Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Clone your best wedding clients - Heidi Thompson
233 Plays3 years ago
Happy Woo Wednesdays!
I love Heidi Thompson and I'm so excited to be a speaker at her summit on August 22nd.
She is no-fluff and very pragmatic. Her background is in marketing so she brings a different perspective to the industry than many others who are wedding pros turned business coaches. She actually marketed poop for a living for a time. Helping wedding pros market their amazing skills and talents is way easier than that!
The old way of looking at ideal clients isn't doing anything for them and instead, they need to talk to their best clients to attract more of them.
Hot Topic:
Clone Your Best Clients - Actionable things your listeners can do right away to attract more of their ideal clients. I published a book on the topic called Clone Your Best Clients and it details the process that I take clients through so that they attract more of their best clients. In it, I get into actually talking to your best clients and interviewing them and my clients and readers have gotten a lot out of getting out of their own heads and talking to them.
Connect with Heidi
game-changing client interviews so people can take action and actually do them for themselves: https://www.theweddingbusinesscollective.com/heckyes
www.evolveyourweddingbusiness.com
https://www.instagram.com/evolveyourweddingbusiness/
Connect with Carissa
https://instagram.com/carissawoo
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Heidi Thompson and Her Work
00:00:00
Speaker
Happy Woo Wednesdays, everyone. Welcome back to Get a Heck Yes with me, your host, Carissa Woo. We have Heidi Thompson in the house. She is the author of the best selling book, Clone Your Best Clients. Wedding photographers and pros, are you sick of people telling you to write down your ideal client avatar? It works, but not really. Heidi has a fresh new way of doing things. You are going to love her down to earth personality. We don't have to pretend like we know it all.
00:00:27
Speaker
If you are loving my podcast, leave me a review and download my free guide on how to generate constant leads.
Carissa's Journey from Photography to Coaching
00:00:35
Speaker
Go to heckyesmedia.co. Enjoy this episode.
00:00:43
Speaker
Welcome to Get a Heck Yes with Carissa Wu. I'm your host, Carissa, and I've been a Los Angeles wedding photographer for over a decade. I've traveled the world, built my team, and seen it all. I now coach wedding photographers hit 10K a month and build a thriving business. In this podcast, we are going to deep dive into how top wedding creatives get that heck yes from their dream clients. We are not holding back on the struggles of the business and how to push through the noise, some healthy hustle, mindset shifts, up-leveling your money story,
00:01:12
Speaker
Timehacks because I'm a mom of two, a little bit of woo-woo, and most importantly, self-love and confidence are just a few of the many things we will talk about. I want to give you a genuine thank you for following along my journey. I hope to inspire you every Woo Wednesday so that you say heck yes to listening to this podcast.
Heidi's Career Path and Marketing Passion
00:01:29
Speaker
See you guys soon! Hey everyone! Welcome back to Get a Heck Yes with me, your host, Carissa Woo. I have a very special guest. Her name is
00:01:41
Speaker
Heidi Thompson, and she has quite the resume. She is the bestselling author of Clone Your Best Clients, which we're going to talk about all today, and the founder of Evolve Your Wedding Business, where she helps wedding professionals grow six-figure and multiple six-figure businesses without working all the time. Her business and marketing expertise has been featured on several wedding and business outlets.
00:02:05
Speaker
and events, including the Huffington Post, that's awesome, Wedding Business Magazine, Sprouting Photographer, Wedding MBA, IELTS Planner, Honey Book, and Wedding More World. She is a creator and host of Book More Wedding Summit, which I'm going to be a speaker in August 22nd, and Wedding Business CEO Summit.
00:02:28
Speaker
Welcome, Heidi. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to chat with you today. I know. Oh my gosh, I don't know even where to start. But I guess my first question is just to talk everyone on YouTube and our listeners like a little bit more about you and how you got started.
00:02:46
Speaker
So the long and winding road starts with me figuring out in college that I wanted to do some volunteering for fundraising events for some organizations that I loved.
00:03:04
Speaker
I love doing it. It was an absolute blast. I found my way into working under a wedding planner and doing some weddings for myself. But after some time, I kind of realized that I thought I loved the event part of it. What I actually loved was how do we get people to care enough about this fundraising event to
00:03:27
Speaker
show up to
Adapting to Industry Trends and Unique Weddings
00:03:28
Speaker
donate. So it was really that marketing piece of the puzzle that I absolutely love because really at its root, marketing is psychology and it's understanding people and getting down to what they want and connecting the dots between what they want and what you have to offer.
