If you’ve started your wedding planning business, how long would you wait for your first bride before giving up? Six months? A year? More? It’s a personal decision that no one can make for you. But if you have been hoping for a long time for your first bride, or for your business to finally have the success you want, it’s time to take a close look at what you’re doing, or not doing, and make some changes, as I suggest to the wedding planner who asks the question in today’s Q&A.
Question
I’m a stay-at-home mom who is running my wedding planning business from home, but it’s not working. I launched my wedding and event planning business three years ago but I’ve never gotten any clients. Most of my business comes from making wedding cards and table stationery. This has dampened my spirits. I feel like giving up. Please tell me what I need to do.
Answer
Don’t give up yet! First give yourself some credit for getting business for your wedding cards and stationery; you must be doing well with marketing your products or you wouldn’t have any business at all. As far as your wedding planning business, it’s time to take an objective look at it and determine what you need to do.
Here are 4 questions I want you to answer about your business that can help you see where you need to make changes:
1) How much time do you spend focused on your planning business?
There are stay-at-home moms who have successful wedding planning businesses because they are very careful to spend some time each day totally devoted to marketing. Make sure you are setting aside time away from you family to work on your planning business. It might be you have to get up in the morning before everyone else in order to get uninterrupted time, but it will be worth it. Be sure you have a plan for child care when you need to meet with brides and vendors and be sure your space is quiet when you do business over the phone, Skype or FaceTime. No one wants to hear a lot of noise from children when they are doing business with you.
2) How are you marketing your planning business?
Marketing a service, such as wedding or event planning, is different from marketing a product, like wedding cards. Clients can see and touch your cards and that makes them confident that they are getting what they want. In order to get a bride to hire you for wedding planning, she needs to see that you’re a professional and an expert at planning weddings and she needs to feel like she can trust you to do a good job.
You can prove yourself by showing her photos of work you have done and testimonials from couples whose weddings you’ve planned. Since you haven’t gotten clients yet, you can offer information from weddings you planned for free while getting experience.
3) Where are you marketing your wedding and event planning business?
If you’re doing the same things today that you did when you started three years ago, you have to try something new. Many times I’ve spoken to struggling wedding planners and have found that they stuck to one type marketing and advertising, even though it didn’t work, because it brought them lots of leads. They felt like there was potential for them to get eventually get a client. However, when leads never turn into clients, it’s time to market another way.
4) To whom are you marketing your services?
In order to be successful you have to have a niche to focus on and create marketing messages that speak to those specific brides. If you try to sell your services to every bride, your marketing will be too general to attract any brides.
One word of caution, be realistic about the type of brides you can attract when you are starting out. Many new wedding planners choose high-end brides with big budgets as their niche and they fail to get clients. This isn’t because they aren’t good wedding planners, it’s because brides with large budgets want experienced planners with good reputations, they don’t want someone new. Target brides you can easily help, build a solid reputation and the brides you want will come looking for you!
And if you have a pressing question about starting or running your wedding planning business, you can send me an email at [email protected]. I’ll answer them on this blog or in my ezine, “Wedding Planner Tips,” which you can subscribe to here.
