How to Stand Out in a Crowded Market with Heidi Thompson

Stand out from your competition as the top choice for your ideal clients, no matter how much you charge and join Heidi's FREE LIVE CHALLENGE MAY 20TH! The Stand Out and Get Booked Challenge

Today, we're here with Heidi Thompson. She's the bestselling author of "Clone Your Best Clients" and the founder of Evolve Your Wedding Business, where she specializes in business and marketing strategy for wedding professionals. Heidi helps wedding professionals grow their businesses and reach their goals without going crazy in the process. Her business and marketing expertise have been featured on several wedding and business outlets, including the Huffington Post, social media, Examiner, Wedding Business Magazine, HoneyBook, WeddingWire World, and she serves on the advisory board for the UK Academy of Wedding and Event Planning.

My favorite topics that we covered in this episode include:

• How to Stand Out in a Crowded Market: The importance of standing out in the wedding industry, where differentiation is key to attracting clients and avoiding price shopping.
• How to Understand who your Ideal Clients are and tailoring your marketing efforts to resonate with them. This involves identifying the specific problems your clients face and presenting your business as the solution.
• How to Create Compelling Service Packages: By crafting service packages that effectively communicate value and address clients' needs, wedding professionals can attract more clients and command higher prices. The challenge lies in articulating the unique value proposition clearly on service pages.
• How to Build Trust with Transparencyin Pricing: How transparent pricing builds trust with potential clients and reduces friction in the booking process.

More About Heidi Thompson:
Evolve Your Wedding Business: https://evolveyourweddingbusiness.com
Follow Heidi on IG: https://www.instagram.com/evolveyourweddingbusiness/
Get Heidi's book, "Clone Your Best Clients" https://www.amazon.com/Clone-Your-Best-Clients-Guesswork/dp/0692878238

Chapters

• 0:00 Wedding Business Coaching and Strategy
• 12:27 Standing Out in a Crowded Market
• 23:10 Effective Pricing and Sales Page Strategies

Transcript

Mike Zabrin: 0:00

If you're a wedding pro, then you know Heidi Thompson is the best-selling author of Clone your Best Client Marketing Strategist and Wedding Business Coach. She's also the host of the Evolve your Wedding Business podcast. And this is how to stand out in a crowded market.

Speaker 2: 0:17

Hey, are you a wedding pro?

Mike Zabrin: 0:41

I am hanging out with the wedding industry's most forefront leaders each week for a month. So if you want to learn more about my upcoming guests for the Business of Weddings Mastermind Series, go to wwwfunktasticchatscom. So today we're here with Heidi Thompson. So today we're here with Heidi Thompson. She's the bestselling author of Clone your Best Clients and the founder of Evolve your Wedding Business, where she specializes in businesses and marketing strategy for wedding professionals. She helps wedding professionals grow their businesses and reach their goals without going crazy in the process. Her business and marketing expertise has been featured on several wedding and business outlets, including the Huffington Post, social Media, examiner, wedding Business Magazine, honeybook, weddingwireworld, and she's an advisory board for the UK Academy of Wedding and Event Planning. Hey, heidi, thanks for coming on the podcast today.

Heidi Thompson: 1:40

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Mike Zabrin: 1:43

Of course. I heard so much about you through so many different channels. I heard you on Alan Berg's podcast. I saw you had Mark Chapman on your podcast, who is like the if you don't know him, he's like the OG of wedding business advertising. I call it with the I Do Society Instagram, so I knew I had to have you on and over the years I've just been so fascinated with the business side of weddings and just curious, maybe to start off, how did you go from being a wedding pro yourself to developing a marketing strategy for other wedding pros?

Heidi Thompson: 2:17

Yeah. So it's like this long and winding journey that only really makes sense in the rear view right, and I got started in event planning in nonprofit. I found my way into wedding planning, really enjoyed that. It was around that time that I myself got married. I moved to the UK. I started to like pay really close attention to what was happening in the market there, Because meanwhile in the background, all of this like my nine to five was in marketing.

Heidi Thompson: 2:47

So it always interested me and always fascinated me and I saw a gap in the market and I knew I didn't want to plan weddings anymore. I love the logistical aspect, I love the design aspect. I do not like the people aspect. I'm too chill. I'm like guys, this is not a big deal, Like you can't have that kind of energy with with being a wedding planner or people just start to drive you crazy.

