You can make beautiful wedding cakes, spend hours perfecting your skills and create work you’re incredibly proud of – but you still need couples to actually find you.
Marketing was certainly something I had to learn alongside cake decorating. Like many cake makers, I started because I loved making cakes, not because I had a burning desire to learn about websites, social media and sales!
But if you want to grow a successful wedding cake business, getting your work in front of the right people is incredibly important.
And I think the right people is the important bit.
You don’t necessarily need hundreds of wedding cake enquiries. You need enquiries from couples who love your style, value your work and have the right budget for the cakes you create.
So if you’d like to get more wedding cake bookings, here are some of the areas I’d concentrate on.
1. Make It Easy for Local Couples to Find You on Google
When somebody searches Google for a wedding cake maker in their area, you want to give your business the best possible chance of appearing.
Your website should make it really clear what you do and where you do it.
That sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to create a beautiful website filled with gorgeous cake photographs without actually telling Google – or sometimes even the customer – where you’re based and what areas you serve.
Make sure your wedding cake pages naturally mention your location and the areas you cover, using the sort of words your potential customers might search for, such as “wedding cake maker in Peterborough” or “wedding cakes Cambridgeshire” where they’re genuinely relevant.
Your Google Business Profile is really important here too. It can help your business appear when people make local searches and in Google Maps, while also giving potential customers somewhere to see your photographs, reviews and important business information.
Keep your profile up to date, add good-quality photographs of your wedding cakes and encourage happy couples to leave Google reviews. The more useful and complete your presence is, the easier it is for somebody searching locally to discover your business and feel confident enough to take the next step.
You can also create useful blog content around the questions couples regularly ask you. This gives Google more opportunities to understand your expertise while helping potential customers before they’ve even contacted you.
Google doesn’t usually produce instant results, but building your local visibility over time can create a really valuable source of wedding cake enquiries that isn’t dependent on you constantly posting on social media.
2. Show the Wedding Cakes You Want to Make More Of
Your portfolio is one of your most important marketing tools.
If somebody is considering trusting you with their wedding cake, they naturally want to see what you’re capable of creating.
But don’t just think of your portfolio as a record of everything you’ve ever made. Think about what you want people to book next.
If you’d love to make more contemporary wedding cakes, show contemporary wedding cakes. If sugar flowers are your speciality, make sure couples can see plenty of them. If you love creating unusual, highly detailed designs, don’t hide those away.
You don’t necessarily have to wait for a customer to order your dream cake either. Practice cakes and styled shoots can help you develop your portfolio and show the type of work you’d like to attract.
Over time, your website and social media should give potential customers a really clear idea of your style and the type of wedding cakes you create.
3. Use Social Media to Build Trust, Not Just Show Cakes
Social media is an obvious place to share your finished cakes, but I think it can be much more useful when you let people see a little of the person and process behind them too.
Show the finished cake, of course, but you could also share:
- Details from the decorating process
- Sketches or design ideas
- Venue set-ups
- Behind-the-scenes moments
- Sugar flowers or decorations being created
- Lovely customer feedback
- Professional wedding photographs
- Your own personality and story
Couples aren’t simply choosing a cake. They’re choosing the person they’re trusting to make it.
Letting them get to know you can help build confidence before they ever send an enquiry.
And don’t feel you have to be on every social media platform. It’s much better to use one or two consistently than exhaust yourself trying to be everywhere.
4. Build Relationships With Wedding Venues and Suppliers
Some of the best opportunities can come from relationships you build within the wedding industry.
Wedding venues, photographers, florists, planners and other suppliers are regularly talking to couples who are actively planning their weddings.
That doesn’t mean contacting every venue within 50 miles and immediately asking to go on their recommended supplier list!
Start by building genuine relationships.
Be friendly and professional when you’re delivering and setting up a wedding cake. Introduce yourself to the venue team. If a photographer sends you beautiful images, credit and tag them when you use them. Share other suppliers’ work when appropriate.
Styled shoots can also be a good way of meeting suppliers and creating professional photographs for your portfolio, particularly if you want to showcase a style of cake you haven’t yet been booked for.
People are much more likely to remember and recommend somebody they’ve actually enjoyed working with.
5. Make the Most of Reviews and Recommendations
Reviews can be incredibly powerful for a wedding cake business.
A potential customer expects you to say your cakes are lovely. It’s much more reassuring when previous couples say it too!
