Heidi Thompson – Creating An Overwhelm-Squashing Marketing Plan
Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the pressures of marketing your business? There are so many forces, pulling or pushing you to try the latest social platform, or are you blindly following the crowd? Heidi Thompson wants to help you Squash the Overwhelm and she shares her 5-steps for doing that in this episode.
Listen to this new episode for some actionable steps on how you can feel less overwhelmed, and more in control!
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– Do you need a marketing plan for your business? Do you even know what a marketing plan is? Listen to this episode and find out. Hi, it’s Alan Berg. Welcome back to another edition of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. I am so happy to have my friend Heidi Thompson on from Evolve Your Wedding Business. Heidi, how you doing today?
– I am doing great. Thank you so much for having me.
– Well, thank you so much for coming on. You know, you and I could talk about this all day long and I said, wait a minute, let’s just talk about this on the podcast so that everybody else can listen in here. And, you know, we talk about marketing. We talk about some people in the industry, they come from a business background, they set their business plan, their marketing plan, et cetera. And a lot of people, let’s face it, you know, they’re flying by the seat of their pants because they haven’t done this before and they don’t have the experience. So you talk about having an Overwhelm-Squash Marketing Plan. Okay, we’re not talking about fall, summer, fall vegetables here, so.
– Just squash it.
– Squash it. What is an Overwhelm-Squash Marketing Plan?
– So I developed this framework for a marketing plan because I found that through I’ve been working with wedding professionals for over 10 years. The constant in everybody is overwhelm.
– Okay.
– So my job and the way I see my job is the way I teach is to help people squash overwhelm in various ways. And this is a, it’s a simplified, it definitely requires work, but it is a simplified, practical, pragmatic way to create a marketing plan that not only makes your marketing work harder for you, work better, be more effective, but it totally squashes your overwhelm because it gets you laser focused in on the things that you’re supposed to be doing, as opposed to, like, I could be doing anything right now.
– Okay, so we’re not squashing marketing. We’re squashing the overwhelming feeling–
– Yes.
– Of I’m drowning here. I don’t know what I’m doing. You know, the screaming into the pillow kind of a thing over here. All right, so wedding professionals obviously range from individuals like an officiant or an invitation company or any solopreneur in our business to little bit bigger, a little bit bigger, until you get to much, much, much bigger businesses there. So when you’re working with people and you have a membership that people can join with you, when you’re working either one-on-one or in the membership, what is it that you start with with people? What do you want them to think about when they’re trying to develop a marketing plan?
– Yeah, so this is actually the first thing we tackle inside my membership. If you were to join, this is your first step. We’re going to go and we’re going to dig into your marketing plan because the way I view a marketing plan is it is the foundation of everything. Because when you get to really, really know your ideal client, when you get to really, really know what works and what doesn’t work for you, it makes everything else so much easier. It’s that like first domino that knocks down a whole series of dominoes for you, as opposed to what I feel like a lot of people sometimes feel like a plan is, is like this, you know, paper document that you fill out and you put in a drawer somewhere and it dies and you never see it again. So first step is always the marketing plan, and the first step within that, it’s a five-part framework, the first step is to develop, okay, what are we trying to achieve here? What is the goal? What does success look like to you? Because depending on where you are in your business, that’s going to look different. So success might be, I want to book 10 more weddings this year than I did last year. Success might be, I want to get my profit margin up by this much compared to last year, or it could be, I want to bring on my first team member and start delegating things. We really have to focus, and focus is a very common theme on this.
– Yeah.
– Because if we don’t put those horse blinders on to a certain degree, that shiny object syndrome just pulls us all over the place.
– Right, so understanding what you’re trying to achieve. And this is important. I had a consult yesterday with someone and he was talking about the number of events that he wanted to do, and I said, “Well, let’s slow down. “Let’s back up on that a little bit.” Everybody has an inventory, and you say “I want to do X number of events”. First of all, does the math work? Because sometimes it doesn’t. I had one client where they told me the number that they wanted to achieve, and I said, “What’s your average sale?” And they told me and I did the math, and it was a floral company and they were going to have to do 130 weddings to get there. And it was a husband and wife, and the wife who does the production, she’s like, “No, no, no, no, no. “We’re not doing that.” And I said, “Well, we either have to adjust the dollar goal “or we have to get that average sale up way higher “to be able to achieve that number.” So be careful what you ask for.
