Opinion: So you think you want to exhibit at the local Wedding Expo ?

Nancy Battenberg
Civil Marriage Celebrant
Darwin Northern Territory

Nancy Battenberg

Based on previous attendance at other Wedding Fairs (also known as Expos), my three colleagues and I were recently invited to be exhibitors at the latest Wedding Expo. While overall we had a very good time, these expos are not for the faint of heart.

First question to ask yourself – why do you WANT to be a part of a Wedding Expo? Depending on your advertising budget, your knowledge of your local community, and even their knowledge of you by your local community, Expos are an excellent way of getting your name out there in lights.

Potential clients can see you in person, check your availability immediately and talk briefly to you.

Remember that our first meeting is obligation free? This constitutes the first interview and people will ‘buy’ you or not, in the first 20 seconds of talking to you.

The other fabulous part about Wedding Expos are the other exhibitors. They get to know you, see you and talk to you as well, and your local hairdresser, with your card in hand, is more likely to spread your name to her clients than other celebrants that she doesn’t have cards for. Similarly, the range of cake decorators, photographers, venue and equipment hire, limousine services, caterers, wine suppliers, printers (for invitations), jewellers, dress designers, lingerie companies and ceremony supplies are all likely to be there and sharing your card with them is an excellent way to get your name around your local area.

But wedding expos are just a part of what we do and the only clients you are likely to get from a Wedding Expo are brides and grooms. If you have a range of ceremonies, very few at a Wedding Expo want to know about your other ceremonies. If you have not been registered yet through Marriage Celebrant Section and at this stage, you are a general celebrant only (no weddings), I would have to think long and hard about whether exhibiting at a Wedding Expo was the right move.

But there are a few tips that I can offer that might make them a bit easier:

• Plan ahead. If you have just been to an expo, and think you would like to be involved in the next one, make contact with the organisers now. These things are planned a good eight or ten months ahead, and many organisers have already booked the next expo (as has happened in our case, and we are already down for the next Expo in November of 2009).
• If you can, join forces. Bottom line, if you are a solo exhibitor, then you are indeed solo. Solo with expenses, setting up, being on your own for two days, taking the stand down, lugging your stuff around… you get the picture. Two of you is MUCH easier, and three or four like-minded celebrants is fantastic.
• Be prepared.
  • Have a good supply of business cards with all details correct. If you have a website, make sure it is listed on your business card, along with email address as many couples like to make contact through email.
  • Think about a brochure with your unique slant on the ceremonies that you create. Most people will collect your brochure and read it at home: many phone calls are months after the event, but people have hung on to our brochure. Heavier weight glossy brochure paper is available for a reasonable price from most stationary shops but it might pay you to get your brochures printed on a colour laser printer, for that professional look without smudging, etc.
  • Have your diary handy and up to date: have a pen handy as well so you can take a booking easily. At the least, people want to go away and think about things after the Expo, and/or talk to their partner, so ask if they would like YOU to contact them in the next week.
  • Have a slideshow of photos running on a laptop. Even if you have done two ceremonies only, have another fifteen photos of local ceremony venues running on your slideshow. If you have joined forces, thirty photos each, some ten seconds apart, gives a reasonable slideshow. On that note, if you are including photos of ‘your couples’, please make sure you have their permission to use their photos. I usually take a photo or two at each wedding that I do, even if it is after the ceremony when the couple are standing there in all their glory, so I don’t have issues with permissions from photographers. But always, always, get written permission from the couple to display your photos on your website or in a slideshow for publicity.
• Think about your stand and the image you want it to send out. Keep it tidy however. We usually have one table with a table cloth, purely and simply to put our rubbish underneath, hide our handbags, cover the storage boxes of additional business cards, hold the laptop, etc.
  • Elegant and stylish? Perhaps continuous curtains around part of your stand, with an urn with a flower arrangement. Often garden supply shops will allow you to ‘borrow’ their things, in exchange for a small card saying where to buy the urn or flowers. Check with your expo coordinator if they allow this type of advertising from people who don’t have a stand at the expo. Often picture framers or art shops will lend you a print or piece of artwork, again with a small business card attached to indicate where you got it from.
  • Busy and versatile? A bank of photos of weddings that you have performed, showing you and different couples in different venues and types of weddings.
  • Helpful and knowledgeable? A3 sized posters with legal requirements and/or paperwork required
  • Unique and individual? What do you offer that other celebrants don’t? Have your beautifully decorated signing table there, to show them, or your parchment copy of their ceremony for their memory book. Make it a selling point of your stand.

