Is Your Wedding Marketing Giving Pickup Artist Energy?

Transcript: Is Your Wedding Marketing Giving Pickup Artist Energy?

Heidi Thompson:

Is your wedding business marketing giving sleazy pickup artist energy? Let’s talk about it.

Hey there, welcome to the podcast. I’m your host, Heidi Thompson. I’m all about helping wedding pros make their marketing easy and make it work so they can get more of the bookings they want. And I want to talk to you about pickup artists for a second. And before you click off of this, I promise this is going somewhere that is very relevant to your wedding business. So if you’re not familiar with the pickup artist world, lucky you, here is the quick version. There is this entire subculture of guys who have built their whole identity around teaching other men how to attract women using a set of scripted tactics. I’m talking memorized openers, specific body language moves, a technique called negging where you give a woman a backhanded compliment to supposedly make her more interested in you, elaborate routines designed to manufacture attraction. These guys have entire systems, flow charts almost. If she does X, you do Y.

If she responds this way, you say that. There are books, forums, weekend boot camps that you can pay thousands of dollars to go to. A whole industry built around the idea that finding a real long term relationship is just a matter of learning the right sequence of moves. Like it’s Street Fighter. And here’s the thing, it almost never works. And when it does work in the short term, it definitely doesn’t lead to what most people actually want, which is a real connection with a person who actually likes them. Because here’s what these guys fundamentally misunderstand.

Relationships are not a puzzle. They’re not a video game. The person in front of you is not a lock waiting for the right key. You can’t script your way to genuine human connection. And why am I telling you this? Because I look at how most wedding pros approach their marketing, and I see the exact same mistake. Most wedding pros have been taught either directly or by just osmosis from scrolling the internet that marketing is a set of tactics that you execute. Post three times a week. Use these particular hashtags Write captions that end in this specific way Run a promotion Boost a post show up on Instagram stories every day blog every wedding send an email newsletter go network with venues. These things are presented like moves in a playbook. Do them consistently and bookings will follow. So wedding pros do them. They post, they show up, they write the captions, They follow the scripts they’ve learned from marketing gurus and other vendors and random blog posts floating around the internet.

And then they stand back and wait for couples to come flooding in. And usually not much happens. Or something happens, but it’s inconsistent. Or the inquiries that they do get aren’t the right people.

Price shoppers, couples who ghost, leads that go absolutely nowhere. And the response to that almost universally is do more tactics, more posts, more platforms, more content, more moves.

This is pickup artist marketing. It’s a series of scripted moves aimed at a crowd of strangers with no real understanding of who these people are, what they care about, or why they should choose you specifically. And just like that guy reciting his memorized opener to every woman he meets at a bar, it mostly falls flat because the people on the receiving end can feel it’s not actually about them. Here’s the reframe I want you to sit with.

Marketing is not a series of moves. Marketing is psychology. It is the practice of understanding another human being well enough so that when you speak or write or show them your work, that person feels genuinely seen and understood. And that feeling, that moment we get of that, oh my god, this is exactly for me, is what creates that pull toward you.

It’s not manipulation, that’s connection. And it’s the same thing that makes real relationships work.

Think about the difference between a guy who approaches you with some memorized line versus someone who actually pays attention, who notices something real about you, who asks a question that shows that he was actually listening, who makes you feel like you’re a specific person he’s interested in, not just a warm body in a room. That second person doesn’t need tactics because they’re doing something the first person never figured out how to do and the pickup artist people never figured out how to do.

They’re actually engaging with who you are. This is what great marketing does. It’s what effective marketing does. It doesn’t shout into the void hoping someone, anyone, any warm body responds.

It speaks so specifically and so accurately to the right person that when they encounter it, they feel like you made it for them because you did That couple who finds your website and immediately thinks oh my God this is our photographer or she gets exactly what we wanted That not an accident That not luck That what happens when someone has done the work to understand their ideal clients deeply enough to speak directly to them. And that work is not about finding the right hashtag formula. It’s about psychology. Now, I know you’ve probably heard you need to know your ideal client about 100 times. It’s one of those pieces of advice that gets repeated so often it really starts to lose meaning. So let me tell you what I don’t mean when I say it. I don’t mean make up a fictional person, an avatar named Jessica, who is between 28 and 34 and lives in a major metro area near you and has a household income between X and Y and follows these 12 Instagram accounts. That exercise gives you a demographic, and demographics don’t tell you how to talk to a person. What I actually mean is this. What is your ideal client afraid of? What keeps them up at night about planning this wedding? What do they desperately want the experience to feel like? What have they seen from other vendors that annoyed them or disappointed them. What words do they actually use when they talk about this with their friends?

That last one is huge. The specific language your ideal clients use is gold. Because when you use their words back to them in your marketing, something clicks in their brain. It doesn’t feel like marketing. It doesn’t feel like an ad. It feels like someone finally understands. A pickup artist learns scripts. They memorize lines, but they never actually learn how to listen. The wedding pro who books consistently has learned to listen. They’ve talked to their best clients. They’ve paid attention to the inquiries that they love. They’ve noticed patterns in what all their favorite couples say and feel and care about, and they’ve built their entire marketing around that. So when their ideal client finds them, it’s not cold. It’s recognition. It’s that feeling of this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. When your marketing is built on a real understanding instead of tactics, A few things shift dramatically. First, the right people find you and immediately feel like you’re their person.

Your website stops being a brochure that lists your services and has some bullet points and starts being something that speaks directly to the couples you actually want to work with. They read it and think, yes, this is exactly what I want.

Second, you stop attracting the wrong people. This is huge and it counterintuitive when your marketing is specific and clear about who you for the couples who aren’t a fit self out They look at your work and think it an option but it not quite right for us And that a good thing You don want to book every couple You want to book your couples. Third, your sales conversations get so much easier because the person inquiring already trusts you before they ever hit send. They’ve been on your website. They’ve seen your content. they feel understood by your messaging. They’re not reaching out to kick the tires. They’re reaching out because they’ve already decided they want to work with you. They just need to confirm some details. That is such a different experience than chasing down every lead and trying to convince strangers to give you a chance.

And fourth, marketing stops feeling like a performance you have to put on because you’re not executing the moves for a crowd. You’re just talking to your people. in your voice about things that they actually care about. That is sustainable.

That’s something you can keep doing without burning out. The pickup artist is exhausting himself, running scripts on everyone he meets, hoping something lands. The person who actually understands human connection walks into a room and finds their person without breaking a sweat because they know what they’re looking for, and they know how to actually show up for them. That’s the wedding business you want. And it starts with doing the one thing that most marketing advice skips entirely.

Actually learning who your ideal clients are at a level that goes way beyond demographics. If you want to build that kind of foundation for your marketing and stop doing the pickup artist marketing, This is exactly what we work on inside the Wedding Business Collective. We start with your ideal clients, the real stuff, not the demographic checklist, not the pickup lines. And we build your entire marketing plan from that understanding outward.

So your messaging actually connects. Your marketing actually attracts the right people. And you stop feeling like you’re just doing these moves, doing these tactics into the void. and nobody’s paying attention. You can learn more, and you can get started for just a dollar for your first month over at evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/pod.

But more than anything, I want you to stop thinking about your marketing the way a pickup artist thinks about women, because I see this connection so clearly, and it’s no wonder it doesn’t work.

The human connection, the psychology, all of it has to be there in order for someone to meet someone and spark a connection and have a relationship as well as someone to find you and want to actually work with you. All right, you can get that info on the Wedding Business Collective and start your first month for just a dollar at evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/pod.

I’ll speak to you soon.