– Yes.
– Is it realistic? And then we talked about inventory, where some dates are more valuable than other dates. You know, according to The Knot and WeddingWire, there’s about 22 Saturdays that account for half of all the weddings in the US, and if you’re listening in other countries, which I know you guys are, in every country there are the most popular dates. Don’t give away those with less profitable business for that. Okay, so understanding what you’re trying to achieve, number one. What’s number two?
– So number two, and this is my favorite part, this is where I get to nerd out, this step is called your research. This is the foundation–
– Okay.
– Of everything. So we really dig into your ideal client, and not in the way that a lot of people talk about of I’m going to invent this person that may or may not exist and give random attributes to them, like they’re a lawyer and they like coffee, because that doesn’t tell you what to do. That doesn’t give you any action that you can take. So the way I do this is I have people go through a process that I call clone your best clients. So you look at the people that you’ve worked with, that you wish you could clone and work with over and over and over again. And we take them and we go and we ask them some questions, because the best source of information about what is actually going through your ideal client’s heads are your ideal clients and–
– Right.
– We don’t tap into that. Like we don’t go and ask these questions. I think we just don’t do the easy thing a lot of times. You know, we have to make it hard for ourselves, but people will tell you why they decided to work with you over someone else, where they looked so you can say, well, that’s interesting, not a single one of my best clients looked on Pinterest. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t include that in my marketing plan. It’s as much ruling things in as ruling things out. Finding out that I had a planner that was part of my membership and she was focused on the typical planner benefits, saving time, saving money, which I get. But when she actually talked to her clients, she found out that was number seven on the list of priorities. The thing they wanted most was either both of these people or one person was Indian, and they wanted to have an Indian wedding fused with a wedding of their own design that wasn’t like their sister’s wedding, that wasn’t like their best friend’s wedding, that wasn’t like their cousin’s wedding. And the second she switched her marketing to be talking about, we can actually keep your traditions and also bring in these personalized elements, people were like, “Oh my God, take my money. “You are clearly the go-to person for exactly what I want.” And when you can get that level of understanding from an ideal client, you can just say, “Hey, I understand your problem “and I have the solution that you want. “I’m the clear go-to for this.”
– Well, it’s interesting. You talked about the planner goes to the, I can save you time and I can find the vendors and all that. It’s assumed, right? Every planner in the world can do that, whether they’ve taken courses or not taken courses, whether they’ve planned one wedding or 1,000 weddings. The reason it’s number seven on the list doesn’t surprise me is because, well, I need a planner because of that. Okay, good, now what? Now why you? And that’s what I–
– And which one?
– Both, right? Why you? And I did a presentation recently as this is being recorded, it was the Catersource Conference. It was a new presentation called “Stop Selling Food and Start Selling the Experience”, because caterers sell food. There’s pictures of food on their website and they talk about food and there’s menus on their website. Well, yeah, yeah. But why you is what I want to know? So if you don’t understand why people choose you, then you can’t sell to them. Because let’s talk about planners, there are literally dozens, hundreds or more planners in every area in the world. By the time they come to you, there’s something that they saw, liked, read, watched, experienced that says, hey, I think you’re a good fit. You don’t have to sell the bullet point list of what a planner does at that point. That was already, okay, that’s off the table. You’re going to do that. I assume you can do that. Like I assume you’re a photographer, you have professional equipment. I assume you’re a DJ, you have a “state of the art sound system”, whatever that means. Right? I always joke that “state of the art” is some guy named Art at the store that sells the equipment, right? That’s state of the art there. Okay, so now, you talked about the avatar and it’s not that they’re a lawyer that’s this. It is, but it’s not, because we do need to know, I call it three things, geographics, demographic, psychographics. So they live where? because you’re really not looking for everyone, although some people are like, “Yeah, but I travel.” Yeah, you do 85% of your business locally. That’s your geographic area, okay? Demographics. Yeah, well, if I do better with people who are 25 versus 35, or 45 versus 25 or whatever, that’s helpful to know because my photos are going to show those people. All right, this one was too, you know, if they’re doing for South Asian couples, you better be showing pictures of South Asian couples in your marketing.
