Ever wonder how to effectively sell to more brides at a Bridal Show?

If you’re like me, you probably have asked yourself this question before or how to increase the number of brides that purchase your services after meeting you at a bridal show.

Sonja van Florestein, of the Houston Wedding Showcase, has put together a seminar for not only her existing clients, but for anyone who exhibits at bridal shows. Best of all it’s free and you don’t even have to sign up for her Bridal Show to get all the great information she has to offer.

I am going to give my honest opinion and review to the best that I can. It is not influenced by anyone nor was I asked to do this.  I was intrigued by the email Sonja sent and I honestly had no intention of attending her show.  I just wanted the free information. After attending the seminar, I was compelled to write this review.

The seminar I attended was held on Wednesday, May 27th at Chateau Crystale. Doors opened at 5:30 pm for networking and the seminar started at 6:00 pm and went until 8:00 pm. She also offers one, today, May 28th, but it did not fit my schedule and besides I wanted to get in early to the information.

The name of the seminar is perfect:

The Secrets of Selling to Brides

If you got her email you could see that she asks a few key questions about Selling to more brides, getting the most out of your marketing dollar, and increasing your sales.

I think she delivered right on target!

The presentation was excellent, very well prepared, and very professional.  Two hours did not feel like two hours, they went by fast.

Without giving away all her secrets, here are a few things that I picked up that could definitely drastically increase my sales as a result of attending a bridal show.

1. I generated 3 key ideas on how I can  stand apart from my competition (no I’m not giving those away)
2. I was able to ’see’ the different components that make up a well organized and effective booth. I could see a booth and say it looks good, but I could never put my finger on why or what made it look good. There are some key components that I had not realized before.
3. The seminar covered in great detail the importance of advertising and really made me understand how and why advertising works. It made me want to advertise, and that is hard to do, since I have all the free traffic in the world from Google and Yahoo and all the search engines.
4. How to figure out how much you are spending per bride, and the importance of knowing that one figure.
5. The #1 secret, in my opinion, to effectively sell to more brides at the show. I almost feel like giving it away, but that would be unfair to Sonja, you have to attend the show yourself in order to completely understand it.

I could go on with 5 more key concepts that I learned, but you will not get the full effect until you attend the seminar.

In my opinion this seminar was worth over $300 dollar if you had to put a price tag for attending, however in benefits, it is up to you on how you implement what you learned but you will definitely increase the number of visitors to your booth if you implement the ideas well.

There were over 17 points well covered in great detail. Any exhibitor (me or any other wedding vendor) could easily understand and implement all or any of them  into their booth.

The only thing I wish I would have seen covered more in detail would have been “Compelling Content.” They threw that word around a couple of times, and in my opinion that is one of the key factors in selling to the brides.  This is just a suggestion that I think could add another dimension to an already great presentation. However, it may increase the length of the presentation a little.

Like I said before, this was a well organized presentation, very professional and inspiring, and many other people would have charged well over $300 to sell that same information. Sonja gave it away for free. In my opinion, she wants to gain your business and your trust by helping you have a better turn out at any bridal show, no matter what bridal show you attend. Who does that? Would you give away your secrets for free, even if your client bought from your competition?

Congratulations Sonja on a great seminar.  you can’t beat the price, the ideas presented were great, and if implemented well, you will definitely;

1. Sell to more brides
2. Get the most out of your marketing dollar
3. Increase sales

If everything works out well, I hope to see you at the  Houston Wedding Showcase on August 29th. For more information visit their website at HoustonWeddingShowcase.com!

Happy Bloggin!

–
|o| Simply Frank |o|
Bloggin Wedding DJ in Houston

Tracking your visitors is essential to your website’s success. Not only do you want to know how many visitors your website is getting, you also want to know where they are going, or how they are leaving your website.

As a wedding vendor, you have only a small amount of time to capture your bride’s attention, offer them something they want or need, and get them to take some sort of action.

Once they are gone from your website, there is a good chance they are never coming back. If there is nothing compelling them to call you or email you, you’ve lost that bride or potential client for good.

If you know nothing about copy writing, now is the time to find out about it and use some copy writing techniques to compel your visitors to take action.

What is Copy Writing:

Copywriting is the process of writing the words that promote a person, business, opinion, or idea. It may be used as plain text, as a radio or television advertisement, or in a variety of other media. The main purpose of writing this marketing copy, or promotional text, is to persuade the listener or reader to act — to buy a product or subscribe to a certain viewpoint, for instance. Alternatively, copy might also be intended to dissuade a reader from a particular belief or action. Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copywriting

In short, copywriting is a technique, or techniques, where by you, the website owner, arrange the words on your site to instill trust, inform about your product or service, and get your reader to want your product or service over your competition.

Quite simply put, if your visitors are leaving your website without taking action, it’s not because your website is ugly (well not entirely), or because you have bad information, or because you don’t differentiate yourself from the competition…

It’s because you don’t use a copywriting technique that does all that and then compels your reader to take an action; to call you, to email you, to subscribe to your newsletter, to subscribe to your blog, etc.

But you can’t know that if you don’t track your visitors and what pages they visit, what pages they exit your website from, what pages they land on, what search engine terms they use to arrive at your website etc…

By knowing all this, you can find out exactly where your website need improvement and thus you are able to maximize your time and efforts on improving only that portion of your site.

OK, already I’m convinced, but what are my options?

It’s a good thing you asked.

Visitor Tracking Options

I use a free software that I installed on my website. It’s called Trace Watch, and you can download it from their website at www.tracewatch.com. Installing it may be a job for someone more technically inclined, like your web guy.

Your other option is to use, Google.com’s analytic program. This one may be more convenient because all you have to do is add a few lines of code to your pages and they do all the tracking. There is no additional software to install. It’s free, it’s good, and it will do just about everything you need. The only thing it won’t do that Trace Watch does is that it will not give you every page that your visitor visits. Read more about it at Google Analytics.

In conclusion, if you are able to find the leaks, so to speak, of your website, then you will be able to plug them by filling them up with the content that your visitors are looking for or will compel them to take any form of action. By capturing those confused website visitors, you will in turn get more money from your website.

Happy Bloggin!

–
Francisco H. Perez
Wedding Blogger!