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Website for Fisher’s Tudor House

February 2, 2012 By 2 Comments

It may not look like it on the surface, but this was a huge project. The mandate was to take two very dated, very old school websites and bring them into 2012. There were so many pages and interior links that just sorting it out required a flow chart. The SEO was Jurassic but losing ranking in such a competitive market wasn’t an option. Top it all off with an eCommerce component and a former webmaster that didn’t want to be a team player. I even pulled in old friend Marc Fuller to tweak the SEO.

 

The shining light was a client I just love. He understood the challenges and listened to my advice. Now he is no longer held hostage and is amazed at how easily he can update the new site himself.

Fisher’s Tudor House 2012

Just so you can get some idea of where we started…

thanks Pete.

Filed Under: Announcement, Website Design, Website marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

Is E-commerce Something You Could Do?

January 6, 2012 By 1 Comment

I am seeing the twinkling of a trend among small independent wedding vendors. E-commerce is beginning to come into play more and more as either an additional service or product or a full on pure play. Monday I’ll start my third E-commerce site in the last 2 months.shopping carts and ecommerce for wedding vendors

How, you ask, are wedding vendors using Ecommerce? They are using it in a variety of ways. I’m not going to give away their ideas, but I can tell you that it runs the gambit from hand-crafted products, to personalized design services to gift cards.

This all ties into what I have been saying about really thinking about what makes you unique and how you can use that to enlarge both your offerings and your niche.

Capitalize on your reputation to expand your business.

Think about what you can pre-package, so to speak. Suppose I were still baking. Now my wedding cakes were all one of a kind designs and not something I could have sold on the internet, but my hand made truffles would have worked. For that matter, if I had really wanted to go for it, I could have sold just the designs, cake blue prints, if you like. Brides could have then taken them to their auntie or local baker to bake and decorate.  Do you see where I am going with this?

Put on your thinking cap and go for a walk outside the box. 

One of the amazing things about the internet, is that you can try these kinds of things out relatively cheaply. Put a page on your site with your products and a simple shopping cart for a small investment. If it works, then you can think about really investing in it. If it doesn’t, take down the page off your site and you are out a couple of hundred buck, tops.

Next week, I’m going to take you on a tour of what I think are a couple of the best sites to emulate to market both your current business and an eCommerce play.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Ask Christine, Blog, Building Your Business, Trends, Website Design, What's Hot Tagged With: , , ,

Top Post for 2011-Groupons for Weddings

December 30, 2011 By 2 Comments

With all the controversy and news of closings and consolidations in 2011, who would suspect that a story advising against wedding vendors getting sucked into the Groupon culture would be number 1?

Groupon for Wedding Vendors? Not!

I am willing to wager that it wasn’t wedding vendors looking for a boost that sent that traffic through the roof. Now as far as I know, there are still more brides than wedding vendors. (Although some days I question that!) I will bet you money that it was brides looking for a deal. You should see the list of search terms used to find Think this year! Of the top 50, 10 were Groupon related.

  • wedding groupon
  • groupon wedding
  • groupon for weddings
  • groupon weddings
  • groupon wedding deal
  • wedding groupons
  • groupon wedding deals
  • wedding deals on groupon
  • groupon for wedding
  • wedding planner groupon

Right about now you may be thinking , “Hey, I could get a lot of traffic if I did a Groupon”.  Well, yes, yes you could most likely use that to get a ton of traffic, but is it the traffic you want? You may want to read this first…

A photographer works for free for a year through Groupon

Sounds like fun to me.

Here is what brides have to say on Wedding Bee. You might want to notice the comment by the bride than got a deal on here engagement photos…not a word about her booking them for the wedding. Hmmmmm Also the one that bought cake pops, didn’t see her commit to a cake from that baker.

What does this mean to you? Front and center it means brides are looking for deals, but you already knew that. I think that you would be smart to find a way to offer some deals, just not through Groupon-type sites. Come up with your own deals and publicize it yourself with your social media. Put it out on Facebook and Twitter. Publicize it on the local wedding platforms you advertise on.

