Interview with The Sassenachs: What’s Working in their Elopement Wedding Photography Business
This is the second of a brand new photographer interview series. I hope you enjoy it!
In this episode, I chat with Matt and Jodie Ward, the talented duo behind The Sassenachs, who are based in Scotland and are known for their breathtaking adventure elopement photography.
Watch the video below, or read the full transcript, to discover how they market their elopement wedding photograpy business.
Throughout this article, you can also see examples of their work. Visit their website for more.
Inside The Sassenachs’ Successful Wedding Photography Business
In the interview, Matt and Jodie (pictured below) share what inspires them and how they elopement weddings became their speciality. They talk about the joy they find in working with couples from across the globe and who they consider to be their target market.
Of course, their work isn’t without its challenges—they have to outwit midges during certain seasons, skilfully navigate crowds at popular spots, and work in all weathers – but it’s clear that they love what they do and where they live and work.
They also talk candidly about their own wedding regrets, and how their personal experience shaped their passion for elopements.
Mastering wedding photography marketing without relying on social media
Matt and Jodie have successfully turned their website into the heart of their business while focusing on what works for them.
They admit to not being very consistent on social media, yet have built a thriving business by focusing on strategies that work for them, proving that it’s not all about social media!
A perfect partnership
What’s clear from the interview is how well Matt and Jodie complement each other. As a husband-and-wife team, they’ve found a natural balance by playing to their individual strengths—Matt handles the marketing, while Jodie takes the lead on photo editing.
I also love Jodie’s honesty when she reveals that she’d get nothing done if she was responsible for the business’ social media marketing activity – the lure of pet videos would be too much of a distraction! It’s a refreshing reminder that you don’t have to be everywhere online to be successful.
Marketing insights
Matt and Jodie’s commitment to experimenting with their marketing stands out in this interview too. For example, Matt updates their website copy every week and keeps a close eye on Google rankings and website traffic using various online tools.
The recent introduction of the elopement wedding planning service is another way that they have recently evolved their offer. They seem to keep things fresh in their business by testing and experimenting, which I think is a great approach!
Interestingly, Matt and Jodie have also chosen to keep their business manageable by limiting the number of elopements they plan each year. With a young family and two dogs to care for, they are conscious of maintaining a balance between work and life—a decision I find particularly relatable.
Listen to the interview and subscribe for more
Listen in to the interview with Matt and Jodie of The Sassenachs on my YouTube channel to learn more about their unique approach to elopement wedding photography, and how they market their photography and elopement planning services to those who dream of an intimate wedding in Scotland.
Whether you’re a photographer looking for business insights, or simply curious about the world of elopement photography, this episode offers plenty of inspiration and practical takeaways.
If you enjoy the interview, don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe to my channel as there will be more photographer interviews coming soon!
Huge thanks again to Matt and Jodie for being so open and for sharing so much with me during the conversation.
LINKS & FURTHER INFORMATION
Video Transcript
Video Transcript
Zoe Hiljemark: Today, I am excited to speak with the man and wife team, Jodie and Matt Ward, a.k.a The Sassanachs. They’re specialists in adventure elopement-style weddings throughout Scotland, a country that is the second most searched-for destination for wedding elopements globally, and which boasts some of the best scenery in the world.
They tell me that Scotland is a Mecca for couples who wish to elope. And that is in fact the only country in the UK where you can marry anywhere. So they’re often shooting in the most remote and rural locations. capturing dramatic cinematic-style pictures for their wedding clients. They have over a decade of experience crafting bespoke elopements and have also recently introduced an elopement planning service.
So Matt and Jodie, welcome to you both and thank you very much for being here.
Matt Ward: Yeah, thank you for having us.
Zoe Hiljemark: So can we start at the beginning? I know you guys have got more than a decade of experience. What were you doing previously and how did you get started in this?
Matt Ward: Well, we met in an office. We worked in an insurance firm. Proper Jim and Pam sort of moment. And we had our first child 11 years ago now. Jodie went off on maternity leave, and didn’t want to go back. It was around the same time that we got our first DSLR cameras and you start, you know, photographing people and their pets.
