Wicked Smart Wedding Marketing How to Get Leads for $100 or Less + Our Secret Facebook Strategy
TABLE OF CONTENTS A Quick Note from Stephanie & Jeff. 2 3 $100 Strategies to Get More Leads 3 4 Tips for Using Paid Advertising..7 Guide for Goal Setting........10 Our Secret Facebook Strategy..11 Copyright 1
One of the trickiest parts of getting more leads for your wedding business is that many marketing strategies cost money. When you re just starting out or when you don t have many leads to begin with you don t have the money to invest. It s Mother Marketing s cruelest catch 22. But there IS a solution: bang for the buck, bootstrapper marketing strategies that really work to get wedding leads on a budget. In this report, we re going to share some of the best dang strategies to market your wedding business and meet your goals. That s what we re all about at Book More Brides. We ll even throw in some proven tactics for reaching your goals, along with a secret strategy that will let you spend your marketing dollars only on the leads you want to spend them on. So grab a cup of coffee and dig in! Stephanie and Jeff P.S. Don t forget to sign up for our wedding marketing blog to get more great tips every week! Copyright 2
If you only had $100 to get leads for your wedding business, what would you do? When you build your own business from scratch, you often lack one small but seemingly important little resource: capital. So you can t put your smiling face on a giant billboard, or procure a 30-second Super Bowl commercial (yet). What you can do is use that resourceful nature of yours (c mon, you wouldn t be an entrepreneur if you weren t resourceful), along with this report, and implement one or all of these three tactics to increase your leads. But wait! After we spill our top three strategies, we ve got a few more tricks up our sleeve. Paid advertising and goal setting are two more invaluable resources we cover later. Are you with me? Excellent. Away we go! Copyright 3
Our Top 3 $100 Lead Strategies $100 Strategy #1 The Facebook Lead Funnel We got this little gem from Christine Dyer, a social media expert and founder of BridalTweet.com. A quick and easy giveaway + a free custom Facebook tab + a few dollars for an advertising budget = budget marketing magic! Step 1: Create some type of cool, free giveaway offer you can use to entice brides. This could be an informational free tips PDF report or video, gift certificate, coupon or other sort of free offer. Step 2: Use Pagemodo to add a custom tab to your Facebook business page containing your offer and a form brides can fill out to get your free giveaway and join your email tips list. Now brides enter their name and email to get your freebie and you have permission to follow up with them. Step 3: Create a Facebook ad campaign targeted at engaged females in your local area. Drive those local brides to your custom tab with your ads and start collecting leads. Tip: Stay tuned to the end of this report for a secret strategy to target only the brides you want! Copyright 4
$100 Strategy #2 The Money Making Bloggin Machine This strategy is straight for yours truly. I m a writer and a prolific blogger as well as a wedding business coach, so writing articles and creating content is a natural for me. My first love (the written word) compels me to get more leads through blogging! Step 1: Create a free WordPress.com blog. Include prominent contact information and a call to action! Step 2: Visit high-end local wedding venues where you want to work. Take photos of the venues and conduct wedding expert interviews. Step 3: Write Money Making Blog Posts including local keyword phrases, photos, quotes and information gleaned from the interviews. Link to the venues and businesses mentioned. Step 4: Send a thank you email containing a link to your blog posts to each wedding business you ve interviewed and linked to. Encourage them to share, like and comment on your post. Step 5: Share your blog post on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, etc. Tip: Buy a few thoughtful thank you gifts for interview subjects to reinforce the relationship. Copyright 5
$100 Strategy #3 Mr. Popular This strategy is all Jeff. He is a wedding marketing strategist and power networker. His strength is in person networking, so he sources leads using just that! Step 1: Order some postcards with your smiling face on one side and a blank space on the back from Vistaprint.com. Step 2: Identify the top 5 wedding businesses (venues, photographers, entertainers, etc.) who work with your target couples. Step 3: Invite those wedding pros out and buy them coffee. Ask them for advice, listen and find a way to help them in return to build and nurture a trusting friendship and relationship. Tip: The secret is the follow-up! Mail each pro a postcard with a thoughtful note of thanks and a personal comment (see the Unforgettable Postcard Strategy) and continue to follow up periodically. Copyright 6
4 Tips to Get More Leads with Paid Advertising 1) Choose the Right Medium Make sure your target couples are actually using the site you re advertising on (whether it s the Knot, WeddingWire or Facebook). While there are engaged couples on these sites, they may not be your target market. Ask the advertising site for statistics about numbers of clicks and page views for other advertisers in your market, if possible. Ask the current couples who ve booked you whether or not they use these sites before paying for advertising there. 2) Design a Strong Ad It must have an attention-getting headline that directly speaks to your ideal clients. It must have a strong call to action designed to get the click. For example, Click here! Watch this video Contact us It must make a compelling offer that your couples want. Copyright 7
