By Michelle Tang, Eversnap, Sunnyvale, Calif.Starting or growing a wedding business can be difficult, but it’s not impossible. Having helped grow a wedding startup, I’ve experienced my own fair share of challenges. However, I learned to turn the struggles into lessons—here are five effective business strategies that you can easily implement to help grow your wedding business. 1. Focus, and don’t try to juggle everything. Whether you’re just starting to learn about the industry or are a well-seasoned planner, as a business owner, it’s easy to get distracted by all the things you feel you “should” be doing to grow your business. Instead, create a solid set of realistic, tangible goals—no more than three—and set deadlines for achieving them. Write down three goals for your business for this month. Make them tangible, measurable (i.e. increase my sales by 10%), and realistic.2. Know your customers. Before you start pouring thousands of dollars into banner ads, Google AdWords, Facebook ads, and listings, know whom you should be targeting. What’s your niche? If you’ve already had paying customers/clients, think about what has brought you success. Interview your customers and get their feedback. Don’t be afraid to give your past and current clients a call to learn about your successes and failures.Nobody can cover the entire wedding market, so know where your sweet spot is. That includes demographics of your clients, their style preferences, and ideal price range. Creating a campaign targeted toward “women between the ages of…” may get you some traffic, but it might be wasting a lot of resources as well. If you decide to go with ads, they are not the cheapest method of getting the word out, so spend on these effectively if you do so at all.3. Don’t be afraid to get help from other experts and industry professionals. I work with many other industry professionals—planners, photographers, venues, etc.—to get the word out about our photo-sharing app, Eversnap. As one person, managing our customer service and marketing, keeping up something as simple as our blog can be difficult. We get thousands of visitors looking for great content every month, so I get help from numerous industry experts to keep things fresh, while providing great content. We have a form on our blog to apply to be a guest blogger, and we get new entries every week. With guest bloggers, we can continue driving traffic to our site, while making the blog much more manageable. Guest bloggers benefit by having a place to share their content and also receive traffic.Things like link exchanges, blog swaps (offering content to other blogs or sites), and sponsored email swaps can be effective and low-cost. At the end of the day, what you offer to another professional should be beneficial and relevant to their audience. Make your partnerships strategic because partnerships can be time-consuming and may not always produce the results you want.4. Use Pinterest to drive traffic. According to www.comScore.com, Pinterest had 46.9 million monthly unique visitors in July 2013 alone. With a few tweaks, Pinterest and your fans can help drive more traffic to your site. Make images on your site “pinnable.” What does that mean? The image should be clear and something that provides value to the pinner. That means it’s not just about having dreamy wedding images. You could even post images that link to tutorials. If your work is your weddings, then don’t be afraid to share them. Have your weddings featured on your site, and make each image “pinnable” by adding a “pin it” widget or plug-in to your page. If you’re working with a professional photographer’s photos, make sure you get permission from the photographer to use the images. Just ask and, of course, credit the photos with the watermark of the photographer so credit is given where it’s due. Aside from content being useful or dreamy to pin, you could create more incentive through a contest that allows people to pin and create their dream wedding board—with a prize given for the best.5. Use your clients as sources of referrals. Choose your clients carefully because you want to build a relationship with them. If your clients are satisfied with your work, they will refer you to their friends. More than likely, if your clients are getting married, they have at least one friend at the wedding getting married in the next year and these can be potential clients.These are just five effective strategies that you can try out for your own business. Most of these do not require brand new tools but are about refining and optimizing what you already have. Do you have other strategies that have worked for you?Michelle Tang, managing director at Eversnap, stays on top of all the up-and-coming trends in weddings, startups, and technology.