Ever find yourself stuck in a rut, communicating with clients in the same old way? Today I'm here to share a goldmine of insights from a recent workshop experience that will supercharge your client interactions. Transform your approach with personalized techniques that make each couple's wedding day as unique as their love story.
Imagine your brand embodying values that resonate on a deeply personal level with your audience. That's what we're diving into, from the heartfelt impact of handwritten notes to the modern flair of personalized videos. These are the touches that have shaped my business and can redefine yours too. Plus, I'm extending an exclusive invitation for a 30-minute business audit session with yours truly—to give your brand that extra edge. All you have to do is leave a review and email me at hello@carinhunt.com.
Celebrate the entrepreneurship journey with me, connect with your clients on a deeper level, and watch your business soar.
Connect with the experts:
Sara Dunn
Just Bloom School
Christy Townsend
Alex Stark
Gwen Tinsley
CONNECT WITH CARIN:
Hey CEO! Join us over at our new membership the Success Cellar 🍾 - exclusively for growth-minded wedding pros just like you!
Enjoy your first month for only $7 with code CELEBRATE7 or click here
Ever find yourself stuck in a rut, communicating with clients in the same old way? Today I'm here to share a goldmine of insights from a recent workshop experience that will supercharge your client interactions. Transform your approach with personalized techniques that make each couple's wedding day as unique as their love story.
Imagine your brand embodying values that resonate on a deeply personal level with your audience. That's what we're diving into, from the heartfelt impact of handwritten notes to the modern flair of personalized videos. These are the touches that have shaped my business and can redefine yours too. Plus, I'm extending an exclusive invitation for a 30-minute business audit session with yours truly—to give your brand that extra edge. All you have to do is leave a review and email me at hello@carinhunt.com.
Celebrate the entrepreneurship journey with me, connect with your clients on a deeper level, and watch your business soar.
Connect with the experts:
Sara Dunn
Just Bloom School
Christy Townsend
Alex Stark
Gwen Tinsley
CONNECT WITH CARIN:
Hey CEO! Join us over at our new membership the Success Cellar 🍾 - exclusively for growth-minded wedding pros just like you!
Enjoy your first month for only $7 with code CELEBRATE7 or click here
Hello and welcome back to the podcast. It's your host, karen Hunt, and I'm just coming back from Ohio, which was a bit chilly and a bit rainy, and it seems like I have brought that chill right back to the Florida keys. So I'm sitting here, I'm all cozyed up in my hot pink sweats, and what I want to bring to you today are a few tidbits that I have picked up over conversations, lessons learned, where I'm finding that there is a magic touch, maybe even a formula, to the way that we speak to others, so that they feel seen and they feel excited that you take the time to ask the right questions, to understand where they're coming from and really want to help them with their end goals. So, when we're talking about our couples, every couple is different and while each wedding has similar bones, right, similar timelines and you know the vendor list typically looks about the same unless we're adding on, you know a lot of different specialties there is a core to each event that looks very similar. That being said, I can tell you I've worked with hundreds of couples and they're all different. All of them are different. All of them have different priorities, they have different stories, they have different parts of their lives that they want to highlight or unite on their day.
Speaker 1:So let's talk a little bit about what I learned specifically over the workshop that I attended up in Ohio. So there were a couple of key people that I want to mention here. Right, so we had our speakers Sarah Dunn you know her as the SEO expert for our industry. Sarah Lagriteria, who is with Just Bloom School, and I'm going to share with you just a little tidbit of what she brought to the table. Alex Stark, who is a burnout coach, and then Christy Townsend, of course, with the paper vow, who has been on the podcast before and has really helped us understand a little bit more about the high touch moments in our businesses. And I'll go ahead. All of you head down to the show notes If there's anything you hear that resonates with you. For any of these people, you can learn more about them. Their links are down there. One other person I'm going to mention to is Gwen Tinsley, who's been assisting me personally when it comes to sales and selling and, as you know, I'm really big into the marketing aspects, specifically word of mouth marketing, and a lot of that gets real involved here in the way that we speak and the way that we talk about ourselves and our business, and then it goes further from there, it goes into the actual sale, and so I definitely have to mention her as well. Okay, again, check everybody out down in the notes.
