September 2009 Archives

How to Differentiate Yourself

September 28, 2009 By ndulj Leave a Comment

From the Archives of Think Like A Bride

It’s a given today, the competition is fierce and plentiful. How are you supposed to capture the market share you need to grow your company if the same old ways you have been marketing have flat lined? You have to differentiate yourself and that can be tough when all your competition is selling virtually the same product. Here are a few things to try.

Most of my clients tell me they have a hard time trying to figure out what makes them remarkable. Rather than trying to set yourself apart from the whole world narrow the focus in your brainstorming to just your closest competitor. Look very closely at what they are offering or doing or how they are marketing, shop them. Ask yourself what they are doing to get market share. There is something, marketing, price, product, availability, agility, something. You need to figure out why people are buying from them and then counteract it. Either zig when they zag, make them prove it, or lead them someplace that they can’t go.

Let’s say for instance you are a bridal salon and you are up against David’s. David’s is an established brand with national reach and an ad budget to match. Everything you are not. Your marketing should say that. “We aren’t a big box conglomerate whose selection is dictated by the home office, we are a very personal boutique that only selects style that reflects the women we cater to. No need to sort through endless racks of things that you would never wear. We go to market with our unique local clientele in mind. Let us show you what personal service feels like.” Boom, that is a campaign that the big box can’t touch. Now make sure that that becomes your mission statement and repeat it whenever and wherever possible.

Make them prove it. I once had a competitor that would come to wedding shows and practically force cake samples down brides throats, always saying ”Now tell me that isn’t the best strawberry cake you have every tasted”. Well it wasn’t. Every bride that came into my shop for a tasting got a piece of my strawberry cake and so did every consultant I could think of taking it to. If they were going to make a claim like that they had better be right! I made them prove it. Did it cost me a bunch in samples? Yes, a little. Did it sell a lot of cakes? Haha, you bet it did!

If your competitor is new and just doesn’t have the connections you have use that in your favor. Get comments for your website from the professionals that you work with regularly. Sit down one day a give all you friends in the industry a call and tell them that you want a personal comment, a line or two to use on the links page on your website. Nobody is going to turn down a link from good site. The more personal and glowing the comment the better:

I love it when our brides hire XYZ photography. X is so easy to work with and so professional. And I always know how great the shots of my cake will be.

Christine Boulton
Indulgence Custom Bakeshop

String about 20 of those along with the obligatory thank yous from brides and you sure look like anything but an unconnected newcomer.

Stop for a minute and think about what your competitor is using to market themselves and nullify it. Not only are you setting your self apart but you have just cost them money on a marketing campaign that is now worthless.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: bridal marketing, Marketing, Wedding Business Success

What It Takes to Build a Great Website

September 22, 2009 By ndulj 5 Comments

There are so many things that go into propelling your blog or website to the top of search. One of the things that so many people forget is the basic structure that supports it all. So hung up are they on keywords and shiny new tools like Facebook and Twitter that they think that site structure itself isn’t important. Maybe that explains why so many people are still struggling to make their flash site search. You can keep throwing money at self proclaimed SEO experts but unless you have the proper foundation it won’t really make any difference.

You know by now how strongly I feel about using WordPress as the content management system for not only your blog but your entire website. There is more to it than just that. Not all WP themes are created equal. As they say “the devil is in the details”

You need a team that understands all the nuances and details behind all of the themes and what makes a great WordPress blog/website. A team that knows how to find the one theme that will not only work for you in terms of look and content layout, but more importantly how each of them is inherently optimized to behave and react in a way that the search engines expect. You need someone with a deep understanding of how the search engines work. Additionally you need someone that knows which plugins, set which way are going to add to your search mojo. And most of all you need someone who can create a great look, so that you grab the interest of the visitors the search engine delivers.

Let me tell you a little story. Last Friday we set the Wedding Dish to maintenance mode and rolled it to a different WP theme. Over the course of the next 24 hours we dressed it up, added a plugin here, tweaked a bit there and set it back to live. By Sunday, the unique visitors had increased by 20%! What’s more, the number of page views per visitor and time on the site went through the roof. That is overnight folks. We did nothing, not one thing to the content. This is purely the power of the right theme, optimized correctly with a look that engages the site visitors. Those numbers have continued to climb each day since and I don’t foresee that changing anytime soon.

Here at the Agency, we have assembled a team with the experts that understand the power of WordPress and how to build a site that can harness that, an award winning graphics team that can give you the look you need to keep you visitor engaged and express your brand and the deep background in the wedding industry to understand how to appeal to today’s brides.

So tell me, what is stopping you from rebuilding your foundation?

Filed Under: Blog, Marketing, Website marketing Tagged With: blogsites, bridal marketing, search optimization, website design, Website traffic, Wedding Business Success, WordPress

Do You Still Think Social Media Doesn’t Matter?

September 15, 2009 By ndulj Leave a Comment

This newsletter was in my inbox this morning.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009
I’m Getting Married — And Social Media Is Helping
By Joe Marchese

So Saturday I say “I do.” It has been an incredible whirlwind trying to keep pace with work and wedding preparations, although I have to say, @ChristieM ( www.twitter.com/christiem) did all the real work for the wedding. The other thing I have found interesting is how much social media has impacted the planning of the wedding. It makes me wonder how people did it before.

First the obvious, I was able to find almost every friend and family member I needed to reach on Facebook. No calling old numbers or mailing invites to old addresses. And Facebook gave me a permanent connection by which to bug people for RSVP responses.

