How She Fired WeddingWire & The Knot And Built Her Own Lead-Generating Machine With Katherine Hunter

Are you frustrated with the constant struggle of chasing low-quality leads from The Knot and WeddingWire? You’re not alone. In this episode, I’m chatting with Katherine Hunter, a wedding celebrant who found herself in the same position—spending money on The Knot and WeddingWire and getting ghosted by leads who just weren’t a good fit.

But instead of staying stuck in that cycle, Katherine took a bold step. She built her own lead-generating machine that brings in high-quality, perfect-fit clients and completely cut ties with The Knot and WeddingWire saving her $4200 per year and hours each week chasing leads that ghosted her.

In this episode, you’ll hear exactly how she did it—and how you can apply the same strategies to take control of your lead generation, build better relationships with venues, and attract the clients you actually want to work with.

If you’re ready to stop wasting time and start booking more of your ideal clients, this episode is for you

In this episode we’ll cover:

• What Katherine decided to do about poor lead quality from The Knot & WeddingWire
• How this decision saves her thousands of dollars per year
• The misinformation The Knot & WeddingWire give couples
• How Katherine devised her plan to fire The Knot & WeddingWire
• How she decided to try something new and be brave
• The importance of blogging in generating leads
• How to get more out of the effort going into a blog post than just SEO
• How Katherine crafted a relationship building strategy with venues
• How she reached out to 26 venunes
• How this got her on preferred vendor lists without asking
• Her criteria for choosing venues
• The role of the decision pipeline for couples
• Why she did in-person meetings
• How this strategy resulted in way more referrals
• How long this strategy took and how you can do it faster
• How she created assets that pay her dividends every week forever
• The role of credibility in this strategy
• Side benefits from building relationships with venues
• How you can replicate what Katherine did for your own wedding business

How She Fired WeddingWire & The Knot And Built Her Own Lead-Generating Machine With Katherine Hunter

0:00:00 – Heidi Thompson
This is the Evolve Your Wedding Business Podcast, episode number 291. How one wedding professional fired WeddingWire in The Knot and built her own lead generating machine. And, even better, she’s going to share with you exactly how you can learn to do what she did.

0:00:21 – Introduction
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. This is the Evolve your Wedding Business Podcast. Here is your host, Heidi Thompson.

0:00:52 – Heidi Thompson
Well, hello there, my friend. Welcome to the podcast. I am your host, Heidi Thompson, and I am all about helping wedding professionals just like you book more of the weddings that you absolutely love to work on, as well as build a wedding business that gives you time, freedom and financial freedom. And whoa buddy, are you in for a phenomenal episode today?

Today’s guest is a client of mine, and she found herself in a position where she was spending money on The Knot and WeddingWire. She was getting ghosted by leads. She was getting leads that were price shopping her or they just weren’t a good fit. But instead of staying stuck in that cycle, today’s guest, Katherine Hunter, took a really bold step.

She decided she was going to break up with WeddingWire and The Knot, so she set out to build her own lead-generating machine to replace it that brings in high-quality and perfect fit clients, and then she completely cut ties with The Knot and WeddingWire, saving her over $4,000 a year and hours each and every week chasing leads that were just ghosting her.

Now, being that I work with Katherine she’s a member of The Wedding Business Collective I got kind of a backstage pass to watching this happen, and I watched Katherine go from being really frustrated and feeling really stuck to attracting these just phenomenal couples who were the absolute perfect fit for her. And the way she did this I’ve never seen anybody do this is the coolest part of this. We’re going to talk about it today, but I invited Katherine to come and teach about this, to break it down in a masterclass.

So I want to give you that link before we even get started, because you’re going to want to get your ticket to this. It’s at https://evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/blueprint and she is going to share how she did this and how you can replicate it, and I think by the time you get like 15 minutes in, you are going to want to grab your ticket because this strategy that she put together is so incredible and it’s really unique and it leverages her strengths and uses different parts of her business in ways I’ve never seen people do before.

This is such an ingenuitive strategy. It doesn’t mean it’s difficult. Does it take work? Yes, absolutely, but she is going to break it all down for you. So, without any further ado, let’s get into the interview with Katherine.

Today. I am joined by Katherine Hunter, who is a celebrant and wedding officiant in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania. I am so excited to have Katherine here today. We’ve been working together for probably about a year or so in The Wedding Business Collective, but Katherine has developed this insanely brilliant process that we are going to dig into today and I know you’re going to want to learn more about. So before we do that, Katherine, tell us a little bit about you, your business and who you serve.

0:04:44 – Katherine Hunter
Okay, well, as you mentioned, I am a celebrant. I am a humanist celebrant and wedding officiant based in the Lehigh Valley of Eastern Pennsylvania. I have been specializing in very custom and either mostly or completely non-religious wedding ceremonies since 2017. So I serve couples who are looking for a very personalized ceremony that is not based in faith. So I tend to get all kinds of couples who are, you know, more excited about the things that they’re excited to do than the things that they’re supposed to do.

