Every now and then I run across these videos. I’ve used some of them in my presentations and seminars. This one has a lot to say about the power of social media. If you think it is just a fad or that you don’t need to use it for your business you are sorely mistaken.

As wedding vendors, your target market IS GenY. If you ignore the media that they use you have no hope of reaching them. In order to sucessfully market anything, you have to:

• Understand your target market
• Know where they are
• Reach out to them in a way that they are receptive to hearing

You can not market your goods or service only in the way that you would be receptive to; or that worked well for previous generations.

Because of how unique our industry is, our target market is constantly shifting. They move at light speed and you have to stay on top of their trends to find them. It is no longer enough to stay up on the latest trends in weddings. You have to constantly scan the jungle to see where the herd you seek to capture is lurking.

There are two distinct schools of thought on how to handle how you use social media: short and frequent versus longer and less

often. Is there really a difference and which style is for you.

The conventional wisdom for blogging was that the best strategy was to put up short posts on a daily basis. Limit yourself to 500 words or less but do it every day.  This is the part that got a lot of my clients groaning. The thinking behind this was that in the eyes of the search engine every post represents a page on your site. Another factor was to keep subscribers happy and coming back. Well with the rise in popularity of microblogging sites like Twitter a new thinking is beginning to emerge.

First let’s look at Twitter. If you are on Twitter than you know what I am talking about when I say that there are too many people clogging the twittershpere with mundane stream of consciousness nonsense. “Yum, starbucks here we come” “Uploading Saturday’s wedding”  “Such a nice day and no photo shoots”  Please people, I have a life, I don’t want yours. Then along comes an article on how the CDC is using Twitter to keep everyone informed about the Swine Flu issue. (which, btw, I found on Twitter in the first place)

Be Simple and Selective on Twitter, Don’t Over Complicate: Unlike many of us (myself included) who congest Twitter’s airwaves with excessive banter, the CDC exercised impressive restraint in sharing only the most essential content. In a weird way, its Twitter account @CDCemergency felt more authoritative precisely because it didn’t spray unnecessary junk our way. Everything it shares is important, timely and actionable. When it arrives, you know it’s important.

Precisely because it posted only the most essential content, you pay more attention to it. I follow close to 500 people on Twitter; it is the ones that only post meaningful things that I really pay any attention to at all. Do you want your followers to hear what you have to say or are you just posting to hear yourself tweet? Constant tweeting can be a plus for name recognition but are you getting recognized for what you want to be known for?

Some one that is doing frequent right on Twitter is Bravo Bride. They post about once an hour but always with a new item on their For Sale boards. It’s almost like watching the Home Shopping Network pop up on my twadget sidebar. What a wonderful, guilty pleasure.

As for blogging; more often doesn’t have to be the only way.  There is such a thing as evergreen posts; those posts that will be just as relevant 2 years from now as they are today. Suppose you write really great how to posts, those will most likely look good for the life of the blog. It’s ok for these to be longer. They may also have the added benefit of looking better to the Googlebots and if they are really good they may just land on the front page of Google and stay there for up to a year. One of the keys is that these posts have to be really well done. Mediocre just won’t cut it for a long post, so edit, edit, edit.

If the posts you write tend to be more topical and time sensitive then you have to be a frequent poster. Just by the nature of the beast you will want to lean toward quick hits here. Think of them as more of a news flash than a well researched feature article. Get your facts right, make your language concise and hit it and get it. Toss in a couple of well labeled images and you are on your way.

Here is an example of the difference.

Short post:  Amber & Josh’s Wedding.

This would be an example of a post that would be short.  Get in all the important information and relevant keywords like your location and the venue complete with town and state. Use your great pictures and let them carry the information for you.

Long Post: Why Amber’s Wedding Makeup Looked So Great & How Yours Can Too

Same wedding, maybe even same images but this time you are giving the brides tips on how to achieve the look they want in their pictures by using the right makeup tricks. Yep, you may have to pick up the phone and ask the makeup artist a few questions, do a bit of refining but you will have a post that has staying (and search) power.