You might even consider doing it in a Groupon-type manner. Limit the number and require a tipping point. Have a deal on a regular basis, say weekly or monthly posted on your website to keep brides coming back to check.

I can’t even begin to tell you what kind of deal to offer. You will have to think long and hard about that one. Make sure that it gets them into your store or your website. Make sure you will at least make something off of it. Make sure that you don’t do something that will overwhelm you.

Just don’t do what the photographer above did. I want you around next year!

 

Filed Under: Blog, Marketing, Outrageous Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

How to Handle a Bad Review

December 23, 2011 By 1 Comment

I don’t know if you have been following the recent string of articles over on eWedNewz concerning reviews on wedding websites. If not you can catch them here, here and here.eWedNewz logo

What started as a story regarding the sale by Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia selling their interest in Wedding Wire grew to be an indictment of Wedding Wire and it’s review program. Whether you like Wedding Wire and it’s review program or not isn’t really important to my point. They are only one of many review programs out there and I happen to think Wedding Wire does a pretty reasonable job.

Here is the thing, you are not going to please everyone.

Yes that is what we all strive for, but it isn’t going to happen.  So on that rare occasion when someone is upset enough to take finger to keyboard and put it out there, how you react is of vital importance.

The first thing you want to do is step away from the keyboard. DO NOT post a response in the heat of the moment. Your feelings are hurt and you are probably angry. Give it a day or two to filter.

Then post one or two reasonable sentences. Something along the line of

“I am sorry that we did not meet your expectations. We are actively reaching out to you via private channels to help resolve these differences.”

Of course you will need to reach out to them, but the point of the post was to let anyone reading the bad review know that you stand behind your work.

What you don’t want to do is post some long, rambling explanation or string of excuses. That is just going to start a very public pissing contest and that is the last thing you want.

Be sure to contact the hosting website to have the review verified or moderated. Sometimes this works. Sometimes.

What if you have no idea who this bride is?

Yep it happens. What if a competitor that is sneaky, malevolent and underhanded lies and posts a bad review on your page?

First you will contact the hosting website to have it verified. That can take forever and they may not even take your side. In the meantime, you need to respond to the review.

“I am not finding any reference to such an incident in my records. Would the poster please poivide her wedding date and location so that I may attempt to resolve this issue.”

Now you have publicly called them out and the ball is in their court. If they continue without providing the information they look like fools. You have also done a lot to CYA.

The main thing you want to keep in mind is that today’s bride is savvy enough not to base her opinion on just one bad review in a long list of stellar ones. In fact in some ways, it makes the other ones look more real. If every single review is Amazing!! Stellar!!! Way beyond expectations!!!!! they start to look a little fake. You know, like those late night infomercials.

Come on now, you do that yourself when you read reviews.

If worse comes to worse and you just can’t take it or find a way to resolve it; contact the website and have yourself removed entirely from the site.

Since this whole bruhaha started with a Celebrity planner’s bad review on Wedding Wire, I reached out to Sonny Ganguly, CMO at WW to be sure you could have Wedding Wire rated badgeyour business removed. Here is his response:

In regards to your question, a wedding professional can inactivate their WeddingWire account by sending a request to our Support team at support@weddingwire.com. Our team will then inactivate the wedding pro’s account and remove personal information that they entered from the Storefront.

Ok, so that was kind of vague and didn’t really answer my question; so I followed up with this:

I need just one point of clarification please.

 Our team will then inactivate the wedding pro’s account and remove personal information that they entered from the Storefront.

Would you remove ALL information regarding said wedding pro? All traces of them, including reviews or would you leave a basic listing?
I still haven’t received an answer to that one yet, but I will post it to the comments when/if I do.
If nothing else comes out of this dust up and the press from it, I do believe that WW will be more closely watched with regard to the review process. To quote one of their, umm, associates “That’s a good thing!”

 
 
As I was writing this I saw this come through my Twitter stream

@idillionaire: If you’re not making enemies, you’re not doing well enough.

Filed Under: Announcement, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

Yes Virginia, Content is STILL King!