3) Create a Landing Page Don t send traffic directly to your home page! Instead, design a specific landing page that s all about the ad they just clicked on. For instance, if your ad offered them a special coupon, take them to a separate page where they can claim it. It must have a strong call to action and offer that matches the ad. It should be designed to capture that advertising visitor as a real lead. 4) Tracking & Testing You need a way to meticulously track the clicks, website visitors and leads you get from each ad. This way you ll know what s working. Don t just create a single ad and pray that it works. Test out one variable at a time and track your results (headline, image, offer, etc.) so that you can optimize your ad for maximum clicks and leads. Run a split test if you can. Keep tracking and testing to make sure your ad is giving you results. If you notice, for example, that you re getting clicks on your ad, but no leads, work on your landing page offer. If you aren t get ad clicks, improve your ad headline and offer. Copyright 8
What about Google Adwords? Your wedding business can get traffic from Google Adwords, however advertising on the Knot is going to be much simpler. If you re interested in Pay Per Click advertising (aka PPC) try running some Facebook ads first to get the hang of it. If you re going to manage your advertising campaign yourself, Google Adwords is usually a good strategy for someone who likes numbers and spreadsheets, since you ll have to carefully track click-throughs and costs in order to optimize it. It s worth doing some Google research on these strategies to learn what you can about successful implementation before you begin. Don t Neglect Avenues of Free Traffic Even if your paid ads start generating leads, don t forget to keep your free traffic coming in as well. For many wedding pros, this is through a blogging strategy. Regular blogging (at least once per week) is a great way to get free website visitors. If you re stumped for what to write about, make a list of 100 topics by combining wedding with another subject. For example: pets and weddings, timing and weddings, mistakes and weddings, children and weddings, seasons and weddings, etc. Be sure to include local cities, venues and topics of interest. Force yourself to keep writing until you have a list of 100 blog post titles. You ll never be stuck about what to write again! In the off season or when you have extra time, write a few more articles and keep them in reserve for your busy months. Copyright 9
Setting Your Yearly Goals A wise woman once said (maybe it was me?) that if you never make goals, you will never meet them. These are tried (by us) and true (studies show!) action steps to turn your goals into a reality. Action Item 1: Make a public commitment When you tell the world, or at least your partner and your Mom, about your new goals, you re WAY less likely to back out and way MORE likely to follow through. It s one thing to let yourself down in private but a whole new ballgame when others know you just gave up. Action Item 2: Get yourself an accountability partner It s not always easy to keep yourself on track with your goals. It s always a good idea to find someone willing to hold you accountable for your goals and give you a push in the right direction when you re struggling to meet them. Action Item 3: Write your goals down This is a big one. Even when our goal was as simple as make $500 extra each month, you can bet we wrote it down. There is something to seeing your goals in front of you that makes you more determined to meet them. SOURCE: Dominican University Study Tip: Make printouts of your goals and post them EVERYWHERE! Next to your desk, on the refrigerator, in the bathroom, and anywhere else you see fit. We speak from experience. No goal is too big or small for this! Copyright 10
Bonus Our Secret Facebook Strategy One of the big questions we get from wedding professionals is: What do I do with the bridal show lead list? If you follow up with those leads by email, you look like spam and it s impossible to stand out in the inbox, since everyone else is going to be emailing them. Sending something by "snail mail" can be effective, but it s also expensive. Fortunately, Facebook has released some powerful new tools you can use to reach targeted couples using Facebook ads...for just pennies a day. For this strategy, you need: A Facebook page for your wedding business. Email addresses of bridal leads. $50 to spend on advertising. (Psst. Facebook gives you a $50 advertising credit when you start a new account, so if you have that you can do this for FREE!) This video walks you through the step-by-step process you can follow to create a targeted custom audience of brides and grooms in your local market. Just click below and enjoy! Copyright 11
Action Time! We re shared a lot in this little report. But none of it does you an ounce of good unless you take action. Don t try to do everything. Focus on ONE action you can take today that will get you closer to your goals. One small step after another and you ll climb that mountain to the profitable wedding business of your dreams. Be sure to let us know how it goes! Stephanie Did you like this report? Want more? Make sure you join our community of over 20,000 smart wedding experts to receive regular freebies to book more weddings! SIGN UP HERE Copyright 12