Posting Every Week & Still Not Getting Wedding Inquiries?

Posting Every Week & Still Not Getting Wedding Inquiries?

Heidi Thompson:

Are you posting on social media every week and still not getting the wedding inquiries you need? You’re not alone. Let’s talk about it.

Here is your host, Heidi Thompson.

Hey there, welcome to the podcast. I am your host, Heidi Thompson, and I help wedding professionals book more weddings with clients they love. And I’m curious, have you ever spent two hours on a reel?

And I mean the whole production. the initial idea, the shot list, the three takes where you say, um, in the exact same spot and want to scream the caption you rewrote four different times, the audio you research and then picked and then unpicked at 10 o’clock at night and then watched it collect like nine likes, six of those from other wedding pros who follow you back out of professional courtesy and to be supportive. One is from your cousin who likes everything because that’s just who they are. And the other two are accounts with a sunset as their profile picture.

If that felt a little too familiar, today’s episode is for you.

Now, I have been doing this work for more than 14 years now, coaching wedding pros.

And across all of those years, the conversation I have most often is some version of, I am working so hard to be seen, and I don’t understand why my inbox is so quiet.

I’m just not getting the wedding inquiries that I need. So today, I’m not going to teach you some new tactic.

I’m not going to give you a list of seven hooks to post or a new posting schedule. I want to talk about what this is that you’re experiencing, because I don’t think enough people dig down into what this is really about. And I think a lot of you have been carrying it around yourselves.

Now, I get it. You are working so hard to be seen. you’re putting in the effort and the gap between that effort and the inquiries that actually show up in your inbox is not a sign of you being bad at your work or that there’s something wrong with you. But I know it is a frustrating, exhausting gap. And engagement season is about to make that feel louder and more nagging in your head because engagement season is the stretch of the year when you most want to be found And I not going to tell you to work harder because you already are What I want is for you to get more of the right people seeing you And I’ll tell you at the end of this episode what I’m doing about that. Now let’s do some rough math and I’ll just make up some numbers so no one feels called out or audited here. Let’s say a reel takes you two and a half hours when you count everything from scrolling through social to find inspiration, coming up with the idea, the planning, the prep, the filming, the refilming, the editing, the caption, the posting, and then replying to comments afterward. And let’s say you make three of those a week. Let’s add a few stories on every day, maybe a carousel when you get the energy, maybe even a blog post or an email to your email list when the guilt gets loud enough and you feel like you should be doing more. That’s easily eight to 10 hours of work. And over a year, that is somewhere north of 400 hours. 400 hours is 10 full work weeks. I want you to think about that for a second. If you took that time and did it for a client, you would send an invoice and the client would be thrilled that you put that much time into whatever you were working on for them.

But we don’t get to, you know, invoice ourselves for this time. So when you look at everything you’ve put in this year to get visible, and then you look at the number of real inquiries that came out of it, and those two numbers are just wildly out of proportion, it makes sense to feel defeated and exhausted. It also makes sense that that leaves you feeling lonely and like you’re the only person this affects because from the outside, everyone else’s feed looks like everything is working beautifully. Hint, it’s not. I see the inside of a lot of businesses. But you’re scrolling past someone’s perfect booking announcement at 9pm when you’re finally getting around to eating some form of dinner over the sink and you assume everyone but you has this figured out. I want to name a few rituals that come with a quiet inbox because I want you to know that you aren’t alone and you aren’t the only person that does this. First, there’s the infinite refresh.

You open your inbox, you’re looking for inquiry form notifications, you see nothing, so you check again and again. And maybe 20 minutes later, like something drastic will have changed in the meantime.

Then there’s the Instagram insights check where you study your reach like it’s a stock ticker and like your retirement is riding on it. there a couple that liked your three most recent posts and saved one and watched every story and then never said a word and you now think about them more than you think about some of your actual clients There’s the comparison scroll that we all get into where you look at another wedding pro in your area who appears to be killing it and you try to figure out what they’re doing that you aren’t. And you end up in their feed at midnight like a detective who’s completely lost the plot. And then there’s the quiet math that happens.

The one you do in your head when no one else is around. About how many weddings you need to book by the end of this engagement season to hit that number that you promised yourself you would hit.

And nobody wants to say that math out loud. So it just kind of hangs there. If you have done any of those, you are in the majority.

You are completely normal. Most wedding pros I know have done all of them, probably before breakfast.

But I get as we go into engagement season, this just gets louder.

