Show notes:

This week on the podcast I caught up with Tayler Cusick-Hollman, founder of Enji and a great industry friend of mine! We explore the tendency of business owners to cling to familiar practices, even when they yield diminishing returns, highlighting the necessity for innovation in response to market shifts. Additionally, we delve into the concept of the “trust recession,” a phenomenon impacting customer perceptions and the imperative for authenticity in marketing efforts. As we navigate through these topics, we aim to provide actionable insights that empower our listeners to embrace change and enhance their marketing effectiveness.

Taylers Instagram

Enji’s website

Time stamps:

06:16 – Understanding the Trust Recession in Marketing

20:02 – The Reality of Marketing in the Wedding Industry

29:31 – The Importance of Consistency in Marketing

37:09 – The Importance of Effective Marketing Tools

54:56 – The Importance of Continuing Education and Community

Transcript:

Tayler
00:00:00.240 – 00:00:19.680
Getting started with something new takes energy and we’re pretty lazy, right? Like we are most comfortable doing the things that we already know how to do. We already have some sort of process.

Even if it’s a not functional process, we will pick that over something else.

Becca
00:00:19.680 – 00:01:24.260
And I’m Becca Pountney, wedding business marketing expert, strategist, speaker and author.

Over the last decade, I’ve combined my love of marketing with my knowledge of the wedding industry to help thousands of wedding pros and venues just like you learn new skills, strategize, get re energized and grow their businesses. Because after all, that’s how you stay top of your game. Whether you’re brand new into this industry or been here forever, I want to help.

So grab a cup of tea or a cocktail, sit back and enjoy a brand new episode of my award winning podcast, Wedding Pros who Are Ready to Grow. Let’s get going with today’s episode. Today I’m chatting with Taylor, the founder of Engie.

Engie is a marketing project management software designed to help you stay on top of your marketing efforts. You may have seen or heard about Engie at this year’s Wed Pros Live where they were one of my headline sponsors.

Taylor has become a great industry friend and we love to geek out together about all things marketing. She’s truly fabulous. I always love to chat with her. Taylor, welcome to the podcast.

Tayler
00:01:25.150 – 00:01:33.310
Thank you so much for having me back, Becca. I am so excited. I’m always so excited to just be in your orbit and it’s the highlight of my day today.

Becca
00:01:33.550 – 00:01:45.550
It’s an absolute pleasure. I love it when we get to chat, when we get to record together.

Now I looked up when you were last on the podcast because it didn’t feel like that long ago to me. Any guesses when it was?

Tayler
00:01:45.710 – 00:01:54.270
Oh, well, now you make me think that it is a lot longer than we think, so I’m gonna go with it was the spring of 2024.

Becca
00:01:54.430 – 00:02:18.330
It was October 23and we spoke. I know. I couldn’t believe it. We spoke.

All things authentic Marketing is actually only episode 81 of my podcast, so if anyone wants to listen to that chat. I remember it well because I remember talking about the Barbie movie, which kind of dates it a little bit.

But yes, episode 81 was when we last had you on the podcast, so you were well due another visit. I’m glad to have you back.

Tayler
00:02:18.490 – 00:02:33.670
That’s a really long time ago and I remember we talked about the prime energy drink and I had never seen that before, but now it’s like the red car. I see it everywhere. Where. So you are officially the person to introduce me to that brand.

Becca
00:02:33.910 – 00:02:48.950
I’m so sorry about that because it’s not a great brand to be introduced to.

But anyway, before we get into today’s conversation, for people who maybe haven’t heard of you before or maybe haven’t listened to that past episode, just give us a really quick recap of how you got to where you are. Get people up to speed.

Tayler
00:02:48.950 – 00:04:04.710
Oh, my goodness. So I discovered about 15 years ago that I am not a good corporate employee. Like, I’m kind of unemployable, to put it that way.

And so I ended up getting connected with some small business owners in San Diego, where I was based at the time, and they happened to be wedding professionals, and things just organically grew from there. So I have been working within the wedding industry helping pros on the marketing side of things for about 11 years now.

And during the pandemic, my husband, bless his heart, he is an engineer and he was bored, so he started coding the guts of a piece of software with, like, no intention of doing anything with it. And I was like, you have to do something with that.

And so we ended up coming up with the idea of, hey, what if we take you as a marketing consultant and turn you into software so that people who have to do their own marketing actually have a platform that supports them doing that? So now I work on NG full time.

It is the thing that is simultaneously the best and worst thing I’ve ever done, because being a startup founder is very special. But, yeah, that’s just a little bit about me and how I got to where I am today.

Becca
00:04:04.870 – 00:04:41.220
Now I am going to let our listeners into another little secret, because I said in the introduction that you’ve become a great industry friend, that we love to geek out about marketing together.

But also on the odd occasion, we’ve been known to get on a zoom call that is never recorded, to have what I like to call a little ranty chat about what’s going on in in business. Because it’s hard, isn’t it? Everyone out there will know it’s hard owning your own business.

Sometimes it’s nice to just chat to someone else, get things off of your chest. Now, we’re not going to share everything we’ve talked about in those ranty chats. Of course we’re not.

But what are some of the biggest struggles that you have right now, just as a small business owner in general?

Tayler
00:04:41.380 – 00:05:40.070
The same struggles that everybody else is feeling at the moment.

And that’s that we are all looking at, you know, marketing, which depending on the spectrum, you may be someone who loves it, like me, feels agnostic about it or you know, wants to stick your head in the sand over it. But everybody is feeling like what happened to marketing?

Like it’s just the same sort of mechanics that we are used to going through have been producing fewer and fewer results over time. And so I’m in the same messy soup as everyone else and trying to figure out how we can work with what we’ve been given.

Because I’m not going to try to control things that I can’t control. I’m going to focus on the things that I do have some agency over. But yeah, that’s definitely the biggest challenge right now.

And I’m sitting here alongside everyone else as a business owner trying to figure it out.

