Wedding Industry Blog

I’m getting back in the swing of things now and trying to make Wednesday morning my regular blogging morning!

I’m getting asked about advertising on a daily basis at the moment, it seems that people know they need to step up their marketing activity and they see placing a few adverts as an easy way to do it.

The truth is most advertising is dying, and I’m not talking about getting old slowly and gradually fading into the background before disappearing, I’m talking about advertising in the way we know it now, being gone within a decade.

But why is this?

It’s because most businesses who advertise are literally throwing their money away because they don’t understand how the advertising model now works

The old model was easy:

Company Place Advert - Customer Sees Advert - Customer Calls Company - Company Sells to Customer

A seamless four step process. This was good, everyone knew where they stood and if you needed more business, you just placed more adverts.

The new model is a bit harder for people to get to grips with (at the moment anyway):

Company Places Advert - Customer See Advert - Customer Visits Company Website - Customer Browses Company Website - Customer Sends Enquiry to Company - Company Sells to Customer

Its not a massive difference admittedly, but you would be amazed how much those two small steps change things.

You see it’s no longer a matter of how good your ads are, or by how many people they are seen, the whole process depends on your website being effective - FACT. An ineffective website now will be the reason why you, and the many people who call me every week, have seen a massive drop in your enquiries. Don’t be fooled, the economy has nothing to do with it - if you sit back and think there is nothing you can do about it then you’re wrong, my customers aren’t just seeing their enquiries stay constant, they are seeing a big increases! Why? Because their competitors are pulling their marketing as it’s not working so there is less competition and they are cleaning up!!!

Action points:

Look at your website and compare it to the best website in your market, how do you compare?
Make sure you have a call to action or a way of contacting you on every page of your site.
Look at your follow up to enquiries, once you have an enquiry you’ve done the hard work, its much easier to sell to that enquiry than it is to generate a new one!

If you are having problems with any of the above then book a free consultation or give me a call and I can give you some pointers

In addition to this whole process there are no much, much more effective ways to advertise than the conventional print and directory based ads, but thats a different story altogether - we can save that one for next week ;).

Until then

Edward

Advertising, Websites