Planning Tools, Ideas, & Advice
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For Wedding Pros
You’re wearing all the hats, tending to your clients’ needs, and hopefully finding some time to spend with family and friends away from work. I totally get it. But, as a wedding photographer, or wedding planner, or any wedding pro for that matter, it's important to take time to understand what's happening in your business.
Use this simple weekly agenda to put on your CEO hat. In just two hours a month, you can feel confident that you know what’s happening in your business and begin to make adjustments, triage issues, and identify new opportunities in order to continuously move your business forward.
Schedule a 30-minute recurring weekly session for a high-level review of you business. Be sure to schedule this during a time you know you're available most weeks to reduce the risk of it falling off your calendar due to scheduling conflicts.
Agenda: Weekly Review—30 minutes
You’re a CEO now…congrats! Be sure to make time to let yourself play that role.
You might be wondering what I mean by working on the business. Working on the business refers to activities that are more strategic and future-focused. When you’re working in the business, you’re doing things like delivering on your contracts or generating new business; it’s more tactical and present-focused.
Everyone in business experiences the challenge of finding time to zoom out. Even when it was literally my job to work on strategy in my most recent role, it was still difficult to get out of the day-to-day activities! Scheduling time for yourself every week to dig into what’s happening in the business is one of the best ways to ensure you’re staying on top of things and preparing yourself for the strategy and planning activities that you’ll do monthly, quarterly, or yearly. More on that soon!
All too often we breeze over wins when we have so much on our plates. Be sure to take time to reflect and celebrate your victories, both big and small. If you can’t think of any off the top of your head, you might expose some through the activities outlined below. Keep a log or a journal, some people keep a little calendar, which I think is such a cool idea to see a timeline of milestones and achievements.
There’s also something to acknowledging what’s working so you can keep doing it, do more of it, or apply it to other areas so don't skip over this part!
Use this time to review performance across your various channels. Take a quick peek at everything to get a view of what's happening. Beware that it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole during this part of the session—I am so guilty of this. Stay out of the weeds and keep it high-level. You won’t formally diagnose any problems during this time, but you will want to note down anything that doesn’t look right (or any changes worth investigating!) for troubleshooting and adjusting when you have more time.
Having access to data that shows the trend of the KPI is key to being able to know if something is amiss or not. In some cases you may need to manually record results so you can keep track of how things are going. This may feel clunky the first time or two, but you’ll get into a rhythm, and eventually, it won’t feel that way. I've listed the most common things you'll want to review but you may have additional tools and analytics available to you so definitely throw those into the mix, if so.
As you go down the list below, note any areas that aren’t performing to your standard. Some things will need to be addressed immediately, while others can wait for monthly or quarterly planning. Using a Project Management tool such as Monday or Asana is a fantastic way to stay organized, assign urgency to things you find, and keep track of their status.
Most of this can be assessed in a keyword tool (next in the list). Google Analytics is the ultimate source of truth when it comes to Google-related SEO performance, but the data is richer in the keyword tools, so I use both.
I look at this more than once a week just to monitor any sudden, major changes. Adjustments to your website, Google algorithm changes, or new competition are just a few things that can impact your rankings, so you’ll want to keep a close eye on that.
This is another one that should probably be monitored more regularly, depending on what you have out there, but for sure, check in on ad metrics once a week to ensure whatever you have running is performing at or above expectations.
For the weekly review, like most of these, this is just an awareness exercise. If you notice something has changed, or is not improving, you'll want to note it in the issues and opportunities list for a deeper dive.
There is less emphasis on followers, but if social media is part of your brand awareness strategy, you’ll want to make sure you’re seeing consistent growth of new followers, even if it’s just a little. The wedding industry requires us to constantly regenerate an audience, probably more so than any other industry, since a lot of our audience “expires” relatively quickly.
You’ll likely touch on conversion through your exploration of the above areas. Be sure to check in on your funnel and conversion rates at each stage and through every channel. Sometimes, it’s easy to feel like things are slow or not working, but when you dig into the actual conversion rates, you might discover that things are on track or maybe even better than expected.
Do a quick check-in on any active initiatives and how you’re tracking to short-term goals and to-do lists.
Spend a few minutes reflecting on what's going well and what isn't. Add anything that comes up to your issues and opportunities list. When it’s time to work on strategy, you’ll have a list of areas that have opportunities for improvement, giving you instant access to ideas for moving your business forward!
Staying on top of your business doesn't have to be hard. With a little intentional time set aside each week you can feel confident you know what's going on in your business, and make necessary immediate adjustments and plans for the future.