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 Today’s bride can smell outdated at thirty paces.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 What about you florists, those bouquets look a little out of date do they?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.
Your target market is talking. Do you know what they are asking for? I do. They are asking for information. Are you giving it to them? At the last bride’s panel one of the questions concerned websites and what brides wanted to see. An online portfolio was nice. So was a blurb about your experience and credentials. But what they wanted and weren’t finding was answers.
Brides tell me that they put together a list of vendors in a specific category by asking friends and relatives. They look through local wedding magazines and attend bridal.shows. This is where you first hit their radar. But once you make the big list, how do you survive the cut to the short list? At this point it is all about your website.
They will sit at the computer, either at work or in the late evening, and go to website after website. The ones that answer their questions get a second look. Do you offer what they are looking for, such as fondant on a cake or two cameras for a ceremony? Do you carry a certain line of gown or invitation or what ever it is that they are looking for? Are you available for their date? Can they afford you? If you answered the questions, then you get a call. Remember, today’s bride has been on the Internet since the 1st grade. Researching a product or service online is an everyday part of life.
One of the big things brides want, but are not finding on many websites is pricing.
That’s a tricky one for most of us. I know it was for me. Everything I did was a custom design. There were a million variables. How do you put a hard price on that?
All brides really want to know at this point is if you are in their price range. They don’t want to fall in love with your work or waste their time on a meeting if they can’t afford you. And you don’t want them to waste your time either. Do you really want to spend an hour with a couple only to find out that their entire wedding budget is in the neighborhood of your lowest package?
Like me, you may not be able to put a hard and fast price on your website. But if your don’t put some indication of a range of your prices, many brides will see the beautiful images of the best you have to offer, and write you off as too expensive. So give them some info. Give them an idea of where your pricing starts and how it works. If you normally include a few freebies in your deals, shout it from the rooftops. The more information they can access from their desktop, the happier today’s bride is.
Think about this when you do the annual review of your website. (You do that, don’t you?) Oh and if you need help, just call.
I promise, it will boost the conversion rate of qualified brides. Better hits, fewer misses. And isn’t that why you have a website?
I would imagine that by now you know you have to be online and that you have to do it right. It is pretty competitive out there and having a website designed isn’t exactly cheap. So here are a few tips to getting the best website for your needs.
- Know what you want and need before you approach a designer. Have a clear idea in your mind about what role you need this site to play. Is it simply an online brochure? Do you want to use it to build a community? Do you need it to be an e-commerce site? What do you want this site to achieve for you? If your answer to that last one is “more business” tell me how it will do that.
- Know what you want it to look like in terms of style. Bring up 5 or 6 sites you like and really give them a good hard look. What is it you like about them? Is it the visual elements or the functionality that caught your attention? They don’t have to be in the wedding industry, feel free to think outside the box a bit.
- Know what you want to include. Do you offer multiple services that can all be included or would they be better served with individual sites? For example, someone that plans both weddings and corporate events may be better served with two sites, each with a very different look. Ditto for the photographer that does both weddings and sports photography. The people seeking sports photography are going to be instantly turned off by the style that would attract brides. Not so for the photographer that does weddings and family portraiture; those two would easily blend. Think about your target market(s).
- Find a designer that understands your industry. Someone that understands your industry will understand your target market. I can’t over emphasize how important this may be. They are crafting your online presence, if they don’t understand your target market they won’t have a clue how to reach it. The may build you a technically spectacular site and still miss the mark.
- Don’t micromanage it. Trust me; you are the only one that the minutiae will make any difference to. Yes it is important that the overall look is right, that colors and graphics are spot on to your branding and that the functionality is flawless. Moving an image 10 pixels to the left isn’t that important. Trust that your designer does this for a living, they know what works. Just like you would not want your brides to micromanage you, don’t micromanage your web dude.
- Don’t rush it. Take your time in making the decisions in the first 4 points. Don’t put impossible deadlines on your designer. Every site is different and there is always something that has to be worked through. Better to let them work through it and get it right than to have them slap some band aid on it to hit your deadline. Be patient; remember right is better than quick.
- Admit what you don’t know and ask questions. Yep, we tend to be a bit techie but a good web designer should be able to answer your question with an explanation that you can understand. The key here is in the admitting what you don’t know. Just tell them it went over your head and to explain it to you.
I hope this has helped. I wish I had had a list like this when I had my first site designed. Wow, was I clueless. Jesse, if you are reading this, I am so sorry.
One of the tools that marketers are using to successfully reach the demographics of our brides is Event Marketing. It has been filtering down into the wedding industry for a while now and is starting to work. Would you like to look at the anatomy of one such event?
Event marketing isn’t about big annual bridal shows, it is more intimate than that. It is about parties and showing your guests a good time. It is about making them feel all warm and fuzzy about you.
There is a young entrepreneur in my market, Ashley, which has been doing a really good job at this. I attended one of her events last night and to be honest, I wouldn’t miss them. She has her finger on the pulse of the market and knows what to do to get that pulse racing.
Let’s think about her market. Standard demographic, women 18-34 with special emphasis on the style minded 24 to 30year old young professionals. Why style minded? The style conscious bride is always going to be willing to spend more than a granola munching earth girl. What else Ashley realizes is the even though they are brides, they are women with interests besides weddings. That is the key.
