Your sales staff (even if it is only you) is the final piece of the great marketing puzzle. The care you take in hiring, training and managing your staff can either close those sales or completely undo every marketing move you have made. Staffing is one of the hardest parts of running a small business. Good Staff is hard to find and a bear to keep. What is the small business owner to do? Maybe you need to look differently than you have been.

Your staff is your surrogate; they are your representative to the public. From the way they look to the way they speak you must be sure that they are representing your brand in the way you want it represented. Why do you think that Abercrombie & Fitch has a floor staff of attractive young kids? Did you really think they were hired for their vast experience in fashion merchandising? Right!

Many times we look over resumes and scour applications with an eye to experience and knowledge; that may not be the best answer. You can teach someone the fine points of your products and client base, what you can’t teach is personality.  I do not care how well trained or knowledgeable an employee is if he/she is surly or condescending they are going to turn off more customers than they will sell. Today it is about connecting with your customers. This is true for any staff member that may in any way have anything to do with one of your potential customers. ANY!

Once you have found some enthusiastic people that fit your brand the key is in the training. You should look at training as an ongoing process. There is always more to learn and always more to teach. Each time you take the time to train your staff you also have an opportunity to refresh their enthusiasm. Back in the day when I was still in the hospitality business the wine and liquor companies would come to my restaurant on a frequent basis to showcase a new wine or educate the staff on a flight of cognacs. Each night the chef would prepare a serving of that night’s special for the staff to taste; he would take the time to explain the ingredients and the methods used. They did these things because they knew that there was always a dramatic spike in sales in whatever they had showcased. By training the staff they were creating excitement around a product; they had sold it to the staff. The staff then carried that enthusiasm forward.

Are you having weekly meetings with your staff?  You should be. These can be a great way to inspire them. If you aren’t doing this regularly the first one may not be pretty. Face it, your staff is going to wonder what the heck is up. Once you get them used to it, use the meeting to sum up the hits and missed of the previous week and to get them excited about the week to come. Just like my chefs and the liquor distributor, show case something different each week. Get them excited about it and run sales competition. Keep the tally posted in the break room or by the time clock.

Just as importantly, ask their opinion. They are the ones interacting with your customers day in and day out. They are also to ones that use the systems and procedures you have put in place. Ask them how to improve both their experiences and the customers experiences. Not only will you get valuable feedback but you will also give them a sense of empowerment.

Take a look at your staff with a fresh eye. The better you make them at their job, the more they will enhance your bottom like. The more enthusiasm you can create the more loyal your staff will be. Sounds like a win/win to me.

By: Marc Fuller

As wedding professionals we have often worked many years developing our skills, becoming masters of the art or service we offer.  Then when we finally feel we are competent to provide our service for payment and proceed to open our own wedding business … we promptly change careers.  We go from developing mastery of our art or service to needing to be an almost full time marketer.

When I opened my business, I thought that to grow my business was the same as growing my skills. If I upgraded my equipment, learned new skills, increased my mastery of my service then my business and income would automatically also increase.  What was I thinking?  I was so wrong.  Looking back I now realize that the moment you open your own business you switch from pursuing mastery to pursuing marketing.  This is why so many wedding related businesses struggle to survive as more than a hobby, rather than providing the comfortable income they should provide.  They may have a marketing plan, but they don’t develop their marking skills.  Here is a rule of thumb, for every moment that you spend on a client task you need to spend an equal time attracting new clients. At minimum you need to spend 50% of your time with simply marketing your business.  In fact you should have only two tasks, providing service to existing clients and attracting new clients.  Anything else is potential clutter which needs to be examined, perhaps outsourced or even discontinued.

Most of our initial marketing plans are fairly simple and very expensive.  It consists mostly of advertising; putting one or more ads in wedding guides, attending a couple of bridal shows, and of course have cards and brochures printed.  Fills in the squares but does not really focus on attracting clients.  Fortunately you can develop marketing skills to attract clients and increase your return on marketing investment.

Here are a few specific points:

• Establish your marketing budget in terms of 1) your time spent, 2) money invested and most importantly 3) your required return on investment (ROI).  Your marketing efforts need to have at least a 10 to 1 ROI. Saying that you get one sale from a bridal show is good, is no longer good enough.
• Look at your target market, and brand your service’s message to your target market.  Stay on message in all your communication.  Both text and graphical
• Learn how to convert leads to sales. Strive for a conversion ratio of ten percent.  Many successful businesses have that or better.
• Communicate constantly.  Then repeat. Communications and marketing researchers have discovered that your message needs to be presented at least 7 times before it gains full consideration.  Fortunately, certain types of direct email marketing can achieve this for an affordable cost.
• Be personal. Use a blog to share information and about you and your services.  Some wedding professionals have replaced most, or all, of their website with a blog.