– Yep.
– So you do need to know that stuff, but I see you’re going deeper than that. And where were they looking for you? This is a basic question that should be in everybody’s intake. You know, where did they look? Where were they reading reviews? You want to find out where you want them to post the review for you later, find out where they were reading reviews up front. So, okay, so–
– Yeah.
– That was number two. Now let’s go into number three.
– Well, as part of number two, I also–
– Okay.
– Have people, so we have the ideal client and I always tell people, you know, bride, groom, those aren’t things, those aren’t identities. We have to appeal to people’s identity. So if you’re like, “I am super outdoorsy “and I just want to have a gorgeous outdoor event “and have a great time and kick my shoes off. Okay, that’s like a very different kind of marketing message than we’re going to give to somebody who’s like, “I want a ballroom, I want black tie.” It depend who you are as a person.
– Right.
– There are tons of different 30-year-old women. If what you value impacts impacts how you spend your money.
– That was the third thing on mine. So geographics, demographics, this is the psychographics.
– Yeah.
– I have some clients that have very rustic venues and they look for people that are outdoorsy. I have a client that’s got a horse farm that they have weddings at. Well, equestrian lovers, right, either have horses, love horses, ride horses, dude ranches, whatever. Well, people that think that way, that’s your psychographics.
– Yeah.
– And that gets back to the why you? People choose me because… I’m a dog lover. There are people who love dogs. They love my dog, whatever it is, right? There’s those, that’s–
– Yeah.
– The psychographics.
– Yeah, we want to be the go-to person for somebody. And I think once that clicks with people, this all just becomes so much easier because then I have people after they figured out, who do you want to be the go-to person for? Now let’s go look at your competition. What are they doing? Who are they speaking to? Because people who you thought were your competition might not actually be your competition.
– Right.
– And you shouldn’t be basing your decisions based on what they’re doing if they have a completely different ideal client or a completely different way of working.
– Right, and this is getting down to your niche.
– Yes.
– In the speaking world, I have a very narrow niche. Somebody at one of my speaker conferences said to me one time, “Alan, your niche is an inch wide. “It’s a mile deep, but it’s an inch wide.” And when I narrowed my focus, my niche got deeper and deeper and deeper. And some people are afraid to do that because they’re afraid of alienating. But if you think about any of your clients or my clients, very few of them can do more than dozens or in some cases a few hundred weddings a year, right?
– Yeah.
– Out of the thousands or tens of thousands that are in their possible trade area. So I was actually talking to this one client about the number of weddings that he wanted to do, and I was like, “Gosh, that’s such a small fraction “of what’s in the area.” If you only focus on what you’re talking about here, getting those 50, let’s say, the right 50, well, let’s not worry about the hundreds that you don’t get or the thousands that you don’t get. Focus on them, because when they’re looking for that go-to, this is what the you’re talking about here, when they’re looking for that go-to, the wording on your website is going to help you a bit with SEO, the photos are going to be the right photos, the wording’s going to be right, photos, and you’re no longer casting this huge wide net with big holes in it. You have a very small net with very tight holes so when they do come in, you get ’em.
– Yeah, and the way I talk about it a lot is like a dartboard. So you have your bullseye, you have that person, and people get scared of focusing on that person. But when you focus on that person, you also create the outer rings-
– Right.
– So that planner who focused on Indian couples is also getting East Asian couples, is also getting other type of mixed culture couples who have the same motivation.
– Okay.
– It’s not that exact match, but it’s like a ring or two out. And you get to decide what you put in your portfolio based on who you want to attract. But it’s so counterintuitive and I totally understand why people resist it, but the more specific you can get, the more you can make yourself the only, the absolute perfect match for somebody–
– Right.
– The easier it’s going to be to attract and book them.