Becca
00:05:40.150 – 00:06:35.300
Yeah. And it’s overwhelming. Like that’s how people keep describing it to me.

When I talk to them about their business and their marketing and their sales, they just feel this huge sense of overwhelm. Like it just feels like such a big challenge. And I think particularly for the individual, it feels unscalable.

Now some of us are fortunate we’ve got to a position where we can have other people helping us in our business. But a lot of the people that both you and I work with are not yet in that position. And I guess we’ll come on to it later.

But I guess that’s where things like tools can help us to try and unload some of that. The other thing I’m seeing in my business, and I don’t know about you Taylor as well, is the trust recession.

Like that feels like that’s come really quite fast over the last few months, I guess because of AI and all of those things. But people are very cynical, very skeptical and very quick to call things out that they maybe don’t like.

Tayler
00:06:35.540 – 00:06:47.060
Yes, totally.

And in the world of software, a lot of that cynicism comes from different tools that people have used over the past that have like promised them the world.

Becca
00:06:47.650 – 00:06:47.890
Right.

Tayler
00:06:48.050 – 00:08:03.630
They’re like, you could do these crazy impossible things, you know, at the snap of a finger. And people are just tired of trying something with really high hopes and expectations because they genuinely need that help.

And then for something to just totally not deliver. And I mean when it comes to, you know, wedding pros or service based businesses, there are, I say this, I mean this is a safe space.

I’m just gonna, I just always say what’s on my mind. But There are some pros out there who, you know, don’t try to level up the entire industry as a whole.

And so there are couples out there who have unfortunately worked with those people. And it kind of, you know, sours the.

The rest of the industry a little bit or a lot, because now we have this formal term of trust recession, which is not a thing that existed, you know, five years ago. So it. It. Like I said earlier, we’re all in this same messy soup. We all are experiencing different parts of it, different flavors of that messy soup.

But there’s a lot of crossover between the type of business that I’m trying to run and build and the type of business that, you know, the listeners are trying to run and build.

Becca
00:08:03.630 – 00:08:21.720
Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve talked about the things that we’re struggling with right now. If we look at wedding businesses in general.

You work with a lot of wedding businesses. I work with a lot of wedding businesses. Are there particular mistakes you’re seeing people making with their marketing right now in 2026?

Tayler
00:08:21.960 – 00:09:39.310
You know, the biggest mistake that I see is not one that I think is a formal decision that people have made, but it’s the one where people are just carrying on with what they’ve done in the past.

And in a version of the world where marketing has just got tipped head over heels, continuing to do the exact same thing and hoping that you’ll just, like, make it to the other side is not. It’s not actually super helpful. And it adds to that emotional overwhelm that people feel about marketing right now.

And so the mistake that people are making is not admitting to themselves that, like, things are different and not accepting that they need to put a little bit of effort into their marketing to try something new. I know, I know everybody hates trying new things, and, you know, just the.

The amount of energy that it takes to start something new or go into a different direction. But those, you know, that combination of things is really, like, the big mistake that I see wedding pros making at the moment.

Becca
00:09:39.310 – 00:10:31.530
It’s so true. We’re kind of. We see people stay stuck or what worked for them before.

They think, well, if I just keep on going, eventually it’ll work for me again, which. Well, that might happen, but the chances are low.

And actually, if it’s not working for you for a long time, then there’s maybe a little signal there that you need to reflect, change, grow. It was interesting.

I had the amazing Elizabeth Marbury on the podcast a little while back, and we were joking about wedding pros who are still posting on Instagram like it’s 2016 and like, forgetting that Instagram has massively shifted. But they went to one seminar on Instagram in 2016, learn how to do it, and have just continued to do it exactly the same way.

And I think it’s not just social media.

I think that goes across the board in all things marketing, that people find something that worked once or they learn once it stops working, yet they continue to just keep on doing it.

Tayler
00:10:32.090 – 00:11:22.830
And, you know, there’s this. There’s a lot of what.

There’s a lot of resilience and almost blind faith that business owners need to have in order to have a business for a long period of time.

But that sort of energy, the I’m going to keep doing this thing, even when it’s hard energy, is different than what we’re talking about right now of the, like, stubbornness of, well, this is how I’ve done it. Right. And I’m just going to keep doing it that way. So I do want to call out that little bit of nuance because it is very important.

If your goal is to build your business so that this is, you know, what you do for the next 10 years, then you are going to have to find it in you to just push through in certain moments. But when things, like, aren’t working and the writing is on the wall, you do have to change your approach.

Becca
00:11:23.230 – 00:11:54.329
Yeah, that is a very helpful thing to tell everyone, actually. You’re very right. Because there are tough times and actually we need to understand that. Yeah, it’s slightly two different things.

So thank you for explaining that so well.

Now, one of the other mistakes think wedding pros make, and I know you see this all the time as well, is that they get busy and for some reason, the first thing they decide to drop is their marketing. They say, I don’t need marketing anymore. I don’t need social media anymore. I am busy. Do you see this, too?

Tayler
00:11:54.570 – 00:13:25.640
Oh, my goodness, yes. If. If people could have seen my facial expression when Becca started saying that, it’s, like, clear that I agree with it.

And, you know, there’s this saying that one of our, the one of the former US Supreme Court justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said that, you know, of course it was like, for voting rights, but she shared this thing where, you know, if you’re in a rainstorm, you don’t put away your umbrella because you’re not getting wet at the moment. Right. And this is very much the same thing that I see wedding pros do is they’re Like, I’m busy, so I don’t need to market, right?

And it’s like, no, because the marketing that you do right now isn’t going to actually pay off for months because the buying cycle or the amount of time that couples are taking to really research who they’re going to hire has just gotten longer and more complicated. And so every time that you go dark for an extended period of time, right, like once you hit a couple weeks, you have lost a lot of that momentum.

So that’s the, you know, yes, you.

It might be pouring weddings on top of you at the moment, and your umbrella is the marketing, but you can’t put that away because otherwise it’s not going to be a really great situation to be in.

