Wedding Marketing Case Study Introduction

Wedding Marketing is a subject that covers many topics. First, there is Print Marketing which it itself is divided into subtopics such as magazine marketing, post card marketing, business card marketing, etc…

Next we have the online marketing which is endless in possibilities and MOST of them are free. There is Blogging, Social Medias (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace), Paid Search Engine Marketing, Organic Search Engine Marketing, Link trading, Directory listings, etc…

As mentioned on my previous post about Wedding Marketing News, I am a firm believer that all you need is a website,  a properly hosted blog, and a bit of patience in order to build up a business. I have completely survived without any offline marketing for the last 3 years. I had an ad on one magazine, but it did not generate much income, mainly because by the time I got a lead from the magazine I was already booked. I have not done a Bridal Show in years… I can’t even remember off the top of my head when my last Bridal show was. I was considering doing the Houston Bridal Showcase in August, but I could not find anyone to help me with my booth. I did not want an untrained person there either.

Wedding Marketing Case Study

Well to prove that effective blogging, blogging with a properly installed blog on your existing domain name, as stated on my previous post about wedding marketing news, I have taken an existing website, one with a blog on those free blogging platforms, and completely redesigned the website to include the blog on it’s own domain name as opposed to having it on the free blogging platforms.

Audrey Hu-Gonzales is a wedding coordinator in the Houston Area, she used to host her blog at wordpress.com. Her OLD blog can be found at http://eventsbyaudrey.wordpress.com/. She was under the false impression that she was doing good by blogging on the free blogging sites and had no clue that her efforts were really pointless.

After Months and months of blogging, her website

1. did NOT generate any traffic because of her blogging
2. did NOT go up in the search engine traffic rankings
3. did NOT increase it’s lead generation
4. and did NOT benefit completely through her blogging efforts.

I took on this project back in March (March 27th, 2009 to be exact) and the first thing I did was to set an initial benchmark to see how her website ranked on Google.com, Yahoo.com, and Live.com (now Bing.com)… Yahoo and MSN Live did not even know her website existed, Google knew it existed but ranked her very very low…

OUT OF 24 KEYWORDS, GOOGLE ONLY RANKED HER FOR 7 (NOTE THE LOWER THE NUMBER THE BETTER)

Keyword	Google.com position	Yahoo.com position	MSN Live.com position
Events Planners in Houston	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	167	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	83	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	93	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	91	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	134	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	167	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked

Do you know if your website is even showing up on the search engines, and for what keywords???

Out of those seven keywords, the closest she could get to the first page of the Google.com search results was one keyword which ranked #83. That showed up on the 9th page of the Google.com search results for that one keyword. That means that people looking for a wedding planner using that ONE keyword had to go through 9 pages of results before they got to her website… NINE PAGES!!!

There is a common belief on the web that says that most people do not even go past the 3rd or 4th page of Google.com when they search for information.

Just think about when you search for something, and can’t find it, how many pages into the search results do you go in before you try another keyword or phrase or just select the best looking page for what you are looking for? I’m guessing not very far, and the majority of the time you don’t go to the 9th page. I know I don’t.

Wedding Marketing Case Study – the Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

With some minor tweaking to her site, a few off-site optimization techniques, and some Search Engine Optimization to her website, only a month later, on April 24th, 2009 to be exact, was already indexed by Yahoo, MSN Live and Google.com

Out of her 24 targeted keywords her website was ranked as follows (NOTE THE LOWER THE NUMBER THE BETTER)

Keyword	Google.com position	Yahoo.com position	MSN Live.com position
Events Planners in Houston	192	11	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	25	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	36	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	10	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	190	71	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	19	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	43	Not Ranked	49
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	173	Not Ranked	115
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	146	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	103	34	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	98	Not Ranked	48
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	145	79
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	75	50
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	135	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	36	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	Not Ranked	Not Ranked	Not Ranked
Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword	148	Not Ranked	182

Well as you can see, just by doing some Search Engine Optimization to her website, the search engines started to rank her website and more importantly, to rank her higher for some of her highly targeted keywords. Now I cannot release the keywords that she is going after because that would is one of the things that I am highly guarding. After all, the keyword hunting was one of the first things we did and that gave us a target to shoot for.

Some keywords are more more important than others because they are searched for, more often.

The keyword hunting took us about a couple of days and it was not too hard but it did involved some head-aching brainstorming and figuring out which keywords were the ones we wanted to go after.

As you can see from the Search engine results, we can conclude that Google.com is slow on ranking a website higher, yahoo.com immediately took her website to the #10, 11, and 19 for some very competitive and highly targeted keywords.

To Be continued…

Happy Blogging!

|o| Simply Frank |o|
Professional Blogging Wedding DJ in Houston

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

Here are the top ten reasons you you should begin bloggin’

10. Because you can Promote your Service or Products

This should be done tactfully tastefully. The last thing you want to do is turn you blog into a spam blog or an self advertising posting page. But don’t be afraid to stand up for what you believe and how your service solves certain problems, as an example.

