Episode #251: How To Get New Clients Without Paying The Knot or WeddingWire

Wish you could get clients without having to rely on The Knot & WeddingWire? You’re not alone!

You don’t have to rely on them when you control your marketing.

What I see a lot of wedding pros do is completely abdicate responsibility for their marketing by giving money to WeddingWire to The Knot and saying they’re that sorted out. They don’t work on their marketing, they don’t make time to make sure they’re marketing and that it’s actually working.

They don’t have a repeatable system for getting clients. It’s all in somebody else’s hands. And then when that doesn’t work, the whole thing comes crumbling down.

Now, I’m not saying you can’t ever use a third-party platform or that you can’t outsource any pieces of your marketing, but you can’t outsource the ownership of that as a business owner.

You have to be the one that’s in control of your marketing. Want to know how?  Listen to this episode to find out!

In this episode we’ll cover:

• How to book more clients without relying on The Knot & WeddingWire
• Why you shouldn’t rely solely on The Knot & WeddingWire
• Why you absolutely must control your marketing
• How to get more leads that are your ideal clients
• What to do if you don’t have time to market
• The importance of creating a repeatable system to keep getting clients so they can stay booked
• How we overcomplicate getting more leads and bookings
• How and why to take control of your marketing

How To Get New Clients Without Paying The Knot or WeddingWire

Hello my friend. Welcome to the podcast. I’m your host, Heidi Thompson, and my whole jam is helping wedding professionals just like you build a business that gives you the financial freedom, the time freedom, the freedom to take some time off, the freedom to travel, the freedom to spend more time with your kids, whatever that is for you, as well as providing you with an income that can sustain you and your family.

And today I wanna talk to you about how to get new clients, how to get new leads without paying The Knot or WeddingWire.

Now, at the time that I’m recording this, it’s about a week-ish since the whole Knot story broke. There were some whistleblowers that worked for The Knot that came and said, you know, the Knot, its parent company, WeddingWire, the whole, you know, megalith of wedding advertising companies.

They had been defrauding clients both on a very large scale, large corporate clients as well as much smaller businesses like yours, like mine. And I don’t think this really surprised anybody. I think it confirmed a lot of suspicions that people had about the kind of leads that they were getting. Now I wanna be totally up front and clear and say that I don’t care if you use WeddingWire or The Knot.

I have clients that do and love it and get a ton out of it. I have clients that try it and it doesn’t work for them and they find that they get a lot of, you know, like spammy kind of ads, or it just doesn’t work for them and their ideal client and their market. That is fine.

I don’t care how you want to bring leads into your business, but what I know from working with thousands of wedding pros is a lot of people wanna get away from feeling like they have to pay The Knot or WeddingWire to get any leads at all.

And even if they are paying The Knot or WeddingWire, they’re often not getting enough leads. And I find that this is something that we tend to overcomplicate. We tend to overcomplicate things in general in our business. I just found myself doing this the other day.

I was working with a bunch of different new tech tools and like, okay, I can get this to do this, but then I would have to connect it to this, and then I would have to connect it to this. And it came to just be like, okay. Or I could just do it the easy way and use the tool that, you know, was best suited for this to begin with.

We all do it. We all like to make things hard. For some reason, it’s normal to do this for yourself, and it’s why you need someone to help you sometimes in your business.

The simple answer to getting more leads, getting more clients is finding out what your ideal clients are. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that simple is always easy. That’s why we go into depth in this inside The Wedding Business Collective.

That’s why when you join and you start working on your marketing plan, one of the first things you’ll do is not just, you know, make guesses about your ideal clients. You’ll actually go speak to them and find out actual data to base your marketing on.

Because once you have an actual understanding that isn’t based on your assumptions, you can make marketing decisions very easily and very quickly. And if you’ve ever wondered, you know, should I advertise on WeddingWire? Should I advertise on The Knot? The way to get out of that kind of limbo is through this in-depth process of really talking to your best clients and figuring out your plan to clone them.

That is a really key piece of what we do inside my membership, The Wedding Business Collective, which you can find out more about at https://theweddingbusinesscollective.com/.

But if you’re wondering how to book more weddings, not just for 2023, but also 2024 and beyond, if you don’t wanna have to freak out about income, I have an entire event coming up August 21st through the 25th about booking more weddings that is going to help you so much. So definitely save the date for August 21st through the 25th.

If you’re on my email list, you will get an invite from me. If you’re not already on my email list, be sure to come over to my website and join so that you do get that invite because registration is opening pretty soon. Now, as I’m actually recording this, we’re just a few days away from that, but that is entirely designed to help you attract more of your ideal clients and book them.

And the simple answer there is you have to find out where your ideal clients are. It’s the annoying reason why I can’t tell you if it makes sense for you to pay these companies, you know, companies like The Knot companies like WeddingWire, other companies that are out there, because I don’t know your ideal client and you only know them to a certain degree, like you’re not inside their head.

