Why Wedding Pros Are Marketing Harder But Booking Less

Transcript: Why Wedding Pros Are Marketing Harder But Booking Less

Heidi Thompson:

Wedding pros are marketing harder than ever, but booking less. And in this episode, we’re going to talk about why.

Hey there, welcome back to the Evolve Your Wedding Business Podcast. I am your host, Heidi Thompson. And if you listen to last week’s episode, you heard me make you a promise. I said I had some data that was going to make you look at your marketing completely differently, and I was not exaggerating. Before I get into it, I want to say something first. If what I’m about to share sounds like I’m talking about you, I want you to know I am not picking on you. I’m just describing a pattern that I’ve seen among thousands of wedding pros, including people I deeply respect, who are incredibly good at what they do. This has absolutely nothing to do with how good you are at your craft, how seriously you take your business. It’s about a pattern so common in our industry that most of us have just accepted it as normal, but it’s not normal and it’s costing you. So a little while back, I surveyed over 640 wedding pros and I asked them two questions.

The first question was, what’s your biggest obstacle when it comes to booking more weddings right now? And the second question was, what do you think you need to do to fix it?

So the answers to the first question were kind of all over the place. not enough inquiries, getting ghosted, price shoppers getting leads, but they don’t convert, not standing out from the competition, they can’t find their ideal clients, they don’t know where to market, which marketing channels to focus on. These were all real, specific, painful problems, you know, the kind that keep you up at night and frustrate you. But the answers to that second question, they were almost identical across the board. So when I asked people, what do you think you need to do to fix this problem? What they said was post more on social media, run more ads, spend more money on ads, be more visible, show up more, get on more platforms, be more consistent, attend more wedding shows, more, more, more, more. And here’s what stopped me cold when I looked at it Most of these wedding pros are already doing these things They already posting They already paying for advertising They already trying to be more visible and it not working So their solution to it not working is to do more of the same thing I want you to sit with that for a second, because I think it’s really important.

And it really shocked me that this came up so frequently. When something isn’t working, doing more of it is not a strategy.

It’s a hope. And hope is not a marketing plan. Let me show you exactly what I mean by walking through a few of these responses.

So someone said their biggest obstacle was getting ghosted. Leads reach out. They respond quickly like they know they’re supposed to. They send over their pricing and then they get silence.

So then their proposed solution to fixing their biggest obstacle was I need to post more on social media. Think about that for a second. The ghosting is happening after someone has already found them, already looked at their website, already filled out their inquiry form. More social media posts reach people who haven’t found them yet.

How does reaching more people fix a problem that’s happening with people who have already reached out and already raised their hand? It doesn’t. These are two completely different problems happening at two completely different stages. Someone else said their biggest obstacle was price shopping.

Couples who go through the whole process, you know, sometimes they even come to a consult call and they come back and say, oh, you know, we can only afford X. And that’s way below this person’s minimum. What did this person think the solution was to their problem? Spending more on advertising. Spending more money to reach people who will then price shop them because you’re not fixing the price shopping problem. You’re just getting more advertising. Again, the price shoppers are already finding them. The problem isn’t the number of people finding them, which is something advertising would solve. It’s where people are finding them. It’s what they’re seeing when they get there. And then there are the wedding pros who just said, you know, they don’t have enough leads. And their proposed solution was more posting, more visibility, more advertising, more absolutely freaking everything. It was exhausting just to read how much more these people were expecting of themselves. And this one at least does have a surface logic to it. If more people see you, more people inquire, right? Except that if your marketing isn’t speaking to the right person, more visibility just means more of the wrong people see you. Or maybe the right people see but they don’t realize you’re the right fit for them, which then leads to you guessed it, more ghosting more praise shoppers more inquiries that go nowhere Here the pattern The problem is almost always about the quality of who finding them But the solution they reach for is always about the quantity of who sees them You cannot solve a quality problem with a quantity solution. I want to give you an image that I think captures this really well. Imagine you’re standing in a crowded room trying to get someone’s attention. You’re calling out, you’re shouting, they’re not responding. Okay, maybe they can’t hear you over the noise. Maybe they’re not the right person, you’re not sure. So you pick up a megaphone. And now you’re louder, way louder. Everyone in the room can hear you.

But if you were saying the wrong thing before, like if you were calling them by the wrong name, now you’re saying that wrong thing at a much higher volume. The people who weren’t responding before still aren’t responding. You just made sure that everyone in the room knows about it. You just made it louder. That’s what happens when you respond to a marketing problem with more marketing. If the marketing isn’t right, amplifying it, doing more of it does not fix it. It just means more people encounter a marketing message that isn’t speaking to them. So the fix isn’t turning up the volume.

It’s what you’re saying and who you’re saying it to. I want to tell you about a member of the Wedding Business Collective who learned this firsthand. She is a wedding planner. She was doing everything right on the surface.

She had a beautiful website. She was active on social media. She had all of her processes down. Her marketing talked about the things that she had been told or had really observed that planners talk about.

Things like saving time, reducing stress, making the planning process easier. It made sense.

It’s what most planners say. It’s what a lot of marketing advice tells you to lead with. But she wasn’t booking enough of the clients she wanted. She was getting inquiries that felt off and not quite right, and they weren’t booking her. So she did something that changed everything. She actually sat down and talked to the clients that she loved working with most, not to ask them for a favor, not to ask them for a review or testimonial, not to ask them for a referral, just to understand them on a human level. Who are you? What were you looking for? What made you choose me? What drove those decisions? And what she found stopped her cold. She noticed almost all of her favorite clients were South Asian or marrying into a South Asian family. And what it turned out they really wanted had nothing to do with reducing stress or saving time They wanted a wedding that honored their culture and their traditions while still feeling very very personal and custom Not a carbon copy of every other Indian or Pakistani wedding that their cousins and their sister and their brother and their college friends had already had. Something that felt truly distinctly theirs. Her marketing wasn’t speaking to this at all. It was speaking to that generic, stressed out, busy couple that every other planner in the world was talking to. It was too generic.

And while some of these couples were finding her, the one she actually really loved working with, they weren’t able to see themselves in what she was marketing. You know, once they got on a call with her, they decided to work with her. But she saw this huge opportunity to change her messaging. And once she built it around her actual best clients who said, this is why I booked you. This is what I was looking for. This is what mattered to me. Everything shifted immediately. Inquiries from those exact types of couples started coming in quick and consistently. And it’s not because she found a new platform or she ran a new ad or she posted more because she finally said the thing that made the right people think, oh my God, this person gets it. They have the solution to my problem.

She didn’t find new clients. She finally told the right clients who were overlooking her, that she understood their problem. And they showed up and they were excited to book her and work with her. Now, I want to ask you something. How did she know what to say? How did she know that these were her people and this is what they cared about? Honestly, she just asked them. Real clients, real conversations, real data, not a worksheet, not a imaginary persona she invented, not a demographic profile. Actual human beings who had actually chosen her and were willing to tell her exactly what made them do it. That process, going to your best clients and actually listening is so powerful.

And it’s what I’m going to talk about next week. And I’m going to challenge something that I think a lot of you believe about ideal client work, and that has been holding you back. Because here’s the thing. Most wedding pros have done some version of an ideal client exercise before.

and most of them felt like it didn’t really change anything. It didn’t do anything for their business. And if that’s you, next week, I’m going to explain exactly why.

And it is not what you think. So share this episode with a Wedding Pro friend who needs to hear it and I will see you next Wednesday.

Bye.