4 Ways to Know If You’re Charging Too Little in Your Photography Business

In the competitive and ever-changing photography industry, setting the proper pricing for your products and services is essential. Your pricing has to be clear and easy for your potential clients to understand. Additionally, it has to be set up to ensure you are profiting when all is said and done! Charge too much, and you will turn away prospective clients. Charge too little, and you won't have any profit left. The latter situation is more often the case for photographers. But how do you know if this is you? We reached out to wedding photography editing company, ShootDotEdit, for their insights on the topic!

One of the first things you can do to ensure you are charging the correct amount is to look at your business in it’s present state. And then the goals you want to meet by the end of the year. After you write out your financial goals for the year, it can still be hard to tell whether you are charging too much or too little. Ask yourself the following 4 questions to discover whether you have chosen the best prices for your photography business.

1. Are You Charging For Your Time?

As you sit down to write out your current expenses, did you factor in all of your time? Knowing the prices of your products and services is important to your pricing model, but your time is valuable and should be accounted for in your prices. There are many parts of your job, including prep, drive, and wait time, that take up much of your workflow and need to be included.

Image Compliments of B?m Photography

Without including your time, you are not paying yourself for the work you do. Think of yourself as an employee who needs to have a paycheck to continue being profitable. If you had a different job, and you were clocking in and out, your time would be fully tracked – and paid for!

2. Are You Discounting Your Services?

If you notice fewer clients are booking you at your current prices, have you started discounting some of your products and services? Keep in mind that you set those prices for a reason (most likely because it helped your overall profit). When you discount the prices for your wedding photography business, it decreases your value and takes away from the profit you could make this year. If you constantly discount your products and services, you are missing out on money you could make to increase your profit and grow your business. Often times, the discounted amount is the profit you miss out on in the end.

3. Are You Outsourcing Your Tasks?

Once the weddings start piling up on your calendar and your tasks become overwhelming, are you outsourcing to partners who can help? In today's photography industry, outsourcing can be
essential to help you focus on being the owner of your wedding photography business. Using a bookkeeper, photo editing company, or an album design company, assists you in eliminating hours from your workflow. Stop spending all of your time on non-profit-generating tasks, and focus your attention so you can do the important, and fun things, like meeting new clients. Which will increase your profits.

Image Compliments of B?m Photography

4. Are You Including Additional Expenses?

When you look at your goals for the profit you want to make, did you include:

• how much it costs to run your business (rent, gear, etc)
• shoot weddings and other events (gas, babysitting, second shooters, etc)
• create marketing campaigns (Facebook or IG ads, etc)
• additional expenses (parking fees, insurance, time, etc)

These expenses are important to document and prepare for, so that you do not lose additional income if something unexpected comes up later in the year.

Your clients’ time is valuable – and so is yours. Do not forget to account for drive time, prep time, time at an event. Also, creating a marketing campaign can be expensive and time-consuming, so make sure your specific plan includes how much money and time you need to dedicate to the process. The more detailed your plan is, the easier it will be to know exactly where you will stand by the end of the year. Understanding the prices you need to charge, and implementing them into your business, will help you increase your overall profit for the year. Once you start profiting each year, you can take on additional projects and bookings for your business.

Download our Pricing Calculator for Wedding Photographers to find out right now if you are charging too little. If you are, make the changes necessary to create a profitable and successful business today!

Special thanks to our friends at ShootDotEdit for this wonderfully informative guest post! ShootDotEdit is the first choice color correction and post production solution for the pro wedding photographer, and everything they shoot. They provide turnaround time as fast as 48 hours. ShootDotEdit Customers now receive Extra, a complimentary gallery hosting and storage service designed to sell more prints for you with zero commissions.