hybrid
option that I personally think is the best of both worlds.
Let me start by telling you
when I think it's a good idea for you to put your pricing on your website.
If you were in your first few years of filming weddings,
I think they're putting your pricing on your website is a great way
for you to potentially get more business and beat your competition.
See, when you're starting to film weddings in your charging anywhere
from zero to 3000 dollars or so.
There are most likely going to be a lot of other wedding videographers
in your area that are competing at that price range, too,
as you raise your prices higher and higher.
There are less and less videographers charging those higher amounts.
So competition gets less intense.
But when you're in that zero to three thousand dollar range, dang,
it can be rough.
I remember when I was charging 1995,
that's $19.95, not nineteen dollars and 95 cents.
And I remember the competition being really fierce.
Other videographers slashing their prices so couples would book them over me
offering bonuses and extras, anything to make the sale.
And couples were encouraging it, too.
I remember being asked by couples if I could drop my prices
or give them a discount or give them a longer edit,
because another videographer in my area was offering something like that.
So why wasn't I doing the same thing anyways?
My main point here is that whenever you're in the first few years of your business
and charging in this range of zero to three thousand dollars or so,
you're really competing based on your price.
And that number is what matters most to couples.
And so to take this back to putting your prices on your Web site
because you're competing on price, if you can list out
all of your prices on your website,
that can actually be a real strength for you if the rest of your competition
is hiding their prices until a couple reaches out to them.
A couple may be willing to go with you just because they can go to your website,
see your prices, have no stress about it, and book you, or
even if your competition has their prices listed on their website as well.
As long as your prices are roughly comparable
to theirs, you're still in the running to be chosen by the couple.
Another benefit of having your prices fully listed on your website is that
couples will automatically
disqualify themselves if you're charging more than they can afford.
Instead of you having to do the awkward
song and dance or a couple reaches out, asks how much you charge,
and then you say 2000 dollars,
and the couple says, oh, sorry, our bunch, it's only a thousand bucks.
Can you come down? And you're like, No, sorry, I can't come down.
Can you come up? No, you can't come up. OK, I'll send you some referrals.
This can take a lot of time and it results.
And you do answer a lot of emails.
And at the end, you're still not making a booking instead of all that happening.
A couple is going to come to your website.
Look your prices and realize, oh, we can't afford that.
Let's go find someone else.
They never sent you an email. You're none the wiser.
And they've moved on and found someone that can work within their budget.
I remember I was toward the end of my first year of filming weddings.
I had not been putting my pricing on my website.
And I had a couple that reached out to me asking me to film their wedding.
And for some reason, I didn't send them pricing the email.
Instead, I met up with them at a coffee shop.
And I remember talking to them for a good 30 minutes to an hour.
And we really hit it off. We're getting along really well.
Things are going great.
And then we got to the part where we talked about price.
Cue the deer in the headlights look from both me and the couple,
as we both realize that financially this wasn't going to work out.
I think that their budget was somewhere around
five hundred dollars and my pricing was around 1500.
And there was no way they were going to be able to get together
triple what they had planned on paying to afford me.
It was very awkward.
I think that I paid for their coffee.
But overall, it was a big waste of time for both of us.
And if I had just led with my pricing and listed on my website.
From the start, I probably would have
never had to meet up with them and wasted their time and mine.
All right, so putting
your pricing on your website sounds pretty good right about now, right?
Couples will see your pricing immediately.
That way they can disqualify themselves and don't waste either of your time.
And the couples that have the budget to afford, you can see your pricing
and immediately know, hey, we can hire them, let's reach out .
It seems simpler overall, right? Well, hold on.
Because while yes, I do agree that putting your pricing on your website is simpler.
Once you get above charging 3000 dollars or so for a wedding film,
this is where everything starts to change from this 3000 dollar price range up.
You can expect to see a large shift both in your competition and in your couples.
First, you can expect less competition.
To be clear, there will still be plenty of other videographers,
but it is still significantly less than the amount of videographers
that are competing in that zero to three thousand dollar budget space.
