Posting More Won’t Fix Your Wedding Booking Problem. Here’s What Will.

Posting More Won’t Fix Your Wedding Booking Problem. Here’s What Will.

Heidi Thompson:

Here is one thing I can promise you. Posting more won’t fix your booking problem. So in this episode, we’re going to talk about what will. In a world where wedding professionals are struggling to market and grow their businesses, one podcast brings together top experts and actionable strategies to help you build the wedding business of your dreams.

Hey, welcome to the podcast. I’m your host, Heidi Thompson, and I help wedding pros book more weddings with clients they love, make their marketing easier, and build businesses that don’t eat their whole life whole and give them freedom and flexibility. Now, a lot of people when they’re struggling with not having enough bookings, think they need to do more posting more. Maybe I should create daily videos on TikTok. Maybe I should create more Instagram reels. Maybe I should spend a few more hours per week on Pinterest so couples find me there. I hear these ideas all the time from wedding pros and I get it because it’s what you’ve been told. You need to post consistently if you want to be seen. The algorithm rewards frequency. If you’re not showing up daily, you’ll become invisible. Your competitors are posting every day and you need to keep up. So you believe that if you just post more, you’ll book more weddings. This is the biggest myth in wedding industry marketing, and it’s burning people out. Let me tell you where this myth really comes from.

You see other wedding pros posting constantly, maybe multiple times a day. They’re always in their stories. They’re seemingly everywhere. And you assume they’re booking weddings because look at all that posting they’re doing. So you think, if I just post as much as they do, I’ll book as much as they do. But here’s what you don’t see behind the scenes. Most of these people posting constantly aren’t getting much of an ROI for all that effort. And I know because I’ve seen the insides of a lot of their businesses. They might be booking weddings, sure, but it’s rarely just because of all of that posting. It’s usually in spite of it. When I look at where their bookings are coming from, their SEO, their vendor relationships, their past client referrals, their 10 years of reputation building, the social media posting, it’s not driving the results you think it is. But we don’t see that part. We just see them posting so we assume that it’s working.

and then we copy each other One wedding pro starts posting reels every day because they feel like they need to And another sees it and thinks oh I should do that too And then another And then another. Pretty soon the entire industry is exhausted, creating content constantly because we’re all copying each other without stopping to ask, wait a minute, is this actually working? Is this worth the time I’m putting in? It’s like we’re all running on a hamster wheel together, too busy running to notice that we’re not actually getting anywhere.

And social media platforms love this, of course, because more content means more engagement, which means more ad revenue for them. There are business coaches that perpetuate it because post consistently is easy advice.

It sounds actionable. It’s something you can control. But the truth is, most people are putting in massive effort for minimal return.

I know, because I’ve worked with thousands of wedding pros. I’ve seen their analytics. I’ve looked at where their bookings are coming from. And time and time again, the posting frequency does not correlate with booking success. And that’s the myth we need to bust.

this myth leads to feeling like you have to be everywhere and do all the things and that creates a huge problem because it actually makes your marketing so much harder than it needs to be and it makes it take more time than it needs to take think about it if you are spreading yourself across Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, blogging, email, and you’re trying to show up consistently on all of them, when do you actually have time to serve your clients or, you know, live your life? And here’s the thing, all that effort usually doesn’t even get you better results. And that’s annoying as hell because you think the more you do, the better results you’ll get. But that’s usually not how it works.

In fact, I’ve seen the opposite happen over and over again. Focus strategy really does beat doing everything.

Let me tell you about Katie Sauter, a wedding planner in North Carolina. She’s been on the podcast previously. When Katie started her wedding planning business, Chaos Otter Events, she had big dreams of leaving her full-time engineering job to do this work that she loved. But like so many new wedding pros, Katie quickly hit a wall. Here’s what her reality looked like. She had just one client and she felt completely stuck. She was doing what everyone told her to do. Trying all the things, posting on social media following all the marketing advice she could find hustling hard but none of it was translating into bookings She even made some costly mistakes along the way like buying a photo booth that didn fit her business model at all We all been there right? Chasing shiny objects because someone said it would help us book more.

Katie was overwhelmed, frustrated, and honestly had no idea how to move forward. And she told me I was feeling frustrated and unsure on what to do. I knew I had the skills to plan a wedding, but I didn’t know how to run a business. Sound familiar? As an engineer, Katie understood something important. Working harder wasn’t the answer. Working smarter was. So she made a decision. She joined the Wedding Business Collective and committed to getting real strategy and structure instead of just doing more. And here’s what changed. Instead of trying to be everywhere and do everything, Katie got laser focused. She learned how to talk to her ideal clients in a way that actually resonated with them. No more bland, neutral messaging that sounded like everyone else. She got bold and she stood out.

She built strategic relationships with venues that became a key source of steady leads. She wasn’t just networking randomly. She was building partnerships with purpose. She focused her marketing on what actually worked for her.

Katie discovered that Facebook groups were her secret weapon for connecting with ideal clients. A lot of people write those off. But for her, it wasn’t Instagram, it wasn’t TikTok, it wasn’t Pinterest, it was Facebook groups. Now that might not be your channel, but that’s exactly the point.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to how do I book more weddings. But when you stop doing everything and start focusing on what works for your business, that’s when things really shift. Katie stopped trying to do all the things and started doing the right things.

