Why Going Viral Won't Help You Book Weddings (and what will)

GOING VIRAL
Going Viral ≠ A Successful Brand

When we first started Runaway Vows, we said yes to just about any wedding that came our way. So when we had a famous Tik Tok couple slide into our DM’s, we thought we had made it. And to be completely clear, this email is not about Carlo and Sarah (we absolutely love them ❤️). This is about what we thought would happen to our brand vs what actually happened after we filmed their wedding.

Across all their social media accounts, they had nearly 10 million followers, with nearly every single one of their videos amassing millions and millions of views. To us, it made sense that if we did an amazing job on their video, and collaborated on a few posts with them, then we may as well sit back and watch the inquiries roll in.

But to this day, we have not had a single booking because of that wedding. Even though at any given moment, we can log into our Instagram and swipe to refresh a constant stream of people liking and commenting on our post we collaborated with them on. The post is nearly two years old and still going crazy.

And this my friends, is why you need to define your audience for your brand.

The truth is, while their audience is massive, it’s not an audience of people who are looking to hire a wedding videographer. It’s an audience of people who love them for their chemistry and humor (and all the Italian food pranks 🤌🏼).

So let’s talk about what actually works for us.

INCREASING INQUIRIES
Working With Wedding Planners

Contrast that story with our story of working in Colorado last year with a wedding planner who is fairly well known. We walked into that wedding not knowing what to expect, but we knew that we would do what we do best:

Do great work, and be a pleasure to work with.

During the course of the wedding, we realized how much we loved working with this planner, and that she had our dream clientele. She is very good at throwing this specific type of wedding that matched our brand perfectly.

After the wedding was over, we pulled an all-nighter creating multiple reels and website banners for her to have in her inbox the next morning when she woke up. After stalking her instagram page, we noticed that she had never collaborated with another videographer on her page, so we set our hopes very low.

But to our surprise, she accepted our collaboration request and even posted one of the reels we made for her and gave us a very warm shoutout in the caption.

To say we were excited is the understatement of the year. But what was even better was what happened after she posted our reels…

Within a week, we had nearly a dozen other high-end wedding planners follow and DM us, asking if they can put us on their preferred vendor list. And just like that, we had 12 free-marketing agents doing our advertising for us.

Each of these planners have couples coming to them every single day asking them to do their wedding, and to align them with the best vendors. No matter how hard we try, we will never have the sheer volume of inquiries that planners have, so it’s in our best interest to be able to leverage their reach.

We say this all the time, but by successfully doing this, you will bulletproof your business.

LUTS
Prestige Pack x Gamut.io

One of the biggest questions we get asked all the time is how we achieve our colors in our films.

While the answer is a lot deeper than just “slap a LUT on it and you’ll be fine”, there is a tiny bit of truth to that. While you should do all you can to learn color theory and how to grade footage, if you capture your image correctly in-camera, then just adding a LUT in post can go a long way.

So how do you get the Runaway Vows look? Here is a step-by-step breakdown:

1. Expose properly in-camera. We do this by programming our zebras to be at IRE 57 +- 5. Whether we are in a sunny or shady location, we will adjust our exposure however we need to in order to get zebras on our subjects face.

2. In post, we convert our S-log3 footage to Rec .709 with Gamut.io’s conversion LUTs.

3. At this point, we are 90% of the way there. We adjust the shadows and highlights with a slight S-curve, and do some minor adjustment to white balance and contrast if needed.

4. The last step, we apply the Prestige LUT pack. This is a pack that we developed with Gamut.io and stress-tested in just about any environment you can think of to make sure that they look good with anything. Our favorite LUT in the pack changes all the time, but at the moment it’s Filmic Glam at about 50% 👌🏻

5. You’re done. Grab a coffee, kick back, and relax.

If you want a live demo of what these LUTs look like, you can check out our recent posts here and here to see how they would match your style.

Use code: RUNAWAY for 15% off

That’s it for this week folks