So Mastery versus Marketing … which “wins”?  If you are a new business and you know what you are doing, marketing is your new imperative.  Targeted, budgeted, consistent, persistent marketing.  Or, in the words of Calvin Coolidge

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

Marc Fuller is a recognized pioneer and innovator in using direct email marketing and the recent phenomena of online social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr to reach and market to today’s bride-to-be.”

From the Archives of Think Like A Bride

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christine Boulton
Indulgence Custom Bakeshop

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

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

For more articles like this please subscribe to Think Like A Bride

There is a lot of buzz about social media as free advertising. Well that’s not completely true. Doing Social Media right requires an investment. Not in the traditional way that you may think, not in money so much as in your time.
This is particularly true of blogs. Blog have an amazing power to increase your visibility and authority as well as to increase traffic to your main website but only if you know what you are doing. You also have to be willing to invest the time.
By time, I don’t just mean the time it takes to write and post relevant content.  It doesn’t matter if you write the most informative/witty/beautiful blog in the world, if no one sees it you are just shouting in the wilderness. So the question is how to you get your blog known?

Here are 3 tips for getting the word out.

1. Cross post: Every blog post I write, I post to Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Plaxo and Bride Wire. It takes maybe an addition 3 minutes. Twitter, LinkenIn and Plaxo are automatic. Facebook posts automatically to my boxes but I go ahead and add a link on my status. StumbleUpon I do from a button on my toolbar and the BrideWire link I have saved to my favorite.
2. Comment: I make a point of commenting on like minded blogs. This does two things, since a link to my blog is in the comment, other readers begin to notice me. Second, the blog owner will often discover you and add you to their blog roll.
3. Label your images: The single biggest referring url I have is Google Images. Brides search for pictures online. If you take the extra time to label your images you are putting yourself way ahead of the game in terms of search. I cannot begin to impress upon you just how important this is. If you are confused on just what I mean, here is a good article on it.

Last year we began pioneering the concept of using WordPress not only for a blog, but even better using it’s content management system for a full website including the blog. Our clients saw instant search marketing results. Plus the new found ability to manage their own websites with lower costs. The win-win of a web/blogsite.

For the last few weeks I have been working to add a shopping cart to a new WordPress web/blogsite I am creating for a friend. We are doing the full site from art to design to programming/implementation. The purpose of the site is to market Trollbeads. The goal was to have a small business affordable website, that can be managed by the business owner and with superior front page organic search results, so the choice of WordPress was pretty quick.

But what for the cart? Third party shopping carts even from Yahoo or GoDaddy can cost $50 to $100+ a month plus transaction and processing fees. We wanted a less costly option with better styling options. We looked at ZenCart, osCommerce and WPe-Commerce. All of them were good and provided an excellent low cost self hosted cart with the ability extension. I was familiar with ZenCart from some other projects but wanted to try something a little different and that would not have the standard Zencart look.

WP e-Commerce is what we used for Trollbeads Trail. Like many WordPress plugins, it is free with full functionality and the upgrades with a grid layout and really cool drag and drop cart are very inexpensive. It is a little complex to setup (all shopping carts are to some degree), but very straight forward once you understand the application’s terms (the developers are from New Zealand).

The finished look is outstanding and the SEO power over the first 30 days has been even better than expected. So much so that we cloned it for a second site for the same customer replacing the existing website for her jewelry store, Santa Fe Trail Jewelry.

This is excellent for anyone wanting to increase their item sales or rental potential while keeping expenses as low as possible. Take a look at the finished site, remember it is all WordPress even the shopping cart, and let us show you how we can put this feature to work for you -

Back in the days before social media marketing, the king of the hill for micro businesses like ours was Guerrilla Marketing. I think it is high time for a little resurrection of our inner guerrillas, and apparently I am not the only one. Companies as large as Miller Brewing and Carnival Cruise Lines have jumped on the band wagon of thinking outside the box.

As you can see, Carnival unleashed a giant beach ball on the streets of Dallas. Next they tried a giant piñata filled with 8,000 pounds of candy. That didn’t go quite as well but still got a lot of attention.

