You’ve got a wedding business that you love and you want to grow it, but how do you market your wedding business exactly? If you’re not sure how to market your wedding business to actually get more clients, you’re not alone!

I get a lot of questions from wedding professionals that sound a lot like this:

“How do I get more likes on Facebook?”
“How do I get more comments on Instagram?”
“How do I get more repins on Pinterest?”

There is a huge problem with questions like this – they are all focused on the wrong thing.

A lot of wedding professionals get obsessively focused on the tactics when really none of that matters without a strategic marketing plan. It’d be like me dumping out the Lego set for the Death Star and not giving you the instructions or the picture of what it’s supposed to look like. Sure you’re doing work putting stuff together, but you have no idea if you’re moving toward your goal because you don’t know what the goal is.

So, what is a wedding professional supposed to do?

How do you market your wedding business?

You stop throwing everything at the wall and create a marketing plan.
 

How To Market Your Wedding Business With A Marketing Plan

 
You could use the “spray and pray” technique where you blast your marketing to anyone with a pulse and a bank account. But here’s the thing…not only is this ineffective, but it also wastes your time and your money and it’s going to leave you feeling frustrated.

To market your wedding business you need a marketing plan, but it’s not just going to be one of those random exercises you write out and put away in a drawer never to be seen again. Here is what a strategic marketing plan that you use every day is going to do for you.
 

1. Provides Focus

 
Your wedding business marketing plan is going to help you identify exactly which activities matter and which can be ignored. This gives you focus and it also helps you deflect shiny objects like you’re wielding Wonder Woman’s Bracelets of Submission.

 

2. Reduces Overwhelm

 
I know that you know how it feels to be so overwhelmed by all of the things you need to do. It sucks! Having a marketing plan helps reduce that overwhelm because you know exactly what you need to do to market your wedding business and what can wait or not be done at all. Not everything matters!
 

3. Provides Clarity & Certainty

 
You won’t feel lost or unsure of what you need to do to market your wedding business and as a result, you’ll take action more effectively. Imagine having the steps you need to take laid out right in front of you. Sounds pretty amazing right?!
 

4. Helps You Do More Of What Works

 
You do a lot of things to promote and market your wedding business, but what’s working for you? Creating a marketing plan for your wedding business helps you do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. You’ll actually know what doesn’t work for your business because you’ll be able to measure! That means marketing your wedding business can become a process of rinsing and repeating. Holy simplicity Batman!
 

5. Keeps You Organized

 
Having a marketing plan for your wedding business will ensure that your marketing is proactive and organized, not reactive and knee-jerk. Proactive marketing gets better results and makes you feel less crazy which is a huge plus.
 

6. Helps You Stand Out From Your Competition

 
Differentiating yourself from everyone else who does what you do can be difficult. Your wedding business marketing plan will help you differentiate your business in a crowded market because you’ll know exactly what your marketing messaging should be. You’ll stand out by design and attract the right people to you when you market your wedding business.
 

7. Makes Things Easier

 
Running a business can be taxing so why not make things easier whenever possible? Having a marketing plan will make marketing your business so much easier! You won’t have to wrack your brain for what to say or what to post to market your wedding business because you’ve already done that work up front. As a result, your marketing will take up less time and less headspace freeing you up to do the work you love and have time for yourself.

Most wedding professionals focus only on the tactics, and that’s a huge problem. When you do that, you don’t get any of these benefits and you don’t get very good results. If you focus solely the marketing tactics without having a plan, you’re going not going to get very far.

A lot of wedding professionals waste months and even years focusing solely on the tactics without having a marketing plan and that’s when they come to me because their tactics aren’t working. You don’t have to go through that frustrating process of trial and error. Get off that shitty treadmill of tactics and start with creating a marketing plan now and you’ll thank me later.

 

What Is A Wedding Business Marketing Plan?

 
Okay, so you know you need a marketing plan to market your wedding business but what exactly is that and what does it include?

If you Google “marketing plan” you’re going to find all sorts of different definitions and ideas of what a marketing plan should entail for different businesses. As a wedding business owner, your marketing plan is made up of just 5 sections. The great thing about this is that once you’ve created your marketing plan, you just have to adjust it going forward. You’ll never have to start from scratch again.

Hint: The secret sauce of a successful marketing plan lies in sections 1-3. Most people jump to section 4 and that’s why they fail.
 

