It's November 21st. The Christmas music is playing on the radio, the Christmas decorations are going up, which means only one thing. The engagement season is upon us and right around the corner. So in today's episode, I'm going to be sharing eight things you should be doing right now in your wedding business to make sure you're prepped and ready for the engagement season.
I'm Becca Poutney, wedding business marketing expert, speaker and blogger and you're listening to the Wedding Pros who Are Ready to Grow podcast. I'm here to share with you actionable tips, strategies and real life examples to help you take your wedding business to the next level. If you are an ambitious wedding business owner that wants to take your passion and use it to build a profitable, sustainable business doing what you love, then you're in the right place.
Let's get going with today's episode. I know it feels like summer has only just ended. Busy wedding season feels like not that long ago. But we are rushing towards engagement season and now is the perfect time to make sure you've done all the prep in your business to get ready for for the busy season ahead of us. So as I said in today's episode, I'm going to share with you eight practical things you should be doing right now in your wedding business to make sure you're ready ahead of Christmas.
No one wants to be doing these things on Christmas Eve or Boxing Day, so get them done now and you will feel ready to go for engagement season. So first up is all about your imagery. So I want to make sure your imagery is ready and updated. So when was the last time you had a look on your website and checked when whether or not you'd updated your images? Anytime in the last couple of years.
I'm sure you've got loads of new great images from this summer from all the weddings you've been doing, but often we hide them away either on our computers or just on our social media and we forget to update them on our website. Are the images on your website out of date? I even meet suppliers who still have stock images on their website even though they now have amazing images to share because they keep forgetting to change them.
So go through your website, particularly your homepage, but go through everything, look at whether or not your images are reflecting your current work are up to date and if not, now would be a great time to start switching them out and updating them, refreshing them, ready. The same goes also for the images on your Instagram.
Have a look at those top three images you know, you can pin three images on the top of your Instagram, which is a great feature because it means you can always make sure your best images are shown to couples first. So go and have a look. When was the last time you refreshed or updated those pinned images? Is it time to change them out? Do you need to put in something new as we go into 2025 that reflects your work?
Now, this is the first thing people see when they land on your page, so it really needs to reflect your business and where you're at. So number one is get your images sorted both on your website and on your social media. Okay? The second thing I want you to look at is your pricing. The end of a year is a really good time to start reviewing your pricing as we go into 2025 and beyond, because sometimes we forget to increase our prices.
And maybe you've had the same prices for a long time and you've not taken into account inflation or change in the world, or maybe just your work is better now and it's time to charge more. So this time of year is a great time to reflect, have a look over your finances, look at your costs. Have your costs gone up? Do your prices reflect that? Do you already have lots of bookings in the diary for next year or 2026?
Often that's a sign that maybe it's time to put your prices up a little bit as well. Now, this is a great time to change your pricing because you can tell people that you're going to do it and it means that you can do a little bit of an offer to try and get people over the line this side of Christmas. So if you are looking at changing your prices from 2025 bookings and beyond, you can say to people, now, my prices are going up from the 1st of January, 2025.
But if you book before then, you get my current rate, which is X. So it's a great way to kind of convince people who are maybe on the fence about booking you to go ahead and get that sorted, get their paperwork signed before that price increase, but don't fall into the trap of having the same prices for years and years and years.
We all need to look at putting our prices up, particularly if you're finding lots of inquiries coming in, lots of bookings happening, that's often a sign that pushing your prices up a little bit is the thing to do. And after all costs have gone up. So we do need to reflect that, otherwise we're just losing our profit. So number two, on my list is reflect over your pricing and look if it needs to change as we go into next year. Again, number three is to review your automation.
All year I've been talking on stage and on this podcast about the importance of automation and making things easy to give a quick response to your potential clients. So now is the time to look at your automation. When I fill in an inquiry form on your website, does it trigger an automation? Will I get an automatic email into my inbox thanking me, maybe telling me what to do next, giving me your pricing or giving me a link to your calendar?
If you are still manually replying to every single inquiry, maybe now's the time to look at automation while things are a bit quieter ahead of that winter season. If that feels like a minefield for you, then why not reach out to us at the Wedding Pro Agency email? Automation setups is something that we do all of the time and we'd more than happy to help help you with that. Outsource it and get it ready.
If you've got your contact form already sorted, perhaps there's other automation you need to look at. If you've got wedding fairs booked in in the new year that you want to get sorted out, make sure your automations are ready for that as well, so that when someone signs up at the fair, they instantly get added to your email sequence. No more sitting down on a Sunday evening after the fair and typing out everyone's email.
That is a thing of the past, it's a waste of your time and you need to get automation sorted. So number three is have a look at the automation in your business and whether or not you can spend some time improving it over the next couple of months. Okay, number four on my list is those testimonials. I'm sure you've got some amazing feedback from the weddings you've done over the past six to 12 months. But are you doing anything with them yet? If not, now is the time to start looking over them.
