Show Notes:

2025 has been a difficult year for many wedding business owners and venues – but how do you respond when enquiries are not at the level you are expecting? Today I am bringing you 10 suggested actions you can take when you find yourself in this situation.

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Time stamps:

00:27 – 10 Tips for Improving Inquiry Levels in Your Wedding Business

05:15 – Proactive Strategies for Wedding Business Success

09:45 – Reigniting Cold Leads

17:23 – Proactive Business Strategies During Quiet Times

Transcript:

Becca

00:00:00.160 – 00:25:35.930

You have heard me interview so many people on this podcast, often talking about the success that they find and all of the great things they’re doing in their business to get things to a better place.

However, we all know that it’s not all fine and dandy all of the time, and it may be that you’re listening to this and that’s not the place you’re in. Whether you’re brand new into the wedding industry or whether you’ve been around a while, perhaps inquiries aren’t where you want them to be.

If that’s you, then this episode is going to meet you exactly where you are.

Because today I Want to share 10 tips 10 things to do if you Inquiry Levels Are Down 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.

Having our own business, we’re totally reliant on the business that comes in and sometimes when those times are quieter, we can get ourselves in a state worrying about it. So today I want to encourage you because I know for some of you inquiries are down right now and it’s not a time to go quiet and hide away.

Instead, today I Want to share 10 proactive things you can be doing right now in your business to help those inquiries start coming back in again. So let’s start with number one. Now the first thing I want you to do is a full, full review.

I’ve recently been talking about this in my TikTok and Instagram series about reviewing right now and looking at where you can improve it.

One of the things since when inquiries are down and actually instead of panicking about, we can look to that time for some particularly useful so the first thing I want you to do is to review your current website and marketing materials. If inquiries are down, you have to ask yourself how is there something that’s holding people back from acquiring you in the first place?

So take a look at your website journey or get someone else to have a look at it for you and give you some feedback. Is it clear what you do? Is it clear how much it costs to work with you?

Is it clear how to work with you am I going to find it easy to make that inquiry? Have you done the basic things like check your inquiry form? It’s still working.

Occasionally had clients where you said their inquiries have pretty much stopped and then we test their inquiry form and that buy it just doesn’t work. So are you having a look at that and are you looking at what happens next in the process?

When someone fills in a form on your website, are you sending them an automatic response? Are you telling them what to do next? Are you encouraging them to go ahead and book a call?

Or is it actually that you have been so busy that you’ve been slow to respond to those inquiries and that’s why they’re not leading anywhere? Now is the perfect time to review your website.

If things are quiet, it’s time to pull everything apart, either on your own or work with someone one to one. That’s the sort of thing I do with my clients where we sit down in a room together and rip their business to shreds.

In a good way, obviously, but look at all of the parts in minute detail and look at where improvements can be made. So the first thing on the list is to review your entire website and inquiry process. Are you confident that your messaging is clear?

Are you confident that you’re speaking directly to the couples that are potentially going to book you? Have you updated your images and looked at the testimonials you’ve got on there, made sure they’re everywhere?

And have you checked the technical aspects like, is your inquiry form working? Have you got an auto responder on and what does it say in that message?

The second thing that you can do is that you can go ahead and start working on your SEO. This kind of comes hand in hand with website design.

Now, SEO isn’t something that’s going to give you quick fixes overnight, but actually, when you find yourself with more time, it’s a great time for you to be putting in the work, the building blocks to help you in the future and working on things like SEO or working on articles that are going to be picked up by AI. Search is a really good thing to do with the extra time that you may have.

And although, like I said, you’re not necessarily going to see instant results, actually it’s a really good time to start plugging in and thinking, right, okay, where am I appearing on Google right now? Where am I in the search rankings? Do I need to improve this? How can I improve this? What keywords are my competitors using?

Who’s turning up higher up than me? What can I be doing on my website to improve now?

Again, whether that’s doing your own work, listening to some training, listening to podcast episodes, or going ahead and working with an SEO specialist, it can be a really good time to put in some work to create those really rich articles or landing pages on your website so that when people are searching for various things, they come across your business. Ultimately, inquiries come when more people see our business and want what we have to offer.

And so if we can make sure we’re showing up in Google, which is where a lot of people are still searching for their suppliers, then that can only be a good thing. But like I said, don’t expect to be a quick fix. This is long term results that we’re looking for.

But if things are quiet right now, it’s the perfect time to be doing some of this work into the long term rather than when we’re head down so busy in inquiries and work that we can’t possibly improve anything. So number one, review your website and your inquiry process. Number two, take a look at your keywords and work on your SEO.

