Wedding Business Solutions

Are you ready for engagement season?

• Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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Are you ready for engagement season?

Engagement season has kicked off—are you prepared? Do your profiles have recent reviews, and are your photos up to date? How about your website's content? In this episode, Alan Berg outlines a checklist to ensure you're ready to capture the influx of newly engaged couples. Don't let outdated information cost you potential clients. Learn how to present your recent successes, stay current, and keep your first impression fresh and attractive.

Listen to this new 10-minute episode for strategies on updating your online presence and maximizing your engagement season opportunities.

If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or visit my website Podcast.AlanBerg.com 


Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review (thanks, it really does make a difference). If you want to get notifications of new episodes and upcoming workshops and webinars, you can sign up at www.ConnectWithAlanBerg.com  


View the full transcript on Alan’s site: https://alanberg.com/blog/


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I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2025 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com

Engagement season has started. Are you ready? Hey, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. Engagement season has started, or at least officially with Thanksgiving here in the US this is the beginning of engagement season. It's when people start getting together for the holidays and people start proposing. And that's what typically happens this time of the year. So you may feel it already, you may not feel it already, but it is starting now. And it's going to continue through the end of the year, through New Year's, another big time for that.

It does go through Valentine's Day, but you typically start to see the beginning of the year when those engaged people now start reaching out, or at least they start doing their research. So what are you doing to get ready? Are you doing anything? Are you changing anything? Right. So what would be a checklist of things that you should do right now? Well, the first thing you want to do is you want to find out all of your placements online. Where are you and are you up to date on those things? Because we know that regardless of where you are, if somebody finds you there and it's not up to date or you don't have complete information, you could be losing out and never even know that somebody passed you by. In the secret shopping that we do and in the research that I do for the sales training and the masterminds that I do, I can't believe how many people I find that don't have recent reviews on their profiles that they have in different places. Now, whether you're choosing to pay for some of these or getting some of these free, if someone is checking you out, which we know that 90% or more than 90% of couples are reading reviews and you don't have recent reviews. And I'm talking, talking about now in 2024, seeing people whose most recent review is 2019, 2018 or whatever, if you're still in business and your recent, most recent review is 5 years old, you're not in business as far as they're concerned. And you could be missing out without ever knowing that.

It's just fact for all of us, if you think about it, when we're the customer and we're trying to decide who to use, if we see one company with recent good reviews and another one that doesn't, it might be good reviews, but not we're going to go with the one with recent because we want to know what you've done recently, not what you've done. Weeks, months, actually. Weeks and months is fine. But years ago. We certainly don't want to know that. So start there. Now is a great time to be asking people for reviews. It also helps if you're trying to get one of the awards on the different sites.

Recent reviews are what are one of the main criteria for them, determining who's going to get those reviews. And these are the different sites all over the world. These are the places for that. Okay, so that's the first thing next is replying to those reviews to making being sure that people who are reading it see that you're engaged in the process. I just recently posted a review. If you seen the or seen or heard the episode I did about my son's wedding. We went on a dinner cruise. I posted a nice review for them on TripAdvisor and Yelp and Google because that's what I do is I will post it in three places for them.

Even though you're not supposed to post the same thing in three places, the companies never complain about it. Getting three good reviews there and their response was very good because they read what I wrote, they responded to what that was, of course, invited us back. But it wasn't just a generic response. Makes me feel even better about the experience because they did it quickly after the review was posted and it was a good personal response, not a generic. Thanks for your great comments. Right. If I take the time to write a review, I take the time to write something specific. Okay, next thing.

Photos. Photos of recent events. You need to have photos of recent events. I prefer photos that show people having a great time. Whenever possible, you want to mix in some photos that show some details as well. But just remember, when people look at those photos, they need to be emotionally connected and say, I want to feel like that. Not just I want that pretty thing. Because the picture that you show might be pretty, but it might not be their style, might not be what they want.

But when they see people engaging with it and saying, wow, they look really happy doing business with you, I want to be happy like that as well. So aspirational images for weddings and events. I typically say good rule of thumb. Would somebody put that on their Instagram? Would somebody put that on their in their wedding album if it was a wedding? So if they're going to share that socially, it's probably a good image for you to use. Not all of them, like some of them are a little bit more personal to them. Other people can't relate. But for the most part, if somebody's going to share that image or put it into their wedding Album. It's probably a good image for you to show because it shows the results of doing business with you easier for some businesses than others.