October 19, 2011 By 1 Comment

I have said it and said it: the content on your website is the most important thing you can do for SEO. If you aren’t  blogging and tweeting and adding new GOOD, RELEVANT content on a regular basis, then you are behind the times.

Search is all about relevant content. The more you add the higher you rank. This info graphic says it better than I ever could, well at least more completely anyway.

Oh, one more note: for all you people that think your Facebook page is all you need, do you even see Facebook mentioned on here?

Brafton's Infographic: Why Content for SEO?

Still unsure about blogging? then get your tushie over to Eventbrite and sign up for Ashley’s blog camp. Not is the mid south? Send her an email since she is considering either taking the show on the road or packaging it into a single weekend so you can fly in to take it. Ya, it really is that important.

Disclaimer: Yes I am a speaker at Blog Camp but no, I am not making a dime. I just believe in it that much.

 

 

Filed Under: Blog, Social Media, Website marketing, wedding marketing Tagged With: , , ,

Marketing to Grooms

June 3, 2011 By 1 Comment

Now that we have established this new dynamic going on in the wedding industry, specifically grooms having more input, how do we use it?

First things first, you have to decide if your service or product is one that is likely to fall in their laps. Some things like gowns and flowers probably won’t. Face it,  you show a groom a bouquet of all white carnations and another of white phaleanopsis orchids and most are going to see two white bouquets. Just about everything else is fair game.

Next, let’s take a look at where he is mentally on this whole thing. He is probably going to have an attitude of “Well heck ya I can do this and I’m going to look damn good doing it! i’ll knock this out of the park.” Underneath all that is doubt and fear at entering an arena in which he has never been. Add to that the knowledge that this is the first really big thing he has undertaken in his budding role as “husband” and the outcome will forever color the opinion of not just his wife but also her mother and sisters. Let’s not forget that he still wants to look manly to his bros. No pressure.

Men Shop Differently

Much of the marketing we do aimed at women can best be summed up as ‘wooing’. We strike her emotions and become her friend. She buys the team, he buys a commodity.

Your first goal will be to put him at ease. A little humor will work wonders here.

You will want to clearly state the benefits of your product or service. Even go so far as pictograms and charts of why you are different. Remember, the nuances that she would see must often be pointed out to the men. Also, men are visual.

You need very clear calls to action. Don’t just list your phone number or contact info. Put in a big button.

Give them clear steps to follow.

  • know your budget
  • know your guest count
  • choose your style (see options)
  • review our menu suggestions (click here for menu)
  • set a tasting
  • book your event

    •  

    Here is the deal, women shop a bit like the students in a Montessori program learn, by seeking out and discovering on their own. Men want a clear orderly list of actionable steps to success. Your goal is to give it to them.

    In the end, your couples are probably going to make the final decision together, but an increasing portion of the leg work is going to fall on him. You need to be ready.

     

    Disclaimer: I am not talking about all men, nor am I talking about all couples or all women. I am in the most general terms trying to help you be ahead of a trend I see on the horizon. As with most trends, this is happening first in the more urban areas with the couples least bound by tradition.

    Filed Under: Ask Christine, Trends Tagged With: , , ,

    Wedding Experts and Web Content

    January 13, 2011 By 3 Comments

    This has been bugging me for a while so prepare yourself for a rant!

    I have been following a couple of discussions over on eWedNews, one about wedding portal websites and another about so-called experts in the wedding industry. Gah!

    First off, have you done any bride-style surfing on the internet lately? Seriously type in any search string  that a newly engaged woman  might use, like “How to start planning a wedding”? Every damn one on the first page for that search is some self-serving drivel written as “keyword content”.  There were 5,240,000 results. The 7th listing was from a website called MamasHealth. For real! What makes them experts in wedding planning?  The 8th result was for a site called the Power of Home Biz telling you how easy and lucrative becoming a wedding planner is. For crying out loud, the Knot didn’t even make the first page! Not that they are an example of great content, but still.

    This is the world your brides step into the minute they get engaged. It is one loaded with hucksters and shysters and carnival barkers all wanting a piece of the supposedly rich, recession proof wedding market.