Don’t be afraid to ask happy customers for a review after their wedding.
Google reviews are particularly useful because they can support the local visibility we talked about earlier as well as providing reassurance to potential customers.
You can also use reviews on your website and social media, so one lovely piece of feedback can continue helping your business in several different places.
Recommendations can be just as valuable.
A couple who had a brilliant experience may recommend you to friends or family. A venue might pass your details to another couple. A photographer could tag you when sharing images from a wedding.
And remember, recommendations aren’t based purely on how the finished cake looked. Being organised, communicating well, arriving when you said you would and making the whole experience enjoyable all contribute to whether somebody feels confident recommending you.
6. Make Your Website Do Some of the Selling for You
Your website shouldn’t just be an online gallery of beautiful cakes.
It should help a potential customer decide whether you’re the right wedding cake maker for them.
Think about the questions couples regularly ask you.
Do they want to know how the booking process works? Whether you offer consultations or tastings? What flavours are available? How far you travel? What your wedding cakes generally cost?
Answering some of those questions on your website can make the enquiry process much easier.
It can also help with something we talked about in How to Price Wedding Cakes for Profit Without Underselling Yourself – attracting couples whose expectations and budget are a good match for your business.
If your website communicates your style, expertise, process and pricing clearly, somebody enquiring should already have a pretty good idea of what you offer.
That can mean better enquiries, rather than simply more of them.
7. Don’t Forget to Follow Up
Not every enquiry turns into a wedding cake booking immediately.
Couples are often contacting several wedding suppliers at once and may be juggling lots of decisions.
If you’ve sent information or a quote and haven’t heard anything, there’s nothing wrong with sending a friendly follow-up.
It doesn’t need to feel pushy. A simple message checking that they’ve received everything and asking whether they have any questions may be enough to restart the conversation.
Sometimes people genuinely get distracted.
And sometimes they’ll have chosen somebody else. That’s okay too.
You won’t win every wedding cake booking, and trying to do so can quickly lead to discounting or taking on cakes that aren’t right for you.
8. Find Out Where Your Best Wedding Cake Bookings Come From
This is something that’s really worth paying attention to.
Ask your customers how they found you and start keeping track.
Was it Google? Instagram? A wedding venue? A previous customer? A wedding fair? Another supplier?
You might discover that one particular venue regularly sends fantastic customers your way, while something else you’re spending hours doing generates very little.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you should immediately stop everything that hasn’t produced a booking, but it can help you decide where your marketing time is best spent.
Running a cake business takes enough hours already!
You want your marketing to work for your business rather than feeling like another endless job on your list.
More Enquiries Aren’t Always Better
When you’re trying to grow your wedding cake business, it’s very easy to focus on numbers.
More website visitors. More Instagram followers. More enquiries.
But ultimately, what you want is more of the right wedding cake bookings.
Ten enquiries from people looking for cakes well below your usual price point may create far more work than two enquiries from couples who already love your style and understand roughly what your cakes cost.
This is why your marketing, portfolio and pricing all need to work together.
Show the work you want to create. Be clear about what you offer. Price your cakes properly and give your customers a fantastic experience.
Over time, all of those things help you build a reputation for the type of wedding cake maker you want to become.
I’ve covered the bigger picture in How to Become a Successful Wedding Cake Maker: Skills, Confidence & Growing Your Business, so that’s a good place to head next if you’re working on other areas of your cake business too.
You Don’t Have to Become a Marketing Expert
If marketing isn’t the reason you started your cake business, you’re definitely not alone!
You don’t need to become an expert in Google, social media, sales, photography and everything else overnight.
Learn a little at a time and concentrate on the areas that make the biggest difference to your business.
It’s also one of the reasons I include business support within my Wedding Cake Lounge.
Alongside cake tutorials, workshops, recipes and demonstrations, I invite expert guest speakers into the Lounge to share their knowledge in areas including marketing, sales, social media and accounting. The Lounge also provides a supportive community where cake makers can share ideas and learn from one another.
If you’d like more support developing your skills, confidence and cake business, you can find out more about the Wedding Cake Lounge here.
Most importantly, don’t feel you need to do everything at once.
Choose one or two areas of your marketing to improve, work on them consistently and pay attention to what’s actually bringing the right customers to your business.
That’s far more valuable than simply trying to be everywhere.
