[00:00:00.120] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Wedding season is officially here. And I know firsthand how challenging it is during wedding season to market your business. But with the state of the wedding industry and the economy, it's more important than ever for you to market your business during this wedding season. Inside today's episode, I'm going to walk you through some really simple steps of how you can maximize your marketing efforts for the 2023 wedding season. You're here to grow a business, but not just any business. You want to grow a profitable business with purpose, a business where you wake up every single day driven to serve your customers and make a difference in your own life. I'm Candice Coppola, published author, business coach, and your guide to building a profitable business with purpose. Join me here every single week as we explore how to build and grow your business or business with purpose. Get ready to dig in and have meaningful conversations about the strategies and techniques that will help you build your dream business. This is the power in purpose. Hey there, friend. Welcome back to the power in purpose podcast. It's me, your host, Candice. This episode is for all my wedding pros who feel like every wedding season you go in with the best intentions to get content, to market your business in real time, to do all the things you know you're supposed to be doing, but you always fall short.

[00:01:42.660] - Candice Coppola (Host)

It's also for my wedding pros who after a wedding, you're scrolling Instagram and it suddenly occurs to you that the guests at this wedding posted more about it than you did. I know firsthand how hard it is during a wedding season to not only be present for the job that you're supposed to do, but also to market your business and to get content that you can use to attract your next best customer. That's why marketing in the wedding industry is so important, especially now in the climate that we're in, where many wedding pros across the world are seeing a downturn in the number of inquiries and bookings. This is the year where you need to prioritize your marketing efforts and leverage all this incredible content that you're creating in real time to attract your next best customer. Before I get into my tips on how you can do this for this wedding season, I want to talk a little bit about why it's important and why you need to prioritize your marketing in real time during your events. I know how busy you get and we're hired to do a job. We're hired to photograph a wedding.

[00:02:57.160] - Candice Coppola (Host)

We're hired to plan the wedding. We're hired to cater the wedding. We are very focused, sometimes singularly, on the task at hand because it's what we're hired to do. We're not hired to be creating TikToks and living our best life. We're hired to do a job. But with that said, as part of your job, you need to be attracting the next best customer. During wedding season, there's this unique situation that doesn't happen in most industries where the fruits of your labor are actually coming to life in a visual way that people experience. Meaning you work so hard behind the scenes to plan the wedding or to prepare for the wedding in some way based on your role that now it's coming to life and the images and the videos of the work that you're doing actually are what attract the next person because couples are buying with their eye. So you have this unique opportunity where content is being generated for you all around you all wedding season long. Everywhere you look, there is something that you could be sharing on your socials, whether it's TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram, or some other platform. I heard there's a new platform called Lemon, which I guess I probably should investigate as your business coach.

[00:04:13.840] - Candice Coppola (Host)

But besides that, there's these platforms that exist that are visual where you are on them and you're constantly looking for ways to market yourself while wedding season presents all of the marketing you'll ever need for the year to market your business. But you're falling short in creating content and getting that content real time. So this episode is really all about helping you have a better marketing strategy for wedding season, creating somewhat of a content bank for you so that you can market it in real time at weddings, after weddings, but also after wedding season is done and people are continuing to search for a wedding pro like you for their wedding in 2024, 2025 and beyond. We've established that the wedding industry is visual. The eye is what buys and during wedding season you have basically unlimited content that you can be creating that you can use in real time and that you can also use when wedding season is done. We know this. We have this information now. So what can we do to maximize your marketing efforts for the 2023 wedding season so that it's not guests who are doing a better job at sharing the weddings that you're a part of, but it's actually you and your team who are doing the best job of sharing the weddings that you're a part of.

[00:05:46.110] - Candice Coppola (Host)

My first tip for you is to actually hire someone or assign marketing to a team member. As the principal, as the business owner, as possibly the lead talent, the lead photographer, you have a lot of things on your plate, which is why you always fucking fail at marketing your business during wedding season. So instead of being left to your own devices, my advice would be to hire or assign marketing to a team member so that someone can be in charge of doing this for you and you can dip in and out of it. But you know it's getting done behind the scenes. I want you to stop trying to do this yourself because it's clear that you don't have the time or the capacity or the ability to do it in the way that's necessary for you to attract clients. You either need to find room in your budget to hire someone and bring them on your team, or if you have wedding day assistance or some type of support crew, there has to be someone on your team who has some skills here, especially if you've got Gen Z folks on your team. You've got a wealth of actual talent.