The third thing I want you to do is to do a full review of your current marketing and the marketing you’ve done over the last couple of years. Often a lack of inquiries is down to a marketing or a messaging problem.

Either not enough people are seeing what you do and who you are, or the messaging is wrong and they can’t see how you can fix their problem or why they would want you on their wedding day.

So I want you to review your paid marketing, whether you’re brand new into the industry, whether you’ve been here a long time, look at what you’ve changed or what you’ve actually done from a proactive form of paid marketing over the last couple of years and what’s worked.

Often when I have these conversations with people who’ve been in the industry a long time, when we look back six or 12 months, when their inquiries were busier, they were doing more marketing and then because the inquiries were coming in, they cut out their marketing.

So they stopped paying money on Google Ads or they stopped advertising in wedding fairs and then all of a sudden with that lag, six to 12 months later, the inquiries are disappearing again. So do go back. If you have had a time in your business where inquiries were higher, why was that? Where were they coming from?

Were you doing a lot of wedding fairs? Were you doing a lot of networking at the time? What particular venues sending you a lot of work? Were you getting more things through social media?

Where Were the inquiries coming from and what have you changed in the business that’s let that to drop off? Maybe it’s time to review your directory listings or to speak to directories if you’re paying them.

If you’re not getting the inquiries, ask them what you can do to improve the directory. Again, it’s proactive. It may be that you need to look at doing some additional paid marketing in the short term to kind of reignite those inquiries.

Again, are there wedding shows coming up that you know have been successful for you in the past and may help you pick up some inquiries, some warm leads and some potential deposits in the short term? Have you done Google Ads in the past and has that worked for you? Is it time to put some money into that?

Again, I’m not saying to just spend money on whatever you think is going to work and panic. I’m saying look back at the past history of what you’ve done and repeat things that you know have worked for you in the past.

Often, as I said before, things work really well for us and then we become successful and so we drop the things that were working well for us and then 6 to 12 months later realize how much we needed them. So now’s the time to go back and review. What paid marketing are you doing?

If budget is a problem, then what free marketing could you be doing proactively with the time you’ve got? Could you do more social media posting? Could you spend more time creating video content? Could you start launching sponsoring yourself on TikTok?

What can you do with that extra time to reach new people? So that’s number three. Number four. Now, number four isn’t about marketing.

It’s actually about following up on some of the leads you’ve had in the past. Quite often we have a whole bunch of leads that have kind of gone quiet or dead.

Whether they’re people we met at a wedding show months ago, people we had a call with and then ghosted us, people that we had a few email exchanges with and then it fizzled out. Never went any further. Even people we send a proposal to and then we don’t hear back from them when your inquiries are low.

Actually, sometimes the lowest hanging fruit to bring in money into the business are the people you’ve already had conversations with in the past. So do you have records of them anywhere? Are there people that you can reach back out to and try and reignite those conversations?

It may be that they’d forgotten about it, it may be that they now have found extra budget. It may be They’ve been busy and now they’re actually ready to go ahead and book and have those conversations.

This where email marketing can work really well.

If you’ve been collecting emails from a web fair and you haven’t done anything with them, why not do a bit of an email campaign and try and generate some interest and spark some excitement? Again, following up cold leads can be one of the most successful ways to bring in fresh inquiries.

Although, yes, they’re not brand new inquiries, but to reignite them into something that’s going to turn into money. The thing is, in our industry we make money predominantly at two places.

One, when someone first books and they pay the upfront amount, and then two, right near the end when we take the final balance.

So if you are having a cash flow problem, if inquiries are down, then if we can bring in some extra bookings this month or next month from some of those leads that have gone cold, that is going to generate cash straight into the business. So could you reignite some cold leads?

Could you send out some emails to people or send them some direct messages on Instagram or WhatsApp, depending on where on earth you’ve spoken to them in the first place, will depend how you follow up with them. But don’t be afraid, it’s not a no until it’s a no.

So unless they’ve told you they don’t want to work with you or they’ve booked someone else, and until they say that to you, to me, they’re still a lead worth pursuing. The fifth thing to do is to post about your availability.

Now, you do need to balance this because you don’t want to look like you’re desperate for work and you don’t want to look like you’re super available. But sometimes we are so good at pretending we’re busy online that people assume that we’re booked.

There’s a lot of messaging out there about how you can’t get your wedding dress last minute, or if you haven’t booked a supplier 12 months before, you’re never going to get them. And sometimes that works against us. Us, especially when we do actually have some availability.