0:05:21 – Heidi Thompson
I love that and I love that way of saying it because it’s like, yeah, they come to you with their own ideas and things that they want to do. So when we met, I know it was at know your exact frustrations, but you were investing a hefty sum into advertising with The Knot and WeddingWire and you were rightfully pissed at the results that you were getting. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

0:06:03 – Katherine Hunter
Yeah, I just felt like the quality of leads that I was getting from The Knot and WeddingWire were very, very poor. These did not seem like couples who had any alignment with the services that I provide and the kinds of couples I try to serve couples I try to serve and you know, The Knot and WeddingWire were encouraging people to not hire professional officiants at all and they were also telling people that they should expect to spend around $200 on average for a professional wedding officiant, which simply didn’t square with what I was paying them and I didn’t feel that I could pull the plug on them because I was getting some leads from them and I didn’t have a really good alternative source of high quality leads. So that was my major frustration at the time.

0:07:00 – Heidi Thompson
Yes, I meet a lot of people in that position because they think and understandably so and they’re promised so much by these platforms that like, if you just pay us this amount, you know you’re going to get fully booked out. And sometimes that happens. It works for some people, but for most people it seems like the amount that they’re spending greatly outpaces what they’re getting out of it. Were you getting any bookable leads?

0:07:34 – Katherine Hunter
I was getting some, but I would say the conversion rate for people who even responded to me individually rather than just an, an automated I’m interested in your services kind of click the box thing that’s generated from WeddingWire. Maybe 30 of them responded to my email at all and maybe one in 10 would go on to book an initial meeting with me. And because they weren’t even though though it was that 10% were not my ideal couples, all of them, even if they did book an initial meeting with me, not all of them were booking me. So it was really really bad percentage wise.

0:08:17 – Heidi Thompson
And that had to be super frustrating.

0:08:19 – Katherine Hunter
It’s a lot of wasted time and a lot of it felt like a lot of wasted money.

0:08:22 – Heidi Thompson
Yeah. So not only are you spending the money on on it, you’re spending the time you’re having to go through and respond to these people and chase them and try to get them on a call and then get them on a call and follow up with them full well knowing that most of them are probably not a good fit like that has to just be such a frustrating position to be in. It’s draining. Yeah.

0:08:46 – Katherine Hunter
It’s very draining and it’s very easy to let that discourage you, and I didn’t want to continue with that.

0:08:55 – Heidi Thompson
So I remember you made a statement to me at some point and you were like I am going to try, I’m going to see if I can do this. And you were like I am going to try to see if I can do this to completely cut off, you know, The Knot and WeddingWire and I’m going to see if I can do it within a year. I’m curious what was going through your head at that time, because a lot of people don’t see any other viable options.

0:09:25 – Katherine Hunter
I didn’t know if there were, if there was another viable option. I know what I was thinking. You know, pie in the sky. What if I could just walk away from paid advertising altogether? Wouldn’t that be amazing? But I didn’t feel like I’m this close to doing that. I felt like, will I ever get there? I want to. I don’t know if I can, but I want to try.

0:09:50 – Heidi Thompson
And I think that’s a really important way to allow yourself to think, because if you didn’t allow yourself to think that way, if you shut it down at the yeah, well, that’s not going to work, which is, I feel like a lot of times, our gut instinct, and I understand why you would have never gone on this entire journey. So I think, just thinking through, okay, like let’s just say it is possible you know I have no way of knowing if it is or not, or what that would look like or what the specifics are, but I’m just gonna like stick out my foot, take a step forward and kind of you know hope, the staircase appears before me as I move forward, and I think a lot of people are afraid to do that. But it sounds like you were at a point that you were just like no, I’m done with this. I would rather try something different and maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t than continue on this path that was leaving you really frustrated. Does that sound right?

0:10:59 – Katherine Hunter
Yes, very much so. So I don’t. For anyone out there who is a Brene Brown fan or who’s familiar with the man in the arena, quote you know the credit goes not to the critic, not to the one who points out how the people trying to do something are failing or could have done it better, but it goes. The credit goes to the man who struggles. You know the one who gives it a go. Who who tries struggles. You know the one who gives it a go. Who who tries. And so trying is is scary. Trying makes you feel vulnerable vulnerable. Trying pretty much guarantees that you’re going to get your butt kicked sooner or later in one way or the other. When you put yourself out there and you try and try and try, you are going to fail sometimes. This little journey that I’ve gone on, it worked, but you know it could have failed. It might’ve gone nowhere, but you got to try something sometimes.

0:11:58 – Heidi Thompson
So what was that first step for you? What was that? Okay, I’m going to put this first thing in place and we’ll see where that goes.

0:12:09 – Katherine Hunter
The first thing that I decided to do was to write a blog post, and this was built on the wonderful foundation of Sara Dunn’s training in SEO. That’s specifically for wedding professionals. I cannot highly I can’t recommend her highly enough. If you haven’t looked into her or considered taking her bootcamp. Go do that Like today. Sign up for it today. It was worth every penny that I spent on it. I think it’s the best money I’ve ever spent on my business my wedding business and I knew that blogging was important.

