The Key to Breaking Through Wedding Business Booking Plateaus

Are you struggling with fewer leads and bookings in your wedding business? You’re not alone! Many wedding pros are facing this challenge right now. In this episode, we’re diving into why this happens and, more importantly, how you can break through this plateau.

With 12 years of experience in helping wedding professionals market and grow their businesses, I’ll share what I’ve noticed and what you can do to attract and book your ideal clients. Plus, I’ll introduce you to a free way to get access to 34 innovative ways to overcome this booking slump.

If you’re ready to adapt and find new ways to grow your business, this episode is for you. Tune in and discover how to turn things around and start booking more weddings again!

In this episode we’ll cover:

• Why many wedding pros are experiencing a lead and booking slowdown
• What you need to do to break through a lead and booking plateau
• How you can find success with collaboration
• Why you can’t copy someone else’s marketing
• How to stop blending in with everyone else
• How to get out of your bubble so you can adapt to the current market
• How to avoid your business being seen as a commodity
• Ideas for collaborating with your fellow wedding pros to get more leads and bookings

The Key to Breaking Through Wedding Business Booking Plateaus

Hello, my friend, welcome to the podcast. I am your host, as always, Heidi Thompson, and I am all about helping you book more weddings with the clients that you really love working with, while also building a wedding business that gives you freedom and flexibility.

Today, I want to talk to you about the number one question I get about booking weddings and booking new clients and this has really been a constant since the beginning of my business now for about 12 years since I’ve been working with wedding professionals to help them market and grow their businesses. 

And people constantly come to me and the first thing they ask is, How do I book more weddings? How do I book more weddings? How do I book more weddings? What do I do specifically? Especially now when leads and bookings seem to be down for many wedding pros.

The market, the economy, ebbs and flows and having been in this for 12 years I’ve seen multiple market fluctuations that impact buying behavior. When things change economically for our customers, we inevitably get plateaus where leads and bookings slow down. Not to mention we still have some lingering effects from COVID where people who would be getting married didn’t meet and start dating in 2020 and 2021.

Plus, it’s an election year in most countries this year and people are historically hesitant to make large purchasing decisions in election years.

And then you’ve got the whole “cost of living crisis” or as I like to accurately describe it, runaway, unchecked corporate greed.

So understandably right now we’re seeing people take longer to make purchasing decisions across all industries. This isn’t just a wedding industry thing.

And you have to adapt to that new normal if you want to succeed. Breaking through this plateau requires you to adapt and do things differently.

I have spent the last 12 years developing frameworks and systems and ways of teaching this to make attracting and booking your ideal clients easier for you.

My expertise really lies in marketing and in building a business that gives you a lot of freedom and the flexibility that you want. Building one that really supports your lifestyle. But, I’m not an expert in everything.

I love, love, love, love teaching what I teach and helping people, you know, with their marketing and helping them attract more of the right clients because we don’t want to just be booking more weddings, we want to be booking more weddings with the people that you actually want to be working with that aren’t going to be nightmares, that aren’t going to haggle and complain about your pricing.

And we all have those people that we really want to be working with. And that’s who I love helping wedding pros attract more of. And then, you know, turn away, not even specifically saying like, I don’t work with this kind of people, but through your marketing, pushing the people who aren’t right for you away because, you know, a magnet has to attract and repel.

But I’m not an expert in AI. I’m not an expert in consultations and making more sales in those. I’m not an expert in branding, but all of these things play a really important role. 

So that’s why I’m bringing Book More Weddings Summit back for the seventh time now. I can’t believe I’ve done Book More Weddings Summit this many times.

It just started as this little thing I decided to do right before the world shut down in 2020. But the whole motive behind it is to bring together experts in other areas because there is more to booking more weddings to growing a business than what I can teach you.

Don’t get me wrong. What I can teach you can absolutely have a huge impact on your business and I see it all the time with members of The Wedding Business Collective, but I am of the mind that there is a lot of value in learning from different people and learning from different sources and taking what works for you.

So I wanted to bring experts in other areas and that is absolutely still a huge motivation for Book More Weddings Summit, which this time is coming up, August 19th through the 23rd. 

I specifically had this lead and booking plateau struggle in mind when deciding on who I invited to speak. These presentations are going to help you break through that plateau.