There isn’t anything wrong with either approach. There isn’t anything wrong with a combination of the two. What you want to be careful of is mixing them up. No one wants to read a 1500 word review of some strangers wedding. If you go long, make it packed with information that your readers can use.

I had an interesting conversation with a new client recently. Part of my review of his marketing strategy included asking him when he last updated his website. His answer startled me; he hadn’t updated anything in over a year!

I’m sure you are thinking big deal but this really is a big deal. In the case of this particular client, a caterer, he hadn’t even changed the prices on the posted menus. If you have bought anything in the last year like oh say food or gas then you know what has happened to prices. What do you think having to live with year old prices did to his bottom line? Exactly.

When he told me why he was doing that to his business I was even more stunned. He hated to call the webmaster to change anything because it cost an arm and a leg. Sound familiar? I am dealing with the same situation with an organization where I am a member of the board. This is lunacy.

In today’s culture a website has to be a dynamic, current, ever changing entity. Today’s bride can smell outdated at thirty paces. I’m not necessarily talking about changing the over all look of a site, although that should be done every 2 to 3 years. I am most concerned with you keeping the information up to date.  Are you a wedding planner that only has pictures of weddings you did 4 or 5 years ago on your site? Why not the images from last weekends wedding? I know, the webmaster again, right? What about you florists, those bouquets look a little out of date do they? Are you representing your business to its best advantage? Probably not.

With the tools and products on the market today there isn’t any reason why you should have a website that can’t be quickly and easily updated BY YOU at the click of a button. If your web designer is telling you different he is holding you hostage to old technology and stuffing his wallet at your expense.

I also have clients that have come to me with a perfectly good site that was in fact built so they could update it but they never learned how. WHAT??  Come on, that’s such an easy fix I almost feel bad telling you. If you need to learn how to use the website you have, call whoever built it, offer to pay them for their time and have them sit down with you and teach you how to use it. How do you think I started learning all this stuff oh those many years ago?

I’ll tell you something else, most web designer will get a kick out of showing you all the nifty bells and whistles in your site. Remember, they are techies, this stuff excites them as much as that new source for the perfect ribbon or staffing solution or newest gown collection excites you. Let them show it off. Something else to think about, if you buy a new website make sure that a complete one on one tutorial is part of the package. That site doesn’t do you a bit of good if you can’t use it to its full advantage.

Technology is moving at light speed. The days of building a website and forgetting it are over. Remember, that is where you potential customers are looking for you.  Can you afford to show them you are outdated and out of sync with their world?

If you would like me to review your website, just drop me a line. If I get enough of them I may just do a column reviewing them next month, with your permission of course.

It is a common fallacy to stop marketing when money gets tight. It is very easy to see your marketing budget as a quick fix place to cut. Don’t do it. You need your marketing now more than ever.

So what do you do when those high dollar spends like magazines and bridal show keep getting more expensive and returning less. I didn’t say you had to keep marketing the way you were, I just said that now is not the time to stop.

Right now the most cost effective way to market is through email, but you need to do it right.

Here are some of the things I have learned along the way.