    If you take the time to read some of this stuff you will quickly get an understanding of why today’s brides are so confused/deluded/insane.

    Once they get past the basic search and start hitting the blogs to gather information to put into their binder they get hit with fairy dust stories of spectacular weddings on a buck .95 budget. Whoops, that bride with the over the top wedding on a $5ooo budget neglected to mention that her sister is a photographer on a par with Jasmine Starr, her aunt owns a posh boutique bakery, her uncle Louie is a caterer to the stars and her best friend is Martha Stewart’s assistant. But hey, she did it for $5K, so can you!!!

    How did all this happen? Greed. Greed for search ranking.

    In a post Google world, search ranking is the golden ring and content is king. Google is after all only an algorithm, it can’t discern the quality of the content, only if it has the right searchable keywords. Therefore, any article with the right keywords, no matter how bad the information, can get to the top of the list. To the searcher, that gives it credibility. Google has judged your content to be worthy and declared  you an expert. Pffffft! Give a huckster a list of the right keywords and they can game the system to make themselves look like an expert in any field, not just this one of badly informed brides. Go MamasHealth!

    With the portals, well they aren’t much different. They want your money, they use their website stats to show you how wonderful they are so you will advertise with them. How did they get those stats? Content. Have you ever actually read any of it? Most of it is bullshit with dash of recycled garbage and a touch of fairy dust. When brides read it, one of two things happen: either the site completely loses credibility or worse case, the bride buys into the bogus information. The first group won’t bother to look at vendors on the site and the second group you don’t want as your bride anyway.

    Then there are the bloggers. I’m not talking about all wedding bloggers. Please don’t think that I am.Some of the only really credible, honest information today is found in the blogs.  There are two kinds of wedding bloggers. There is the vendor that chats about their business and the weddings they have done as a way to market their business and educate brides on their business and their part of the industry. Good on you. Then there are the ones that are just trying to keyword load and will post anything they can think of to wrap around a keyword. My all time favorite was the DJ that was telling brides if your baker wouldn’t guarantee you that your cake would be baked the morning of your wedding, move on and find a reputable baker.

    Then there are the probloggers. Generally these guys are pretty good. After all they make their living off this and know where and how to find the real experts to quote and inform. They have a little work to do on budget honesty, but all in all, most are pretty good.

    I know this was a long rant and I appreciate you patience in reading it. Unfortunately I don’t have an answer for you…yet. I just wanted to make you aware of the lay of the land in a Google world.

    Filed Under: Blog, Rants & Raves Tagged With: , , ,

    Why the iPad Matters to Your Bridal Marketing

    November 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment

    Simply put because it is the future.

    Check this blip about the new Glamour magazine app

    Each digital issue includes the entire contents of the magazine, PLUS exclusive extras like video, photos and app-only fashion picks you can tap to purchase straight from your iPad, iPod touch or iPhone! You can also save your favorite fashion and beauty items–complete with details on where to buy them–for easy shopping reference when you’re on the go.

    This may be just the thing that causes the revival of bridal magazines. Oh stop, I know that Glamour isn’t a bridal rag but they are owned by Conde Nast, so is Brides. Which means that Brides has access to the tech, if they are smart enough to use it.

    Why carry a bridal magazine that weights a bunch around when you can just read it on your iPad or iPhone? Double score that you can just click to buy or link to a vendors website. Sounding better? What’s better, since it is in the app store it is now an impulse buy. Bored on the train to work? Buy the latest Bridal porn. Done.

    The iPhone is great but the screen isn’t really big enough to really give the reader the same feel of a high end print glossy. But the iPad does.

    Next you are going to tell me that, yes the app lets you view the entire magazine but you have to pay for it and no one will pay for content. Au contraire my friend!

    Check out this article from the New York Times

    The News Corporation said on Tuesday that it had gained 105,000 paying customers for the digital versions of The Times and The Sunday Times of London since it started charging for access to their Web sites this summer.

    The company said about half of those additions were regular, active subscribers to the newspapers’ Web sites, iPad application or Amazon Kindle edition. The rest were occasional purchasers. Another 100,000 readers have activated free digital accounts that are included in print subscriptions to the papers, the News Corporation said.

