Are You Wasting Time on the Wrong Marketing? Wedding Vendor Marketing That Works

Are You Wasting Time on the Wrong Marketing? Wedding Vendor Marketing That Works

0:00:00 – Heidi Thompson
Are you wasting time on the wrong marketing? Let’s talk about wedding vendor marketing that actually works.

0:01:20 – 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.

0:01:51 – Heidi Thompson
Hello there and welcome to the podcast. I’m your host. As always, Heidi Thompson and I help wedding professionals make their marketing easier so they can book more weddings with people they love to work with, as well as build a business that gives them freedom and flexibility. And today we are tackling a big question Are you wasting time on the wrong marketing? Yes, that can be a thing. If you feel like you’re doing all the things posting on every social media platform, blogging, networking, running ads but you’re still not booking as many weddings as you like, this episode is definitely for you.

I see so many wedding professionals pouring time and energy into marketing that isn’t actually bringing in bookings, and I get it. It’s easy to assume that, because you see someone else doing something, you should be doing it too, and we all do this when we look at our peers. But if you’re spending hours on marketing that isn’t working for you, that’s time you could be using to improve the strategies that do bring in your ideal clients so they work harder for you. So today we’re going to break down how to figure out what’s working, what’s not, and how to focus on the marketing that actually books weddings.

If you’ve been feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, my goal here is to give you clarity so you can stop spinning your wheels and start making your marketing work for you. A big mistake I see wedding vendors make is trying to market everywhere without a clear plan. They post on Instagram, they try to blog consistently, they join every Facebook group. They dabble in Pinterest. Maybe they spend some money on ads, but when they step back, they have no idea what’s actually working, what’s actually driving leads. The really important thing to keep in mind here is that not every marketing channel works the same way for every business.

Your best marketing strategy depends on your ideal clients and how they make decisions. Some couples search for vendors on Google, some rely on vendor recommendations and some book after following you on social media for a while. But if you don’t know where your bookings are coming from, you could be spending hours each week on marketing. That isn’t moving the needle. So let’s talk about how to find out what’s actually booking weddings.

The first step to making your marketing more effective is to figure out what’s already working, because if we can do more of what’s working and less of what isn’t, we’re going to get better results. So, instead of guessing and going off hunches because we’re always somewhat wrong. When we do that. Look at the data. Ask your booked clients where they found you. This is the simplest, most straightforward, most powerful way to know what’s working. When you get an inquiry or book a couple, ask how they found you and track it. If you’ve been assuming Instagram is your best marketing tool, but all of your booked clients are coming from vendor referrals, well then that tells you something.

Next, I want you to check your website analytics, your website analytics. If you have Google Analytics set up and you definitely should. If you don’t go do that today, because you cannot get data before it is set up. So go set it up today, then you’ll have the data in the future. But you can go to see where your traffic is coming from and you can see, if you set this up in your analytics, where your inquiries are coming from, and you can see, if you set this up in your analytics, where your inquiries are coming from. Are they finding you through certain search engines, are they coming from certain platforms, are they coming from social media, and which platforms are sending you the most visitors. But we have to keep in mind we’re not just optimizing for traffic here, we’re optimizing for bookings. So where are you getting the most bookings versus where are you getting the most traffic from? Because those might be different places, and that’s okay. We just want to make sure we know what’s driving bookings.

Number three review past bookings. Number three review past bookings. Go, look at the last 10-15 weddings you booked and see if you can recognize a pattern. Were they all word of mouth referrals? Did they come through your blog after searching for you or for someone that does what you do, for you or for someone that does what you do? Did a particular venue send you multiple clients? That is so incredibly important because we can’t do more of what’s working if we don’t know what’s working.

Case in point Katie, a planner inside the Wedding Business Collective, was doing everything she could to book more weddings. She spent time on Facebook and Instagram and networking and blogging, assuming that more visibility would lead to more bookings, which is totally reasonable, and I absolutely understand why we all think that. But when we looked at her past bookings and we looked at the inquiries she was getting, we found that most of her ideal clients came from a mix of vendor referrals and Facebook.