Heidi Thompson: 3:16

But I noticed this gap in the market in the UK and this was around 2011. And this was around the time where rock and roll bride, offbeat bride were really blowing up. It was that millennial shift into very personalized weddings, very focused on the couple and their interests and what they wanted, and the market was not responding to that. So I saw the opportunity to create a wedding show, a wedding fair, to bring couples and these incredibly talented vendors together, and then I found myself spending a bunch of time coaching them on, helping them make the most of it and get a better return on investment. And that's where it like dawned on me that not everybody is just interested in marketing and also has a wedding business. So it's like this convergence of worlds.

Mike Zabrin: 4:11

I love digging into evolve your wedding business because, for example, when I was in music school, there was coursework and masterclasses and lessons and with the end goal to me make a living off being a musician. But after music school, coming in the wedding industry, I really think that you are the only business I've seen out there that truly gives you all the resources and teachings to be a CEO, your own boss, in the wedding industry. You have the best of the best collaborating with you on these courses and I was wondering if you could talk more about what Evolve your Wedding Business is today.

Heidi Thompson: 4:47

Yeah, and thank you for your kind words. I appreciate that. So I started Evolve your Wedding Business off the back of this realization that I needed to bring these worlds together, and in the beginning it was one-on-one coaching, it was courses. The way it has evolved today is the way I work with people is primarily through my membership, the Wedding Business Collective, where I've brought all of the coaching and courses and resources together, because I found that people who were doing one-on-one coaching needed the education. People who were doing the education needed the coaching. So it was like, okay, we need to just bring this together into one place.

Heidi Thompson: 5:31

And then I started, like a month into the pandemic, I had my first online summit which I've had I think about 10 of them now focusing on helping wedding professionals book more weddings. And then the other one is focusing on helping wedding professionals in the CEO role. So what does that mean for you in terms of how you manage your work and how you manage your own brain and do we build a team and what happens to the actual business side of things? Because I am not here to teach anyone like you to be a better musician. I don't know how to do that, but my focus is on helping people book more of the weddings that they want with the people that they want, and also build a business that gives them freedom and flexibility. That's a really important piece to me, because if you're working 80-hour weeks all the time, that's not what I consider to be a successful business, no matter how much money you're making, because you have no life and that's not fun.

Mike Zabrin: 6:42

I did not realize that until I got engaged and my fiance was like you literally have to turn it off If I wasn't here. You would just go from sunup to sundown every single day and through my relationship with her I finally got some work-life balance if I wanted to have well, any future with her. So I totally can relate to that, and I read that your clients in particular. The average time they get back per week is something like five to eight hours per week, and that adds up like crazy. Yeah, so that's really meaningful, being able to get that time back.

Mike Zabrin: 7:18

The question for me is that it's one thing to get your time back, but also what do you do with it to want to work on your business instead of in your business? Because we hired additional people this year so that I could free up more of my time, and then I found myself just nitpicking Instagram and nitpicking TikTok, and then I found myself playing video games for two days. I have no idea what to do with my life here and I was just feeling lost, even though I got what I wanted. I got my time back, and so do you help entrepreneurs not only get their time back, but also realize what their goal is and how to achieve that goal as well.

Heidi Thompson: 7:57

Yeah, and that goal is really important to me because my goal I don't have kids. My goal in my business is going to be different to someone who has three young kids and they want to be able to shut down by two 30 and spend the rest of the day with their kids. Everybody's different and you can build a business to support any life that you want, but you have to be intentional about it. You have to know what you're working toward, know what you're building to, because the right or wrong thing for anybody in any business is really going to depend on what you want. I think a lot of what you said. Like, when we get into working on the business, I think a lot of people get stuck on what they are supposed to do. They don't really know what it is that they're supposed to do.