Becca
00:13:25.720 – 00:14:16.010
It’s so true. And this happens all the time.

And I think people get lulled into this false sense of security, of I’m really busy right now in front of me where I can see it and I’m not thinking about the future prosp. And that’s one of the things that’s really difficult about our industry, right, because we’re always having to find new people.

We cannot rely on constant repeat customers. We’re not a dentist or a hairdresser where people come back every six weeks or six months, and we can just have the same customers.

We have a constant churn of customers.

And so when we are delivering weddings right now, we should be looking forward six months, 12 months, 18 months, two years, even beyond two years to who’s coming next otherwise. And this is what I’m sure you see as well, you suddenly then go to a season where you’ve got nothing and you’re starting all over again and.

Tayler
00:14:16.010 – 00:15:05.410
You are freaking out because the money that you need has just stopped coming in, right? You’re not getting those deposits and initial payments anymore. And so you find yourself in. In this really uncomfortable gap with your income.

And so it’s not just about getting your calendar booked out. It’s about maintaining some stability in your own life as a human who’s trying to exist on planet Earth. And we all need money to do that, right?

And so every time that you decide it’s okay for me to not do my marketing, right now what you’re doing is you’re impacting your business ability to generate the money that you need as a person.

Becca
00:15:05.890 – 00:15:51.590
So, so true. The other thing I’m seeing at the moment, and again, I’m interested to see your take on this, Taylor as well, from a marketing perspective.

But a lot of pros I’m Speaking to, I’m working with people one to one and they expect marketing to give them an instant result.

And I think part of this from a Ranty Chat perspective is because there’s all these people on the Internet saying, buy this program and overnight you’ll get six figures in your wedding business.

You know, all of these things, which is kind of teaching people like, you do one thing, you change one piece of marketing, you do one piece of content and all your problems would be solved.

And so when I’m saying to them, right, let’s track that in three months, they’re like, oh well, I don’t want to wait three months, I want to wait three minutes. So are you seeing something similar at your end? Why do you think this is happening?

Tayler
00:15:51.590 – 00:19:36.160
I mean, people are impatient, right? It’s, it’s just like a character trait that we all have in us and to varying degrees.

And just the way culture has moved in the past five years, we have become even more impatient as like a species because I mean, we’re like everything that we do in our everyday lives feels like instant gratification, right? We can have things delivered to our homes at the click of a button within a few hours.

You know, we’re scrolling on social media to get constant dopamine hits in our brain. And so we’re always thinking that it’s easy, excuse me, to get like what we want and to feel good very quickly.

But going back to the trust recession, again, you know, wedding pros, the amount of money that you charge is like not a little bit of money. It’s a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of money in many cases.

And the more money that your services cost, it’s going to take someone more time to feel comfortable enough to even consider giving you that amount of money, right? And so there is a discrepancy between what we expect as business owners and what our potential clients are doing.

And you know, even as for, as a personal example, Ng costs US$29 a month. That is not a lot of money. But because it’s an ongoing relationship, because it’s a subscription, right?

There is more of an emotional layer to this than a one time $29 purchase. And so even I have to navigate this longer sales cycle than I would personally want.

Like, I would love for people to just, you know, discover NG and subscribe right away, but that’s not the reality. There’s this, you know, it’s your marketing funnel, right? People have to realize you exist.

Then you have, it’s your job as the business Owner to nurture them in order for them to really get to know like, and trust you before they ever get to the point where they are sitting at that moment deciding whether or not to complete your inquiry form. And it takes a lot of effort to do all of that. And that’s just to get someone to talk to you. Right.

It’s not even to get them, get them to the point where they’ve actually, you know, paid an invoice or signed a contract.

So, like, I do hope that wedding pros really like, accept that those expectations of someone saw a post on Instagram and then of course they’re just going to complete my inquiry form. Like, that is not reality. And there used to be a saying, Becca, right?

Like, it takes seven touch points in marketing to get someone to do what you want. That number is. You can trash that number.

I’m pretty sure it’s like 40 something touch points to get someone to finally be ready to do the thing that you’re asking them to do. So it’s. I say all this and it doesn’t.

It might not be sounding like the most optimistic, but I am a realist and I think that people can set better expectations and do better work when they are operating with a like, set of facts of what’s most likely to happen.

Becca
00:19:36.400 – 00:20:28.570
Absolutely. And I think it’s important people understand the landscape. You talked about the funnel.

I’ve been talking at the moment about how that funnel has like become a theme park. It’s like a marketing theme park. It’s like there’s absolute chaos out there. And so people are spending a long time in the theme park looking for you.

They’re riding the rides, they go around the stalls. They’re everywhere. And actually, it’s not an instant thing. There is so much noise now, as you said, we may sound a little bit negative.

So let’s take a moment to think about something a bit more positive. Because although it is chaos, there are incredible people doing incredible things in their marketing.

There are people in the wedding industry who are getting bookings and they are finding things that work. So I would love to hear what you think is working as a from a marketing perspective for wedding pros right now.

I don’t know if you’ve got any examples or just generally. What do you think’s actually getting people work?

Tayler
00:20:28.730 – 00:23:02.950
You know, kind of. This kind of ties back to our podcast episode three years ago of authentic marketing.

And what’s working right now is marketing that isn’t perfect, which might have just made some folks get a little Get a little twitchy. But there’s a few reasons that imperfect marketing is working right now. And the big elephant in the room is artificial intelligence, right?

Where it’s so easy to create perfect captions, perfect images, perfect, perfect everything and put them out into the world. And that fuels the trust recession, right?

Because people, yes, they want to be inspired and there is a time and a place to use your imagination, to show people the art of, you know, what’s possible, right? But when someone is evaluating your business, they want to see what is really likely to happen, right? Like coming back to these expectations.

Because a big part of marketing is couples trying to answer for themselves the question, can you do that for me? And I have to shout out Davy Jones for that because he put that phrase in my head like 10 years ago. And I was like, oh, that is so good.