As for Miller, it’s was all about the SuperBowl. Long the nearly private party of Anheuser Busch and outrageously expensive, Miller still wanted to play. So rather than go the traditional route of forking over billions to the network for a 30 second spot, their ad men got creative. Rather than spent $3m on 30 seconds they produced a series of 1 second ads and ran them on the local channels running the game in markets all across America. The spots ran throughout the game. There is an out of the box solution. They haven’t released how much they spent on the campaign, but I can guarantee you it was a better value than a single $3m spot would have been.

Sometimes you have to think differently to get noticed. Now I am not for one minute suggesting you commission a giant beachball or buy a Superbowl ad; I’m suggesting that you let your freak flag fly a little. Here are a couple of ideas to get you started.

How about those beach balls? Is there a local outdoor concert that draws people in the age likely to be thinking of getting married? Get some beach balls imprinted with your name, number, url and logo and send in a couple of people to start blowing them up and setting them flying. I’m not talking 3 or 4, more like 30 or 40. Heck, why not 100, beachballs are cheap. Extra score if they are in a really bright color. Can’t you just see all these beachballs being tossed around above the crowd all afternoon? I’ll bet you whatever local TV station is taping for the 10 O’clock news will get a nice shot of it. Repeat the stunt every chance you get.

Do the same thing with Frisbees. This time send your team off to the local college campus on the first pretty spring day and start handing those babies out on the quad. Oh yea, they’ll get tossed around and shared and kept. One day when those students get married, they will remember you as the wedding professional that was enough fun to think of Frisbees on the first day of spring. If you’re lucky the college paper will even cover it.

A group of wedding professionals in Indiana got local firefighters and police to volunteer for a men’s beauty pageant at their cities summer street festival. All the locals gathered to whoop, holler and cheer on the sexy men. Of course the formal wear portion was sponsored by the tuxedo shop and you know they all wore boutonnières. Yep, they got some nice publicity.
I don’t know what kind of events there are in your community, but find a way to make a splash.
Have you ever heard of Sir Richard Branson? Virgin Record, Virgin Air? Ring a bell now. Why do you think he keeps doing all the crazy stuff he does? It’s all guerilla marketing and it isn’t just for people without marketing budgets.
If you want to bounce your ideas off me, drop me a line.

This article appeared in the March issue of Think Like A Bride. If you aren’t already a subscriber, please join us.

What Influences Woman’s Buying?

In a word, everything. A recent conversation with a bridal salon got me thinking about how the purchasing habits of women are influenced. There is always talk in the industry about price and how that is the determining factor in closing the sale. That’s not altogether true. It may be a factor in whether they ever meet with you but price alone won’t ultimately be the only influence in their purchase.

Women are hard wired differently than men. They see, smell and hear everything around them and on one level or another are influenced by it. Men tend to hone in on the things that are of interest to them with complete focus and clarity. Why does this matter and what can you do with it?

First it matters because your customers are primarily women. Even if this wasn’t the bridal industry it would still matter; women make or influence 85% of all purchases.

Even if you provide men’s formal wear women control the purse strings.

If a woman loves your work, accepts the price and isn’t put off by your contract you may still lose the sale on something that you never even considered, like say your lighting or your bathroom. Remember I said woman see, smell and hear everything. Do you? You probably don’t because you see it everyday.

From the time a woman makes contact with you, everything counts: how fast was their email answered, was the phone answered by a human during business hours and were the answers given helpful? Remember also that you are dealing with them at a highly emotionally charged time in their lives. Even the slightest perceived disconnect may take on more significance than usual.

The shop owner I spoke with asked if I thought that personal appearance mattered. Yes, everything matters. Women pick up subliminal clues. If your appearance does not match what you are saying they will catch it. For instance, if your style of photography is hip and trendy but your clothing is stodgy and traditional you are projecting a disconnect. If you are selling high fashion and your manner of dress is purely for comfort with tennis shoes and old sweaters your clients aren’t going to trust your judgment. I don’t know how often I have said it here but perception is reality. What your customers perceive you to be, you are.

This same philosophy carries all the way through what ever contact you have with your clients. If you meet with clients in an off site location like a restaurant or coffee house you need to consider how that location reflects you and your product. While the local diner may be convenient and familiar does it project the image you want to send? If the image you are trying to project is upscale you may do better to set up camp in a chic dessert shop across town. Everything matters.

Sometimes we are to close to the situation to really see it. An interesting, though sometimes painful exercise is to ask a trusted friend to tell you what they see. Pick a friend that can be brutally honest and have them meet you as a client would; dressed as you would be in the place you most often meet clients. Find out what their perception is. Does it match what you were hoping to project? I often send articles I am working on to an editor friend of mine with the subject line “Shred my copy”. Sometimes it hurts, but it always makes me a better writer.