[00:06:52.860] - Candice Coppola (Host)

They can literally take a picture of anything and make it look fucking good. I don't know how they do it. I don't know how they do it. I take a picture and I look terrible. But a Gen Z person takes a picture of me and I might as well be on the cover of Rolling Stone. I look like a fucking rockstar. So the same can be said for the Gen Z people in your business. You have an assistant, you have a support person, you have somebody on your team, you have somebody who follows you around with your gear, you have somebody who supports you on wedding day, find a person who knows how to use a phone and task them with creating content for your business this wedding season. If you don't have somebody on your team who is capable of doing this, then just hire someone to do it for you. There are plenty of places to look, whether it's a local high school, whether it's a local college or university, or somebody who's interested or curious in marketing. There are plenty of students who are studying marketing right now in their education who would love the opportunity to just come and create content for you at your weddings.

[00:07:58.700] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Not for free, of course, because people who are paid pay attention and show up and do the fucking work, but they don't have to cost you an arm and a leg. Reach out to your local high school, reach out to your local university or college and see if there are any students there who have an interest or who are studying marketing, especially social media marketing or even video marketing or photography, and have them come in and take this content for you. There is going to be so many opportunities for a person with a separate set of eyes to video and record pretty much everything and anything that creates a content bank that you can use later. My first tip is to prioritize this with a team member who is not you and add this cost to your services next year if this works out for you. This year you can't up your price necessarily. You can't go back to an existing customer and be like, Hey, I need 200 more bucks because I'm bringing a social media dude with me to your wedding. So this is going to be something that you absorb. It's a cost of doing business.

[00:09:03.920] - Candice Coppola (Host)

It's a marketing expense. But in the future, you can build this into your price. If you even need to, you can build this into your price and charge for it in the very next wedding season. Tip number two is to develop a pre wedding marketing game plan. You have somebody in charge now of your marketing strategy at each of your weddings. They're going to be there to capture all the things. But unless there's a game plan that you're established ahead of time, they're walking into who knows what. They don't know. And anytime we can prepare in advance for literally anything in life, we're always going to be one step ahead of the game. So you need to develop some type of pre wedding marketing game plan with your team. And how you're going to do this is first you're going to sit down and talk with your team about a game plan for each wedding. Now in my business, we had something called a pre wedding huddle where the team got together before every wedding and we discussed the finer points and all the nitty gritty details. This is something I also teach inside the Planner's Playbook, my community for planners.

[00:10:09.050] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Very shameless of a plug, very unchameless plug. I teach this inside the Planner's Playbook. But if you're not meeting with your team before weddings, you should be because you want everybody to be prepared, have a timeline, have a flow of the day, assigning tasks. But outside of that, this meeting should also cover marketing and a marketing game plan for your weddings. I want you to make sure that you're communicating what you want to get from a marketing perspective. Invite everybody to participate in creating content for the business. What's the strategy? What's the end game here? What's the result we want? And how are we going to plan to leverage the content from this wedding to attract our next best client? What are we going to do? What thoughts and ideas do we have? What reels are we going to create? Is this going to become a blog post? What are we going to do to leverage this content? What's the purpose? And then what are the logistics behind this? Are there any mechanics we need to walk through? Are there any specific points we need so and so stationed here to capture this? As you read through the timeline, are there certain interesting things happening or traditions that you want to highlight or moments that matter to your audience that you want to capture?

[00:11:28.550] - Candice Coppola (Host)

This pre wedding marketing game plan or huddle will help you to map out the finer points, set your expectations, which is so important, but also invite your team to communicate and to collaborate. Some of the best ideas I've ever had in business were not mine, but were someone else's. And as much as I want to take credit for literally fucking everything, I can't because so many people contribute to my business on a daily basis, whether it was my planning business and the team behind that and my co conspirators, my vendor friends, my own mentors, or even in my business today, where I get ideas from colleagues, even from my students, I get ideas. There's so much beautiful this that happens through collaboration and conversation. So this pre wedding marketing game plan meeting is going to help you to get ideas from your team that you didn't think of. If you ever sit down to write a marketing plan and you're like, Dude, I don't know what the fuck to do, you should come join us in Planner's Playbook if you're a planner. You should also come join us in Wedding Pro Insiders because we do marketing workshops every single quarter inside WPI.

[00:12:39.230] - Candice Coppola (Host)

My mastermind for high achieving wedding pros. But if you ever sit down and you're like, Dude, I don't know what the fuck to write for a marketing plan. You're not alone. What you really need is some masterminding, some collaboration, connection and conversation with other people to help generate ideas. That's what these meetings do. They help you talk things out. If you think you're the be all end all of your business, my friend, you are mistaken. There's so much wonderful creative collaboration that comes from connecting with people on your team. So invite them to start a dialog to give you ideas to share things that they think would be cool. And before you know it, everybody is connecting and collaborating, and better ideas are coming out of this marketing meeting. Hey, friend, hear that noise? That's the sound of Honey Book depositing cold, hard cash into your bank account. Honey Book is an all in one client flow platform that helps you manage your leads, send wedding proposals, and sign contracts all with the click of a button. And every time you get paid, you're going to hear this noise. Honey Book also offers a variety of resources and materials to help you grow your business.