00:03:48
Speaker
So long series of working in like every industry you could imagine in marketing. And I was living in the UK at the time, which is where my husband is from. And I noticed that the industry was kind of going in a different direction to where the people were going. So everything in the industry was like white fluffy Cinderella.
00:04:14
Speaker
The thing that everyone was really gravitating to was like rock and roll bride, offbeat bride. This was in like
00:04:26
Speaker
So yeah, so people went hard into that. So I started a wedding fair to bring together couples who wanted something different and vendors that provided something really, really creative and different. And I found I was spending a lot of time coaching them and helping them make sure they were getting a good return on their investment. And that's when I realized
00:04:48
Speaker
not everyone is just a nerd for marketing and I could, you know, kind of bring these two worlds together and help wedding professionals on the business and marketing side.
Personal Stories and Life in the UK
00:04:59
Speaker
Yeah, you do have a unique perspective in the marketing side because I think you're right, not too many people see the wedding industry as like the marketing perspective. We're just about like pretty, pretty, pretty style shoots and
00:05:12
Speaker
posting on Instagram, but I know you have a ton of strategy to get into today. Tell us about what you were like as a kid and actually where do you live? You mentioned UK, but where are you located?
00:05:26
Speaker
So I'm in San Diego now. I grew up just outside of Detroit and my husband is from just outside Cambridge in England. So I moved over there. We were there for about six years. Literally we came on vacation. We did like the Pacific coast highway and it happened to be January and it was
00:05:52
Speaker
gorgeous in San Diego. And we were like, let's move here. That sounds like a good idea. San Diego is great. I lived there for a summer when I had an internship for Sony. So it's just, I feel like I want to retire there. It is so beautiful. It was so spoiled for weather here. It's ridiculous. It's so nice. Okay. So let's see. You
00:06:17
Speaker
work for a wedding planner in college and did you just instantly fall in love with the wedding industry? I did. It was totally new to me at that point. I didn't really have any exposure to it previously, but just seeing
00:06:35
Speaker
what was possible to pull off for an event, but also all of the intricacies of what's going on behind the scenes to make it happen was really fun. I really did enjoy it. And I love logistics. I love the brass tacks of putting things together and making things work. So I really enjoyed it. It just came to a point where it was like,
00:07:02
Speaker
I don't want to deal with the people side of it anymore. Couples anymore. So yeah, that's when I was like, Yeah, I'm gonna lean more into this marketing side of things. Oh, I love that. Okay, so you mentioned like off eat fried and like
00:07:18
Speaker
that kind of demographic. And then you said, you mentioned like a wedding fair. Did you actually have like a bridal show? Yeah, we did. And one of our exhibitors, like, oh my God, her dresses are like West End quality, like the UK Broadway quality, like costume design of dresses, like
00:07:44
Speaker
I've never seen such detail and of course use of color because we're not staying within the strict, bridal sense of what you're allowed to wear. Seriously, the creativity of these people was insane. It genuinely irritated me that they weren't making more money because
00:08:11
Speaker
they should have been they were amazing at what they did okay that's really crazy cuz i started my or the way i started my business was i attended bridal shows and i actually sold picture frames with my dad that had like the wedding date and that's how i got involved with the wedding industry
00:08:30
Speaker
Oh, wow, that's so cool. So I do have like that heart for bridal shows. So good job to you.
Marketing Foundations and Entrepreneurial Spirit
00:08:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's so fun to just like, have an event and bring everybody together and like have a good time. It was fantastic. I loved hosting it. But I was like, I keep having to tell people these things that I feel like
00:08:53
Speaker
everybody knows. But it's like one of those things where it's like, why doesn't everybody do this? And it turns out that's an indication that that's probably what you should be doing. Yeah, I love that. Um, I was gonna ask you kind of take me back a little bit. What were you like as a kid and growing up and
00:09:14
Speaker
were you always just like this marketing guru? I feel like you kind of had it like in your heart from like it comes natural to you, not like it comes natural to everyone else. So take me back. Yeah, so little nerd for sure. I was definitely the kid who was like, Excuse me, do you have any reading recommendations for me over the summer? Because like I need to read.