Heidi Thompson: 8:46

So the way I structure things is so we first put together your marketing plan. Basically, everything I teach people has this delineation between CEO mode and worker mode. If you can make as many decisions as possible in CEO mode, that makes your work infinitely easier. So when we create a marketing plan, we're making all the decisions. Not just I'm going to market on Instagram, it's. I'm going to market on Instagram because I found out, that's where my people are, that's where I'm getting the best leads and because of that, this is what I'm doing. I'm doing these kinds of posts this many times a week. This day of the month, I'm going to set aside and do these like you're making all of the decisions, so that you just get to show up and do the work. And I think, whether you're working on marketing or any other piece of the business, if you can separate decision-making and strategy from actually doing things, it gets so much easier.

Mike Zabrin: 9:52

Was it kind of a natural process for you expanding, Evolve your Wedding business? Because when I was about to submit a contact form, it was like join this community of 6,000 wedding pros. I was like, wow, that is a crazy community. It just sounds amazing. And was it a pretty natural thing where just one person just kept telling another person about it? What was the journey like for you building this?

Heidi Thompson: 10:16

It was weird in the beginning because I was one of the first people in the industry doing it, so there wasn't as much of an education industry within the wedding industry at that point, and the tech wasn't great either. So, like looking back at the tools they had available then versus now, it's okay. Wow, that's a huge difference. So the first several years were very much organic yeah, working with different people, getting in front of different audiences, and since it was really when we did the first summit in 2020, the size of the community that I have exploded exponentially because that event, that first event we had it was about 3000 wedding pros attended and it was worldwide, because it's an online summit and then, like, speakers from all over the world are pulling in people from all over the world. So that really took things up a notch from, like kind of the steady growth of the general audience that I have to what happened after that. It was a big shift.

Mike Zabrin: 11:38

Okay, speaking of shift, and you said shift in 2020. And this is one of the questions I wanted to ask you here is that last year was really the first season where you could do a wedding and there were no COVID restrictions. And all these brides who just hoarded money since 2020, ready for this big reception, this big party, what kind of shift have you noticed so far that you've heard from other wedding pros or just seen yourself? This year, in 2024, compared to last year, have you noticed the industry shift?

Heidi Thompson: 12:10

Yeah. So it's interesting because I haven't been able to find like a clear pattern of like maybe a certain vendor type experiencing something or a certain region experiencing something. It's like bits and pieces in every region experiencing different things. So I've heard from a lot of people that their leads are slower or they're getting leads and there's a longer lead time, not making decisions as quickly. I've heard from some people that they feel like people are more they're conscious of the amount of money that they're spending. And it's interesting because over the past few months, I've been hearing this from people and you know I had mentioned to you like it's weird because these are all I think. We think these are like individual things, but they're all symptoms and the thing that I'm seeing that they're all symptoms of is people not standing out.

Heidi Thompson: 13:15

And we are in a transition in the industry where it used to be if you got a referral, they were going to book you, and now we're seeing people getting referrals and not booking those referrals because these people are doing more research they're looking at okay, let's see, let's check out your website, let's check out your social media, see more about what you're all about, and if I think that's a good fit or not.

Heidi Thompson: 13:42

It's not like this automatic thing that I feel like it used to be. So we're finding people be I don't want to say more selective. I think they're looking for a point of differentiation to make their decisions easier, but they're not finding it. And actually, before we jumped on, I was recording a podcast episode for my own podcast and it was with a social media expert, but she is engaged and she mentioned I can't tell the difference between a lot of these people. I have all these tabs open and I really don't know the difference. So then it boils down to okay, who gets back to me first or who's the cheapest, and that's not necessarily where we want to be focusing.

Mike Zabrin: 14:31

Yeah, I think it was your podcast. I was listening to where you were like, if you can copy and paste all of your content on somebody else's website and it just looks fine, that means that you're you are not standing out. And actually when I went to your website anytime I see those colors I'm instantly going to think Heidi Thompson for the rest of my life. How do you go about standing out in a market where it's already so crowded already?

Heidi Thompson: 14:56

So I take it back to what I call the foundation of your business and that's who do you want to be the go-to person for? Who's your ideal client? Who are we talking to? Who do you want to book? Because every decision you make about the content you create, the things you talk about, the way you differentiate yourself comes back to that. Because what has to happen for anyone to buy anything is to see okay, this company is to see okay, this company understands my problem and they have a solution for my problem. And this is how that works.

