The Wedding Marketing Mistake That Attracts The Wrong Clients

Transcript: The Wedding Marketing Mistake That Attracts The Wrong Clients

Heidi Thompson:

Today, I am breaking down the wedding marketing mistake that attracts the wrong clients and is costing you a ton of time and money.

Hey there, my friend. Welcome to the podcast. If this is your first time here, I am your host, Heidi Thompson. And for the last 14 years, I’ve been helping wedding pros make their marketing easier and make their marketing work so that they’re able to book more weddings with couples they love to work with. Now, last week in the last episode, I made the case that most established wedding pros don’t have a lead problem. They have a fit problem. And the fix to a fit problem is not more visibility, it’s more specificity. And today I want to go even further. And I want to say something I’ve said before, but I get that it sounds a little bit crazy coming from someone who teaches marketing for a living.

And it is that more marketing is not your answer. I know you’re like all entrepreneurs.

You want to hustle your way out of problems. You’re hardworking. It’s a big part of how you got here. But you can’t in this situation.

Stay with me. There is advice that you are taking that is making things worse. Every time booking slow or inquiries feel off, the answer is the same. The gut feeling is exactly the same. I gotta get out there. I gotta hustle. I gotta get my name out there. I gotta do more. I gotta post consistently. I’m going to start that blog. I’m going to do more reels. I’m going get on Pinterest. I’m going to run Instagram ads. I’m going to go to networking events, and maybe I’ll start a YouTube channel, and I’ll get on TikTok like I’ve been putting off, but I’m going to do it. None of those things are inherently bad. I’ve recommended all of them at one point or another, not all together like that. But here’s the question that none of those recommendations account for. What happens when the people who see your marketing don’t care? It doesn’t connect.

They don’t want to work with you as a result of seeing your marketing. Because here’s what I’ve noticed after over a decade of working with wedding professionals across every category you can think of Visibility is not the bottleneck for most established wedding pros Your message is the bottleneck And more marketing doesn’t fix a messaging problem It just turns up the volume and makes it more expensive It doesn make anybody want to work with you. They just see more things from you. Let me give you an analogy that I think might make this click. Imagine you are building a house and you decide to skip the foundation. You just start building, walls, roof, the whole thing. And then you hire an interior designer to make it look beautiful. You get incredible furniture, the perfect lighting, the exact aesthetic that you wanted. It looks incredible. It’s also going to fall down. That’s what most wedding marketing looks like right now. They have the Instagram strategy and website redesigns and Pinterest boards and SEO and ads and networking events, all of it layered on top of messaging that doesn’t actually tell the right person why you’re the one for them. The decoration looks great.

The wrong people still show up. Because none of those tactics fix the underlying problem. They just give more people a chance to see messaging that isn’t speaking to them, that they don’t care about, and just ignore it.

I have watched Wedding Pros double their posting frequency and see zero change in the quality of their inquiries or in the number of their inquiries. Triple their Pinterest efforts and still get the same discount requests.

redo their website for the third or fourth time and wonder why the same wrong fit people keep finding it because it’s so pretty. It’s not the tactics that are broken, it’s the foundation. The foundation is non-existent and continuing to try to hustle your way out of this problem to do more marketing is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I worked with a photographer recently who was doing everything right on paper. They were posting consistently on social media. They were getting great engagement on those posts. They had beautiful work. They were getting inquiries, but she kept attracting potential clients who wanted to negotiate on price, and they would compare her to other photographers in her area that were charging half of what she charged.

And these people could not understand why her packages were priced the way that they were. And understandably, she thought her problem was her pricing page. And by this point, she had rewritten it four times. The problem was not her pricing page. The problem was that nothing in her marketing communicated who she was specifically for and why they should care Nothing helped her ideal client recognize themselves So she was attracting everyone which meant she was attracting a lot of people who were never going to be the right fit and she was wasting a ton of time, hours and hours every week, chasing them, hoping to turn them into clients, which was never going to happen. When we looked at what her best clients actually said about her, you know, the ones, the ones that you love working with, the ones that never question your prices, the ones that refer you to everyone they know, the language was completely different from what was on her website. Her clients talked about wanting someone who would take charge and push back creatively, who wouldn’t just do what they asked and take the photos that they wanted, but would tell them when something wasn’t going to work and suggest something better and come up with ideas to make their photos even better. Someone they could trust to make calls on the day without having to check in with them constantly. They wanted a photographer who was a creative partner, not an order taker. And absolutely none of that was on her website.