[00:13:54.150] - Candice Coppola (Host)

One of my favorite features of the Honey Book platform is the community of creative entrepreneurs just like you. Honeybook is offering listeners of the Power and Purpose podcast 35 % off any of their three plans for your first year. 35 %, it's an amazing deal. Use the code purpose at checkout or go to candice coppola. Com honeybook to learn more. Step number three is to create a B roll footage content bank. I got news for you, and this might be a news flash for some of you guys. Video is where it's at right now. I as much as much as we hate video, and we wish we could go back to the Instagram of old where our feed was time based and we saw pictures and it was like, Oh, look at my fucking cool picture and my amazing caption that I wrote. That's not where we're at anymore. Video is king. Short form content is king. There was an interview with Gary Vee. If you don't know who Gary Vee is, congratulations. He's a marketing guy. I don't know how to describe him. Maybe the new era of marketing, we would refer to Seth Gordon as the grandfather of marketing, not to date him, but he really is in this generation set the precedent for marketing.

[00:15:20.070] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Gary Vee would be the equivalent to that. But in today's influencer TikTok world, you can go look him up. Hopefully, I did his description justice. But anyway, video is king, my friend, and we need to start treating it with respect. Mark Zuckerberg and Adam over at Instagram, as much as they might be prioritizing carousels this week, they want you to fucking post video. You need to have video. You need to start getting as much B roll footage of you working in your craft as possible to tell the story behind the job that you're doing. We need more video. You need more video in your business. The best and easiest way to do this is to create a content bank. A content bank is simply a folder in your Google Drive where you drop raw images and footage of things that you are banking to use at some point in the future, whether that's tomorrow's Reel or next year's presentation at a conference. You're creating a bank of content that you can pull from day after day, week after week, month after month, and wedding season after wedding season. The more B roll footage you take at weddings, meaning 15 second clips, little spans of a tablescape, or a little video of you photographing, a video of you doing a flat lay, a video of you styling flowers, a video of you doing video.

[00:16:46.760] - Candice Coppola (Host)

The more you can create footage of you in it and then footage of the event as a whole, the more options you'll have to create content on the fly. One of the hardest parts about reels and video is there's trending audios, which one do we pick? And sometimes we're not inspired, sometimes we're not camera fresh or ready in the moment. We have an idea, but we don't want to get dressed. There's all these logistics that need to happen when it comes to creating video. It's not easy. Otherwise, we would all be doing it. We'd all be doing it well. But a video content bank or just a general content bank with images and video is going to make it easier for you to jump on a trending audio, make it easier for you to see somebody's real and be like, Oh, I could do that too, and just fricking do it without all the analysis, paralysis, and procrastination. I have a huge content bank. It's a list full of ideas. I have a list full of B roll footage, video, headshot video, all different types of stuff in my business. And if I were a wedding planner today, I would be prioritizing B roll footage so that I could have amazing reels and show me in the moment doing my job, show my clients, and show the transformation I provide people in the amazing weddings that I am planning.

[00:18:03.360] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Tip number 4 is to post it in real time and also repost throughout the week. I want you to do both because wedding season presents this interesting dynamic on social media where next year's couples are stocking this year's weddings. Picture this, a couple getting married at insert your favorite, most boogiest amazing venue is literally stocking every wedding that's happening at that venue every single weekend. They're on the hashtag, they're on the venue's Instagram, they're in geo tags, which is the location based tags on Instagram and TikTok. They're keyword searching, they're googling, they are pinteresting, and they are following guests. They're peeping at guests who are posting that they're there to see what things look like. They're looking at vendors to see what vendors are posting there. They're going down rabbit holes to see what's happening at their wedding venue and how they... As they're planning their own wedding. As you know, couples get engaged and they, most of the time, become obsessed with wedding planning. So picture this, you're at this boogie ass venue, you want more of these couples because, Hi, they have the money, they have the style, they're cool, you love working here.

[00:19:27.050] - Candice Coppola (Host)

If you were to post in real time, you're satiating their desire to see what's happening in real time. And if you're to repost the same shit throughout the week, you're getting everybody else who just wasn't plugged in on the weekend. So I want you to post in real time at the wedding and your new social media person can do this for you. And I want you to then repost throughout the week because as much as people are online on the weekend, many people aren't because, Hi, it's the weekend. And most people don't work on it. Unfortunately for wedding pros, that can't be said. But the rest of the population tends to take Saturday and Sunday off. And that usually means that they take off from social media, too. They're not as active. So they may have missed some amazing shit you posted over the weekend, which is why I'm giving you free permission to literally repost the same videos, the same photos, and the same content throughout the week so that it can be seen again. The person who saw it once, who sees it twice, will not care nor really even remember. Even your mom isn't going to remember.