Heidi Thompson: 15:45

The crazy thing in the industry right now is you can use a somewhat rudimentary way of communicating that, like we're not insurance companies. That's hard as hell to differentiate. It is relatively easy to say we're the go-to band for couples who want X, y, z, if you can fill that in, if you can understand what that is for them. And, by the way, most of the time we base that on assumptions and it's almost always wrong, myself included. I come up with oh, I'm going to do this thing in my business because people want this thing. No, that's not. I don't understand the problem because I'm not in those shoes. Like, I've been in business this length of time. I can't put myself back in a position of someone who's just getting started or, you know, is going through something different.

Heidi Thompson: 16:44

So what I take people through in my membership is actually identifying the people that you've worked with that you wish you could clone and work with over and over again, and talking to them and asking them why they made the decisions they made. And almost always you're going to find out you're at least a little bit wrong, because what I find is every vendor has their thing. Like planners think that they get hired because they take stress off of their couples, and bands get hired because they think the couple wants to have a killer reception. And while that can be true, it's not the whole story.

Heidi Thompson: 17:31

So there was one band I worked with and the thing that they found out when they started really talking to their people about why did you know you decide to work with us instead of someone else it had to do with not just having a killer reception but being able to get mom and dad on the dance floor, being able to get grandma on the dance floor, having that breadth of catalog that they could pull from.

Heidi Thompson: 18:00

That it wouldn't just focus on one group or another and there's probably a lot of bands that have that, but this was the only band that was saying we are for you if you want. You and your friends want to be on the dance floor. You want mom and dad on the dance floor, you want grandma on the dance floor. You don't want to alienate anybody with your music choices. And then someone sees that and they're like that's exactly what I wanted and it becomes like an apples to oranges kind of comparison. It's like I could hire these other bands, but this band has exactly what I want. It's exactly that solution to the problem that I have.

Mike Zabrin: 18:41

Vendors in the past who I've had on here to chat with me. The common word is always luxury when defining their ideal client, and I wonder if you could talk about that, because luxury seems very vague to me and also maybe scaring your right couples away.

Heidi Thompson: 19:03

Oh, it absolutely could be, if they don't see themselves that way, if they don't identify with that language, which is why it's important to understand, like, how do they talk about what they want? I don't know what it is in the industry this heavy focus on luxury because, okay, by definition, a wedding is a luxury, but I don't think most people getting married would describe it that way. People getting married would describe it that way, and if we're talking like true luxury weddings, like million dollar budget plus, that's such a small percent of the actual industry. And I think what most people want isn't that they don't want to work with those couples because, quite honestly, I've known people that work with those couples and they're a lot because of how much they're paying. But it's weird.

Heidi Thompson: 20:04

I feel like everyone just copycats each other in the terminology and the only person you should be copying is your client and the way they talk about it. And if they don't say I was looking for a luxury experience, okay, first of all, no human being talks like that, so you shouldn't be talking like that. You should be using their words. And I think it's funny Like we all have this access to absolute marketing gold in the heads of our favorite people, but we don't really think to tap into it and find out okay, why did you buy what was important to you and that can really make a big shift and a big distinction?

Mike Zabrin: 20:48

And a lot of our reviews, because each time we do a wedding, we ask a couple to leave us a testimonial on the knot and what any wire and Google and all that stuff. Very little of it is actually about the music. It's all about how great it was to work with us, how the process of working with us, the things because that is something that they they couldn't watch firsthand on youtube like of us compared to us performing, and so I think that's so interesting and a lot of I assume a lot of great content could be created by looking at reviews as well oh, absolutely, and like a great way to do that.

Heidi Thompson: 21:24

A very quick and easy way to do that is take all your reviews, go into chat gpt, explain to it who you are, what your business is, and then I'm going to give you some reviews from customers and I want you to tell me what they said, the most important things were, and it'll pull it out.

Mike Zabrin: 21:46

As far as pricing on your website, depending on what industry you're in, some vendors post them, like when we were looking for our wedding. When we were looking for photographers, every photographer had pricing listed right, but some other vendors don't at all. Across the board, it's very hard to find until you submit a contact form and they ask you to get on a phone call. What is your opinion in general about putting pricing on your website and through those listing sites, and is that a way to stand out in the market, depending on what the competition is doing, or are you shooting yourself in the foot because the people who reached out to you wouldn't know how much a wedding band costs and maybe they just see a big number and leave?

