Why Your Marketing Isn’t Attracting The Right Wedding Clients

Transcript: Why Your Marketing Isn’t Attracting The Right Wedding Clients

Heidi Thompson:

If your wedding marketing is not bringing in the right clients, if it’s only sometimes bringing in the right clients and also bringing in a mess of other people, this episode is for you. We’re going to break down exactly why that’s happening and what you can do to change it.

Hey there, my friend. Welcome to the podcast. I am your host, Heidi Thompson, and I help wedding professionals of all different kinds make their marketing easier so they can book more weddings with couples they love. Now today I want to start with something that might sound a little bit strange and that is most established wedding pros don’t have a lead problem even if they feel like they don’t have enough leads. I know that might not be quite what you expected to hear from a marketing person, but stick with me. If you have been in business for a few years, you’re probably getting inquiries, you’re booking weddings, you’re making money, and yet something still feels kind of off. Because every so often, you wrap up working with a couple and you think, oh, I wish they were all like that. And then the next inquiry comes in, without fail, and it’s someone asking if you can do something similar but cheaper, or they disappear and ghost you the second you send your pricing, or they book you and then spend the next several months being exactly the kind of client that makes you question whether or not you even want to do this job anymore. If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you, because that is not a lead volume problem.

That’s a fit problem. And those two things have completely different solutions. Now, whenever this comes up, the advice is always the same.

Post more on social media. Be more consistent. Get better at SEO. Start a blog. Do more reels. Get on TikTok before it’s too late. Run ads. And look, none of this is empirically bad advice. I teach marketing. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that visibility doesn’t matter. But here’s the question nobody asks before handing out that advice. And this just drives me nuts. That question is, what happens when more people see your marketing and it still doesn convert Because visibility will never fix a messaging problem It actually amplifies it and makes it worse makes it more expensive If your marketing isn making the right people think, oh my god, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for, then reaching more people just means there will be more people feeling absolutely nothing about you. You might get more inquiries, but you’re going to be getting more of the wrong ones along with them. And that is exhausting to have to sift through. And it’s not the answer to this problem. And here’s an exercise that I want you to try after this episode. Go look at five wedding business websites within your vendor category, or don’t because it might depress you. But I’ll tell you what you’ll find. You’re going to find phrases like capturing your love story, or making your wedding day stress-free, creating unforgettable memories you’ll cherish forever. Every single one.

and not because everyone set out to copy each other, though some definitely did.

It’s because everyone, for some reason, was taught to describe what they do instead of who they do it for and the problem they solve for those people. And describing what you do sounds exactly the same as every other person who does the same thing. It’s like if a hotel website said we have beds.

Okay, I should hope so. That’s kind of what a hotel is. Here’s the test. Pull up your homepage right now. Look at it for five seconds.

You only get five seconds because that is the amount of time you have to stand out to someone just landing on your website for the first time. So five seconds. Then close the tab. What do you remember? If the answer is not much or something about stress-free planning, that is your problem right there because your ideal client is doing the exact same thing.

They’re landing on your website, they’re scanning for five seconds, and they’re deciding whether to stay or to keep looking at your competitors. And if nothing reaches out and grabs them in those five seconds and tells them, oh my God, this is exactly the thing that you’ve been looking for, they’re just going to keep moving. Most, like the vast majority of wedding business websites fail this test.

And it’s not because they don’t have good work. It’s not because they’re not skilled. it’s because the marketing describes the service instead of the person it’s for.

It’s like if a restaurant marketed itself as a place that has food. It’s like, yeah, that literally the definition of what a restaurant is Couples don wake up hoping someone will capture their love story Nobody cares about that They wake up hoping someone understands the kind of wedding that they actually want to have and will be able to give it to them. Those are two completely different things. One is about you. The other is about them and what they’re getting out of that. Let me tell you about a planner I worked with a while back. I’ll call her Sarah because I don’t have her permission to use her name. She had the kind of messaging that pretty much every wedding planner has.