It may come to a point where you need to reallocate some of your already stretched marketing budget and hire a consultant to look over your shop or office to get a new perspective. Be sure and have a clear picture of the image you are wanting to project; an image that reflects the style of your work. Remember it is the total package. I know some people that are wonderful at their chosen field but struggle because they just aren’t projecting the right image. It may sound sad or petty, but in today’s highly competitive world it is the tiniest pieces that separate the winners from the losers.

This is another tidbit you can use from the archives of Think Like A Bride. To read more articles like this subscribe to Think today

I had an interesting dialog recently with a baker. In looking at different ways their website could be set up to improve their search ranking I noticed that if you searched for them by the bakerery’s name you had to drill down at least six pages on Google for them to even come up, and then only as a link on someone else’s website. Read more

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. Read more

The deeper I get into helping clients update their website the more often this question comes up: Flash or HTML. The answer lies in how you respond to this one simple question: Is your website your marketing or are you going to have to market your website?

What? You read it right. I thought we had gotten past the time when people were fascinated with the cool factor of having a Flash Site and had woken up to the reality of it all. Flash is pretty but if you want to get traffic you are going to have to advertise your site instead of your site advertising you.

This quote from SEO evangelist Tim Nash’s blog sums it up pretty clearly,

“Adobe Flash (formally Macromedia) is a great tool for developing highly artistic multimedia applications; it has the accessibility and searchability of a brick. If you are serious about getting organic rankings the only advice is stay away from Flash, I mean it stop reading this post it will not help!”

It all boils down to search and accessibility. Let’s look at search first. Even though the large search engines like Google have some Flash indexing capabilities these are still very limited. The internet is and always has been a text based environment. That is just how search works and html still does it best. When the spiders crawl your site they are looking for words and relevant content; to do that they have to be able to read the words. The text on a Flash based site is read as an image, not readable words. Since the spider doesn’t see any relevant content it just crawls off to another site and doesn’t bother to index your cool pretty Flash site. No indexing, no ranking in the search engines. What more, is they often see your entire site as a single image. That means that even if you have 1000 images in your gallery of the coolest cakes ever the search engines still see it as a single image. Not good.

I don’t care how cool your site looks, if no one finds it what are you getting for your marketing dollars? So the question remains do you want to spend your marketing dollars getting clients to you business or to your site? Traffic to your site shows off your work and your business and prompts clients to contact and hopefully hire you. The more good traffic you have the better chance you have of selling more clients. If your site, cool though it may be, doesn’t show up high in the rankings of the major search engine you are going to have to drive people to your site through other marketing channels. That means increased print media buys and increased exposure at bridal shows to advertise your website just to get people to find it. Bummer. So here you have spent all this money on what your designer told you was a pretty cool website and you are off having to spend buck just to get people to view it. You may even sink so far as to use Adwords to get visitors. That doesn’t sound like a plan to me.

Accessibility is another factor to consider. I know, most everyone has a Flash player plug in, if they don’t your front page can include one. I know too that everyday more people have high speed broadband connections but there are still people or situations that use dial up. On anything less than broadband the load time for Flash is somewhere between molasses in February and a geriatric snail. You have between 10 and 30 seconds to capture your audience; they aren’t going to stick around to wait for the load bar to finish. Heck I get frustrated waiting and I have broadband.

Navigation is another failing of a lot of Flash sites. Most have their own unique navigation conventions which force your visitors to spend time figuring out how to navigate your site. On sites designed with an older version of Flash hitting the back button takes you out of the site completely.

The third and I think most potentially deadly access issue with a pure Flash site is when it comes to phone based browsers. Look around at your target market, they all have phones with web browsers and they use them. Guess what, mobile browsers won’t load Flash. Not do it badly, won’t do it at all. Browsing the internet on your mobile is the tsunami of the future. Now explain to me why you would shell out your hard earned dollars for a site that can’t be seen AT ALL by a great big chunk of people looking for you?

“But Christine, I don’t want an ugly site.” Oh for crying out loud, who said that if you pass up Flash you have to have an ugly site that just lies there like a dead fish. Most likely some web designer that does mostly Flash. It’s not true, you can still have a beautiful, visually engaging site without having a pure Flash site. You can still have beautiful, huge galleries and slideshows with full audio. Heck there is nothing wrong with even throwing in a few Flash elements, search won’t read them, but it will read the rest of your site.

Before you buy or build a new website ask yourself the simple question. Is your website your marketing or do you want to market your website. Sometimes, simpler is better, but it all depends on your answer.

You can read more here and here, or just Google Flash vs HTML.