Wedding Marketing

So, I’m not really complaining.

Instead let’s just call it…research.

I don’t exactly whine about juggling my work/family/everything else.  I “report from the front lines”.  And I do it for my WedLock readers.

I’m only half kidding. Like my readers, I lead an insanely hectic life and I often find myself teetering on the edge of burnout.  In my role as Editor In Chief, I don’t just teach wedding pros who are trying to run their own business without running themselves down…I am one!

This is one of the reasons I’m currently working up a presentation on time management. I’ve been asked to speak at a few upcoming wedding business events and I think this is a topic that wedding pros need help with. Badly.

Because how many of you reading this right now would give anything for just one more day in the week? One more hour in the day?! I know I would.  Unfortunately, I’m not a warlock, so summoning excess time from thin air ain’t happening.

But what I can do is help you find your own ways to eke more productivity out of the time you do have available to you. How to eke more calm sanity out of your busy life. Here are some incredibly easy but effective ways to feel like you’re running your life. And not the other way around. I’m listing them in no particular order.

Slay The Beast, One Poke At A Time: Quick – think of the biggest, grossest task you have looming over you. Taxes? Finalizing your wedding contracts? Chances are, one of the reasons you are putting this task off is because it’s a big time-consuming task.

So why tackle it all at once? Simply set aside 15 min a day where you tell yourself you will start chipping away at it. You’ll be surprised how much better you feel once it’s done, and how much easier it is to work on this task when you know it’s for only one 15 minute block.

Write It Out! I know, I know. You’re an egghead genius who can remember everything and keep it all straight in your head. But guess what? It takes mental energy to keep all that straight. Energy you could otherwise use to get these tasks DONE.

So every day, over coffee, pull out a notebook and write out what you’d like to get done that day. Don’t type it into your smartphone where you will ignore it later. Put pen to paper and write it out. First, list it all out.  The big tasks, the little tasks, all of it.

Then asterisk the ones that are the top 3 priorities. Start on those FIRST. That way, even if you run out of time, you’ll have knocked off the most important things first. Too often, we just do whatever is in front of us, versus what is most crucial. So no wonder we are stressed and guilty by the end of the day when “the clock runs out.” By being more intentional with your time, you’ll go to bed each night feeling a lot more in control.

Say No. Say It Often. When you think about it…how much of what keeps you busy every single day is actually avoidable? Will anyone in your book club really be upset if you bow out during wedding season?  Is there any way you can reschedule that non-essential coffee date with your vendor colleague?  You can make a little air in your schedule by just not saying YES to everything.

When You Can’t Say No… Then Yell Help! Are you delegating enough? If you have an assistant or an intern, is there anything you are doing this week that THEY could easily take off your plate?

The trick is to actually let them! I know it’s tempting to handwrite all your thank you notes, but are you sure that you can’t dictate the message once to your assistant? Then she can hand-write it out, and then you can scribble in just your name? That’s just one example of how, once you let go a little control, you can regain a lot of time.

How about you? Are you drowning or are you skilled at ‘eke’-ing? Share your time-saving tips or tricks to share with your wedding peers in the comments below!

Once in awhile, something so unusual comes along my desk that it makes me pause whatever it is I’m doing (talking on the phone, posting photos of a cat on Facebook, playing Angry Birds, etc)…and actually read.

This happened when Jeff Kear reached out to me a few months ago, telling me about his interesting wedding vendor service, My Wedding WorkBook, Professional Edition. I knew he was on to something special, something that actually focuses not on the BRIDE but on vendors themselves. Something unique that helps wedding pros run their businesses. (Sounds like WedLock!)

Jeff Kear at his own wedding!

So I interviewed Jeff about his MyWeddingWorkbook Pro service, about his thoughts on the wedding industry at large, and about the importance of staying “professionally organized.”

Give me your elevator pitch. What is My Wedding Workbook Pro, in a nutshell?

My Wedding Workbook Pro is a better way for wedding professionals to manage their business, plan their events and collaborate with clients. It’s easy-to-use online wedding planner software that gives you the tools you need to run your business.

What is the genesis of this system? What did you do before this?

Before we created the My Wedding Workbook online wedding planner, my business partner Steven Feingertz and I ran a branding/marketing firm in Denver, CO called Kear Stevens. We had worked with lots of companies in the high tech and financial services sectors, helping them establish their brand and build online marketing efforts. And now we are looking to build a few more products for event professionals, including Web-based photography studio software and event management software.