So I always try to make sure that I give him a shout out when I say it. But you know, when you put out real social proof, right?

Like content that has your couples, like talking through what it was like working with you, or real behind the scenes footage or captions with typos in it, right? Like they know that a human was behind it and that it’s not fake and that they can actually trust it.

And so that might seem a little counterintuitive, but that’s what I think I have seen as more of a trend than just like a one off. Oh, there’s a few wedding pros out there that are being very real with their content.

Like, no, I see a lot of them doing this and they’re the ones that are like having less of a challenging time right now because they are cutting through a lot of the emotional challenges that other people with like this overly perfect content aren’t quite able to work through in the same way.

Becca
00:23:03.030 – 00:24:29.560
Yeah, it’s so true. And that trust thing, again, it keeps coming up in this conversation, but it’s true. We’re looking at stuff and we’re becoming increasingly skeptical.

I don’t know about you, Taylor. I am definitely becoming increasingly skeptical. I look at pictures and sometimes I’m like, is that real? Is that AI? Is that genuine?

In fact, I saw someone advertising and I don’t think there’s right or wrongs in any of this yet. It’s just a new era for us. I saw someone advertising, like, you can pay us and we’ll create you an AI brand shoot.

So you give us one image and then we’ll create like 50 images. And they look like photos and they were pretty realistic. Like I was. And then I’m thinking, well, we can put ourselves anywhere.

How’s anyone going to believe that I’ve been to this place or I’m really on this stage?

And I have to tell you, this funny story was I was on a podcast interview, whereas I was a guest very recently, and I went on the call, and the person’s back. I’d never met them before in person, but the person’s background was so perfect and the way they spoke was so perfect.

For the first five minutes of the call, all I could think of was, are you real? Yeah, exactly. Are you real, or is this a robot? Like, that was generally what was. And I was like, is this real?

Is this, like, some AI thing that’s interviewing me on the Internet?

And quite frankly, I’m fairly sure they were real, but there’s still this, like, 10% voice in my brain that says maybe they weren’t, because the way they spoke there was just something funny about it. And I think we’re only going to get more skeptical as this stuff gets better.

Tayler
00:24:29.640 – 00:24:53.750
Yeah, I mean, if I could move away. Oh, I guess you can’t really see. I rearranged. You actually can’t see we’re in the process of moving again.

And so, like, behind me, there’s, like, piles of things that I’m starting to collect. So this is very real. This is not. You are talking to a real human who’s living life and trying to at least clean up her background a tiny bit.

You can see my peloton right there.

Becca
00:24:54.470 – 00:25:57.430
Well, I’m glad it’s real, but I think that’s what we need. Like, it was too perfect, and I didn’t believe it. And I think that’s what we’re going to start seeing from couples.

If you’re putting out these images that look what they deem as too perfect, too stylized, too great, they will start to think maybe this isn’t real.

Whereas when you show up and you tell the story and you show the flowers and you do the things, and it’s not perfect, people are more likely to believe it.

And I think the other thing is that this should be freeing for us as business owners in many ways, because we, a lot of us, are held back by perfectionism. And actually, you know, the fact that now, as my book is called, we can literally just be done is better than perfect.

It means we can get out there, we can do our marketing, we can show up as our messy selves, and it doesn’t matter. Which I think instead of us being afraid of that we need to see that as a real selling point. What about anything other than social media?

Because I feel like we’ve talked about content a lot. Are you seeing other forms of marketing working? Well, I mean, we got the SEO, we got AI wedding fairs. What’s working for people?

Tayler
00:25:57.670 – 00:28:04.880
You know, I have a few friends who are starting to see success with having the AI chatbots refer them. And so, like they’re asking because couples are in fact going to chatgpt Claude, fill in the blank.

Like whatever AI bot that you can type in questions to, they’re asking those bots for recommendations.

And so I do have a few friends who are getting, you know, not like a ton of leads every month, but it’s a statistically significant, like, pattern that they’re seeing. Right. If you were, if you could do something to get, get one more lead a month, wouldn’t you be pretty stoked about that?

Because most people have a pretty solid closing rate once someone has actually inquired.

And so, you know that that whole reality is something that people do have control over in this seemingly chaotic version of the world where, you know, it’s about writing content that answers very specific questions. There’s also a lot of digital PR involved with this, right? Like getting.

Making sure you have reviews online and collaborating with the other professionals that you like to work with in real life, like collaborating with content. So the Internet can see that, oh, this florist is really great because this other planner is also talking about them.

So that is something that in the grand scheme of things is a pretty easy. I’m going to use some figure quotes because what is easy to me is not easy to other people. But I’ll say straightforward.

It’s a little bit more of a straightforward piece of marketing because, you know, if you’re not comfortable on camera, right. If you, for whatever reason, then writing right now is, you know, there are AI tools to help you write content super quickly.

So it seems to me like it, it’s, it’s worth trying for folks and it’s relatively easy to do at the.

Becca
00:28:04.880 – 00:29:51.890
Same time, but it also won’t give you the instant results. So we need to put that caveat in there because otherwise I don’t want anyone coming back and be like, I wrote one article and nothing’s happened.

Okay? Marketing takes time. You won’t see the results overnight. But it absolutely is something that’s going to be a growing market.

I mean, increasingly I’m asking my Claude for stuff all the time. And, you know, I always think I’m an early Ish adopter of technology.

And there’s a whole lot of couples that are going to be coming in my wake, you know, asking the questions. And so I think now’s the time.

The people that get ahead of this and start thinking about what’s important to the AI and like, even the simple tip, I’ve said this a few times of just go search some stuff and see where the sources are that the AI is pulling from. See what it likes.

Like some search queries, it really rates, like Google reviews some things, it really rates the map listing some things, it really rates those kind of listicle pages where it’s like, what’s the top 5x in this county? And if you can get yourself on one of those, it really rates it highly. So that’s some homework for everyone.

Just go spend some time asking it some questions and just look at what it values and then you can work backwards strategically from there. The other thing I think people struggle with. So we’ve talked about how they can’t drop their marketing entirely because that’s going to be chaos.