Speaker 1:So let's get into it. Over the past two, three months, we've really been digging into our onboarding process, taking those leads that are coming in from engagement season, and let me tell you, if it's felt a little slow, it's because people are window shopping right now. It should be right about now that you're starting to pull those leads in and see those leads come through. And if you're not, lean in a little closer to this episode, because I'm going to tell you a little bit about why we're not maybe seeing those conversions from lead to client. The first thing that I'm going to talk to you about is kind of where you're showing up and where you're putting in the majority of your time. So, if you are looking at your business big picture, let's be a CEO, sit in your CEO seat right, pull on your CEO pants, as I like to say, and let's look at your business big picture. Where is it that you're showing up?
Speaker 1:Usually, when I ask this question, the answer is Instagram and Instagram is becoming like the word authenticity, like I'm just kind of I hear it and I get a little bit anxious around it, because, really, instagram you should consider as your portfolio and we spend so much time on a platform where we're told constantly that users have a two second attention span and only 1% of those users are really seeing what you're posting. So why do we spend so much time there? Because the influences around us are telling us Instagram, instagram, instagram. But the reality of it is that our home is where Our home on, in our online presence, is going to be our website, and when people are searching on Google and Pinterest and Yahoo and all these different search engines, where are they going to find us? They're going to find us on our website and that's where we're going to find all the information.
Speaker 1:So my suggestion to you is to go ahead, go down, follow Ms Sarah Dunn and learn a little bit about SEO. And what's really interesting and I talked about this with Taylor Qsikhalman as well last year is that we're coming into a shift in technology, especially with AI, where we need to be telling a story in our SEO. It's not just as easy as posting your geographical location, posting the word wedding planner right. We really need to get very specific in what we're telling the SEO robots of the world. As Sarah mentions that we need to be explaining some. This is what we do. This is what our images look like. This is exactly what my company does and how we serve people, so that when couple A goes in and types in looking for a wedding in the Houston area for outdoor setting that our if that is you that your website is coming up.
Speaker 1:And so, when it comes to these magic conversations that I'm talking about, it starts on the back end of your business. So it starts where we're having those communications, with the people who are searching for us, and it's been said that we need to have seven to 18, I've heard as high as 36 touch points on a lead before they make a decision, before they decide, yes, no, I'm interested, I'm not interested. So what are the conversations look like from a lead's perspective when they're looking at your marketing? Are you just fully selling to them? Are you sharing valuable information? Are you sharing about yourself and about your team and what your values are, or are you just asking for the sale? And it's not that asking for the sale is a bad thing. It's just not the first thing that we need to do, because you have to build that like no trust factor that we've talked about from day one.
Speaker 1:The next person I want to talk about is Sarah Lagriteria, if I can say her name right. She's with Just Bloom School, which is a really interesting company. It is not necessarily a wedding industry based, but she really looks at the psychology and scientific evidence around creativity and she even said that we begin to lose our sense of creativity around the age of nine. Uncomfortable for us to hear as creative entrepreneurs, when a lot of our business is based off of the creativity that we bring to the surface to attract those ideal clients, right? So this Sarah I know we have two Sarah's. Just to make this confusing, sarah L, we'll say she brought us a workshop and I'm going to go over it very lightly and again, if you're interested in checking more out about her, her studies are incredibly interesting.
