The Longest Shortest Time
Photo by Beth LaDuca Photography
We are in the longest shortest time. Quarantine seems to be dragging on forever, yet somehow it’s nearly June. Before we know it, this too shall pass. How have you been using this time to build your wedding and event planning business? Are you doing everything you can to ensure you are ready when we are all suddenly back in action for our 2021 wedding season? We know you’re still busy now. As wedding planners, we’re rescheduling events and still planning for next year. But, without events, we do have a little bit more flexibility in our schedules. Here’s what what we recommend to make the best of this time before it’s gone.
Update your website. We’re all guilty of getting behind on our websites. We finish a big website refresh and then step away…sometimes for years. Now is the time to make sure your site is reflecting your company and your portfolio accurately. This might be as simple as adding some new weddings or it might mean doing a full website overall. Don’t forget to add badges for recent publications, too!
Post about your weddings and events. Take control of your blog. Blogs help with your SEO, so make sure your current work is also featured on your blog. Maybe you post about one event every two weeks or so. Share all the behind the scenes details that went into making the day a success. We recommend pairing this with an instagram story about the wedding, too!
Streamline your operating procedures. As wedding planners, we need to be organized and put together at all times. When we’re often on the go, this can be tough to maintain. To make this easier, you should automate your system. Okay, so what are we talking about? You should have canned responses for your most frequent email replies. For example, you should not be spending time writing a brand new email to a prospective client each time you get an inquiry. You can easily save time by having that email ready to go and tweaking it as needed. You also might want to consider tools to automate your social media posts, meeting scheduling, task management, and client reminders.
Update your branding guidelines. Every event planning business needs a set of branding guidelines which should have your logo, branded colors with the codes, and fonts. A part of this document should also be your social media guidelines, which should include your presets or filters that you use for stories, any team hashtags you use (ours is #teambrilliant), and a list of the hashtags you’re currently using on your images. This should be ready to go as one document so that if you receive an inquiry for a partnership or decide to invest in advertising, you don’t need to put this together each time. If you already have this, take the time to read it over and make sure it’s still accurate.
Review your business plan. Now is a good time to take a hard look at your event planning company. What is working for you? What isn’t? What brings in revenue? What costs the most? It’s a time for being honest with yourself and making changes to be better going forward. If you know things need to change, but you’re not sure what, now might be the time to bring on a small business coach for wedding and event planners.
At Brilliant Event Planning, our Boston and NYC wedding planning and design offices are getting ready for next month when we’ll finally be revealing what we’ve been working on! If you missed the hints we shared in our newsletter last month, make sure you sign up below so you don’t miss out. Looking for more event planning business advice? Check out the rest of the event planner series!