And on top of that, these videographers are in general making more.
And so they don't need to book
the same quantity of weddings as videographers that are charging less.
Then when it comes to couples, these couples are going to be less
price sensitive than couples with smaller budgets.
See, these couples aren't asking for as many discounts from videographers,
and there's less videographers fighting for the couples in general.
So the market's healthier and a lot more people are getting what they want.
I really like it because videographers are charging
more and couples are paying more and everybody wins.
And this is also the point where putting your full pricing on your website
is not the strength that it was before,
because these couples are not as price sensitive.
They're not going to be as swayed by seeing a cheaper price.
Instead, these couples are going to be looking for quality.
This is a fundamental shift.
And one of the reasons why some couples are willing to pay 4000, 5000
or even 10000 dollars or more for a wedding fell
once a couple starts to care more
about the quality of their wedding film than they do about the price.
The sky is really the limit for what you can charge.
And the conversation with them is going to become a lot less about price
and significantly more about what sort of experience you can give them.
So the point is, in case you can't tell,
once you get above the 3000 dollar ish price range,
I do not recommend putting your full pricing on your website.
In my personal experience, you can make significantly more money
by taking the time to start building a relationship with your couples.
This starts by showing them a high quality
website, introducing them to you and your best films.
And then once they've decided that they like the quality of your work
and they've reached out, you can then present pricing to them.
It's like going to McDonald's and looking up at the menu
and telling the employee what you want versus going to a fancy restaurant
where the waiter reads off the specials to you in exquisite detail .
And before you know it, you're paying
whatever market price is for a steak and lobster because you deserve it.
You're just eating both times.
But at one of these restaurants, you're paying 10 or 20 times more
because you want the overall dining experience and quality of the food.
Once you start charging
more as a wedding videographer, I want you to start thinking of yourself
as a fancy steak restaurant and not fast food.
All right. Analogies aside and going back to the start of this video,
there are a lot of wedding videographers out there
that are going to tell you that you should put your full pricing on your website.
There are also a lot of videographers that are going to tell you
you should not have any pricing on your Web site.
And I think I've showed you the pros and cons for both of these.
Now I want to show you an alternative option, a hybrid of sorts.
And this is the one that I choose to use in my website in business.
I don't post all my prices on my website because I want to compete
on the quality of my films over the price of them.
But as I'm sure you will soon discover,
if you do not put any of your pricing on your website, you will find yourself
inundated with emails from couples that love your films
but have nowhere near the money to afford your work.
This happened to me many times.
So what I implemented was a hybrid option.
The only pricing information that I recommend
you put on your website is your starting price.
This is the price of your absolute cheapest package,
and it serves two useful purposes.
First, this is going to allow any couple that is unable to afford you
to automatically disqualify themselves whenever they see your starting price.
So they don't bother to reach out.
This is going to cut back on your emails and work you have to do.
And second, for the couples that can't afford you, they know
at least have a hint of what they can start to expect to spend with you.
But they know they're going to need to reach out to you for more information.
This is going to give you the opportunity to start to build a relationship
with them and communicate the value that you can offer them
and why they should spend more money with you.
So to wrap everything up now, if you are starting your wedding
filmmaking business or if you've been running one for a few years
and you want to improve your chances of booking your couples,
I would recommend putting your prices on your website.
But once you start to charge more than 3000 dollars or so,
I would recommend taking your prices off your website, competing more on quality
than price and only listing your starting price instead.
I really hope this advice helps you and your business.
And I want to thank you so much for watching.
I also want to help you more.
If you want to book more couples and Philmore weddings,
I've created a free guide that's going to walk you
through some practical steps you can take right now in your business
to book more couples and philmore weddings.
It's a completely free guide
you can download at the link down in the video description.
Also, I would love if while you're down there,
you would leave me a comment and let me know.
Do you put your full pricing on your website? Do you keep it hidden?
Are you going to implement this hybrid approach?
Let me know in the comments below.
Thanks so much for watching and have a great day.