So what gave us the crazy idea of starting a Web-based company providing software for the wedding industry? That credit goes to Steve’s wife, Tammy, who identified a need in the market for a truly great piece of online wedding planning software. Lots of sites had one-off tools for brides, but there was nothing truly comprehensive for either brides or wedding consultants, so we decided to build it.

What is the #1 challenge you think wedding professionals face in this economy?

Keeping their business going.

One big symptom of a recession is unemployment, and when people lose jobs, their income takes a massive hit. This directly impacts discretionary spending, which is what most people use to hire wedding planners. Left without a big hunk of discretionary spending, most engaged couples are cutting costs and doing it themselves, leaving wedding planners out in the cold.

To be honest, few businesses truly thrive during a recession, and often the best option is to hunker down and ride it out. But what planners should be doing now is preparing themselves for the recovery. Recoveries are the best times to grow a business, mostly because the recession has eliminated many competitors and made others reluctant to spend time or money marketing themselves until business is back to normal. So look for ways to market yourself and establish a presence now so that, when engaged couples have their discretionary incomes back, they can easily find you.

How important is staying organized?

Staying organized in any business is vastly more important than what most people think, and especially in a service-based business. And here’s why…

Service-based businesses (like wedding and event planning) mostly make money from people’s time. Sure, some planners sell products and mark them up, but most planners make money based on their efforts. So if you are more efficient and organized, you spend less time scrambling and dealing with the clutter and more time serving clients and working on growing your business.

In addition, being organized is also one good way to make your clients more satisfied. If you are on-the-ball and make things easy and convenient for your clients, you make them happier (which makes it more likely that they will refer more people to you).

Have you heard any horror stories averted by a professional being organized and prepared?

Sure, every day. One recent story that comes to mind is a wedding consultant customer of ours who had a client couple who had typed out their vows and saved it in a Microsoft Word file. The planner told her client to pass along all electronic files to her so that the planner could save them in her My Wedding Workbook Pro account (one feature we offer is online electronic file storage for clients). Well, the bride’s computer crashed, she lost the original file and forgot that her planner had a copy of it. So she called up in a panic and the planner simply pulled it up and emailed it to her client. Crisis averted because of being organized.

There’s another side of that coin, too, in that being organized is also a way to CYA. We had one planner who collaborates with her clients via our Ideas and Inspiration Board (it’s a note and picture sharing tool where planners and clients can create notes, add comments and attach pics of cool ideas). She and her client had a series of notes on the floral arrangements, and the client had a note clearly stating what flowers she wanted in the bouquet. On the wedding day, the bouquet came as requested but the bride freaked out that this wasn’t what she thought she requested. The planner simply pulled up the notes and showed client that the flowers were requested, and they both laughed and chalked it up to wedding-day nerves. Crisis averted again because of organization.

What’s the advantage of hosting this system online versus installing it on one’s own PC?

Almost everybody has had a hard drive crash on them or some sort of awful data loss experience. Personally, I lost an entire 30-page final report in graduate school because my computer crashed the night before it was due (and I couldn’t salvage the document or anything else on the drive and had to rewrite it from memory … yuck).

Anything that sits on your hard drive and isn’t backed up is at risk of being lost forever, and I can’t imagine losing all my business and client data just because my hard drive decides to up and die one day. It could certainly lead to lots of lost clients, tons of stress and could even damage your business reputation beyond repair. So, having a solution like ours where everything is organized for you, stored on our secure servers and backed up daily without you having to think about it can be a great relief and lifesaver (or at least business-saver).

What problems does your program solve?

Our system solves several big issues for wedding planners. First, most wedding consultants are very creative people who are great at design and have excellent people skills. However, they don’t often care much for the nitty-gritty of running a business, including tracking finances, leads, etc. Our system simplifies all the business management tasks so planners spend less time on business management and more time on doing what they love to do.

Also, most clients are very busy people, making collaborating and coordinating with them a challenge. The collaboration tools in our system enable planners and clients to easily share ideas and have online conversations, saving lots of face-to-face and phone meeting time as well as huge games of phone tag. And there’s an ongoing record of everything discussed.

Finally, every event and wedding planner has loads of ideas that all get written down on paper scraps, napkins, post-its, etc., and they also might have dates, appointments and information all stored in dozens of places. Our system gives them the power to pull all these loose ends together in one place and manage their entire business life in one convenient place.

What’s the best tip you can give wedding pros about staying organized while they work on a wedding?

