Wedding Industry Insider Podcast

WII 081: Calder Clark Explains How to Highlight Your Brand Without Overextending Yourself

Are you a wedding planner who loves design? Or do you thrive in logistics? Perhaps you enjoy both sides of the planning process.

Yet, regardless of which skillsets fall in your wheelhouse, you can’t do it all. Ultimately, it helps to bring in support, which is why this guest shares how you can affordably outsource in a way that highlights your brand.

So, be sure to tune in for this podcast episode!

Calder Clark is the owner and Creative Director of Calder Clark, a full service consulting and design firm. With over 22 years of experience, she now focuses on producing a limited number of exclusive weddings and events each year, as well as serving as a sought-after national speaker. Additionally, she is recognized as a top planner by the following publications: Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Martha Stewart Weddings, Southern Living, and The Knot

In this episode, Calder explains the role of vision in guiding the way that you manage the design and logistical details of event planning. Specifically, she offers practical advice for how you can outsource specific areas in order to level up and step away from doing everything yourself.

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Wedding Industry Insider Podcast

WII 077: Tara Melvin Advises You to Learn and Network Like a CEO

When it comes to small business success, having a great product – or being a great planner – isn’t all it takes. The truth is that running a business requires its own skill-set. And this guest is here to tell you how to gain it through transformational learning.

So, be sure to tune in for this podcast episode!

Tara Melvin is the Principal Planner & Designer of Perfect Planning Events, an award-winning event planning firm in the Washington DC metro area. She is also the Founder and Organizer of The Signature CEO Conference, an educational platform and annual event designed to help creative entrepreneurs ignite business acumen and leadership skills. Additionally, she is the Founder and President/CEO of The National Society of Black Wedding & Event Professionals (NSBWEP). Considered the Olivia Pope of Events, she was named the 2021 WeddingPro Fellowship for Change Mentor and was listed in BizBash’s 2020 List of 500 Most Influential Event Professionals.

In this episode, Tara talks about the importance of concrete business ownership skills as well as the power of networking. Plus, she shares the branding and selling tips that will help you stand out from the crowd.

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Wedding Industry Biz

How to Use Analytics to Optimize Your Messaging

You’re a smart, established professional who runs a successful business. So, why is it so hard to know what your ideal clients want to hear?

You try to be useful. You try to educate. You try to showcase your best work. But something’s not working the way you think it should.

Well, sometimes a big mistake that wedding planners make is unintentionally focusing too much on themselves. They emphasize what they like, what they want, and what they think is important. In essence, their marketing is all about them.

Instead, with a few small tweaks, you can start targeting your ideal clients with strategic messaging that makes them feel seen and understood.

Because when you make your ideal clients feel understood, it builds trust in you and your services.  Importantly, it’s how you can demonstrate, rather than just talk about, the value you offer.

But, how do you know what will make them feel this way? Fortunately, it’s easier than might think – you already have valuable information at your fingertips.

Here’s how to maximize your presence throughout your marketing channels, with the help of some light research and a little bit of data.

Your blog

Since your blog lives on your website, you can use Google Analytics to get an idea of the content that resonates with your audience best. The first thing you’ll want to look at is a traffic report to identify the blog posts that received the most visitors. These numbers can hint at the topic categories that garnered the most interest, but it’s important to note that traffic per post can also differ because of your promotional efforts. A heavily-promoted blog post will naturally see more visitors than one that is only shared once or twice.

For this reason, you’ll want to look at a few other metrics: time spent on each post, bounce rates, and conversion rates. If you notice that a blog post saw a much higher average time spent on the page, it’s a good sign that visitors stayed around for a thorough read. Lower times and high bounce rates signify a post that doesn’t keep a reader’s interest.
So, conversion rates are a vital piece of data as it’s where the money lies. Check out the blog posts that garnered the most conversions —what sets them apart? You might have had a particularly strong call-to-action, or perhaps it was a well-written piece that nailed your ideal client’s pain points. Follow the data to the highest-performing posts and continue to replicate the success.