So my next blog post was going to be about venues wedding venues in my area. So I took that as the basic idea. But I was going to be multiple venues and I thought how can I get multiple benefits out of writing this blog post? I don’t want to just create a blog post with careful keyword research. I don’t just want another blog post on my blog, on my website. I don’t just want to rank really well for those keywords that I’m targeting.

What else can I get out of it? How can I make more out of the efforts that I’m going to put into this? So I thought, if I’m going to be writing about these venues in my area, I want to use that blog post as a springboard to build relationships. I want to know more about the venues in my area. I want them to know more about me, them to think of me. When they have couples who are not going to get married by a priest or a minister and they say we don’t want a faith-based ceremony, who do you recommend? I want them to think of me first. So I thought of this blog post as a springboard for connection and I will tell you right now.

I am an introvert. I am in my happy place when I’m on my couch in my comfy pants, with my cats and my computer or television on. I am not a natural networker. It is out of my comfort zone. So if you are also an introvert, if you feel like that’s a scary idea, I don’t have the nerve to reach out to venues and ask them to meet with me. I feel you. I feel you, yeah, and I can say that it was enough when I reached out to venues for me to say out to venues, for me to say I’m planning a blog post about venues in this area.

I would like to include you. Would you be willing to give me an hour of your time so that I could sit down with you and ask some questions about your business. That’s a big ask, right? It felt like a big ask to me because I felt like I didn’t have much to offer. I didn’t, you know. I was saying, yes, I’m going to write this blog post, but they didn’t know if I could write. They didn’t know that I am very well-versed in SEO now and I can write a great blog post. They didn’t know if I would follow through. Maybe I would say I’m writing a blog post and never produce it, right? So I, in spite of feeling I wasn’t coming to them with a lot to offer, most of them said yes. Some of them had to be nudged a few times, but most of them did meet with me.

0:15:59 – Heidi Thompson
They did, and how many venues are we talking in this initial blog post?

0:16:04 – Katherine Hunter
I think I initially reached out to 26 venues. Now, these are not picked at random. We can talk at some point. We can talk about what went into the venues I reached out to. What were my criteria, how did I vet them, how did I approach them? But altogether, I think initially, 18 of them responded.

Now some of them took a while to respond. Some of them responded almost right away, a day or two. Some of them had to be nudged. Some of them said we’re not interested. Right, I have some private country clubs near me who host weddings and they’re members only. They have no interest in being listed in a list of venues. It’s there. They only cater to their membership. They didn’t want, they weren’t interested. And so some of them just flat out said no, and that’s fine, you can’t. You can’t take it personally. To some extent it’s a numbers game. So I knew that I would not be getting 100% of the venues that I reached out to. But I reached out to 26 initially. 18 of them agreed and it was those 18 that I went on. I went on to include in my initial publication of the blog post.

0:17:34 – Heidi Thompson
Let me ask you because for someone who maybe isn’t super well-versed on the strategy around blogging and SEO, what made you decide to put such a strong focus on venues in this post? Because I think that’s probably not the thing a lot of people would do.

0:17:48 – Katherine Hunter
Mm-hmm. Well, a lot of venues have preferred vendor lists and I would like to be on preferred vendor lists. So I think it’s absolutely feasible to take most, if not all, of my methodology at least, and write a blog post about a different type of vendor category. Like I’m an officiant, I think this is very adaptable. I could write a very similar blog post about my local wedding planners or my local wedding DJs or my local wedding photographers or videographers.

It happened to be that I started with venues because I could identify them in a regional, in a geographical region. So one of my criteria for inclusion you know, I didn’t even reach out to vendor venues, rather, that were more than a 30 minute drive from my house because I wanted to be able to focus on venues where I could serve couples at those venues without having to charge them a travel fee. Okay, so that’s a very cut and dried, objective criteria. These are the venues I want to focus on because they’re close to me. I would rather not have a long drive on a wedding day because it’s stressful for me. So if I were to focus on planners or photographers or DJs, I would think there would be some geographical or regional component, but much less specific because they’re not in one place as venues are. Nor, as far as I’m aware, do they have preferred vendor lists that get used as much as venues do.

0:19:36 – Heidi Thompson
That makes sense and it’s smart the way you prioritize this also because just the way people tend to book things for weddings, the way people tend to book things for weddings Like they’re going to be researching their venue first or in the first you know three things that they’re booking and you, as an officiant, are further down the line. So it’s such a good opportunity to get on their radar early.

0:20:05 – Katherine Hunter
Let me say a little, can I, can I say a little bit about that?

0:20:08 – Heidi Thompson
Yeah, please.