I never would have imagined how hard it is to pick wedding music, but with a combination of iTunes Genius feature and Pandora’s magical ability to suggest other music based in part on the wisdom of the crowd, we have one kick-ass play list. Christie and I could even turn to Twitter and Facebook to ask our networks which song (“The Blower’s Daughter” or “First Day of My Life”) Christie should walk down the aisle to, when we had differing opinions. Everyone agreed with Christie’s choice (“First Day of My Life”) by the way, something I am sure I will be getting used to in married life.

The honeymoon was my responsibility, and again I turned to Twitter and Facebook to get suggestions on where to stay in the cities we will be visiting in the coming weeks. The responses were amazing. Thanks to all the feedback, I am feeling very confident about the hotels we are staying in, even though I have never been to any of the cities before. For example, in Dubai we are staying at Mina A’Salam at the Madinat Jumeirah (. Dubai was particularly difficult, because sites like Travelocity and Expedia seem to rate every hotel five stars. But people in my Facebook network actually introduced me to friends they have living in Dubai, and I was able to get some local insight on a city I knew very little about.

I plan on trying out iPhone apps and crowd sourced programs to find great places to go while traveling. (Does Paris or Rome have Foursquare?). The whole time, I’ll be keeping my Twitter network apprised of how the trip is going and asking for more suggestions @joemarchese ( www.twitter.com/joemarchese). So if you want to keep up, or have any great tips, come say hi on Twitter or Facebook. I will try not to tweet during the ceremony.

How did people do all of this before social media?

Just saying….

Filed Under: Marketing, Social Media

The Synergy of Email Marketing and WordPress

September 9, 2009 By ndulj 3 Comments

Many wedding professionals are using Email blasts for marketing. Let me show you why moving to WordPress will make that easier and more beneficial.

In today’s fast paced environment, email marketing works best when it teases several articles rather than using the full article content. If a reader doesn’t get hooked by the first one, there are more chances on down the page.
I have been doing this with my Think Like A Bride newsletter. The great thing about it is I can look at the stats for the email campaign and see what articles are catching my reader’s eyes. Then I of course write more of them. The thing is, you have to have somewhere for those full articles to live.

Publishing content remains a huge barrier to small businesses who too often rely on static Web sites – and sometimes-expensive, often-hard-to-reach Webmasters to update those sites.
That is where WordPress comes in. Publishing via WordPress is something that most anyone can grasp. It becomes a simple task to get your content online. Even if your newsletter is just a collection of images from the last month’s weddings, you can still manage it yourself.

In each teaser in your newsletter you link to the post for the full article on your WordPress site. By posting it on your site you have the benefit of added content and better SEO. That is something that just putting it in an email won’t give you.

Additionally, WordPress sites are set up to easily allow you to install the tools needed to gather leads as well as cross post your material to all the other social networks like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. Again, great for SEO and a timesaver for you.

Even if you aren’t ready to completely switch you website to a WordPress CMS, (which I highly recommend) you can still just have a WP blog set up on your existing site. Call it something like “Latest News” or “Fresh Ideas” and let your articles live there.

It is something to think about. Why not get all the benefit you can out of the effort you put into writing articles for your newsletter? Kind of seems like a no brainer to me.

Filed Under: Blog, Marketing, Social Media, Website marketing Tagged With: bridal marketing, email, search optimization, SEO, wedding marketing, WordPress

Why Your Blog Is So Important

September 4, 2009 By ndulj 3 Comments

Your blog is the most important piece of your online puzzle, more important than your website. That is true even if you have your main site built on a blogging platform*

Your blog is the central hub, the mothership for all the other social media platforms you use. Here are some of reasons why.

Most websites are static online brochures. Oh maybe there is some interactivity, a shopping cart or a place to sign up for newsletters; but by and large it is a static place. That is how it should be; a safe, comfortable source of needed information.

Today, people want more; they want to get to know you and what you value. The best way to do that is to update your blog. A blog gives you time and space to really put your ideas forth. In some ways your blog is akin to a constantly updated online resume for your business. It’s the place to let the world know what you think in more than a sound bite. Here is the repository for all of your ideas about your particular area of expertise. Here is where you make yourself an authority. Here is where you give potential clients a reason to visit your online brochure.
Your blog is also your archive. It shows your potential clients where you have been and what you have done. If a bride wants to see your ideas on a given subject, it’s all right there, indexed and searchable.

Facebook and Twitter are places to build community. The problem is that those platforms don’t have the space and permanence to really build a whole picture of who you are. Once you have a community, you have to give them a place to dig deeper.
One of the ways I use Facebook is to draw readers to my blog, where I can flesh out my ideas more fully. Rather than having my blog post just lie there, I push the synopsis into the community and then pull them to the blog.
Your readers and especially your potential clients want to know what excites you. For that I use Twitter. I do a lot of research on the web. Anytime I find a page that my followers might also be interested in, I post the link to Twitter. Once a week all those tweets are complied and posted on my blog. The reason for that is the difference in the transient nature of Twitter versus the more permanent nature of a blog. Tweets are rolled off in a matter of minutes, your blog post live forever.

Use your blog as the central hub of all you do, make everything lead back to that one, easy to use spot.

*This website is built on a blog platform. It functions just like a regular website, gathering leads, presenting products and closing sales. What is different is that the face of it is my blog. In some things, you really can have it all. Here are two more websites we built on blog platforms.

TWESA.com

The Something Blue Shop

Filed Under: Blog, Building Your Business, Marketing, Social Media