Creating a plan to make up lost income.
Photo by Cameron Clark
I’ve been fortunate to have worked with wedding pros from 94 countries over my career and I’ve heard from a ton of them this past month – all with similar questions, stories of lost business, uncertainties of what to say to clients who are completely stressed.
We’re all in this together. If you have questions on Coronavirus and your wedding business, feel free to email me at hello@thinksplendid.com. I’ll be sharing my answers here on the Think Splendid blog so that everyone can benefit. I’ll also keep your name anonymous.
Focus on the Splendid
We're an industry that makes our living by celebrating life's milestones, so I'm going to start each of these update posts with a few positive COVID-19 things we can all smile about:
TOTAL GLOBAL RECOVERIES
The number of global recoveries is now more than 124,000 people, up from 114,000 yesterday.
STYLE YOUR VIRTUAL MEETINGS
Canva has introduced free virtual background templates for Zoom.
This question is from a wedding planner in Italy:
I'm a destination wedding planner based in Italy. As we know, COVID-19 has brutally affected destination weddings to Italy; most of the weddings have been postponed to next year or, the worst scenario, cancelled.
All the wedding industry is suffering and struggling. But, for me, it's even worse: this would have been my first wedding season since I launched my business only last Summer (before launching my business I worked as a planner for a different company).
These would have been my first weddings, my first couples, my first photos, visibility, etc. All the images I would have had from those weddings were extremely necessary for my content in social media and promotion.
This scares me: what should I do this year while waiting for wedding season 2021? How can I attract clients and get enquiries for next year? The only idea I have is planning photo shoots to build a portfolio but this won't bring an income. If I had a small budget to invest in visibility and promotion, what should I choose? I'm personally oriented to advertise in Instagram but I would love your opinion on that.
Any suggestion is highly appreciated.
Answer from Liene:
I have zero doubt that you have dreamed of launching your own business for a long time and have been diligently working towards opening your doors. Yours may be a different situation than one many other wedding pros are facing right now, but having a dream deferred is still an emotional blow.
One of my favorite quotes on the realities of running a business comes from the book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, in which tech CEO-turned-investor Ben Horowitz writes: “As a startup CEO I slept like a baby. I woke up every two hours and cried.”
Starting a business is always a leap of faith, and seeing everything you’ve worked toward come to a screeching halt just when you were getting going can make you feel like its not worth pursuing at all.
In addition, being under incredible stress can trick you into believing that your passion for what you do is gone.
Don’t believe the lie that your passion has left you if you’re not fired up and feeling like a cheerleader all the time. Some days passion includes all things new and exciting and puts some pep in your step. Other days it includes nothing more than the mundane routine of responsibility. You won’t always feel the passion you have for what you do, but it’s most likely still there.
This will be important to remember because my advice for you right now – when taking the risk of starting your own company is making you sleep like a colicky baby – is to commit yourself to the mundane aspects of marketing basics.
The basics provide a solid foundation, but most people skip them in favor of whatever is flashy and new or feeds their ego. The basics tend to be boring. The basics tend to be tedious. Nailing the basics is what will set you up for longer term success.
Here are some suggestions for you to focus on during this time. Again, this is not advanced stuff – we’re focusing on the basics:
1) If you're able to do a photo shoot to build your portfolio, do it. People are visual and they want to see what you are capable of.
The photo shoots can also be a good way to show what you can do and not just what past couples have hired you to do. A lot of times wedding planners and event designers get stuck doing a certain type of style over and over again because their clients keep hiring them to do the designs they've seen.
This can be an opportunity for you to show your own design ideas that people have never seen anywhere else before. Since you don’t have to take an actual bride or groom’s opinion into account, it’s an opportunity to show your point of view as an artist undiluted by compromise.
Bonus: you’ll be able to stand out amid the Instagram scroll where wedding content can tend to look the same same same.
2) Create a marketing strategy that shows your expertise and not just your design savvy. Your wedding business may be new, but you are not new to the wedding industry. You know what you are doing and you can do it well.
Since you don’t currently have a library of photos of showing the work done under your own brand name, you’ll need to show that you know what you’re talking about in order for couples to trust you enough to hire you.
3) Create a blog for your website if you don't have one already and post a minimum of three days a week. If you can swing five days, do that.
Every word on your blog counts as a keyword on your site, so it is still the best way to help your wedding SEO, quickly. Since your company is new (even though you are not new to the work itself), building your SEO is something you should be working on anyway.
Remember: your blog and website are the house you own. The “house you own” refers to the parts of your business that no one can take away from you. The “house you rent” refers to things that can be useful to your business but that you don’t ultimately control since they belong to someone else.
Everything that falls under the “house you rent” category could go away tomorrow, leaving you in hot water if those were the main things you’ve been investing in.
As an example: Facebook could shut down Instagram tomorrow for a valid reason or for absolutely no reason at all simply because they own it and have that power.
If you’re stuck on what to write about, create a Google doc and brain dump every single thing you know about weddings, Italy, travel, and anything else that relates to what you do. As wedding professionals we are so immersed in the work that most of what is second nature to us is brand new information to brides and grooms who have never planned a wedding before. You have so much more to say and expertise to share than you may initially think.
Topics can be anything from the logistics of planning a wedding to non tourist trap restaurants locals love that destination wedding guests should visit to design concepts like color theory and how you incorporate those things while creating a wedding.
4) Consider a YouTube and TikTok strategy so that people can get a sense of your personality visually.
Cross post your TikTok videos to YouTube (you can upload them as YouTube Shorts, which will create a separate category for them). People use YouTube as a search engine, so being able to search all that advice allows you to leverage both TikTok and YouTube.
If you post a video on your blog, include the transcript in the post as well so that Google can crawl all that text for SEO purposes.
Celebrity hair stylist Jen Atkin’s channel is a good one to check out as an example of a creative using it not to just show their work but also show their personality, expert advice, and glimpse behind the scenes.
5) If possible, create content in both Italian and English.
This shows you are bilingual and able to work with any couples having a destination wedding in Italy. Coronavirus has everyone on high stress right now, so even just the added peace of mind that there won't be a language barrier while planning can go a long way in building trust.
6) Hold off on spending money on advertising, for now.
I am not anti advertising, but for where you are at right now, it would be a waste of money.
Ads are typically not what makes the sale, especially in weddings. Ads are an introduction or a reminder that you exist and are an invitation to get to know your company better.
If a bride or groom sees an ad in a wedding magazine (or on a wedding blog), they pull out their phone or iPad and look up your website. If the website isn’t mobile responsive or doesn’t load quickly or you don’t have enough content on your blog to keep them engaged, they move on.
If they see a promoted post or ad on Instagram, they click through and scroll for a while. If you don’t have many images for them to scroll (and save!), they move on.
Ads are very rarely the thing that makes someone say, “I have to hire them right now!” Ads are the thing that make people say, “Oh interesting, let me go research them some more.”
I would not spend on ads until you have an archive of content that they can spend a few minutes (or hours!) reading/watching/scrolling.
Questions from Wedding Pros
Have a question on a sticky client issue, running a wedding company, or an aspect of business you feel you should know by now yet don’t?
Liene is happy to weigh in with her trademark compassionate yet no-nonsense advice.
To submit a question to our Wedding Pro Q+A column, send us an email. We’ll keep you anonymous.
Written by
LIENE STEVENS
Liene Stevens, the founder and CEO of Think Splendid, is an author, speaker, and award-winning business strategist. Armed with $2000, a healthy work ethic, and an undeserved dose of privilege, Liene bootstrapped Think Splendid from a scribble in a notebook to a successful wedding business consulting firm with a client list spanning 94 countries.