Jodie Ward: You’d been dabbling in landscapes.
Matt Ward: Yeah. Did a few weddings, you do your first one or two for free, with no clue what you’re doing.
Zoe Hiljemark: Finding your feet, I think! Just working it all out!
Matt Ward: And then, yeah, from that, I suppose we’ve been full-time for about 10 years. During that time, we kind of swung around a little bit. We’ve done everything from weddings – we’ve also done landscape photography tours and workshops, which was probably my main bread and butter for quite a long time – babies. Then some portrait work and commercial stuff.
And then we thought we’d put the landscape and the portrait and the wedding thing all together and get into the elopement business. And that’s we’re at now!
Zoe Hiljemark: Amazing. So it was almost like an organic process really of trying lots of different things, which I think is pretty common actually? So, was there anybody doing that, the elopement style that you’re doing that inspired you, or was it not a thing those years ago?
Jodie Ward: There were a couple of big names. One, especially, that really inspired us, was The Ferros, the Italian photographers.And they’ve done a few…
Matt Ward: …yeah, Italian, Scottish backdrops,
Jodie Ward: And they were biggest…
Matt Ward: …inspiration. Yeah, and then a couple of other names like the Kitcheners and the Carrolls, who have been pretty solid for quite a few years as well. I suppose it’s just looking at them. I will say that we never felt like we fit into that mould in the same way as these guys did.
I’ve looked at all of these guys as being like Uber cool, like proper trendy arty types and I don’t think we put ourselves in that box, you know. So it was kind of a question of us finding our own way in the elopement side of things. And I think we made a little bit more conscious effort to be very landscape based, you know.
Zoe Hiljemark: Yes. With your background in that genre that would make sense. Yeah.
Matt Ward: Yeah. I spent years myself, travelling all around Scotland, finding all these places that, obviously some are well known and some not so much. And just learning the environment that you’re in, best times of year to shoot, places to go, places not to go, times of year not to go, and all of those really important things.
Zoe Hiljemark: Yeah, because I think I’m right to say there’s certain places you won’t shoot at certain times of the year because there’s midges and different challenges of those locations. Can you talk to us about that and how you, just through experience I presume, established that?
Matt Ward: Experience of both working and living here. So we actually live in Glencoe. We know from just experience of letting the dogs out to go for a week that the midges are hell on earth for a couple of hours each day at certain times of the year. So for instance, we wouldn’t tend to work in the West Highlands between the months of late July and mid-September. We do make slight exceptions for various reasons, but we are pretty firm on that.
Jodie Ward: I react to the midgets quite badly as well, so it’s miserable for me.
Zoe Hiljemark: Ah, so it’s practical reasons too. Sure.
I think what comes across strongly from your marketing and your website is that you’re creating bespoke experiences. You want to create something completely magical for the client. I imagine midges and things are just not going to be part of that magical experience, are they?! So it’s really great that you say very clearly that you’ll only do certain locations on certain dates.
Matt Ward: Yeah. It’s the same with tourist numbers as well, you know. The wonderful thing that lockdown gave us is we all started exploring our country, whether it’s Scotland or the wider UK or whatever. As a result, certain places have just swelled beyond what it feels like they’re capable of taking. The Isle of Skye is one.
Jodie Ward: Yeah.
Matt Ward: So for instance, we’re not taking any bookings pretty much on the Isle of Skye outside of kind of November to February because we feel that it’s just too busy. Again, there are certain caveats to that. We would do very small sections of the island outside of those times, but the main points that people want to go to like The Quiraing or Fairy Glen, Perry Pools or whatever, we absolutely wouldn’t touch anywhere from March to October. It’s just too busy. And it doesn’t give the couples the experience that I think they think they’re going to get, especially if they’ve not been here before.
Zoe Hiljemark: Talk to us now about your ideal clients because you’ve touched on your clients and I’d be interested to hear how you would define them. Like who are they and has that evolved? I know they’re certainly traveling to Scotland in many cases, perhaps even for the very first time there, perhaps from Europe or even much further afield. So, could you tell us a bit about that and how you’ve, in your marketing and your business practices, refined that in terms of positioning your business to them and how that works?
