Wedding Professional Success! has a New Home. And new URL.

Thank you all for your visiting and commenting on this blog.

In response to the success of your support and since self-hosted WordPress allows one to do so much more; from blogging to websites to marketing, I have decided to relocate Wedding Professional Success!

New posts are at the blog's new site.

Did a little redesign too. Hope you like the new look.

If you are ever updating your blogroll or bookmarks I would appreciate your adding the new URL -
http://www.marcfuller.com

Thanks in advance. Look forward to seeing you there!

Flash based websites: "the accessibility and searchability of a brick"

In the quest to find methods to help improve marketing results for wedding professionals I often look at website options/techniques. Previously I have discussed the impressive advantages of using a rich featured blog engine as the basis for your website, but ignored the almost crippling impact Flash based websites can have on your Internet marketing.


Well Christine Boulton of Think Like A Bride has just posted just such an article on her marketing agency's website complete with her attention to useful detail and frank discussion. Go read it - Flash Sites vs HTML Sites

A new wedding zietgeist

This is going to be one of those lazy blog posts where I suggest you go read someone else's blog, but it is Sunday afternoon and Rebecca Grinnals at Weddex blog has a great post about what I think will become the new wedding zietgeist, or cultural climate, which values meaning above luxury.

Her prime basis for the emergence of a new cultural climate? One of the most important cultural catalysts of the recent past ... Sex In The City. Rebecca's post is really worth the read and some thought.

Teleseminar recording with exceptional wedding/bridal marketer Lori Osterberg

A lot of people have asked when this recording would be available and I just finished the editing and upload. I think it was the best, most valuable teleseminar for wedding/bridal marketers yet!

This last Wednesday evening was our regular monthly Great Wedding Network wedding/bridal marketing teleseminar.

Guest expert Lori Osterberg CEO of Vision of Success and author of "Six Figure Wedding Photographer" provided some great advice and insights. Our discussion ranged from how she grew her wedding photography business to the marketing power of blogs as websites to improving direct email marketing to understanding how to use social networks for business. Lots of useful information from someone with first hand experience.

I invite you to download and listen to the mp3 at your convenience. Here is the link (mp3, 9.9mb) to the teleseminar recording.

Online Testimonials Image Generator

Ever wish there was a better way to present those emails of thanks you get from clients? Well this might help. And it's free!

The CopyDoodles™ Testimonial Generator

Just pick your paper color and style, font style and color, then enter the text and it will generate a gif that looks like a handwritten note. You can then put the gifs on your testimonials webpage and have some variety. Takes less than than five minutes.

A new marketing agency devoted to only wedding and bridal businesses

Colleague and friend Christine Boulton, well known wedding/bridal business consultant and writer extraordinaire, has new marketing agency for wedding and bridal businesses!

The Agency at Think Like A Bride provides a full range of high value/low cost marketing services to wedding and bridal businesses all dedicated to increasing profits.

Visit her new website and learn what they can do for you!

The secret life of a blog based website

A blog based website is not a "normal" website. Like Clark Kent it may look normal, but it has some special powers.

Recently I wrote that it was my opinion that for marketing purposes a blog based site made the best wedding professional website. It stimulated some questions that asked to me explain more why or how a blog based site is better.

There are four basic parts to my opinion on this and it is a little technical so I provided some links in my explanation for more detail.

First is fairly obvious, the desire of most brides-to-be to obtain a lot of information before making purchase decisions and the ease of which the owner of blog based site can present new information through site updates, for site visitors to share comments and easily bookmark it on social networking sites like Digg. This allows the blog based site owner to meet the target market bride-to-be desires for wedding related information and benefit the blog based site owner with the competitive advantage of customer engagement, and potentially viral marketing.

The second part is a little more obscure or secret to many of us and has to with the inherent nature of most blogs relationship to search engines. Blog based sites are very "friendly" to search engines easily presenting their text based content. In the background a blog based site creates a brand new web page for most updates, which is noticed by search engines and often gives the site increased search relevancy ranking. Blog based sites also have an additional group of blog only search engines. Blog only search engines such as Technorati work by indexing blog article tags and then presenting those articles in order of the most recent. The more a blog based site updates and provides relevant tags, the more the site will be in the top search results.

