10 Reasons To Create A Signature Service In Your Wedding Business
As you’ve built your wedding business, you’ve probably created different services, packages, and prices.
That might feel like you’re giving people the options they want but what it really does is confuse your potential clients.
Our ideal clients are usually planning a wedding for the first time and they don’t know what they want, what they need, or what to expect.
What they really need is an expert (that’s you) to take them by the hand and create an incredible experience for them.
That’s where creating a Signature Offer comes in!
Creating a Signature Offer is the best way to eliminate competition, stand out in your market, and do the work you love to do for the people you love doing for.
By creating your Signature Offer, you’ll be able to book more consultation calls, clearly showcase your value, and raise your prices.
Creating your seamless, branded Signature Offer allows you to build trust with your potential clients, close more sales, grow a team more effectively, and take more time off.
Imagine how much simpler your business would be if you took every client through the same, amazing, well-thought-out process!
I invited Amanda Shuman of Carrylove Designs to teach this special workshop because her Signature Experience is a well-oiled machine that commands a premium price, puts clients at ease, and delivers an incredible client experience. She has absolutely mastered creating a premium Signature Offer that keeps her booked out for months.
As soon as I experienced that as a client of hers, I knew you’d want to learn how to do this in your own business.
I mean check out what Amanda was able to do after she created her Signature Experience:
- Build a nearly half-million-dollar business on 1 offer
- Scale from a solopreneur to a team of 11 within 2 years
- Consistently book 65% of all consultation calls (a significant increase from before!)
- Raise her price because potential clients clearly see the value she provides
- Improve SEO due to niched-down keywords
- Create more effective marketing posts that drive conversion
Your Signature Offer might be a Signature Service where you sell the same thing to everyone. Or, if you do highly customized work and send out custom proposals to each client you can develop a Signature Process that shows your potential clients what working with you is like. This builds trust, sets you apart, and gives them peace of mind knowing you have everything under control.
No matter which one is a fit for you, there are 10 very compelling reasons why you should create your own Signature Service or Signature Process.
1. It Makes Your Stand Out & Eliminates The Competition
I knew my website needed a big-time revamp and my messaging needed to be refined.
I knew my business had outgrown my brand.
What I didn’t know was how I was going to fix that.
I looked at brand designers, website designers, and copywriters, all of whom were fine but didn’t have the solution to my problem.
Ultimately, I decided to make a $10,000 investment with my friend Amanda’s business, Carrylove Designs.
Why?
Because they aren’t brand designers or website designers or copywriters. That’s not what they sell.
Amanda and her team created their own category that they own entirely by developing the Carrylove Designs Signature Experience.
Nobody else offers what Amanda does in this package and nobody else approaches it quite the same way.
It became an apples-to-oranges comparison.
No one else was selling The Signature Experience.
2. It builds trust & demonstrates credibility
Creating your own Signature Service or Signature Process shows that you know your shit. It shows that you’re an expert and that you’ve been doing this work long enough to have created a formula for making it happen.
It’s also great for piquing curiosity. I’m the creator of the Clone Your Best Clients strategy. Amanda is the creator of The Signature Experience. When someone hears that you’ve created a custom formula, framework, or experience, it stands out and makes them want to know more.
Let’s think about some non-wedding industry examples:
Marie Kondo sold millions of books, had a TV show, and made countless public appearances because of her KonMari Method. It wasn’t just cleaning or tidying up, it was a specific method and she was the only one providing it.
Weight Watchers introduced their Points System in 2008 to make it simple for anyone to track and manage their food so they can actually lose weight.
Billy Blanks was on every TV in the 90s showcasing his TaeBo System that combined dance, tae kwon do, and boxing into a specific workout system. If you didn’t buy those tapes, I bet you knew someone that did.
Packaging up your signature method into a compelling method, process, or service shows that you have the answers to your ideal client’s problems.