0:20:09 – Katherine Hunter
So I don’t know how many people are familiar with the term of the decision pipeline, but it’s this idea that an engaged couple starts to make decisions in planning their wedding. So almost all of them. As you said, heidi, the first decision is their venue, because that gives them the when and the where. And if you’re a wedding vendor, you know that if a couple reaches out to you and they don’t have their when and where, there’s not much you can tell them. You need to know where they’re getting married and when they’re getting married so that you can tell them whether you’re available or not. So the wedding decision pipeline starts usually with the venue and then the couple goes in sequence through a bunch of decisions.

Now, as a wedding officiant, I am nearly always at the very end of that pipeline. When a couple comes to me, 95 plus percent of the time they have all their other vendors booked. So I want to stress that as a wedding officiant, I’m at one far end of the wedding decision pipeline from the decision about their venue. Almost everyone else is closer to that decision about the wedding venue than I as an officiant am, and yet this strategy still paid off in spades for me. So as a wedding officiant, for instance, I could.

As I said, I could write about planners or DJs or photographers. If you’re a planner and you know that you get booked, I don’t know what this decision sequence is exactly. Maybe photographers tend to get booked before planners, or vice versa. You don’t want to write a blog topic about a decision that happens after you are booked. If you’re a planner and you know that photographers are booked before you, great, you can write about photographers. If you’re a photographer and you know that planners are booked after you, you don’t want to write about planners. Does that make sense? Yeah, did I say that correctly?

0:22:26 – Heidi Thompson
This is a sequential sort of thing, so you want to think about, just like you would with you know referrals. Who can refer me? Is you know who has the customer before I have Exactly.

0:22:40 – Katherine Hunter
So you want to blog about something upstream from you?

0:22:43 – Heidi Thompson
essentially Correct, yeah that’s a really good way to think about it, and I mean, venues are pretty much upstream from everybody, which is great, and they are location specific, as you said, which definitely helps. So you made this decision. You reached out to 26 venues. You heard back from 18. You sat down with them for an hour each. Over how long of a period of time was this?

0:23:19 – Katherine Hunter
I think I crammed almost all of my face-to-face meetings into January or maybe into February of 2023.

0:23:30 – Heidi Thompson
Which makes sense, because it’s a slow time for you, a slow time for them.

0:23:34 – Katherine Hunter
Right, right, actually I think it was. I think I started a little bit later because I actually had I know I had surgery early January of 2023. So I think I started late January and into February, but it was a pretty short period of time. I was doing as many as I could, as quickly as I could.

0:23:52 – Heidi Thompson
I really liked the way you did this, because there are multiple ways to get this information out of people that you want to create this blog post. That’s, excuse me, going to help you rank, for you know, the venues in your area. You could have just sent them an email with questions. You could have sent them a form, but because you were prioritizing relationships, you opted to do face-to-face. We’re going to sit down, I’m going to maybe walk through the venue, we’re going to talk, we’re going to get to know each other a little bit. I think that’s a really, really important decision that you made that this could have turned out very differently in terms of the relationship piece and the referrals piece, because if you’re just sending someone a form, like you don’t really have that continuing relationship with them, you don’t have that conversation, that personal connection.

0:24:52 – Katherine Hunter
Exactly, I didn’t just want to write a blog post. I especially didn’t want to just write a blog post based on what I could find online about venues. So if I were researching venue X, maybe the information online is outdated, maybe it’s no longer true, maybe it was never true in the first place, maybe the venue would prefer that completely different aspects of their business be focused on. More importantly, I couldn’t make an impression. More importantly, I couldn’t make an impression. Yeah, right, if I’m just an anonymous name or an email address on the internet, what kind of impression are they going to get at me? Almost none, right.

So I will say that, while I did reach out to venues that I had officiated at a few times, I also reached out to venues I’d never officiated at, that I wanted to work at, and those people really didn’t know me, right? So this strategy allowed me to get in front of either the venue manager, the sales event manager, sometimes the owners, and it allowed me to make an impression. I was often given the same tour of the venue that prospective couples get if they’re considering booking the venue for their wedding, which is not something most vendors usually get. Or you know, you’re told things, you see things. You experience things that you don’t experience as a vendor working at that venue on a wedding day.

0:26:35 – Heidi Thompson
Yeah, that’s a totally different experience than like hey, can I email you a couple questions? And I think it’s really key to point out that the reason you made that decision is because you knew that these relationships were going to be important. And getting to know them a bit, and just to give people a little bit of preview of the results you got, tell us a little bit about what these relationships have yielded for you.

0:27:15 – Katherine Hunter
So of the um, the 20, so shortly after I published the blog post with 18 venues, two kind of slow poke venues caught up with me and I had time to add them in before the really busy season hit. So it was up to 20 venues in the blog post shortly after it was published blog post shortly after it was published. Of those 20, I know for a fact that six of them put me on their preferred vendor lists. I never, ever, asked any venue to put me on a preferred vendor list, and I strongly suspect, although I can’t know for sure, that there are other venues that I wrote about who also added me to preferred vendor lists. But those preferred vendor lists aren’t available online, so I don’t see them. I don’t know them for sure. I don’t know for sure that I’m on preferred vendor lists, but I’m sure getting more inquiries from their couples.

