326. How To Turn Your Small Following Into Big Revenue

You didn’t start your business to stay stuck. If you're ready to finally hit 6 or 7 figures WITHOUT burning out — book a call with our team → https://weddingproceo.com/application 

Stop letting a small follower count make you feel like you're behind in your business while you’re grinding through another busy wedding weekend. 

This episode breaks down why vanity metrics are keeping you overworked and underpaid, and exactly how to pivot your strategy to attract high-paying buyers instead of just more "likes." 

The (FREE!)ASSUME Sales Training: 2x your wedding bookings in 30 days—step by step. Thousands of wedding pros have already used it to land more clients immediately! http://weddingproceo.com/freetrainingorg

A favorite book of mine: Profit First by Mike Michalowicz 

https://amzn.to/4lbqZFw

Another favorite book of mine: Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell 

https://amzn.to/3ITKLb4

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EPISODE SHOW NOTES BLOG & MORE:

https://weddingproceo.com/turn-small-following-into-big-revenue/

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Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Wedding Pro CEO Podcast. If you find these strategies helpful, make sure to share this episode with your fellow wedding pros. And remember, in the world of weddings, it's all about building genuine relationships and showcasing your best work. Until next time, keep shining, CEOs!

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Transcript

1:01

You don't need 50,000 followers to make six figures in your wedding business. You just need 50 people willing to pay you $5,000. So stop chasing followers and start attracting buyers. If you're sitting there thinking, I only have 2000 followers and I'm so behind you are not behind CEO, you're simply distracted from the actual goal. today I'm gonna show you exactly why follower count has almost nothing to do with revenue and what actually does. By the end of this video, you will stop obsessing over followers and start focusing on the numbers that actually make you money. Wedding pros are obsessed with growing their following, and I totally understand this because I was here once too, and to be honest, sometimes I still get excited about seeing that number grow. But we see these influencers with 30,000, 50,000, a hundred thousand followers, and assume that must be the goal. They must be making so much money. We compare our 3000 followers to someone else's 30,000, and we feel small. But here's the truth. Influencer metrics and business metrics are not the same thing. And if you're building a business, not a brand deal career, you need to understand the difference. So today we're covering why a big following does not equal big money, the quality versus quantity problem that most wedding pros ignore, the only metrics that actually matter for revenue and how to build six figures with a small engaged audience. Here's the follower count myth. You can have a hundred thousand followers and make $30,000 a year, or you can have 2000 followers and make $300,000 per year. Follower count has almost nothing to do with revenue. Most of those large followings that you see are made up of other vendors, which listen. Nothing wrong with other vendors. We want them in there, but they're not buyers. They're referrers. So be thoughtful of that. They're bots. They're out of market Couples. Couples who've already been married or aren't even engaged yet. They're people who just love your content because it's pretty, but they're never gonna book you. They're here for inspiration and not transactions. So let me give you a real world example. One of our students came into the program and she had 1200 followers, and she was embarrassed by that, but almost all of them were ideal clients in her local luxury market. We had her stop creating content for growth and virality and start creating content for buyers, and her inquiries went from 4 to 12, per month. That's insane. Her following only grew to 1500, but her revenue doubled. The algorithm didn't change, but her audience quality did. That small audience was so targeted and it was much more profitable. So instead of her just trying to get more followers, get more followers, we encouraged her and helped her to create buyer content. Buyer content that is gonna help move people through the funnel, not just get them there to hit like. number two, engagement isn't revenue. Now all of these metrics are important to track. I want to know how many people are engaged with my content on social media, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's gonna equate to dollars in my bank account, A 10,000 follower account with 2% engagement is way less valuable than a 1000 follower account with 10% engagement. But even engagement can lie. You can have a 10% engagement from other planners who just love your flat lays, but they're never gonna book you. The algorithm doesn't care about your bank account. You can go viral, you can get a hundred thousand views, but you can get zero inquiries because it found the wrong people. The content was shown to people who can't afford you or don't live in your market or aren't planning a wedding. They just loved your content. And while that's fun, it is not gonna equate to dollars in your bank account. And as a business owner, the only thing that we should care about are dollars in our business account, not how many followers that we have. Let's talk about audience versus community. I want you to stop trying to build an audience. This is where we're just trying to go viral. We're just trying to get eyes on our content. Instead, I want you to build a community of buyers, an audience watches your content, but a community buys. 500 people who trust you will make you more money than 50,000 strangers. Wedding pros tend to fall into this influencer trap where we just want to create content and see that view count go up and go up and go up. It's exciting, trust me. I know. I feel that way too, but those aren't buyers and often, actually, most often, the content that makes me the most money that gets the most people to click our link and to actually book a consultation with us is the content that gets so few views, and even less shares and saves, right? It may not get the most engagement, but that's because the engagement they're doing is actually reaching out to book you. They're forgetting to hit like because they went to click your link in bio to book a consult with you. We don't want to fall into the influencer trap. Influencers