7 Ways to Grow Your Wedding Business During the Holidays

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While the wedding season is winding down for a lot of pros, there’s still much to do. And there’s no reason why you can’t boost your bottom line during the holiday season, too.

Here are some ideas you can use to market your wedding business, make more sales and earn referrals during the holidays.

1. Tap Into Holiday Buying Power

People buy in an emotional state. Sure, we like to think that we’ve carefully considered the pros and cons of getting that Mac Book Pro to reach a logical decision, but it’s always an emotional need that gets rationalized afterward.

Why not tag along on the emotional buying frenzy created by shop-happy “holidays” like Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

People who open their wallets on these shop-a-holic days are primed to purchase again and again. Offer them a special deal to channel some of those economy boosting funds your way.

2. Thank Your Local Customers

Thanksgiving is the perfect time to send a card that doesn’t get lost in the deluge of greeting cards in December. You have a much better chance of standing out from the competition.

Even better than a thank you card, give your brides and grooms a special gift. An informational article or video filled with holiday tips and ideas is a great way to show your appreciation, earn customer loyalty and get extra sales.

Don’t forget your wedding vendor friends! Show them the love so that they shower you with referrals.

3. Showcase Your Holiday Wares

If you have a product or service that makes a great holiday gift, this is the time to show it off. A special deal or promotion makes it extra enticing.

For photographers, holiday photo shoots, portraits or mini-albums can be a big hit. Think Groupon, if you dare, and fill up those empty spots in your studio calendar. Wedding DJs might offer a special mid-week holiday rate or rent a Santa for a family party. Event planners could offer a class in holiday planning entertainment.

You’ve already earned the trust of the brides and grooms who’ve hired you. Come up with a cool gift they can give to their family members or friends and make them a repeat customer.

4. Get the Promotion Wheels Turning Well in Advance

Start promoting your holiday specials early. Submit press releases, tweet and Facebook about it in social media, and get the buzz going. When the shopping season officially kicks in your fans and followers will know exactly where to go.

Promote, don’t over-promote, with social media. DO let your fans and followers know what you’re up to, but make sure you keep providing valuable tips and information that isn’t a sales pitch. Don’t promote your stuff more than 50% of the time or people will tune you out altogether.

5. Sponsor a Local Event or Give to Charity

The holidays are the perfect time to embrace the spirit of giving. Earn some good karma and some good PR for your wedding business by giving back to your community. It earns goodwill and makes people feel good about doing business with you.

6. Publish a Holiday Gift Giving Guide

Desperate brides and grooms (especially grooms) are scouring the internet for hip and cool gift-giving ideas. Make it easy for your couples by sharing a top 10 list of the best holiday gifts.

Some of these gifts might be your products and services, but even simply sharing original gift ideas on your blog will attract eager website visitors.

You might make your holiday gift guide a PDF giveaway report, a blog post, a video, or send it in your email newsletter or by mail. If your ideas are good, they’ll be well appreciated.

7. Host a Holiday Themed Contest

People are always hungry for good gift-giving ideas, holiday entertainment tips and yummy recipes. If you don’t have any to share yourself, hold a contest for the Best Holiday Gift Idea, the Best Gingerbread Cookie Recipe or if you want to stay wedding-themed, the Best Romantic Holiday Gift.

Contests are easy to pull off yourself with applications like Rafflecopter and Wildfire that leverage the power of social media to spread the word. A holiday themed contest is a great way to tap into the excitement of the holidays to promote your wedding business.

These are just a few holiday promotion ideas. How do you market your wedding business during the holiday season?

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Making Facebook Advertising and Your Wedding Business Page Work

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If you’ve ever tried Facebook advertising you know that you’ve got a 50/50 chance of it working. The thing about Facebook is that people want to interact, learn, and well, be social while they are on Facebook. What they don’t want is to have their chat with an old friend interrupted by an advertisement. As a result Facebook is working on revamping their advertising to try and make the ads more relevant to its users. Make sure to read the article by Tim Worstall or Forbes to find out a bit more on how the new ads are going to work.

There are some things you need to know as a wedding business however that will help your advertising reach people better. First of all, Facebook is not your billboard. Your ad needs to get Facebook users to interact with you. In other words your ad needs to be social. The more interaction you can trigger with your ad and with your Facebook business page, the more likely you are to be reaching an audience who will actually be interested in using your business.

