The Costly Ideal Client Mistake Most Wedding Pros Make

Transcript: The Costly Ideal Client Mistake Most Wedding Pros Make

Heidi Thompson:

There is a big ideal client mistake that most wedding pros are making.

Let’s talk about it.

Hey there, welcome to the Evolve Your Wedding Business podcast. My name is Heidi Thompson. I’m your host, and I’m all about helping wedding professionals make their marketing easier so they can book more weddings, work with the clients they love, and build a business that gives them freedom, and flexibility. If you’ve tuned in over the last two weeks, you know we’ve talked about what’s really happening behind most wedding pros booking problems. It’s a clarity problem around their marketing, not a visibility problem. And we’ve looked at the data showing that the solutions that most people keep reaching for are never going to fix it. So today I want to go one level deeper, because I know you may be listening to this and thinking something like, okay, Heidi, but I’ve heard the ideal client thing before. I’ve done the exercises. I know who my ideal client is, and nothing meaningful has changed in my business. I get it.

I hear this constantly, and I want to tell you something important. It’s not on you that it didn’t work, but the reason it didn’t work probably isn’t what you think, and once you understand why it didn’t work, it’s going to open a whole new world to you. So let’s start at the beginning. Up top, when you started your business, you got into the wedding industry, you know, you were taught or you observed that what you were supposed to do is market to brides.

Now, I know that sounds strange. Of course you market to brides. You work in the wedding industry. What else are you going to do. But here’s the problem. Aside from bride not being an inclusive term at all, bride is not an identity. It’s a role. It is a temporary role that millions and millions of completely different human beings step into every year and then step out of. Think about that. There is nothing, no shared value, no common belief, no consumer behavior, not even the same reason for getting married that comes with simply being in the role of a bride. The couple who wants a black tie ballroom reception for 300 people, and the couple who wants to do barefoot bows on the beach with their 12 closest friends they both brides or perhaps they both grooms But they have nothing in common They want completely different things So they respond to completely different marketing They would never book the same vendors And yet if your marketing is aimed at brides, you’re treating them as if they’re the same person. And when you do that, your marketing ends up speaking to neither of them. So we came up with a solution in the business world, the ideal client avatar exercise. You’ve probably done it. You fill out a worksheet, you give your ideal client a name, an age, an income bracket, a location. A lot of times, like what is their Starbucks order, maybe some interests. She loves Pinterest and brunch and golden hour photos. She’s planning a romantic outdoor wedding. She has a budget of $30,000 to $60,000. And then you build your marketing around this person. Except here’s the problem.

She’s not a person. She’s not real. She’s a collection of your assumptions about who you think your ideal client might be. And assumptions have no power. A made-up persona can’t tell you what words to use on your homepage. It can’t tell you why they would choose one photographer over someone else. It can’t tell you what your ideal client was actually worried about at 2am when she was searching for vendors because you made her up out of thin air. Or you squished a bunch of people who have nothing in common together to the point where they aren’t people anymore. That’s why nothing changed when you did this exercise. It’s not because having an ideal client doesn’t work. It’s that what a lot of business owners put out as ideal client work wasn’t. It was a guessing exercise. It was making a paper doll dressed up as strategy. and let me go deeper on this because I think it’s really important. Think about your actual best clients, the ones you loved working with, the ones who trusted you completely.

They didn’t complain or question your prices. Maybe they sent you referrals, left the kind of reviews that make you cry when you think about them. Think about them, actually the individual human beings. Now, are they all the same age? Probably not. Same income, maybe similar, but not identical.

Even same location, not necessarily. But I would bet that when you think about them, they have something in common that has nothing to do with demographics, the kind of thing that would make them get along if they were all in a room together.

Maybe they all care deeply about sustainability and they’re super outdoorsy. Maybe they all have a very specific sense of humor and are very down to earth.

Maybe they all people who know exactly what they want. They make decisions quickly and confidently. Maybe they all value family traditions in a particular way that shows up in how they talk about their wedding. That thing that they have in common, whatever it is, that’s your ideal client.

not her age, zip code, income bracket, not the Pinterest board, the actual human being underneath the role of bride or groom. I’ll give you an example. I once had a student who told me, I know that every single client I work with is a huge Kate Spade fanatic. Now, if you’re not familiar, Kate Spade makes handbags and accessories. I’m sure they make a lot of different stuff. And that has nothing to do with weddings on the surface. But think about what that tells you. It tells you something real about how this person sees herself, what she values, what sort of aesthetic appeals to her, and what she’s willing to spend money on for something that she loves. This is how our values impact our buying behavior. Suddenly, you know where to look for inspiration for your tone and for marketing ideas and your messaging and your images, not because, oh, your ideal client likes this one type of handbag, but because you understand something real about who they are as a human being. Demographics are not helpful for this.

Demographics describe a massive amorphous group of people. You know, if I said I serve couples between the ages of 25 and 40 that live within 20 miles of my zip code and want to pay my prices, I would come up with people that if put in a room together would absolutely hate each other. They might fight. They might legit get into a physical brawl because being in a certain age bracket doesn’t make you have anything in common with anybody else. And I’m sure you felt this way when you see, you know, think pieces about generations. You see the way people talk about your generation and you think, that’s not me. That’s not me at all. That’s not me.

