Tips For Keeping Up With Marketing & Lead Generation
Are you in the wedding and event space and find it hard to keep up with your marketing and lead generation efforts? Whether it’s writing a blog post, posting social media content on Instagram or TikTok, keeping your galleries and website up to date with your best, most inspiring work, or scheduling pins on Pinterest to find newly engaged clients, we know marketing work to promote our business is important. We know that we have to promote our business so that new leads and couples planning a wedding can find our business. But, between working long hours at events on nights and weekends, and keeping our engaged clients (and their families!) calm and happy, keeping up with marketing a wedding and event business can be difficult.
If you’re a wedding photographer, designer, planner, DJ, caterer, florist, rental or lighting company, stationery designer, and more, you’ll love today’s expert and helpful marketing advice where I share my own personal favorite tips for staying up to date with marketing efforts. These are the exact steps that I take to stay on top of my own marketing so that my marketing is working in the background bringing in new leads while I’m busy doing my job, and the things I love in my business.
Marketing your event business is so important, it’s the best thing we can do to keep the leads and inquiries coming in, but it can feel overwhelming with everything else you have to do to keep our business afloat. (And live our life outside of work!) It can also feel confusing because many of us in the wedding space don’t feel like we’re good writers and we’re not marketing experts. But, don’t worry, I am and I’m here to share the secrets!
Don’t be stressed! Get the ultimate marketing organizer and tracker for wedding and event pros - this has everything you need to promote your business and bring in new leads so you can get back to doing what you do best!
Photo Credit: Carter Rose Photography
Here are my four best tips for keeping up with marketing and promoting a wedding and event business, including keeping everything ridiculously organized, staying on top of your work and not putting off mini tasks, creating templates for all tasks no matter how small, and taking meticulous notes so you can pick where you leave off when you have to take a break.
So, if you’re looking for a few quick wins to help promote your business and bring in referrals and leads - even during the busy wedding season, you’re in luck with my super simple advice! I should point out that all of my marketing tips are free, as in cost no money, and require no extra work on your part. In fact, taking this advice will save you time and money, and as a small business owner myself, who can argue with that??
Spoiler Alert: The best tip for marketing your business is to keep everything all in one place. Yes, the simple act of organizing your marketing materials and content in one centralized location is the best thing you can do to keep on top of promoting your business. When you’re organized, it’s much easier to be creative, find the time to schedule your marketing, and, most importantly, hire someone else to do the marketing work for you.
If you need help with marketing your wedding business and keeping everything in one spot, be sure to check out my ultimate marketing organizer and tracker for wedding and event pros. Fellow wedding pros and friendors are always asking me what I do, what I use in my businesses and how I stay organized. And, this is it. This is the exact marketing organizer that I use for everything, from Instagram, keeping track of photos (even ones on my phone!), email blasts, testimonials, blogging, gallery creation, Pinterest and so much more. Enjoy and happy marketing organization!
Enough delay, here goes with the four best things you can do to keep up with prompting a wedding and event business and help bring in new leads.
Marketing Tip #1: Stay on Top of the Mini Tasks
I get it. You’re busy, you have a million things to do. The weekends are long with events and weddings. But, the best way for wedding and event pros, from photographers to planners to florists, to keep up with their marketing is to stay on top of it. Don’t let the little tiny things slip behind, or even, worse put them off until the off-season.
Often marketing tasks don’t nearly take as much time as we think, so if we stay on top of the mini ones (I’m talking less then 30 minutes!) and do them in the moment, it will save us time in the end. There are lots of little, micro things that we can do with our marketing work that will set us up for success, such as download photos, rename titles, research keywords, draft a blog post, reach out to a referral, check in with a peer, update galleries, and one and on and on.
Marketing tasks, whether it’s updating a gallery or scheduling a post on Instagram, don’t have to take a long time. If we just do the little things right away at the moment, it’s not that big of a deal. There is a time and place for working in batches and block scheduling when it comes to marketing. But, do your best to stay on top of the little tasks so that when it comes time to do your marketing, you’ll be much more efficient and effective.
For example, if you’re a wedding planner, DJ, or an invitation designer, when you get the professional photos back from the couple’s photographer after the wedding is over, download those real wedding images right away. Put the images in a folder for blogging and social media content later. If you put off downloading the images until you magically find time in your schedule to work on it, often the link is expired or you don’t have the password. This takes even more time because now you have to do a password reset or request a new link.