Section 1: Your Goal

 
This first section of your wedding business marketing plan lays out what success looks like for you. This is going to be different for everyone. For instance, it could be a $ amount in revenue or in profit. It could be a certain number of clients. In order to come to this number, work backward. If you want to earn $10,000 more this year than you did last year, how many more clients is that?

When you’re setting your goal, make sure it is a specific number. If you set your goal to just be “more clients” you’ll never know if you reached it. Is more clients 1 client or is it 20? If your goal is to earn $10,000 more this year than you did last year, you have an exact number you can measure.

In this section, you’ll want to decide on your big annual goal and then break it down into a goal for the next 90 days. Inside The Wedding Business Collective, we go more in depth on exactly how to plan your marketing down to the month, week, even day in the How To Squash Overwhelm With A Marketing Plan course. Click here to start your free 10-day trial and see if it’s right for you!

90-day planning allows you to break your goals down into small steps you can take on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis. This makes reaching your goal so much easier and less daunting.
 

Section 2: Research

 
In order to have an idea of what will work for your wedding business marketing, you have to do some research. The How To Squash Overwhelm With A Marketing Plan course takes you step-by-step through how to do this. This section of your plan is going to contain research that you’ll do on your ideal client, competition, your business as it is currently, your ideal client’s buying cycle, and where you need help.

Your Ideal Clients

In order to research your ideal clients, you’ll go through my Clone Your Best Clients method. In a nutshell, you’ll first determine who your best clients are. These are the people you wish you could clone and work with over and over again. We’re going to build your marketing plan around attracting more of these people.

Once you identify your best clients, you need to ask yourself some questions.

• What do they value?
• What do they care about?
• What do they fear?
• What do they love?
• What do they geek out on?
• Who are they as people, not just as a bride or groom?

There are plenty more questions where that came from but this is going to help you start to really identify who your ideal client is on a very human level.

I cannot stress this enough. Your ideal client is the foundation of your wedding business and unless you have a good foundation, you’re going to sink.

Your ideal client is a whole person, not just a bride or a groom, and their values directly influence their consumer behavior. The key to marketing effectively is understanding those values that your ideal client holds and using them in your marketing.

Take your own consumer behavior for example. I’m sure there are certain places you love to shop and I’m sure there are other places you never shop at because you can’t stand them. If, for example, if you really value being green and ethical in your purchasing decisions, you probably take your own shopping bags with you on your trip to Whole Foods.

Why Whole Foods?

Because that brand makes you feel good and secure knowing that what you buy is safe for you and your family, was made fair-trade and came via their green distribution centers. Whole Foods gets you and your values and they market to you using those values.

Our values impact our consumer behavior and of course they do because where you decide to spend your money is incredibly emotional and personal. No one wants to support a brand they hate. These values matter whether we’re talking about grocery shopping hiring a wedding professional.

These values are intensely personal and powerful and it’s something you just don’t get when you only look at the basic demographics of who you think your ideal client is.

Most wedding professionals are far too vague in defining who their ideal client is. Get to a point where you can describe them like you would describe a friend of yours to someone who you think would be a great boyfriend or girlfriend for them. You wouldn’t describe them as being 20-35 and busy. That’s not what matters in that case and it’s not what matters in your business either. I challenge you to go deeper when you market your wedding business.

Why?

Because when your marketing doesn’t line up with who your ideal client is and the problem they want you to solve, they won’t buy from you.

On the other hand, when you do understand your ideal client as an actual person, you know what they love, hate, truly care about, can’t stand, wouldn’t ever go for and the words they use. all of a sudden you don’t have to wonder what to say in your marketing to attract them because you actually GET them.

Your Competitors

If you want to stand out in a crowded market, you need to understand who your competitors are and why someone would choose to work with them over you. You’ll need to do a simple competitive analysis where you’ll examine who your competitors are, who they’re marketing to, and how they’re marketing. We go more in depth into this inside the How To Squash Overwhelm With A Marketing Plan course so click here to get access!

Your Business

In the How To Squash Overwhelm With A Marketing Plan course, I walk members of The Wedding Business Collective through running a SWOT analysis for your business. Conducting this kind of analysis allows you to clearly see your strengths and weaknesses. It also opens up opportunities that you may not have seen. You can conduct this analysis on your business as a whole or on a specific part like your packages, pricing, or marketing.

Buying Cycle

Every client goes through a buying cycle from being totally unaware of their problem or what options are available all the way through to making a purchase. In this section, ask yourself these questions:

• Where do your clients come from?
• When do they come to you?
• What stages of the buyer’s journey exist for them?