Speaker 1:One of the things that she had us do was sit next to each other and had us answer a simple question. I believe the question was what do you like to do outside of work? Like just a very simple question. You could do this with probably any question, and she had us ask our partners, who had just answered the question, more questions around who, what, when, where Not asking why and not asking how, but asking the other questions to see if we could get to the root of the why. Does that make sense? And by doing this, a lot of times, what happens is you connect with your client on a deeper level than any other vendor will, and you connect with your client in a way that tells them that you care, that you're listening, that they are heard, and what is a result of that is you're able to create a unique experience for them based off of their why, and what was very interesting in the exercise is oftentimes the why that you come up with as the questioner is just as valid, but not what the client is actually thinking. So they become even more excited and surprised that you can get them, that you understand them, just based off of asking all these other questions and getting to a new perspective on what their why is, and so that was incredibly exciting to see.
Speaker 1:And finally, I wanted to chat with you a little bit more about the high touch. This is something that's so powerful, and I know that some of you roll your eyes and we say write a letter, write a letter, say thank you, and it's something that I do and I'll continue to do. But what I want you to continue to keep in mind are those brand values that we talked about back in an earlier episode. I'll link that episode below too. It's the most important thing you can do for your business is to build your brand values. So if you haven't done that yet, after this, just dive right into that episode and do the exercise.
Speaker 1:I teach it live, I teach it here on the podcast for free, I teach it in the success seller, and it's something I will continuously do in my own business, because what happens is you pull these five values that you're able to use as your North Star and when you're writing to somebody personally and you're able to pull from your brand values also, adding gratitude, adding value, like all of that wrapped up in a beautiful bow, feels so yummy to the client, to the lead. So if you are able to capture a lead's address, mailing address, right or if you're able to send them a voice memo, or if you're able to send them a video, maybe they were curious about how their timeline would go, and so you decide to create a loom just for them saying their name. There's so many ways that we can still do high touch, even if it's using technology, but if you're able to have something that they can hold in their hands. I once had a client and this was pre-COVID I had a client who said that they booked with my company because I gave them something that they could walk away with. Everybody else was digital and they were able to walk away and take the information I gave them and put it in a binder and they were able to feel and see and read through it and share it with their friends and family.
Speaker 1:And yes, we are going in a digital age and it should still be available in that capacity, because we do have a new generation coming. But we are tired of staring at the screen everybody. I mean, what is the? If you're looking at the top mentors in the industry, what do they do? As soon as they're done with their day, they turn their computer off. Many of them even take their phones and they put them into like they put them into an end table or leave them in their office, because the screen time is taking away from those moments where we're able to connect with people, and the more that we're stuck in the digital age, the more that we forget to pull in our brand values, to pull in those magical questions that we can ask. We're so eager to get to the root that we just go straight for the why, that we just go straight for a quick thank you email so that we can get on with our day.
Speaker 1:But what if we set aside the idea that time is money? In fact, we're not going to set it aside, we're going to lean into it. We're going to say, if time is money, why don't we spend more time nurturing and engaging with these people who are supporting our business? We must have clients to have a business, so there is that selfish side to it. But what if we put that away, locked that up in a box, and instead thought of it as what valuable time I have connecting with these people, to learn more about them, to serve them in the best way possible, so that we can do this over and over and over again and truly be creative entrepreneurs instead of just business people. I'm going to leave you with that.
Speaker 1:There was a lot of thought in this. There's so much that I have learned over the past three months from these beautiful people and I continue to learn and grow and pull in these insights from the other thought leaders, as they do with me, because we must continue growing and developing. Yeah, there's a new age coming in. Right, we have this Gen Z that is coming in and starting to work with us, starting to hire us, and we have to continue to grow. And I think, to grow we have to slow down a little bit.
Speaker 1:So automate what you should, but really lean into those moments that matter most. I am celebrating your business, I am celebrating you and I'm wishing you a win. If you loved this episode, please, please, please, share it with a friend like. Review it. It just helps us get to be in front of more and more people. In fact, if you review it, I would be happy to give you a 30 minute one on one session where we can audit your business and help you get to the next level. All right, you guys have a beautiful day and we'll see you on the next episode.