As of late yesterday, almost 60 wedding professionals from Greater Cleveland (including Akron, Youngstown, and beyond) had chosen to invest one business day and a few dollars in Wedding University, a 4-seminar presentation by THE Wedding Marketing Authority, Andy Ebon.

Today’s Bride, a full service wedding marketing company (bridal show, magazine, and website) is hosting the wedding marketing seminars.

The all-day seminar series will cover a variety of topics designed for wedding industry businesses, including: Website Usability, Effective Bridal Show Promotion, Print Ads That Sell, and Building A Focused Social Media Plan. The day will be capped of with a catch-all, question and answer session.

This is an 11th hour call to spread the word to any wedding industry peers you have in the Greater Cleveland market.

Today’s Bride is a member of BSPI (Bridal Show Producers International).

Andy travels North America and beyond, presenting single seminars, half-day and full-day sessions, as well as speaking at national and international industry conferences. To inquire about bringing The Wedding Marketing Authority to your market, please feel free to inquire via this site or call 702-227-9926.

Cleveland Rocks!!

Share on Facebook

OK, I plead guilty. 404 Error Messages are one area I have neglected (up to now) on my sites and many clients. That is about to change. And it should change for you, too.

No doubt you’ve searched a website or clicked on a link to one, and been faced with a PAGE NOT FOUND message (404 error). Often, a dead link or missing page occurs because a page has been renamed, so it has moved. Other times, it simply has been deleted.

On The Wedding Marketing Blog, I use several different statistical programs to analyze the traffic and activity. I’m very please with the overall volume of activity, but I thought the level 404 Errors was a problem.

Your hosting company usually includes a generic 404 page. What needs to be done (if you haven’t already done it) is to customize the 404 page, with some kind of site map, at least to the major gateways within your site or blog.

One of the blogs I visit regularly, Smashing Magazine, posted a great collection of 404 page examples. They are well-crafted and often utilize humor.

Bottom line: If a 404 page is customized and well designed, it is more likely that a prospect will continue on your site than move on to find a solution, elsewhere. At the risk of stating the obvious, THAT is important for every wedding marketer.

Andy Ebon
The Wedding Marketing Authority

Share on Facebook

The Get Married Microsoft Tage

While setting up for the Wedding MBA Trade Show, I had the privilege of seeing a mock-up of the Premier Issue of Get Married Magazine.

The publication launches next month and features incredible new interactive ‘tags.’ The Microsoft tags are unique and allow you to take a photo with a smart phone. Your phone then automatically brings up web-based video with detailed description, audio and video describing the 2-dimensional magazine content.

Just eyeballing the magazine, quickly, it appears that dozens of advertisers have elected to utilize the new technology.

On the simple side of things, I also notice a section of the magazine, blocked out for small space ads, dedicated to local businesses.

It’s going to be an exciting few days!

Andy Ebon
The Wedding Marketing Authority

Share on Facebook

The 6th Annual Wedding MBA Conference kicks off Tuesday, providing a truckload of seminars for more than 1000 eager wedding professionals. As well, An industry trade show will take place Tuesday and Wednesday (the conference runs through mid-day, Thursday).

Wedding Marketing Authority, Andy Ebon, will be presenting two new topics on Wednesday, 9am. The first is: How To Navigate In A Web-Centric World. In this general session presentation, Andy will highlight some of the underutilized, but extremely helpful tools, that can help every wedding business.

Wednesday afternoon, at 3pm, Andy will present a breakout session with the edgy title: How to Avoid Weddings of Mass Destruction. In this session, he will take on some of the industry dysfunction, conflicts of interest, inflated bride expectations, and other challenging factors in the world of weddings.

Joe Fabitz
Contributing Writer
The Wedding Marketing Blog

Share on Facebook

The Magic Wedding Marketing Pill

Some of the recurring questions I get, typically at seminars and conferences is: “What’s the right social media to do first?” or “Should I cut back on print advertising?” or “How come my website isn’t working like it used to?” or “How do I find the time to understand all the latest technology?”

All these question are, in essence, the same question. “Andy, could you please give me a list of the optimum marketing methods to make my business successful? I need the Magic Wedding Marketing Pill.”

Sorry, no-can-do. Answers in Wedding Marketing are not that simple.