00:09:41
Speaker
Um, I did as a kid start a lot of little like entrepreneurial endeavors for sure. I was just thinking about this the other day, all sorts of stuff. Basically, you know what I think got me
00:09:55
Speaker
really thinking that way was selling Girl Scout cookies, actually. You can get people to give you money for things. Okay, let's see what we can come up with to do this.
00:10:13
Speaker
It felt like a creative endeavor for me. And thankfully, like the adults in my neighborhood humored me. So it was it's fun. I loved being able to just like be like, no, this is my project. This is my thing. This is what I'm doing. And just go nuts with it. Oh, yeah, I just had my daughter, my five year old daughter. We did a lemonade stand on Fourth of July.
00:10:41
Speaker
And we got really lucky our first couple of minutes. We got two customers, but I wanted to teach my kid the same thing. Like, hey, you could ask for money and you could sell stuff. And it's just creating this entrepreneurial spirit in her.
00:10:57
Speaker
Yeah. It's so interesting because it's like, you don't know how money works when you're
Writing 'Clone Your Best Clients' and Sales Strategies
00:11:02
Speaker
a kid. You don't know how anything works. And then you see like, Oh, okay. I can offer this in exchange for this. And that's like a little light bulb goes off and you just want to keep doing it. Oh, that's so cool. What was your experience like in the UK? I loved it. So my husband grew up in this teeny tiny little village of like,
00:11:27
Speaker
3,000 people, so small. I grew up 20 minutes outside of a city, so that was very weird for me, but it was also very
00:11:38
Speaker
novel, like fun. I loved it. And being able to get to London pretty easily because the trains are really solid. The thing that made us want to leave, well, I can't speak for my husband. I think he also wanted to get out of a tiny town.
00:11:58
Speaker
But the weather was killing us. It's so far north that in the winter, it gets light at eight, it gets dark at four, and the entire time it's overcast. Wow. It doesn't get super cold, but it's the lack of sunlight. I was like, okay, I want to go somewhere that is sunnier so I can be outside every day.
00:12:23
Speaker
Yeah, my husband just saw me taking some vitamin D pills last night and he's like, we do have sun outside. I was like, well, a podcast said it was good for me. Anyways, I wanted you to speak upon your book, like tell me
00:12:44
Speaker
Because I'm writing a book, it's almost done. So tell me like your journey of writing this amazing book for wedding professionals and like when you wrote it and what kind of sparked that inspiration? Oh, journey is the word for it for sure. Because I have this framework that I've been using and I've been teaching and I was like, okay, I want to put this into another format so that it's
00:13:10
Speaker
something that's digestible in one piece, people can take it, they can run with it. I've always wanted to write a book ever since I was a nerdy little kid. I was like, oh yeah, this will be easy. I write all the time, put my outline together. Then I found my editor.
00:13:31
Speaker
And she handed my ass to me, which needed to happen. I remember she gave me the first round of edits and I was like, oh yeah, I'd probably sit down and knock this out in like 15 minutes going through and approving changes. And I was like, oh my God.
00:13:50
Speaker
oh my god there's so much because you know the way you write a blog post is very different than the way you write a book and making sure that it's all in
00:14:03
Speaker
you know, proper grammar and like the English language is weird and like there should be a semicolon, not a comma. And it's just, that was a lot. Editing was a lot for sure. I'm very happy I worked with an editor because I wouldn't have caught any of that because it's in my voice. So to me, it makes perfect sense. But to someone else, I can see how, you know, you wouldn't have that same connection to it.
00:14:32
Speaker
Oh, same. I've been trying to write this book for two years, so I know how it is. But just for some context for the listeners and for the viewers, your book is called Clone Your Best Clients, and that's a hot topic today. But I guess to kind of start off with your hot topic, how do you get your, heck yes, from your favorite clients or your dream clients? So I'm all about the pre-work.
00:15:02
Speaker
I'm all about making sure that by the time someone is even considering buying from me, they understand if I'm a heck yes for them or a heck no, and that they understand so clearly what the thing I'm selling is going to do for them, that it's a no brainer. My goal is to always make it as much of a no brainer as possible. So I do a lot of selling on the page.
00:15:32
Speaker
And I find that to be super, super helpful. It's something that the wedding pros in my membership that have gone through and done the process of actually writing like a service page that's more like a sales page.
00:15:48
Speaker
definitely get more people who are like, I'm 90% there. I just need to make sure you're available, we're a good fit. So the call isn't as much sales as it is confirmation.