Compounding all this is the unique "push" power of web feeds and feed readers. Most blog based websites have the advantage of automatically creating a web feed which allows your target market to be presented information about website updates automatically on a daily basis, thereby enhancing customer engagement. This may be a little obscure to many of us but it is fairly well known by our bride-to-be target market's generation. They know all they need to do is click on the orange syndication image in the right side of their browser's site address window to add a blog based site to their feed reader, easily getting a summary list of updates of the websites in which they have interest. They can then click through from the summary to visit your blog based website. Helping to insure the blog based website owner the competitive advantage of customer engagement.

Lastly, development and ownership costs of a blog based website are frequently much less than conventional websites.

So, in short summary my opinion is based on the reality that the blog based website owner often has higher search results, receives the additional competitive advantage of customer engagement and saves money.

Help for the color scheme challenged, like me!

I love color! Unfortunately putting together innovative and attractive color schemes is a talent I do not have. One needs only to take a look at this blog for evidence. But, I have found help.

Colorschemer.com is sublime! Good for both wedding professionals and brides-to-be. The site has over 3,500 color schemes all tagged for searching. Plus tools to determine the colors of almost any webpage or the explore your own color grouping in a gallery type web-browser widget. They even have a professional color wheel based "color-matching application that will help you build beautiful color schemes quickly and easily" for only $49.00 in either Mac and PC versions.

If you are trying to find just the right color scheme for a wedding reception or a web-page a few minutes on their site will be time well spent. You could even use some of the tools to show a bride-to-be your ideas.

May everyone enjoy a great weekend!

The perfect wedding professional website is a …blog?

But, probably not your father's blog.

Web technology and, more importantly, web users are continually changing. We all realize the importance of our websites, and there is a range approaches from simple static text, dynamically generated pages to gorgeous flash presentation sites. They all have had a place in the evolution of the web and web users.

To understand what’s the best answer for today we need to examine two perspectives; 1) what our target market web users are seeking in their web experience and 2) what search engines value or rank highest. The good news is that these two perspectives have very similar and compatible objectives. They both seek; fresh, relevant, easy displayed and read content. And in these objectives contemporary blog platforms excel for the services business owner. Some of the fastest growing wedding professionals I have observed began with a simple blog that the used to regularly share their work and philosophy with prospective clients.

A blog is; content rich, easily updated, personal, search engine friendly (unlike flash), browse-able on virtually all devices including mobile (again unlike flash) and fast (once again …). And today’s blogs can be attractive. Many of them don’t even look like blogs, but they are. Take a look at the low-cost, easily adaptable WordPress themes available from Revolution. And, realize that you can easily post new images and stories about your work into those blogs almost as easily as sending an email.

I am beginning to think that over the next year new well designed blog platforms will become the standard for wedding professionals who want to have the highest website return on investment. If you would like more info just drop me an email. I can also refer you to web professionals who are familiar with these new style blogs. Look forward to your comments.

Today's brides-to-be want your email

If you still think that email doesn't work, please read this very recent article from eMarketer. It is an excellent summary of recent consumer direct marketing channel preference.

Some important information from the article:

"Asked to judge the acceptability of various channels for marketing purposes on a scale of 1 to 5, respondents gave direct mail an average score of 3.9, followed by e-mail at 3.7. All other channels averaged under 3.

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they had made a purchase because of a marketing message received through e-mail. More than three-quarters said they had made such a purchase in response to direct mail. ...

About two-thirds of respondents to that survey said they preferred e-mail when dealing with businesses, and about as many said they expected to continue to prefer e-mail in five years."(emphasis added)

The article has more info and very useful tables showing preferences by age groups. Please take a short read of the full one pager.

What the surveys used in the article should reveal is that if you are not getting good results from your email marketing it is probably the result of the marketing message. Don't settle for poor results.