I get that. But recent images, if you're a decor company or a DJ and you're using gobos, there's projected monograms. Make sure they don't have dates in them because I've seen these where it's a beautiful photo, but it's four, five, six, eight years ago. Is the date on the wall projected over there? So check that stuff, check it on your own website, right? Google loves fresh content. Are you putting fresh content on your website? Blogging is one of the easiest ways to do that because you can blog about the weddings and the events that you do, show some photos, show the details, tag the other vendors that were there, link to them, ask them for links back to you, and now you have fresh content. Without having to think about it too much. You get to just do that. Some people are using AI to help write the text.

If you're not good with that, putting the details there. Other people are just doing voice to text where they're just dictating, just talking about it and having that turn into text and then just edit that a little bit and put that over there. But Google loves fresh content. If you're not changing the content on your site, your SEO is going to be weaker than if you are. Because again, Google loves fresh content. You want to make sure you're using the right keywords, but not keyword heavy to the point where it doesn't read properly. Remember, it has to read properly first for the person who gets there, regardless of how they get there. If they didn't come through a search engine and your site just reads keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, it doesn't read correctly in terms of a conversation that you're having with that person.

You could actually lose someone because they don't feel welcomed. They feel like you're just trying to fool the search engine with keyword, keyword, keyword, right? It's UX first, user design, UX the user experience, design first. Then it's SEO, because not everybody gets to your website through a search, through a search engine. Or maybe they were searching for you by name and that wasn't because of the keywords, that was because they were searching for you specifically by name. So updating your social channels, making sure all your contact information is there, I really suggest that you click on all of the links that people can be clicking on, because I can't tell you how many Times I find broken links or going to pages that don't exist anymore. Make sure that you follow the path that your customers are going to be following and that everything that they can click on, you've tested it, see that it works. I, you know, if you've listened into my stuff, my books and things, you know, I'm not crazy about PDFs because people are opening them up on their phones. So take a few steps in their shoes, right? That was one of the podcasts.

If you can't walk a mile in their shoes, take a few steps, click on those links, open those documents, look at them on your phone and just ask yourself really honestly, is this a good user experience? Right? Is it 8 pages, 10 pages, 12 pages, 30 pages, 40 pages? I've seen all of those, right? Is that a really good user experience? One of my clients recently would send a pricing document and they said people would come in and ask how much it cost. Even though they sent them all the pricing, it was because the PDF was so long and so hard to read on a phone. People weren't even doing it. So here they thought they're being transparent, but they actually were not making it user friendly. So people weren't engaging with it the way that they thought they were. Speaking of that, on sites like the Knot and Wedding Wire, you are allowed to have pricing information. So take a look at that pricing information and update it. They've been changing the way that they're using that.

So take a look, it might have changed. Make sure you complete your storefronts on the not Wedding Wire or Weddings Online, Easy Weddings Hitched, all these different sites. Make sure that you've completed the information, it's up to date as well. And if you're allowed to put a pricing document there, make it so that it's readable on mobile. Make it so that it's not just a plain white page, that you have branding, that you have aspirational images. Put a little bit of social proof on there. I grab some sentences out of great testimonials. Give an idea of price people are looking for that transparency price range being my favorite, maybe with the most popular.

And then a call to action. Too many of those pages I see are just plain white pages. No branding. Some what, but not the why they should choose you. That's where the social proof comes in. So you can do better on that as well. So follow the path, follow the path of their research. If someone is looking for someone like you, if they don't know you already, where are they going? And what is your presence there look like? And is it the most up to date that you want to put your best foot forward right now for the 2025, 2026 events? Is that what you want to be showing, or can we do better? And now, when you have a little bit of time, now is the time to do that, so that when things do start getting busy, you don't have to do that because you're already getting the inquiries, because you've already done that work.

So hope that gives you something to think about. And I hope you take some action on that. And happy holidays.

I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or you can  text, use the short form on this page, or call +1.732.422.6362, international 001 732 422 6362. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2024 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com


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Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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