9. Because you love to express yourself

We all have a voice and we all want to be heard. Bloggin’ gives everyone that freedom of expression that the great US of A is known for. By expressing yourself, through your blog, brides can get a feel, a sense of how charming and intelligent you are. After all, brides and any other client buys if you reach their emotions, get them to trust you, and if they feel you are the best choice there is.

8. Because you can establish yourself as an Industry Leader

Leaders Lead. Leaders know where they are going and what they are after. Leaders know how to solve problems. Leaders are trusted. Brides look for the industry leaders. nuf said…

7. Because it’s ZERO-DOLLAR-MARKETING!!!!

Blogs cost nothing but time to keep up with. You don’t have to pay anyone to blog. You can but you don’t have to. You can do it yourself. You don’t have to worry about how much space you have to run an ad. You don’t have to limit the amount of words you can use. You really don’t have any ‘real’ limits. Just the limits you put on yourself. The most popular bloggin programs are FREE. Installation is FREE, if you are technically inclined or if you have a great tech support on your website host.

6. Because you can Network with other bloggers

Bloggers love to network with other bloggers. They will read each other’s blog and make comments on their buddies blogs, add their view about a particular topic, add their insights to the industry, promote other vendors they believe have great service, write a blog post about another blogger, etc… Bloggin’ is the new Secret Society, except it’s all over the internet.

5. Because you will get ‘wider’ search engine exposure

The more you post to your blog, the more content you will have accumulated, the more the search engines will have to chose from, the more traffic you will generate. Typically when you blog about your industry you will cover many words and keywords and search terms that you would never know your brides were looking for.

Here’s a quick summary of how this works. A bride is looking for a particular wedding services, product, or to solve a particular problem. She opens up Google.com; types in a term, search engine phrase, or keyword; gets all the Google.com Results; and clicks on the ones she likes or the ones that seem to do the best at solving her problem. Those keywords are the ‘gold nuggets’ we want to target. How to find them is beyond the scope of this blog post. In my case, I run a DJ company, the ‘gold nuggets’ brides used to get to my website was Wedding DJ in Houston. Now that was an ideal keyword, but in the real world of Google.com, not every bride will use that exact phrase. They will use anywhere from Wedding entertainers, wedding music, dj companies in houston, what’s the best dj in houston, etc… and those, each, return 100% different results from the other. I also posted an article titled “Related Search Engine Terms” where i went into detail on some of the keywords my Wedding DJ Blog attracts form Google.com and Yahoo.com

4. Because you can achieve a Higher Search Engine Ranking

Google and all the search engines, like all the brides that use it, are looking for quality, authoritative websites. As mentioned before, by posting constant, quality posts to your blog, you will soon become the leader in your industry for your service and Google.com will begin to recognize that after some time. As a result, it will bump your website up on the rankings. But you must stay focused on what search engine terms you are trying to rank high for and use them tactfully. How do I know this for a fact? My Wedding DJ Website ranks very high for my targeted keywords.

3. Because you will increase traffic to your website

This is almost a no-brainer, but I still have to put it in here. Higher search engine results, wider search engine tracking will result in increased traffic. If you are on page 10 of the search results and you move up to page 1 then your search engine traffic will increase by an estimate of about 1000%. I was getting about 10 visitors per day to my website before my blog, now I am getting over 100 visitors per day consistently. I got 175 a few days ago.

2. Because you will increase your Lead Generation

Leads are golden. A lead from your website means that you just need to do a few more things and that lead will become a client. After you’ve created some great content, you’ve established yourself as an industry leader, provided great value, solved a problem for your bride, they will gladly give you their contact information so that you can offer your services. Have a way to capture that information by putting a form on your website. Just try to get the basic information: Name, phone number, email address, and wedding date. other than that you can get the rest of the details when you communicate with them.

1. Increased Income

This is why I blog at http://www.fhpentertainment.com/blog/ …. nuf said

Happy Bloggin!

–
DJ Francisco
Wedding DJ Blogger

Here is a summary of some of the stuff covered at the meeting. Some we did not get to because of a lack of time.

1. Online Traffic
2. Web Usability
3. Email Marketing

Online Traffic

• Need a Website
• Identify Targeted Keywords
• SEO For Targeted Keywords
• Search Engines Love Content
• Best Way to do this W/ a Blog
• Most Major Business Have a Blog
• Blogs are nothing but content
• Content can be used to targe to your search terms

Website Usability

• Do Not Confuse Visitors with Links
• Website Should Direct Traffic
• Sales Copy
• Customer Should Call or Email you
• Why? – They take an Action
• Tracking Visitors Google Analytics

Email Marketing?

• What email marketing is not
• Spam, Send same email continuously, insult customer
• Send Information Strategically
• Personal
• Build Relationship
• Keep In contact with customer until he sings your contract
• Surveys, Reviews, Thank yous

Summary / Conclusion

• Go over everything in summary
• More Traffic = More Calls / Emails = More $$$
• Once Traffic gets to your website direct them and get them to take an action
• Once they take that action, keep in contact with them at least until they book

–

Francisco