I would say that staying organized is all about creating a system for yourself that you will use and follow on a regular and consistent basis. Whether you use My Wedding Workbook Pro or not, creating a system for yourself gives you something to lean on when work starts to get really busy and complicated. Staying organized is usually pretty easy when things are calm. But when you’re in the weeds (as we used to say when I waited tables in college), the systems you have in place keep you sane and enable you to function on a higher plane. The best wedding planners are grace-under-pressure personified, and it’s because they have a system that they can rely on when things are crazy.

Interested in trying out My Wedding Workbook Pro? Use promo code WLOCK50 and get not just a free trial, but 50% off the two first months!

Search Engine Optimization is one tool that can help increase where your website appears in a  Google search for wedding business or wedding marketing.  This week I wanted to focus my attention to the top websites that appear when brides-to-be Google anything about wedding planning.  [The websites that made it to the top are based off of online presence.]  Each of these sites offers multiple links that provide brides-to-be with inspiration, planning tips, vendor information, and much more.  Keep in mind that these are not ALL of the wedding websites available to brides; these are simply some of the websites that get the highest views.

The Knot – This website is a comprehensive site for planning.  It is the most trafficked wedding community on the web.  It’s a bride-to-be’s complete guide to wedding planning, wedding ideas, wedding dresses, and wedding vendors in specific locations.

Wedding Channel – This is a companion site to The Knot.  It offers a variety of tools and advice with an emphasis on choosing vendors.

Brides – The online home of Brides magazine has excellent articles and planning tips from wedding experts.

Project Wedding – This website was created to help brides choose vendors.  It has expanded to include forums, articles, and photo galleries.

Wedding Wire – This community is built around the largest collection of vendor reviews on the web.

Martha Stewart Weddings – The dedicated community provides expert advice on planning and etiquette and plenty of project ideas for the do-it-herself bride.

Wedding Bee – A wedding blog updated daily by real brides across North America with lots of DIY tutorials.

Style Me Pretty – A wedding blog that is heavy on image posts for inspiration.

NYCity Weddings – This site is all about planning for weddings in the New York area.  It allows you to follow couples as they plan and share their special day.

Wedding Mapper – Create a wedding map, build a wedding website, and manage your vendors with this location based on community.

The three sites that ranked the highest in page views and unique visitors are The Knot, The Wedding Channel, and Brides.  According to The Knot Experts, the website gets more that 3.4 million unique visitors per month, and more than 125 million page views per month.At Conde Nast it states that Brides brings in 1.6 million unique visitors, and 34 million page views per month.  A press release from The Wedding Channel explains that the sites gets 1 million unique visitors, and 20 million page views per month.

All of these websites are fantastic for the bride-to-be when it comes to planning her wedding.  If you have yet to become a noted vendor on these sites, now is the time to get to work on it.  These are the highest trafficked sites on the web, which means they will bring major status to your company.

In our everlasting hunt for new wedding marketing ideas, we occasionally pick up on a new trend.

So though we’ve all seen this particular trend many times before, this is the first time it has hit major news stations world-wide.  One wedding dress has spawned millions of interested nationwide consumers,  The royal wedding has gone “mass market”.

When the world awaited the first glimpse of Kate Middleton stepping into her Rolls Royce outside of the Goring Hotel, many bridal designers and boutique owners were awaiting the first glance at the gown created by Sarah Burton, of the Alexander McQueen house.  Simply so they could begin their sketches of replica gowns.

After the global infatuation with the Royal Wedding, and the excitement from Kate and Pippa Middleton’s gowns, it was only a matter of time until millions of brides-to-be would want a dress similar to theirs.  Dan Rentillo of David’s Bridal is one of those designers taking action.  He too is creating copies of Kate Middleton’s dress, which he hopes to have in all store soon.

The New York Times reported that celebrity wedding gowns have inspired many creative copies, but executives in the bridal business say this is the first time they can recall companies wishing to design a dress based on what a bridesmaid wore, too.

At Faviana in Manhattan, designers are working on copies of Pippa Middleton’s dress so they too can get on board with the mass market of celebrity dress copies.

But mass market isn’t just a news-item, a flash in the pan. Loads of savvy high-end brands are going mass market too. And this is where the really clever wedding marketing begins. Take fashion’s first lady of bridal wear, Vera Wang, for example.

Vera Wang has been working on her newest line; White by Vera Wang, which hit the nation’s largest wedding retailer, David’s Bridal, in February and is expected to expand by June.  Typically brides would spend upwards of $20,000 for a runway design by Vera Wang, but thanks to her decision to mass market her collection, brides can plan to spend $600 to $1,400 for a gown.  She will now be producing large quantities of the White by Vera Wang collection into the market to increase profits.