So some different things that I’ve seen work for people.

First of all, if you’ve got a couple of key date that are still available for next year or the end of this year, don’t say I’ve got loads of availability, but instead you can specifically say, I still have availability for these key dates.

If you are still looking for xyz, depending on what you do, perhaps you’ve Got lots of midweek availability and you could put up some kind of post with some kind of offer, added value offer or you know, restricted offer because it’s midweek that you put out there on your social media and talk about to try and pick up inquiries for the last minute or for those weekday weddings. Sometimes posting and saying we’re available actually results in work rather than us pretending we’re super busy.

Now like I said, you have to balance this. You don’t want to be like, I haven’t got any work, please give me some money because that’s not going to have the right impact.

But at the same time saying we still have limited availability for winter 2025.

Don’t think it’s too late to book XYZ, we’d love to chat to you may just trigger someone who’s watch watching your stories to reach out and go, actually I thought I was too late to book this. Have you got availability on my day?

This leads me on to number six, which is when inquiry levels are low, you have to do the opposite to what your brain is telling you. And that is I want you to show up more online.

When things are quiet, when we feel like inquiries aren’t coming into the business, we feel like hiding away. We feel like business isn’t going well.

Maybe we feel a sense of shame or embarrassment about the fact that we haven’t got the inquiries that we want and so our natural instinct is to hide away. But all that does is actually perpetuate the problem. Instead, when things are quiet, we should actually be doing the opposite.

We should be actually showing up more, being more visible because we need to generate the work and also we have the time to put into it. So if things are quiet right now, double down on what you’re doing. In terms of visibility, how can you be more visible?

Could you start a video series all about what you do and giving tips to people? Could you do something collaborative with other vendors? Could you just show up every single day talking about what you offer?

Being online and showing up is going to reach you out to more people and actually increase your chance of getting an inquiry. Whereas hiding away is just going to perpetuate and mean that it just keeps on being quiet.

So I know it feels more comfortable to hide away, but I want to encourage you that if you’re in a space right now where work is low, that you double down on showing up rather than double down on hiding away. There is nothing to be ashamed of in business. There are peaks and troughs.

Things rise and fall There will be busy times, there’ll be quiet times and it’s not always a reflection on you. So give yourself some grace and realize it just means you need to reach some new people, some different people.

Maybe you have been a bit lax on some of your marketing because you’ve been busy doing weddings. Maybe you did drop some things that you didn’t realize were actually so powerful for bringing in inquiries.

Maybe the inquiry process has shifted and you haven’t caught up. Maybe it’s just a quiet time of year and things will pick up again next month. Don’t beat yourself up. Instead lean into it and show up.

Even learn more. Okay, let’s recap those first six things then. So number one review your website and your inquiry process.

Number two work on your SEO and that long term plan for gaining new people via Google search and AI search. 3. Review your paid marketing from the last couple of years. Do you need to go back to some of it? 4.

Have you got cold leads or people sat on an email list that you could reignite and try and get some interest from? 5. Are you posting about the fact you have got some last minute availability? And six even though you want to hire away, keep showing up online.

Okay, let’s move on to number seven. Again, maybe counterintuitive and not what you want to do.

But my number seven is if you feel like things are quiet and inquiries are low, you need to go out, go to more events and network. There is no point just going to networking events when you feel successful just so you can go in a room and tell everyone how successful you are.

I know that’s when we feel like doing it because we feel proud of what we’ve achieved. But actually that’s not when we need the work. When we need to go out and network is when things are quieter. Why?

Because we need to get our name name out there more. We need more people talking about us. We don’t know who we’re going to meet on the night. We don’t know where that might lead to.

That business conversation could lead to you generating more income over the next few months. So if things are quiet right now, let me encourage you to look at what’s going on in the industry.

Are there wedding industry networking events you can go to? Have you got conferences in the diary? Are you going to the UK Wedding Conference? Are you going to come to Wed Pros Live?

Because they are the perfect places to go to meet other people in the industry and network and learn. Do you have coffee with any suppliers that you could Organize.

If you’re in a venue, could you have some kind of get together where you invite supplies in for tea and coffee or for drink to meet them? If times are quiet, this is the time when you want to meet as many people as you can. Networking is an incredibly powerful marketing tool.

I know people whose whole businesses have succeeded because they knew a lot of people and they made a good impression on a lot of people, and a lot of people were recommending their couples to go and use them, and that results in business, business. So are you hiding away? Are you hiding behind your office chair? Or have you got things in the diary to get out there and meet people?