• Don’t use your regular email. Use a quality bulk email system that has a good opt –out  application.  I like A Weber and Emma. I like Emma enough to become an agency for them. Both offer great tracking and are ridiculously easy to use. I recently started using Constant Contact for a client. I have to tell you, I am not a fan.
• Preview, preview and preview again. A good system lets you send test emails to yourself and a limited group free of charge. In my case I send them to myself at email addresses on three different email programs just see how they look. I use Outlook, G-mail and Thunderbird. Be sure to check how it looks in the various preview panes on your mail programs. Sometimes that is all your recipient will look at. Once I have it tweaked, I add the client to the final test for their approval.
• Have a “Tell a Friend” button prominently placed in your email. Most systems have this feature just be sure you enable it.
• Use good lead lists. The single best way is to build your own list. As I have said in a previous article, the ones you get from magazines and bridal shows are dicey at best. In fact, Emma won’t even let you load them.  If you do bridal shows, have brides sign up IN YOUR BOOTH. Offer them something in return, a discount coupon works well.  Set that up as an auto-responder when they opt in, don’t just hand them to them at the show.
• Make sure you have a lead generator on your website. Again, offer them something to sign up. It can be information, invitations to events or a coupon. Give them something.
• Be regular in your mailings. You can’t send an email blast every now and then and expect it to work. You have to send them out on a regular consistent basis. Remember, brides take between 12 and 16 months to plan their wedding. If you take away the months they spent getting around to thinking about your particular service or product and the months the need to book in advance of their date you have a window of 6 months at best, probably more like 4. Looking at it in that light, weekly isn’t a bad goal.
• Make your emails short, sweet, lively and fun. Make your readers look forward to the next one.  Include a few interesting illustrations but don’t overload it. To high of a percentage of images to text sets off the spam filters.
• Include pertinent links to things you talk about. Say you are having a special on Fondant cake, include a link to your description of fondant and a galley of fondant cakes on your website.  Running a special on Maggie Sottero Gowns, link to their website. You can track those click-thrus to find out what gets your readers interest; then do more like it.
• Tracking. Yes any good system has good tracking stats and you need to be using them.  I’ve said it before, there is gold in your statistics if you would just use them.

Email marketing is easier than you think and it certainly is more cost effective then most other forms of marketing. Here is one more little thought to get you thinking…

Among 18- to-34-year-olds, consumers are more likely to be influenced to make purchases based on e-mail marketing messages and direct mail than from advertisements or marketing messages on social networks according to new research from Ball State University and ExactTarget.

If you would like the Agency @ Think put together you email marketing strategies send me an email here.

When I first started in this business the single best way to market yourself was through personal engagement with your customers. That meant one thing: Bridal Shows. Websites barely existed and at best they were an after thought. The more things change, the more some things stay the same.

The single best way is once again through personal engagement, the difference is that now it is ALL about the internet. Let’s take a little look at where bridal marketing has been and where it is now.

We all loved bridal shows because we got to talk to the brides. We got to show our personality and our passion. In truth, it was about the only way to market. Oh there was the Yellow Pages and maybe one local magazine put out annually by the newspaper, but other than that there was little else.

Next came the influx of pretty, glossy local magazines. Before you knew it there were so many that you were having a hard time figuring out which ones to give your money to, lord knows you couldn’t do them all! So we did what we could and let their art department design our ad, virtually handing over control of our branding to someone else. Heaven forbid they got it wrong because we were stuck with their mistake for at least six months. Trust me I know, it happened to me. Even if it was right, it still just lies there hoping someone would be inspired to call you. What’s more, you were dependant on how good of a job the publisher did at distributing the book.

Then we were told that we had to have a website to be competitive and so we got a small site that was static and couldn’t be updated. It really wasn’t much better than the magazines. There was no customer engagement, we couldn’t change them and again, they just lie there hoping someone would find them.

Then came the holy grail of Search Engine Optimization and all the little tips and tricks to drive traffic to your static website. Get that baby on the first page of Google and we were home free. Ya, right. You bought into that too, didn’t you? Magazine sales reps said we had to have an ad to publicize our web site; web designers spoke lovingly of keywords and metatags. The Gurus preached Google AdWords to us in hallowed tones. Yet with all this, most of our brides were still coming from the bridal shows. Customer engagement still ruled the day.

That much hasn’t changed. What has changed is how we go about getting that personal customer engagement. Part of that is due to how today’s bride uses the internet and partly because of how the internet itself has changed.

The rise of social media and its influence on how our target market shops can not be underestimated. Today’s bride is interconnected and interactive. Her influencers are all over the world. She is as likely to keep up with friends around the corner as well as around the globe on Twitter or Facebook. She expects to find her vendors there as well.

Much has been written in the last few years about the plummeting readership of newspapers and magazines. Gone are the days when you could count of your market being plopped in front of the TV for 6 hours a night.  If today’s bride isn’t using her time to read periodicals or watch mindless TV what the heck is she doing with all those freed up hours? She is sitting in front of her broadband connection talking to friends all over the world in one window, shopping in another and looking for advice in a third. All while playing around in a graphics program working on her save the date cards.

