Are you doing business with the right customers?
Very often I’m consulting with wedding and event pros, and I’ll hear complaints about them getting inquiries from less than their ideal couples/clients. It always begs the question whether it’s their marketing and advertising attracting the wrong customers, their pricing and packages aren’t correct for their target market, or whether they’re just settling for the wrong customers.
Listen to this new 8-minute episode for some thoughts on whether you’re choosing the right customers.
Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:
- Apple Podcast:
- YouTube: www.WeddingBusinessSolutionsPodcast.tv
- Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sGsuB8
- Stitcher:
- Google Podcast:
- iHeart Radio: https://ihr.fm/31C9Mic
- Pandora:
Below is a full transcript. If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at [email protected] or contact me via text, use the short form on this page, or call 732.422.6362
Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review (thanks, it really does make a difference). If you want to get notifications of new episodes and upcoming workshops and webinars, you can sign up at www.ConnectWithAlanBerg.com
– Are you doing business with the right customers? Listen to this episode and find out. Are you attracting and doing business with the right customers or are you doing business with the people that happen to be coming your way? So what do I mean by this? Very often when I’m consulting with businesses just like yours, small businesses, medium size, larger businesses, I have people saying, “These are the people I really want to do business with but these are the people that I’m getting.” Now, part of that is your advertising and marketing efforts. Part of that is where you live, right? Your location. I have people that’ll complain to me, “Hey, I can’t get prices like they do in New York. How do I do that?” And I was like, “Well, you’re not in New York. You’re in another part of the country and weddings are just different over there. Doesn’t make ’em better. Doesn’t make ’em worse. They’re just different.” And sometimes people charge more because, well, their rent is more and other things are more in the area and sometimes people charge more because they can.
So what it comes down to, very often, is how many people you want to do business with. How many of those people there are in your particular market? So if you’re looking to do very, very high-end weddings and your market doesn’t have a lot of high-end weddings, then you’re fighting for those with all the people that are trying to do high-end weddings. Whereas if you’re trying to do weddings in the middle of the market, whatever that price point is for your service in your area, there’s a whole lot more fish in that sea for you to be fishing for. So doing business with the right people is attracting the right people through your marketing and advertising and yes, sometimes you can price yourself out of certain parts of the market. I’m dealing with this right now with one of my clients and we’re raising the price on her venue because of just the volume that she can do in order to hit the number she wants, she’s gotta go up higher and she said, “Well, I’m probably pricing myself out of the local customers here.” I said, “Well, is that okay?” Because people are already coming from a further distance where her higher price, doing air quotes here, her higher price for the local area, is actually a good value for people to travel a little bit to get there and since she’s not trying to fill her calendar with 150 weddings a year, it’s a much, much, much smaller number, I said, “We only have to get these people to say yes, whether it’s 20 people or 30 people or 50 or whatever the number is for you, we have to get them to say yes.”
Same conversation I had today with another client of mine, they potentially could do 120, 130 weddings a year, but they don’t want to because production wise it would just cause so many more headaches, it would be so much more hectic. I said, “So what we’re looking for is maybe 80 to 100 that are paying the right prices.” And this is what I very often say when I’m consulting, “Let’s not worry about the thousands that are not going to hire you at that number. Let’s worry about the ones that will and let’s laser focus ourselves on them with our advertising, with our marketing with our messaging, with our networking, with our website, with everything that we do, let’s focus it on those people and not worry about the others.” It is knowing your niche and owning that niche.
This is a conversation I had with myself back in 2013, I left The Knot in 2011, 2012 I had a full year under my belt, 2013 I said, “Well, do I want to be a guy that speaks on sales training, a guy that speaks on sales and websites and those things that I speak about or do I want to be a guy that speaks on that to the wedding and event industry and narrow that focus?” Which is what I had been doing but I started to get a little bit of business outside of the industry and I’m wondering, “Hey, you know, they seem to pay better in some of these other places. Should I follow that?” And I made the conscious decision in the summer of 2013. I went to a speakers’ conference, National Speakers Association, and I made the conscious decision that I was going to narrow my focus and somebody described my niche as an inch wide and a mile deep, and I thought that was a really good way to explain it because the wedding and event industry is a very narrow niche. True, people spend $50 to $60 billion a year on weddings and event receptions just in this country, just in the US and much more around the world, hundreds of billions of dollars, but in the global scheme of things, it’s a very narrow niche.
Now I’ve been able to make that deep by speaking to the 12 to 14 different service groups that make up weddings and do that in 14 countries, much, much more if you take in remote, especially during COVID. Last year alone in 2021, I had people from 48 countries tune into things that I did remotely. So that’s a really, really deep, very narrow niche there. Within your market, within your category, you have a niche. You’re not going for everyone. I haven’t met anybody in the wedding event industry unless somebody’s selling a product, and even then, I don’t think they’re going for everyone, maybe wedding insurance, maybe that would be going for everyone, but most people are going for a part of the market. The thing is, do you know what that is? Do you own that part of it? If somebody thinks of, “Hey, I need somebody who does this around that price point with this quality level.” Do you come to mind immediately because people know that’s you? If you’re not clear on that, then you might be fishing for the wrong customers because you’re not clear who you’re going for, what the messaging is, and how you need to do that. And then you’re not going to get the prices that you want.
So yes, you can price yourself out. I remember another venue client I was talking to years ago and they bought their venue, the people before had been charging a very, very low price. They made improvements. They raised the price significantly. I mean, it went up from something really ridiculously cheap like $500 to rent their venue to a few thousand dollars, which still is inexpensive by some standards, but they’re in a more rural area, but it was five times, six times what it was before and they also priced themselves out of that clientele that was looking for a $500 venue but they were getting different clientele. So as long as there are people that will pay your price to get your results, then don’t worry about the ones that won’t because you don’t need them all. You need a small fraction of the people getting married in your area or having an event in your area to pay your price, to fill your calendar. Every area of the country has dozens or hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of a events going on.
So, the more events, the more competition, but you only need a small fraction of that. So are you attracting the right customers and doing business with the right customers? And if not, you need to step back and rethink. What’s the avatar of that ideal customer? Where do they live? How do they think? What are the demographics that we know about them? What are the psychographics? What are the way they think? What would attract them to us? And let’s make sure that everything we do, advertising, marketing, social media, networking, website, messaging, everything that we do is aligned with that, and the clearer we are, the clearer people will know that we’re the right fit. Hope it gave you something to think about.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:
- Apple Podcast:
- YouTube: www.WeddingBusinessSolutionsPodcast.tv
- Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sGsuB8
- Stitcher:
- Google Podcast:
- iHeart Radio: https://ihr.fm/31C9Mic
- Pandora:
©2022 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com
