Very often potential wedding planners say they have many skills and want their businesses to not only offer to plan weddings but provide other services, such as wedding photography, wedding design, catering, and cake design and baking. They can do it all and want to be a one-stop shop.
Great! Having knowledge and skills in different aspects of weddings will help you offer better guidance to your brides and grooms. But when you first start your business, the best way draw attention to yourself is to establish yourself as an expert in one area.
When you offer too many different services at one time, potential clients become suspicious. They want the best their money can buy and believe that anyone who offers a wide variety of services has not taken the time to become the best at anything.
They also may believe that you have set your business up to offer a wide variety of services because you are desperately trying to capture any and every possible client. They will think you don't know enough about their particular type of wedding to be able to help them.
Here are 4 tips for starting your one-stop business successfully:
1. Get experience
Work on as many weddings as possible. Take some time to figure out what aspect or aspects of weddings you do best and love doing the most, and what clients would pay for. For example, if you want to be a wedding designer, get experience in floral design, lighting design, and designing and executing themes.
2. Become an expert
Take the time to learn all you can in your chosen area so you become an expert. This may mean taking classes at local colleges in horticulture, interior design, fashion, hospitality, photography, or the culinary arts.
3. Highlight your expertise in your marketing
Brides often say they can't tell the difference between different wedding planners. By having developed your expertise in one area and focusing your marketing around it, you will stand out as being unique among other wedding professionals.
4. Add complimentary services as your business develops
Once you are getting a steady flow of clients in your area of expertise, and have learned what other services they would be willing to purchase from you, begin offering a few additional services and products that work well with what you do and don't compromise the quality of your core services. Partner with other high-quality wedding and event professionals who offer the services and products that you do not.
You might fear that if you don't start your business as a one-stop shop, you won't get many clients. But the opposite is true. Brides highly value wedding experts with unique abilities. They will seek you out, be willing to pay premium prices for your services and offer you high-quality referrals.
No comments:
Post a Comment