Matt Ward: Well they tend to come from the USA. Canada and Australia are probably the next two countries on the list. And we tend to find there’ll be people with a link to Scotland.
Jodie Ward: Yeah.
Matt Ward: Usually that’s family heritage, you know, maybe their families left during their clearances in the 18th century or whatever. Or they
Jodie Ward: Or they just love Outlander!
Matt Ward: That’s the other one, Outlander, Brave Heart, Harry Potter. Those three are huge draws. They’ve seen that and that’s basically been their introduction into Scotland. So you’ll get a lot of people saying, Hey, we want to go here. We want an Outlander style wedding. Can we have our ceremony there, or whatever it might be. So they would tend to be our clients.
They also tend to be more modern thinking. These are people who are doing away from the traditional wedding. They don’t want all the bells and whistles and to spend £30,000 on a big white wedding with a cake and a first dance and speeches and all of that sort of stuff.
Jodie Ward: I think that’s possibly the joy of Instagram. Now people are seeing how much money is being spent on these big lavish weddings and they’d rather spend that money on an intimate wedding and enjoy a honeymoon at the same time for a fraction of the cost. It’s pushing more over to the elopements in our opinion.
Zoe Hiljemark: Yes, it’s growing really quite well, isn’t it? As an industry.
Jodie Ward: It’s what a wedding, what a marriage is about. It’s about the couple coming together and declaring their love for each other and anything else outside of that is a bonus. And we just think that it’s a magical moment to have together.
Matt Ward: And it’s funny because we’ve had people, when we used to do big weddings, literally tell us of their regret of their big wedding on their wedding day.
Zoe Hiljemark: Oh wow! And, you guys are married and you didn’t do an elopement, did you? So this is almost part of the story, isn’t it? I think I’m right to say that you were like, we did the whole big white wedding thing. Maybe we wouldn’t do it now. Is that true?
Matt Ward: I’m going to throw Jodie under the bus here. I wanted to elope and Jodie didn’t want to elope!
Jodie Ward: Well, I did, but I just didn’t want to upset my family. And I still upset family because we couldn’t afford at the time to invite everyone. And I chose some friends over family. And now I don’t even speak to those friends because. I no longer work with them, so it is a regret. I’m not marrying him, obviously, but…
Zoe Hiljemark: You regret the format!
Jodie Ward: Yes. The big wedding, I regret. I wish we’d have done a smaller, intimate adventure. Those memories would have been so much nicer than the ones we currently have. The only bonus I’ve got is that my grandad was able to be there. He unfortunately passed away from cancer weeks afterwards. His main goal was to make it to our wedding and he did.
Matt Ward: But I think this is part of the reason that makes us so passionate about what we do.
Zoe Hiljemark: Yeah. Well, that’s what I was going to say as well. Like that lends to the stories, doesn’t it? Within the business and the storytelling element that you can share with clients. Yeah.
Matt Ward: And when we did do the big weddings, as I said, you could almost see the stress and the heartache people were experiencing. Going through a process that they maybe weren’t expecting, or were totally invested in, you know. They were doing things because their mom or dad or aunt or whatever it was wanted them, or wider society pressures expected them, to do. We felt those same pressures and expectations. I think you get caught up in it.
One of the big things that we hear from our clients is, that we’ll do the video calls and stuff with them four weeks before the wedding date. And so many people say to us, “It feels like we should be doing more. There’s nothing for us to plan”.
Zoe Hiljemark: And that’s a nice segue actually towards the planning service that you now offer. Because that’s a relatively new offer, but tell us about that. And obviously, why did you do it initially? I guess it may have been because clients were asking for it or you decided there was a market for that aspect as well, but how is that working out for you?
Matt Ward: Yeah, it’s good, isn’t it? We’ve done about a dozen or so since we launched just before Christmas last year.
Jodie Ward: So we’re keeping it small at the moment, purely for our own sanity.
