Earlier this week, I brought Wedding University to Greater Cleveland (Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown). The sponsoring organization was Today’s Bride, a 21-year old company providing a total package of wedding marketing opportunities, including website, bridal shows, and publications.
At one level or another, all businesses want new prospects to become customers and existing customers to invest more in a product or service. The day before the all-day seminars, a skeptical local business questioned the intent of the host in a public Facebook post: paraphrasing “Isn’t this just going to be Today’s Bride trying to sell us more advertising.”
The ever-so-vigilant, Anna Herman (Something New Entertainment) chimed in to praise this blog, and my approach to educating wedding industry businesses.
Anna Herman got it. And, happily, so did my hosts, from Today’s Bride.
The goal of seminars, such as these, is to provide information and coaching to help local area businesses be more effective marketers. Simply put, driving traffic to a website is really effective only if the client website is up-to-date, optimized, and easily navigable. Offering thorough circulation of a magazine is more helpful to businesses that have well-designed, intelligent ads. And attracting thousands of brides to wedding shows does the most good for companies that have planned for the show, create a glorious presence at the show, interact well with prospects, and follow up after the show.
The Today’s Bride staff performed the following functions:
- Organize
- Promote
- Host
- Introduce Speaker
- Mingle
- Provide Hospitality
- Register Attendees
- Show Appreciation
The things they did NOT do, were:
- Self-promote
- Sell
The results become quite clear. Some 70+ attendees absorbed a myriad of information, at a modest expense, in a compressed time frame. Different people learned different things, depending on their own knowledge base.
They never felt as though they were being sold to… because they weren’t.
This mindset should apply to all wedding businesses in working with clients and referral source. The process of educating a client, directly or indirectly, about your area of service, will always make them a better client and improve the relationship.
What are you doing, one-to-one, or for a group, to enlighten, inform, educate or motivate your audience?
If you’re not consciously doing that, periodically, maybe it’s time you should.
Thank you to the entire crew at Today’s Bride – Jim, Denise, Jennifer, Rachel, Sabrina for being great hosts, both to me, and to their clients and future clients.
Andy Ebon
The Wedding Marketing Authority
I couldn’t agree with you more, Andy, that relationship building is essential. It’s critical to building trust with clients and wedding vendor colleagues alike. However, in my experience as someone who, like you, coaches business owners on relationship, I’ve found that there are two sticking points that prevent folks from putting your good advice to work.
First, the word relationship freaks people out. LOL We know how to have relationships in other contexts like family or romantic. And, we even have a model for conventional business relationships, but not this new, more authentic transparent style of business today.
Second, I don’ think a lot of folks easily t know what to say or do in this kind of relationship. For some it must feel weird or inappropriate, to connect deeply with clients. After all, it’s business for goodness sake!
What I realized in my work is that the relationships are one in the same when you get right down to the bottom of them. I mean, shouldn’t you treat your bride with the same care, respect and support you’d give to your best friend or your sister. Of course, you should, and if you can bust through fear of the unknown, make deep connections, you can be more satisfied with your business (which will be booming) and your life than you ever imagined.
Guess you can tell I feel passionately about this stuff. Thanks for letting me share.
Warmly,
Dina