Fact: DRY SPELLS ARE AN INEVITABLE PART OF RUNNING A BUSINESS

No matter how long your career, or how successful your wedding business, there will be times along the way when work loads and enquiries slow down. Of course it is super important to consider and effectively oversee your company’s financial health, but it is also necessary to fully understand that some slower periods will be as a result of various factors outside of your control – things like seasonal trends, holidays and national events, global economics and world politics.

Whilst it's easy to feel a sense of anxiety or panic when these happen, it's actually providing you with a rare opportunity for you to develop and refine your business. From developing new packages, to spending more time on vision planning or marketing strategies. It's a great time to enable you to do more of a deep dive into often overlooked "to do" lists like gathering client testimonials, SEO updates and blogging.

While we know it can feel scary, we would urge you not to let dwindling turnover get the better of you, and instead take the time to pause and reflect, realign your long term goals and set your business up for future success.

In this article, we suggest five things you can do proactively when business is slow to make necessary improvements to your business, and help manage your stress.

1. Update your website portfolio

When you’re busy working on projects, travelling to weddings, delivering services and creating products, the very last thing on your mind is often your online images and write up of work outside of social media updates. Now is a great time to upgrade your website portfolio (or create one if that's still on your to do list!). A fresh content update is a significant step towards supporting your digital marketing strategy. It may well be that you also want update or change your current website design or platform, and now would be the perfect time to implement that too - give yourself the time to focus and test it thoroughly. Prepare all of your (unique) copy and imagery in advance to keep any "website under construction" or changeover time's to a minimum.

2. Re-package your services

When first starting out, most wedding suppliers tend to price themselves below their competitors and increase over time without much consideration to profit margins and market changes. The liklihood is that you may have already built a solid reputation for your business using that strategy but you also need to consider other sustainable income strategies. Consider having multiple packages or products for different prices, and implementing a more regular billing cycle with instalments rather than charging a deposit and final payment closer to the wedding day and your delivery. You may want to explore offering much smaller but still profitable bitesize services or digital products so you can continue to scale your business but also increase cash flow with passive income while pursuing higher fee paying clients and those larger projects.

3. Create & refine your marketing plans

In our online webinar and "transform your wedding business" course we explain in depth different traditional and digital marketing strategies for you to consider using for your business to attract quality enquiries and bookings. If you haven’t already, make sure you are able to access Google Analytics for your website and take a good look at your statistics. It's a really useful way to identify what content, other websites, social media platforms and searches are bringing the most traffic to your website. It's really useful to take time out to review your past activity, and assess what you are doing right, before creating new plans to move forward with as part of an overall strategy to reach your business goals both short and long term.

4. Spend time on your search engine optimisation (SEO)

A slow down or dry spell in the market can be a sobering reminder that your marketing reach is limited. Officially SEO should be part of your overall digital marketing plan, but we think it deserves a special mention here. Educate yourself on SEO basics with resources like our FREE mini guide and have a read of the guides available on sites like Backlinko. Spend time making sure you have the basics covered - from Headings to Alt Tags and backlinks!

5. Take a course or find a coach

There is no better time to invest in learning, dedicate time to furture proofing, and really refine your skills. Are there specific things you struggle with on a day-to-day basis? Perhaps there is software that you struggle to use effectively? Or maybe you want to expand or specialise in a new areas of expertise? There are so many online learning communities and mentoring guides out there, so put your best foot forward and find one that will give you the most value. There are websites that are free to join and offer tens of thousands of courses that you can participate in without leaving the comfort of your home. Finding someone to mentor and coach you one-to-one can be a huge boost to morale and support in putting plans into practice.