We’ve talked about how the landscape is changing. We talked about what works. I think the other gap is consistency.

Because I see people, maybe they hear a podcast like this, they hear us talking about a certain strategy, and they’re like, I’m gonna go all in on this. And they do for two weeks and then they forget about it and it doesn’t happen again.

So why do you think people, particularly in the wedding industry and probably small business owners in general, struggle so much with remaining consistent?

Tayler
00:29:52.370 – 00:33:31.460
I believe I think about this a lot, Becca. Like, a lot, a lot. I think about this.

I mean, consistency is something with marketing that is hard for small business owners and wedding professionals to maintain because there are not those immediate results. Like, I think it’s. I think with all of the factors that could be influencing the reason that someone isn’t consistent.

The, essentially the lack of consequence right now for not doing your marketing is why people like, it’s fine, I’ll just, I’ll get to it next month. I’ll get to it when things slow down, I’ll get to it when. Fill in the blank. Right?

When it’s booking season, when it’s engagement season, and because people don’t feel like their marketing pays them in the moment, then they are just fine saying not today. But consistency, you know, it has sort of been a. It’s been a part of this entire conversation we’ve been having. Right?

Because if your marketing isn’t consistent to whatever degree And I, I want to remind people that consistency doesn’t mean doing the exact same amount year round.

Like, what is consistent for you during engagement and booking season is very different than what consistency in your marketing would look like during busy season. Right? So your marketing is allowed to ebb and flow. What it shouldn’t do is go completely dark.

So, but if you are consistent in your marketing, then you are, you know, proverbially tapping couples on the shoulder constantly to get to those many touch points that are required for them to get to know, like, and trust you and finally inquire. And when you are consistent in your marketing, you will have a steadier income of leads because you’re just visible all of the time.

And you’re, you are putting your business in a position where you are being seen at the right moment by a couple. And the fun part is we don’t ever know when the right moment is. It just like happens. So that’s why we need to just like, be there on a regular basis.

And then when you have that steady in like, steady influx of inquiries, then you are set up for success in terms of having a steadier income for your business and yourself. And so it’s, it’s like, you know, you’re not doing this work for right now. And like the stress that you might feel today, you’re doing it for.

How stressed out is Taylor going to be in three months from now, right? Is she going to be very stressed? Is she going to be a little bit of stress? Is she going to be like, oh, life is good. Right?

And so that’s why consistency is hard for people to maintain. But I also think to your point, like, people have, they think that they need to go all in all of the time. And that’s just like, so not true.

There are some weeks that, you know, I’m like, I just need to do bare minimum, like maintenance mode levels of marketing for a couple weeks, right? Because I just like need a break. That’s fine. But I get going again at some point to make sure that I keep building the momentum.

Becca
00:33:31.620 – 00:34:22.080
And I think if we take one step further out from people’s perspective, I think the other reason that it’s chaos for them and they’re inconsistent is because they don’t actually have a plan in the first place. So they’ve never actually kind of gone big picture with any of this stuff either.

And so it’s hard to be consistent or stick to a plan when you don’t even have a plan. Now, obviously you created NG for This very reason to kind of help people have a plan.

And you said that when you created ng, you kind of put yourself in it. So let’s pretend that we’re not working with NG right now. We’re working with Taylor. One step removed from ng.

Like, I come to you, I’m a cake maker, I’m a florist. I’m in chaos with my marketing. And I go, I don’t have a plan. What does Taylor do for me? Which I guess is then what Angie tries to replicate.

Tayler
00:34:22.080 – 00:34:47.650
Yes, it’s very funny, like, how close the processes are. But the first thing that I’m going to do is work with you to figure out, okay, what are the two to three places that, you know, you can be.

You can try your bestest to be consistent on that. Also, in the Venn diagram of things, it’s like you enjoy doing them. And also they are likely to bring you in leads.

Becca
00:34:47.650 – 00:34:48.010
Right?

Tayler
00:34:48.090 – 00:38:00.370
Because if you hate. I always go back to the. I hate being on camera. Well, let’s say you’re someone who hates public speaking, right?

Then I would never tell you, like, oh, you should try to book three public speaking engagements every month. Like, that would be not cool.

So it’s about finding, what do you enjoy and where it overlaps with the kind of marketing that actually is going to help you get discovered by couples and then have them eventually inquire. So that’s step one is just picking those two or three marketing channels.

Then step two is, okay, what are we going to do on a regular basis to make sure that something is happening with these marketing channels? And the. One of the first questions I always ask people is, how much time do you have to work on marketing every month or every week? Right.

And the reason that that’s really important is because if you tell me I have two hours a week to work on my marketing, but then you say that your marketing plan is going to be on three marketing channels and you’re going to do five reels a week, and you’re going to blog twice a week. And, you know, you’re also going to go to 4 Network of. It’s like, hi, the math doesn’t work there.

So that amount of time that you have is how you can come up with a plan that actually fits your life so that you get that positive reinforcement of, I can do this because you actually did it. And so that’s like the. The core of where I start with people and trying to get them to a plan.

And from there it’s like, what’s Your routine going to be, you know, for wedding professionals. I would, I would have a very strong reaction if someone told me that their marketing day is going to be on Friday.

I would say, no, it’s not, that’s not true.

Because I know that Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then even Monday, when you need to like, debrief and like, have a day off after a wedding weekend, like, those are just all days that are, are kind of not in the cards. So, you know, picking maybe your marketing day or your couple hours you’re going to work on marketing, every week is on Tuesday.

Okay, so Tuesday is going to be the time block. What are you going to do then? Right. And so it’s just, it is project management at its core.

And I know that every single wedding professional listening to this podcast knows how to project manage because that’s exactly what you do for your clients in your weddings. But for whatever reason, no one does it for themselves and their marketing. And I love that you’re laughing because it’s like so true.