That’s not my friends. That’s not my partner. That’s not how any of us behave. And that’s because demographics just describe this big blob of people. Values and personality describe an actual human being. And this is really important because you can only market to an actual human being. You can’t market to a demographic. Let me tell you about one of my clients, Katie Sauter, a wedding planner. She’s in North Carolina. When she joined the Wedding Business Collective, she had worked with one client. And she was completely overwhelmed by all of the marketing advice she was hearing coming from every direction. You know, post on Instagram, be on Pinterest, get on every directory run ads network everywhere. It like what we were talking about last week just do more more more keep yelling. Yell louder. She had no idea where to focus. She was doing bits of everything and nothing was working And she felt like she was spinning her wheels constantly and going nowhere.

She told me I was frustrated and I was unsure how to even move forward.

I knew I had the skills to plan a wedding, but I didn’t know how to run a business. And the first thing she did was to stop trying to do everything and get really specific about who she wanted to work with, about who that ideal client was.

Not brides, not in a demographics way, not filling out a worksheet with a fake name and a fake age and a fake income bracket. In a real specific, who is this actual human being kind of way.

What do they care about? What do they spend their time on? What are they looking for that they can’t find anywhere else? And once she had that clarity, everything else clicked into place.

She discovered that for her particular ideal client, Facebook groups are where people were spending time. She built real relationships with venues, and she made sure that they were aligned with her ideal client. And she landed spots on four preferred vendors lists this way.

Now, she didn’t do that because someone said, hey, go market in Facebook groups. Hey, go build relationships with venues. Because that advice on its own is useless if that’s not where your people are.

Within a month of getting clear on who she actually wanted to attract and work with and where she needed to show up as a result of that, she had booked five clients. By the end of her first year, she booked 29 weddings, and she already has 28 on the books for the following year. She said, I finally have a marketing system that works, and I’m not constantly second-guessing anymore. 29 weddings in a year, all because she decided to choose exactly who she was talking to and figure out what to say to reach them. Not by doing more, actually by doing a lot less and cutting out a lot of things that didn’t work. So if that ideal client avatar exercise that I feel like everyone and their mom does at some point in their business does not work, what does? You go to the best possible place. You go to the source. Your best clients already exist. they already chose you they already paid you money they already have opinions about why they did that and if you ask them the right questions in the right way they will tell you absolutely everything you need to know to build marketing that attracts more people just like them the words they use to describe why they hired you, what they were worried about, what they were searching for, what made them certain you were the right choice, those words become your marketing copy.

Not the words you think sound polished or professional. They’re words, the actual language of actual human beings who paid you actual money to do this work. When your ideal client lands on your website and reads words that sounds exactly like what is running through their head, maybe what they’ve said to their partner, when she feels like you are somehow in her head, something shifts. She doesn’t feel like she’s being marketed to.

She feels like you understand her. And you do. And that feeling is what makes her reach out. And it’s also what sets you apart from your competition.

Let me show you what this looks like in practice. Mercy Ibarra is a bilingual Latina interspiritual minister in Los Angeles.

She works primarily with first Latino couples whose families are very Catholic but them being first they a little bit more spiritual than the very Catholic parents and grandparents they have. They want a ceremony that honors their own spirituality, but they also want something that acknowledges their traditions without being bound by them.

This is a very specific client with a very specific need. For a long time, those couples had no idea she existed.

And it wasn’t because she wasn’t being visible. It wasn’t because she wasn’t posting more. It’s because her marketing wasn’t speaking directly to them.

It wasn’t saying, hey, you, yeah, you have this problem. I have your solution. It wasn’t using their language. It wasn’t reflecting their specific situation back to them like a mirror in a way that made them think oh my God this is exactly who I been looking for When Mercy got really clear on who she served when she rebuilt her marketing around that specific person, using the language that that person actually uses, something shifted immediately. Couples started reaching out to her already knowing that she was the one they wanted. There was no question. And when they wrote to her, they actually used her own words back to her, nearly verbatim. She told me it’s like they’re reading my marketing message back to me verbatim when they’re writing an email to me. When that person finds me, their reaction is like, oh my god, I didn’t even know you were out here. You are the one I want. And it’s not even a question for them. That does not come from a bigger advertising budget. That doesn’t come from posting more on Instagram that from putting the right message in front of the right person and having the understanding to know what that message needs to be. And when that happens price stops being the entire focus of the conversation because they wanna work with you and only you.

Now, next week, I’m pulling everything I’ve been talking about together. I’m going to show you what the system actually looks like from start to finish. I’m going to share some stories from wedding pros who have used it and what happened on the other side. And I’m going to share something I’ve been working on for a while that I think is going to make a lot of things click into place for you.

I don’t want to give too much away, but if you’ve ever looked at your best clients and thought, man, I wish I could work with more people exactly like them, next week’s episode is exactly what you’ve been waiting for. So share this with one Wedding Pro friend and I will see you next week.