So what has all this got to do with you, your marketing and customer engagement?

First you get that you have to be out on the internet, right? Now think about it, your brides are engaging with people all over the world, all the time ; at work, at home,on their iPhone on their commute. Shouldn’t you be one of the people they are engaging with? “Now just how do you expect me to do that Christine?”

First off, your website needs to be interactive and change frequently. By Frequently I mean at least every third day. The best way to do that is to have a blog based website. One that can be syndicated for feed readers and that you can update yourself easily. The more often you post the more often the search engines take notice of you. Every picture you add and every word you type sends them a signal that you are alive. As you build a following of brides it also sends them a signal that you have something new to add to the conversation. That keeps you in the front of their mind. It gives you an opportunity to engage and connect with them. Just like at the bridal shows; except that instead of talking to one bride at a time you are speaking to many at once. What’s more, your words hang there in cyberspace until she is ready to hear them.

Once you have that down I highly suggest that you think about either Twitter or Facebook. I have a coaching client that has been diligently taking my advice since the first of June. In that time she has made connections with wedding planner all over North America, been featured on Wedding Bee and Ritzy Bee, been contacted by Alexis with Martha Stewart, the editor for Grace Ormond and Stacie at Get Married. She just did here first taping for the Wedding Podcast network. In short, she is making some very valuable connections through her blog and through the other social networking sites she is mining. Put another way, this is just like the time you spend at bridal shows meeting the other vendors. Just like in the real world, you network with the other professionals and they in turn get your name out. You can do the same thing in about an hour a day. Before you even ask me where you are suppose to get the time for that, why not try thinking like a bride. Drag your laptop out to the couch and network while you catch the latest installment of you favorite must see TV.

Once again, it is about personal engagement. Isn’t that where we started?

For our industry, blogging and email marketing are the most effective tools in the social media tool bag. Yes there are  Facebook and Twitter to be included but for most of my clients the first two are the most powerful and easiest to incorporate into the mix; the last 3 take a measure of dedication and devotion that not many of you have. Heck some days even I don’t.

Our most effective tool is email marketing. I’m sure you have put a bulk mail program like A Weber in place but have you customized your template? Is there a lead generator on your website for people to sign up? Do all of your email blasts look alike and friendly? Do they include your branding and pertinent information like phone number and hours of operation? Do they have links to your website? Or are they just plain, boring text messages that lie there like yesterday’s news? This is advertising people!

How often do you send out an email blast? This isn’t like the old days when you had to pay someone like the Knot an arm and a leg to send out a blast. Today’s bulk mailers are dirt cheap and completely DIY for very many of us. You should be sending out a blast to your lead list at least once a month, every other week is even better. Surely you can think of something to say that is short and informative. You are trying to build a relationship with your leads.

When I say leads, I don’t just mean brides. You should have a lead list for other wedding professionals too. It goes back to networking. The other professionals in your area are the true influentials in your market. Keep them informed on what is new and exciting in your field and you will quickly become the go to guy in your market. They will bring the brides. I hope I don’t need to remind you to do the same for them.

The other most effective tool is your blog. I know you have a website but a blog is different. As I have said in the past your blog is where you let your personality come through. It is where you show your excitement. Your excitement get’s others excited. Talk about your events and your products. Use your blog to show case upcoming promotions and highlight your successes. Corporate blogging, unlike blogging for profit, is about showing the human side, the personality if you will of you and your company. Because of that difference, your posts don’t have to be long winded research pieces. They should just be short little bites that illustrate your day.

Blogging platforms today are a breeze to use and when you add all the cool free tools on the internet that you can use to enhance them your blog should be a lively place for prospective clients to visit.  Pop up a slide show of last weeks wedding or one about the backstage setup on your last big catering job. Do a slide show of a recent trunk show to show how much fun the brides were having. Keep it up to date and exciting.