The lesson here is don’t be afraid to do what you can to appeal to any budget. There’s no shame in catering to the new, economy-sensitive, price shopping bride!

They say its an honor just “to be nominated” but sometimes its also excellent to see something all the way through.

Today – that happened for the WedLock community. After months of discussion, our alliance with huge wedding community of WeddingWire.com was announced. We’re thrilled!

Here’s the press release that appeared in their press center today:

WedLock Online Learning Community Named an Education Partner on WeddingWire


The debut of the “WedLock Sampler” and WeddingWire “Tech Report” marks the beginning of a compelling new resource for wedding pros

Atlanta, GA – April 1, 2011 – What’s smart and unique and helpful all over? The new educational alliance between the WedLock Online Learning Community and WeddingWire.com.

Recognizing the importance of providing marketing education, as well as astonishing exposure for a robust community of 200,000 wedding professionals, WeddingWire has invited the WedLock Online Learning Community to be an education partner.

This partnership will take two forms. The first is the new “WedLock Sampler”, which will appear in the WeddingWire Education Center featuring sample articles from WedLock Magazine. In turn, WeddingWire will regularly appear in WedLock Magazine, penning “The Tech Report”, a column designed to keep WedLock readers on the cutting edge of wedding technology.

“Engaged couples are becoming more and more tech-savvy with each passing day,” explains Jayne Hallock, Editor and Founder of WedLock. “Today’s wedding pros need to keep on top of that tech – and their marketing – if they’re going to survive. WedLock’s vision is to empower the fantastically creative, but sometimes technologically-hesitant wedding professional. We want to help them meet the modern couples where they are already looking for wedding help. Increasingly, this means they are online, they are using mobile apps, and they are employing social media. So WeddingWire, with all their wedding industry savvy and tremendous bridal reach, was the ideal ‘voice’ to educate our members about wedding tech.”

“We are excited to showcase WedLock’s premium educational content in the WeddingWire Education Center,” says Sonny Ganguly, Chief Marketing Officer, WeddingWire. “This opportunity provides WeddingWire wedding pros, the largest wedding professional community, with comprehensive, innovative and insightful instruction from industry leaders.”

WedLock and WeddingWire look forward to strengthening their relationship, while serving the wedding industry with future webinars, seminars and live events.

About WeddingWire, Inc.
WeddingWire.com, the nation’s leading technology company serving the $70 billion wedding industry, is the only online wedding planning resource designed to empower both engaged couples and wedding professionals. For engaged couples, WeddingWire offers the ability to search, compare and book over 200,000 local wedding vendors, from wedding venues to wedding photographers to wedding cakes. WeddingWire also offers an online community and a suite of cutting-edge planning tools for weddings, including wedding websites and wedding checklists, all at no charge. For wedding professionals, WeddingWire provides free online management tools creating the only market opportunity that gives local businesses control over their clients, reviews, leads and performance. Businesses that join the WeddingWire Network appear on WeddingWire.com and other leading sites, including MarthaStewartWeddings.com, ProjectWedding.com and Weddingbee.com (both part of eHarmony), and Celebrations.com (part of the 1-800-Flowers family of brands).

About WedLock
The WedLock Online Learning Community offers three business-building tools for one low monthly membership fee. All subscriptions include access to the marketing expert Q&A forums, the WedLock bimonthly journal and one monthly webinar, with recordings. WedLock teaches wedding pros anything from social media, to SEO, to how to make the most of their bridal show investments, to how to negotiate contracts…anything a wedding professional needs to keep ahead of their competition.

Okay I admit it.

I’m always excited about a new issue of WedLock. That’s always true. But lately we have been so busy with our new forums and prepping for the next big webinar…that sometimes I just like to go back to my roots. My written-word-roots.

And this issue we’re currently putting together is absolutely no exception. We’re formatting our new “8 week Step by Step Program” layout and making sure that every single article that appears in WedLock is accessible, easy to understand and more importantly – easy to implement.

Here’s a sneak peek of what the new format looks like, and a sneak peek of what you’ll learn in this month’s issue…

~ Tips for Selecting Your Super Vendor Team

~ Using LinkedIn For Wedding Networking and More Referrals

~ How to Get Going on YouTube and Get More Bride’s Attention

~ The Wedding Wire Tech Report:Building Your Online Rep the Right Way

~ How to Get Free PR by Pitching a Guest Blog Post

~ How to Be A Leader in Your Field

~ Plus WedLock Mixer pages, Andy Ebon’s Column, To Do Checklists and more!