Mistakes Most Wedding Pros Make With Their Marketing
Are you in the wedding and event industry struggling to keep up with your marketing efforts? Between blogging, social media, content creation, videos, and search engines, do you wonder if you’re doing your marketing right? Are you worried about where you’re next lead is coming from and scared that you’re doing it all wrong when it comes to marketing your wedding business?
Between doing your job, serving your clients, working long, physically brutal hours on the weekends, and living a life, it can be hard to make time, much less find the mental energy, to market, or promote, your creative small business in the wedding industry.
If you’re wondering if you’re marketing your business correctly and curious to know if you’re doing it right, you have the best seat at the reception as I share the most common marketing mistakes that I see with most wedding pros, including DJs, officiants, floral designers, wedding cake bakers and more.
When it comes to marketing your wedding business, such as a wedding photographer or videographer, and doing the work to bring in new inquiries or leads for your next clients - whether it’s on your blog, social media like Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok, or search engines like Google, Pinterest, and YouTube - just knowing what to do, is not enough.
For wedding photographers, planners, designers, DJs, caterers, stationery creators, florists, and bridal shop owners, knowing what not to do in your marketing can be more important in helping wedding businesses generate new clients through marketing.
Here are the eight most common marketing mistakes that most wedding pros make when it comes to promoting their business and generating new leads. Plus, I’m sharing a few tips for avoiding and overcoming these marketing mistakes.
Marketing Mistake #1: Focusing On Perfection
I will admit that I’m guilty of the number one marketing mistake that is holding most wedding and event businesses, including wedding dress designers and florists, back from creating a marketing system that brings in new leads without taking over their lives. And that is perfectionism.
Most wedding pros are too worried about doing it perfectly and not worried enough about just getting started, anywhere. You’re marketing doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to get done.
If you are stuck in perfectionism and it is causing you to not post, or not create new content to be shared with your potential future clients, you’re not marketing your business. And that’s not going to work long term.
My Advice: Focus on consistency over perfection when it comes to marketing and you can’t go wrong.
Marketing Mistake #2: Finding Reasons To Procrastinate
Many wedding and event professionals, such as destination wedding planners and decor rental companies, find reasons to procrastinate or put off their marketing efforts and this is a huge mistake. If you put off your marketing efforts, you might miss out on your next round of clients, and cause huge breaks in your business which isn’t great for cash flow.
If you’re in the wedding industry, you likely don’t have repeat clients on account that most engaged couples don’t get married more than once. This means that you cannot rely on repeat clients who are constantly planning weddings to keep yourself booked. Every year, you must bring in new clients, which means that you’re inquiry machine must always be running and attracting new clients.
Most wedding and event businesses, such as wedding websites and app developers, need a steady stream of inquiries and referrals coming in all year long to keep their business afloat. This means that your marketing efforts need to always be on. If you procrastinate your marketing for weeks or months, put it off until you have more time, or wait until the off-season, you’re not setting yourself up for sustained success.
My Advice: There’s always a reason to put something off, but the idea of not having any business in the future should be reason enough to move marketing up the priority list.
Marketing Mistake #3: Worrying About Unimportant Things
Most wedding and event professionals, including calligraphers and honeymoon travel agents, make the mistake of focusing on all the wrong and unimportant things when it comes to their marketing. They are worried more about little meaningless details such as time and quantity that in the end don’t make that much of a difference. When they should be worried about posting in the first place or staying consistent with their marketing.
Wedding pros should be focused on consistently putting out the best quality, most helpful content that they possibly can. That’s it.
Instead, they are focused on marketing details that have nothing to do with their clients. They are worried about how often they should post, how many photos they should put in a piece of content, or how long their video content should be. Those are tactics, and while they do matter on some level, they don’t matter nearly as much as posting in the first place.
My Advice: Potential future clients don’t care what time of day you post, they care that you solve their problems and make their life better. And you can’t do that if you don’t post at all.
Marketing Mistake #4: Putting Impressing Over Helping
Marketing a wedding and event business, such as bridal hair and wedding day makeup artists, is about bringing in new leads and inquiries into your business. And the fastest, most efficient way to do that is to be helpful to future clients. Sometimes in the visual and highly creative industry like weddings and events, marketing becomes more about impressing peers and competitors rather than serving potential customers.
Whether that’s sharing inspirational content that intrigues them, or solving a problem they are struggling with by sharing expertise, there is no shortage of ways that we can use marketing to help our potential future clients.
