Facebook or Blog?

I ran across an interesting question today about where you should put more effort, in your blog or your Facebook page.

I’m not really sure why that is a question. Let me break it down for you.

Your website is your own personal piece of  internet real estate. Think of it as your home because in terms of your marketing, it is. Your blog should be the heart and soul of your website. In web design today, integrating your blog as a page on your website is the only way to go. If your blog is off on another url from your main one you are missing the boat.

Today’s brides go to one place to find their vendors above all others:

SEARCH.

If you aren’t ranking high in search engines for what you do and where you do it, you are behind the game.

Reread that last sentence. Notice I did not say for your name. I hope to hell you rank number one for your name. Unfortunately, that isn’t how brides search. They search for things in places.

Huh?

They search for florists in Bucks County.They search for wedding planners in Washington, DC. They search for caterers in Fairbanks, AK. They don’t search for Polly Sue Purebreds Catering. If they do it is because they have already been made aware of Polly Sue from a referral and that is a post for another day.

Now that you understand this, you understand why your personal piece of real estate is so important.

Back to the original question: your blog or Facebook.

Every time you post to Facebook, you are sending all that Google juice to Facebook.com, not to Polly Sue’s url. Great, I’m sure Mr. Zuckerberg appreciates the Google juice, but frankly, you need it worse than he does.

Think of it this way, you have an office or a store but you still meet people in the local coffee-house. Instead of investing to improve your office or store, you take time and treasure to improve the coffee-house. That’s just dumb.

How about this instead, you work on improving the store, and then post updates on the coffee-house bulletin board. When your potential customers start looking for you the coffee-house bulletin board is one of the many signs pointing to your store. When they get to your store, they see how amazing you are.

Enough with the analogies, if you don’t get it yet you never will.

Your blog should be an integrated part of your website.

Facebook should send traffic to your website, not the other way around.

Post to your blog and have it automatically cross-post a headline and an excerpt to your Facebook page leading them to your website.

 Done.

 

 

The Picture of A Great Website

I loved the phone call I got on Wednesday.

I had a site go live for a client, PictureThisNashville.net, on Monday. On Wednesday Elaine, the owner, called to tell me she had booked a wedding from the site and for the first time the client said they had found her on Google.  That 3 days to go from not showing up on Google at all to showing up on the front page. Not bad if I do say so myself.

Here is what Elaine had to say

Where do we begin to thank you. Christine you are amazing and we are so glad we met you.  I will never forget our first meeting I knew right then and there you were the person to help us get our business heading in the right direction. Since you redid and relaunched our website we have had a 42% jump in viewers and we booked a wedding from someone that found us on a google search which I know you helped with.

Thank you so much. You ROCK!!

Elaine Pardo – Ingram
PICTURE THIS NASHVILLE
www.picturethisnashville.net

Have a look for yourself. (the image is a live link)

By the way, Elaine’s concept for a completely new type of Photo booth is killer. Please check it out, especially if you at all techie. It’s worth a look just for the Touch Screen iMac’s. They are so fun to play with!

Websites to Sing About! How’s Yours?

I have been a busy, busy bee. Lot’s of my client sites were in need of an update, but I still found time to build a few new ones.

First up, A Song for Her. Gil Grand and his PR agent Melissa Mathews first approached me with their idea in the spring and it was a great one. Gil is an award winning singer songwriter and now you can have him write a custom song for you. Need to say “I love you” or “Dang, I screwed up” or “I miss you?” Then Gil’s you guy.

Now I will be the first one to admit that I know virtually nothing about music or the music industry ( ya, ya I know I live in NashVegas) but by listening to what they wanted and what they did, I was able to identify their target audience and give them what they needed. Have a look

To make a long story short, Gil and Melissa were so happy that when Gil’s company, Grand & Gee were nominated for CCMA Music Publisher of the Year they called me to do their ad! We wish Grand & Gee all the luck in the world, they deserve it.

Does Your Marketing Reflect Your Re-invented Business?

2010 was a brutal year for many. We pulled back, we hunkered down and we regrouped. We had the time and we took it to re-invent and to ponder how we really wanted our busness to look.

2011 is the dawning of a new era in the wedding busines. The smart ones have seen the handwriting on the wall and are poised to go forth and kick butt in the new enviroment.

You have reinvented your business model,

but have you redesigned your marketing to match?

If your business has evolved and you are marketing as you always have it is literally like sending out your message on a different frequency. It creates static. Static is distracting and annoying and it won’t do anything to sell your product. So now is the time to make sure everything is in sync.

Take a look at the new YOU.

How has your business model changed and how has your approach to bridal in general changed? Have you found another product that appeals to today’s bride? Have you found a way to capatalize on the here to stay DIY brides? Have you seen your weddings take a turn to casual from clean and elegant?

Whatever has changed, your marketing material needs to reflect that change. All of it.

That means more than updating your blog. It probably should include updating the look and feel of your entire website. It may even need to go as far as your logo.

One thing I can tell you about today’s brides is that if your image looks stuffy or in any way old school, they won’t look any further into what you have to offer.

Think about it this way, with so much competition today, first impressions mean more than ever. If your website or your business card or your logo screams “Mom’s Choice” you are not going to get a second look.

Today’s brides are cool, casual and very independent and they want a very personalized wedding. They don’t care that you have been doing this for a hundred years, they want to know that you are going to ‘get’ their vision and help them to achieve it.

How does your marketing speak to these women?

Here is a tip:

Lead with your work. Show off your style. Don’t try to be all things to all brides.

If your style is shabby chic, reflect that in your marketing. Your brides will find you.