I've talked a lot again this year about how the testimonial page on your website is dead in the water. You don't need a testimonial page instead. Instead you should have testimonials everywhere on your website. When I land on your homepage, can I read what someone else has said about you pretty quickly? If not, it's time to add them in and now is the time to go in and refresh your testimonials. If all your testimonials say they were from 2021 or 2022, then maybe it's time to update them.
I think that you've probably got some better ones now than you have from before. So go in, switch them out, freshen it up a little bit. Why not also add some of them onto your social media pages over the couple of months as well? Because this is a great way to showcase to your followers what other people think about you. If you haven't yet added a kind word section to the highlights on your Instagram, let me recommend that to you as well. Then you can have all of these testimonials.
When you've added them to social media, you can save them in one place. And if someone wants to read about you, they can find it very easy on your Instagram. So that is update. Number four is update your testimonials. Make sure they're all up to date. Make sure you're using the new ones that you've got and shouting about them. Don't let them hide away on your computer somewhere or in a handwritten card. Use them in your marketing and get them up on your website.
Okay, number five is now is a great time to start thinking about whether or not you want to add in any new services for 2025 and beyond. Perhaps you've got new ideas. Maybe there's something new that's trending that you want to start bringing into your business. Maybe there's something you want to stop doing because it's not making you very much money. Now is a great time to reflect on those things. Look at what's coming into the market, look at where you can be creative.
Now. One of the things that came out a lot when I was at Wedding MBA last week was the importance of the experiential offering at weddings. As we go into 25 and 26, people are looking for hands on experiences as part of their wedding day. So examples include things like interactive table plans where they can go and they get something to do or they take a ticket or they have to get a magnet. There's all sorts of things with their table plan.
So no longer is it just a piece of paper that tells them where they're sitting, but there's something that goes along with that. Some people are even getting sent their ticket for their table plan ahead of the wedding with their invitations. So is there something in your business that you could add in that is experiential? I enjoyed lots of lovely cocktails when I was in Las Vegas and one of the big things about them is again, they were experiential. They were pouring things on them.
They were making them smoke, they had sweets attached to them. It was all very exciting and experiential. Why? Because then you want to film it, you want to put it on Instagram, you want to put it on TikTok and it's great marketing for them as well. So where can you add in a bit of creativity into your business? Is there a new service you can look into? If you are based in the uk, I always recommend look at what's going on in America.
Go and check out TikToks of American Wedding planners because often the trends start in the US and then come to the uk. So you can get yourselves ahead of the trends by looking at what they're doing and looking at whether there's areas you can add a new service or a new idea into your business. Why not be creative rather than do what everyone else is doing? If you do something new and exciting, quite often people will want to book it.
So have a look at what offerings you can add for 2025 and beyond. Okay, number six is now is the time to start thinking about planning out your 2025 every single year. When it comes towards the end of the year, I do this in my own business. I meet up with someone and we go through my strategy for 25.
We look at what works over the year that's just passed, we look at my marketing, we look at my numbers, we look at my costs, we look at all of my key performance indicators and then we decide what to do for 25, what to focus on, what to cut out, what to do more of, where to market ourselves. And this is the time that you should be doing the same in your business as well.
Whether it's a solo exercise that you do on your own or whether you do it with me as a one to one strategy, I'm more than happy to do that with you. Reach out. I've already got a couple of half day strategy sessions booked in where I'm going to do exactly that. We're going to meet up, we're going to sit down and we're going to go through what's working, what's not working and what we're going to aim for in 2025. So things you should be thinking about are, is there places you could save money?
Are you spending money on things that's not working and you need reassign that money? Maybe your costs are too high, you need to look at reducing them. Perhaps it's that pricing thing again. Maybe you need to update your pricing to reflect those updated costs. Maybe you need to look at where you marketed yourself last year. Maybe it was on a directory, perhaps it was in a wedding fair.
Have a look at what the return on investment of that marketing opportunity has been and whether or not it's worth doing again in the coming year. We don't make these decisions based on feelings alone. You need to look at the statistics, look at what's actually working. And this is why tracking it all the way through the year is really helpful.
So I do with my members in our members lounge, every single month we have a zoom call where we look at where their inquiries are coming from, what's working, what's not, so that they've got all that written down when they come to make decisions for the following year. The other thing you should be doing is looking at your 2025 diary and plotting out time off. I always say it's important that you put your time off at the start of the year, otherwise it will never happen.
So decide how many days holiday you want to take as if you're in a proper business and start blocking them out on your calendar for 2025. If you block them out now, you' likely to take them. If you wait until you find time to take holiday, guess what? Everything else is going to crowd in and you're never going to find the time and you're never going to take the holiday. So block it out.
