When you’re planning on becoming a wedding planner, try not to fall into the very common trap of thinking that you can provide all things wedding to all people getting hitched. You can’t.
Weddings are really important events in people’s lives, and it’s a huge responsibility when you’re thinking of setting up a wedding planning business to ensure you find your own niche to avoid becoming an event planner who spreads themselves too thinly, possibly offering services that you really can’t deliver…
If you want to be successful in any business – not just the event planning business, you need to identify your own unique speciality or niche to make sure you stand out from the madding crowd!
Think about who your target audience is and what makes them your ideal client -are they: local to you? Further afield? Celebrities? Do they want a destination wedding? Maybe themed? In other words, what wedding planning services are you happy to offer?
If you’re happy to offer everything from start to finish – as a full-service event planner- regardless of what may be required of you, that’s fine, but it’s essential you appreciate what a huge undertaking this wedding business can be and so, to avoid becoming swamped, and perhaps a little lost, it may be better to specialise in a particular area…
Hence, find a planning niche that suits you and perfect it.
Be Authentically You…
Perhaps start by playing on your own personal story, background or special characteristics. As corny as it may sound, at the end of the day, you are the only that is ‘you’ in the world – and that is a major asset especially when it comes to your target audience of the bride and groom.
People today are looking for authentic and relatable ‘brands’ that they connect to, especially when it’s for something as special as a wedding – so being yourself in your event planning website and other marketing content will help to attract the niche audience that resonates to that.
It’s essential to define what’s unique about your personal event planning business brand, tell its story – marketers use storytelling to build an emotional connection with whoever is reading their material, to encourage them to return.
It makes you and your wedding business brand sound more human and makes your website users feel like they know your wedding business for more than just selling your services.
So, in your wedding business brand story, incorporate your personal values and beliefs to show your website users what your wedding company is all about and what it stands for. That’ll help them decide that yours is a company they want to invest in – both financially and emotionally.
Hone Your Wedding Planning Niche
One key step to take when trying to hone your niche and define what is unique about your personal business brand in the wedding marketplace is to focus heavily on your value proposition.
A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered from the brand to the client. Essentially it all boils down to why a customer would choose you over another wedding planning business that offers the same service.
You have established your company for a reason – to either offer the niche wedding service at a better price, with better performance or offer more value in general.
Because even though you will be selling the same niche service as others, focusing on your value proposition will aim to differentiate you from the competition in a positive way.
Be proud and showcase what makes your niche company unique and let that shine through in your branding.
What Makes Your Niche Stand Out?
To get to the heart of what makes you stand out from the wedding planner competition, you should ask yourself this question: ‘If I stopped offering my wedding business services tomorrow, what would my clients miss the most about working with me?’.
This question gets to the root of what makes your wedding planning company unique so, make sure that your answers are reflected on your website, your branding, your social media and in the ‘voice’ that you use when connecting with your target audience. Don’t be shy -let that part really shine out!
What Does Your Niche Say About You?
The most prominent wedding planner niche brands know that it’s important to stand for something – when you find your niche, don’t be afraid to stand by it.
It’s true that you will lose a portion of your website audience to other broader brands who aren’t so niche, but when your niche resonates with a group, you’ll find loyal customers for a lifetime.
Build your marketing content around the niche you’ve chosen and push it forward to differentiate your wedding brand. People will identify with your niche brand and, as a result, connect with it and become customers for the long run, spreading the word of what you can offer…
Find Your Niche
So, some of the best wedding planners stand out in the crowd by setting themselves apart from other planners by creating their own niche.
When you’re establishing your own wedding planning business, perhaps you should try and aim to do this too. The possibilities for a wedding planning niche are endless and include:
- All-inclusive wedding planning
- Outdoor weddings
- Marquee weddings
- Encore weddings – 2nd or 3rd time round weddings
- Same-sex civil unions and weddings
- Providing for cost-conscious brides
- Planning high-end weddings – with wedding budgets upward of $50,000
- Celebrity weddings
- Honeymoon Help
- Themed weddings including vintage
- Weddings in a hurry
- Destination weddings—focus on one particular destination or area
- Ethnic weddings
Once you start to identify with what niche markets you’d be interested in specialising in, you’ll find that the list is endless…
Event Planning Business
There’s no shortage of wedding planners, so it’s essential you focus on what makes you different and better than your competition – maybe this is why you should specialise.
Wedding planners often offer similar services to clients and their duties, resources and vendors are usually the same.
Come on – most wedding planners are generally really well-organized people who pay great attention to details – so, do you have a specific skill set that goes beyond being just organized? Think about your own background and what unique skills you could bring to the wedding table…
Okay, not many of us will have a degree in interior design or a diploma in floristry, so, if you don’t think you have additional skills, start attending seminars or programs to develop skills that will make you stand out.