[00:20:32.760] - Candice Coppola (Host)

And she probably remembers a lot. She probably has a lot of stories she could tell about you, but you reposting the same shit on Instagram is not going to be one of them. So I want you to post in real time. Look booked, look busy, show people what you're doing, and then feel free to repost that throughout the week to show the wedding of this past weekend for the people who missed it. And just to remind people too about where you were, the amazing things you're doing, and the clients you're serving. The final tip that I have for you today is to get feedback from your team on marketing. Just like we sat down for this pre wedding huddle, this marketing game plan meeting, I want you to get feedback from your team on marketing. So after each wedding, you should sit down with your team and get some feedback about the wedding itself, the job you did. We call this a post mortem or debrief. This was also something we did in my business and something I teach. I think it's very important to improve and to get ahead of any weird situations that may have happened.

[00:21:32.540] - Candice Coppola (Host)

But for the premise of marketing, you want to, after each wedding, sit down with your team and get their feedback. Go through the content that they all created and discuss what's working, what you like, what could be done better for next time, so that you're always improving upon the marketing process and the system. You'll find that once you get this going, you will discover ways to do it better, things that you might not need, things that you need more of, things you like, you don't like. And these meetings help to communicate that, bring it to the surface, and get feedback from the team. So make sure after each wedding, you are getting feedback from your team on the marketing and essentially what can be done better. Now, just in the premise of saving time, you can do these meetings before you go into what's happening this weekend. A lot of times we would do a post mortem and then we would go into this week's wedding. One meeting because girl, meetings honestly, I know I'm saying meetings and you're like, Candice, I don't want to fucking have a meeting. I get it. You can bring the two together.

[00:22:45.760] - Candice Coppola (Host)

You can start off with a debrief and then go into debriefing what's happening this week just in the effort of saving time and bringing people together. So this is how I want you to prioritize and maximize your marketing efforts for this wedding season. Let's recap really briefly. I want you to hire or assign marketing to a team member. Stop trying to do this yourself. It's clear you cannot be left to your own devices. You are very busy and this isn't a priority for you, but it actually needs to be a priority for your business. Next, develop a pre wedding marketing game plan. Set down with your team, communicate details about the wedding, what you want covered or captured, and get feedback from them on what they think you should do based on what they're seeing on social media and how you want to market your business. Talk about the goals you want to get from what you want out of this wedding and what the purpose is behind some of the marketing strategy and logistics to accomplish it. Next, it's time for you to start creating a B roll footage content bank where you take raw footage and raw video, short clips that can be used forever and that can be used again and again over and over to create different bits of content.

[00:24:03.410] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Video is really important here. It's king. It's why I'm videoing this podcast right now because video is where it's at and you need to get on the bus whether you want to ride on it or not. Next, post in real time and post throughout the week. Your next client is stocking Instagram and stocking TikTok to find weddings that are happening this weekend at their dream venue or with their dream vendors. By you positioning yourself with people and in venues where your ideal clients are stocking, you raise the chances of people noticing you and hiring you. Finally, after each event, get some feedback from your team. What worked well, what didn't work so great from a marketing perspective, but then from the perspective of just the wedding in general. Those are my tips for you to prioritize and maximize your marketing efforts for this 2023 wedding season. I'd love to hear which of these tips are you going to apply to your business. Is there one you're definitely going to do? Are you going to do them all? Head over to my social media, let me know. I can't wait to see all of the amazing marketing that you do this year during your wedding season.

[00:25:18.940] - Candice Coppola (Host)

Listen to me closely, friend. You need to make this a priority. You need to stop hiding and stop making excuses about why you can't get all this video footage, why you can't get all these images. You also need to stop waiting for the professional images and video. The professional images and video are great and we want those. But we're living in a society right now where you don't need those to market your business anymore. They're a part of the marketing equation, but we're not going to wait for professional photo to post on Instagram. We need to post today because tomorrow our competition is coming to this venue. Our competition is working with these vendors, and we want to make sure that we're not holding out waiting for our wedding to be published or for the video team to send us videos before we market our business. You can't wait. It's too fast paced. And with where the economy is and where the wedding industry is right now, you can't afford to wait. You need to be front and center. And PS, you are front and center. You're the fucking best. And we need people to know you exist and that they should be hiring you.

[00:26:31.340] - Candice Coppola (Host)

So make sure you prioritize my tips today. Okay, friend, that's it. I'm off my soapbox. My rant is over. As always, I want to remind you there's so much power in your purpose. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the Power In Purpose podcast. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode and consider leaving a review. Head over to powerandpurpose podcast. Com to access all of the resources and links mentioned in today's episode. That's powerandpurpose podcast. Com. I'll see you next time.