My Advice: Do your mini-marketing tasks right way, in the moment, and you’ll set yourself up for later success down the road.
Marketing Tip #2: Keep Everything Consistent
Most wedding and event businesses, from invitation designers to caterers, struggle to keep up with their marketing because they recreate the wheel every time they sit down to work on their marketing. When they write a blog post or update a gallery on their website or create graphics for Pinterest, it feels like it’s the first time they’ve done it, because they have no marketing system in place. It’s so much harder to start from scratch every single time.
If you want to be efficient in your marketing, try to be as consistent as possible. Being consistent will eventually create a system. Yes, you should be consistent in your marketing with posting and sharing of content. But, that’s not what I’m talking about in this case. I’m talking about being consistent on your back end as well.
Name all of your folders the same, store everything in the same spot, always title your photos the same way, make all your photos the same size every time, and so on. Write your process down so you can rinse and repeat the next time, or better yet, you can have someone else do the work for you. Do the same thing, for everything, every time and you can’t go wrong. Oh and you’re now well on your way to developing your own in-house marketing system! Go you!
My Advice: Templetize every part of your marketing to save yourself time and energy. Every task from photo naming to titles to storge should have a repeatable system.
Marketing Tip #3: Save Yourself From Yourself
One of the best ways to keep up with your marketing, whether you're a wedding dress designer or a rental company, is to take meticulous notes as a reminder to yourself. This is important so you can pick up where you left off when you do take a break. As busy wedding and event business owners, we always have a million things going on at one time and it can be a few weeks or months (or years!) before we get back to our marketing work. You think that you’ll remember where you left off and what is next, but quite often we don’t.
Save yourself time and energy from having to start over or refresh your memory, or worse, redouble your efforts because you can’t remember where you were when you stopped the last time. Whether you’re writing a blog post, downloading photos from photographers, updating a gallery, or reaching out to a client asking for a testimonial, always make a note of where you left off.
It might take you a while to find time in your calendar to work on your marketing again, so you’ll want to refer back to your notes, so you don’t waste any time getting started again - especially if you follow my advice above about keeping up with the mini tasks!
My Advice: Future you will thank you for taking notes and setting reminders so you can remember where you left off in your marketing.
Marketing Tip # 4: Keep Everything All In One Spot
I’ve shared a few really good tips for keeping up with your marketing when you’re in the wedding and event space, from such as a photographer or wedding cake designer, but I saved the best tip for last. The best way to be an effective marketer for your wedding business is to keep everything all in one spot. Yes, it’s just that simple.
Get yourself one main document, such as a spreadsheet, and house all of your marketing in this one document. Use the rows, the columns, and the tabs to keep everything organized by each wedding or event. I also like to create different tabs for each marketing platform, including my blog, Instagram, Pinterest, and email.
And guess what? (I bet you knew I was going to say this!) Do you remember my previous tips about keeping up with your marketing, including making templates for all tasks, taking meticulous notes, keeping consistent, and staying on top of the mini-tasks? Where do you think the best place to do all of this work is?
That’s right!
The best place to keep up with marketing your wedding and event business is to use one, single marketing document. One main marketing document will not only keep you organized, which saves time and money, but it will hold you accountable. You’ll be able to quickly see what’s next and you’ll be able to see where the holes are in your marketing.
Bonus points if your one spot for organizing your marketing efforts is shareable (and editable!) with others on your team, your assistant, or a V.A. If everyone on your team can see your content calendar and can contribute to your marketing efforts like updating files or adding content, that’s less work for you.
My Advice: One centralized spot for all of your marketing work is the single most important thing you can do for your business.
I have been there and done that when it comes to running my wedding and event business. I have procrastinated my marketing, put it off until the off-season waiting until I magically found time in my schedule, made all the mistakes that come from being unorganized, and what I’ve learned is that the time never comes. If you want to market your business successfully, you have to make the time. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t have to be your favorite thing in your business, you just have to make the time and then get it done.
If you’re ready to get your marketing in order, be sure to check out the ultimate wedding and event business marketing tracker and organizer. Whether you’re a planner, designer, DJ, or officiant, I made this for you!
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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!