It might not seem like there is a direct connection between how you are attracting your potential clients and how you are booking them, but there is—and the connection is important! Because when push comes to shove, these two facets of your business are both very much related to your client experience. So today, we wanted to talk about what you’re selling, how you are communicating that through your marketing plan, and how it all ties into your booking process. If you want to make sure you’re attracting the best wedding leads and guiding them through a sales process that almost ensures they’ll be asking for a contract, read on!
Your client experience is central to marketing and sales
When you think about what it is you’re selling, you probably think of things like wedding planning services, flowers, a venue to get married at, etc. And while all of those things are true, there is something else you are selling—you’re selling an experience. Think about it. Each of your wedding leads has options of where they can get different services (and that’s why marketing is such an important thing for you to do). But, in addition to your services and pricing, your client experience is one of the big ways you can differentiate yourself from others—and win the business.
So, before we dive in any further, there are a few things we encourage you to think about in an effort to make your business, brand, and offerings stand out from the crowd:
- Work to understand what your potential clients are experiencing in terms of problems, what they are worried about, and what stresses them (be specific!)
Prop-tip: If you haven’t created your ideal client avatar yet, be sure to do that!
- Map your services to the problems your clients are facing and be able to communicate exactly what your solutions are.
- Develop messaging/copy that communicates how you solve your potential clients’ problems through the lens of your process and client experience.
Your marketing plan needs to communicate your client experience
Now that we’ve covered the premise of everything, it’s time to talk about some specifics! Because once you’ve sat down to think about the relationship between your potential clients’ problems, your services/solutions, and your client experience, you’ve got to put that out there—and all of this is core to the marketing messages you need to communicate. From getting couples to see that you understand where they are and what they feel to earning their trust and getting them to inquire, your social media content, website copy, etc. should all be showing people why your services and client experience are the best for them. And here are a few tips to help you plan your marketing content:
- Show your face (and/or the faces of the people your couples work with) because this is key to building trust
- Create behind the scenes content that shows people your process and expertise (read: what they can expect to experience)
- Create content that shows the transformation (or end result) of what your couples get when they work with you. This can be physical transformations of the space as well as client reviews
Plan your booking process to be an extension of your client experience
Even though your wedding leads are not booked clients, they still need to feel what it is like to be your client! And one of the ways we see wedding pros misstepping here is not having consistency between what people are getting on the marketing side of things and what they experience after they reach out. For example, are you incredibly responsive to DMs but it takes you days to reply to an email? Or is your brand voice and personality on social media very different from you as an actual person? Our advice is to be mindful of all this and keep consistent with the expectations you are setting with your marketing to ensure you can carry that through to your booking process.
Taking the time to audit how your marketing efforts and booking process are connected can really impact the quality of wedding leads you are getting as well as how many you are booking! And if you’re ready to make some adjustments and start seeing more inquiries in your inbox, be sure to read this piece to help you get more leads next!