I decided to do some research and find out what is working for some of the top wedding companies on Facebook. Believe it or not, they didn’t have a lot of advertising spiel going on. The main tactic they were all using was posting interesting pictures. A picture on Facebook generates instant interest. It gives people ideas for their wedding, lets them share it with others which is free advertising for your business, and triggers conversations. Use pictures of weddings you’ve done, wedding bloopers, cartoons, a dog eating a wedding cake, anything that will both help your audience and spark interest in your business. Your caption can help the conversation along as well as pointing people to your website. What do you think?

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Why A Wedding Business Needs To Be Chatty On Facebook

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Women_Talking

There is more to social media than meets the eye. At least that is true when it comes to wedding marketing. Pronet Advertising makes a good point in their article that people don’t want to be talked at on their social media platforms. They want to talk with people and businesses.

A lot of businesses miss this and simply use it like traditional marketing. I can tell you from personal experience as a user of Facebook that business who talk at me loose me as a follower in about a week or two. The whole purpose of social media is to be social. Yes, we all want tips and tricks, but we also want to engage with the company.

A good place to get a feel for this is to follow a couple of your favorite musicians (preferable big name musicians) for a while. Case in point is Michael Buble. His fan page gets a ton of activity, and his marketing team used that page to create a huge buzz leading up to the release of his Christmas album. Be chatty and personable and the interaction with your page should increase, which triggers more interest in your business.

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How To Use Google+ For Targeted Wedding Marketing

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LookGoogle+ isn’t Facebook. Regardless of all the speculation that went around when it was first announced there is a huge difference between the two sites according to Jeff Bercovici. The main thing that users need to know is that Google+ isn’t a social networking platform; it’s a shared interest platform.

What does this mean to a wedding business? It means that you absolutely should be on Google+ because once a few brides find you they will share it with others in the same interest group, and it will spread from there. It honestly is a great way to get free advertising, as long as you’re posting relevant information that interests brides who are planning a wedding. Make sure to read Jeff’s article for more information on exactly how Google+ actually works, and how to make it work for you. Have you tried Google+ yet, and if so have you seen any benefits of it in your business?

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Is Advertising An Investment Or Expenditure?

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For a small business advertising can be a pill. You don’t have a huge budget, and you don’t have the time. And yet, the bottom line is that if you want your business to grow you have to find a way to advertise.

sale

There was something mentioned in an article by Business ihub that was brilliant. And that is, quite simply, you have to view advertising as an investment, not an expenditure. The difference in how you view it makes a huge difference on your advertising efforts. If all you can see is the money, you’ll find that the amount you make isn’t worth the amount spent. But if instead you are able to realize that you are building the long term future of your company as well as the short term gain of sales, you’ll find that it is worth every penny and minute spent.

It’s easy to get caught up in how much you are spending on advertising to how much you are making from it. While that is important information to know, what is more important is to realize that getting business exposure is part of what you are paying for. There will be brides and relatives of brides who see your advertising that will remember you a couple of years from now. So even if you don’t instantly get the sale, you have to realize that it’s worth the money for the exposure. What do you think?

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How to Get Free Advertising on Google

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Handshake_MoneyAdvertising online is a great way to get more traffic to your website, and move those visitors down the sales funnel into clients. As a result it’s easy to end up spending major money on advertising, and the good news is that sometimes there are ways to advertise effectively for free.

A great example of this is using Google Local to get on Google Map search results. Mike Volpe has a great walk through of how to get set up in his article. It’s easy, painless, and can get you amazing search ranking with people in your area looking for a business such as yours.

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How to Target Facebook Categories for Advertizing

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Facebook is moving toward helping advertisers reach the correct market by testing out some new and exciting strategies for choosing categories for ads. Why should this excite you? Well according to Josh Constine’s amazing articlesome of the sub categories are things like “Engaged (

Facebook_Advertisement

Regardless of the great advances you can still implement more targeted ads by choosing from the current lists of categories, and sub categories. For instance you can target your area down to the exact mileage away from your business base that you want to reach, or choose to target single gals in a certain age range. The more targeted you are with the categories the better you will be able to reach people who are actually looking for your product/service. 

Keep checking your demographics and plan on changing your exact target audience for your Facebook adds at least once every couple of months. If you aren’t seeing high returns on your ads don’t be afraid to try targeting a different group of people.

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How Do I Know If My Wedding Advertising Is Working?

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by Claire Gould 

A dozen pink English roses reflected

The secret to successful wedding advertising

It’s important to work to clear objectives when advertising your wedding business. It can be very easy to place an ad in your favourite local wedding magazine and simply hope it will bring some orders in. That’s what I did when I started out – but it didn’t work too well for me.