– Right. My business name when I started, when I left about 11 years ago, was Left of Center Marketing and Publishing. And it was because when we published our first book, we self-published and my speaker friends said, “Alan shouldn’t publish Alan’s book.” So my wife said, “Okay, I have a name for us. “It’s Left of Center.” “I said, “Why is it left of center?” She goes, no joke, Heidi, she goes, “We’re not quite right.” And that was the name. And it was no more deep than that, but it didn’t represent what I do. And we changed the name a little while back to Wedding Business Solutions, because that is what I do. And does that alienate people that I could speak for, train for, do other stuff like that who are not related to the wedding and event business? Yes, it can, but if my calendar is full of people that are in the industry, why worry about it? And that’s that–
– And I can tell you when I am looking for speakers for my summits, I am looking specifically for people who squarely put themselves in the wedding industry. If it’s like, I can speak for anybody. It’s like, well–
– Yeah. It’s not going to be specific enough to take action on, and–
– Right.
– That’s not what I want to deliver to people.
– Right, and that’s what we’ve seen at some events where a speaker will come in. I think the worst example I had I was actually in Dubai, and this guy comes on. He’s a social media expert, and I have to follow this guy. Meanwhile, he’s like six foot two, looks like a male model, just dressed, guy’s like, oh great, I got to follow this guy. And he gets on stage and the very first thing he said is, “You know, I really don’t know the wedding industry, but”, I see your face there. If you’re not watching on this on YouTube and you saw Heidi’s face there, what he just said is, “Don’t listen to anything I’m about to say.” That’s what he just said. He should just sort of gone up and talked and told us his expertise and said how he can help us, but he just said, I don’t understand you. And what we understand in the wedding and event industry is this is a different world, where there’s similarities to people in other industries but there’s a language, there’s a seasonality, there’s all these other things. Okay, so we now know who our ideal client is and now we need to know why.
– So now we know our ideal client, we understand our competition, we have the lay of the land. Then we move into messaging, which is taking everything you just learned and figuring out, okay, what do I even need to say? You know, what are the words? What are the things, the ideas that I’m trying to convey? What do I stand for? So I have another planner in the membership who her big thing is “unconventional weddings done your way” not your mom’s way, not your sister-in-law’s way, not grandma’s way, your way. So all of her messaging is very focused on that. How do I deal with my soon to be mother-in-law that’s like, “No, we have to do it this particular way.” How do I make the decisions that I really want to have? So everything in her marketing ecosystem really speaks to who this person is, what the questions they have are, and what they need to hear in order to be like, okay, I think you are my person.
– Right, now, you said a very important word there if people didn’t catch it, is “questions”. The number one way that people search on Google and on YouTube is with questions. And I’ve done this on my website. and I do it in a lot of my marketing, is I will ask a question as a headline that the person is thinking.
– Yep.
– Because then they’re like, oh, that’s exactly what I want. Like, how do I deal with my future mother-in-law when she wants her idea? You know, that’s a long one, but if you had that, a short version of that on that planner’s site, the person that you’re trying to attract is going to look at that and go, “Oh, I need that.”
– I want to work with you.
– Right.
– I don’t care how much you cost. You’re going to deal with my problems.
– Right, and this is important when you’re writing your ads, when you’re writing your website, is to speak to that person about what you can do for them. As I said in a presentation recently, they care more about their experience than your experience.
– Oh, totally.
– So–
– And the cool thing when you do talk to your ideal clients is you get these words. You get these exact sentences that you can just take and use as a headline on your website, take, turn into a social media post because they’re telling you how to attract more of them, and it just makes it so easy to keep all of this language in a Google Doc, in a spreadsheet so that when you decide to run an ad, when you’re working on a social media post, when you don’t know what to do, you can just grab something that aligns perfectly with them.
– And if you read your reviews, because I’ve said this–
– Yes.
– On other podcasts, your reviews are your brand. Branding, if you’re watching on YouTube, that’s my new jacket I just got with my logo on it. Over my shoulder’s my logo. My book’s over here. That’s branding. My brand is what people say about me, right? My brand is when somebody like two days ago, somebody said, “We’re planning on this event “and we’re thinking about speakers, “and we’re like, okay, I don’t know if we can afford him, “but if we could get Alan Berg,” right? That’s my brand. There’s my brand. But if I read my reviews, it’s why people want me. It’s why people think about it. If you read your reviews, you’re going to find, this is why people chose me. You can turn those into questions. Are you looking for? And there you go, and now you have that. So questions are a really good way to put on your website, a really good way to put in your marketing. because if it resonates, somebody’s going to be like, oh, he or she or they are the one, right? There you go. Okay, next.