Oh thing you must understand about social media marketing is that rather than broadcasting your message to a massive group and hoping it lands on a few friendly ears you are building relationships with a small group of influentials and encouraging them to spread your message. To that end, one of the things you can do to get your message out to the right people is by reading and posting comments on their blogs. You should be following blogs of like minded individuals in your market and making a connection with them. Let’s say you are a photographer that wants to expand into destination weddings. You should read a list of blogs written by wedding planners that specialize in destination weddings and you should comment frequently and intelligently enough that they begin to recognize you. When you do get to the point of pitching them they will already know you. Hmmmmm, that’s a good thing, no?  Suppose you are a caterer, you should be leaving comment on the blogs connected to venues you like. Again, it is about making connections and building relationships.

Social media marketing only works if you work it. The thing is that it get easier to use every day and the cost is next to nothing.

If you have been in the wedding industry for more than a nanosecond you already know that the single best marketing is word of mouth. What you may not know is how much word of mouth has changed in just the last few years. Yes it is still about the Courtneys telling the Ashleys who the best caterer is for their wedding but now when Courtney speaks she is telling half a million Ashleys instead of just one. With that kind of reach you had better be a part of the conversation.

I have been talking about the social networking phenomenon for a while now and it may be beginning to bore some of you. I think many more of you are just now beginning to see the light. I can’t go anywhere these days that I don’t get peppered with questions about blogs or Twitter or FaceBook. All of these are the building blocks of word of mouth marketing campaigns. Yes you read that right, I said marketing campaigns. The big boys of marketing recognize that WOM is a tool in their arsenal that can be crafted and managed.  Multi national companies like Coke and Proctor & Gamble are sinking money to the tune of 30% of their ad budgets into social media campaigns. They recognize the fact that it is the way today’s consumers get their information. So how does that translate to the small or even micro businesses that are bridal? Very easily, it just takes time.

Basic marketing consists of finding your message and shouting it at the masses and hoping it sticks. You craft the message and they have to take what you say at face value. WOM is essentially based on open two-way dialog. Yes that means you lose some control of your message, but if you think about it you never had any control over WOM anyway. With the tools today you at least get to be a part of the dialog. If you put forth the effort, Courtney and Ashley will invite you into their conversations where you can listen, learn and participate. That is what’s so new and exciting.

There are a lot of you that are building pages on sites like Facebook or are trying to maintain blogs but if you aren’t becoming a part of that community you aren’t accomplishing any thing more than your magazine adverts are. You have to become one of them in order to earn their trust. That is what a WOM campaign is all about. First you have to listen to them and then you have to participate.

You have to respond not just to the voices that love you but more importantly to the ones that don’t. If you find a negative comment about you or your part of the industry respond and find out how you can make it better. Learn from it. It is about becoming a trusted voice from the other side of the table.

But Christine, you say,”I don’t have time.” This is too important not to make time for. Here is a trick that I use called Marketing Blitzkrieg. Take one hour every other day and focus completely and totally on your WOM campaign. Get into the fray on Twitter or the blogosphere. Read as many forum posts or blogs as you can and respond. Most of these give you tools to ‘follow this thread’, use them. What that does is when someone responds to your comment you get notified, usually by email, and you cancontinue the conversation. You have to become a part of the dialog. It won’t be long before you become a recognized part of the community. That is your goal.

Here is why that matters: it’s not what you know or who you know…it’s how well you know them. Wouldn’t you rather do business with someone that you know and trust as opposed to someone based on just their slick ad campaign? Get Courtney and Ashley to know and trust you and they will do the rest of your marketing for you.

Word of Mouth, yes you can finally have some influence on the single most trusted source of referrals in the industry. You just have to work at it.

What is new media marketing? Should you care? Oh no, what is this going to cost me?

The answers to the second two are: Absolutely and a whole lot less then you might think. The first one is a little deeper.

If you haven’t heard about New Media Marketing then you haven’t been paying attention. NMM is about conversations, it is about sharing, it is about engaging your target market instead of just shouting your pitch into the air and hoping it lands on your potential customers. It is about building relationships first and making the sale later.

It’s blogging and Facebook and MySpace. It’s forums and email. It’s Flickr and YouTube and before you know it will be mobile phones too. Advertising has changed in so many ways in the last decade and it is the age demographic the wedding professionals seek that has been at the forefront of this wave.