You’re making judgments and assumptions based on the things you see them doing. I do see a lot of people, well, I’ve heard from a lot of people recently that say that, you know, not only is it an issue that they’re not getting enough leads, but they don’t have time to do the marketing to get the leads. And even if they did, they don’t know what to do on a consistent basis.

I just wanna call attention to this because I hear from a lot of people that they always feel too busy.

So you’re definitely not alone if you feel that way, but if you’re too busy to market you business, you’re too busy to plan and be strategic, you’re too busy to grow your business. And yeah, like if you run your business the way that many wedding professionals do, you are too busy to do those things.

And that’s a really, really, really big problem because you’re effectively too busy to make money, which is a huge problem in business considering that is the function of the business. You know, if you’re too busy to market your business, which is getting clients, how are you supposed to get clients?

That’s a catch 22 that a lot of wedding pros find themselves in. So it’s not just you if you’re experiencing this, most wedding pros don’t have time to do the marketing to get the leads that they need. And then it becomes the question of, okay, even if they did, they don’t know what to do on a consistent basis.

And next month, like I said, I’ll be joined by other wedding industry experts. We have over 25. It’s a killer lineup to show you what to do to bring in leads and bookings reliably and consistently. And that reliably and consistency part is really, really important to me and everything that I teach.

So you’re definitely going to get a lot out of this event if you’re not really sure what you should be doing on a consistent basis. And I’ll also be showing you how you can shave off at least 5 hours a week so that you can make the time to market your business, because it’s not optional to market if you want a profitable business that gives you time freedom that gives you financial freedom.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t easier ways. We absolutely have ways to make it easier, and we’re gonna be covering those and Book More Weddings Summit.

It’s gonna show you how to get booked out with clients you love, even when things are slow, whether it’s just for you or in your market. And like I said, it’s happening August 21st through the 25th. If you are not at all on my email list, you can get on the waiting list specifically for the summit at bookmoreweddingssummit.com.

The third issue I see people having when it comes to, okay, how do I get these leads? How do I get these clients is they don’t have a repeatable system for getting clients so they can stay booked.

And the way I look at this is your marketing is a lot more like a Vegas buffet instead of a five star dining experience. So if you’re like most wedding pros I talk to, you randomly pile a little bit of everything on like you’re the crazy person at the buffet, eventually you have no more room on your plate and it’s a total mess.

And it’s just like this mis mishmash of food. You’ve got like jello on the mashed potatoes and macaroni on top of that. Nobody wants to have to eat that and pick through that, and it’s just unwieldy. You can’t do anything with it.

Having a repeatable system to keep getting clients so you can stay booked is a lot like cooking. It’s a lot like working from a recipe versus winging it. So you know, like at that buffet you have a lot of different things, you have a lot of randomness going on, and then you have that five star experience. This is usually like a set menu and these are the things that those chefs have gotten so good at.

I swea, by cooking with a recipe. I once tried to cook some hobnobs, which are a British biscuit. I don’t think there’s really an American equivalent to it. They’re fantastic though, I love them. I tried to cook them without adhering to a recipe like I glanced at one and I got a little loosey goosey with it.

I wound up with a tray of just all flat hard like flapjack, like granola. They weren’t even individual biscuits or individual cookies at that point. It was just a giant rectangle and it was an absolute mess. And that’s what happens when you know you’re starting from scratch every single time when you don’t have a repeatable system that you’re working from.

The same thing happens in our marketing. And I know a lot of wedding pros are starting from scratch, you know, every day, every week, every month with their marketing. What you really need is a repeatable system. You need that recipe so you can keep getting clients so that you stay booked.

Now, that recipe may include ingredients that are things like The Knot or WeddingWire, and you get to decide, do you wanna do business with them?

Do you wanna steer clear of them? If it’s something that’s working really well for you, maybe you just wanna stick with it, you know, maybe you’re fine with it and you recognize that, eh, I mean whatever, they’re not the greatest company on earth, but it’s working well for me. I’m not going to rock the boat. You know, I’m gonna market in other ways too, so I’m in more control.

And that’s the thing I really wanna bring your attention to today, is that you have to be in control of getting new clients if you ever wanna get away from paying these companies.

What I see a lot of wedding pros do is completely abdicate responsibility for their marketing by giving money to WeddingWire to The Knot and saying they’re that sorted out. I’ll just get clients through that. This will just work. They don’t work on their marketing, they don’t, you know, make time to make sure they’re marketing.

They don’t have a repeatable system for getting clients. It’s all in somebody else’s hands. And then when that doesn’t work, the whole thing comes crumbling down.

Now, I’m not saying you can’t ever use a third party platform or that you can’t outsource any pieces of your marketing, but you can’t outsource the ownership of that as a business owner.