0:28:16 – Heidi Thompson
So many people want that. So many people want that I want to be on their preferred vendor list. Like, what do I have to do? That’s right.

This is such a brilliant approach because you didn’t go in there asking for something. You didn’t go in there, you know, begging to be referred. You went in there giving. You went in there saying I want to feature you, I’m working on this, I want to get as much information I can about your venue and naturally they’re going to be like, oh my God, this is fantastic, yeah, and if they like you, if they get to know you a little bit, they’re like, yes, we should absolutely, you know, collaborate more together. I would love to refer you know clients to you. It just opens so many doors, especially when you consider it sounds like a lot. But an hour of your time to talk to someone and to come at it from a position of giving as opposed to, can I set up this interview with you so I could ask you to give me stuff that’s game changing for your business and it’s such a highly leveraged return on investment for that time spent.

0:29:37 – Katherine Hunter
Yeah, it was a huge reward for the time invested. I do want to stress this is not what you would put in your quick wins category. Oh, no hours of work per venue, okay, so, as I said, I didn’t just reach out randomly to venues. I did quite a bit of research. Some you know some of that research resulted in certain venues being rejected. I always wanted to go to the venue, knowing something about them and being able to honestly say to them I believe we serve the same couples Right? Yes, research was significant. It was.

It was a big chunk of the time that I spent and also planning out how the blog post would be structured.

So, planning out how the blog post would be structured Now, some of that is work that’s still paying me dividends, because I repeated this strategy for another region this past winter.

So I’ve you know I saved myself time the second time through and I can certainly save people time with some tips. I don’t think it would take somebody else quite as long as it took me the first time through when I was figuring it all out, but it’s a significant investment of time that continues to pay dividends for me, both in terms of my network and in terms of the wonderful leads I get directly from venues. I also think that, because I did make sure to go to venues where I did genuinely believe, I think we serve the same couples. If that is true, and to the extent that that is true, when I do get referrals from those venues, they are my ideal couples. No, I’m not fielding junk inquiries anymore. The inquiries that come to me tend to be very, very high quality leads, so that return on investment has been huge, not to mention that I was able to walk away from paid advertising and still get amazing leads, better quality leads overall.

0:32:15 – Heidi Thompson
I love that so much and I remember distinctly when you were like today’s the day, pulling the plug, don’t need it anymore. Like saving all of this money that I was spending to get terrible quality leads, because I’ve basically built my own lead generating machine through blogging and SEO and relationships. Right, that’s amazing.

0:32:43 – Katherine Hunter
So yeah, but I mean, if you do the math, 10 hours of work per venue, that’s in the blog, that’s 200 hours of work. Mm-hmm, it might be a little bit more than that, honestly, but I would say it was at least 10 hours of work because you got to. You know, do your research, reach out to them, drive over there, have the, have the hour or hour and change with them, drive home, write up your notes, structure your blog post, double check everything. I mean, it’s. It is a significant undertaking. I’m not I don’t want to soft pedal this to anybody. It’s, it’s a lot of work, but I am so glad I did it.

0:33:26 – Heidi Thompson
And I think it’s important to highlight that this is one of those things where you know, when you just throw up a post on social media, it’s there and it’s gone. What you have created is an asset on your website that really improves your SEO, really improves how you’re found. But you’ve created a bunch of other assets, like 20 other assets in the relationships that you kicked off and really continued to foster through all of these different venues that you sat down with. And when we think about the difference between okay, here’s this thing I do, and you’re in this kind of hamster wheel of having to do it all the time versus building an asset, this asset pays you dividends. You know, every week, every month, going forward, every time, you get a new lead as a result of this, and it doesn’t stop Right.

That’s my favorite thing about this kind of strategy is it’s not, like you know, on social things have a certain lifespan. That’s not the case with this. Sure, you know, if a venue adds on an entire new building and you want to add something about that, yeah, you’re going to update it. Sure, but you know 99% of the work is done and it’s this investment that just keeps paying you, and I love to see it Right.

0:35:06 – Katherine Hunter
So let me give you an example of something that works to my advantage. Around this blog post, there is a small venue that was included from the get-go in the first 18. They moved from the get-go in the first 18, they moved right. They didn’t move very far, they’re still in my region, but I noticed that they moved. That was an excuse for me to reach out and say hey, I want to be sure that my blog post still reflects, you know, accurate information about you. Is there anything that’s changed about your, your business, that I can, I can update? You know, they invited me to the grand opening at their new location, so that was another chance to renew my relationship with them. It also was a chance for me to update my blog and then tell Google hey, this blog post has been updated, it’s fresh. The Google algorithm likes fresh, right, so there are just so many multilayered benefits built into this overall project.