With the cost of direct email being less than 10% the cost of direct mail while nearly as acceptable to the customer (and the fact that I also offer a unique quality targeted bride-to-be leadstream) one of my objectives is to help wedding professional clients refine their marketing message to reach today's brides. I do that not only through this blog, but also a weekly ezine newsletter, frequent teleseminars, dedicated small online groups and individual review.

The marketing messages many of us have relied upon have seemingly lost much their effectiveness as our prospective Internet savvy bride-to-be clients have become more sophisticated. Thankfully it usually only takes a minor rethink and some simple changes to recapture marketing success. Direct marketing still works and direct email has the best return on investment.

The Power of APPLICATIONS! Easy, Low-cost, Results - Expand Your Brand plus Direct Market in Facebook & MySpace

Many people have well justified reservations regarding the return on investment in marketing on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. While brands are easily extensible into the social networking environment through profile creation, addition of friends, group presence and advertising, actually making sales is difficult.

Advertising on social network has had infrequent success. The initial comparison of social networking sites to portal sites Google or Yahoo has been proven wrong as network members demonstrate an established resistance to clicking to off-network websites.

Plus, the nature of social networks and expected privacy standards also make it impossible to easily include social network friends in direct marketing efforts.

Building your social network of friends can be expensive. While participation in most social networks is free, actively networking in their environment is very time consuming.

Yet there is a a very powerful, and mostly overlooked, low-cost way to build strong brand relationships and generate leads for direct marketing from your social network based target markets.

For full understanding first allow me to review some why and what related to users of social networks.

• The reason why, is that social networks can be incredibly rich in certain demographics. For example, while engaged people comprise lees than 1% of the US population, they are as high as 6% within some networks on Facebook.

• Secondly, what is a social network profile other than a collection of personal information that the profile owner desires to share with her friends.

These two points, a discernible richly populated target market with individuals wanting to share personal information is a potential "treasure".

The way to reach this social network treasure is through a social network application that supports the targeted profile owner's desire to share some particular piece of information, while at the same time extend your brand and support non-social network direct marketing efforts. In other words, someone using your application on their social network profile is virtually providing you word of mouth advertising and allowing you contact information needed to support direct marketing through regular email.

When we first began our efforts on MySpace almost two years ago I noticed that quizzes were madly popular. So we created our own quiz to appeal to our target market and provide traffic to our website. The quiz was just a few simple questions and a formula that, dependent upon the value of different answers, presented a banner to be displayed on the quiz taker's MySpace profile. The quiz is named "Which Princess Bride Are You?" and has five different bride types. This created a huge number of links and dramatic increase in website traffic.

And, last year when Facebook opened up their application platform. We developed an application to place in her profile an engagement announcement and a fully functional self-created Google wedding map where she can share all the important location details of her wedding. This application allow us to extend our brand to a large number of Facebook members who are engaged and supports volume lead generation for direct marketing efforts for us and our client wedding professional subscribers.

I have also developed custom applications for a social cause (womens shelter), clients and helped others to do the same. While these social network applications cost from a just a few hundred dollars, they will operate for months with almost no time (and money) consuming personal involvement from the owner or assistant while providing measurable results 24/7/365. Leads, traffic and virtual "word of mouth" advertising - automatically.

After many discussions and brainstorming sessions, I think that almost all business can benefit from an application, because almost all our businesses provide some services, goods and expertise that our clients would enjoy sharing with their friends. If you would like to talk about how an application could be linked and useful for your business or the value of targeted applications in general just send me an email*. I would be glad to share more specific in-depth thoughts.


(* - Or if you are a wedding professional who would like to participate in our unique bride-to-be leadstream.)

Surviving and avoiding weddings from hell

Just an article from CNN on weddings from hell and how to survive them.

Some astounding disasters are described, but I liked best the closing paragraph's argument for simplicity -

Future brides and grooms may also want to remember that the more bells and whistles they dream up for their wedding, the more chance there is for trouble, says Samantha Schoech. "Weddings have gotten bigger and grander these days and I think that leaves you open for more disasters," she says. "If you want white doves to fly over you right as they're saying 'I now pronounce you husband and wife,' you're asking to get pooped on."