3. You can charge more
Your pricing now is limited by what your competitors charge because you are seen as all selling the same thing. Can you charge more? Sure, but it’s going to take some real effort to stand out from your competition.
When you have a Signature Service or a Signature Process, you’re not selling photography or wedding planning services, or officiant services. You’re selling your Signature Service or process. Your Signature Service is proprietary, it’s unique to you and no one else has it.
Could I have hired a brand designer and a website designer and a copywriter to work on my website?
Sure.
But that’s way more work and it wouldn’t be cohesive.
I didn’t even compare Carrylove Designs to those other providers because they provided an experience that solved my problems, made me trust them, had proven results, and felt well worth the $10,000 price tag.
Would I have spent $10,000 for any old brand designer or website designer? No, not unless they were able to provide something better than what Amanda and her team do. She owns that domain because she created the Signature Service and she can command higher prices as a result.
4. It provides a better client experience
Working with Carrylove Designs felt so easy. I just held out my hand and said “let’s do this!” and they led me through an organized, streamlined, luxurious experience. It’s an experience people are willing to pay a premium for.
Amanda learned that without copywriting, her clients weren’t getting the results they were after with their new websites. So, she decided to roll it all into her Signature Service. As a result, her clients got much better brands that stood out more, were able to command higher prices, and attracted their ideal clients.
The client experience feels well thought out, seamless, and organized (because it is) and that put my mind at ease. That’s a really important part of the client experience we don’t think about. The most important time to make someone feel amazing about their choice to work with you is right after they hand you feel money because they’re thinking “I hope this is the right decision”.
Carrylove Designs provides an exceptional customer experience and it’s only possible because Amanda developed her Signature Service. Every client goes through the same experience and feels taken care of and confident about the investment they’ve made.
If you want all of your clients to have the same extraordinary experience working with you, a Signature Service or Signature Process is worth considering.
5. You can easily automate and scale
When you follow the same steps to serve each client, it becomes so much easier to automate things and scale your business. It’s much easier to train a new team member on how to deliver 1 Signature Service or Signature Process than 6 different ones. That’s going to allow you to grow quicker and reclaim more of your time as the CEO.
Imagine creating systems and processes to deliver 1 Signature Service or product and how much easier that would be than trying to create different systems and processes for 6 different services or packages. It’s a lot of extra work!
This is true of huge corporations as well. You will have the same experience at a McDonald’s in Denver as you will in Dubai and that’s by design. Sure the menu might be a bit different to adjust for local tastes, but the systems, processes, machinery, and everything that happens behind the scenes with the staff are the same. There isn’t a McDonald’s that works in a totally different way than the others because that would make no sense.
There is a more luxurious version of this where the automation and streamlined processes provide a consistently excellent client experience. When you sit in the first-class cabin on a plane, the flight attendants are providing you with a streamlined service that’s only possible by creating processes to make it run smoothly. If they handled every flight differently, it would be a mess.
If you’re spending your time writing a new and unique proposal for each client, you then have to spend time remembering what’s included for each client. This results in having to do a lot of context switching between your clients and it winds up costing you more than you’re getting paid for those custom services.
You can still do custom work with a Signature Process! If you’re a florist or a caterer or someone who needs/wants to continue doing custom work, you can create a Signature Process to get all of the same benefits you’d get from a Signature Service.
Even though you do custom work, you’re still walking clients through each of the same steps in the Signature Process. This allows for easier automation and outsourcing. That’s possible even with a custom service!
6. It focuses your marketing
Right now, you have multiple different products, services, and packages that you can promote in your marketing. That means your marketing has to showcase each of them and sometimes that can be a real challenge.
If you’re a wedding planner and you really want to promote your full planning service but you feel like you also have to promote day of coordination, you’re going to have to create totally separate marketing messages to do that. It’s likely that your ideal clients for those 2 different packages are different and need to hear different things. So you’re doing twice the work and getting half the marketing done for each package.
