Preparing for Yes.
Photo by Nancy Ray
“Engagement season” refers to the period of time each year when the most wedding proposals happen. In the United States, it runs from Thanksgiving (fourth Thursday of November) until Valentine’s Day. For many other locations, it starts just a few weeks later, going from around Christmas to Valentine’s Day.
The most popular days for engagements are currently Christmas day, Valentine’s day, New Year’s Eve, Christmas Eve, Thanksgiving, and New Year’s day – in that order.
Just like most good publicists will start prepping and pitching their clients’ Christmas campaigns in early Summer, wedding pros’ prep for engagement/proposal season should ideally already be underway. However, if you, like almost every wedding business owner, have been juggling a zillion things, the next best time to start is now.
For the month of October, I’m going to be mostly discussing the things you can do get your wedding business ready so that yours can be the company they most love once the ring is on their finger.
Nearly three quarters (72%) of women (and some men!) who know that the proposal is coming are scrolling wedding hashtags on Instagram before they get engaged. Nearly half (49%) are reading wedding blogs and over a quarter of them (27%) have purchased wedding magazines before their partner has popped the question.
Since Instagram is the second place nearly-engaged couples turn to for wedding inspiration (Pinterest is still first), I want to mention a common mistake I see a lot of creative professionals make that can be immediately corrected with a tiny change in how you post.
If you #write like #this in your #Instagram #caption with #hashtags on every #keyword, it does #more than just #look #ugly: it literally tells the reader's brain that you and your brand are exhausting to work with.
Here's why: The visual clutter of the hashtags in your captions slows a person's eye down while reading, causing fatigue. The brain subconsciously associates that fatigue with you and your brand.
The potential client may l-o-v-e your work, but for some reason they can't quite pinpoint, they're not entirely comfortable hiring you.
Use your branded hashtags in your caption and save the keyword hashtags for the bottom or the first comment underneath. You'll still show up in search for those keywords, and you won't be actively branding your company as exhausting.
It really doesn’t matter if you think this is unfair since your photos show that you’re clearly the best at what you do. When it comes to how you think things should work in marketing versus how the brain actually works, you need to bet on the brain every time.
(Splendid ProTip: if you want to clean up your captions even more, this site will automatically create line breaks for you in a way that Instagram won’t convert back to a wall of text.)
A version of this was originally published in March 2012