Simplicity can be foundation for both elegance and economy. Perhaps Samantha Schoech has offered an Occam's Razor ( "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.") for weddings and receptions?

As professionals are we aiding brides-to-be in being able to consider that "less is more"?

A potential price increase is more powerful than a discount. A lesson from "Sway"

"Sway" the new book by brothers Ori and Rom Brafman (one a psychologist, the other an entrepreneur) has many powerful lessons for marketers. The most useful for us wedding professionals maybe the emotional motivation of "loss aversion" Here is a partial excerpt from their book:

... economists wouldn’t expect people to be more sensitive to price increases than to price decreases. But what Putler found was that shoppers completely overreacted when prices rose.

Anyone who’s made a shopping list with a budget in mind can tell you how this plays out. If the price drops, we’re mildly pleased. But if we see that the price has gone up since last week, we get an oh no feeling in the pit of our stomachs ... This feeling of dread over a price increase is disproportionate—or asymmetric—to the satisfaction we feel when we get a good deal.

We experience the pain associated with a loss much more vividly than we do the joy of experiencing a gain. ...

Putler’s research illuminates a mystery that economists have been grappling with for years. For no apparent logical reason, we overreact to perceived losses.

The take away here for us wedding pros is two points;

• Be willing to share the any upcoming price increases with potential clients. As we now know, inflation is very real, particularly in energy costs, any oil based products and food, all very important components to a wedding and reception. Truthfully informing your potential client of the need to raise your prices soon is a disproportionally powerful influence for to her to contract for your services before any price increase.
  

• If you are doing discounts or special offers to bolster sales, by all means include a meaningful expiration date in those discount offers. Don't overlook the powerful fact that"We experience the pain associated with a loss much more vividly than we do the joy of experiencing a gain." A savings of itself does not have equal power to the risk of losing that savings.

To learn more about "Sway" visit the book's website.

Indeed - Email Marketing Still Works!

For another insight into the value and power of well managed direct email marketing read this recent eMarketer article.

A few important grafs -

• Half of US adult e-mail users surveyed in April 2008 for Merkle's "View from the Inbox" study, conducted with Harris Interactive, said they had made an online purchase in the previous year as a result of permission-based marketing.

• In addition, e-mail was second only to customer reviews on Web sites for influencing online purchases, according to DoubleClick Performics' "Green Marketing Study," conducted by Opinion Research Corporation in February 2008. E-mail was roughly equal to search results in terms of influencing online purchases.
  

• "There is a substantial gap between what marketers believe is relevant to the consumer, and what consumers rate as valuable," said Lori Connolly, director of research at Merkle.

This last point contributes to what I have been stressing in our weekly newsletters as we are attempting to help wedding professionals redesign their marketing communications.

There is a lot more info and statistics in the article. Worth the read.

Insights to Facebook and MySpace friends and our upcoming May 28th teleseminar

Just a short post, part of getting ready for our free teleseminar regarding how wedding/bridal professionals can use MySpace and Facebook to increase their income.

Newsweek has a helpful article online by Steven Levy covering Facebook and MySpace friending, "How Many Friends Is Too Many?" The article provides excellent info contrasting the two social networks and how their prime users manage online friends in the virtual social network.

Our free teleseminar on how to use Facebook and MySpace to increase your business will be Wednesday May 28th, 8pm EDT, 7pm CDT, 6pm MDT, 5pm PDT. Mari Smith published Facebook business author, business development consultant and former wedding DJ will be featured guest speaker.

If you would like to participate in our teleseminar just send me an email I will reply with call in phone number and access code.

Death Watch for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

I haven’t wanted to say much on this topic because the SEO voice is so loud. And for good reason, SEO had some great results and every website should still always have good search engine management and “hygiene”.

For the last few months I have been watching SEO consultants enhancing their marketing efforts at the same time SEO results are becoming less productive and reliable. But as a non-SEO expert I felt I didn’t have the "footing" to express my observations and ideas.

Then I came across this article by Chris Copland of SearchInsider titled the Last Days of SEO. To me the take away graf is - "So, the future of SEO as defined today is a bleak one. Whether we merely change the description of SEO or use a new acronym like DAO, the days of success being optimization for 10 text links on a standard results page is going to end up just like our old description of the engines: as dinosaurs. Extinct dinosaurs." Please read the entire article.

