How to Create an (Actual) Marketing Strategy
You’re more than a few years into your wedding business, and things are humming along. You’ve got a portfolio with great clients. Have an awesome network of professional friends. And your business is making pretty good profit! The thing is, even though most of your business has systems for this and workflows for that, there is one thing you’re still flying by the seat of your pants on.
You guessed it. I’m talking about your marketing.
But no one is pointing fingers—the thing you’ve heard a million times is true. You didn’t go to school for marketing, so you’ve always just “figured it out.” And that worked…until it started to not.
Which is why you’re probably here. Digging through the Planner’s Vault blog looking for advice to help you get your marketing act together. And I’m glad you are—because that’s exactly what I’m going to talk about.
Because you are (more than) starting to feel the pressure of marketing. And you know waking up and winging it isn’t going to cut it anymore. And you also know that whatever “strategy” you have right now, doesn’t feel so much like a strategy as it does a list of tasks. So let’s get you set up with what you need to create an actual marketing strategy for your wedding business.
And I promise it’s way easier than you think.
What is a marketing strategy and what goes in one?
You’re right in feeling like you need to create an actual marketing strategy for your business. Because (even though you know you need to market your business and you do…even if it’s intermittently), it feels like you’re herding cats. You feel like you’re spread thin. And it doesn’t feel like you’re making real strides.
All signals that you need a marketing strategy.
But before we dive in, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page about what a marketing strategy is. And it’s simple. A marketing strategy is your plan of the things you’ll do to make sure people know your wedding business exists!
Now, I alluded to this earlier, but a list of tasks is not a marketing strategy (just in case you were thinking, “But, Tayler—I have a list of things I want to do!” And the reason it’s not a strategy is because a list of tasks doesn’t give you direction. It just gives you things to do (i.e. herd cats). So when we talk about a marketing strategy, these are the 4 things you need to have in order to call it one:
1. Goals
2. Customer personas
3. Marketing channels
4. Tasks (your list isn’t a total waste!)
Your goals define where you are pointing/driving/focusing your effort because this is where you are trying to take your business.
Your customer personas help you decide what marketing channels you will be on as well as the content you need to create. Because you don’t do your marketing for yourself—you do it to attract your ideal customer personas.
Your marketing channels are the places you’ll do your marketing.
And your tasks? Well, you’re a wedding pro and I know if competitive checklisting was a thing, you’d win.
How to create a marketing strategy for your wedding business?
So how do you create an actual marketing strategy? The first step was learning what needs to go in one (check). So the next step is to fill it in. Like down on paper. Because it doesn’t count if it lives in your head.
Step 1: Write down your top 1-3 goals. What are you trying to achieve with your marketing? Are you trying to get more leads? Better quality leads? Are you trying to do a better job with SEO? And resist the urge to have too many goals—remember feeling like you’re doing all the things and not going anywhere? Yeah. Keep it focused.
Step 2: Write down the details of your ideal customer personas. And I wrote a whole article about just that! Click to learn what you need about customer personas for wedding pros.
Step 3: Define your marketing channels. And this is another spot you need to resist the urge to “collect them all”. Especially if you would tell me you only have 1-2 hours a week to work on your marketing. If that’s you, you need to cap yourself at 3…4 at the very most.
Step 4: Write down what you are going to do on each channel and set a pace for it—you do want to make sure you’re regularly doing your marketing after all!
Then…you’ve got your actual marketing strategy 🎉
A few pieces of advice from here
I’ve seen and heard a lot when it comes to wedding marketing, so I want to leave you with a couple do-this-not-that pieces of advice.
Don’t overthink your marketing strategy! There is no “perfect” marketing strategy and the only marketing strategy you need is an actionable one!
Marketing is always going to be an experiment because things are always changing around us. So you will need to make adjustments to your marketing strategy over time
Commit to the time you set aside to do your marketing—and protect it! Your marketing strategy is worth nothing to you if you don’t do it
Track your metrics! If you want to know if your marketing strategy is working, that is the only way to know for sure
You have what you need to create a marketing strategy. I’ve shared my best advice. And now it’s time for you to level up your marketing with it! But if you want something more than a Google doc strategy or you’re looking for ways to make less decisions around it, definitely give Enji’s marketing strategy generator a try!
All you need to do is play a game of 20 questions with Enji and you’ll get a marketing strategy that’s customized to your business. Plus Enji will organize all the tasks it recommends on a calendar for you—and has tools like a social media scheduler and metric tracker to help you do more in one place.
Start your free 14-day trial today!
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