Everybody has this skill of, here’s the wedding, here are all the things that need to happen. I need to organize my calendar to make sure that those things are happening at the right timing. Your marketing is the exact same thing.

Here’s the task that needs to get done. When do I need to work on it? So that blog actually goes out or whatever.

So that’s my soapbox speech about creating a marketing plan and how you can actually start to organize it in a way that lets you get it done on a regular basis.

Becca
00:38:00.610 – 00:38:27.430
So if people are listening to this and they’re thinking, okay, that sounds good, I’m very disorganized with my marketing. I need to get a clearer plan, I need to get a clearer picture. And they can’t afford to work with someone one to one.

And they think, right, well, this software that Taylor put herself in, sounds like a good solution, is not going to do the marketing for them, is it, like, explain, give us the nitty gritty of what it’s actually going to do and how it’s going to get them results?

Tayler
00:38:27.830 – 00:42:00.810
Yeah, you know, I, before I get into that, you know, I.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think that there is a good amount of the marketing that we do that should not be touched by artificial intelligence.

So I, there are, and I say that because there are people that I talk to that are looking for some sort of AI platform that’s just gonna like, tip to tail, do all of their marketing for them. And that’s where you get Your. That’s when you put your business in the space of like, nothing is real, so why would anyone trust you? So that’s my.

That’s my second little soapbox. I love it. But. So what NG does help you do is you answer a questionnaire so that NG can get to know your business.

And based on how you answered that questionnaire, it puts together a marketing plan for you on a calendar that takes into account how much time you have to work on marketing every week. What do you like doing? Where are your leads already coming from? And so that’s how it, like within five minutes goes. And you’re like, okay, I have.

I see what I can do now. And it’s actually not in a. The plan isn’t in a way that like, oh, ng’s making me feel pressured to do a lot of marketing. That’s the opposite.

We want you to feel like, oh, I can do this. So you get that plan and it lives on a calendar, which is also the same place where you can actually do the plan.

So that’s one of the unique things about NG is that it’s a project management tool that brings your planning and your doing into the same place.

Instead of you having a list of marketing to do’s in your Asana account and then you needing to go to Claude to write captions and then Canva to create graphics and do editing and then to later to schedule your content. Like you can do everything but what you can do in Canva. Because I’m not trying to build Canva, we love Canva.

But NG helps you draft content, so blogs, social media captions, email newsletters, and a couple other things. We do have a Canva integration so that you can automatically pull in your designs without having to upload and download things.

And then there’s the social media scheduler that’s also within the software. So you see the thing that needs to get done and then with the least amount of effort and the cleanest workflow, you can do it all in the same place.

But then one of my favorite tools, and I’m so happy that other people love it, is the results dashboard where NG automatically tracks your website metrics and your social media metrics. And it shows you how things are going, where you’re having wins, where things are kind of plateauing, where eventually you like.

If a graph tends to go down and toward the right, it’s not a good thing. You could just say, well, I tried it, I’m not doing it anymore.

But that results tab then helps you make the Smartest decisions that you can about the marketing that you’re going to do moving forward.

So it is at its core a project management tool, but it is an extremely functional project management tool because it’s not just a place for you to keep tasks and to dos and ideas. It actually is going to help you turn them into real pieces of marketing that you get to put out into the world.

Becca
00:42:01.210 – 00:45:48.780
That’s so helpful.

And I am an NG user, so I thought it’d be helpful to tell the people how I use it in my business because sometimes a use case is helpful to understand. So I thought I’d share with you, Taylor, the three parts of NT that I use the most myself in my business as a marketer, how I do it.

So my favorite one I’m gonna save till last. My second favorite one though is the social scheduler.

I go in there still and I schedule my socials on there because it’s so easy, because I can click on the date when I’m supposed to do it and it links through to Instagra. I can write my caption and then I can copy it to Facebook and edit it slightly and then copy it to LinkedIn and edit it slightly and then hit go.

And when you added the Canva integration, that made my heart sing. Because I no longer have to download the image from Canva to my computer and then re upload it to ng.

I can literally just click through and the image is there.

Now I don’t even do a lot of my content anymore, but the content that I do do for my podcast or carousel graphics, I always just go and upload it in engie so that I can repurpose it. But importantly, edit my caption because no one wants to see an Instagram caption that’s got a link that doesn’t work in it.

Whereas on Facebook I can put the clickable link. So that’s my second favorite feature of ng. My other third favorite feature of ng, I’ll come back to number one in a minute.

My third favorite feature is the tracking tool.

So I use this in my business and I encourage people to use it for wedding fairs, I use it myself for conferences, for speaking when I do something thing to tell me how much it cost me what the plan is and then to track in that project, in that campaign how many leads did I get back, did I make any sales so that when that same thing comes round the year after. And Taylor, you taught me to do this very well yourself because you showed me how you do it. I can go Right. Did that work for me last year?

Because we think we can remember, but we don’t always remember the numbers. And so I think for people listening, when you do a wedding show, are you keeping track of how much did you pay to do that wedding show?

How many conversations did you have? What did you spend on materials? What return on investment did you see?

So when the same opportunity comes up next year, you can ask yourself, okay, let me go into my NG and see what happened last year. And then I can tell myself whether it worked. Which brings me on to the number one, my favorite tool from ng.

I’ve done them in a funny order, but my number one favorite tool is a KPI tracking. That is the place I spend the most time in Engie. I tell my members about it. I think I did a whole podcast episode about it.

If people want to go and listen about the KPIs. I track. I have so many graphs in my dashboard. Some of them which populate automatically, some of them that I go in and populate.

And I track things like, obviously, my social media statistics, both followers and views. I track my costs. I track my profit and my income. I track how many people downloaded my podcast.

I track how many people clicked on links from my podcast. And I have all of these graphics, but they’re not graphics for the sake of graphics. They help me make decisions, and this is important.

They help me when I get in a slump.

So when I go, I feel like my downloads are rubbish this month on my podcast, I can go back to the same time last year and then go, oh, wait, this happened the same time last year. And then they bounce back and you start to see paradise patterns, and you start to see that data making sense. And so there we go. That’s a rundown.