I love this time of year is when I get to go out to lots of events and speak and network because it’s when all the conferences and networking events are happening. Over the next few months, I have dozens of different events, both online and offline in the diary. So are you going to any of these events?

And if not, ask yourself, why not not? These are the perfect places for you to go and actively chat to people and potentially generate business number eight.

In the spirit of collaboration, and I alluded it to it earlier, another great thing to do when inquiry levels are low is to collaborate with other suppliers and to see how you could work together to get in front of their audiences.

If your audience has kind of gone lukewarm and it’s not growing and people aren’t really new coming in and wanting to work with you, then actually one thing you can do to regenerate that is to go and get in front of other people’s audiences. So how do we do this?

Well, perhaps you could do a series on Instagram where you go live once a week and interview a fellow supplier or talk with a fellow supplier about something that’s going on in the industry. You both do it together, you both share it on each other’s platforms, and therefore you’re both reaching a whole new audience of people.

If you want to take it a step further, getting on a podcast, applying to be on my podcast, for example, having a look at podcasts that are specifically for couples and seeing if you could be a guest on there. How can you collaborate with other people and get in front of more people people?

Perhaps you could collaborate on guest writing a blog post for someone else, or, I don’t know, get going on a live video on TikTok or Facebook. There’s so many different things you could do.

But what could you do to collaborate with other people, other pros, so that you can get in front of their audience and again, increase that visibility. Marketing is as simple as getting more visibility to the right people.

The more people you speak to, the more people that you reach, the more people you’re going to find that need what you do and the more sales you’re going to make. Okay, number nine, this one is a little bit more involved, but still a good thing to do, especially when times are quiet.

And that is to look at what you have right now and create new offerings. If inquiries aren’t coming in right now and you need cash flow, then look at what else you could be doing right now to generate some income.

So for example, if you’re a florist or a decor person, are there other opportunities outside of weddings that you could be proactively talking about to generate some inquiries in the short term? Things like corporate bookings. Is there anything for Halloween that you could be doing?

Is there anything for Christmas that you could be planning, creating, making? Are there family photo shoots that you could be organizing? What is it that you could do right now? It may not be what you want to always be doing.

Weddings may be your number one thing, but if you need to generate interest and inquiries right now, then creating some kind of additional offer that’s for a different audience that you can proactively go out to or that you already know can be a great way of bringing in some extra income. So have a look at everything you’ve got. Are there ways you can change what you’ve got?

Are there things that are working right now that you could tweak and then advertise in a different way? Or is there a whole different sector of people you could be reaching out to?

Now is the time when people are talking about organizing their Christmas parties, for example, or New Year’s events. Maybe there’s conferences going on and you have a service that you could offer to conference organizers.

There are so many ways a lot of you can diversify your businesses.

And if inquiries are low right now, again, you have the time to start thinking about what you can be doing proactively to create new offers, Think about different angles for things and get out there and try and bring it in some money. You don’t have to do it forever, but it may just plug a gap.

When I talk to my one to one clients, we often talk about sales targets and how much money they want to bring in in a month. And when we change our mindset and start thinking like that, we realize that we have to be proactive.

Because if you set a target of I don’t know £5,000 to come in in the month and you’re currently only got £2,000 coming in. You’ve got to proactively work out where you’re going to find that other £3,000.

So when you get back on the call with me, you can say, oh, Becca, these are all the things I tried to do to get to my target. Even if you didn’ hit the target, at least you found ways to try and get closer to it.

If you come back to me and just say, I just sat there and nothing came in and I didn’t hit it, then my answer to you is going to be, well, of course you didn’t hit it. You didn’t do anything to try and get there. Right? Business isn’t about just sitting around and waiting for people to come to you.

You have to proactively go out there and find the work too. So, number nine, create new offering. Which brings me to the final idea, which is number 10.

And this is kind of bringing together everything I’ve talked about. But it comes down to being proactive. We’re so often reactive in business and we wait for people to come to us.

But there’s a reason that many big companies employ sales reps. Because it works. People going and talking about what you have to offer works. And as business owners, we can sometimes feel uncomfortable.

We find this really difficult. We find it difficult to go out there and be proactive. Now, one of the things I’ve been doing recently is I’ve been updating pages on my website.

And one of the pages I updated just a couple of weeks ago was for my venue training days. So I love doing these is when I go into a venue, I spend a day or half a day with a venue team and I do sales and marketing training.