If you can focus on promoting your Signature Service or Signature Process, it makes your marketing so much easier and clearer
7. It’s less overwhelming for you and your clients
When your potential clients are looking for wedding vendors, they have a LOT of decisions to make and decision fatigue is very real. They don’t know which of your packages is best for them and when you have multiple offers, they tend to talk themselves down to a lower package.
Have you ever been to a Cheesecake Factory? Has that menu ever made you want to just randomly pick something? That’s what happens when we have too many options.
When someone is overwhelmed, they don’t end up buying anything at all.
In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper from Columbia and Stanford University published a study about jams that proved this. On a regular day at a local food market, people would find a display table with 24 different kinds of jams. Then on another day, at that same food market, people were given only 6 different types of jam choices.
What Iyengar and Lepper found was that while the big display table (with 24 jams) generated more interest, people were far less likely to purchase a jar of jam than in the case of the smaller display (about ten times less likely). Overwhelmed minds don’t take action.
Creating a Signature Service or Signature Process reduces the number of options down. The only decision to make left is “is this a fit for you or not?” and if you design your Signature Service or Signature Process with your ideal client in mind, it will be a fit for them. It’ll be a Cinderella glass slipper kind of fit because you designed it just for them.
8. It helps you sell the value of what you offer
A Signature Service or Signature Process is a powerful business asset. When your business has strong brand assets they increase its value as well as its earning potential. Think of it this way: What’s the real difference between a pair of Louboutins and any old pair of heels?
The value that people put on that red bottom of a pair of Louboutins and the perceived quality & prestige that comes with it allows them to charge $1000+ for a pair of shoes that look a lot like $50 pair of shoes. But that’s okay because Louboutin isn’t selling shoes, they’re selling their unique process and the prestige that comes with it.
A Signature Service or process allows you to position yourself as the best option, which people will happily pay more for while relegating your competitors to the realm of the knockoff Louboutin. It’s apples to oranges.
If given a choice between branded products and non-branded products, most people will go for the brand they recognize every time and there are 2 very simple reasons for that:
1. Trust
2. Quality Assurance
I know that when I signed up to work with Carrylove Designs and go through The Signature Experience, I did it because I had the utmost trust in them and knew the quality of their work.
Why did I trust them? Because I knew what to expect. I knew I was going through their tried and true Signature Experience. That is something that gives people peace of mind and that’s not something you can put a price on.
9. It lets you do the work you actually love doing
If you’re like many wedding pros I meet, you have a package, a service, or a product that you just hate. You’ll do it but you’d really like to not have to.
Creating a Signature Service or Signature Process allows you to do the work you actually love. It’s your sandbox and you get to make the rules.
If you only want to take on clients who want your full DJ package, you can do that. Turn it into a Signature Service or Signature Process that they’re dying to get their hands on!
All too often, we let other people govern what we do in our businesses. There is absolutely some validity to making sure your ideal client wants what you’re trying to sell but you don’t have to let people order “off menu” if you don’t want to.
After all, if you went to a donut shop and ordered a steak, they’d remind you that you can either order a donut or head to a steakhouse. You don’t have to provide everything someone could possibly want, including the stuff you hate, in order to book clients.
10. You can still provide other services
Focusing on a Signature Service or Signature Process doesn’t mean you can never provide other services. It simply means that you focus on marketing your Signature Service or process. If your Signature Service centers around combining videography and photography and you have planners ask you to provide just photography, you can choose to do that!
If your Signature Service focuses on your unique way of creating wedding cakes but you want to run a promotion to offer holiday cookies toward the end of each year, you can absolutely do that!
This is your business and you’re in control. The idea behind having a Signature Service or Signature Process is to give you focus and ease. It’s not meant to restrict you or prevent you from offering something new.
A Signature Offer can do a LOT for your business. Do you see how valuable it is now?
Well then, I have just the thing for you.
How would you like to create your own Signature Service or Signature Process with the guidance of Amanda Shuman of Carrylove Designs (who I call the master of the Signature Offer)?