That’s my three favorite things. And I’m in NG doing this stuff all of the time. And yeah, that’s my three. Three favorite things. Are you proud of. Are you a proud energy parent? I am.

Tayler
00:45:48.940 – 00:45:50.860
I’m your proud energy auntie.

Becca
00:45:52.380 – 00:45:53.700
Honestly, it’s. I love it.

Tayler
00:45:53.700 – 00:45:54.060
I love it.

Becca
00:45:54.060 – 00:46:13.190
It’s such a helpful tool. And I think, okay, here’s my next question for you.

Because I think sometimes people adopt tools and I see this as well, and it makes me want to tear my hair out because they’re like, becca talked about this great tool. It sounds really good. I’m gonna go sign up and join this tool. And then they don’t do anything with it. Why do you think that is?

Tayler
00:46:13.350 – 00:48:05.030
Oh, my goodness. That is the bane of my existence. Becca. So it’s because try. It’s because getting started with something new takes energy and we’re pretty lazy, right?

Like, we are most comfortable doing the things that we already know how to do. We already have some sort of process. Even if it’s a not functional process, we will pick that over something else.

And in the world of, like, sales psychology, you know, when, when you give people options, the do nothing option is the one that is taken the most. And that also applies to wedding professionals who are marketing their businesses to couples, right?

Like most couples who are going to discover you will do nothing. So, you know, little, little full circle there. But, you know, the. With ng, it is for.

It’s for anyone who needs to do their own marketing, but it is most powerful for that person who is going to say to themselves, something needs to change, right? Like, I have been doing this in a way that makes me feel crazy and is inefficient, and I need a better way to get my marketing done.

And so if any of that clicks or feels like something that you have said to yourself, then I would encourage you to try it.

If you’re in the camp of, like, it’s fine, like, you know, I could deal with it, it then keep, keep doing marketing the way that you’re doing because you know you’re not in the right space to try something new. But when you are looking for a better solution, then NG is. Is here for you.

Becca
00:48:05.270 – 00:49:37.830
And it’s hard because I think you’re right. With any technology, there’s that hurdle.

Like, I love helping people set up CRM systems, but the hurdle to, like, set it up and then get them to actually adopt it is one of the, the biggest challenges because again, it’s a bit like we talked about earlier, the payoff is so far in the future, sometimes they can’t see it.

And I’m like, if we just get you doing this thing, you’re going to get so much of your time back, but we’ve just got to get you over that little hill to realize, number one, you want to do it, and number two, you’re going to put time and energy and effort into doing it well and understanding it. And so you’re right. There is that kind of, you’ve got to be in the right headspace to take on something new.

But equally, if you never give yourself that headspace, you’re gonna be having this conversation with me and Taylor this time next year where you’re like, marketing’s hard, marketing’s overwhelming. I’m not tracking any Numbers, I don’t know what I’m doing. And so it’s like at some point you’ve gotta go, something needs to change.

And that may be that you can afford to outsource some of it. It may be that you can afford to work one to one with a consultant like we talked about.

But if you can’t, there are other options absolutely available to you as well. So just before I move on, because I’ve got a couple of other questions I want to ask you before I let you go. Give me the results.

You see the end users, the super users, the power users, the people who are doing this. Well, I’ve given my example. But tell us the results that you’ve seen other customers have when they do lean in and use this.

Tayler
00:49:38.070 – 00:52:01.140
Yeah, these are US based businesses. But Dan of Bow Tie and Brush, he does live event illustrations, like guest portraits for folks.

And Dan, he’s one of those business owners that used to think I just need to post on Instagram and it’ll be fine.

And he and I met at an event in Florida I think about two years ago and we had a conversation and he, he, he was like, oh, there’s different kinds of marketing that I could be doing that don’t take a lot of effort but can have really big results or impacts on my business.

And so he started using NG and now Danison blogs on a very regular basis and he is number one for a bunch of keywords that are very related to, you know, live watercolor illustrations and you know, like, like event sort of activations. And I know that he schedules out his social media content and so he doesn’t have to be on Instagram every day. Right.

Like he does it, I think twice a month is his routine and he batch schedules out his, his Instagram content. But last year in 2025, I remember him telling me that he hit his sales goal for the year in September, I believe it was.

And so that’s a full three months ahead of schedule. And 2025 was the year where he really started getting consistent with marketing his business in a few places.

And so, you know, and his sales goal was like, I think he wanted to sell. It was like a hundred thousand dollars. Right. So something that is a really great goal for a lot of business owners, but not, not unattainable.

It’s not like he was like, oh, I went to making a million dollars a year. And so that’s why I like to talk about Dennis and stories because it’s very realistic.

And Denison now has, you know, I don’t really like the word balance, but he does have, he has boundaries and balance between him getting to work on his business and then working in his business and then just being a dad and a partner and someone who, you know, wants to go have fun.

Becca
00:52:01.220 – 00:53:17.580
I love that. And often when we have a plan in place, it does give us that space to do other stuff.

I think so many of us spend all this time hustling and worrying that when we step back and we actually have a plan in place, it’s often quite manageable to do that blog when you know when it’s coming and you’ve planned ahead and you’ve got something helping you with the content, ideas, you know, it doesn’t have have to be a headache. Right.

I’m going to take a left hand turn here before I let you go, Taylor, because there’s one thing I mentioned right at the start of this conversation and I want to come back to it because you very kindly got involved with my first ever wedding industry conference, Wed Pros Live. And I am so thrilled that you did. I’m sure people would have seen your stuff there.

I’ve seen so many photos of the backdrop and your little NG logo in the background. I found, I’ve seen photos of the professional and I need to send it to you, actually.

A professional photo photo of me on the stage with your big face and your big NT logo right behind me. And I love it. So you were there in spirit even though you weren’t there in person. And I’m so thankful that you got involved.

Why did you decide to get involved in this crazy little conference the other side of the world? And why do you think continuing education and conferences like this matter?