The other thing I want to recognize is that I felt like my standing, my authority and my stature was improved in multiple ways by writing this blog post. It certainly improved my standing among venues. They sort of saw, okay, this person, you know she’s a writer, she’s asking intelligent questions, she knows about our business before she shows up here. She’s interested in our business, she presents well, she follows through with what she offers. The other thing is that the amount of information that gets dumped on me when I have these meetings is huge. There are things that I learn about the staff members, the owners, the managers, whoever I’m meeting with, and the back end of their business and how long they’ve been like. You just get so much information you would never get on a wedding day and that raises my stature, not only with them but with prospective couples.

So I mentioned that not every venue I included was a venue I had actually worked at prior to the blog post being posted. When I got inquiries from couples for that venue, I was then able to say to them honestly, that’s a venue I’m familiar with. I didn’t say to them that’s a venue I’ve officiated at, but I really was familiar with that venue. I’d gotten the same tour that they had. I’ve talked to the staff there. I have an impression of the staff, I have an impression of the place, right. That is a depth of knowledge that makes me look very credible, very experienced, more professional in the eyes of prospective couples.

0:38:10 – Heidi Thompson
That is one of the benefits that I think most people wouldn’t think of. But yeah, you clearly know your stuff about this venue. You have a connection to it, you have an understanding of it that a lot of other people who’ve never worked there just don’t have, and that really helps you stand out.

0:38:33 – Katherine Hunter
It really does, and I think you know I’ve been doing this since 2017. And in spite of that, there were some venues quite close to me where I’d never officiated. If I were a brand new wedding professional with very little experience of my local venues, this would be a wonderful way to jumpstart your knowledge base of your region. You would come off as having the experience of somebody who’d been at it for a few years at least, I think.

0:39:04 – Heidi Thompson
Yeah, it’s going to give you that intel, it’s going to give you the connections, it’s going to wind up putting you on preferred lists. All of these benefits from this one strategy. So now in your business, what do things look like? Where are your leads coming from? You know, tell me more about, like, the result of this. I know it’s been good because she shared it with me and you’ve done it again with another area, so clearly it was worth it. But like what is it like now, as opposed to how it was, was what was a year or two ago, when you were like I, all these leads are shit, like I can’t do anything with them.

0:39:51 – Katherine Hunter
I spend very, very little time fielding leads. You know the leads that come to me are highly qualified leads from the jump, so I do get some random kinds of leads from people who find me through Google. My SEO has been an ongoing project, as I said, and that is paying dividends. Most of the people who find me through Google, I would say, are looking for low-end services, elopements or simple license signings, which are really quite economical services. The ones who are booking a venue obviously they want a good ceremony service, a full service, and so, yeah, most of my leads do come through more in one way or the other. They’re coming through the venue or as a result of this blog post.

I’ll tell you what’s not happening. I don’t think couples who are looking for their venue are finding my blog post, reading it, making use of it and then going oh look, honey, this was written by a wedding officiant. Maybe we should reach out to her and hire her. That’s not happening as far as I can tell. I am way down the pipeline from their venue decision. So I think it’s an indirect route to lead generation. For me, it’s not the blog post motivating the couple to reach out to me, it’s the relationships I’ve built with venues and them recommending me to their couples and seeing my value. That’s how I get my leads.

0:41:39 – Heidi Thompson
It’s kind of an interesting loop that you’ve built so like they could come to the blog post, go check out those venues, and those venues, after they’ve booked, are turning around and saying, yeah, you should work with Katherine.

0:41:54 – Katherine Hunter
I mean, it’s possible that there are couples bookmarking my blog posts and, you know, maybe they are kind of in the back of my mind. They’re saying, well, you know, down the line we’re going to need an officiant. I’m just going to bookmark this, but I don’t think. I don’t see that happening, not directly. I see it more. The venues know me, the venues have confidence in me. I have multiple ways built in to nurture the relationships that I built.

I stay fresh in the minds of these venues and I continue to remind them that I exist, that I wrote a great blog post. It’s ranking in the top five for Lehigh Valley wedding venues. It’s a strong asset out there on the web for that. It gives the venues, by the way, free advertising. Yeah, my blog post on Lehigh Valley wedding venues outranks The Knot and WeddingWire, or at least at times it does. The algorithm is always bouncing search results around a little bit, but a lot of the time, what I did for those venues for free for an hour of their time is higher profile on the internet than what they are paying for and what you were paying for and what I was paying for, yeah. So I would love, love, love, love to teach other people to do this, because I don’t think anybody. I think local networks can be, and should be, stronger than what we pay for to people we don’t know.

0:43:42 – Heidi Thompson
That’s a really good point. I never really thought about that, but it should be quantifiably better. You’re right. Right, because this is a relationship business.

0:43:56 – Katherine Hunter
Right. The other thing I want to say about the approach I took to creating the blog post, gathering the information I need for the blog post everybody is talking about AI right now is they cannot. It cannot give a subjective impression of anything. All it can do is go out there, scour the totality of the internet and see what it knows. What can it find out about a venue or a wedding vendor? Right, when I visit a wedding venue, I have a subjective experience of the place. What stands out to me? What do I think makes this place special? What would I say to a couple in particular about this venue or this vendor? Right, ai can’t do that. Nothing stands out to AI. So when I write about a venue and I say this is what I think makes this place special, I am doing something that AI cannot do.