To me it is the growth of the internet combined with the increasingly sophisticated users and search engine providers that makes it difficult to rely on old style SEO.

Particularly in light of these points;

• Increasing and increasingly sophisticated users. Look at your website logs and see how specific many of their search terms have become. Generation Y has excellent, focused search skills that I respect.

• Increasingly sophisticated search engines, looking to deliver precise valuable results to their users. And at the same time seeking to maximize their sponsored link income.

• Overwhelming size of the commercial WWW. With 200 million websites and over 10 billion webpages and an almost infinite variety of search terms how can SEO reliably assure that one particular site will be in the first 10 results returned for any period of time?

Marc's tip to wedding professionals –
Use a balanced approach. Continue to follow good SEO practice and hygiene while utilizing other low cost ways to get your company’s website in front of your target market. Don't be consumed by getting a particular search rank result. Most importantly, shift to concentrating on having an effectively persuasive website thereby converting your visitors to clients.

It is not the format! It's the story! Change your message for success.

The buzz on wedding marketing is to use blogs and newsletters/ezines. Unfortunately many of us are simply putting the same low results text content into these new formats. And we wonder why we are not getting improved sales. Because we haven't changed the old message. Putting the same old message in a new "envelope" is not change.

Everyday we are presented 3,000+ buy messages. And we have become, particularly GenY and Millennial, very good at ignoring them. To effectively reach today's bride-to-be requires sharing stories and building relationships.

Our current wedding generations are focused on relationships. Their formative and current entertainment such as Battlestar Galactica, Roswell, Seinfeld, the Office to Charmed, movies from the "Breakfast Club" to "Sense and Sensibility" are all about relationships. Last week I was reading about a screen writer who shared that many of her best story lines for Dawson's Creek (what show was more relationship anchored?) came from Jane Austen novels. Look at the size and power of social networks like MySpace and Facebook, it is all about relationships.

Long ago I had a sales manager, who told me that "a salesman is only as good as his story". Stories are how we learn and share knowledge. If interesting, stories are able to pass through the defenses we have created to withstand the 3,000+ daily buy messages. What could be more interesting and persuasive to a bride-to-be than stories about what you do for weddings and the professional relationships you foster?

And this is why blogs and ezines can be so effective. Blogs and ezines are the superb at easily broadcasting your wedding stories to today's internet connected brides-to-be. Share stories!

If you want to discuss this approach further send me an email and we can arrange a telephone conversation.

Comparing three web marketing options on your profits

As a wedding professional you have three major channels for business development and marketing on the web, in addition to your website.

They are

• Paid Search like Google Adwords,
• Display Ads/Banners on placed on wedding directory websites or other sites either directly or with a service like AdSense
• Direct Email.

All three are used to inform people of your goods and services, encourage them to visit your website to learn more and hopefully become your customer. Importantly for your business and profit decisions they also have different success rates and costs.

Fortunately on the internet there are ways and firms that measure the success rates of these different methods. Below is a table complied by Datran Media from DoubleClick, Morgan Stanley and WebSide Story for 2006-2007

Comparative marketing performance for Paid Search, Display Ads and Direct Email

Click-to-Conversion (sale) Rate:

• Paid Search - 3.4%
• Display Ads - <1%
• Direct Email - 13.46%

So what does this mean? In short, display advertising is the worst, search is better and direct email is almost 4 times better than paid search. Out of 100 click throughs an average web marketer could expect over 13 new clients from direct email, over 3 new clients from search and fewer than 1 from a display ad.

Marc's tip to wedding/bridal professionals:
To be blunt, unless your conversion rate to sales is very high, don't buy display ads and do the math for paid search and direct email. From the measurements above you could spend 3 times as much for direct email as paid search and still, direct email would be the most profitable choice.

So explore what your Google Adwords are bidding at and what quality leads might cost then make an informed choice for the lowest cost and your highest potential profits.

For more assistance or questions just comment or send me an email.