    “These figures very clearly show that large numbers of people are willing to pay for quality journalism in digital formats,” said Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, the London-based arm of the News Corporation that publishes The Times papers.

    The advent of the iPad has given a glimmer of hope to the currently on life support print media.

    So there are two things I want you to think about:

    First if you are considering putting any money into print, make dang sure that their presence on the iPad is what it should be. Don’t let them get away with telling you that they have a website. Tell them you want something like Glamour has put together.

    Second, make sure you back up your purchase with a website that will show up on the iPad when a bride to be clicks on your ad. That means one thing—NO FLASH–. Yes I know it’s pretty, but it is totally useless with the format that today’s brides use to access the web most. You may just want to read this to be sure your site is where it needs to be.

    The iPhone and more importantly, the iPad are not fads. This is particularly true with the higher end brides.

    Check out what Mary Schmidt has to say about the future and the iPad.

    Filed Under: Marketing, Trends, Website marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

    Seriously, How is Your Website?

    September 9, 2010 By 1 Comment

    I posed that question in a recent email blast to my subscribers and members. Hopefully it got you thinking.

    Today I ran across a recent survey done by online wedding planning site, MyWeddingWorkbook.com

    Here is the meat of the survey:

    Wedding websites, wedding-related blogs and online search engines are the first three places brides look for ideas, followed by online wedding forums, bridal magazines and shopping at bridal boutiques and salons.

    “Generation Y and the Millennials have been using computers and the Internet practically their entire lives, so it only makes sense that these are the first resources they use when they start planning a wedding,” said Jeff Kear, owner of My Wedding Workbook.

    In fact, when brides were asked what will be their main source of aid throughout the wedding planning process, the Internet (17.8%) ranked just behind brides’ fiances (28.4%) and their mothers (21.3%) – one of the more interesting statistics from this wedding planning survey…

    “It’s no surprise that wedding guidance and shopping are definitely the two areas of most interest for online brides,” says Kear. “However, the recent recession has made brides even more reliant on the Internet for assistance in these two areas. Brides are more budget conscious than ever, so they are planning more events and details themselves and need more guidance. They are also spending more time comparison shopping and browsing for bargains, and the Internet has become the default venue for comparing prices and vendors.”

    If your website is old, tired and out of date you are missing this generation. They are on the internet all day and have been for years. They use it for work, they use it for entertainment and they use it to shop and research. They use it on their phone and on their iPads. They have seen the best that the web has to offer.

    In light of these new statistics, it’s worth taking a look at your current web presence.

    Filed Under: Blog, Marketing, Website marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

    Why Does Everyone Want to Be in Wedding Planning?

    August 6, 2010 By 1 Comment

    This was in my PR file this morning.

    The Dessy Group Introduces Wedding Planning Tools Online.

    Now why would a bridal fashion house take the leap into planning? Or, more correctly, to become a

    “one-stop shopping” wedding site

    I can think of two reasons why.

    The big one, at least on the surface, is to keep brides on their site as long as possible. Any couple that decides to use the Dessy suite of planning tools has to do it through their website. Everytime they log on to use the tools or update their wedding website Dessy has the opportunity to expose them to their product line. That is pretty self evident.

    The more important piece of this puzzle is that if it catches on, Dessy will now have access to a very deep level of information on its target market. I have a hard time imagining that a company as large as Dessy would have built this thing with out including a few algorithms to pick the data apart. When you spent as much of your marketing budget to build something like this what’s a little more to be able to fully mine the results.

    I think that is the the key behind this project. Data.

    Will it work? Good question. Wedding planning tools are a dime a dozen on the internet. These are going to have to be pretty spectacular to even get noticed. Had they done it 6 or 7 years ago, maybe.

    On a personal aside, I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall at the pitch meeting for this. I’m sure it was never mentioned that they would be taking on the Knot, Wedding Wire and Brides.com. Just sayin’

    Filed Under: Blog, Website marketing Tagged With: ,
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