Monthly Archives: April 2012

5min Video Is Better Than 60sec!

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We chose to go above and beyond with our guide by actually providing a commercial for all of our wedding professionals. Women watch more video than men! It only makes sense that we provide a video of your business for them to watch. 90% of people change the channel when a commercial comes on for either TV or radio. Think about it, how many channels do you have as a “back up” channel the moment a commercial comes on?

Well it turns out that the only time that people actually watch a commercial is when they go to a website to get more information. If the video is good enough people will watch it over again and pass the link on to friends. In fact it turns out that people will turn to You Tube to try to find even more video on the business that they are searching for. So it pays to have a commercial, but not the the standard 30-60sec that you get on TV or radio, you need to have something that is 3-5min to give the kind of information that the client is looking for.

We had clients who looked at video that was 30 & 60 seconds long. We had up to 40 videos for them to view, and after they were done watching them we asked them basic questions about what they liked & didn’t like. The overwhelming majority of our brides liked the video, but said it was not enough information. They said they wanted to watch something that explained everything they wanted to know in 5min or less, but it had to be full of the information that they wanted. If it was too boring, or not informational enough they would just click on something else. This makes sense because when a vendor watches a commercial they are not trying to extract information, they are just watching. If you are a bride who is looking for the information, you will pay very close attention to that video, and play it again if there was something that you wanted to double check.

This might be radical thinking, but when you stop and think about yourself, what do you prefer? I know I look for video, so does my wife, friends, and family, but only when I am looking for the info. I will spend extra time looking for video, or watching video if it has the information that I’m looking for.

Please check out our first commercial of Holland Studios:

The Difference Between An “Event” & Expo

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When telling people about the Wedding Experience they love it. There are so many things that are different with the Experience compared to other events, people have a hard time remembering everything that makes it different. In this list you can see the real difference between the Wedding Experience and your typical show side by side. This way people can make a real comparison and understand the difference.

The key goal of the Wedding Experience is to interact and get more intimate with clients. A common theme found from both the wedding professional and the engaged couple was this: both could not communicate the value of the company & services with a 10×10 booth. Clients wanted to go to a wedding or event to see the professional in action. The business owner complains that the clients will never be able to understand what kind of time and effort they put in to their wedding compared to other “vendors.”

The event is going to showcase the best of the best. The only way that they could be shown in the best way is by letting them do their thing. The clients gets to see them in action, get to hear them talk, and experience what makes them stand out. By the end of the event it’s no longer a questions of who they want, they just experienced the best and have to have them!

Why People Don’t Trust Websites

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People between the age of 18-34 use Google to search 93% of the time. When Google gives those top results people trust them, but every once and while a site gets through that is questionable. How does one determine whether a site is trust worthy? There are many different ways that people can tell if a site is questionable.

Is your information and contact information current? If things are outdated, or links don’t work, people won’t trust your site and will go somewhere else. Do you have social media buttons? If you don’t have a Facebook & Twitter account with a lot of content, and current content, people will bail. There are also small reasons why people leave, but they are legitimate:

  • Flash site
  • Adds
  • Flash items
  • Block design
  • No dates
  • Automatic music
  • Pop-ups
  • Boring site
  • To bright of colors
  • Bad font
  • Bolding all the key words

If you have anything from this list that is on your site, you need to call your website editor, log on and make changes. Once you do this you will start to see very positive things happen to you and your business!

Wedding Expos – The Real Stats

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In many industry’s expo’s and show’s are the primary way to meet new clients and drum up new business. The wedding industry is no different, but there needs to be some light shed into the events themselves in order to fully understand how successful, or unsuccessful they end up being. It also matters who is the one getting the success: clients, vendors, or the producer of the show.

Lets start with the stats that producers typically inflate or lie about in order to get vendors signed up, and make their show sound big. Numbers for expos are usually never what they say they are. The reason for this is because majority of shows give their tickets away to improve attendance. The producer of the show can see how ticket sales are doing, and 99% of the time they don’t have enough tickets sold, so they give them away. Many shows (even the most popular & most established) in the area usually give away 1/2 of all their tickets to fill their event. This is terrible for the vendor because this attracts people who aren’t serious, and don’t really have money to spend. If you give your tickets away the guest doesn’t really care about the show because they aren’t invested in it, unlike someone who bought the ticket.

Recently some local shows said that they had record attendance. When you break it down you can start to see the “real” numbers. The producer might state that they had 1000 attendees. Then you ask other vendors, brides, and people who went to the event to check it out, and you hear very different numbers.