If you are on my email list, you will get an invite. Those will start going out on July 22nd is when I’m going to open registration. It’s an EXCELLENT way for you to find ways to break through your own booking plateau.

But this is such a fun event that I get the pleasure of putting together. Yeah, it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of behind-the-scenes wrangling, especially when we have more than 30 different speakers, but it allows me to do that thing that I just explained, wanting to bring other experts in so that you can experience all of these different things you can do, all of these different ways you can grow your business.

So I really wanted to bring in experts in other areas that has always been true. That’s absolutely the case this time around as well. And I also wanted to bring more diverse information to you.

I see sometimes in our industry that there is a lot of sameness and there are a lot of people just copying what other people are doing or relying on one source. There are a lot of people in our industry like me who love teaching, love speaking, love educating but then sometimes it gets to this point where you just see the same people over and over and over again and that’s something I wanted to get away from with Book More Weddings Summit.

So what I’ve done is I have brought together a lineup of speakers, across several countries, because I think sometimes we get in this bubble, especially in the US. We operate in such a bubble in general, but then you take it to the even smaller bubble of the wedding industry, and we’re just copying the immediate things we see.

You see this in people’s branding, people’s colors, people’s websites, people’s marketing. It’s a lot of following the leader, but there is no leader. It’s like the blind leading the blind kind of thing.

So… I wanted to bring in people that not just have expertise in different areas, but that are from different places that do things differently, that have found that certain things work for them that will absolutely apply to you.

And I think it’s very easy to get stuck in this trap that the only things that will work for us are the things we’ve seen another DJ, another photographer, another planner do. Or the only things that will work for us are things we’ve seen in our immediate market, like our greater metro area when that’s absolutely not the case.

If you’re based in Ohio, you could absolutely learn something from someone in Australia that you could apply and get great results from, but you’re not going to learn that if you don’t get outside the bubble. So hopefully I’m poking some bubbles here to bring in people who you probably haven’t heard from before.

We have a lot of different vendor types represented in the speaker lineup, which I’m very excited about because a lot of things in our industry talk about it being about the wedding industry and the whole, but really, in reality, are very geared toward planners. And I get this question time and time and time again so I know it’s something that people are constantly coming up against is, “okay, this is only for planners. Well, I’m a videographer or I’m a venue owner or I’m an officiant. This isn’t going to work for me.”

I am not doing that. We definitely have a diverse audience. We have a diverse lineup in terms of where people are from, who they are, what they do, what their backgrounds are, and you are going to get to learn from all of them. 

And you may decide, oh yeah, I’m totally going to do this thing or this thing isn’t for me and that is totally fine, but I want to get you outside of the bubble to introduce you to new people, new ways of doing things, and getting you to be a little more creative and innovative in your marketing.

Because again, you have to adapt if you want to succeed. If the same old things aren’t working for you and you keep doing thing, they’re going to continue not to work.

And then there’s the other big problem that comes from all of our marketing looking and sounding the same. We fall into that same position: couples don’t have anything to base their decision on other than price because there are no other differentiators.

I am a big proponent, I talk about this all the time. You’ve heard me talk about it on the podcast. If you’re in The Wedding Business Collective, you know we talk about this constantly about really positioning yourself as the go-to person for your specific ideal client. And it’s really important that you do that in your marketing, that they can see that.

And if you are copying what everyone else is doing, you’re attracting who everyone else is attracting and it becomes just like this apples-to-apples comparison. It’s like buying sugar or buying flour. It’s like, well, it’s all flour. I’m just going to buy the cheapest one because who cares? It’s just flour. It’s all the same.

That commoditization is something that happens when we stay in our bubble and we do things all the exact same way. Plus I really just love collaborating while running both of these summits. 

There is Book More Weddings Summit happening August 19th through the 23rd and then I also have Wedding Business CEO Summit, which we ran in January. We’ll be running it again next year.

They are some of the most fun things that I get to do in my business because I absolutely love collaborating with other people. I’m very much of the mindset that there’s enough for everybody. A rising tide lifts all boats and it’s powerful.

It’s absolutely one of the most important things you can do in your business and all of the best marketing, all of the best sales-related things that I’ve done have been related to collaboration. It just works so much better.

You’ve seen me promote other people’s stuff. You’ve seen me, if you’re in The Wedding Business Collective, bring other experts in to talk about different things. You’ve seen me co-host things with people. Of course, having guests here on the podcast because it’s not about me. It’s about getting you the result that you want.

