81% of couples bought or hired a wedding dress, 79% employed hair and beauty experts, 77% bought wedding rings, 77% employed a live band, musician or DJ.
72% employed a professional florist, 69% had a specialist wedding cake provider and 53% used a someone to design & print their wedding stationery.
40% employed caterers who were separate from their venue provider. 36% hired suits. 30% employed a videographer. 28% had a photo-booth. 27% hired a wedding car or vehicle.
In the niche categories, only 8% of couples surveyed said they employed a wedding planner. 6% hired a mobile bar separate from their venue or caterers. 4% employed a dog chaperone and 3% employed specialist childcare for the wedding.
As celebrants we are still in a growing sector of the wedding industry. Many couples have no idea what a wedding celebrant does and the benefits we can bring to their wedding day. Consequently, education should be a primary pillar of our sales and marketing strategy. If couples do not know what we do, then why would they book us?
Other wedding vendors who are more commonly used, understood and trusted are key allies in our mission. Do not underestimate the impact that wedding photographers, wedding venue staff, bridal wear retailers and florists etc can have on your wedding celebrant business.
Couples do not always plan the details of their wedding and book their wedding vendors in a logical order. Yes, the venue is probably booked first, and the ceremony should, in theory, be booked second, but you will be amazed how many couples will get wrapped up into the details of the dress, their hair and makeup or the flowers long before they get round to thinking about their ceremony.
Every year couples make the mistake of leaving it quite late to secure their ceremony. Sometimes it is a simple oversight and often it is couples just not understanding what is involved in booking registrars.
If they leave it late, they suddenly find that either there are no registrars available to do their ceremony on their wedding day or if they are, the only time they can do the ceremony is really early or really late and completely up-turning the couple's timetable for their wedding day.
It is at this point, that the couple may often turn to their existing vendors and suppliers for advice and help. If the photographer, venue co-ordinator, hairdresser, make-up artist or florist knows and recommends you, then you have a good chance of a quick booking.
These second-choice bookings are not always ideal, but you have an amazing opportunity to delight and surprise a couple with what you can do. Not only will you have written and delivered a beautiful and personal wedding ceremony, but, in their eyes, you have possibly rescued their wedding day too.
So how do we team up with other wedding vendors? Well, often the best thing about going to a wedding fair as a celebrant is not the contact with potential couples (because actually, a huge majority may have already organised their ceremony), but the networking opportunity it presents to meet and get to know other wedding vendors who are exhibiting. So take a large sample of business cards and leaflets for them to have for future reference. Connect with wedding vendors on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Be active in developing a supportive and allied social media community. "Like" and comment on their social media posts. This will help to make your posts more visible to them and hopefully they will reciprocate.
Secondly, you can learn a lot from other successful wedding vendors by looking at how they go about about their marketing. Look at their websites, their social media posts, their pricing structures, their literature and their packages. Take inspiration from these other successful businesses in the industry rather than simply looking at the echo-chamber of other celebrants. Not everything will apply to wedding celebrancy, but given that we are all trying to communicate, persuade and capture the same engaged couples as clients, it makes sense to learn from what clearly works.
In the final blog post in this series, where we have been looking in detail at the data in the National Wedding Survey 2022, we shall investigate the wedding trends that appear to be emerging or fading and what this means for us as wedding celebrants.
