How to Boost Your Bridal Business with Smart Marketing
To build a successful wedding planning business, you need a blueprint. Your marketing plan will help you go from wishing and dreaming to doing and achieving.
You should have a clearly defined plan for every major business goal. It doesn’t have to be a long and complicated document. Don’t worry about making it impressive. It’s a plan of action, not academic exercise.
You don’t need detailed cash flow projections and other bells and whistles unless you are using the plan document to borrow a lot of money. You need a Wedding Planner Marketing Plan.
Bridal Business Profits Start With Planning
Keep your marketing plan short and to the point. Make it as simple as possible. Here are the items you’ll want to include:
- Mission: Go beyond the meaningless buzzwords and connect with why you’re trying to build your business. This isn’t the place for puffery. Aim for clarity.
- Objectives: What goals do you need to accomplish? When do you need to accomplish them? What steps do you need to complete in order to complete your mission?
- Strategies: What’s the big plan for attracting new clients? What are your back-up plans? Never depend on any one way of accomplishing your goals.
- Action Steps: What do you need to accomplish on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to achieve your goals? These tiny steps will lead you to successfully completing your bigger strategies.
- Keeping Score: Break out your action steps into actionable items with deadlines.
- Daily Tasks: This is an offshoot of your marketing plan and should be part of your daily calendar. Instead of creating a daunting list of projects, break each and every project into simple steps. What’s first? What’s next? Beware of vague agenda items.
For example, a poorly defined action item would be, “Do bridal shows.” It’s not instructive because it doesn’t give specific action steps.
A better agenda would look like this:
- Look for local bridal shows on Google.
- Get producer contact information on at least 10 shows.
- Email for information.
- Schedule time to attend five bridal shows to preview as a guest.
- Attend shows, take photos and notes for ideas.
- Get contact information from non-competing exhibitors.
- Call each exhibitor to get their opinion of the show.
- And so on/
With a detailed and actionable lists of tasks before you and your staff, the next step is doing it. Keep records of the tasks you accomplish. Hold yourself accountable to completing each task.
On a monthly basis (weekly is even better), sit down with your plan, your task list and your journal. What’s working well? What can be improved upon?
By scheduling regular thinking time and diligently monitoring your progress you’re already taking steps that unsuccessful planners never will.
Keep your eyes open for new and more effective ways to promote your business. Right now, the internet offers an incredibly fast and cheap way to reach out and communicate with thousands of wedding shoppers.
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You can promote your wedding business online for free using amazingly powerful but easy to master social media tools. If you’d like to learn how leverage the power of the web to grow your business faster than ever before, be sure to download a free copy of “More Clients Now.” Discover how quickly you can start booking more weddings without spending a fortune.
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Tracking
People ask me, “Brian, should I advertise on The Knot?” To be honest, some wedding planners have a lot of success and others hate advertising there. What’s the difference?
I find that those who advertise on The Knot have an offer that appeals to the readership, an effective ad placement and a landing page that converts. The wedding and event pros who think The Knot is a scam? They have terrible ads (defined as ads that are never split-tested in my humble opinion) and they send the few clicks they get to a terrible place … the homepage of their website.
What’s your opinion? I’d love to hear it … please leave a comment.
[...] The Wedding Planner’s Marketing Plan [...]
Many wedding planners fall by the wayside after thinking what a great business to be in after organising their own weddings.
If you are in this scenario think very carefully why you are considering becoming a wedding planner. Your own successful wedding does not mean you will make a great wedding planner.
If you are going to do it talk to as many suppliers as you can and find the things that will set you apart from everyone else. Every bride might not want everything you offer but they will appreciate the innovations and ideas you bring them.
It’s true … just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you don’t need a solid marketing strategy and sales skills.
I always suggest to my brides to just let us handle the work, that’s what we are getting paid.