How to plan a styled shoot at your venue

A styled shoot is where a group of talented suppliers get together and host a beautiful shoot at a wedding venue, it should be a collaborative effort to showcase the venue and the suppliers work.

The aim of a styled shoot is to gather good quality marketing material you can use to showcase what you do. You can make the most of this collaborative effort to showcase your wedding venue’s unique features, attract potential clients and establish your self as the perfect wedding venue for your ideal client.

A styled shoot is often organised by wedding photographers or wedding planners/stylists.

The shoot has to represent your venue well, please bear in mind that not every styled shoot opportunity will do this. The images you get from the shoot have to be what you want to put out to attract your ideal clients.

Make sure what you are saying yes to fully aligns with your venue and will attract those clients you want more of.

You don’t have to say yes to every styled shoot, as a suggestion you can put together a questionnaire or application and when you do have suppliers reach out you can ask them to fill in the questionnaire or application to see if you both align.

Firstly you will need to ask what the purpose of the shoot is, is it mainly for social media content, brochure content or will it be getting submitted to a publication. You as a venue could benefit from all of these, especially getting published in a publication, feel free to ask which one and check this out!

Ask to see their vision board, other suppliers that will be involved and their website & social media accounts. It’s important you get to know and trust the suppliers you will be working with.

Styled shoots are a great way to meet other wedding industry professionals and network! Especially for new venues, I cannot stress enough how important networking is in the wedding industry. (blog coming soon on this topic!)

Don’t be afraid to put together a “shot list”, this is a list of images you would like to get from the shoot that will benefit the venue. Do you have a new outdoor seating area? New chairs? Whatever it is I’m sure the photographer would love to capture this for you!

Once all suppliers are on board it’s important to communicate your vision clearly and discuss everyone’s responsibilities expectations and deadlines.

You can easily put together a contract for this, nothing scary just to have in black and white what each supplier is responsible.

This is really important and beneficial to everyone, suppliers are contributing their time and costs into the shoot so it’s a shame when suppliers are let down by someone not doing their part.

It can be really simple, here’s an example of what this needs to include:

The venue is responsible for XXX and agrees to do XXX

The photographer is responsible for XXX and agrees to do XXX

For the venue you’ll also want to have a clause in there to say that you will receive high res images without any brand stamps.

Styled shoots are highly beneficial to venues, especially if you are a new venue as you can get some amazing content to put out for your potential ideal clients to see.