And timing is important. Engagement season, you know, that stretch that starts around Thanksgiving, that runs through the holidays and Valentine’s Day, is when we see a huge number of newly engaged couples start looking for their vendors and reaching out.

They’ve got a ring, a Pinterest board, about 3 million open tabs, and they are searching. That means the weeks right now, before it even starts, are the weeks that count.

Whatever you put in front of people this fall is what they’ll find when they start looking. So when your inbox is quiet in October, it doesn’t necessarily feel like a quiet month. For many people, you may have a lot of events going on this month.

It kind of feels like the starting gun is about to go off and you should be getting a flood of leads, but you just kind of feel like you’re left standing there wondering, okay, where is everybody? And I understand that feeling. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to be anxious about, to be thinking about. It means you care about your business and you can see what’s coming. And then, then comes the scramble. When the inbox gets quiet, wedding pros go hunting. They look for a new platform, a new posting schedule, a new post template that you’re putting together at 11 o’clock on a Tuesday night with a glass of wine and a whole lot of optimism. You tell yourself that this is the week you finally are going to get started on TikTok or start that YouTube channel and you open the app and you stare at it and you close it again. Now, there’s no judgment here. Because the instinct underneath that is a good one. You want to be seen and when you want to be seen Doing more feels like the only move you got It what any motivated person does in this situation The problem is that a motivated person such as yourself can run on that instinct for a long time without anybody telling them whether it’s working. And that’s the part that really wears you down and burns you out. I want to tell you about a real person. She’s been on the podcast because I know sometimes it helps to know that someone else has stood in the position that you’re in.

Elise Stokes is a live wedding painter and stationery designer in Atlanta. She’s a member of the Wedding Business Collective. And before she joined in July of 2024, she had a few clients, but they were coming in very sporadically. So she decided she was going to do this big promotion for her birthday. And for the first 10 days of July, she ran this big birthday promotion with specials and deals and posts and boosted posts and ads on Facebook and Instagram.

And she was so sure that this was going to get her seen and pump up her business.

She’d already poured a lot into a new branding session with some beautiful photos and a website that she was obsessed with. And she was trying with everything she had to make Instagram work.

Well, people liked the posts. She got some comments. She got a few shares. Her engagement looked good. But then that 10-day period ended. Not a single person inquired or bought. Not one. She told me she felt so discouraged, like crying on the floor discouraged. She had put her whole heart into generating more business. and she had the likes and comments to show for it, but not the bookings.

And that’s a picture that I think you might recognize because the effort was there and the numbers on the screen were there, but the inbox, the inquiries and the bookings didn’t come. Now, I’m not telling you about Elise to make you feel behind.

And I’m telling you because that quiet stretch is where you may be standing right now. And I want you to know that that’s not where you have to stay.

And that’s not where Elise stayed. That’s not where her story ends. I’ll tell you more about where Elise is today in a few weeks because it’s a good one. And I want it to land at the right time. But for now, I just want you to know that that quiet stretch was not permanent for her. And it doesn’t have to be permanent for you either.

I want you to take three things from this episode. First, the effort that you’re putting in counts. for something. And it says something about you. People who keep showing up even when it’s quiet are the ones who are still here 5, 10, 20 years down the road. It means that you refuse to quit and you need that kind of tenacity in business. Second, wanting to be seen is exactly what you should want. That’s not needy or vain. Your business depends on the right couples finding you, and you should be found by them. You’re great at what you do. Third, you don’t have to white knuckle your way through engagement season and just hope things are going to get better. I am putting something together for this exact situation, and I don’t want you walking into November on Hope Alone.

On Tuesday, October 27th, I am hosting a brand new free live workshop called How to Get More Visibility This Engagement Season. It’s for the wedding pro who’s doing all the work putting in all the effort and wants more of the right people to see it which is a pretty good description of everybody listening to this episode Registration opens next week and I will send the link out to my email list the moment it live and I’ll talk about it on the podcast next week as well. If you aren’t on my email list yet, you can go to evolveyourweddingbusiness.com. You can sign up at the bottom so you don’t miss anything. The workshop is happening live. I’m really excited. This is something completely new I’m putting together and I would love for you to be in the room. That’s what I’ve got for you today. And if this episode is hitting a little too close to home, I’m sending you hugs and I would love for you to send it to a wedding pro friend who’s also been posting every day and is still just staring at a quiet inbox.

Sometimes the nicest thing you can say to someone is me too.

And of course, they’ll get access to that workshop when it becomes available. So you’ll both be able to join in and see your path out.

Thanks so much for taking the time to listen in today. I’ll speak to you again very soon.

Bye.