Tayler
00:53:17.980 – 00:54:13.710
Well, it was easy to get involved because it was you.

And you know, I don’t say that lightly because like, as someone who works on marketing all the time, I do have a good amount of a good number of opportunities to be a part of events that I can’t attend.

And I had experimented with doing that quite a bit in 2025 and 2024 of hey, I can’t travel to this but you know, I’ll still sponsor it and you know, send promo cards and things like that. And in full transparency, I’ve, I’ve posted about this in places so this is not like a news flash. But most of those events did nothing for us.

And when you were telling me about Wed Pros Live, I was like, well, you under. You use ng. Like you really use it. You don’t just fake Use it.

Becca
00:54:14.190 – 00:54:15.310
No, I really use it.

Tayler
00:54:15.870 – 00:56:18.750
Yeah, you really use it. And, and you and I are friends.

And if we lived closer together, if I wasn’t on the California coast and you were in England, then I would have been there in person. And I knew in my bones that you were going to be someone who would represent me even though I couldn’t be there.

And so that’s what made it super, super easy to be a part of the event. And that’s why I’m so thankful to have even had the chance. Chance.

But continuing education is like, it’s one of those things that is never going to go away for any of us as business owners because it’s so cliche. But the only constant is change.

And I have been a business owner since 2015 and the way that I did business then is very different than how I run my, like, all of the pieces of my business now.

And if I didn’t on a regular basis seek out opportunities to learn from the people who are just a little bit ahead of, be a little bit ahead of me, then I would be not doing myself a favor. I’d actually be doing myself a disservice because I wouldn’t be able to work as efficiently as I could. And that’s what I need.

So surrounding yourself with people who are just a little bit ahead of you is something that I’m a really huge fan of doing. Because even if there’s not this like existential realization that you have, you are going to get pulled forward in some way, shape or form.

And that’s what we’re all wanting to do as business owners. We’re all wanting to make progress forward.

So like being around other people who are sharing information and being generous with their time and their knowledge, like you can’t, you can’t do that alone. So you, you need to put yourself into the room or get yourself into the room with people who take that mentality like you.

Becca
00:56:18.830 – 00:57:08.390
And as I like to say, my favorite Hamilton quote, you gotta be in the room where it happens. And I’m so thankful. I genuinely am so thankful for Ng being a partner, helping me put on this event.

Putting on a conference is not for the faint hearted. I’ve said it many times. I may be doing it again for sure, but it’s not for the faint hearted.

So thank you for getting involved and letting letting Wed pros live come to life. And I’m sure it’s got a big future here in Europe and I’m excited to see where it goes next. Taylor, It’s a pleasure.

I could talk to you all night long, but all the listeners might go to sleep if we carry on talking about marketing for too much longer. I always end my podcast with the same question. I’m going to ask it to you now. I see if you’ve got a fresh answer for me.

What is one thing you wish you’d known sooner in your own business business.

Tayler
00:57:08.710 – 00:57:52.270
That where I start or where I started is not where I was going to end up. Like, not even close. I started my business like really focused on social media management and now I am the co founder of a software company.

Like, who would have ever thought that that was going to happen?

And even if you don’t end up taking a really, really hard left turn into a different form, like what you are doing day one isn’t going to be what you’re doing on day, you know, 1532 for sure. It’s, it’s always going to be a little bit different.

Becca
00:57:52.510 – 00:58:49.210
It’s so true. And when we speak again on this podcast in three, four or five years, maybe you’ll be in a different place entirely.

Maybe I’ll be in a different place entirely because I think that’s one of the most exciting parts of business and one of the most terrifying parts of business business is you never really know where that business is going to go next or where you as the individual are going to go next because there’s always something new, exciting, different, challenging, hard, around the corner. And so yeah, we need to hold on to that and remember it’s okay to evolve in our businesses. It’s okay to say no to stuff. It’s okay to change.

And I think sometimes people need to hear that, that it’s okay to make a change, to do something different, to change, to move into a different part of business or even to stop. Because we’re on this journey together. Taylor, it’s been such a privilege chatting with you today.

If people want to find out more about you, more about ng, where are the best places for them to find you? And I’ll pop it all in the show notes.

Tayler
00:58:49.210 – 00:59:22.320
Yes, if you want to learn more about me, then my personal Instagram is Tailored designs, T A Y L R D underscore designs and you’ll see lots of silly shenanigans there.

But if you’d like to learn more about NG and how it can help you actually get your marketing done, you can go to Enji Co Backslash Becca to learn all about what we do in more detail and then also get a little discount a la Becca’s friend, Link. So that’s where I would encourage you to go scope things out.

Becca
00:59:22.320 – 00:59:57.860
Amazing.

And if you’re WED Pros Live and you’ve still got your WED Pros Live program, you can flick right through there, see a beautiful picture of me in my green dress and you can scan the code there if you didn’t catch it too. And I’m sure you’ve all got those still by your sides because I turned the program into a note taker, Taylor for WordPress Live.

So the program became a notebook so that everyone could keep all that information together. So yeah, if you’ve got that nearby, you can give that a scan too.

But I will for everyone else, put all of the information in the show notes and you can go and find it there. Taylor, it’s been fun. Thank you so much for your time.

Tayler
00:59:58.410 – 01:00:03.930
Thank you so much, Becca. Have a fantastic rest of your night. And from across the pond, thank you so much.

Becca
01:00:03.930 – 01:00:39.580
I hope to see you and give you a hug somewhere very soon. Love chatting with Taylor. Isn’t it always a great conversation?

I love talking about all things marketing with someone else who gets it and I love the fact that she’s put herself in a piece of software.

So if marketing is a struggle for you and you’re not in a place to pay someone to consult with you, you’re not able to pay me to work with you one to one one. And you need a solution where everything is in one place. Go and check out Engie. As I said before, all of the details are in the show notes.

Go and try it out and if you’re stuck, reach out to me and I’ll show you how I use it. I’ll see you all next time.