And I know that that’s best served through collaboration plus, a huge perk is it’s super fun for me as well. So as you’re listening to this, I would encourage you to think about first, how can you get outside your bubble?

Attending Book More Weddings Summit is absolutely going to be a way to do that but you can start thinking about that now before free registration even opens. 

And something else I would really love to encourage you to think about is how can you do something or do more things collaboratively. What can you put together?

Because I think a lot of times we like to collaborate on things, but something has to come up for that to happen, and we fail to realize that we all have the ability to create something that we can do.

Whether that’s, let’s see, I have a member in The Wedding Business Collective who went to multiple venues in her new area. She had just moved and she took a bunch of photos. She created an in-depth blog post for each of them and then shared that and it became this collaborative piece of marketing.

There is another member who is an officiant that wrote this monster, amazing blog post of all of the venues in her area and gathered data on them. Like who are they best for? What do they have? How does it work? You know, what are the price ranges like? So you can gain so much as a couple from this blog post and it’s building relationships further with these venues.

You could put together a styled shoot. You could put together a wedding show, wedding fair, bridal fair, or whatever they’re called in your area. I feel like there are about 50 different names for them but there are so many different things you can do. You could put together a networking event, and it just opens the doors to so many more opportunities.

I’ve seen so many opportunities in my business come from collaborating and getting curious and really thinking, okay, how can I create a situation where I can work together with this person or I can work together with this group of people in a way that would be a win for all of us? To me, that’s the most fun way to do business.

It’s the most fun way to do marketing. And it just makes it so much less lonely because when it’s just you and you’re building your business and you’re working on it and you’re just in your house doing your work, it gets lonely. It gets isolating. And people don’t really get it. They don’t really know what it’s like, but your fellow business owners do.

There are so many benefits of collaborating, but quite frankly, it just feels good. And I would say it’s one of the most important marketing activities you can do. It’s definitely found its way, unintentionally, into every facet of my business, whether it’s the summits or the podcast or different promotions that I’ve run, different workshops that I’ve put together, or The Wedding Business Collective.

There’s a lot that has come from collaboration and I only actively identified it a couple of years ago. So I’ve been actively seeking out ways to collaborate with people because I know it works super well. I know it’s a fun way to work and it’s just a win-win-win win all around.

So, consider what you could do. It doesn’t have to be something big. I’m not saying you should put a summit together. You probably shouldn’t. It’s a ton of work, but, for me, it works. I love it. For you, maybe it’s something else. Maybe you put something else together, but get creative and think about it.

How can you bring more collaboration into your business? And that could be something as small as featuring another vendor on your social media, featuring another vendor on your blog, or creating content for each other. 

Collaborations can be small like that, but they are a really fantastic way to help you market in a way that stands out, which again, as I said, is something that’s really, really important and absolutely a problem I see in our industry.

There are a lot of people doing the same thing and blending in does not help you. It just causes couples to have to make the decision on price, which is really not what we want them to be doing. So do me a favor, if you’ve gotten any ideas, if you’re thinking about this, shoot me a DM on Instagram. I am @evolveyourweddingbusiness.

I would love to hear from you and any ideas you have to get more collaborative in your business, and then definitely look out for your email invite to Book More Weddings Summit. 

Like I said, those will be going out on July 22nd if you’re on my email list, if you are not, you can head over to www.bookmoreweddingssummit.com and get on the waiting list.

Free registration is going to be opening July 22nd and we kick things off on August 18th with our kickoff call, and then the summit itself runs August 19th through the 23rd. So I hope you will join me for this. It’s a super, super collaborative event. You’re going to learn so much.

I always learn so much from our speakers. I always get so much out of it. And by the way, I’ve seen some of the presentations already and they are really good. You’re going to get a ton out of it. So I hope you’re excited!

But I would love to hear from you in my DMs, shoot me a DM on Instagram. Let me know if this has given you any ideas about how you can be more collaborative. And I’m just nosy. I want to know what you’re getting up to. I want to know what are some things that you have done that are collaborative that you want to do more of in the future.

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Links & Resources:

The Wedding Business Collective
Book More Weddings Summit
Website Mistakes That Cost You Bookings: Expert Advice from Designer & Bride Emily Foster
The Lazy Girl’s Guide To Marketing Your Wedding Business

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