The Marketer’s Guide to Getting Married
The first thing I did when I got engaged was to create a spreadsheet. The second thing I did was revisit my rusty Pinterest page. Within a few weeks, we had a date picked. By three months, we had the big things booked and I was starting to craft my table decorations. After a year and a half, I was just ready to marry the love of my life and go to Hawaii. (Which I did. It was lovely. We were lovely. Being married is awesome. But that’s for another day.)
All of which is to say that getting married as a marketer is a whole separate ball game. When you’re a civilian, all of these things are new to you. You’ve never created a website before, your hashtag is a precious thing to be agonized over during wine nights, and your colors are the stuff of mood boards. It wasn’t the case for me. I knew, high-level, that I wanted to be organized and strategic; I knew that this would be a giant project that would quickly become overwhelming.
What I didn’t realize was that, unlike the rest of America, the stuff I would beat myself up over later wouldn’t be my crazy cousin or forgetting the cake cutting knife. It wasn’t the day-of details that everyone warned me about. As a marketer, my bigger failures stemmed from the copy on the wedding website, the language on our invitations, and the logistical details of the afternoon. In sum, it was the marketing that kept me awake at night after the sun burns and unwrapping were faint memories.
As a marketer who plans events, manages websites, and handles social media, getting married was a strange exploration into avoiding the bridal shenanigans that most people enjoy. My constant refrain was closer to let’s make this easy than let’s make this the event of the century.
A lot of people have written some very fantastic things about getting married. A Practical Wedding and Offbeat Bride basically kept me sane. But the one thing I couldn’t find was a guide to how marketers handle their own weddings. It’s sort of like a pastry chef baking a cake for a family gathering: it’s something you do daily, but when it’s outside work, it just becomes more complicated.
One of the most hilarious slash I’m a terrible person things that happened was when my sister in law took me shopping to look at bridesmaid dresses. The sweet but naive sales assistant asked me my colors, and me, sick of the entire process by this point with at least a year to go, made a joke about not having the hex codes and the tackiness of matching dresses. Because the entire thing is absolutely ridiculous if you ask me. And when I tried to force my gals to just buy a dress that was vaguely pale pink and call it a day, they pushed for swirling tulle skirts in a cascade of pale pinks and purples. They wanted direction, and I had no patience to give it because it just didn’t matter to me.
The hashtag is another thing that felt overdone to me. While my now husband has affectionately called me “Smalinghaus” for years, I had no interest in a cutesy phrase like #timandmegan2019. Hear me out. I’ve been managing social for about a decade at this point. I know all of those sweet but blurry pictures that follow the hashtags, and I’ve tagged brides and grooms myself at times. But we paid a very nice photographer a lot of money to pose us in our bridal best, and I really don’t need your extra frames.
My goal was to be present because we so rarely are in our work world. I wanted this one thing to be free of social expectations and a digital performance that would have Goffman rolling in his grave.
That being said, here’s my guide to getting married as a marketer.
1. This isn’t work.
The one thing that constantly surprised me throughout the entire process was how ill-prepared I felt and how many things I’d change in hindsight. It was difficult for me to take off my account manager hat and just be a bride at times, and most of my emails included that client-ready closer “Let me know if you have any questions.” There’s still a huge part of me that wishes I could do again so I could nail down the details in a better way. But this isn’t work, and as much as I control what happens for my clients, it’s impossible to be the client and the account manager at the same time.
The easiest part of the wedding was my now husband. Writing our vows together, circling the wagons against the parents on big decisions, and keeping all those details straight helped us become a wedding power duo. It’s like how people say that IKEA is the ultimate relationship test; powering through planning a giant wedding just helped me love that man more fiercely. (We’re great at putting together furniture together too, in case you were wondering.)
Remember my marketers: this isn’t work and everyone may be insanely confused about which chapel you’re saying I do at, but nobody is going to fire you for it either.
2. Embrace who you are together.
I was worried that some parts of our wedding felt crafty or silly, but in retrospect it was very us. From promising to kill each other’s enemies to hot gluing thousands of tiny felt leaves, that wedding was us, full stop. It wasn’t perfectly designed and I’m sure it wasn’t Instagram-worthy, but I realized early on that I just didn’t care what people thought as long as the two of us were happy. Most of the tiny details fell away by the time May rolled around, and we were left with the things that mattered.
My dear marketers, there is no standard for you to meet. You are not held to a higher regard because you know how to do this in your sleep. It’s not about whether your clients will be impressed or whether you can show off your writing acumen. It’s about you and your person.
3. Pictures are awkward.
Man, I just can’t be that Instagram girl sharing posed pictures. It’s not me. Maybe it’s growing up in Southern California where the goal was to simultaneously look pretty while looking like you didn’t try at all, or maybe it’s just my own self awareness speaking, but the posed, walking through the fields, staring down the camera is just not me and it’s beyond not my husband either. In fact, as beautiful as our pictures are (and they really, really are - shout out to White Lotus!), I still haven’t shared a giant album of us on Facebook yet. It just doesn’t feel authentic to me.
What did feel right was asking our photographer to embrace our own awkwardness. While I manufacture Insta-worthy moments for clients, I was more enamored of the pictures of my husband sticking his finger in my nose than in any of the sweetly posed variety. We found an authenticity that felt right to us, and, in doing so, allowed me to let go of the expectations of having perfect pictures.
Looking back now, we had a perfect wedding, even with the failed details and insanity of the day. And, unlike most brides, I actually got to eat dinner and I’ll remember every second of the day. Just don’t get me started on changing my name.