What I do is I go in and I block out all of the school holidays so that I have them all in my diary so I know when I've got the kids home from school. So if that also impacts you, maybe you want to do the same thing. The other thing some of my clients do is they look at when they've got weddings booked, because some of them say they only want to do a certain amount of weddings in a month or a certain amount of weddings over a weekend.
And then they start blocking out days either side of them so that they can't take more weddings for those dates, or so they've got time to recoup and relax and refresh themselves before they go again with the next wedding. So take a look at the diary for 2025 as a whole and start making marks on it. Start blocking out weeks, start putting in important dates and start making sure you're going to have some time off.
That planning session is one of the most important things you can do for your business. Knowing where you're going, making important decisions rather than doing everything off. Emotion and feeling will make a difference when you come into 2025. Know what you've got as a budget to spend, know how you're going to spend it, and make wise decisions regarding your business.
And like I said, if you need help with that, if that feels overwhelming or isn't something you feel you can do on your own, I get it. That's why I have to do it with someone else myself. Someone else can look at my business in a much better way than I can look at it myself. That's why I have that session. I have got a couple of spaces, so if anyone wants to do that either in person or on zoom, depending where you're based, reach out to me and we can chat about doing a strategy session together.
I'd love to work with you on that. Okay, number seven on my list is now is a great time for education. Now is the time to educate yourselves. Often we're a little bit quieter at this time of year, and so it's the time to look at what's going on on Instagram, what's changing, what's shifting. It's the time to look at your SEO and work out.
If you need to invest or spend some time on that, it's the time to look at some of those bigger trainings that you maybe haven't thought about before, but you want to stretch yourself to do something new in your business. If you're in my members lounge, now's a great time to log into the members lounge and watch some of that training you maybe missed in the busier times of year.
It's all arranged into different levels depending on your income and depending on what you need help with, so it's really easy to navigate. If you're not in the members lounge, why not consider joining for a couple of months and having a look at all the training that I have to offer in there. It's a great place to upskill yourself and educate yourself for the season ahead. It's also a great time now to catch up on missed podcast episodes, to read business books.
If you've got a copy of my book, now's a great time to read it and to just really think about how you can improve your business for next year. I always say every, every year you should be looking to improve it at least 1 or 2%. Even if you've got a great business, there's always room for it to be better. So now's the time to educate yourself and learn how you can be doing that. There is always something new to learn, whether you've been in business five minutes or five years or 15 years.
There's always something new to learn, something new that's coming in. And things like social media are changing all of the time, and all of us find it hard to keep up with it. So it's a good time to start reflecting that. Also, YouTube videos are a great place to look if you have software that you're using that you don't understand. I always go on YouTube how to do stuff on different pieces of software. And again, now's a good time to upskill yourself and get that sorted.
So number seven is education. Now is the time to educate yourself, ready for next year, so that when the season starts getting busier again, you are ready to go. Okay, that brings me to my final one for today, number eight, and that is take some time out. Right? As business owners, we're really bad at doing this. We're really bad at taking breaks. But actually, for a wedding business owner, often our winter is like everyone else's summer holidays.
This is when we're a little bit quieter with work. This is when we can afford to take the holiday, take the break, take some time out for us. You probably worked more hours than most people over the summer. You probably work very, very hard. So don't feel guilty for taking a day out and doing nothing. Have a duvet day, have a Christmas shopping day, have a spa day, whatever it is for you.
But take some time for you now, because we all know if you don't take it now, it will start getting busier again and you'll regret it. So have a look at your diary, block some time out and go and do something nice for yourself. Have a clear headspace. None of us want to reach burnout. And if we keep going, going, going all of the time at 100 miles an hour, that is what will happen. So if you want to be More effective in 2025, make sure you've got the headspace and take the break.
Often when I take a break, that's when my best creative ideas come. So why not go and sit somewhere and have a spa day and lie there and reflect? That's where you might get creativity for new products, new offerings for 2025 and beyond. So you've heard it from me. Becca tells you, go, take a break.
I know it's been a little bit of a shorter episode today, but that's because I want you to use the time you would have spent listening to this episode, going and working on all of the things I've talked about. So, a quick recap. Number one, update your imagery on your website and on your Instagram. Number two, make sure you've reviewed your pricing. Do you need a price increase for 25 and beyond?
Number three, take some time to look at automation in your business where you can add it in and where you can improve it. Number four up update those testimonials. Get some new words on your website, on your social media. Number five, Is it time to add some new creative services into your business? Get creative. Get experiential. Number six, plan out 2025. Set those goals. Book those holidays. Make sure you know where you're going next year. Number seven, now is a great time for education.
If you want to join the Wedding Pro members lounge, now's a great time to do it. I'd love to have you join us. Reach out to me or look for the link inside the show notes. And finally, number eight, take some time out for you. Go get stuff done. If you're stuck with anything, you know where I am. Reach out to me on Instagram eccapount and we can chat a little bit more. And I will be back next time with all of my insights from last week's wedding mba. I'll see you soon.