Matt Ward: There’s a lot involved. We work with our friend, Jo, who’s much more organised than we are. Hence the reason we chose to work with Jo. That, and she’s lovely. So yeah, people were asking for it. So we would jump on these calls with people and they would basically be lost. They’ve never been to Scotland. They didn’t have a clue what they were doing.
We would often say, right, we recommend this humanist, this hair and makeup person and this place for flowers or something like that, and then leave them to get on their way. And I think it was a conversation you had with one of our brides about time differences, and like them struggling to get hold of certain people because of time differences from the other side of the world. So we thought, well if we just reduced all those points of contact for our clients, we just did it ourselves.
And we’ve got the network, we’ve got the experience, we’ve got the knowledge of Scotland. So we now do the whole thing. We organise their whole trip here. So we just had a couple come over from California last month and they did 11, 12 days here. And we planned from the moment they landed to the moment they took off. Absolutely everything for them. We wrote out itineraries, we booked accommodation.
The beauty of that is that we’re in control of what their photos are going to look like. So, they’re. prep shots for their wedding day…if we choose their hotel, we know that the hotel is going to be suitable and lends itself to beautiful photos. So in some ways it’s handier for us as well to… I’m not going to lie to have that little bit of extra control. But, I think it just takes away the pressure from them. And, the absolutely insane thing is, is, a 10, 12, 14 day trip over here from the States is still going to be about half the cost, max, of that big white traditional wedding.
Zoe Hiljemark: Is it really? Wow. So how have you marketed that particularly, or even just the business in general? In terms of just your marketing specifically, what are you doing day to day to get yourselves out there or has your business and your name become so well known that you’re getting inquiries organically? How well is your website working for you? Can you tell us a bit more about the marketing side of things?
Matt Ward: I suppose I’ll answer that ’cause that’s my side of the business. So our marketing works in a couple of ways. So we don’t really do social media. We’re very erratic when it comes to social media. I’ll have a moment where I go, oh, let’s just go and put 10 posts up in one go and basically schedule them all and then that will be it for us social media for three months and we won’t touch it again.
Jodie Ward: If I do it, I get distracted by cat videos!
Matt Ward: So yeah, we are not big on social media. I don’t know how many followers we’ve got on Instagram…1500 or so, and it’s nothing really in the grand scheme of things. Everything that we do is through Google; we do SEO work, and we are quite heavily invested in the SEO side of things. We rank reasonably well across about 50 or 60 search terms, which is pretty handy. And then we run Google ads.And I was actually looking yesterday Google ads conversion cost is about 30 pounds, which is really quite cheap for our industry. So that’s nice to have as well.
I’ll be honest, most of what we do is centred around our website. You know, our website is the thing that we just hope will convert people into browsing through to people who book. And then something that you actually, when we were working with you Zoe, got us to do was the mailing list.
Zoe Hiljemark: Yes, we should say we worked together for a time. So yes, I did get you started on mailing list, email marketing, as you say. Yes, I very much agree that that’s a really important facet in terms of being able to reach your ideal clients – people who’ve been stalking your website and are interested enough to sign up. So yes, well done. So you’re continuing with that?
Matt Ward: Yeah, we get about, about 15 to 20 percent of our inquiries come through our mailing list. It’s actually quite high.
Jodie Ward: We get positive feedback on how helpful it’s been too. They often tell us it was the mailing list that made them decide to contact us.
Matt Ward: So we do the mailing list. We have a downloadable guide to elopements in Scotland. It changes every so often.
Zoe Hiljemark: So, you’re saying you’ve got a lead magnet, essentially, to hook them in in the first place.
Matt Ward: Yes, and they then receive an onboarding campaign, which depending on what country they’re in is between seven and 10 emails long talking about elopements and then talking about us towards the end of that campaign. And then they join our mailing list.
The mailing list, I wouldn’t say we’re great at. We probably send out an email twice every five weeks, I would say, sometimes I do it one week and then the next week and then leave it for a month. Because I feel like I’ve got nothing to say or I just forget about it, but it genuinely does work and that’s the thing that I think is great.
Matt Ward: If you can get people onto your website, and then from that website, get people to either be invested in you enough straight away to contact you there and then (which is pretty rare, if I’m totally honest)….
