With the summer wedding season over, it’s time to maximise your marketing potential in the quieter months. In a recent webinar, Easy Weddings Digital Marketing Manager Dan Wild shared practical strategies for marketing in the low season to land bookings once winter is over. Here’s what we learned.
Why Marketing in the Low Season is Critical
The objective of any successful wedding business is to make sales in the short and long term, says Dan.
Marketing can often be viewed as a tap. If the goal is to continually bring value to our clients, we mustn’t turn off the tap when we think that things are too crazy. Likewise, we don’t turn the tap the whole way in the short term, hoping it will change something. Marketing is a long-term commitment, and it’s something that we must continue to push for.
Statistically, couples hit a transactional peak with most wedding vendors — where they’re more willing to make an actual purchase — in the first three months of the calendar year. But while we may not see the sales convert throughout the year, suppliers still need to be front of mind for couples in the experiences and the months leading up to the critical transactional period.
During that research phase of the user journey, couples are trying to find solutions to problems. Businesses that are invisible during that crucial research phase at the top of the funnel are at risk of losing out on future sales during the transactional phase.
Your inquiries do not just start and stop. A couple’s intent changes throughout the customer journey, and we need to match that. A visible business is a trustworthy business, but one that is silent is generally something that people are wary of.
Google Analytics
If we don’t have good measurements, we can’t get good results. That’s where Google Analytics comes in.
From July 2023, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) will replace Google’s Universal Analytics. The main goal of GA4 is to give marketers a clearer picture of the activity on your site.
We touch on the changes to Google Analytics and migration to GA4 in our article, What you need to know about Google Analytics 4 (GA4), here. More information on the changes are available on the Google Analytics support page, here, and tips on migrating your settings are available here.
Social Media
As we mentioned earlier, we need to be growing a harvest of content and storing it to use later.
Take whatever photography and video you can when you are at a wedding, working with a client, or just out and about, to build that bank to share when you are too busy to create content. Show restraint by rationing your content to maintain longevity all year through. Your algorithm will notice, and so will your followers. Lean on scheduling tools like Later to pre-schedule content that can be created and uploaded in bulk.
Don’t shy away from creating templates or re-using content. Templates create consistency and make it easy for anyone in your business to grab an image or video, add some text and stay on brand.
Consider multiple ways you can repurpose one single piece of content. Take, for example, our recent Digital Marketing webinar. First, we shared the full replay link, then this recap article was created with the content from that video.
We’ve also created a second article focusing on Google Analytics, and made some Reels. For your business, this could come from a video you take at a wedding, a long-form internal office review, speaking opportunity, behind-the-scenes moment, or venue tour. There are many opportunities to cut up a piece of content to distribute later.
You can tend to struggle a bit on social media if you don’t get it perfect. My recommendation is to build a solid organic presence first, then supplement that with a bit of paid content to test. People are becoming less attentive to paid advertising because they know it’s sponsored. So creating high-quality content for free is an incredible way to keep people coming back to you whenever you have any new updates or ideas to share.
Building that trust and redeveloping your social media strategy to be more consistent is one of the most substantial ways to see growth, particularly on Facebook and Instagram — if you are making great content for non-paid activity.
“The important thing that you think about, when you do your paid strategy, is what are my people there to see? And you need to provide them with something that they want to see. So as long as you’re matching that intent, you will do just fine.” — Dan Wild.
TikTok is an incredible platform for ‘how-to’ and research intent. Despite not being the intent of the people on the platform, they just want to be entertained. If you provide great ‘how-to’ content, you can really blow it up, and that’s incredible.
TikTok’s secondary push at the moment is relatability. Someone who does that well is Emma Woythaler, our Social Media Manager. She’s incredible at getting into the mind of a couple planning their wedding. Be aware that the relevance of experiencing a shared problem is a great way to build engagement.
The reach that Instagram Reels have is unparalleled. There’s no other place pulling this much organic view for someone mindlessly scrolling. Instagram is competitive with TikTok and YouTube Shorts, but it has a strong market in Australia. Instagram is video-first, so you will see a lot more reach and engagement on any Reel than you will a standard photo post.
For Emma’s crash course on creating Reels, read our article How wedding suppliers can level up on Insta and watch her three-part webinar The Basics, Let’s Create and Repurposing.
And finally, it’s great to provide inspiration and solve a user’s research intent, but don’t forget to lead them to your website!
If you aren’t yet online with Easy Weddings and would like to see how we can help increase your brand presence and help book more weddings, submit an online enquiry form, here, and we’ll be in touch.
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