3 Things Wedding Pros Tell Me (And Why They’re Wrong)

Transcript: 3 Things Wedding Pros Tell Me (And Why They’re Wrong)

Heidi Thompson:

I hear these three things from wedding pros all the time. They’re wrong and they’re holding you back.

Hey there, and welcome to the podcast. I am your host, Heidi Thompson, and I have heard every single reason in the book not to fix your marketing. Every single one over the last 14 years. And most of them have a grain of truth in them. And that’s exactly why they work so well at keeping people stuck. So today I am dragging the three I hear most into the spotlight and showing you why the grain of truth they give you is not the whole truth. The first one, Heidi, I already book weddings. I am doing fine. I don’t need to fix anything. All right, I believe you.

You book weddings. But booked how exactly? Are you booked out with people you love at prices you actually love? Or are you booked with people who caught you on a discount, who negotiated you down or never quite understood what made you different and what you were worth? Because you can absolutely have a quote-unquote good year by volume, a full calendar, decent money, and still be leaving a fortune and your sanity on the table. You could be making the same income off a third fewer weddings if those weddings were the right couples at the right prices. And a lot of wedding pros book despite their marketing, not because of it, but because they’re great at the work and people manage to find them anyways. That’s not a system. That’s luck. And as the market matures, that luck begins to run out. Let me tell you about Liz. She and her husband were wedding officiants and they had been at it for well over a decade more than 100 weddings in some years They were successful by any measure you would look at And when Liz actually looked at her numbers she realized her two cheapest packages were making up 20 of their bookings and under 7% of her income. They were also creating like 80% of the problems. Her words where 20% of the work is making 7% of the money and creating almost all the problems, so she cut them.

The average revenue per wedding went up, and she got to work less for what turned out to be more money. This summit, Book More Wedding Summit, is not just for people with zero bookings. It’s for the ones who want to go from booked to booked well, from booked and burned out to booked and, you know, actually having a life.

And Liz and her husband, Jack, were able to make more money, work fewer weddings, and only need to work 25 to 30 hours per week. Thing number two that I hear all the time, this is probably the most common thing I hear, I don’t have time to work on my marketing. My season is insane right now. I hear you. Maybe you’ve got three weddings this month, this week.

Back to back, you are scarfing down lunch in your car just to make sure you’re able to eat. That’s real. But here’s the part that stings. The busier you are right now, the more you need this.

Right now, you’re booking. You’re surviving. You’re feeling fine. You’re feeling busy, but you’re feeling fine booking-wise.

Six months from now, when your season goes quiet, what is actually in your pipeline?

What has your marketing been doing for you? The couples deciding about next year and even the year after are shopping right now. And if you’re not showing up for them when you’re slammed, somebody else is.

I don’t have time almost always means. I never built the system that brings couples in on repeat.

And you cannot build that system if you only think about it when you’re already desperate for leads and bookings. Nancy Skipton is a solo planner. She has been on the podcast. She doesn’t have a team. She does everything herself. She’s more booked now than she’s ever been.

Her fix is ruthless focus. not finding more time because there isn’t any. It’s making sure that she sticks to her calendar Everything goes on it or it doesn’t happen And her marketing is organized It focused It goes on it like a client meeting It’s not, oh yeah, someday I need to work on my marketing. She has the exact items that she needs to do on her calendar and she treats them like a client meeting. Because if it’s not on her calendar, it’s not happening. That is how a maxed out solo wedding pro stops letting her marketing slide to later, which then becomes never. And this is exactly why the Book More Wedding Summit is free. It’s virtual. It’s something you can watch from a venue on your phone. I built it for busy people because I know every single one of you is busy. But being busy isn’t an excuse to not marketing. That’s just going to lead you to not having any leads and bookings. The third thing I hear, I don’t need this. I can do it myself. And you probably can.

That’s true. But can you do it fast? And can you do it well without burning six months learning what took someone else 14 years to figure out? Because here’s what I watch happen.

Someone decides to DIY the whole thing, figure out all of their marketing on their own. They spend six months tweaking Facebook ads. They spend a year working on SEO, not quite sure if they’re doing it right or not. They spend months wrestling with their website copy, maybe building their own website, and by the time they ship anything, the market has already shifted, or they are so fried from that learning curve. They crawl back to what always worked, in air quotes, even though it barely works now. There is a really big difference between being capable and being efficient. And it’s kind of funny to see because in the wedding industry, we see so many wedding professionals complain about couples who want to DIY everything. But I see so many wedding professionals falling into the same trap in their business.

Carolyn, a wedding floral designer that I had the privilege of working with built her whole booking process herself. And it works. It works very well. It books 100% of couples she sends proposals to But it took two long years of trial and error to get there Two years She was more than capable That was never the issue The issue was that capable takes the long way around And watching someone who already cracked the code would have handed her most of that time back. You can figure out things alone. The question is why you would want to spend the most valuable thing that you own, your time, doing it the slow way when somebody else already knows the answer. There is a shortcut. Take it. And in this case, with the Book More Wedding Summit, it’s free to get that shortcut. Now, I want you to notice what’s actually underneath these objections. Objection one is usually fear. That’s if you touch what’s working, it’s going to break. The whole thing’s going to fall apart. You’re scared to work on it. Objection two is really all about overwhelm.

You’re already drowning and one more thing feels impossible. That’s why I focus so much on taking things off of your plate and not just adding more. Objection three is control or money. You want your hands in every decision or paying for help feels like too much. Every wedding pro I know who’s booked out with dream clients felt all of those things and they moved forward anyway. They were scared it wouldn’t work. They were scared they’d waste the time and they walked straight at it instead of around it. The fear didn’t go away. They just stopped letting it drive their decisions. And this is where track four of the Book More Wedding Summit will really help you. And it’s turning inquiries into bookings.

It’s not just about closing more deals. It’s about handling the objections, the things going on in the minds of your couples, why they hesitate, why they ghost after pricing, how I need to think about it becomes where do I sign? Because your objections and your ideal client’s objections rhyme.

If you can’t sit with your own doubt, you’ll never be able to sit with theirs. So this week, notice which objection you heard and went, yep, that’s me. That is not your reason to skip the summit. It’s your reason to be there. Go grab your ticket at bookmoreweddingsummit.com or comment the word summit on any of my posts over on Instagram and I will send it your way.

I’ll see you there.

Bye.