Even though a show or expo has around 1000 guests registered, they gave away a quarter to half of their tickets, and so only about half the registered attendees showed up. Out of the half that showed up there were actually only half of those attendees who are getting married. Those brides had an average budget of less than $10,000, so a majority of the attendees cannot afford hiring anyone at the show. Vendors were booking clients at the show, but the ones that got booked had the cheapest prices.

Majority of vendors aren’t getting any inquiries from many of these expos and shows. In fact the biggest problem that vendors voiced about many of the shows was there were too many DIY brides taking pictures and video of the decorations and backdrops. The brides picked the cheap vendors and the other 90% didn’t get anything.

Is this the kind of success that most people are looking for? The whole point of a show or expo is to get vendors bookings that they normally wouldn’t get. It’s great if you are a bride not planning on spending to much because you have smaller budget, or you’re the producer of the show itself making money primarily off your vendor booths. If your a vendor though, you get the short end of the stick.

As a vendor these are the questions that you should ask the producer of a show:

  • Whats your demographic?
  • How are you marketing to them (traditional media, social media, print, online, etc.)
  • How many vendors typically book, and how much do they book?
  • What is your budget for marketing?
  • What is the average wedding budget for the attendees?
  • How many tickets do you give away?

Wedding Experience Uses Google +’s “Hang Out” To Communicate

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The Wedding Experience is an avid user of technology, and they seem to have found a new tool to cut down costs for businesses. Many people have heard about Google+, but very few have heard about the amazing feature called “Start A Hang Out.” This one little feature is very powerful, and unlike GoTo Meeting it doesn’t costs anything. It is a virtual meeting room where you can invite people from your circles. This is great because now we all literally have video phone, and have the ability to talk to more than one person at a time!

Here we see that even Newt Gingrich is jumping on the technology bandwagon and has started communicating with constituents using Google+’s Hang Out. If someone like Newt Gingrich can figure out how to chat, then pretty much any one can. In this video you can see what Google+ looks like when chatting with a group of people in a Hang Out.

When asked why the Wedding Experience is using this Simon Blanco had to say this:

We embrace technology, and this just makes the most sense. We need to speak with our planners on a weekly basis, and this allows use to not only speak with everyone, but to see everyone all at once! Instead of trying to rent a space, or find a quiet restauraunt and spend money, this is FREE! Who doesn’t like FREE especially when it works. Everyone in the wedding business has a laptop, and they all have cameras installed on them.

It seems like technology is making our world smaller & smaller everyday. The question you have to start asking yourself now is how long until we get virtual meetings with actual holograms!

50% Male Attendance At A Wedding Event! How?

The Wedding Experience is going to try and beat a record for the wedding industry right here locally in Portland Oregon. One of the biggest problems that both the bride and the vendor complain about is getting the groom there to the event. Guys hate wedding expos and wedding shows, and the ones that do show up are dragged there by their fiance, and want to leave ASAP. The few grooms that are at shows typically walk around staring at the floor and ceiling and hoping that there will be alcohol.

How do you get a guy to come to a wedding expo/show? DON’T DO A SHOW/EXPO! Put on a real wedding so they can see, taste, smell, and touch what would be at there wedding, and see it set up too! You give a guy what he wants: food, alcohol, Blazer tickets, cigars, money clips, and give him 50% on hotel rooms. The point is you need to cater to the guy, not just the bride!

Look what Simon Blanco had to say about your typical groom here in Portland:

I recently sat down with a groom planning his wedding. He was inquiring about DJ services, and he ended up hiring me. When we were finishing our conversation he asked where to find a good resource for other wedding vendors. I asked him if he wanted to go to a wedding expo and find vendors there?

Oh F*@# no! I would never go to one of those things.

OK, well how about going to an event and not a show or expo? What about a luxurious mock wedding at the Benson where you get to eat a 4 course meal, have unlimited beer/wine, see a huge local act, have an opportunity to win Blazer tickets, cigars, a money clip, and get a chance to win the Presidential Suite that night!

Wait, when is that? I want to check it out!

Getting 50% male attendance:

Marketing to males is one thing that the Wedding Experience is going do different that other shows have just missed out on. By doing this and by also offering prizes that are male oriented they are hoping to get a 50% male attendance. These males would want to be at the event, and would most likely stay the entire 5hrs. Even brides admit that if they go to a show or expo that is 5hrs long, they only stay for no more than about an hour. The Wedding Experience plans on getting both the bride and the groom to the event, and get them both to stay the full 5hrs. With a response like the client above it looks like the producers of the show will meet their quota!