Last night’s event was a Sex and the City premier party. What does that have to do with weddings? Absolutely nothing. It does however have everything to do with the passions of her target market.
An extremely well done event, Ashley pulled in a long list of wedding vendor to pull it off; vendors that fit in with the theme. There were wedding and event planners, floral décor, caterers, cake designers, a DJ and a lighting company helping to put the event together. Oh and let’s not forget the limos to take the attendees to the theater in style. Every one of those vendors got a ton of exposure to a core group of influential’s in the exact market they want.
The event was by invitation and also promoted on her website. The guest list was brides from her lead list. Over 100 brides jumped at the opportunity to sip Cosmos and shop before arriving at the premier of this much anticipated film in limos surrounded by their sisters in the SATC cult. Let me tell you, when they arrived the buzz among the other women waiting in line to get into the movie was intense. I am willing to bet that a large percentage of them now know all about Ashley’s Bride Guide.
Here is the pay off. Ashley raised the profile of her website tremendously. The women that attended will talk about the event to their friends and want to be in on the next one. Her traffic is going to spike like crazy. As a result of this event Ashley is building her reputation of being hip and capable and in the know. In short, she is becoming trusted by her target market. The advertisers on her site will reap the benefits. “If Ashley likes them, so will I.”
Part of what makes these events so popular is that they are not wedding-centric. By using non-wedding events to bring brides together she is able to reach them on a different level and earn their trust. When their mind does turn to their wedding planning, Ashley is already a trusted source.
Stop thinking about your future clients as “just brides”; mine that niche a little deeper. Realize that just because they are brides doesn’t mean they stopped being the women they were before they got engaged. Welcome to the new world of marketing.
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.
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.
Here at the Agency we build websites for small, very small, businesses that are sick of paying some web guy to update every little thing on their site. We build websites for clients that don’t want to spend an arm and a leg but know they need a great site, which is connected to social media and does amazing things for their search. We build these sites for clients that aren’t web-heads, some of our client have barely mastered sending an attachment with an email.
So therein lays the one thing that makes us different: our sites are beautiful and functional on the front and elementary on the back.
The Proof is In Our Clients Reaction
Last night I had a client meeting to do the final tutorial and hand off on a site we had built for a wedding association with over 200 members. Everyone involved is an over worked small business owner that volunteers what little time they can to run and grow the association. One of their goals was to have a site that they could mange themselves. The also wanted some fairly heavy backside integration with membership subscriptions, a private blog and an integrated email newsletter system.
At the meeting was a florist, a transportation company owner and the associations one paid employee, a part time accountant.(hardly the most techie bunch) I had created a manual for the association with all their passwords and the how to information on all the different parts it took to put the site together. In under an hour, all three of the attendants were blown away by how simple the whole thing was to manage. From managing the member roster and the email newsletter to pulling reports about subscriptions (the money part) to updating and adding new content to the site my clients were having an “I could have had a V-8” moment! Why had they not done this sooner?
We had already blown the rest of the members away with the look and functionality of the public side, now we had blown away the association officers with the stunning ease of the backside. SCORE!
“Thank You For Making This SO Easy”
That is what I love to hear and that is what they said when we were done. What your website looks like is only half of the battle, the real beauty of a website from the Agency is what you can do with it all by yourself. For a long time I struggled with my
consulting clients trying to get a website that worked for them, so we began to build them. We know who our clients are and that is why we build them the way we do. We know their skill level and we know how little time they have to devote to their site. We don’t build sites for geeks; we build site for small business owners that already have their plate full and are sick of getting their pockets picked by traditional web design firms.
Let me know when you are ready to move your site to this new way of thinking.
See for yourself. TWESA.com
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?
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.
Have you ever heard the phrase “What you measure, gets managed?” I love that phrase. I have talked often both here and on Think Like A Bride about how and why you need to be tracing the stats on your websites and blogs. To name just a few of 
the things they will tell you:
• What is getting the most traction
• What you are doing well and not so well
• Who is following you
• When you need to rededicate yourself
That last one is really ringing true with me. You see, after my little mishap last January I rather lost focus on one of my blogs, Wedding Dish. Not only did I stop posting almost completely I stopped checking the stats. Last week I was on the verge of just chucking the whole thing, there are so many wonderful wedding blogs out there compared to the dark ages when I stated the Dish that I didn’t figure anyone was still reading it anyway. So after months of neglect I checked my stats. Holy cow, batman! My visitors have nearly doubled to over 10,000 visitors a month. Ok then, I guess it’s still a valuable property.
Needless to say, I have rededicated myself to the Dish.
There are two lessons to take away from this.
1. Blogs have legs. One of the reasons that I am still getting that kind of traffic is because my content is deep. I had been posting nearly daily for over three years before my hiatus. Google doesn’t forget, every one of those articles is and will continue to be indexed until the internet goes away.
2. Tracking your stats is important. Had I been diligently tracking my numbers, trust me, I would have been just as diligent in posting. Nothing inspires you like knowing people are listening to what you say.
If you haven’t been to the Wedding Dish, please have a look. The brides are.
