Krystal asks:

“I seek perhaps some advice on how I continue to be “out there” without sailing into the boring seas or moving into sharing content on social media that isn’t relevant. Maybe I need to be patient with the process, once my first wedding is over and I’ll feed my future marketing off that.”

It was such a joy to read your entire email Krystal, I remember those early days and especially performing a family member’s ceremony, that was my first too!

Here’s the thing that you need to get deep down in your soul, and honestly all celebrants need to as well: you’ve got to know the process, love the process, trust the process. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is your business.

The process is simple and beautiful:

  1. You need to have a good product, price, package, deal, customer journey. Before anyone books you in as their celebrant you need to have the whole deal ready to sell. Forms, systems, invoicing, a solid customer journey for the couple to experience.
  2. You need to have a story to tell. You need a backbone. A conviction. And truth be told is that the conviction you start your celebrancy story with will evolve and mature to something greater in the years to come, but your story today is your story, so own it and be proud of it. Believe in something and go to war over it. Not enough people fight for good ideas these days, but those that are brave enough and strong enough to do so, always win.
  3. You need to tell that story over and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, until you retire.

That’s the process. It will grow and evolve and mature. But you need to trust the process because all the couples getting married in the next 1-2 years aren’t all convening together in a secret group chat talking about who they’re going to enquire and book with and when so it’s all balanced and easy.

They are all individuals with their own personalities, habits, and tastes, marrying another individual who has their own buying habits, and wedding ideals, and they come together to create a once-off event. And some of them, dare I say that almost all of them, don’t even know that you or I exist.

So the process is to ‘dance naked in public’ as Jerry Saltz described it, to tell that story on different mediums, to different people, to be “out there”, in the hope and prayer that people who book celebrants like you, find out that you exist, and fall in love with you and book you.

Because in the end everyone is telling a story about how people like them do things like this.

Or you can just spend every cent you earn on Google and Facebook ads and join the race to the bottom of the market like everyone else.