How to Plan for Wedding Booking Season So You Actually Reach Your Goals

Transcript: How to Plan for Wedding Booking Season So You Actually Reach Your Goals

Heidi Thompson:

How to plan for booking season so you actually reach your goals. In a world where wedding professionals are struggling to market and grow their businesses, one podcast brings together top experts and actionable strategies to help you build the wedding business of your dreams. This is the Evolve Your Wedding Business podcast.

Here is your host, Heidi Thompson.

Hey there, welcome to the podcast. I’m your host, Heidi Thompson, and I help wedding pros book more weddings with clients they absolutely love working with and make their marketing easier. And we are getting into that time of year, at least for the Northern Hemisphere, where we are really getting into booking season. Now, my last episode with Taylor was about getting ready for booking season. The episode prior to that, I talked about how is it that you’re busy when you’re not fully booked. And we talked a lot in the episode about how it’s really easy to get busy doing the wrong things, doing things that don’t actually have anything to do with your goals. They don’t lead to revenue, but we feel busy.

And because we have sort of subconsciously made feeling busy our goal, that’s what we’re optimizing for. But it’s really, really easy to set a revenue goal for yourself or a booking goal and then spend the whole year doing things that have absolutely nothing to do with it, that are never going to lead to it, that are completely disconnected from it. And that’s why I don’t recommend just setting annual goals.

In the Wedding Business Collective, we create 90-day plans. And our next quarterly planning session is coming up here on, let’s see, September 30th. If you want to join us, you can sign up for the Wedding Business Collective over at evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/pod and become a member. You’ll be able to join our quarterly planning session. You’ll see exactly what I mean about why it’s so important to create these 90 day plans. Because if we just have this big goal for the year, that doesn’t actually tell us anything about what actions we need to take. Like, what do I need to do today in order to reach that goal. That’s a really big disconnect in most wedding businesses and many businesses. You know, we have this big picture, we have this eye on the prize of maybe it’s a certain amount of clients. Maybe it’s a certain revenue number. But then when it comes to, all right, what do I actually need to do to get there? And what are the most important action steps to get there?

That where I see a lot of people get stuck And in these quarterly planning sessions we look at what are your big goals for the year And then we break them down We brainstorm the action steps that you actually need to take to achieve them. And we break those down into 90 day plans. And the reason why I really like 90 days is it’s long enough to see results, but it’s short enough to where you can know exactly what action you need to take in any given period of time. So the way we break this down in the Wedding Business Collective is I have members choose goals or focus areas that they’re going to work on, and then we break those down. So maybe a goal or a focus area for you is improving SEO. Most people stop there. They say, I want to get found more in Google search. I want to get found more in AI search. The end, right? They don’t actually know what steps do I need to take from there. And that’s exactly what we do. So we take, I want to improve my SEO and we break it down into 30, 60, and 90-day tasks.

Because a really big mistake I see a lot of wedding pros make is you have this task list, you have this to-do list, but it’s full of projects. It’s full of things that you can’t do in a sitting. So you look at your to-do list and you see improve SEO or increase referrals by 20%.

And you just think, well, what the hell am I supposed to do with that? It doesn’t tell me anything about what I need to do right now. So while we are in CEO mode in the Wedding Business Collective, we break this down. That way, Worker BU knows exactly what they need to work on when they sit down. They don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to try to strategize and plan and implement at the same time, because that is a recipe for overwhelm and disaster. So to give you an example here, the goal, the focus area is improving SEO. So in the 30-day category, I have a couple of tasks. I’m going to do keyword research for all of the pages on my website. I’m going to identify which pages have missing meta descriptions. I’m going to write new meta descriptions for those pages. And I’m going to identify the images that I need to optimize. Those are all very, very, very clear tasks. They’re things you can do in one sitting.

Right? So these are things that you can schedule into your calendar. And you know, if you do these four tasks, you have completed your action steps for this focus area for 30 days. Then we move to 90 days. And what I have here, or sorry, you moved to 60 days. What I have here for the 60 day period is optimize all of my main pages optimize all of my images identify any broken links and brainstorm 12 blog post topics Really really clear And at the 90 mark do keyword research for the blog posts that I just came up with. Develop 12 blog post topics slash titles from the research I’ve been doing, outline the 12 blog posts with the SEO info, so it’s going to be easier for me to write. And in that month, I’m going to publish my first monthly blog post. You see how this makes us so much more digestible and much more doable? So if you wanted to increase your referrals by 20%, your 30-day tasks might look something like, identify networking events in my area that I can attend.

Sign up to them, RSVP, then put them on the calendar. Make a list of vendors that I want to get to know. Make a list of the existing relationships that I have. And spend 15 minutes a day interacting with vendors on Instagram.

It’s that simple. But the reason why we never make progress on this is that we don’t break it down to that level. We just sit down and think, oh, I need more referrals. But what are you supposed to do with that?

So for the 60-day mark for this, I have identify three venues to blog about.

This is a common tactic that members use in the Wedding Business Collective.

They will reach out to a venue. They’ll go on a tour of the venue. They’ll write a blog post about the venue. It is part relationship building. It’s part SEO. It’s a powerful strategy. And it can also give you some social media content.

It really addresses different things. So for this 60-day mark, I have identified the three venues that I want to blog about. I’m going to schedule the meetings with those venues. And then I’m going to do the tours.

That’s it. And then on the 90 day, I’m going to write those three venue spotlight posts, optimized for SEO to schedule. I’m going to create a referral plan going forward where if someone refers me a new client, they get something or the client gets something.