Now I generate all the sales I need through my websites, and in quiet times I advertise online via a select few advertising channels (like Wedding Chaos) which actually work for my business.

Your wedding advertising objectives should be realistic, measurable, and flexible. It’s important to have a methodical approach to advertising. Plan carefully, monitor your advert’s performance and evaluate its success rate on a regular basis. Be prepared to make changes to your ads and you’ll know for sure what works for you, and that you’re not wasting your advertising budget on poorly performing ads.

Where to begin

While you read this article, think about your existing wedding adverts or any ads you’re considering. The process of setting objectives is easy to work with and will pay for itself.

Start with the basics: what are you advertising for?

Ultimately it should be to generate a profit from your wedding business. Your advert is a tool to help you achieve this.

Any wedding business advertising has to fit within your means. A small jewelry business will have a small advertising budget – that’s fine! In the case of my calligraphy business I know if I spend too much on advertising I’ll be turning orders away because there’s only one me, with one right arm and the ability to use one pen at a time. Setting objectives is important no matter how large or small your wedding business.

Objectives for internet advertising

The only place I advertise right now is online. It’s what I’m good at, it’s what I know and understand and most importantly it’s what I’ve tested and proved. I ran a series of ads over the summer on Wedding Chaos, testing an ad for a new product on a targeted page.  (See the surprising results of my Wedding Chaos advertising experiment here.)

I planned and tested different advertising placements, creative and formats on the same page and measured these against objectives – it was a great exercise and taught me what really works for my business – and now I’ve set real long term objectives for my advertising strategy which allow me to rein in my spend and still get the conversions I need.

Advertising a wedding business online has its own set of unique challenges. To effectively advertise online you need to advertise on a page with very relevant content.

I advertised a calligraphy product on a web page focusing on Wedding readings and poems – highly targeted and relevant to my business. Website owners design their pages to attract a certain visitor, usually through the use of keywords. Their copy is designed to inform, persuade, educate or discuss a topic.

Wedding Chaos bridal advertising results

Wedding Chaos is a favourite advertising site for me as it allows you to choose the exact page and position for your ad, from information pages on all kinds of wedding related topics.

Finding an appropriate page for your ad is crucial. Then it’s down to numbers: I work to a click through rate of anything from 1% to 0.2% (so if a page gets 1,000 daily visits an ad should get between 10 and 2 clicks).

Measurable wedding advertising objectives

It’s nice to know your advert is doing “quite well”, or that you’ve had a couple of enquiries or an order. But it’s better to know exactly how many visits you’re getting per $ spent on your ad.

Think backwards: how many orders do you need to generate? This works for small businesses who process one order at once, such as a custom jeweller or florist. Does your advert need to generate 10 bookings to fill your diary for a month? Or if you’re selling a product, perhaps you need 1,000 sales to generate your $5,000 dollar profit target?

Taking the former example you can do a quick calculation: 30 enquiries might generate those 10 orders. To get 30 enquiries from your ad you’ll need 300 clicks. At a CTR of 1% your ad will need to be seen 30,000 times. Make sure the page you’re advertising on gets that many views in the right time period for you.

Measuring your wedding advertising performance

Never place an advert and simply leave it. You might as well make a tiara and jump on it. The internet is a vast advertising space with thousands of options for advertising, so do choose carefully and measure performance. Don’t expect to get it right first time either!

How to measure your wedding ad’s success

Measure regularly and in accordance with the size of your ad and objectives. This could be weekly for a small business or hourly for a large organization. If you’re spending $$$ on an ad, measure harder! Don’t take your eyes off that ad until you know it works!

Measure everything you’ve set out in your objectives: clicks, page views, enquiries and conversions. If one goes wrong it can create a domino effect and your whole ad will fail. (If you’re getting 100s of clicks and no enquiries, review your landing page for example.)

Measure your wedding ads across a period of time. For many of us our business is seasonal, so an ad will work less well in winter than in summer. But it may be the case that your ad performs best at weekends, or on rainy days in your state! With AdWords you can even turn off an ad for a day or two if you need that flexibility.

Review your wedding advertising

Whether your advertising strategy has overperformed or not met its objectives, reviewing performance is an essential step.

Just because your wedding advert didn’t generate the sales you needed first time round, it doesn’t mean you should give up. Look carefully at what worked and what didn’t. Adjust placements, creative or landing pages and try again. Compare one ad with another and you’ll get a picture of what works best for your wedding business.

