Are You Doing Marketing All Wrong?

Do you participate in any wedding industry Twitter chats? I do. I make sure I take part in #weddinghour and #weddingoclock and there is something I see wedding professionals doing in these chats that is part of a bigger problem. Twitter chats are meant to be social and conversational but wedding industry Twitter chats end up being spammed to death by wedding professionals who don’t realize they are doing marketing all wrong.

These people constantly pitch, even though their ideal clients are not on these chats (they are at least 90% wedding industry professionals) and is comes across as desperate. When you go on social media and say “Hire me! Hire me! Hire me!” over and over, it gets old real fast. That is not marketing. That is spammy self-promotion. It’s the equivalent of standing on a rooftop shouting down to everyone “hire me!”.

Marketing is not about annoying people into working with you. It’s not about taking your sales pitch and jamming it down everyone’s throats either.

Marketing is about building relationships with people and you don’t do that by screaming at them in all caps about how they should hire you right now. The goal of marketing is to find out what your customer’s pains/needs/desires/struggles are and position what offer as a solution. Marketing is about solving problems. In order to understand what people need, you have to build relationships with them.

There are a LOT of wedding professionals (and small business owners in general) who need a mindset shift around what marketing is. If you look at their social media accounts you’ll find them hard selling 100% of the time and that doesn’t work. Instead of pitching all the time, what can you provide that is useful & helpful to your potential clients? That will attract them to you while the sales pitch will send them running in the other direction.

I’m not saying don’t sell, but sales and marketing are a lot like dating and you can’t just walk up to someone at a bar and propose marriage. They don’t know who you are and why they should care yet. If you want to learn more about building a marketing and sales system that turns these strangers into clients for your business, check out Book More Weddings Academy.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes for a moment. How would you respond to constant sales pitches from businesses that seem to only be concerned with taking your money and not at all interested in you or your wedding?