00:16:06
Speaker
Yeah, so I like setting basically like setting up the dominoes, so to speak. Yeah. Okay, so do you say like, do you think wedding photographers and professionals just don't know how to find their ideal clients? I know you have kind of a different perspective on it. So can you dive deeper on even like the title of your content and your I mean, the hot topic in the book?
00:16:30
Speaker
Yeah. So the old exercise around ideal clients is like make up somebody and this person, Melissa, is who you're going to target. And these are her demographics.
00:16:46
Speaker
My beef with that is it doesn't tell you what to do. It doesn't give you any anything actionable. It doesn't tell you where to go from there. So instead, I have really worked on developing this process for wedding professionals of being able to look at, OK, who are the people that you have worked with?
00:17:14
Speaker
And you wish you could just clone and work with over and over and over again. And we're going to build your marketing around them. And we're going to get information directly from them in order to make it so that you're not basing this on, you know, assumptions about what you think the person wants, but really, you know, they want something else.
00:17:41
Speaker
I love this unique perspective that you have, because the old way, like you said, is, oh, like, you know, pick your client avatar, I always named mine like Julie, because my baby was named Julie. And it's like, where do they shop and the apology? Like, what do they do for fun? What magazine say? Do they, do they read? Are they people's persons? Are they shy? And it just
00:18:06
Speaker
I would always write that, but it didn't really resonate to me. I know I was speaking to that person when I did my Instagram posts, but I'm like, it just doesn't truly make sense or resonate with me. So I love this way. Okay. So my next question is, say you have your clients interview their past best clients.
00:18:27
Speaker
What is a mindset behind it? Because I know some people are going to be like, I'm scared, I'm nervous, I feel awkward, I don't want to, what if they say something bad about me? What if they didn't like me? So how did they get over that first, even reach out to their clients?
00:18:43
Speaker
So, you know your people. You know if you've worked with them and you just clicked and you loved each other that they're deep down, they loved working with you. They aren't going to say anything horrible to you, especially not to your face, hopeful. That's just rude.
00:19:06
Speaker
But when it comes to reaching out to them, I like to use just like straight up genuine flattery. So this person is like your favorite person and they have no idea. So the approach I take and that I'll give to your listeners in a download as well, along with questions to ask is
00:19:27
Speaker
If, you know, I could work with the choruses of the world every day, I would be the happiest person, but unfortunately there's only one of you, so would you mind hopping on a call with me so I can ask you some questions to find more people just like you?
00:19:43
Speaker
Oh, I love that. More often than not, human beings are going to be like, yes, I will tell you about how awesome I am. I will tell you like everybody loves that. I never thought of that. That's a good one. Truth, too. I mean, you aren't lying to them. You do want to find more people just like them. And then in terms of the mindset, I always tell people to go into this.
00:20:13
Speaker
as like a detective, go into it as an investigation and try to be very curious. So if someone gives you an answer to a question, if they say, oh, I booked you because I wanted blah, blah, blah, you could leave it at that or you could ask them, why was that important to you? Which is going to give you a better insight into the way they're thinking.
00:20:41
Speaker
which again, marketing and psychology, you have to understand what people are thinking about, what their preconceived notions are, what they actually care about. And to give you an example, a planner that I worked with in my membership, she was really struggling to
00:21:05
Speaker
get the right inquiries. So she had absolutely worked with her people, but she wasn't getting like a constant flow of them, which is super, super common. So she went through this process and up until this point, all of her marketing was completely focused on your standard wedding planner, saving you time and making things less stressful. Boring.
00:21:34
Speaker
So, she went through this process. She identified her people. She started talking to them. And every single conversation, she started hearing the same patterns of, well, we wanted an Indian wedding, but we didn't want the Indian wedding that my sister had and my brother had and my friends and my cousins had. We wanted to put our own unique spin on it. We wanted to bring our personalities into it and be
00:22:00
Speaker
trusted that you were able to do that. So something she was already doing, but she wasn't putting herself out there as, I'm the wedding planner for you if you want an Indian wedding that isn't like every other Indian wedding that you've ever done. That is very niche. I love that. Yeah. And she attracts all sorts of people, all sorts of different multicultural weddings that want to... The common thread is, I want to bring in tradition.