• Get ready to talk… and talk, and talk and talk. Particularly if you are in air-conditioning, have LOTS of water and fluids handy to keep you and your throat hydrated. If you tend to get a bit croaky, pitch your voice slightly higher (not louder or softer) but make sure you have some pineapple juice handy (an old performer’s trick that cuts phlegm).
• Be comfortable.
  • Shoes; Nothing turns a potential client off more than a celebrant with a sour and/or pained look on her face. This is the day for comfort shoes (but NOT your favourite joggers). Stylish, but comfortable is the aim of the game as you could potentially be on your feet for at least eight hours. Unless you are particularly good at wearing stilettos for eight solid hours, I wouldn’t…J
  • Clothing: Similarly the day of the Expo is the day for comfortable, but professional looking clothing. If you appear in your casual clothes, the bride who wants upmarket and formal might slip right past you, but similarly if you are dressed TOO formally, the bride and groom who want the beach wedding might slip past you too. We usually have a good selection of photos on the wall that show us in several lights, at the beach wedding, at the formal and traditional wedding, in the garden setting, etc so at least you can show your versatility. One newer celebrant literally took every type of clothing and she and her husband took several shots of her in different venues supposedly waiting for ‘her couples’ to arrive so she had a good representative sampling of the types of weddings that she ‘does’, and how she looked in each one.
  • Chairs: Have at least one chair so you can sit down when there are slow periods during the Expo. It is better to provide three or four chairs however, because often as people wander around the expo, what they want to do is sit down for a brief time too. What could be better than a potential client hearing your spiel and getting your cards, while she sits down for ten minutes beside you?
  • Plan for brief breaks: make sure you start your day with a substantial breakfast, plan for lunch and snacks, and make sure you take rest stops along the way. Look refreshed and energetic, even if it is the last three minutes of the Expo – clients only see you for a brief time and if you are exhausted and looking like it, they are likely to go elsewhere.
• Smile, make eye contact and enjoy yourself. If meeting new people petrifies you, perhaps an expo is not the right place for you. But if you enjoy meeting people, can empathise with their wedding expo experience, and have a brochure and business card in hand, people will respond to that. Make eye contact with them – more people are brought in for a discussion by you making eye contact. If you don’t, nor will they.

• Have something for the other exhibitors. One of the cutest things given to us by other exhibitors was a little tulle bag with ‘ceremony’ glitter in it, two lollies, business cards AND a 5% discount voucher for their services as a fellow exhibitor. Now I am not saying that you need to offer discounts for your celebrant services, but guess where I next went to get my hair cut?
  • Others this year gave out pens, little business card holders, and little notebooks, all of which we accepted gracefully. What did we have? We had a bowl of the best darned wrapped chocolates at the Expo, and by the second day, I think every exhibitor came to visit our stand for a good chocolate and sugar fix – and to take away some business cards for future reference ‘in case’ one of their clients needs a celebrant.
  • Be careful with clients with children – we always tell the parents that the wrapped lollies are chocolate, and if necessary ONE chocolate per child. Boys of eight or nine will often try to grab handfuls of chocolates, but for what it is worth, I had the MOST delightful discussion with one astute eight year old (with his eye on the chocolates) who filled me in on his thinking about girls, why kissing them is so yukky, getting married and having children. In the end, he took one of my cards however (he asked for it!) and I thought he deserved the four or five chocolates for the scintillating discussion.
• Don’t take too many of your own resources with you. If you have a good selection of ceremony ideas books, don’t bring them to the expo. The first year we did an Expo, some couples thought we were being generous, and some of our books disappeared when we were engaged with talking to other couples. It is SO embarrassing to race after a couple to retrieve a ‘borrowed’ book – they will never be your client. If you have books galore, take photos of them to show what couples can borrow once they are your clients.
• Have a nice time! Being an exhibitor at an expo can be a wonderfully social, exciting, hilarious, sharing and caring time where you get to meet your future clientele. It can also be exhausting and disappointing if you think you didn’t get one client out of your two days. Many of our clients ring us up many months down the track, however, having met us at the Expo, so don’t despair. Your name is now out there, you have exhibited at an expo as a professional person engaged in the Wedding industry, and your first expo might not gain you the exposure that you want. But this expo – our fourth – was excellent as couples we had married were now bringing their friends to meet us, and it was fabulous to catch up with ‘our couples’ as well as meet new ones.