A good place to start is to look into the courses and seminars offered by the Event and Wedding planning associations such as us here at the Wedding Academy as we can help you identify your own uniqueness and show you how to utilise those individual skills.
And when you start to focus on your ideal client or wedding type, you become an expert in a niche market.
Once you’ve picked your niche, you should start to promote it on your website and social media – but you must make sure to showcase why you are the expert for these types of weddings and the benefits of your particular wedding services.
You could partner with other companies to get your name out there – for example, you could build relationships with travel agents if your niche is for destination weddings.
Create wedding boards on Pinterest
One of the first social media platforms a potential bride turns to for wedding ideas is on Pinterest – this is definitely one of the best places to be to gain more clients.
You could create mood boards on Pinterest that reflect the wedding trends you are seeing in today’s Post-Covid weddings, or in your own unique niche market.
You can have mood boards specifically for centrepieces, wedding favors, desserts, specific color themes, bridesmaid dresses, wedding dresses and this is just for starters.
You could try making a separate board that showcases your excellent wedding work, which can include everything from a beautifully decorated room to stunning bouquets – and you can even create photos of your organization binder!
Another important way to use Pinterest is to have a board focused on your blog posts, as this will help to increase your website traffic.
Diversify Your Niche Services
Similar to using your unique skill sets, perhaps you could diversify your offerings. An essential skill that most wedding planners have is creativity, so you could think about creating handmade wedding favors, invitations, centrepieces, jewellery, personalized gifts, wedding décor, silk bouquets, headpieces – phew!
Etsy.com is another social media platform that potential brides search for wedding ideas. You could consider opening an Etsy shop and start selling your unique wedding items which complement your wedding niche – for example, if your niche is vintage weddings, you could sell headpieces and vintage lace…
It’s just another way to supplement your wedding business income and to also help you find clients for your niche wedding planning business.
Check Out Your Competitors
As an event planning entrepreneur who’s thinking of either starting a wedding planning business from scratch as a niche service, or an existing wedding planner who’s decided to become more niche, it’s important to keep an eye on the wedding planning business competition and to find different ways to set yourself apart from others in your event planning industry.
In a busy wedding planner market, it’s especially important to stand out as an event planner with a strong personal brand, so to achieve this, you’ll want to define what makes you and your wedding planner brand unique. Sometimes the best way to find what makes you stand out is to look at your competitors and what they are offering.
When reviewing your competitors’ wedding services, try to figure out what they are missing that your niche brand has, and then use this to your advantage and make it a major selling point in your marketing material and throughout your website.
Wedding planner pros tend to want to grow and expand their wedding services and given the constant change to the modern-day wedding budget, this is very understandable.
However, there are two potential problems to consider when adding on services or offering second, perhaps even third businesses to capture those essential dollars:
- Be careful that you aren’t just adding more of the same of what you already offer… If you’re thinking about moving into a new niche service that’s fairly well covered in the wedding market, you risk limiting your skills and refining the experience your clients have in the area you’re already strong and best-known in.
- Make sure you aren’t potentially alienating your colleagues or existing suppliers… Referrals are at the core of every thriving wedding and special events business. If you’re thinking about creating an extension to your existing wedding business, be aware of the impacts as well as the implications on your business relationships within the wedding industry.
An important part of this process is identifying your niche – what makes your brand quintessentially and undeniably ‘you’.
What is your passion, what do you do well, and what makes you stand out in your market?
If you can confidently answer these questions, it will be that much easier for clients of yours to identify your wedding business to be the go-to service for that particular type of wedding service.
Let Us Help You Find Your Niche…
It’s not always easy to specialise in a particular area of the wedding industry – it takes confidence, bravery and a specific understanding and knowledge of what’s out there in the wedding marketplace already, to appreciate where the gaps are.
Here at the Wedding Academy, we offer advice and an abundance of courses that will help you explore which niche market would work best for you.
We find that many of our students are afraid of having a niche because they think they can’t work with other clients – however, one of our mentors at the Wedding Academy, Zoe, has a niche in marquee weddings. However, she still works with clients who don’t want a marquee.
What she is able to do is to tailor all her marketing, so it speaks to couples looking for a marquee wedding which makes her a marquee wedding specialist, and an expert in that area, but she still works with other couples who decide against having a marquee as a venue.
Because finding your niche is the first piece of the puzzle – you’ve eliminated the couples that aren’t applicable to you and what you offer, so now you can hone in on your target audience much quicker by knowing what your niche is.
It’s essential to remember that your niche should be something that feels easy for you. Something that’s a natural fit with who and what you represent as a person. What you’ll find is that you come across as authentic and genuine and your perspective clients will believe in you and the services you are offering…
Let us guide you to finding your own niche.