00:22:25
Speaker
But I want to bring in myself. I don't want it to be just tradition. So once she started marketing based on that, people were like falling over each other to book her. She was looking up like crazy. And it wasn't because like she suddenly became better at what she did or she even changed what she did. It's because she signed a light on the problem that her ideal clients actually wanted her to solve.
Overcoming Career Struggles and Finding Value
00:22:55
Speaker
Oh, mind blown. That is so good because I feel like those Indian couples, they just, they're over it. Like they don't want the same photographer that all their Indian friends have that the parents like and they don't want their photos to look identical to everyone else's. So she's speaking to that bride, which is so specific, but there is definitely a market for it.
00:23:21
Speaker
It is. And then you think about, like, the comparison shopping that happens. People are looking at, you know, different planners, different photographers, and then they land on one that is like, hey, I understand your exact problem and I have the exact solution for it.
00:23:40
Speaker
All of a sudden that person is like in a category of their own. They're no longer able to be compared to everybody else and they can charge a lot more because they're a specialist. Yeah. I'm just trying to go back into my early years. It was very hard for me to pick my client, my egg baby, Julie. And I feel like you think you have
00:24:07
Speaker
similarities to different photographers, like I thought everyone loves color. I thought everyone loves fun. But actually, like they don't everyone's so unique. And I feel like if you talk to these people, you read your reviews, you're gonna, you know, get these similar phrases that people say, Oh, Chris loves fun and vibrant, like poses, she poses like differently than other people, you know, things like that, where you don't even know about yourself. So it's
00:24:35
Speaker
so powerful. So being the detective, you said that question, or that something that was so striking. You said, Oh, I would love more of Heidi. I went more Heidi brides. Because you're so awesome. And you're one of my favorite people to work with. What is another question that you could ask?
00:24:58
Speaker
I was shooting weddings basically for free or for like a grand. And I was having to haggle for every single session to try and like show them my value. And now I have clients coming to me saying that they want to work with me. And I have more importantly other people in the industry recognizing my worth and asking me to work with them.
00:25:24
Speaker
which to me means even more than the clients because they're people who've been in the industry for 10 plus years. They've seen you know hundreds of other photographers and they're able to recognize me and the value that I can offer them.
00:25:41
Speaker
Hey guys, you all know me. I'm Carissa Wu and I'm a coach for wedding photographers. I've also been a wedding photographer for over a decade so I've been through it all. I was a shy, awkward girl and I've come so far. I'm now beyond passionate about helping wedding photographers not struggle how I did for so many years.
00:26:00
Speaker
It was six years into my business and I was so tired of being ghosted, nickel undimed, and hearing the dreaded words, we went a different direction. I also knew I needed to find a way to not rely on referrals or paying $350 a month for the knot to get my leads. I didn't want to have anxiety about when my next payday was going to come and I wanted to scale my business.
00:26:22
Speaker
Fast forward to now, I created my very own stack system to help wedding photographers get constant leads and master the dreaded sales call and get a heck yes in 24 hours or less. And charge more than 4, 5, 6K. No more waiting around, guys. This is our livelihood, our artistry, and our passion, and we deserve to be respected, valued, and paid for what we are worth. I've helped so many wedding photographers.
00:26:48
Speaker
Watch my 20 minute masterclass all about lead generation and closing the sale. The link is in the bio. You don't want to miss out on the wedding boom and you don't want to miss out on booking your calendar for 2022. It's engagement season, guys, so you don't want to miss this. See you guys soon. So I love getting into why base questions, you know, why did you decide to work with me instead of another photographer and
00:27:17
Speaker
then asking about that like, Oh, okay. Maybe they say, well, you know, you really seem to be this kind of person or you shoot in this particular style. Why was that what you were looking for? What is it that you love about that being able to dig just a little bit deeper gets you some real real gems.
00:27:38
Speaker
And it gets you the words that your ideal client uses to describe what you do, which we are all terrible at because we're in it. You know, like the way a photographer describes photography is only the way a photographer would describe photography.
00:27:59
Speaker
We can't put ourselves in a position where we don't understand the thing that we do day in day out and You know what those people are looking for how they would talk about it and the great thing about this process is you can take their exact words and Use them use them on your website use them in your marketing use them in the way that you talk about the thing that you do because
00:28:26
Speaker
sometimes we're just too close to it and we're just too good at it. Like we're at an expert level of what we do and we're dealing with people who don't know anything about the thing that we do. Yes. My copywriter, Cindy, shout out to Cindy Suzuki. She's on my team. She did this exercise for my coaching program and she reached out to about four of my past students and
00:28:54
Speaker
I was just blown away. Someone said that she booked $25,000 like right after our call. So I was like, what? Like no one told me this. So the things that you could get out of your past clients is just something that literally will be hiding under a rock if you don't do this.