Zoe Hiljemark: Yeah, hence the need for such a guide to hook them in, isn’t it? And indeed your social media channels…they help by being a place that, if nothing else, is where they can just follow you.
Matt Ward: It’s just tiny little things as well. Like when we first started doing the mailing list and you write who your email was from… I used to just put The Sassenachs. And then I thought, do you know what? We should probably change that. And now it’s Sassenachs Elopement Photography. So even if they don’t open their email, they’re associating our brand name with eloping.
So hopefully, even if they don’t open it, they see it. And then when they’re ready to take that next step to actually book an elopement photographer, they’ll think “Oh, I remember we were chatting to them” or “we looked on their website”. So it’s just kind of like, a little wave at them every so often just to kind of hopefully stay within their memory.
Zoe Hiljemark: Yeah. And I love that. I mean, what you said about social media, the fact that you’re not on there all the time, I love the fact that you found your groove and you’re doing it in a way that suits you. Ultimately it’s your business and you can do it if you need more clients. If you needed to fill that diary, of course, you’d perhaps be doing more, but I think I’m right to say that you’re fully booked for a long time in advance, aren’t you, as it stands now? You’re clearly confident in your ability to attract those clients at the right time and the social media and email marketing simply supplements what you’re doing. I think that’s a very admirable situation to be in actually.
Jodie Ward: Yeah, we’re quite fortunate in that sense that the social media that we do use, it’s just another place to have our portfolio really. To find inspiration as well, but then I just get distracted with cats and dogs.
Zoe Hiljemark: And you’ve got your own dog, haven’t you?
Matt Ward: Yeah, we’ve got two dogs. We have, yeah. We sent them out because they would be involved in this conversation…
Zoe Hiljemark: So, that’s really interesting how you’re incorporating the Google ads, you’re doing the SEO work, so very much making your website the hub of what you’re doing, which is very much a strategy I recommend that is really your online home, isn’t it? Your shop front.
And I think what you guys do well is the copy is really compelling, it really pulls people in and tells that story about how this is so different to anything else that people might have considered in regards to wedding planning. So I think you’ve done a cracking job there and the guide and the nurture sequence and all of that. It just sounds like you’ve got it all. All in place. Well done.
So what percentage of time typically in a week would you sort of spend on marketing? Are you doing something every day or is the funnel with the Google ads and everything set up and just automating working in the background for you?
Matt Ward: What we tend to do, because Jodie edits pretty much all the photos, you can probably do eight out of ten weddings, don’t you? My time is spent either doing the other ones, the wedding videos that we also offer, or the marketing. So I wouldn’t say I do it every day, but we do quite a lot every week.
We used to do quite a lot of blog posts. But we tend to do those more in the winter when we’ve got a little bit more time. I update my website copy every week, even if it’s just tweaks. And actually, we changed our pricing page last week and we had five inquiries across two and a half days after that change. So, you know, it’s like, right, that must work. You know, it’s nice to see that. I’m quite a firm believer in keep updating things and keeping things fresh. If it doesn’t work, we can always go back to it, but there’s something somewhere that triggers people to either take that action or not.
It’s things like having HotJar installed on your website so you can actually track what people are doing. I think that might’ve been another thing that you led us towards.
Zoe Hiljemark: Yeah. Fascinating that, isn’t it? And you see where people are navigating and where they get stuck.
Matt Ward: And I think it was actually when I was looking at website recordings. I realised how blocky our text was. And I thought, oh, that’s quite text heavy, just paragraph after paragraph. And then we saw another website that used a lot of icons, lots of ticks and crosses and bullet points in paragraphs. So I think we’ll do that.
You now see that people can flick up through our website a lot quicker and just take in the bullet points that they need as opposed to thinking, right, okay, they’re going to read a thousand word essay on why they need to book us. Because in reality, they’re not.
Zoe Hiljemark: Yeah, absolutely. So subheadings, bold, like you say, short paragraphs, little icons, bullet points, all of these things. It just makes it so much easier to read, doesn’t it?