– All right, so that brings us to step four, and I call this the how. This is the thing everybody jumps to, but notice, we did a lot of work already.
– Yeah.
– And this is the stuff that makes the how actually function. So this is where we’re going to decide, okay, for the next 90 days, what are the three platforms, the three channels, the three ways of attracting clients I’m going to focus on. And I tell people, pick three. Go based on what’s already working for you. All too often we try to reinvent the wheel. And then if you want to run one experiment, if you’re like, I want to see if I can make Facebook ads work, I want to see if I can make Pinterest work, go for it. Three channels, one experiment. And you’re going to make as many decisions when you’re in “CEO mode” as possible because doing it on the fly is a recipe for a disaster. I always talk about, you have “CEO mode” and you have “worker bee mode”.
And if CEO-you doesn’t write the work order out, worker-bee-you’s like, what am I doing? Like, I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do here. So we’re going to decide, where am I marketing? How am I doing it? So let’s say you’re going to go all in on Instagram for the next 90 days. What specifically are you doing on Instagram? What types of posts are you making? Are you doing Reels? Are you doing static images? Are you doing video? Are you doing lives? How often? What days of the week? Is Wednesday going to be the day you do your real weddings or is it Monday? Like let’s make all of those decisions right now so that worker you can just be like, yep, okay, we need to do these things. I have clear focus on what I’m supposed to get done.
– I had Mark Chapman on recently. We were talking about social ads and stuff like that. And the other thing, I love that you said three things here, no more than three. It doesn’t have to be three, right?
– Yep.
– It could be two or. But the key is if you don’t invest enough into those channels, it’s a recipe for just throwing money away. And this is a mistake people make, is they say, “Well, I’m going to put my toe in the water “and spend a little bit here, “and if it works, then I’m going to do more.” But it’s backwards because a little bit doesn’t tell you if it’s going to work. Going big tells you if it’s going to work and then you could pull back. You could add more, you could say, no, this doesn’t work, here you go. Back when I published magazines, people would say, “Well, I’ll take that eighth of a page ad “in black and white on page 96 in the magazine, “and if that goes well, “then I’ll take a half a page in color further forward.” Like, they’re not representative of one another at all.
– Right.
– That’s like saying the last seat on the plane that’s by the bathroom in the back that doesn’t recline is kind of like what first class lay flat bed would be like. Let me see if that’s good, and if I like that, maybe I’ll buy a first class. No you won’t. No, no, no, they’re not related at all. Go big or go home. If you’re going to invest in the platform, do it right. When I was VP of sales at The Knot, I can tell you that the ads on top get seen more. If they get seen more–
– Makes sense.
– They get clicked on more. Magazine days, the back cover or the inside front cover, you know, the full page ads, they got seen more. It wasn’t rocket science, it was data.
– Yeah.
– It’s right there.
– And that’s the thing. We don’t do things with intention enough. We don’t do things backed with data, which is the next step. But I want people to know, I, okay, saying you’re going to market on Instagram. That is like the vaguest statement in the world. So what are you supposed to do when you sit down and you’re like, okay, time to market on Instagram? What does that mean? What do I need to create? So you should be able to basically give yourself a work order that says, okay, other version of Heidi, when you sit down to create your Instagram content, here is exactly what you’re going to do. And that is the level of intentionality that gets results. Because like you said, if you’re dipping your toe in, if you’re doing things scattershot, you don’t get results because you’re not focused and you’re not showing up regularly enough to have any sort of an impact.
– It would be like putting one gallon of gas in your car at a time.
– Right.
– And then–
– That’s so much more work.