00:29:15
Speaker
Yeah, and why they decided to work with you, what was important to them. Another one I really like is if you were referring me to a friend of yours, what would you say?
00:29:29
Speaker
Oh, I love that. Because then you can get very exact words for how they would describe you to someone else, which is how you want to be describing yourself because copywriting has to meet, you know, your people where they are.
Summit Success and Educational Collaboration
00:29:44
Speaker
And being in it every day, we're just inherently bad at that. Yeah, you see that so much better than I say it, I would
00:29:52
Speaker
I would tell my students, what are people saying behind your back? It's kind of like, it's the same thing. It really is. It's like, say someone's talking about, you know, Heidi, I would say, wow, like she's really helping wedding professionals in the industry. And I just feel like you do take that marketing approach. Even your Instagram looks a little more, you know, marketing style.
00:30:22
Speaker
And I just feel like the way you speak to the wedding industry is just very, just trying to help them. And I love your feed. Can you tell us a little bit about how you started this summit, which you had like 2000
00:30:36
Speaker
attendees your last one, which is crazy. Yeah. So this is something I've been wanting to do for a while. I finally found like a really good mentor that had a program that was like, okay, this is going to make sure you don't miss a single step of it because obviously there's a lot, there's a lot of moving parts. We have, I think we have 29 different presentations.
00:31:04
Speaker
and it's a lot. There are actually whole systems that get put in place. My first one of these was weirdly enough in April of 2020 and I considered not doing it because of COVID.
00:31:24
Speaker
Uh-huh. But it turned out that that was a time that was really perfect for it because people were like, well, I can't, you know, go do work at weddings. I guess I'll, you know, work on the business side of things. So that is really where it started. It's only been a little over two years. I feel like I've been doing them forever now.
00:31:50
Speaker
I absolutely love them. They're like a week long of just awesome education. It's a very collaborative thing too, which I really enjoy doing. I happily take up any time I can in my business. I love working with other people. So being able to
00:32:11
Speaker
have it not just be like, Hey, it's me and I'm teaching everything. It's like, no, there's all these other people and they're all teaching on things that I can't like, that's not my specialty. So I love being able to team up with other experts like yourself and just be able to like dig into everything. Okay. How do we attract and book more of our ideal clients?
00:32:41
Speaker
I it was honestly a big win for me when I got your email because I always ask my friend Gabby from because we can events like how are you part of all these summits and you know you ask get asked to speak here and there and she's like because I have my niche and Pinterest and no one else is doing it or not to me people and so when you
00:33:00
Speaker
email me saying that I love your, you know, your mastery of mastering the joy that sales call. I literally slacked my team right away. I was like, Oh my God, guess what? It's working. Like, you know, people are hearing about my niche because that's what I want to be known for. Exactly. And this is like the same thing as your ideal client.
00:33:19
Speaker
What do you want to be known for? Who do you want to be the go-to person for? And anytime I'm researching a speaker for this, just like when I'm trying to put my business out in front of my ideal clients, I'm looking at, okay, what is this person known for? What is their area of expertise? What do they talk about? And I think sometimes we get into our heads that repetition is a bad thing.
00:33:46
Speaker
But me seeing that you've talked about sales calls in multiple places multiple times, she clearly knows what she's doing. So this is who I want to have talk about it.
00:34:01
Speaker
Oh, thank you. And I kept saying to people, I was like, I'm not like an expert at sales. I just been doing it for 13 years. But now I'm taking courses on sales. And like, all I do is listen to sales. I'm like, I'm kind of, you know, I know what I'm doing. I literally talk to a lot of brides all the time. Okay, so how the heck did you get 2000 people to attend? That's, I mean, you'd have that mentor, but
00:34:31
Speaker
What was like your secret sauce? That's so crazy. So it was a combination of a couple of different things. So I am a very big proponent of email marketing. Love it. I think it's a totally underutilized way of marketing because it allows you to develop a relationship over time with people. So I had a significant number of people on my email list. I was running
00:35:00
Speaker
Facebook ads, which we got a decent amount from. But it was also helping the speakers be able to shout about themselves and being like, hey, go tell the world that you're speaking in this because it's a free event that you can invite people to.