Her website talked about stunning images and an editorial style and capturing genuine moments, which is true, but it’s also what every other photographer says. Once that language that her clients actually used showed up in her marketing, something shifted. And it shifted fast. The inquiries increased a little bit in volume, but she was already getting a lot of inquiries. And the quality changed completely. Because the couples who wanted a cheap photographer, an order taker, self-selected out of the process before they ever hit her inbox.

And the ones who wanted exactly what she was describing started to recognize themselves. That is the version of marketing that I’m interested in. Not just doing more, but actually doing better.

Wouldn’t you rather a higher percent of your inquiries see you as the perfect fit and didn’t care much about price, as opposed to just getting more inquiries from the same old people that are going to price shop and ghost. You don’t build the foundation by doing more, by hustling, by getting more visible, by being more active, by posting more, despite every urge I know that is in your body to hustle your way out of a problem. Because that’s how we learn to do things. You build it by getting specific about exactly who you talking to what they actually care about and why you are the only right answer for that specific person And here what most wedding pros I meet miss about that The answer to that is not in your head.

It not something you can sit down and brainstorm your way into or come up with with ChatGPT. It’s not in a workbook or a framework or a course. it’s in the heads of your best clients. The couples who hired you that you absolutely loved working with, who never questioned your prices, the ones whose weddings you’re still really proud of, the ones who referred you to everyone they knew. They told you exactly what to say. It’s sitting in your old inquiry emails, your reviews, your thank you notes, in your DMs, in the things they said to you on consult calls that you didn’t write down. And they will tell you exactly how to attract more people just like them. You just have to know what to ask. Not a single wedding pro I’ve ever worked with has invented the best messaging in their own minds. They discovered it. And they did it by actually asking their best clients questions and listening carefully to what came back. When you do that, something really interesting happens.

You stop trying to convince people to hire you, you just shift your marketing to be exactly what they want. Your marketing starts helping the right people recognize they’re already in the right place. It becomes an oasis in the desert that they are excited to find. It becomes, and I legit have seen this, a Girl Scout cookie table outside of a dispensary. Everybody wants that, that is coming out of that dispensary. That is a completely different experience of running a business than trying to cater to these price shoppers and people who ghost you and chasing people around.

Now, I’m going to be straight with you about why I’m talking about this specifically right now. I have spent years teaching the clone your best clients process.

The research, the interviews, the pattern finding, turning what you discover into the perfect positioning and messaging that actually works. And over and over again, I watch and see what actually happens.

People get it. They understand why it matters. Then they put it on their already very long to-do list.

Busy season hits, something else comes up, and the marketing that needed to change is still exactly the same six months later. So I’ve built something that I’ve never offered before.

It’s called Perfect Fit Clients, and it is a done-for-you service where I do this work forever. for you. Not a course to work through on your own timeline, not a framework that you have to figure out yourself. Me coming into your business, personally leading the research, finding the patterns, building your positioning, writing your messaging, and handing you everything you need to go from my marketing sounds like everyone else’s and is not working to my ideal clients see themselves immediately and are excited to book. Your only job in this process is to forward one email I write for you to your best clients and show up to a 30-minute call. That’s it. I handle everything in between and hand you messaging that is designed to be the perfect fit for your ideal client. The kind that stops them in their tracks and makes them want to work with only you. Applications are open right now through July 17th. And the founding price is $9.97. And that is going to go to $1,997 on July 18th. And if you’re busy right now, I have some good news for you. Once you’re in, you have six months to get started. So being in Peak season is not a reason to wait and not take advantage of this discounted price.

So you can go to the link in the show notes to apply, or you can head to evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/fit to see if you the right fit. It’s free to apply. You hear back from me within 24 hours. And it application only because I need to make sure this is the perfect fit for your business. So you’re not wasting your time or your money. You don’t need to know how you stand out or why your best clients booked you. I’m going to go figure that out for you. And I’m only offering 10 spots at this price, and they’re going to the first 10 people who apply, get approved, and book their spot.

If you’ve been in business long enough to know what a great client feels like, but can’t seem to consistently attract more of them, this was built to solve that exact problem. It takes almost none of your time. And what I create for you is going to start attracting perfect fit clients easily. So go check it out. That link, again, to learn more and apply is at evolveyourweddingbusiness.com slash fit. Applications are open right now through July 17th. And if this sounds like something that might be a good fit for you, go ahead and apply. I will let you know if you’re a good fit or not. And if I still have one of these 10 spots at the founding price, I’ll see you next week.