make money from brand deals. You make money from bookings, and they are two completely different business models. One of our students was chasing trending reels, and her following grew from 2000 to 6,000, which was super exciting. It really was exciting, but her inquiries weren't changing. And so what we had her do was to stop chasing the trends, to stop creating all of these reels that were taking her time and energy, and were exciting because they were getting so many views, but we had her stop using those trending audios and start building authority. What it's like to work with her, what it's like behind the scenes, what it's like to design a wedding, What her clients were saying about working with her. And we wanted her to pre-qualify them. We wanted her to create content that helped buyers to know, is this the right wedding pro for me? Her follower growth did slow. It didn't stop, but it did slow. But her inquiries jumped more than 20% per month. And that's the shift that we want from you. Not from small to big, but from random to right. So let's talk about the metrics that actually matter, Because we do wanna make sure that we're tracking our metrics, but which ones actually matter? If you want your revenue to grow, these are the things that I want you to track. Number one, how many inquiries that you're getting every single month actually track this number. Number two, how many of those inquiries are booking a consultation with you? So your conversion from inquiry to consult. Number three is your close rate. So how many of those consultations are becoming paying clients? And number four is your average cart value. So the average amount that your clients spend with you over the course of a quarter or a year. That's it. Now let's do this math. Okay, so if we get 15 inquiries per month and we close six of those at$5,000, that's $30,000 per month. That's $360,000 per year. Follower count is irrelevant. We wanna look at it. We wanna have fun with it, but we do not want to care that much about it. We don't wanna put a lot of energy in our follower count. Revenue is what matters. And to be able to understand the predictability of it, we want to start tracking these metrics and not our follower count. When you're thinking about your content, I want you to think, I don't need more followers. I need better content. Content that builds authority, that shows client results, that talks about pricing confidently and helps engaged couples understand budgeting for their wedding and pricing. Content that explains your process and what it's like to work with you. Content that pre-qualifies and helps people to know whether they are a right fit for you. Content that creates urgency and content that positions you as the obvious choice. Your marketing is part of your sales funnel. You want it to warm the clients up and weed out the wrong ones and keep moving your ideal clients. Through the funnel so that by the time they get to a consultation with you, it's a no brainer. We're not creating content that's designed to go viral. We're creating a simple revenue driving content rhythm. If we're posting three times a week, this could look like a client result, a testimonial from a client, not just a graphic post, but what I love to do with these is put the testimonial behind me and do a green screen and talk about that client. Talk about why we loved working with them and specific things that they said in their review of us. I wanna also talk about an. Authority piece. So working in a great venue or again, what it's like to work with you behind the scenes. then also a personality or a belief based post. So have a lot of fun with it. Talk about like what it's like to work with your team or what you guys are like in the planning process or in the journey of working with your couples. So let's recap. Follower count has nothing to do with revenue. And I want you to remember that quality beats quantity every single time.. Don't worry about how many views a post gets. I want you to worry about how many link clicks or consultations a post gets, and you can see that right inside of your metrics. Engagement doesn't matter if you're getting engaged by your ideal client, so don't look at, oh, am I getting all of this engagement? If you are, that's great. If it's your ideal client and you're actually getting bookings from it. But if it's just engagement for the sake of engagement. We don't want that. The only numbers that matter are inquiries, close rate and cart value. You do not need 50,000 followers. You need 50 ideal buyers. So if you're sitting here and you're obsessed over follower count, you're focused on the wrong thing. Vanity metrics are keeping you broke. And I know, I know you guys trust me. I feel this too. It is so much more exciting to have a large follower account so that other people think that you're popular, think that you're doing well. It's a vanity metric, but here's the thing. It doesn't really matter what everyone else thinks. If your bank account is keeping you broke, if you have to wonder how you're making payroll next week, it really doesn't matter if you have a hundred thousand followers on Instagram, I promise you it is way more amazing to actually be successful than to just look like it. So stop comparing yourself to influencers on Instagram because you are not building a highlight reel. You are building a company. If you're realizing right now you're listening to the CEO and you've been chasing the wrong metrics, and you want help building content that actually converts into paying clients by building a converting sales funnel from your social media into your bank account, I want you to book a gap assessment with my team. These are free calls that we do with wedding industry business owners where we're gonna audit your Instagram. We'll look at your content strategy, we'll break down your metrics, and we'll show you exactly what's keeping you from turning your audience into revenue. Head to the link in the description below, or head over to wedding pro ceo.com/application book a time to get on one of these free gap assessments with our team. You guys, make sure to hit subscribe or follow on whatever platform that you're listening on. And if you're feeling extra generous, a five star review is always appreciated. To help let other wedding pros know that this is a valuable place where they can learn to grow and scale their wedding business. Because we are on a mission to change the way the wedding industry does business and we love you for helping us do that. Thank you so much for being here, and I'll see you next time.