This is going to help you determine where you need to be marketing, when, and what your marketing message should be for people in each stage of the buying cycle. When you market your wedding business with this in mind you’ll get much better results.

What You Need Help With

Business is lonely and difficult when you try to do everything on your own. Why make it harder than it needs to be? Where do you need help, guidance, assistance, or support to enact your plan? Is there knowledge you need to market your wedding business or do you need help executing?
 

Section 3: Messaging

 
So you know who you’re marketing to, what stages of the buying cycle they go through, and what your competitors are up to. Now it’s time to decide on the words and messages you’ll use to market your wedding business.

What is messaging?

Messaging is what grabs your prospect’s attention, tells them how you can solve their problem, why they should trust you, and why they should choose to do business with you over and above any and all other choices they might have. Messaging does a LOT of heavy lifting for your marketing and sales efforts.

In order to start developing your messaging, ask yourself these questions:

• What is your USP? (Unique Selling Proposition)
• What is your niche?
• Who are you to go-to person for?
• What language do you use to attract your ideal client?
• What messaging do you need to use for each stage of awareness? (Someone who isn’t even sure how wedding planners differ from wedding coordinators need to hear something different than those who are deciding which wedding planner to hire.)

 

Section 4: The How

 
This is the section most wedding professionals skip to but it requires you to have done sections 1-3 first. Iif you try to market your business without them, it won’t work.

This is the section where you’ll determine how you’re going to market your wedding business based on everything you’ve put together in sections 1-3.

Channels

You’ve researched your ideal clients and hopefully, you’ve interviewed them as well.

Which channels/platforms will you use to market to them? Which ones are they using?

You don’t have to be on every platform! You don’t need a full-on plan for each platform either because this marketing plan will carry across channels. I love saving your time like that. ?

Have you decided which channels you’ll use to market your wedding business? If so, you can move on to tactics.

Tactics

Tactics are simply what you’re going to do on each platform.

What will you post? How often?

What assets will you need? Do you need graphics or videos or will you be using text-only communication?

Your Roadmap

Your roadmap is a map of what you’re going to be focusing on and when to market you wedding business. This helps you stay even more focused and makes your marketing incredibly simple and easy to execute. Map this our for the next 12 months with monthly focus topics.

When will you promote certain products/services?

When will you do promotions? (Not sure how to plan a promotion? We have a course for that inside The Wedding Business Collective!)

90 Day Planning

I already shared that I love 90-day planning because it helps you determine exactly what you need to do on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis to reach your goals. In this part of Section 4, you’re going to create your 90 Day Plan.

What is your goal for the next 90 days?

What are you testing? (After all, business is a constant experiment!)

What will you do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis to market your wedding business?

If this plan is something you need in your business, I highly recommend you join us inside The Wedding Business Collective. Not only is this covered in detail in the How To Squash Overwhelm With A Marketing Plan course, but we also do 2 planning workshops each year to work on creating these plans. Good planning leads to getting the results you want!

Ideas For Later

Part of shiny object syndrome is the anxiety that you’ll forget or lose your brilliant ideas. While you’re creating your marketing plan, decide where you will store your great ideas for later. Then, every 90 days, go back and decide which ones you’ll pull out of storage and put into action!
 

Section 5: Measuring

 
You can’t possibly know what works and what doesn’t work for marketing your wedding business unless you’re measuring. This doesn’t actually have to be that complicated and it’ll make your marketing a whole lot easier. After all, why would you want to spend time doing something that doesn’t work?

In order to determine how and what you’ll measure in your business, ask yourself these questions:

• What KPIs will you measure? (Key Performance Indicators)
• How often will you measure them?
• What is working and what isn’t?
• Why?
• Where are the leaks in the funnel?
• What can you test?

If you aren’t already using Google Analytics, get that set up on your website today. It’s a great tool for determining what’s working, where people are coming from, and where there are leaks in your funnel that needs to be patched.

Make a CEO Date with yourself to measure and review your findings. From there, you’ll be able to decide what to do next to improve your results. With this process, it’s a matter of tweaking. Not starting over every week and throwing everything and anything at the wall only to find that nothing sticks.

Are you ready to dive in and create your marketing plan that will squash overwhelm and actually get results? Click here to start your free trial to The Wedding Business Collective and dive into the How To Squash Overwhelm With A Marketing Plan course right away!