Like, for instance, if and this is different in every market, I’m not necessarily saying you have to like pay someone a commission. Some markets work like that, some don’t. But it might be that you have it where if this planner you know sends you a particular client, you’re going to give that client an extra bonus as part of their package because they came from that planner and you want to make them look good. Maybe that’s part of the referral plan. And then you’re going to tell your vendor partners and your past clients about the plan. We broke this down into really no more than four tasks in any 30-day period.

And you can absolutely get these things done in a 30 period because they are tasks They not projects Projects are things that have a lot of tasks within them like improve SEO redo website You sit down, you look at that, you think, what the hell was I thinking when I wrote that? First of all. Second of all, I’m just going to go on Instagram and do something because that is actually something I can do right now? I don’t know how to take action on this because it’s not a task. It’s a project. And we have to break this down for ourselves if we want to be able to take action on it. And we want to know that our actions are actually linked to reaching our goals. When you sit down and you map out your 90-day plan and you map out all of the tasks, it is a clear line between where you are and what you want to achieve. And all you have to do is complete each of those tasks. Now, you might have to make some tweaks along the way. Of course, no plan is perfect. I don’t have to explain that to you.

But it makes it so much more likely that you’re actually going to reach your goals because there is a very clear sequence of tasks that you need to do to get there. And you know, these are the most important tasks I can be doing in my business because they are directly tied to my goals. Whereas everything else is something that you could be doing. Sure, there’s a million things we could do in our businesses, but they’re not the most important. Then we break our 30-day goals into weekly milestones. How does this work in your business? Do you work on your business a certain day of the week? Okay, we want to get these things scheduled in. And then on a daily basis, what are the top three priorities? And then you focus on those things before anything else. This is so important. So we need the goals, the focus areas to be projects, big things that we want to accomplish. We need the actual action steps in the 30 days, the 60 days, the 90 days to be tasks. And if you don’t know the steps for a project, well, then your first task is figuring that out. Maybe it’s going through a course, maybe it’s going through training in the Wedding Business Collective, maybe it’s coming to one of our mastermind calls and asking a question or asking a question in the group to get clear on it.

But figuring it out is the first task. And most of what gets stuck on your to-do list is stuck there because it’s just a project pretending to be a task. You cannot make progress on things that way. And that’s why I’m such a fan of this. I think sometimes people think because I love marketing, I’m like, oh, you know, let’s create more work. Let’s spend all our time on marketing. Ultimately, good marketers are lazy. I’m lazy. I don’t want to do more work than I have to to get a given result. Nobody does. The goal is not for you to work more. It’s to do the specific actions that are going to get you the results in the best, easiest, fastest, least overwhelming way possible. And I have found that this 90-day, this quarterly planning ritual really, really helps with that. It’s something we do every 90 days inside the Wedding Business Collective.

We set aside two hours. We go through the entire process of reviewing your last quarter because there’s a lot of important information and data that’s hiding in your business that we can use to make better decisions. What most people do is they just keep starting from scratch.

They just keep reinventing the wheel. and something that I’ve said a million times and I’m sure I’ll say it a million more is your marketing is supposed to get easier over time.

I don’t think many people realize this because I meet people who’ve been in business for 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years and their marketing has never gotten easier. And the reason for that is they not looking at the data in their business And I not talking about on like some super analytical level but if we just basically look at okay what working what not working how do we get more out of what’s working? And how do we stop spending time on things that aren’t working? Well, that’s going to improve your results. It can be as simple as that. And that’s really what I want for wedding professionals is for them to have a simple structure framework to be able to take these goals, these big things we want to achieve and make them reality. And they don’t become reality by sitting and wishing for it or crossing our fingers and hoping for the best.

They become a reality when you break down the steps and then you do the steps. And it sounds really simple. And it is actually very simple, but most people don’t do it. And that’s why we carve out this two hours together to go through this process of reviewing the previous 90 days. What can we learn from that? What are we making decisions based off of? What’s going on in your life that we need to plan around? Because I am very much a proponent of a life first business, a business that supports your life and doesn you know chew it up and eat it whole and spit you out in the process We want to make sure that you have freedom and flexibility and time off in your business And then we look at, okay, what are your goals?

What do you want to accomplish? And then we break down those goals into the 90 days.

So what are you specifically going to do and take action on in order to reach these goals? And then we have an AI tool in the Wedding Business Collective that takes your 90-day plan and just breaks it down for you on a weekly basis. So you can just be like, okay, what do I need to focus on this week? What makes the most sense for me to focus on this week in order to get these things done? And it can give you those answers. So I make this as easy as humanly possible so that you can go into booking season with a plan. You know the action steps you need to take in order to make the most of the season, in order to reach the right people, in order to get them to say yes to booking you and not your competitor, not someone cheaper.

And you actually by the end of the year reach your goal And then we can go into the second half of booking season in the first quarter of next year looking at okay what do we want to accomplish then and breaking that down into the individual steps. And it’s that breaking down piece that most people never do. They never make the time for it. That’s why we always make the time every quarter to do this in the Wedding Business Collective. So if this sounds like something you need, if you’re like, yeah, just tell me what steps to do so I can actually reach my goals. Come join us in the Wedding Business Collective. You can find out more about it at evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/pod. Come and join us. You will absolutely love this quarterly planning session. And let’s go into booking season with a clear, step-by-step, easy-to-implement plan so that you actually reach your goals and you don’t spend another booking season just spinning your wheels.

Thanks so much for taking the time to tune in. I would love to hear from you what you took away from this. Shoot me a DM over on Instagram. I’m @EvolveYourWeddingBusiness over there. I always love talking to podcast listeners. And I will speak to you again very soon.

Bye.