Advertising on Wedding Chaos: further information

If you’re interested in testing your own ad on Wedding Chaos I’d definitely recommend giving it a go. It’s good value for money, the website is so well targeted and gets very high traffic – and you can sign up for a month for starters then see how it goes!

You can also check up on your advert’s performance at any time: the dashboard shows the number of clicks, and cost per click, over the previous 30 days (which is key to making those choices about what is and is not working). Then if you need to, you can change or remove the advert at any time. Credits are only deducted each day the advert is active.

Good luck!

Claire Gould

Claire Gould is editor of English Wedding, the UK wedding blogs for brides and industry professionals. As an ex Marketeer and owner of several wedding websites as well as a full
 time calligraphy business, she knows how the wedding industry works and is happy to share industry secrets with the world!  Rose photo credit.

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Does Your Wedding Marketing Measure Up?

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I was hanging out on Wedding Wire the other day and came across this question: 

What comes first…the branding or the client?

It’s a good question.  Do you create your marketing message first and then attract the clients you want…or do you consider your ideal client first and then design your message to attract them?

While it can be tempting to design your marketing, logo and image to suit your taste…it’s a mistake.

Your image and marketing…which includes everything from your website to your business cards to your emails and the way you answer the phone…MUST connect with your ideal client or you will lose her.

Identify your ideal client first and design everything for her.

I can’t tell you how many DJ websites I’ve seen that have a dark background with a high-tech, modern design.  They’re designed by guys.

But websites designed by guys appeal to guys.  Not the target bride.

Christine Boulton of Think Like a Bride does a really good job of pointing out how important it is to match your marketing to your message in the blog post below.

Read it here: Does Your Marketing Reflect Your Message?

If your website looks like it belongs to a wedding vendor her mother would hire, today’s bride won’t even give you a second look.

What do YOU think?

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About Us

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Hi!  We are Stephanie and Jeff Padovani, a husband-wife power business duo.

We accidentally started our adventure in the wedding business way back in 2000.  We wanted to combine our love of music, passion for working with people along with our expertise in Stephanie & Jeff Padovanibusiness marketing, advertising, and sales, so we formed The DJ Solution, an entertainment business specializing in “non-cheesy” wedding entertainment.

The response from brides was huge!  What started out as a way for us to make an “extra $500 a month” quickly became a full-time wedding business grossing over 6 Figures each year.  We were finally able to leave the corporate world for good.

After seeing how the economy and the recession has affected many of our wedding professional friends…business is down 25% or more for some of them…we decided we had a responsibility to take what we’d learned and share it with them.

We help wedding professionals…who are really good at what they do, but not so good at booking weddings…build a 6 Figure Wedding Business THIS YEAR, without fighting with “price shoppers” or wasting money on expensive bridal advertising that doesn’t work.

The wedding business should be about doing what you love, having fun doing it and getting paid what you’re worth.  We don’t believe any wedding vendor should waste hard-earned time and money with over-priced marketing that doesn’t work or struggling to convince brides about your value.

Stephanie and Jeff Padovani presenting at Millbrook Winery

We are ONLY interested in cost-effective (or free!) marketing and business solutions that work for the wedding industry…and our mission is to sift through the BS to bring you the best of what we discover.  

That’s what Book More Brides is all about…sharing the wedding success secrets we’ve learned with wedding vendors across the world!  Contact us anytime with your questions, comments or complaints about the wedding business.

Who is Stephanie Padovani? 

Stephanie Padovani has been a professional wedding entertainer and “mistress of ceremonies” since 2000.  Her specialties include client communication, Stephanie Padovani at Book More Bridescopywriting, web management and search engine optimization.  She draws on a rich background in inside sales and marketing.

She is also a freelance writer for the wedding industry whose works have been published in WedLock Magazine, Wed Biz Journal, Hudson Valley Weddings, Savvy Women’s Magazine and numerous other online and offline publications.  Stephanie is the managing editor of the regional wedding planning blog, Best Hudson Valley Wedding Ever.

Who is Jeff Padovani?

Jeff Padovani of Book More BridesJeff Padovani is a professional musician, DJ and business marketing strategist.  He’s the “big ideas” mastermind behind many business ventures and is chiefly responsible for the birth of the three businesses he currently co-owns with Stephanie.  

Jeff has over 25 years of experience in sales and marketing for several industries including retail, real estate and outside sales.  He was a top sales performer and trainer for Lechmere Corporation for 10 years.  Jeff currently manages the affiliate and advertising programs at Best Hudson Valley Wedding Ever.

Book More Brides
106 Fairview Ave
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601

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