00:35:22
Speaker
and you know like they can choose one of our upgrades or not but it's such an easy thing to invite people to and really it was that collaborative effort of you know every time we do this we have at least 20 speakers
00:35:37
Speaker
of just that many people talking about it and inviting people to it.
Business Evolution and Messaging Challenges
00:35:43
Speaker
So I was shocked. Like the first time I did it, I was like, maybe we can get 500. That would be nice. Okay. More people. What a huge, huge accomplishment.
00:35:59
Speaker
What was the biggest struggle in your business, if you have any? And how did you overcome it? Yeah, tons. That's a really good question. So many, honestly, I feel like
00:36:16
Speaker
I've developed a really good mindset around failure as a result. We need to be able to learn to test things and try things and let them flop. And just be like, okay, whatever, it's fine. When I started, I had a very hard time getting clarity on
00:36:46
Speaker
not just how I wanted to like position myself, but also what I wanted to do in the industry. So I started by doing one-on-one coaching in this business. And then I went into education, so like creating courses. And then I kept running into this situation where
00:37:09
Speaker
The people in the coaching needed the education and the people in the education needed the coaching. So I finally took like the hammer over in my head to be like, change things.
00:37:21
Speaker
and completely changed my business model to have it all as part of a membership that people can take part in. So that was a big one. The other, which I'm actually in the middle of, my new website will be out in a couple of weeks, but I'm in the middle of a rebrand and I feel like for the last year,
00:37:45
Speaker
Messaging has been hard for me and I think people assume if you know things about marketing that this becomes easy. It's never easy when it's yours. I can help
00:38:02
Speaker
anybody, you know, with their marketing. But when it comes to my business, like I'm so close to it, I can't see it objectively. So that has been a thing I've kind of been wrestling with for a while. And I finally decided to just be like, you know what, I'm just going to do a rebrand. I'm just going to completely revamp everything. But it took me a long time to get to that solution for sure.
00:38:30
Speaker
Thank you for being transparent about that. Because I think when people see you or maybe someone that's been doing it for a long time, they may see just, oh, wow, like she's got it all together. But you're transparent. And like, hey, I'm still working on this every single day.
00:38:50
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's really valuable to know and I feel like that's something we talk about in my membership a lot is learning to be kind to yourself because the way you perceive everybody else is made up. Everybody else is in the exact same position that you're in is like beating their head up against the wall, not being able to figure out why something isn't working or why something isn't happening for them. That's all of us.
00:39:20
Speaker
Every single one of them. Yeah, exactly. And it's funny even people are like, oh, I can't believe you have that. I'm like, that's funny to me. That's so funny to me. And it's like, you know, it's all perception. Like I, my husband is one that keeps my ego in check for sure. But he he'll read like reviews and things. He's like, do these people know you like what you're really like?
00:39:49
Speaker
Have you taken a shower today? Oh my God. That is funny. You're so relatable. And I like people that, first of all, are all about the community. And second of all, keep it real. Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to pretend I'm something I'm not. It's just a lie.
Practical Marketing and Community Goals
00:40:10
Speaker
What is your woo factor? What is your Heidi Thompson factor? What makes you stand up? Okay.
00:40:19
Speaker
So I think definitely the fact that I come from, yes, the wedding industry, but not just the wedding industry. And then I have, you know, several years of working in marketing at, oh my God, a furniture company, Cambridge University, a fecal transplant clinic.
00:40:44
Speaker
I know, I was like, I was waiting for that one. I was like, did that say poop on the question? Yeah, that was interesting to work in. But being able to see like all of the commonalities and the threads between these I think has really helped me be able to take things that can be very heady and like
00:41:13
Speaker
you know, overly complicated in marketing and bring it down to, no, this is what we need to focus on. These are the steps we need to take. Like you don't need to create this like vision. It's like 10 pages long and it's all just like in your head. Like, no, we get done to brass stacks. Yeah. Because when you start researching too much, you get analysis paralysis and you just get stagnant. You're just like,
00:41:42
Speaker
I can't do this overwhelmed. Yeah. And the marketing industry is full of jargon and fluff. And in a lot of cases, just justifying yourself and making yourself look good to your boss. And we're trying to do this in our business that's like
00:42:00
Speaker
That's a very different thing. So for trying to learn from sources that are, you know, super corporatized, it's not going to be as applicable because we don't care about the theory. Like we care about how does this get me more clients?