It is the internet version 2.0. Yes, brides start by looking through magazines but they look there for ideas not their service providers. When it comes time to start connecting with vendors they hop on line. If the only on line presence you have is a webpage that is nothing more than an online brochure you are barely going to get noticed. Classic websites are little more thatn online yellow page ads. Today’s brides want more interaction.

If you read this month’s Bride’s Say column than you have an idea of why this is important. Bride’s today enter the market place with a huge chip on their shoulder. Rather than expecting the best they assume that every single member of the bridal industry is out to screw them. To say the very least trust is an issue. You can thank the few bad vendor and authors like the Fields and Rebecca Mead for that.

NMM is one way to help rebuild that trust as a way of attracting your potential customers. If you attach a blog to your website brides will read it and hopefully comment on it, by doing so they get an idea of what you are like. If it is well written they will get to see how passionate you are about what you do. If you post images of your work to your blog you can get a feel for what your market likes by keeping track of which ones are viewed most. They get to know you and you get to know them.

Another way to build community on line is through sites like MYSpace and Facebook. Build a page and read and post to the group forums there. Become an authority in your field, set yourself up as “the go to guy” when brides have questions about your segment of the industry. This is valuable even if the person you are talking to is neither in your price range or geographical location because brides that fit your demo will be reading these interactions too. There are a lot more lurkers than posters.

Flickr and YouTube are another way to get your name out. Watermark your images and upload them. That gets them out there for the world to see for free. There is a brand new group on Flickr put together by Marc Fuller from Great Wedding Network that is working to become the largest repository of wedding related images on the internet. They are soliciting images from brides as well as pros and tagging them so they are search friendly. I can guarantee that if a bride keeps seeing your name come up as she pick things she likes she if going to take the next step and contact you. Get your images out there and not just the set up shots that you put in the magazines and your portfolio but the quick snaps you take on site. Brides want to see the real thing not just the beauty shots.

Believe me, this is where your brides and grooms are, these are the places they go to do their research. You have to be there in a substantial way. You can’t just play around the edges on these things you have to be genuine and real. They will know the difference. Remember, this is about building trust before the sale and about making connections. Think of it as a 24/7 bridal show with a global reach without the sore feet.

Here is a list of some blogs I read. Some I have included because of their popularity and some because of how well done they are.  The first one is the highest rated wedding blog in the states and is written by brides; the rest are the blogs of wedding professionals. Give them a look.

Wedding Bee

Bridal Wave

A Softer Image

The Artist Eye

Style Me Pretty

Bridezilla

Your business will not grow if you do not market it. Period. End of story.

That’s may seem like a pretty strong statement especially in an industry where word of mouth has long proven to be the number one source of new business. You can’t buy good word of mouth advertising so what are you supposed to do?  You can prime the pump a little, that’s what. Build some traffic, create some buzz. You just have to do it in a smart, transparent way.

Here are a few simple truths that when taken together can point you in the right direction

One tenant of smart marketing is to spend your ad money where your target market is looking for you. In our case that is the internet and they are fanatical about looking at and sharing pretty pictures.

Another truth about our target market is that they tend toward being self-centered and narcissistic. They love to see themselves and their choices held up and applauded.

If you applaud their choice they will do the work of spreading the word.

Here are some things I discovered from my blog stats over the last month or so. Recently I posted some wedding photos of the daughter of a friend on my blog along with a link to her photographer’s site so they could see more images. Out of courtesy I sent mom a link.  By noon the bride had forwarded the link to a few friends. By the end of the day my site traffic had QUADRUPLED and the photographer’s had TRIPLED.  Hmmmmmm. Remember, I only sent the link to one person, but that person cared about those images enough to want to share them.

Something else I have noticed is that my referrals are almost all coming from Google images now. Needless to say I am trying to post some type of relevant image on every post. My numbers continue to climb.