– Right, exactly. Well, but again, don’t waste your money. And whether it’s going through you with your membership and your classes or taking classes online, or doing some research online to see how to do it right, doing it right, this is what professionals are for. Why do they hire you? You’re a band, you’re a DJ, you’re a photographer, videographer, you’re a caterer. Why do they hire you? Because you have the experience to get them further forward. Could you figure it out? Yeah, like you could figure out how to arrange your own flowers. It’s going to take you a whole lot longer and you don’t have the resources, et cetera, et cetera, but it’s going to be a whole lot better if you just hire a professional and let them do it. So this is why I have folks like you on, because you have the expertise. And it’s not saying they have to choose you. It’s you have the expertise because you’ve seen people fail and throw money away. And why do we want people to hire us, you know? Nobody needs me to teach them how to sell, unless they want to sell more faster, right? If they want to make less mistakes and whatever. This plan here, it sounds like work because if it’s going to give you any kind of good results, it has to involve some work.
What you were describing always reminds me of my analogy is the captain of a cruise ship. Like, doesn’t have their hand on the wheel. Doesn’t have their hand on the engines, right? But they are scanning the horizon and saying, we’re going here, and then somebody, this is that work order, somebody is going to put the engines at the right speed, somebody’s going to turn the ship the right direction. somebody’s going to have all this figured out to get where we’re trying to go. But if you don’t know where you’re trying to go, right? And if you’re not in the right ocean, that’s not going to help either, so there you go. So pick no more than three. Invest well. And now that investing is based upon the results you’re trying to get, right? If you need to get three more weddings this year, you probably don’t need to invest the same as somebody who needs to get 30 in the same market in the same category, so that’s also important, right?
– Yeah.
– That investment’s going to be different for each business, so don’t copy what your friends are doing because their needs are different. Don’t copy their website. It might work for them. It might not work for you because your ideal client and their ideal client might be different, right?
– Exactly, it’s like an iceberg. You only see what’s above the surface, but it’s like we’ve just talked about, there’s a whole lot below the surface holding the whole thing up.
– Right, right. I said this to somebody yesterday, why is somebody successful? You don’t always know, right?
– Yep.
– I know people that have horrible websites and they’re very successful despite that because their business isn’t coming that way. Their business is coming from referrals and networking, et cetera, et cetera, and people forgive that when somebody said, “Oh, hey, you have to use Heidi. “Go use Heidi.” And if they’re like, “Oh, her website’s not great, “but they said, she’s great. “Okay, I’m going to go with her.” Right?
– Sure.
– So despite themselves–
– Yeah.
– They’re doing that. Or people that copy someone else’s website and they don’t do well because it is a different target audience, it is a different demographic or it is different there. Okay, so are we done with four or do we still have more on four?
– Yeah, we’re done with four, and I will say, you know, you mentioned, this is work. The cool thing about this is you only have to do this whole thing one time.
– Okay.
– Then you just revisit it, tweak it slightly, which is what number five is all about, just measuring. So this is the part a lot of people skip. If you’re going to run an experiment and you don’t check the results, what was the point of running the experiment?
– Right, right.
– Because we can do things that are already working for us. We can, it’s so funny. Like I said, we like to make things hard. We try all these different things, but we don’t stop to be like, wait a minute, this one particular thing is absolutely killing it for me. What if I changed it in this way? What if I spent five percent more of my time on it? What if I made this tweak to it? Then you can make it work harder for you. We got that. Let’s keep it going, let’s try to leverage it as much as possible. And then we can look at the things that don’t work and say, okay, do I need to change the way I’m doing this? Does this just not work because of my ideal client, my marketing? Am I advertising in a place that doesn’t make sense–
– Yeah.
– For my ideal client? Guess what? You get to quit doing that. And that is the most liberating thing I get to tell people, is like, just stop. Just quit.
– Well–
– Because focus on the things that are working, tweak things that aren’t, and if they just don’t work for you, if you can’t make them work, despite your best efforts, changing strategy, maybe just don’t do them.
– Well, but part of this is, and it’s funny, I did a podcast episode that I did not run the title by my wife and it got a chuckle from people, and it was called “Just Because You Can Measure It Doesn’t Mean You Should” And I was talking about results, is what I was talking about. And part of this is, this ad, whatever you’re doing, might be working, but you also have to have then the sales skills, the follow up skills, the things there. because I’ve had people that have quit doing certain marketing and advertising because they weren’t getting business, but they were getting good leads.