00:42:19
Speaker
That's so funny. It's like you're trying to prove yourself to the boss, but you are the boss. Right. Oh my God. Okay. So I was going to ask you if you have a magic wand, ideally, where would you see your business in three months, 90 days? I'm always looking at reach.
00:42:38
Speaker
because I feel like I know I've impacted a lot of people, but I also know the vast majority of people I've never interacted with once. So I would say,
00:42:56
Speaker
I double all my numbers. My email list, my, um, I don't really care as much about social media following, uh, like my members and my membership. That's, that's what I would do. In a nutshell, what do you teach in your membership? I know you mentioned, you know, the messaging and then the email marketing.
00:43:20
Speaker
Yeah. So it's all structured around the six figure wedding business roadmap. So the first part of it, we're looking at how do we get more of your ideal clients and book them? So what does your marketing look like? How do we make sure we're bringing them in? And then we address the inevitable next problem of now I've booked all these people and I have no time and I'm going to kill myself in this business. I'm working 80 hours a week. So,
00:43:46
Speaker
We focus on getting your time back, getting systems in place. And then we focus next on scaling and starting to really be the CEO of your business, being able to delegate to team members, to hand things off and just start to free up your space to work as little as you want or really just form the business around the life you wanna live because that's different for all of us.
00:44:17
Speaker
Yeah. Be the CEO of your company, not an employee. I hear that. I know you're all about that and I really respect that because we don't want to be working all the time and photographers get overwhelmed very fast because there's a lot of things you have to do. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, if I had to sit and edit as much as you guys do, there's no way.
00:44:42
Speaker
Outsource as much as you can.
Resources and Podcast Conclusion
00:44:44
Speaker
Totally. Okay, so I guess last question. Say you're a wedding photographer or pro and right now you're listening to this and you're just like, okay, I got to work on my messaging, maybe reach out to Heidi or Carissa. But I'm not hearing anyone, I'm not getting inquiries. What would they do like today, maybe one or two things?
00:45:07
Speaker
Okay, so you're gonna go to this download and you're gonna grab this interview framework. So it'll be at theweddingbusinesscollective.com slash heck yes. You're gonna download that, you're gonna go through this process of identifying your best people and asking them questions. Because people come to me all the time, they're like, should I advertise here? Should I do this? Like, how should I be getting my people?
00:45:35
Speaker
The answer is it depends. It depends on where your ideal client is. And usually if you're not attracting them, it's because you're not baking yourself.
00:45:48
Speaker
you know, the go-to person for them. So this is gonna solve those problems and it's gonna show you, okay, now we have this information, what do we do with it? How do we change things to make sure, okay, the website needs to immediately speak to them. You know, you land on the website, is it super clear that you're the go-to person for who you wanna be the go-to person for? And when you make that change,
00:46:14
Speaker
And that's usually a one-time change that you make in your business. It is a huge, huge cascade effect where you will attract more and more and more of your ideal clients that will be happy to pay more to work with you because you are the specialist. You are the person that has the solution that they've been searching for and everybody else can take photos. That was definitely my audiogram right there. Mic drop.
00:46:44
Speaker
For sure. It's like, boom. Okay, so tell everyone where to find you and how to work with you because I want to work with you right now, girl. So my home online is evolveyourweddingbusiness.com. You can find out all about how you can work with me there. You can see my new website coming very soon. Super excited about it. I think August 8th, I think we're rolling it out.
00:47:11
Speaker
But you can find out about the podcast there. You can go to Carissa's link to sign up for Book More Wedding Summit, which I hope you'll enjoy. Totally free event. You're going to get to learn from, like I said, I think we have 29 presentations right now and some awesome sponsors who are doing some cool stuff as well.
00:47:35
Speaker
You definitely won't want to miss that. That happens August 22nd through the 26th. I'm so excited. Thank you for coming on my podcast and I hope to come on yours one day. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, Heidi.
00:47:54
Speaker
Thanks for joining me this week on Get a Heck Yes with Carissa Wu. Make sure to follow, subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend about the show. Take a screenshot and post to IG. Tag me. Also, don't forget to download my free guide on how to become a lead generating machine. See you next time, wedding pros.