0:45:12 – Heidi Thompson
Yeah, that’s a really good point and it’s not hard and it’s scraping from existing information which could be wrong, and unless you’re in contact with the venue, you’re not getting the correct information and it’s not building the relationship, which it’s funny, because you started off on this it sounds like as an SEO project and it’s springboarded into a relationship project and the two are just infinitely intertwined. But you’re getting so much return from those relationships that I think sometimes it’s easy to overlook those relationships and how much we need them. But it has radically changed your business. AI is not going to do that for you.

0:46:01 – Katherine Hunter
Yeah, it has radically changed my business and while I don’t see the keyword ranking as of primary benefit to me, like I said, couples aren’t going directly from finding my blog, making use of it, to booking me, but it matters for me to be able to reach out to a venue and say, hey, I just want to let you know I really appreciate you giving me the time so that I could post that blog post. You know it’s been up for three months now and it’s ranking number six in the search results for Lehigh Valley wedding venues, and I just wanted to let you know that I really appreciate you helping make this happen. Right, when you’re telling them, my blog post that talks about you, that didn’t cost you a penny, is doing this well, I think it matters to them, yeah.

0:46:57 – Heidi Thompson
I would be thrilled if I heard that from someone.

0:47:00 – Katherine Hunter
Right. And the first time I did this for the Lehigh Valley wedding venues, I had to go to them feeling very empty handed. You know I was offering to write a blog post, but the blog post didn’t exist yet. I really had nothing to show, nothing that I could point to and say here’s what you’re going to be getting for giving me an hour of your time. That blog post does exist now. So now when I go to the next region over, or when I went to the next region over, I said look, here’s what I did for Lehigh Valley wedding venues. I’m interested in writing a new blog post about the wedding venues in your region, and you know I focus on SEO so that my blog posts rank. Well, go check out what I did for Lehigh Valley wedding venues. Would you like to be involved in the next round? That’s very powerful.

0:47:55 – Heidi Thompson
Was that an easier? Yes, that second time.

0:47:58 – Katherine Hunter
It was. You know, having the proof of concept, having something to show, has made it a lot easier. It’s made me more confident, of course, but it’s also something that already exists. And also, by the way, you know, some of the venues that never responded. A year later I reached out to them and said hey, you know, I reached out to you a year ago and I guess you just you know you probably were busy or my email got buried but I’d really like to update this Lehigh Valley wedding post. Would you be interested in having a meeting? A couple of them said, yeah, they weren’t interested the first time around, but now that that wedding venue post exists, they want to be on it. So it’s easy to add to a successful post like that.

0:48:46 – Heidi Thompson
That is so amazing to hear, because we don’t think about marketing in this way enough.

We don’t think about the assets that you can build, that you can leverage, that you can continue to get a return on, as opposed to just having to reinvest your time every single week on these various tasks that we feel like we need to be doing.

This is largely your marketing plan now and it’s amazing, it’s working beautifully. You’ve created your own lead generation machine that has given you so many side benefits and so many relationships. You’re so much more connected with you know the venues and probably the vendors as well in your community Like there are just endless lists of benefits from doing this and approaching your marketing in a way of looking at how do I build my own lead generation machine, how do I create an asset that is going to keep giving me a return on investment instead of just like sputtering out after a week? And I think that is a really huge shift in the way most people think about marketing, and I know you are going to be teaching people how to do this and people yes, I cannot wait. I was so excited you agreed to do this.

0:50:25 – Katherine Hunter
I really want, I want other people to be able to pull the plug on expensive advertising that wastes too much of their time as well as their money. I and even though venues are kind of, because they’re at the opposite end of the pipeline, so they can’t benefit from this strategy in the way that vendors can. But if you’re a venue owner listening to this, I want you to understand that if someone offers you this and they can pull off a high ranking blog post like this, that’s free to you. That’s that’s. It costs you nothing. Yes, your competitors will be on the list. That is what makes it a good blog post in the eyes of the Google algorithm. Eyes of the Google algorithm. Right, if it’s just focusing on your venue, it’s not going to get found by people looking for their venue in a region. Yet, right, it’d have to be searching specifically for your venue. So if a vendor in your area comes along and says would you like to be involved with this, please say yes, would you like to be involved with this?

0:51:41 – Heidi Thompson
Please say yes. I mean, there’s just endless benefits for everybody involved. It’s amazing to see what you’ve done with this and the fact that you now want to teach it to people. You guys, you’re going to be able to learn directly from Katherine.

On October 29th, you can get your ticket at https://evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/blueprint. She’s sharing her full blueprint on how she built this strategy that got her away from The Knot and WeddingWire. And again, I’m not for or against. I’m for let’s do things that work, and this works so much better for you. You’re spending less time fielding leads. You’re getting more leads. They’re higher quality. You’re getting more bookings. I mean, why wouldn’t you want to do this?