Surprisingly, not as much from Instagram, and she had been spending hours creating Instagram content, when she could have been strengthening those vendor relationships and using Facebook more intentionally. Once she shifted her focus, she booked 15 weddings in her first year without adding a bunch of new marketing tasks to her plate, because we were really focused on doing more of what works, not a bunch of random new stuff more of what actually works and less of what doesn’t. So the takeaway is that if you don’t know what’s working, you’re probably wasting your time.

Now what do you do when you realize something isn’t working? I’m sure you will find things in your business where, okay, I’m getting some great leads from here, I’m getting some great bookings from here. This is not working how I thought it would work. Whether that is a particular venue that’s sending you leads, or it’s Instagram or any other social media platform, you may find something isn’t working how you thought it would, and once you identify what’s not working, you really have three choices that you can make. You can quit it completely if it’s not bringing in leads, especially if it doesn’t align with your ideal clients. It might not be worth your time. So, for instance, if you are spending hours a week creating TikTok content but none of your couples come from there maybe none of your couples even use TikTok. It might be time to let that go.

Your second option is to change your strategy. If you do think a marketing channel could work for you but it’s not producing results, it could be a strategy issue. Maybe your social media posts aren’t speaking to your ideal client, or your blog isn’t optimized for search and that’s why it’s not getting found. So, before quitting, ask yourself is there a better way to use that platform to get better results? And it usually doesn’t mean completely reinventing the wheel, like I said with the blog posts. Okay, we need to optimize them a little bit for SEO, but the blog post is done. We are making like a 5% adjustment to get it to work.

Your third option is to do more of what’s working. This is the biggest opportunity, and it’s funny because this goes against every instinct. I don’t know why it is. Maybe it’s like a squeaky wheel gets the oil, kind of thing. But when we have something that doesn’t work in our business, we kind of get hyper focused on it, we fixate on it, we get obsessed about making it work. But what if we just let it not work? What if, instead of spending all of our time and effort on that. We spent our time and effort on the things that are working.

So if you’re getting clients from referrals, put more effort into those relationships. Get more strategic about it. If you’re seeing results from SEO, create more content that ranks. If Instagram is working, double down on the types of posts that are leading to inquiries. This is such an easier way to market your business. Instead of looking for something new, instead of fixating on the thing that isn’t working, that you feel like should be working, look at what is actually working and how can I get a little bit more out of this. If you’re like 10% more strategic, 10% more intentional about it, you will get significant results because it has already proven that it’s something that works for you. So let’s do more of that.

One of the things that I focus on inside The Wedding Business Collective is helping wedding vendors stop wasting time on the marketing that doesn’t bring in bookings marketing that doesn’t bring in bookings and members go through my step-by-step process to figure out exactly where their best clients come from and how to get more of them, how to clone them. Instead of guessing. You’ll know which marketing efforts to focus on so you can book more weddings without working more hours. If you’re tired of feeling like you’re doing a million things and you’re not getting the results you want, the Wedding Business Collective will help you create a marketing plan that actually works for your business. And if that sounds like something you need, head over to evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/pod that’s P-O-D, to learn more and join us. Couple final thoughts here.

The biggest marketing mistake wedding vendors make is trying to do everything and giving everything equal effort and attention instead of focusing on what actually books weddings. I don’t know why we do this. We just all have this tendency to ignore the things that are working, because they’re just they’re doing their thing. They’re over there. But when you take the time to track your leads, see what’s working, you can spend your time where it matters most, because if you put a little bit of extra intentionality or planning or effort or time or strategy into something that’s already working, it’s going to pay dividends, as opposed to putting that into something that’s not working that has not yet proven itself. So I hope this episode gave you some clarity on where to focus your marketing efforts. It’s going to be different for everyone. If you had an aha moment or realize something you need to change, send me a message. I would absolutely love to hear about it. Send me a DM on Instagram. You can find me at @evolveyourweddingbusiness, and I will speak to you again very soon.

Links & Resources:

The Wedding Business Collective
Wedding Planner Marketing That Works – How Katie Sautter Booked 15 Weddings in Her First Year
The Lazy Girl’s Guide To Marketing Your Wedding Business

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