So what happened? Within a month of Katie getting focused, she booked five weddings.

Within a year, she had booked 29. As I’m recording this, she has built a team of rockstar planners and has no problem booking them all out. But it gets even better. She landed spots on four preferred vendor list at venues in her area, and that’s marketing gold. She built a portfolio of glowing testimonials that showcase her value. She revamped her website and social media to attract her ideal clients with ease, not by posting more, but by being strategic. She confidently left her day job to go full-time. And Katie told me the structure you provided helped me realize I knew how to plan a wedding, but I didn’t know how to run a business, and having the foundation made all of the difference Now let that sink in for a second Katie was not failing because she wasn’t working hard enough. She wasn’t failing because she wasn’t posting enough She was stuck because she was trying to do everything instead of focusing on what actually worked for her. The moment she stopped spreading herself thin and got strategic, she went from one client to 29 bookings in a year.

And here’s what most people don’t understand about marketing.

It’s not about volume. It’s not about quantity. It’s about strategy. When you’re trying to be everywhere, you can’t go deep anywhere.

You’re creating surface level presence across multiple platforms instead of creating a meaningful impact where your ideal clients actually are. And when you focus, you can actually understand what’s working.

Refine your message to resonate deeply with your ideal clients so they see you and they’re like, that’s the one. Build real relationships and authority. Create marketing that converts and have time to actually serve your clients well.

Think of it like award-winning rose growers. They don’t try to grow every plant. They don’t even try to grow every variety of rose in every color.

They strategically prune, getting very, very intentional about what they’re cutting and what they’re keeping. That’s how they produce prize-winning roses.

And Katie isn’t the only one. I see this pattern repeat over and over inside the Wedding Business Collective.

A floral designer, Carolyn, stopped posting on Facebook altogether and cut back on Instagram. She focused on SEO and referrals instead.

The result was she booked her biggest wedding ever, a $35,000 floral spend, while just working two hours per week on her marketing. A photographer stopped blogging weekly and posting daily on Instagram.

She focused only on Pinterest and referrals, and her inquiries doubled. A cake designer cut her social media time in half and invested in SEO.

She’s now ranking number one for her dream keywords and booking premium clients who find her on Google. The pattern is always the same. Do less, focus more, get better results.

Now I know what you might be thinking, but what if I stop posting and my competitors pass me by? Well, here’s the truth. your competitors who are posting multiple times a day are probably exhausted and not booking any better than you. And if they are booking, I can guarantee you it’s not because of their posting frequency. It’s because they’ve nailed their positioning, their messaging, and their target market. Katie wasn’t outposted by her competition. She out strategized them, and that’s what mattered. If you’re wondering, won’t the algorithm punish me?

Girl, the algorithm doesn’t pay your bills. Bookings do. And. Katie’s ideal clients were not hanging out waiting for her next Instagram post.

They were in Facebook groups looking for recommendations and asking venues who they should hire. If you’re worried that you’ll become invisible, that only happens if you disappear entirely. There is a huge difference between posting less and having no marketing strategy.

We’re talking about strategic focus, not radio silence. Katie didn’t become invisible when she stopped trying to be everywhere. She became more visible to the people who actually mattered, her ideal clients in the places they were actually booking. She just did less in these places where, sure, people may check to see her presence, but it’s not where they’re actively finding her.

And this is exactly why I created the Wedding Business CEO Summit. it Because I been watching talented wedding pros like you who are really freaking good at what they do who care about their clients and care about their work burn themselves out trying to be everywhere posting constantly, doing all the things, because that’s what everyone else was doing. I kept seeing the same pattern pop up, people working harder and harder, getting more and more exhausted and still not getting the results they wanted. And I thought, there’s got to be a better way here. Katie found it. And so have hundreds of other members inside the Wedding Business Collective. But I wanted to bring this to more wedding pros. I wanted to show you that there is a different path. One where you’re not constantly drowning in content creation, and where you’re not copying what everyone else is doing, where you actually have time to live your life.

And from February 16th through the 20th I bringing together 40 experts who understand what it like to be in this position These people are not going to tell you to post more be everywhere hustle harder They going to show you what actually works how to find what’s worth your time and what’s not, how to stop wasting energy on strategies that don’t move the needle. Because you deserve to build a business that doesn’t require you to sacrifice your entire life to make it work. And even then, it’s not working for so many people.

So make sure you get your free ticket to this event for all wedding pros who wanna reclaim their time and stop feeling overwhelmed and pulled in a million different directions. You can get your free ticket at weddingbusinessceosummit.com. And I know it feels risky to do less when everyone around you is following the same pattern of doing more, because everyone else is doing more But I also know that what you doing right now trying all the things being everywhere posting constantly is not sustainable You can keep believing the myth that posting more will fix your booking problem Or you can do what Katie did. Get strategic, get focused, stop doing everything and start doing what actually works for your business. Katie went from one client to 29 in just over a year, and it’s not because she posted more. It’s because she stopped trying to do everything and got laser-focused on what actually worked. The choice is yours, but I promise you, posting more won’t fix your booking problem.

Finding out what works for your business and doubling down on that, that’s what’s going to fix this. I’ll see you at the Wedding Business CEO Summit.