How to Book More Weddings: What Booked Wedding Professionals Do

How to Book More Weddings: What Booked Wedding Professionals Do

Heidi Thompson:

I have a secret. The wedding pros who are booking easily aren’t actually doing more than you. They’re doing less.

Hey there, welcome to the Evolve Your Wedding Business podcast. I am your host, Heidi Thompson. I am all about helping wedding pros book more weddings with clients they love by making their marketing easier and helping them build a business that gives them freedom and flexibility. We’re not doing 80-100 hour weeks over here.

Okay, real talk. If you spend any time in wedding industry Facebook groups, scrolling Instagram, it can feel like all of these vendors out there are just slammed with bookings and you’re over here refreshing your inbox, hoping something comes your way. And that comparison will absolutely destroy your confidence if you let it.

It will. But here’s what I’ve learned after working with thousands of different types of wedding pros. The vendors who are booking consistently, booking easily, like leads are just coming to them and booking, they are not working harder than you. They’re not doing more marketing than you. They’re not waking up at 5 a.m. to create a bunch of Instagram posts and grind and hustle harder. They’re doing marketing differently.

They’re doing strategic marketing, and that is a very different thing than just doing tactics. We have this idea in the wedding industry that the people who are just absolutely crushing it must be working harder than us. They have more content, more platforms, they go to more networking events, more everything. And yeah, some of those people are absolutely working their asses off.

But most of the consistently booked vendors I know, they’re not doing more.

They’re doing less. They’ve figured out which activities actually lead to bookings for their business. And they focus almost entirely on those things. Everything else gets dropped or deprioritized. No guilt about it. They just don’t do the stuff that doesn’t work for them. That’s not laziness. That’s strategy. That’s prioritization. And it’s something I see a lot of wedding professionals struggle with. The difference between a vendor who’s stressed and scattered versus one who seems just calm and consistently booked usually comes down to focus.

stressed and scattered vendors are scrambling they’re reacting they’re trying to do everything they’re on five different platforms they’re chasing every trend they’re saying yes to things that don’t even make sense for their business because some guru somewhere on the internet said it works the consistently booked vendor chose very intentionally chose two or three things that actually reach their ideal clients, and they went all in on those. They build trust with their audience through consistent, intentional marketing. They position themselves clearly so when the right couple finds them, there is no question in their mind, this is the right person. I can stop searching. They have less chaos and more results. I regularly see wedding pros come into the wedding business collective.

And at first, they usually don’t know how much time they’re spending on all of this random marketing. But when they figure it out, it’s usually about 10 hours or more of their week on marketing. And they are struggling to get inquiries and bookings.

Then they put the overwhelmed squashing marketing plan system to work in their business, and they start easily bringing in inquiries and bookings, working on their marketing just two hours a week. From 10 hours or more to like two hours.

Focusing makes all the difference in the world. You can’t just hard work yourself out of this problem because doing more doesn’t actually get you the results that you want. But here’s a trap that I see wedding pros fall into constantly. I’ve fallen into it myself. And that’s trying to copy what someone else is doing, because it looks like it’s working for them. And this is really hard to resist, because you see, you know, a photographer in your market who’s killing it on Instagram, and you think, all right that clearly what I need to be doing I need to do what they are doing so you study their content you try to replicate their style and you do it And you wonder why it not working the same for you And that because your business is not their business Your strengths are different. Your clients are different. Your market might even be different, even if you’re in the same city, even if it seems like you serve the same kind of people.

The goal isn’t to build the same marketing strategy that someone else has. It’s to build a unique one that works for you and your strengths, your ideal clients, your specific goals. That is the only version that’s going to work in the long term anyway.

After working with a lot of wedding pros, thousands over the years, the ones who are consistently booked tend to have a few things in common. First, they know exactly who they’re trying to sell to.

They know exactly who their ideal client is, not just demographics, not just psychographics, not just the ideal client worksheet. They know deep down what those couples care about, what they’re worried about, what language they use when they’re searching for a vendor, the real problem that they want solved. They have messaging that speaks directly to that person.

So when the right couple finds them, it feels like they’re reading their mind.

Now, I want you to think about messaging as different ways that you could talk about the same thing. But until someone draws a direct connection to you, you don’t see that you’re the right fit for them. So let me give you the example of, let’s just go with like a generic painkiller, ibuprofen. So if ibuprofen were running some sort of marketing campaign, and they were talking specifically about migraines, you better believe people who get migraines would be paying more attention and would be more likely to buy from them because they’re not just talking about pain. They’re talking about something specific.

And that is what is so important to do in your messaging. And you can’t do that if you don’t understand who your ideal client is on a deep level. That’s what I take people through in the wedding business collective.

Then these wedding pros can show up consistently in the places where their ideal clients are actually looking. Not everywhere. Not randomly. Not guessing. consistently in the right places with the right message for the right people. That’s it. That’s the whole game. That’s the difference between these. You cannot market more your way out of this. You cannot hard work your way out of this because more marketing is not the thing that books clients. Marketing that clearly speaks to your ideal client and shows them why you are the best choice for them, including all of your competitors.

You are the one for them and you have the thing that they want and you make them want to book you. That’s how marketing actually works. Doing more posts, doing more random things that do not accomplish that, that’s just busy work. That’s just noise. You’re just yelling about stuff that nobody actually cares about and nobody is paying attention to because you don’t, deep down, understand your ideal client, which, like I said, is a big part of putting together your marketing plan. Because we have to know who we’re talking to in order to market to them in a way that makes them want to buy from us.

If you want help figuring out what this looks like for your specific business, that is literally what the Wedding Business Collective is built for. We help you get clear on exactly who your ideal clients are. We take words directly from their mouth. We are not guessing. We are not assuming that it’s not good enough for marketing. We build messaging that actually lands and gets them to pay attention and want to work with you and not any of your competitors. And we create a marketing plan tailored to your strengths. Not what someone else is doing. Not someone else’s playbook yours, yours specifically, because that is the only one that is going to work for your business. So if that’s what you need, head over to evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/pod. Come join us in the Wedding Business Collective. You can get your first 30 days for a dollar. And speaking of the Wedding Business Collective, in the next episode, I’m going to be talking about who it is and who it is not for. I would love to hear from you over on Instagram.

Shoot me a DM. I love talking to podcast listeners. I’m really curious. What light bulb moments have you had in this episode? What have you realized you’re doing or what did you think was going to work that isn’t going to work for you? I would just love to hear what your takeaways are.

Shoot me a DM. I am @EvolveYourWeddingBusiness over on Instagram, and I will be back with another episode for you very soon.