But, when the focus is on bragging or showing off, it is not only unappealing to potential clients, it makes your job of sealing the deal that much harder.
My Advice: While impressing your future clients matters, I certainly don’t want you to put out work that you’re not proud of, you’ll catch more bees with honey.
Marketing Mistake #5: Going Too Broad
It really is true when it comes to marketing in any industry, but especially in the wedding and event industries, including for wedding transportation companies and planners, when they say that the riches are in the niches. Many wedding pros make the mistake of marketing to an audience that is far too broad. And when you’re trying to speak to everyone, you’re speaking to no one.
Broad marketing that appeals to a wide audience is a mistake because it is hard for your potential future customers to find. Broad marketing terms are competitive and highly sought after. But, the smaller, more focused you go with your marketing, you’ll find there is less competition and the clients who are interested in your topics are more engaged, aka more likely to book.
My Advice: Go small with your marketing to grow big with your wedding business.
Marketing Mistake #6: Swerving Outside Of Your Lane
Wedding and event businesses, like photographers and florists, get tripped up in their marketing when they don’t stay in their lane or zone of genius. Sure, they might know more than their customers about a lot of different wedding-related topics on account of just being in the industry, but going outside of your area of expertise is a mistake. Not only is it competitive (see tip above), it is confusing to your potential clients.
Do what you do best when it comes to your marketing and you can’t go wrong. It might feel repetitive to always say the same things over and over again in your marketing, but it’s not repetitive to your potential clients. Engaged couples have never planned a wedding before. They need you to be the expert and tell them what they don’t know.
My Advice: Tap into what makes you you and stay there. As long as you’re consistently putting out helpful content in your area of expertise, your marketing will pay off as more and more customers will be able to find you.
Marketing Mistake #7: Avoiding Overdone Topics
Many wedding pros make the mistake of avoiding topics in their marketing that they feel are overdone or have been covered many times before either by competitors or big-box media publications or wedding planning websites. However, this is a mistake because, as we’ve discussed above, there are new clients every year and they are desperately looking for answers.
This year’s engaged couples will likely be married this time next year. They will be replaced with a new set of engaged couples who all have the same wedding planning questions as those who came before them. If you avoid overdone topics, you risk not attracting new clients who are looking for answers to their questions.
Furthermore, if a topic is trending or it’s being covered a lot, that just means that people are interested in it. Consider this your sign to weigh in on it and let your potential clients know what you think about it.
If you don’t tell them why you’re different or put your two cents in on a topic, how will you ever set yourself apart from your competition?
My Advice: Putting your unique spin on a topic or a trend will appeal to your potential clients no matter how many times it’s been done before.
Marketing Mistake #8: Thinking They Need To Like It
You don’t have to like doing it, you just have to do it. Liking marketing your wedding and event business, whether you’re a caterer or videographer, or considering yourself a marketing expert is not required to be successful at marketing.
We all do things all the time in our business that we may or may not love doing, but we do them anyway because they matter. For me in my business in wedding fashion and bridal accessories, I don’t love sending out invoices. It takes too much time and it’s tedious. But, I do it because I want to get paid.
The same is true with the marketing of your wedding or event business, like stationery or lighting design. You might not love writing blog posts or creating videos for social media, but because you need to market and promote your business by putting it in front of your potential clients, you have to just get it done.
My Advice: You don’t have to overdo it and give away all the keys to the kingdom with your marketing, you just have to do it. Share your best work. Be the expert that you are. That’s it. Notice, I didn’t say that you had to love it.
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Most wedding pros, including invitation designers and rental companies, are just doing the best that they can, trying to get by. They are working so hard and putting in long hours. For many, the last thing they want to do is market their business or spend hours and hours creating content only to have it fall flat, especially when they don’t think they are good at it, or the pay offs aren’t immediate.
Just remember, marketing in the wedding industry is nothing more than consistently sharing your best work, and putting your expertise out there with engaged couples so that they are interested enough to inquire more about working with you. You don’t have to be anything other than who you are! That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less!
If you’re a creative small business serving the wedding and event industry - such as a wedding planner, photographer, entertainer, DJ, rental company, florist, invitation designer and more - and you need help with your online marketing, content creation, or your Pinterest account, please send me an email at info@juliannesmith.com or check out my done-for-you and training services for wedding pros. I’d love to work with you to maximize your creativity and the overwhelm and work with the clients that you want to work with!
For more tips and advice on the wedding industry, be sure to check out past blog posts and sign up for my weekly emails where I’ll send you all kinds of wedding business education nuggets in 100 words or less!