The Buyer’s Journey: Why Prospective Clients Need You to Guide Them

Wedding couples need your help. They’ve probably never been married so they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re spending a boatload of money, more than they’ve ever spent on anything else in their lives. They’ve got a ton of pressure on them to be good hosts, out-do their friends’ and families’ weddings, and show everyone a good time. They’re incredibly busy with advancing their career and having fun with their friends. I could go on and on.

What they need more than anything is a guide to get them from this stressed, overwhelmed, confused place in their lives to a place where they feel comfortable with their decisions and happy about the experience along the way. 

Whatever it is you do for wedding couples, your number one job is to be the expert they (may or may not know they) need. 

All buyers are on roughly the same path to choose their services. First, they have to learn what their needs are. What do they want, what are their priorities, what’s important to them. Second, they want to learn who offers what services to meet their needs. They explore, show interest, and then collect information about services offered. Finally, they are ready to make a decision on who’s going to provide what services. 

One of the biggest problems we all face in the wedding industry is no one is really sharing the path with them. We have wonderful media and resources that talk about what they’re going to do for the wedding, but who’s out there showing how wedding couples are going to get all these things done?

Some people talk about educating their clients, but that often devolves into a diatribe about how the client has no clue what things cost or how hard it is to produce something with the constraints they’ve been given. Educating, as it’s often discussed by wedding pros, doesn’t really help the buyer understand how to make better decisions.

If you want to stand out from the crowded market in whatever service you provide, do yourself a favor. Stop focusing on being better than your comp set at doing what you do with weddings. It’s not that important to most people buying what you’re selling. 

Instead, focus on what’s more important, and be the one who shows them how to get what they want from the journey, not just the destination. We live in an experience economy. The one who sells this is the one who gets to the front of the pack.