– Yeah, I see that too, and it’s, I tell people you have to look at, so let’s imagine it as a pipe. Is the leak at the front, is the leak at the back? You know, where are people falling through? Because if you keep just jamming people in a leaky pipe, well, then you’re going to lose a lot of people.
– Right, I say marketing’s like a relay race. You know, the baton gets handed off.
– Yeah.
– So when that ad hands it off to you, you then have to do the right thing. And people make judgements like, “Oh, they’re all price shoppers.” Well, how do you know? “Well, they all ask me how much it costs.” Well, what do you expect them to ask you? They don’t know how to shop for what you do. Don’t expect them. That doesn’t make them a price shopper. Everything I’ve ever bought I’ve asked how much it costs.
– Yeah, at a certain point, you need to know that information.
– Right, and I’ve had salespeople when I’ve asked, gee, how much is it? That they kind of, like, “Well, you know, it’s this much, “and you could look at this one that’s cheaper.” I was like, I didn’t ask for cheaper. I just asked how much it was.
– Yeah.
– It doesn’t mean I can’t afford it. It doesn’t mean I won’t buy up. It doesn’t mean I won’t even buy up from that if you’re like, “Oh, well, we also have this that does it.” Oh, you can do that, I didn’t know. People ask for what they know exist. They don’t ask for what they don’t know. This is what Steve Jobs did so well. We didn’t know we needed iPads and then we couldn’t live without them, right? I didn’t know I needed an Apple Watch. This is my third I think now, right? I forget how many iPhones I’ve had. You know, think about all these things, but that’s what he did well. I’ve said this story before, Henry Ford, when he developed the Model T, people said, “Well, did you do market research? “Did you ask people what they wanted?” He said, “No, if I asked them what they wanted, “they would’ve said they wanted a faster horse.” because that’s what they knew existed here. So be careful with all of this. You get to this and you’re measuring results. Are the results sales? Because your ad doesn’t make a sale. Your ad gets you a lead.
– Yeah.
– Right? And I’m sure you tell people this as well. That was the handoff, that was that pipe. Okay, so now the ad handed it off to you. You have to do the follow up and do the sales, do the upsells, you know, do all that stuff. That’s where profitability comes from. All advertising is is putting you in front of an audience. That’s all it can do. If you put the right stuff in front of the audience, they’ll take an action.
– Yep.
– If that action is making an inquiry, the ad’s done.
– Yeah, and what I do a lot with my members, my clients, is diagnostics. So we’re looking at, okay, what’s the problem? Okay, people are asking about price. Okay, let me see your service page. Let me see what information we’re giving people. Okay, let’s change this copy so that people know more going in so that they’re not as concerned about it. Or maybe we need to do more selling on the page in the copywriting so that closing is easier for you. Like, diagnose the problem that you have. It’s like if you had a fever and you just threw yourself in a trash dump. Like no.
– Yep.
– Don’t do that.
– No, but, and so I have some clients, I have one client who has a venue in Pennsylvania. The prices on her website are for venue, she’s venue and catering, per person, including tax, including service, and then the minimum number of guests for different days of the week. She doesn’t want to deal with the price question, so that’s one way to do it, is complete transparency.
– Yeah.
– And some people are like, yeah, but now they have the price, they go shop around. If she’s filling her calendar, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. There was a venue in Texas that heard me talking about this. She sent me a link to her page, and it was a venue rental. Here’s the price on the weekend, here’s the price during the week. There it is, total transparency. Well, now they’re not going to ask you how much because it’s already there. If that’s your problem, that they’re all asking about price, well, maybe you should tell them, all right? Maybe. I’m saying maybe.
– Crazy idea, right?
– And there you go. And listen, on my website, I have price of certain things that I do. I don’t have price of other things that I do. I have price ranges of certain things that I do because I want to get all inquiries on something like speaking, because people come to me in the industry and they have no budget and I’m able to turn it into a full fee speaking event. So I don’t put the price there because I know if they see the pricing they’re going to be like, forget it. There you go. I do that intentionally.
– Yeah, it’s all about intention.
