10 Tools To Make Your Wedding Business Easier To Run
Running and growing a wedding business can be hard and time-consuming. It’d be pretty great to get some of your time back, right? Maybe even make your work easier? That’s why I’ve put together 10 tools to make your wedding business easier to run. Even if you only use one of these tools, it’s going to save you time, energy, and effort and what wedding business owner wouldn’t want that? Hooray for making things easier in your wedding business!
Aisle Planner
This one is specifically for wedding planners. Aisle Planner is a genius design, planning and collaboration tool for wedding planners. If you aren’t managing your projects, to do’s, customers and everything else involved in planning a wedding in one place, you are going to be in a constant state of disorganization and panic. That’s no way to work or live.
Aisle Planner was created by a wedding planner for wedding planners and it’s not only efficient and easy to use, but it’s also beautiful. You can even invite your couples to collaborate with you so that everything really is in one place. No more lost emails or scribbled notes on napkins.
You can get 25% off of your first 3 months of Aisle Planner if you use the promo code “heidi”. I’m friends with the creator of the tool and she has been on the podcast and she wants to hook you guys up. Click here to find out more about Aisle Planner.
Calendly
Ohhh how I love this tool! You know those “When works for you?” back and forth emails when you’re trying to schedule a time to meet? Those take up lots of time and there are much easier ways to schedule meetings & appointments.
You can list times available and allow people to book, use Calendly. It’s clean, simple and super user-friendly. I’ve used both their free and paid plans and they’re both excellent and super easy to use. Click here to find out more about Calendly.
Dubsado
There are a lot of little things that need to happen in your wedding business to keep things humming along smoothly, but you don’t have to physically do them. You can automate a LOT the tedious things in your business with Dubsado. Why do it over and over again yourself when you can use a tool to do it for you? Dubsado can handle a lot of different things for you including client onboarding, workflows, proposals, funnels, payments, and so many glorious automations that you’re just going to love. It’s like a magical robot that runs part of your business for you. Click here to find out more about Dubsado.
ClickUp
Every business needs a way to manage projects and this is my favorite project management tool that I’ve ever tried. I’ve tried Trello, Asana, and bunch of other project management tools but none of them really felt like they made intuitive sense to me. ClickUp is super flexible and just makes sense to me. It works the way I think it should and I’m not left trying to jam a square peg into a round hole.
ClickUp provides the perfect balance of structure and flexibility and it has all of the features you need to help you keep track of all of the to-do’s and projects in your wedding business. It also has a lot of things that other free project management tools lack that will make your life easier. In my opinion, it’s a damn near perfect project management tool! Click here to find out more about ClickUp.
Process Street
If you’re going to build a business where you’re not doing all the work, you need systems and processes. You need to document how to do a particular task so you can hand that off to someone and they can do it for you. That’s how you build a wedding business that doesn’t require you to do every little thing so you can focus on what you love and actually have a life. But how do you keep track of all of those processes and provide them to your team or virtual assistant in a way that makes it easy for them to execute and get the task done? That’s where Process Street comes in.
Process Street is the perfect way to document recurring tasks in a way that makes it easy for anyone to do them for you. All you do is create your checklist template once with as many steps, photos, and videos you need to show someone exactly what to do. When that person is ready to do the task, they just run your process and go through your steps. It’s a really, really smart checklist tool that will allow you to easily delegate recurring tasks. Click here to find out more about Process Street.
Smarterqueue
Smarterqueue is a social media tool that allows you to create a library of evergreen posts. Let’s say you have 50 blog posts on your wedding business website and they’re all just as relevant today as they were 6 months ago. Why would you post them on social media just once? Smarterqueue allows you to create a library that it cycles through so your posts never die in the archives. You can create different categories for your social media posts and some of mine include my content, other people’s content, promotional, quotes/fun, and testimonials.
This tool saves me SO much time and I freaking love it! It takes care of posting for my Facebook page, Facebook group, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also supports Instagram and Pinterest but I have another tool I prefer for those. Click here to check out Smarterqueue and start a 30-day trial.
Tailwind
Tailwind is the smartest tool I’ve used for both Pinterest and Instagram. I started off using Tailwind for Pinterest and I absolutely love all of the unique features they have like optimized scheduling, multi-board pinning, bulk upload, drag-and-drop calendars, content discovery, and seriously awesome analytics. Tailwind now supports Instagram and has a range of similar features that help you optimize what you’re doing on Instagram and find opportunities to improve. Tailwind really goes beyond a social media scheduler. It’s a full-on Pinterest and Instagram manager that will help you get the best out of both platforms. It’s no secret that Instagram and Pinterest are big platforms for the wedding business owner and Tailwind will help you take advantage of the opportunities that are out there for you. Click here to find out more about Tailwind.
Wave
I originally signed up for Wave to use it for my bookkeeping but the real value I get from Wave is in the reporting. Wave helps me stay on track with my financial goals by allowing me to zoom in and see where my revenue is coming from easily. It also allows you to invoice, do payroll, and take payments but I’d recommend Dubsado for that. You need to keep an eye on your wedding business finances and this free tool allows me to do it easily! Click here to find out more about Wave.
Qapital
This tool has helped me save so much money. If you’ve ever used IFTTT (If This, Then That) to create an automation (like when I publish this blog post, post it on Facebook), this tool is similar but it’s for money. Qapital moves money to savings automatically based on a ton of different triggers you can choose from. You can use it to build up your emergency fund or set aside your wedding business taxes every month so you aren’t caught off guard when it’s time to pay. This tool basically tricks me into saving more of my own money by automating it and I love it for that. Click here to find out more about Qapital.
ConvertKit
I’m a huge fan of email marketing for wedding businesses. Email marketing fills in the gap between “I’m just researching and I’m not ready to have a sales conversation yet” and “I’m ready to work with you, let’s talk”. That gap is HUGE (it can be many months long) and it’s where decisions are made so it’s important that you insert yourself here.
With email marketing, you allow a visitor to your website to sign up for your email list so that you can keep in touch with them. Couples don’t make these decisions quickly, they spend hundreds of hours researching, so the chances of them booking you off of their first website visit is pretty slim. You could see this as an annoyance or you could use it to your advantage. Honestly, it’s a wedding business opportunity waiting to be taken advantage of!
How do you use it to your advantage in your wedding business? You set up a sales funnel to nurture them as a lead over time and market to them so that when they are ready to work with someone, you are top of mind. But you need to use an email marketing provider in order to do all of this and harness the power of email marketing. That’s where ConvertKit comes in.
I’m a big fan of ConvertKit and when I came across it years ago, it was the first email marketing provider I used that actually made sense to me. It’s a powerful tool and it can help you keep in touch and market to those interested but not quite ready to book people and convert them to clients. In fact, inside The Wedding Business Collective, you’ll find a Selling With Email Marketing course that has a 7 email done-for-you autoresponder that you can take, tweak, and start using today with ConvertKit or any other email marketing provider. Click here to learn more about Convertkit.
Do you have any tools that you use to make running your wedding business easier? Tell us about them here in the Facebook group!
