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

June 4, 2008 by Marc 1 Comment

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.)

Filed Under: Advertising, Leads, Profits, Sales, Wedding Marketing Tagged With: Facebook, GenY, Millenial, MySpace, Social Networks

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

June 1, 2008 by Marc 1 Comment

“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.

Filed Under: Advertising, Profits, Sales, Wedding Marketing

Indeed – Email Marketing Still Works!

May 28, 2008 by Marc Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Advertising, Leads, Profits, Sales, Wedding Marketing Tagged With: direct email, web

Comparing three web marketing options on your profits

May 21, 2008 by Marc 1 Comment

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.

Filed Under: Advertising, Profits, Wedding Marketing Tagged With: statistics, web

Mastery versus Marketing – Congratulations on Your Career Change!

May 19, 2008 by Marc Leave a Comment

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 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 emotional needs. 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. Share emotion. 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.

Filed Under: Advertising, Profits, Sales, Wedding Marketing