Heidi Thompson: 22:32

Yeah, it's funny because we think that. But then the opposite happens as well. You see no number and you're like well, I don't want to put myself in a situation where I have to tell someone to their face that I don't have the money to hire them. That's uncomfortable and a lot of people would just rather not enter into that conversation at all. And we've definitely seen through millennials being the main group, getting married into now Gen Z the opinion about transparent pricing is becoming more and more important. Just because it's okay, let's all be above board about this.

Heidi Thompson: 23:10

But I think there is there's a right and wrong way to do it. There's a way that shoots you in the foot where you're just slapping a number on there, and then there's a way where you are building context for the price. So you have a service page that is actually doing a lot of selling for you. That's using the copy on the page to build the value, to show exactly what you're going to get from this and how incredible the experience is going to be, so that by the time you get to the price, it feels either in line with what you were expecting or it feels like a deal. And that is just the power of like how you structure your service page and what you include.

Heidi Thompson: 23:54

It's like numbers without context are useless. So it's $20,000, a lot of money, like For a wedding band yeah, maybe For a brand new Ferrari, no. So you have to build. The context of this is why this costs this much and this is why it is worth the value in the copy and that's something. I review one member's website in my membership every month and that's something I probably talk about almost every month, like 11 months out of the year, because we have a training with a brilliant copywriter, ashlyn Carter, in there, where she talks about like the pieces of a sales page. A service page actually sells for you and it's a. It is an easy way to stand out. It's going to be work to put it together, but it's going to stand out because I very rarely see it being utilized in the industry.

Mike Zabrin: 25:00

If you want to check out what Heidi's Evolve your Wedding Business looks like. There's actually a Vimeo video where she walks you to the platform and all these cool features and all the courses and all this stuff. And the one that caught my eye was create a service package that sells for you, and I saw the text there and is it okay if I read the description really quick, I think?

Mike Zabrin: 25:22

it's like a really great description. So now that you know exactly what you're selling, you're going to use the power of copywriting to create a service page that does most of the selling for you. Most wedding pros don't do this, and it's a way to give you a huge leg up on your competition. I invited Ashlyn Carter to walk you through the parts of a service page that sells for you. By the time someone gets this, this is my favorite, but by the time someone gets to the end of this kind of service page, they are capital letters dying to work with you. It also allows you to present your prices in a way that doesn't attract price shoppers. So if you want more people to visit your service page to actually buy from you, this is a can't miss step. Okay, I don't know if I'm just like the biggest nerd here, but that just gives me chills. I love that.

Heidi Thompson: 26:06

That's the power of copy.

Mike Zabrin: 26:08

Yes, that's the power of copy. Yes, I know, yeah, because I think the way that the sales was taught to me is that you gotta get them on the phone first, don't give them prizes so you get them on the phone. They gotta get on the phone with you, they gotta. But I just think about my own experience now, just uh, searching for vendors myself and it was frustrating.

Heidi Thompson: 26:29

It is and it's, it can just lead people to pass you over and either because they don't want to deal with it and they have a million other people they've contacted, or because they don't feel like they can afford you if you don't have your price listed.

Heidi Thompson: 26:44

It's like that, if you have to ask, you can't afford thing, where it just makes people really uncomfortable. So I'm pro transparent pricing, but do it in a way that shows the value of what you're creating. I think it's really important to set expectations, because so much, even if it's and it's just client management, client communication, everything it's and it's just client management, client communication, everything it's just about setting expectations. And if someone knows, okay, this photographer I really want to work with for my wedding it's going to be $10,000 and all the other ones are $5,000. Well, I can maybe make some different decisions about different things, see if I can make this work, and then I'm going to go to them, whereas if they would have just come to you and they didn't know, they would probably feel blindsided and well, there's no way I can do that because they weren't in the driver's seat.

Mike Zabrin: 27:44

Essentially, I know you have a live challenge coming up the week of May 20th. Yes, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Heidi Thompson: 27:54

Yeah, I'm really excited about that.

