Tips to Step Up Your Wedding Business in 2019

Photo: Purple Tree Photography

Written by: Rebecca Chan of Rebecca Chan Weddings

Wedding planner and lifestyle expert, Rebecca Chan, has built a name for herself as one of Toronto’s top wedding planners, known for impeccable taste and effortlessly styled celebrations. She regularly is featured in the media providing expert tips for wedding planning, including appearances on Breakfast Television and Cityline.

 

At the end of each wedding season, we get a chance to breathe and take a break. We are all guilty of going on coasting mode as we just try to survive the busy summer of weddings. But once the end of fall hits and work slows down, it is the perfect time to refocus on our goals and improve on what we’re doing for the upcoming year. Here are a few of my tips for stepping up your business game for 2019.

Improve on your social media

Social media is something that gets pushed aside when the wedding season gets busy. But regular and consistent posting is so important for our branding and marketing. This is the time to plan strategically for the upcoming months, when you know you will be too busy to plan in advance for what to post. If you know you are the kind of person who doesn’t remember to post regularly, create a posting schedule for a few weeks in advance. Maybe on Mondays you post about real weddings, Tuesdays it is decor ideas, Wednesdays is Wedding Wednesdays for posting inspirational quotes, etc. Facebook and Instagram are getting pretty good at predicting the behaviours of our readers to let you know when a good time to post is. Use this valuable information to figure out when posting is most optimal to reach the most people. Hootsuite and Facebook allow you to schedule posts as well, so you have no excuses!

Add to the blog

Blogging is an important part of any wedding planner’s website, as it shows your expertise and it gives potential clients a glimpse into your ideas for planning weddings. More importantly, blogging helps with your SEO (search engine optimization), helping search engines connect potential clients to your website when they are looking up specific planning tips. After a full summer of stimulation from executing your weddings, consider putting some of the tips you have provided to your clients into writing for your blog. “Evergreen” posts are articles that stay relevant whether it is written five years earlier or if it is read five years later. They are articles with tips that always are important and vital for readers of your blog. As a wedding planner, this might be Top Tips for Planning an Itinerary or How To Create a Wedding Budget. You can always refer back to them for clients needing help in a certain area, and they will always be relevant in search engines. Consider putting your thinking cap on and writing a few evergreen posts to add to your blog.

Work more efficiently

There are always areas to be improved on when building our businesses and working efficiently will get you to your goals faster. Reflect on activities you dread or what takes up a lot of your time. The time you spend on tasks you aren’t good at or don’t enjoy doing, could be time used to make more money with actual client work. Subcontract out tasks you are not strong at (ie social media, building a website, designing marketing material, etc), and hire help for things you don’t like doing (for me this is doing taxes). If you are really busy, you could even hire an assistant or virtual assistant to help with multiple tasks, so that you can work more efficiently in the tasks only you can perform.

Build your team

If you are turning down a lot of inquiries because you are too busy, and generating enough business for a full calendar each year, you can consider expanding your team in the new year. At the very least, you can start building a foundation to see what this would look like. This may mean considering giving one of your assistants more responsibilities to see if they are able to handle more work. This could also look like hiring assistants to take care of some business tasks that take up too much of your time, as mentioned earlier. Expanding your team is scary, but it is a sign of a healthy, growing business when done well. But it is exponentially a lot more work to manage a team, versus just managing client work itself, so tread carefully if considering this!

Give yourself a raise

If you worked a day job, every year you would have a performance review and potentially get a pay raise. At the very least, you would get a pay raise for living adjustments and inflation. The same should be said of your own work as a wedding planner. Consider giving yourself a raise if you had a full and busy wedding season this past year. Don’t even feel bad about it. You’ve gained another year of experience, and that means you also gained more confidence in what you do and more skills to service your future clients better. That sounds like a great excuse for a raise to me! You deserve it.

Whether you are a new or experienced planner, the fall/winter off season is a great time to take a step back and figure out where you can improve for the coming year. You should be constantly improving yourself, because your colleagues will be doing the same.

Take action on one or all of the tips above to step up your business game in 2019, and happy planning!

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