– Right, a two-hour website review, the price is on the website. There’s no seasonality. It’s I’m available or I’m not, that’s all it is. I don’t mind having the price there because there it is. That’s it, and if that’s too much, okay, I get it. Then you can go for a book. You know, spend $30 instead of hundreds of dollars. It’s okay. But getting back to results, you have to be able to measure the results but you have to know what those results are that you want. Inquiries is one measurement, but it’s not your goal, right? I hope it’s not your goal. Your goal should be profitability, which is what you said. Not sales, profitability.
– Yeah, and something that comes up a lot, we do these quarterly planning sessions in my membership and we talk a lot about setting your leading and your lagging metrics. So things like inquiries, bookings, those are lagging metrics. They’re things that happened and you can’t do a ton to influence them. A leading metric is something that you can do to knock down the set of dominoes. So for me, I get a lot of people that find me on podcasts. So what am I doing right now?
– Shocking.
– That’s my leading metric. I can say, I want to reach out to five podcasts this month, this week, whatever.
– Right.
– And then I know, did I do it, did I not? That’s the first domino, that’s the thing I can control. Then we can tweak things further down if we’re not getting the result that I want.
– Right, so and again, this is a form of advertising and marketing for you.
– Totally.
– Right? Right, it’s like at the mall at the food court, you want some bourbon chicken? You want a little tooth pick with some bourbon chicken? You give a little taste of what you do. I’ve been on other people’s podcasts for years before I created my own and it was for that reason. My audience knows me. I wanted to get in front of audiences that don’t know me.
– Exactly.
– And that was what, I’ve tried advertising, I’ve tried Facebook advertising and stuff. It just doesn’t work for what I do. What I do, organic marketing, which is time, right? This is your time right now. You’re investing your time. You’re giving away free stuff here. You just told us your five steps for free. If you weren’t listening folks, she just gave you all the good stuff there for free, so that people might want to say, okay, well, what is this membership or what? You know, let’s just do that right now. So what is this membership you talked about?
– So my membership is called the Wedding Business Collective and it’s where I’ve combined all of my courses, my trainings, my group coaching and accountability into one place, because I was finding my coaching clients needed education, my education clients needed coaching, so we just smashed the whole thing together into one big membership. And your listeners are going to get hooked up with a trial of that.
– Well, all right, tell me about that. So where do they go and what’s the hookup?
– Yeah, so you can go to TheWeddingBusinessCollective.com and when you sign up, you can use coupon code ALAN, all uppercase, and you’ll get a free two weeks so you can dig in and start working on this. And if you’d prefer to start a different way, I have a checklist as well of all these things. So we talked about these five steps, but there are lots of little pieces within them. So I have a checklist available of here’s everything you need in order to make sure your marketing actually works, and they can get that at EvolveYourWeddingBusiness.com/alan And I hope anyone who’s listened to this walks away with the idea of it needs to be specific to me, it needs to be specific to my business, my ideal client, and dear God, it needs to be intentional. The things you do with your time have to be intentional if you’re going to get the results that you want.
– Terrific, we’re going to put all that into the show notes, because that’s a lot for people to write down–
– Yeah.
– Especially if you’re driving right now. So we’ll put it in the show notes. The full transcripts are always on my blog as well. So they get a free two weeks at the membership. They unlocks it for them to look and see what’s inside.
– Everything.
– What’s behind the green door, green curtain or whatever that is. And then the checklist at the EvolveYourBusiness website, we’ll put it all in there. Thank you so much, that’s very generous of you. So the key here is be intentional. Don’t just say, “Oh, I have some time today. “I’m “just going to throw some money at Instagram or whatever.” Let’s be intentional about this. Let’s measure this. Let’s know who we’re trying to market to. Let’s use the right voice. This is all consistent with what people have heard on the podcast. Like I said, we could talk about this all day, but we try to keep these a little bit shorter. This is already one of our longer episodes. Thank you so much. Heidi, I’m going to put all this in the show notes, your generous thing. Last words for anybody?
– Thank you guys so much for listening, and if you have any questions, come find me over on Instagram. I’m @evolveyourweddingbusiness I am very happy to have conversations with people in the DM, so if you want to talk, come shoot me at DM.
– Fantastic. All right, thanks for listening.
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