Stress-free planning, vendor recommendations, timeline management, all the usual stuff. Nothing wrong with it. It just describes what they do. But it was completely invisible because of that fact. every single planner in her market and quite honestly on the planet was saying the exact same things. So we did something that she had never done before. We talked to her best clients. We didn’t guess at what they cared about. We actually had her reach out to them and ask them some key questions. Why did you hire me instead of another planner? What were you worried about before you booked? What would you tell someone who’s considering hiring me right now or if you were going to refer a friend? Let me tell you, not a single one of those people mentioned stress. Not one. Instead, they kept bringing the conversation back to really wanting a wedding that honored South Asian wedding traditions without it feeling like a copy of every other Indian and Pakistani wedding they had ever attended. Because they had been to a lot by this point between their siblings, cousins, college friends. They wanted something that put their unique spin on their favorite traditions and made it feel unmistakably them, not like yet another Indian wedding. And that became her messaging. Not stress-free planning, not let us handle the details. It became about helping couples create a wedding that honored their cultural traditions without feeling like it belonged to someone else.

And the couples who needed that started recognizing themselves the instant they landed on her website. These perfect fit clients started booking her like crazy.

That is what good messaging does. It doesn’t convince people. It helps the right people recognize they’re in the right place. because this wasn’t something new she had to invent. This was what her existing clients told her that they loved about her and they loved about the experience of working with her She was just bringing that into her marketing Now this is where I see a lot of wedding pros get stuck They tell me you know I just getting price shoppers Everyone keeps asking about price. I keep getting people who want to negotiate and I get it. I know that is incredibly frustrating. But think for just a minute about how people buy things. If I land on your website and I can’t immediately tell why you’re different from four other people I just looked at, what else do I have to compare? Price. Of course, it’s the only obvious difference.

It’s the only thing you’re giving me to go on. But when someone lands on your website and thinks, you know, it’s great, stopping their tracks, oh my god, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for before they’ve even finished reading your homepage. They’re not asking who’s the cheapest. They’re asking how they can get you specifically, because you put yourself into your own category. This is so powerful that I have had multiple wedding pros with couples who literally changed their wedding date so that they could work with that wedding pro. That’s how bad they wanted it. And that is a completely different buying conversation. So here’s what I want you to do after you finish this episode.

Go read the first thing people see on your website before you even scroll down. Not to edit it, not to change anything. Just go read it. And then ask yourself, could one of your competitors copy this and paste it onto their website and nobody would notice? If the answer to that question is yes, that’s not because you’re boring or unoriginal. It’s because your marketing is describing your service instead of the person your service is perfect for and what it gives them from their perspective. And that is completely fixable.

Your best clients have already told you exactly what to say. It’s sitting in your old inquiry emails, reviews, your thank you notes, the words they use to describe why they hired you, what they were worried about before they booked, what made them finally decide who they would recommend you to and why. Nobody’s collecting that. Nobody is looking for the pattern. So everyone keeps guessing and they end up writing this generic copy based on their own assumptions. The wedding pros who attract clients consistently, the kind of clients that they love working with, and stop competing on price are not doing more marketing. They’re just doing better marketing. Marketing that was built around what their best clients actually said.

That’s the whole game. That’s what you need them to see. Next week, I’m going to go deeper on something that might be a little bit uncomfortable. I’m going to go deeper on something that might be a little bit uncomfortable. going to make the case that more marketing is not your answer. And that for most established wedding pros, doing more is actually making your problems worse. And I’m also going to tell you about something I have been building behind the scenes for a very specific group of wedding pros. It’s not a course, it’s not a membership. It’s something I have never offered before. And I think for the right person, it’s going to be exactly what they’ve been waiting for.

Now, before you go, if what I talked about today is hitting close to home, go run your own homepage through the five second test tool that I built for you. Because five seconds is all you got to stand out, to make it clear who you are the best fit for. And this tool will analyze and let you know how you’re doing. You’ll see exactly what a stranger sees when they land on your website and whether it tells them anything or if it just sounds like everybody else. You can go to test.evolveyourweddingbusiness.com. I’ll also include the link in the show notes.

So go check that out and I’ll see you next week.