Wedding Industry Insights: where do quality enquiries come from?

Where do quality wedding enquiries come from? Well isn’t that the million dollar question.

Whether you’re inundated with wedding enquiries of a mixed quality or are struggling to get enough leads to your inbox, it would be pretty handy to know exactly where you should be focusing your efforts and resources to guarantee the best quality enquiries, wouldn’t it?

Well we’re here to tell you that if you can invest a little more time in being strategic in your approach to lead generation and begin to build insights around your target audience’s behaviours you could very quickly streamline your marketing efforts so that they focus on the channels that bring YOU your best enquiries.

What does a good quality enquiry look like to your wedding business?

Before we look at where you can find quality enquiries you must first determine what you consider to be a high quality enquiry for your wedding business.

We use a traffic light system to categorise the types of enquiries we typically receive and to determine where they fit in our priority list. This helps us to decide where to allocate our resource.

Here’s what a traffic light system could look like for your business:

Green = newly engaged couples with a wedding date, location and budget in mind

Amber = couples who seem to be contacting many suppliers to ‘get a feel’ for what is on offer

Red = secret shoppers or individuals reluctant to give you much information about themselves

Once you’ve established what a good lead looks like for your business it’s time to go through your enquiry database from the past few months or year (depending on the volume of enquiries you’ve received – you should ensure you’re working with a large enough sample size) and organise your enquiries into categories to see which channel has been working well for you historically, over the short-medium term.

Determining where to allocate your resources

It is important not to entirely dismiss a channel that appears to be delivering lower quality enquiries unless the volume for that channel is also very low.

High volume enquiry channels mean exposure. You’re getting noticed. These channels are worth closer inspection to see if there’s anything you could be doing to filter your enquiries further and ensure only the ‘Green’ enquiries make it through to your inbox.

This is the formula we use to help us decide how to approach each channel, post enquiry analysis:

High volume, low quality = opportunity

High volume, high quality = lead gold

Low volume, high quality = opportunity

Low volume, low quality = dead wood

The ‘lead gold’ channels are the ones you simply cannot do without and they’re the ones that are already working well for you. Take a closer look at these channels and make sure you’re doing all you can to make sure they continue to work well for you.

The ‘opportunity’ channels are there for your exploration. You’ll need to invest time and effort into optimising your business presence on these channels in an attempt to generate higher quality leads and filter out the Red enquiries altogether. Make sure you set yourself a deadline to revisit and re-measure the success or failure of ‘opportunity’ channels. You should be looking for short-medium term improvements in their performance to justify your resources being invested there.

The ‘dead wood’ channels are those that have consistently delivered poor quality leads and disappointing volumes for a prolonged period of time. You should cut your losses with these channels and allocate your resources elsewhere, where they’ll be more impactful.

Taking a closer look at key lead-generation channels 

Company website

Your website should be a high quality enquiry generator. It will most probably fall within the lower volume, high quality category which means there’s a definite opportunity to work on optimising your website and increasing traffic to it.

And more relevant traffic to your website means more, high quality leads.

Tip: read Using local SEO to attract local brides and grooms.

Social media

Social media is a tricky medium to call in terms of predicted success rate as it depends entirely on your objective for each social channel.

Many wedding professionals find Linked In is great for networking with fellow suppliers but it’s certainly not a channel for attracting couples.

Facebook and Instagram are probably the best two social platforms for attracting newly engaged couples however actually generating quality enquiries on social platforms is tough.

The fundamental nature of social media is that of fast content consumption and skim reading behaviour, and your messages are broadcast to a vast, broad audience which means it’s a lot trickier to use social channels as lead generation platforms.

Social media is better placed as an attraction tool – helping your wedding business improve local exposure so that couples want to find out more about your wedding business rather than make an instant enquiry off of the back of a social post.

Wedding directories

It is commonly believed that enquiries coming through third party websites such as wedding directories are of poorer quality and that couples enquiring through these channels are just looking for discounts and cheaper suppliers, regardless of whether they’re professional or not.

This kind of stereotyping is harmful, as it deprives many wedding pro’s of an excellent opportunity to benefit from a high volume of quality leads. As mentioned above, where high volume is concerned there is at the very least an opportunity to receive excellent quality enquiries if you approach featuring on wedding directories in the correct way.

Choose the right third party platform. A UK based platform such as Bridebook focuses on location based searches to ensure couples searching for wedding suppliers are shown the most relevant wedding companies possible. This is good for couples and it’s good for you.

Most wedding planning platforms are free for suppliers to register with. You can feature your wedding business on Bridebook completely free which means the risk associated with receiving what you deem to be a low quality lead is minimised because you’re not actually paying anything for it.

Optimise your business profile by adding tons of relevant information about your wedding services, location, pricing and reviews. This is likely to get you noticed in search, help filter out any time wasters and ensure you only receive informed enquiries from couples with real intent to book your wedding services.

It’s important to be where your clients are

If we could ask our readers to take away one key thing from this article it would be to remember that your business is unique and that what works for you may be very different to what works for a fellow wedding supplier.

Of course, sharing tips between wedding pro’s is helpful but be sure not to let preconceived ideas about certain channels discourage you from trying them out.

As long as you adopt a strategic approach to identifying which channels work best for your wedding business and you ensure that your wedding business has a presence where your potential clients are hanging out, you can’t go far wrong.

Remember, millennial couples behave differently to the generations before them and you need to be where they are. This generation of newly engaged couples will browse wedding services and suppliers on multiple platforms. They will do their research and use tools such as Bridebook to ensure they’re getting the best supplier for the best value.

It’s now up to you to be strategic in your approach to choosing where to feature your wedding business. Be where your audience are and provide tons of useful information to filter out the ‘Q&A via email’ process.

Do these things and you’ll snare the highest quality enquiries in the wedding industry.