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A new wedding zietgeist

Marc — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:40:00 +0000

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.

The secret life of a blog based website

Marc — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:34:00 +0000

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.

Today’s brides-to-be want your email

Marc — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:04:00 +0000

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

Marc — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:15:00 +0000

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.)

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

Marc — Mon, 26 May 2008 21:50:00 +0000

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)?

Marc — Sun, 25 May 2008 16:09:00 +0000

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.

Marc — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:18:00 +0000

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.

The Challenge in Marketing to Gen Y / Millenial Brides-to-be

Marc — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:06:00 +0000

I recently came across this open letter on Facebook. I think it is very instructive as to the intelligence of this generation’s brides-to-be and how we need to become more authentic and helpful in marketing our services. If anyone would/want, please comment on this opinion by Ashley Keene a college senior from Cincinnati.

“My generation, the millenials, grew up with the blinking ads that claimed we were the 1,000,000th visitor and had won money. We grew up with simple, absurd games of “catch the fish!” or “punch the rabbit!” or “shave her legs!” that sent us away from the page we were viewing if clicked. We grew up viewing millions of pages of content with absurd animations attempting to draw our eyes to the ads.

These early, poorly-planned, poorly-designed marketing schemes destroyed web marketing. They established early habits in consumers that are not easily broken.

Banner ads have a reputation for being annoying, misleading, untrustworthy and ignored by almost everyone.

We will never click on an ad to interact with it because we were taught that clicking anywhere on the ad, even if it wasn’t a link, would send us away from our page.

We will never believe that an offer is in any way exclusive or special.

Animations never grab our attention.

I’m just a college student, but I’m also a designer who has interned at a couple of marketing agencies. Whenever I’m confronted with creating a design for a web advertisement, I feel lost because I know there’s nothing I can do to break the long-established habits of internet users. “