The same goes if you are highly contemporary. Reflect it and the brides attracted to that will find you.

Here is the beauty of a plan like this, by setting yourself apart, you will attract the brides that you most want to work with. Everybody knows that is a lot more fun.

Sit down today and review your new, reinvented business and then see how it measures up with your current(mostly old) marketing.

Photographer’s Website

For the longest time photographers have been caught up in having a Flash website. They do it because of the galleries and yes they can look great. The unintended consequence is the loss of search and now the loss of readability on mobile phones is also a huge issue.

Is there a fix? You bet there is.

Take a look at Paul Maynard Photography.

His site has big beautiful galleries that can be animated if he chooses. There is a slide show on the homepage that renders beautifully on phones and he can update the whole thing himself with the push of a button. Now isn’t that cool?

If you look closely at the image of the slideshow in the picture below, you will see that I caught this capture mid-fade. That’s cool too.

Designing your Online Presence

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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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).

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

Bridal Marketing and Building Buzz

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.

New Bridal Salon Dialogue Website

We just completed another social media dialogueBridal Salon Website website for The Something Blue Shoppe, a full service bridal and prom salon located in Hartselle Alabama.

Sarah Morris, the owner, contacted me after hearing a presentation I did on Doing Social Media Right for 2Be University in St.Louis. Sarah wanted all the advantages that goes along with our all WordPress based websites, including:

  • Easy do it yourself content additions, upgrades, and site maintenance.
  • Complete automatic interaction and cross posting with Facebook and Twitter
  • Integrated blog
  • Low cost hosting
  • And the truly best SEO that only WordPress based websites can deliver.

We updated the look and layout, while still keeping the established branding of The Something Blue Shoppe

After just one lesson, Sarah is doing her own updates like a pro. I wish you could have heard the excitement in her voice when she realized just how easy her new site was to manage.

Please take a look.

What Makes a Website a Dialogue-Site

It is well recognized that to convert a prospect to a client requires a dialog.  In the past that had to be done with a personal presentation, conversation, a phone call, a series emails or a combination of all.  The website was just a static information resource.  Now we have advanced the website to be a large page of the dialog, to become a Dialogue-Site.

A Dialogue-Site will,

  • Allow for the simple additions of new information, images and files.  Done as easily as creating and sending an email.dialogue
  • Integrate your blog within your website, directly increasing the ranking or your website and reducing traffic leakage due to people’s resistant to click into new sites.
  • Dynamically, automatically display featured content in different locations on main page and other pages within your website.
  • Allow site visitors to rate your content and even post comments.  Even support comment threading allowing true discussions to evolve on particular subjects.
  • Automatically post notifications of any new information to Facebook profiles and page and Twitter.  Yes your website will automatically Tweet your changes and also post your Tweets to the front page of your Dialog-Site.
  • Create XML sitemaps, save them and confirm notification of Google, Bing and Ask search engines to retrieve the new sitemaps.  All automatics every time you make a site change.
  • Built-in social media links on every page allowing your site visitors to bookmark and note your site on their social profiles and within their favorite social media/networks.
  • Site content syndication.  Allow off site subscriptions and reading of your site and its content updates via feedreader or direct email.  At not cost to your or your subscriber.
  • Easily add new features and pages.

See an Example of a dialogue-Site

WordPress Chosen as New Website Solution for 200+ Member Event Association

When the Tennessee Wedding & Events Specialists Association decided to replace their old website they had a long wish list. First it had to appeal to a very web savvy target market and be easy to use across multiple generations.  It needed to be updatable and expandable.  It needed to be fully optimized for both social media and search and compatible with mobile devices. It needed to integrate membership accounting functions such as membership applications and online renewal. What they chose was a website built entirely on a WordPress platform!

capture

TWESA turned to the experts at the Agency@Think to find a solution. What they got was more than they expected.

TWESA.com is a full website including extensive galleries, blogs, video and member listings all built on a WordPress platform.  It is fully integrated into social media such as Twitter and Facebook, even the calendar has its own RSS feed.  This is just what visitors see.On the non public side, members are able to post to the site as well as update their listings.

The Agency@Think included a member’s only blog that functions more like a Facebook wall or a Twitter feed. Since the private blog is fully optimized for mobile devices, members can use it as an instant way to communicate with each other while working an event. The importance of having a private one to many back channel means of communication on a busy event day is priceless.

Also an important factor in choosing WordPress was the ability to incorporate membership accounting functionality. The site now has the ability for new members to apply and pay online, members to renew or upgrade online and automatically bills members when their annual dues are up. The system generates full reports on member billing and accounting activity; eliminating many dollars previously paid to an accountant for billing and record keeping. Because WordPress integrates so easily with so many plugins, the Agency@Think was able to set the payment function up completely with in PayPal eliminating the need for and expense of a traditional shopping cart.

Search Engine Optimization is important for any website. Previously TWESA had been paying over $200 a month for SEO. With the new site, because it is built on the semantically correct WordPress Platfom the site is virtually self-optimizing. With each new post or listing the site’s search power increases. But at the end of the day it is results that count.  The new Dialog-Site website has increased search engine referrals over five fold in just its first 30 days, with no additional advertising or other time expense.

According to Vicki Sanders, President of TWESA, “When we started this project I don’t think we fully grasped the possibilities. The Agency @Think understood our needs and not only showed us what was possible, but even added functionality that would benefit us that we never even knew existed. Many of our members have WordPress blogs that they loved. So we knew how well WordPress worked for that but we were surprised at how well The Agency@Think was able to use WordPress to build an entire website on those strengths.”