Matt Ward: I didn’t realise, genuinely, like we’d see our website all the time, but I didn’t realise until I watched other people going through our website…
Zoe Hiljemark: I think you’re so close to it, aren’t you? When it’s your own business, your own website and yes, gosh, how other people navigate it is very different to how perhaps we would because we know where everything is. And yep, a fascinating exercise. And that’s a really good tip, for anyone listening to do that on their website, if they haven’t done already.
Jodie Ward: And if they dare and they have chat GPT, ask chat GPT to roast your website.
Zoe Hiljemark: Interesting tip!
Jodie Ward: It really bummed Matt out. It was painful. Oh no! It was really painful, But it did help us, didn’t it?
Zoe Hiljemark: In terms of just refining the copy, what you’re saying, or content style, what was it?
Matt Ward: I think you get caught up in trying to make it look arty and everything was like “let’s have the best adventure of your life” and all this stuff and it was so unclear as to what we’re actually talking about.
So now it’s something more like “have your dream wedding day”. It’s so much more concise and so much more clear and to the point, as opposed to this flowery, arty text, and I think that probably came from our own, I suppose, insecurities and trying to be like other people within the elopement industry. They said adventure, they say this, they say that, and you would try and find your own way around it.
But what was happening is they were maybe like one step away from saying a wedding, but then because you were almost copying their copy, you’d be two steps away because you didn’t want to use the same wording and stuff like that. So, yes. You know, it bummed us out a little bit, you know, and it’s little things like “click here to make it happen”. Why put stuff like that? Just put “Contact us”! Just an actual call to action. Absolutely fine.
Jodie Ward: And ChatGPT was pretty good at that because it doesn’t care about your feelings.
Matt Ward: Yes, ChatGPT was taking no prisoners.
Zoe Hiljemark: Yeah, well, that’s a good thing, obviously, refining it for the better. So yeah, another great tip there. Thank you for sharing that. There are so many ways you can be using AI, but if it can help you refine and improve then all the better. I definitely wouldn’t just advocate copying and pasting and all of that, finding your tone of voice and that original angle and everything that makes you different is so, so important. But yeah, sounds like you use it in a positive way and what a great tool it is.
Well, you’ve shared so much. Thank you. Is there anything you’re working on at the moment? Anything new? Anything you wanted to mention before we wrap up.
Matt Ward: Really, you know, we’re just keeping things going and, trying to refine. I think that the biggest thing for us is we keep trying to niche down, we keep trying to be as tight as possible into what we were doing. It starts off that you do everything and then you just do some things and then you just do a few things and it’s down to one thing and then you want to do that one thing really, really well.
I think that we’re trying to be as close to the bottom of that funnel as possible. So for us, it’s just continually trying to evolve. And then hopefully we’ll be able to start passing this information on to other people through like mentoring and that sort of stuff.
Zoe Hiljemark: Yes, you have some exciting plans in regards to that, don’t you?
Matt Ward: So we’re just going through at the moment whether or not we’re going to do it in person groups or one-to-one. The whole online course thing, which is what we were thinking of because we’ve done the online courses over the last 10 years and the majority of them are not that helpful because they’re so generic. So you could
Zoe Hiljemark: So you could add something new to the market? Exciting times! Well, good luck with that. And of course, with all the weddings that you’ve got in the pipeline, am I right to say you’re booked well into next year? And even beyond perhaps? When are you getting inquiries for these days?
Matt Ward: For 2026 mostly. We’ve got one booked in for 2027. The market tends to book with us about three to nine months in advance but we will book out autumn. We are big, big fans of autumn and we tell everyone this is when you need to book. Yeah, we have a bit of a premium on that. And then we just fill out those months around it afterwards. So yeah, it’s a nice position to be in.
Zoe Hiljemark: Well, well done with everything you’ve achieved so far and good luck with everything going forward. So thank you so much for everything you’ve shared. You’ve been really generous and if anyone wants to check out their work do because it’s an absolute visual treat. The website is thesassenachs.co.uk and I’ll include the link in the description below.
But both of you, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. It’s been great to have you on here!
Matt Ward: Thanks so much for asking.
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