Here is something else I ran across last month: JEEP’s new site was being praised on one of the PR/Marketing blogs I read. Why? Because the have added a page where fanatical JEEP owners can up load pictures of their pride and joy. People will share that which they are passionate about. What is your target market more passionate about than their wedding?

Bear with me, this will all come together. I promise.

I recently came across a site for a bridal salon that posts photos of the “Bride of the Month”. Now don’t you know what that has done for their site traffic?  They ask for brides to submit their photo and chose one at random each month. The post a new one each month but don’t archive the old ones.

We are getting closer. Now how do we tie this all together? Use you blog to showcase something every week, our cake of the week, or centerpiece, or bouquet or ‘best looking Groom’ or funniest cake smashing, whatever works for you. Make sure to drop the bride an email asking for permission and then send her the link. They will do the rest.

What’s all this going to cost you? Maybe an hour a week to pick you favorite image, post it and send the appropriate emails. Some of you will need a small digital camera to capture your images, some of you will work through your photographer associates. It isn’t about the best images; it is about consistency and using real wedding material to generate word of mouth. Be sure to have your blog linked to your primary website.

I can hear it now, “How is this going to help me.”  Because if you have a large number of woman in the prime marrying demographic check your site, or better yet being referred to your site every week when any one of them gets engaged yours is going to be the first site they hit to set up an appointment. You have been referred to them over and over by their friends, family and sorority sisters.

It is about priming the pump for word of mouth and getting your market to generate the buzz for you.

I talk a lot here about social networking and word of mouth marketing.  I ran across a recent report from BIGresearch that finds that 94.2% of consumers regularly or occasionally give advice about products and services they purchased, and 90.8% regularly or occasionally seek advice about products and services before making a purchase. Are you doing anything to harness the power of WOM advertising?  Or are you running in horror that someone might post a negative comment?

When you go online to research a product or buy something don’t you always look at the customer reviews? I know I do. I wouldn’t even think about buying something on EBay without considering the Seller’s rating. When was the last time you bought a book on Amazon and didn’t read the customer reviews? What are you doing to give brides a way to check out your fabulous reputation? Hoping they post on theKnot.com? Asking them to tell all their friends? Come on. The only time most people are going to go out of their way to post about you is if you made them mad. “Going out of their way” was the key phrase in that sentence. How about making it easier for them?

Let’s look at EBay and Amazon. When I buy something on EBay I quite often receive a follow up from the seller to post a positive review to up their rating. They always include an active link where I can post my rating. Do you do that? If you did, where would they post?  Look at any book on Amazon and there is a link to “Review this Book”. It is right out there, easy to find and for the world to see. Even blogs do this. At the end of every post is a cue to “Post your comment”. It is all about making it easy for the people you please to spread the word. Trust me, the ones you anger will find a way no matter how hard it is. (More on that later)

I met with my web designer and am having him enable comments on each one of my columns. I’m making it easy. I want to know what you think and I want you to know what my other readers think. You should be doing the same. You need to have a comments page on your website. It needs to be easy for everyone to find to both post and view. Since it is on your website you control it and have the ability to delete something if you need to. You also need to follow the lead of the EBay sellers and send a follow up email with an active link to each of your clients encouraging them to share their experience. You have to prod them to post. . By having it on your website, front and center, it lets your potential clients know that you have nothing to hide. “Yes, please review me. I have ever confidence that you will be happily satisfied.”

I have said it often enough that you should know it by heart now; today’s brides trust personal recommendations far more than advertising. How far are you going to use that bit of information? A marketing site I read made the comment that anyone can post one or two positive testimonials, but who can argue with one or two hundred? Give your potential clients the personal recommendation of as many happy clients as possible Yes, there is a good possibility that the random negative comment will show up. I want you to know two things about that. First, like I said if it is on your site you have control and the power to remove it. Second, I hope you will read it and learn from what was said. It may sting but you need to know what is being said so you can fix it. It is how we improve. Better that a disgruntled bride limits her negative comment to a site you can control rather than go completely off the deep end like this young lady did. http://angrybride.proboards107.com/index.cgi Yes I buried that url as far into this article as possible but feel free to post there. I’m all about transparency.