We talk about what’s going on in the wedding industry. We might talk about Gen Z, we might talk about social media, blogging. There’s all sorts of things that I cover.

And I updated and refreshed the page with my new topics and new offerings. Now I could just sit back and wait for people to stumble upon that page when they look at my website or on Google.

But instead I decided I was going to take the bull by the horns and be proactive.

And so I’ve been slow contacting venues that I have details of or I’ve had relationships with in various guises in the past and just sending them a message and saying, hey, I’ve updated this page on my website. If you’re looking for sales and marketing training, for your venue right now I have some availability. Here’s the link to have a look.

Let me know if you’re interested. Now, they may or may not reply, but I’ve been proactive and I expect some of them will come back. Because when you’re proactive, often it works.

Yes, you have to get used to people ignoring you or saying no, but if things are quiet for you, then you need to do something proactive to get out there and say, have you considered this? Have you considered this for your corporate business?

Have you considered these different gifting ideas in case you’re doing Christmas gifts this year? Push yourself out of your comfort zone and be proactive.

The worst that someone can say is no or just ignore your email, but if you don’t try, you’re never going to know. Okay, let’s for one final time recap all of the above.

Because if you are sitting there listening to this and resonating with the fact that things are quiet and inquiries are down and you feel like you’ve got too too much time and you’re panicking, then I want you to be able to lean into these different things and actually go out there and be proactive. So here they are. Number one Review your website and inquiry process.

Step two Work on your SEO and think about the long term gains on creating landing pages and pages people are going to find you on in Future in Google. 3. Review your paid marketing.

Whether that’s stuff that you did a couple of years ago or you’re doing right now, or is there something you knew that you need to do to bring in those leads? 4. Are you following up on cold leads? People sat on an email list, people that haven’t responded to you for ages for follow up with them.

See if you can reignite any of them. 5. Have you told people you’ve got availability last minute? Think about how you do that, but don’t hide behind a full diary. 6. Show up more online.

Even though you feel like hiding away, get yourself out there and keep showing up. 7. Get out your house and network. Meet other people in the industry. Meet other venues. Meet other professionals.

Go to conferences, go to networking events. Come to wed pros live. Get yourself out there. 8. Are there ways you can collaborate with other vendors online with Instagram lives?

By sharing posts with each other, by doing a collaboration, collaborative Instagram posts. Get in front of other people’s audiences or be brave. Go pitch to a podcast and get in front of an audience that way. 9.

Create some new offerings, maybe for a totally different audience or A different sector of that audience for a different time of year. Get out there and find ways you can bring money into your business in the short term. And number 10, don’t be afraid to be proactive.

Reach out to people, reach out to contacts and ask if they need anything from you right now and tell them about what you you’ve got going on. I think my big message for you is don’t beat yourself up if things are quiet. Remember, things ebb and flow.

If you’re new into the wedding industry, it will always be quiet to start with. And now’s the time when you’ve got to run at it and throw everything into being more visible. But my big message to you is, number one, don’t panic.

Number two, push yourself forward and don’t hide away. And number three, don’t cut all your expenses immediately.

I want to end on this because one thing I see a lot is that when times are quiet, quiet people panic and they cut all their expenses. First things to go business training or marketing.

And the reason I say just hit pause on that for a moment is because often those are the two things that are going to actually reignite your business. And if you take them away, that’s not going to help you.

So if you suddenly pull your marketing because you’re not bringing getting in the inquiries, then that’s only going to lead potentially to less inquiries in the future. We need to make decisions on cutting our marketing when we’re in a right headspace, not because we’re panicking.

So if you’ve the work and you’ve looked at the return on the investment and you realize that’s not the marketing channel for you anymore, then change it. But don’t just panic overnight and cut all your marketing expenses. And the same with business training and business groups.

Of course, don’t go into debt. I would never advise that ever. But are there other things that you can cut before that?

Because often the networking and the training that you’re getting is actually what’s going to help you to bring in more business in the future. And by cutting that out straight away, you’re leaving yourself even more vulnerable. So don’t panic, push forward and keep going.

Get yourself out there because probably is just a quiet season and better things around the corner. I really hope you found this episode helpful. If it’s resonated with you, let me know if there are things I can do myself to help you.

Whether that’s working with you one to one, giving you some additional training, or if you’ve got more things you want to talk about on the podcast that are going to help you get those inquiries, then reach out and let me know. Instagram DMs are probably the quickest place to find me.

I hope that this inspires you to get out there this week and go and find some new business and I’ll see you all next time.