Mike Zabrin: 27:55

I'll definitely put the links in the show notes here as well, but please tell us about it.

Heidi Thompson: 27:58

Yeah, it's called the Stand Out and Get Booked Challenge, and it's a challenge that I have developed to really answer the question of why should a couple book you instead of any of your competitors? Because if you can answer that and you can make it really clear how you stand out, this cuts down on price shopping. It cuts down on ghosting, it cuts down on losing clients to competitors, it cuts down to having to chase people to get responses. It cuts down on frustration and resentment that naturally comes with that. There's so many things that the root is you're not standing out.

Heidi Thompson: 28:39

So if you can stand out and one of the things we do in this is make sure that within five seconds of landing on your website, your potential client should know exactly what you do, who you're best for and why you're different and if you can do that, which you absolutely can I'm going to show you how, in this free challenge, it so clearly positions you as the go-to person for your clients, which then removes you from that category of bands into a more specific category bands that solve my very specific problem or deal with the thing that I really care about, and people will pay more for that. We all have things in our life that we've paid more for, because it was like, yeah, I could get it there, but I really want it from this company because of some way that they're different or how they do things. So we're spending five days, we're going through five different steps and by the end of it, you will clearly stand out as the go-to person for whoever your ideal client is. Everyone has someone different that they really want to work with.

Mike Zabrin: 29:57

So five days and it's totally free too. You said right, it is yeah. Where do people go to sign up for this?

Heidi Thompson: 30:04

You can go to Evolve.

Mike Zabrin: 30:05

Your Wedding Business. I'll be the first one. Yeah, I'm pumped. Where do I go, Heidi? Where do I go?

Heidi Thompson: 30:12

You can go to evolveyourweddingbusinesscom slash challenge. That'll take you to the registration page and, like you said, we kick off on the 20th. Every day you're going to have a short live training where we're going to do something really specific. You're able to get input on that, you're able to ask questions, you're able to get any help or feedback you need during that week so that by the end of that week you have this clear differentiator for yourself.

Mike Zabrin: 30:47

That is so awesome. Well, I love your podcast, and so I cannot wait to definitely listen to Heidi's podcast, because I think it's just like free advice on how to just make your wedding business amazing. And also you have a private podcast. Right that when you sign up for membership with you.

Heidi Thompson: 31:06

Yeah, I actually have two private podcasts. So I have one that is a like a training, basically like a short free training, and one is we take everything we do in the wedding business collective and put it in podcast format for the members so that if you couldn't make the Q&A call that we do, you can still get through it in a way that is digestible. You don't have to sit in front of your computer and watch a video.

Mike Zabrin: 31:37

One story that really made me mad on your podcast was that I spent all this time making these beautiful reels and everything like that on TikTok and Instagram, all this stuff and you had somebody on there. I don't know if it was like what did she say? She's talking a lot about TikTok and she was like the most popular TikTok I have is. I made a caption that was just like raging Friday night and then I was just me folding napkins for a wedding the next day, or just like 15, 20 seconds just behind the scenes. People love that. But so, anyway, I just learned so much from you and I just can't thank you enough for coming on here, and please check the link to the show notes and we'll have all Heidi's info up there. Thank you so much, heidi, I really appreciate it.

Heidi Thompson: 32:17

Thank you so much for having me. This is fun.

Mike Zabrin: 32:20

Okay, that's it for this week, but make sure you tune in next week for the mother hustler herself, terica Skaggs. She's a wedding business coach, international speaker, wedding pro, educator. You're not going to want to miss this. Remember. You are extraordinary.

Speaker 2: 32:34

We'll see you next time, maybe because your lifetime's enough For every dark sky to be bright enough. You are a once in a lifetime love and I don't want my life to be like it was Maybe because your lifetime's enough For every dark sky to be bright enough. And you are a once in a lifetime love and I don't want my life to be like it was Maybe because your lifetime's enough For every dark sky to be like it was Maybe because your lifetime's enough for every dark sky to be bright enough. You are a once-in-a-lifetime love and I don't want my life to be like it was Maybe because your lifetime's enough for every dark sky to be bright enough. Yeah, Once in a lifetime lifetime.