Your social media

All of the top social media platforms have built-in analytic dashboards that are pretty robust, providing valuable data points to inform your marketing strategy. Review your top-performing posts to see what kind of content draws in the most engagement. Perhaps your audience loves sharing input when you ask them leading questions in a post. Maybe your weekly advice posts attract a lot of attention. Take note of the type of content that is most interesting to your audience, and adjust your content strategy to align with it going forward.

Of course, social media likes don’t translate to cold hard cash. That’s what conversion rates are for! Take it one step further by looking at the Social data report to see which social media platform sends the most traffic and conversions. You can then match up the dates with your social media posts to identify the content that truly drove the most conversions.

Once you’ve gathered enough data to tell you what your audience loves (and what they don’t), you’ll be able to answer the three core questions that drive a great marketing strategy:

  1. What should I start doing?
  2. What should I improve?
  3. What should I stop doing?
As you learn more and more about your audience’s preferences, your messaging and overall marketing strategy will hone in on your ideal client with precision, and your bottom line will grow accordingly. All it takes is paying a little bit of attention to your data, and you’ll be well on your way to a more profitable future.

 

Christie Osborne is the owner of Mountainside Media, a company that helps event industry professionals brands develop scalable marketing strategies that bring in more inquiries and leads. Christie is a national educator with recent speaking engagements at NACE Experience, WIPA, and the ABC Conference.

Wedding Industry Insider Podcast

WII 072: Tasha Bracken Challenges You to Invest in the Brand That You Want to Build

Feel like you’ve ramped up your business too quickly? Or like you’ve given so much you’re burned-out?

If so, then be sure to listen to this podcast episode!

Tasha Bracken is the Owner and Principle Event Producer at Tasha Bracken Events and the Founder of Protégé Collaborative for Planners. She has almost two decades of experience in event planning, and her work has been featured in numerous publications such as Style Me Pretty and Carats & Cake. With a background in PR and Marketing, Tasha is an industry expert in producing weddings as well as nonprofit galas. She has also won the NACE Boston chapter award Wedding of the Year five times.

In this episode, Tasha talks about the way that she rebranded her business and refreshed her love of event production.

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Wedding Industry Biz

Building Wholesale Relationships to Increase Your Bottom Line

By Audrey Isaac, 100Candles.com

When your business is running efficiently, your marketing and pricing are just right, and your team is top-notch – so, what’s next? What options do you have for increasing revenue and pushing your bottom line to the next level? It’s time to build profitable wholesale relationships.
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Wedding Industry Biz

The First 5 Steps to Creating a Killer PR Plan

flowers-bouquet-bridesmaids-PR-Plan

By Meghan Ely, OFD Consulting

Creating a public relations plan for your business can seem like a daunting task to some, and is often put on the back burner as something that can be done later down the road (aka never). But, guess what? PR is often what will get you the results you’ve been looking for all along- press features, an elevated reputation in the industry, and the clients you’ve always wanted.

So, why not go ahead and get started on your PR plan right now? We’ve got your first five steps below:

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Timeline Genius

Behind Our Rebrand: Making Our Looks Match Our Smarts

Hello Timeline Geniuses!
Those of you who knew us before might have noticed that we had a makeover:

 

TG_Logo-01

 

Tada! What do you think?

Like any startup, Timeline Genius had to make choices about where to invest its time and money. The main mission was to enable planners to create timelines easily. By doing this, we would be eliminating stressful and tedious aspects of the job, thus making work more enjoyable (yes please!).

We would also be creating more time for planners, which would allow them to thrive and take on more business. Our tool had to be robust and perfect. So for the first year and a half, that is where Timeline Genius put its resources: perfecting a tool that truly makes the lives of its users better.

 

custum-made-template

 

 

Once that was in place, Eddie was able to address more layers.

Enter rebranding.

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