You have to have ways to get enough leads simply and easily to make the time to do that, and to have a repeatable system so this becomes easier and easier and easier for you. This is what we do in The Wedding Business Collective.

Everyone that comes into The Wedding Business Collective starts by creating their marketing plan and they go through figuring out exactly how to get more of their specific ideal clients. So everybody’s marketing plan looks different because everybody’s businesses are different and everybody’s ideal clients are different, but by the time they finish that marketing plan, they know exactly what they need to do on a monthly, on a weekly. For some people who like to get real specific, even down to a daily basis to know that you’re doing what you need to do in order to bring in clients, because there are an infinite amount of ways to do that.

But you have to make time to create the strategy, to make the plan, to actually make that happen so that you can be in control of it. That way when something’s not working, you can tweak it, you can adjust it.

We do this all the time in The Wedding Business Collective. This particular tactic isn’t working for me, this particular strategy isn’t working for me. What can I change? What can I do? And when you look at it through that lens, it puts you in the driver’s seat. It really puts you in control of your business.

I know I’m the kind of person who likes to be in control. I like to know that if I need more clients, I can get them. I know how to do that. I have processes for that. And if you don’t know how to do that, come and join us in The Wedding Business Collective, and I will show you how to do that step by step.

You can join us, like I said at www.theweddingbusinesscollective.com, but I really want you to look at your business and ask yourself, are you abdicating responsibility for your marketing by paying companies like the not or WeddingWire?

Like I said, it’s totally fine if you wanna do that. I’m not gonna be the person to judge you for it. Like, hey, whatever works for you. I’m not going to advocate for them either. I’m just very neutral on any given marketing tactic or strategy. I’m more interested in what’s going to work for you in your specific business, in your specific ideal client, in your specific market, and for the way that you like to get clients.

Like, you know, if for example, you absolutely hate video, I’m not gonna be like, you have to use TikTok or your business is gonna die ’cause that’s not true, it’s just not. So it’s really all about figuring out what is going to work for you.

And that is how you basically build yourself out of having to pay these companies like the Knot or WeddingWire. You learn how to generate your own leads, you learn how to attract, you know your exact people to you so that you are in control and that you have ownership of that.

And you don’t have to be, you know, forking over thousands of dollars just for them to deliver on that. And knowing that the second you stop paying them, it falls apart. Whereas if you spent that time, if you spent that money working on a marketing plan for yourself, working, working on executing that, working on getting the help that you need, when you stop doing things like the whole thing doesn’t crumble because you’re in control.

So I really don’t want you to wind up in a position where if you stop paying these ad companies, you’re absolutely screwed. And I meet a lot of people who’ve gotten themselves into that position.

So I highly, highly, highly recommend working on taking control of your marketing because that is how you are going to be able to get clients without paying The Knot or paying WeddingWire.

Does it take work? Yeah, of course it does. Everything in business does everything that’s worthwhile does. But with some upfront work with creating your marketing plan, and I see a lot of members of The Wedding Business Collective do this in a month or less.

You have control in your business, you have ways of bringing in clients that you are immediately in control of. You have actions that you can take to influence those things. Whereas when you’re paying the Knot or WeddingWire or any other platform, you know, you don’t have any additional control.

You can’t say, okay, I wanna get three more clients this month. No, you’re just either on there or you’re not. And that is a very passive position to be in in business, especially when we have so much control and so much, you know, ability to shape what we create.

I would love for you to focus on actually creating something that you own, creating something for yourself, a strategy that you can follow, something that’s repeatable, so that you can continue doing it.

You don’t have to be forking out this money if you don’t want to. If you want to, then by all means, continue to do that. I would say use this in conjunction with it so all of your eggs aren’t in that basket so if for whatever reason something happens with The Knot, something happens with WeddingWire, they change something, you are not beholden to the changes in their business or your ability to pay them for advertising because paying for placement somewhere, that’s not a marketing strategy.

That is one very small marketing tactic and it’s not enough to put you in a place of control where you can feel comfortable and confident that you can continue to get new clients with or without them.

So I hope this has been helpful in giving you some things to talk about. Like I said, we have Book More Wedding Summit coming up August 21st through the 25th that I’m sure is going to be a huge help for you if you want to book more weddings.

And if you wanna get started now on creating a marketing plan that is repeatable, that makes your marketing easier, the more you do it, the more you learn from it month in, month out, it gets easier and easier and easier to attract and book these clients, come join us over in The Wedding Business Collective because that my friend, is exactly what I can show you how to do when you first join.

Thanks so much for taking the time to listen today. You can find the Wedding Business Collective over at theweddingbusinesscollective.com, and I will speak to you again very soon.

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Links & Resources:

The Wedding Business Collective
Book More Weddings Summit
Episode 189: Is It Worth It To Advertise On The Knot & WeddingWire?
‘The Knot’ wedding site swindles advertisers, fosters ‘culture of fear,’ ex-workers claim

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