I taught college for eight years, and one important thing I learned is that students were look for THE right answer. Sometimes I would present a real life business situation that I had experienced. Along with the scenario, I would present four or five possible alternative solutions to address the problem. The class would discuss it, and then would vote on the preferred path.

I would coyly try to move on to another subject, and students would interrupt with, “But what’s The right answer?”

With a smile, I would respond, there is not ONE right answer. I can tell you what decision I made, and why. However, there may be several effective choices; sometimes none.

In the same way, as a wedding marketer, you are looking for the Magic Wedding Marketing Pill. You want the correct dosage, the least side effects, and the best schedule to make it work.

When working with a client directly, I can recommend one or more courses of action. Even then, if you don’t take the pill on schedule, or take too many, all the recommendations are for naught.

Many marketing wizards believe that you should be spending up to 50% of your time on marketing (that should include selling). Perhaps a more efficient and effective person might be able accomplish the same level of sales with a 35-40% commitment. Typically, improving marketing/sales efficiency come with plugging the holes in the the leaky boat.

Beware of the Bright Shiny New Object: This is the axiom for we ADD business marketers who fail to follow a strategy to its fruition because we get distracted, drop the ball, and move on to something else.

• One blogs, perhaps somewhat effectively, but get distracted by trying Twitter. With no goal or strategy for Twitter, we drop the ball on both, and fail miserably, announcing that New Social Media doesn’t work.
• The new bridal show or wedding publication comes to town. They can’t sell booth or advertising space at retail, because they have no track record, but manage to attract commitment. Let someone else waste their money on testing these new shiny objects. If you wouldn’t pay retail for them, why should you bother with them, at all. Stay with what you know, and improve your ad, or booth exhibit.
• I’m not sure whether to focus on Facebook or LinkedIn. Facebook seems like more fun. I think I’ll do that.

Marketing is an endless set of alternatives. How many phone calls to you make? How many emails or postcards do you send?

Here is the solution: Measure the effectiveness of everything, and then start optimizing, based on results.

If you don’t have the tools or methods to do that, you better get started. Otherwise, you are engaged in seat-of-the-pants-marketing. And that, my friend. is like rolling the dice.

Spoken like a true Las Vegan!

Andy Ebon
The Wedding Marketing Authority

Share on Facebook

Happy Landings

A Landing Page is the screen visitors arrive at after clicking on a link to your site, or enter a specific domain address (we’ll get back to this).

Depending on your plan, the landing page must demonstrate one or more things to get the prospect to stay, and continue.

Users want to know the following, and more.

• Is this the website I was looking for?
• Is the style of the site what I thought it would be?
• Does this navigation give me an obvious path?
• Should I continue on this site or go back where I came from?
• Will I be able to find what I need in a few minutes or is this going  to take a while?

The goal should be to give prospects the shortest path to filling out an online inquiry form.

Back to the definition of Landing Page. Long gone are the days of a single welcome screen. If your company provides products/services for several types of events other than weddings, then your website should entry points, each one optimized for that particular group of prospects. Bar Mitzvah mothers don’t care about wedding information. Corporate convention planners don’t care about weddings. High School committees and faculty are not concerned with anything but their dance or prom.

Each category of work demands its own landing page, with design and specific information for that customer. Properly customizing the content of a Landing Page should cause dramatic improvements in SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Before you even spend time thinking about any website redesign, just shorten the path. If you having paid or free linking from advertising, organization directories, or reciprocal links, make certain they are linking directly to the wedding section of your site, bypassing the welcome screen. i.e. www.DesignerMusic.com/weddings.

One of the frustrations of wedding guide publishers is that it can be difficult to track their impact on traffic to your website. My recommended solution for this is a simple on. Buy an additional domain name, just to use in print ads (even if you only advertise in one print publication).

Using the same example, for Designer Music, I would see if DesignerMusicWeddings.com were available. Assuming it was not taken, I would register it, and point it to DesignerMusic.com/weddings. Using that strategy, tracking would show direct entry DesignerMusicWeddings.com which only could have come from reading a publication where the domain appeared in  your ad.

OK, that’s Lesson #1: Now, go out and spend $10/year on one more domain to point to your wedding section and update your print ads. We’ll work on the composition of Landing Pages in future posts.

Happy landings!

Andy Ebon
The Wedding Marketing Blog

Share on Facebook