0:52:38 – Katherine Hunter
I think so. Yeah, I love the leads that come to me now. I just I feel good and excited about the leads that do make it into my inbox and, yeah, it’s just less wasted time and a lot less wasted money.

0:52:57 – Heidi Thompson
I love that and I love that this has combined so many different areas of business for you into like this one hub that you can rinse and repeat, that. You can improve upon that. And I hear in what you’re saying about finding ways to continue to connect with venues that maybe you missed the first time around because they didn’t get back to like. It just keeps giving these opportunities over and over and over again if you’re open to it it really, really does.

0:53:29 – Katherine Hunter
We have, I have there’s lots of things I haven’t even touched on. Um, I consider the ongoing nurturance of those relationships to be kind of phase four of my project and that will be ongoing. All the heavy lifting is done but you can’t just let it sit there as a blog post on your website. You know you have to continue to water the seeds that you’ve planted. You have to continue to leverage the work that you put in. But it’s so rewarding and I love knowing more about the wedding professionals and the wedding venues in my area and having a personal connection to them. It does feel like I’ve built a network with this blog post.

0:54:20 – Heidi Thompson
What a great side effect to get from that and it all came from. I don’t want to pay this company this kind of money anymore because they’re giving me poor lead quality and it’s making me do a bunch of extra work. And now you’re getting to do significantly less and reap more because, like you said, of the seeds that you plant it yeah, it’s funny I said seeds because I have a background in permaculture.

0:54:46 – Katherine Hunter
I don’t know if anybody is familiar with that, but, um, it’s a way of, you know, providing food and necessities for humans, and one of the core principles in permaculture is how do you get multiple benefits out of one. Whatever you’re doing, whatever you put time or effort or resources into, how do you get more than just one benefit out of it? So that’s a sort of a challenge to your mindset, like, if I’m going to do this, what can I get out of it? How do I make, how do I do this in a way that provides multiple benefits and not only to yourself? Sometimes the benefits are to others, right? So that permaculture thinking was also a part of how I approached the project overall. How do I leverage this? Where do I, where can I squeak out one more benefit in in doing this? How do I, how do I get more?

0:55:47 – Heidi Thompson
And it’s so much easier to get more out of something that is already working than be like, oh, I’m going to go like, do this other thing that I have no proof will actually work. I love the way you think about that. I think that is really what has enabled you, uniquely, to be able to put this together and now be able to share it with others. So if you would like to learn this process how you put your own blueprint together, your own lead generating machine, so you can, you know, leave these platforms, stop spending this money head to https://evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/blueprint. That’s happening on October 29th and I cannot wait for that, Katherine. I will link to the infamous blog post, of course in the show notes.

But if people want to connect with you, where should they go?

0:56:46 – Katherine Hunter
I would say just go to my website. My email is on my contact form. If you have questions about the upcoming training and the mastermind class, I am more than happy to answer questions. I love connecting with other vendors and I’m so excited to share this technique and see more vendors empowered, you know, to to create their own lead stream without having to pay for it.

0:57:15 – Heidi Thompson
Me too. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today, and I cannot wait for you to share this with everyone. That link again, guys, is https://evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/blueprint. Katherine, thank you so much for sharing this with us.

0:57:31 – Katherine Hunter
Thank you so much for having me, Heidi. It’s been a treat.

0:57:34 – Heidi Thompson
Okay, so was I right, Are you like? Oh my God, I need to do this? Because it is such a brilliant strategy and Katherine is willing to break it down for you in that masterclass coming up October 29th. You can get your ticket to that at https://evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/blueprint and I will have the links to everything we talked about today in the show notes.

I would love to hear from you what did you think about this episode? What did you think about this strategy? Is this something that you want to put in place for yourself or has it given you some ideas of other things that you can do? I love talking to listeners of the podcast, so shoot me a DM on Instagram. I am @evolveyourweddingbusiness over there and I hope to see you at the Expert Masterclass with Katherine. Again, that link is https://evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/blueprint and I will speak to you again very soon.

About Katherine Hunter

Katherine is a wedding officiant and mentor who is passionate about helping other wedding pros step away from paid advertising. Despite being an introvert, she discovered how to forge connections and build mutually beneficial relationships with her fellow wedding professionals that allowed her ideal couples to find her.

She is no longer constantly hustling to find them. She’s eager to share her experience and strategies to help other wedding entrepreneurs do the same.

Website: www.katherinehuntercelebrant.com
Instagram: @katherine_hunter_celebrant

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Links & Resources:

The Wedding Business Collective
🎟️ Get your ticket to the live How She Fired WeddingWire & The Knot And Built Her Own Lead-Generating Machine Masterclass and Q&A with Katherine Hunter!
The blog post behind Katherine’s strategy
Sara Dunn’s Wedding SEO Bootcamp
Episode 204: 3 Tips for Blogging for SEO (Even if You Hate Writing!) with Sara Dunn

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