There are many reasons advertising fails,
but I believe one of the biggest reasons is because it's not purchased
correctly in the first place.
Quite often, a wedding professional will
hear about an advertising opportunity and the first question they ask is,
"How much does it cost?" While I understand price is a consideration,
I believe that being concerned about price before all else is one of the major
reasons most advertising fails.
It's even more perplexing when wedding
professionals focus on price because I've had many lament the fact that the
first question a bride will ask is about price. They want the bride to focus on
quality, or experience and they find it frustrating that the first question she
asks is, "How much?" Yet, they do the same thing when they’re presented
an advertising opportunity.
We know that statistically speaking 74% of
brides have never planned a wedding before, so it’s a bit more understandable
that a bride would focus on price first. The average bride can’t compare the
difference between a photographer with 20 years experience and professional
equipment to the Craigslist amateur just starting unless it’s explained.
However, for business owners that invest in advertising all the time it’s a bit
more disconcerting. Just today I saw a Facebook post where a photographer took
offense that a bride asked if he could do a ton of work for half his normal
rate. He was mad that she didn’t realize his value, but how could she unless
it’s explained to her? Or the professional DJ's who complain that the bride
decided to use an amateur from Craigslist or a relative with an iPod. The
bride decided to save money and the DJ’s upset she isn’t using a professional,
yet that same DJ will design their own literature, create their own website and
do things for their business that are better suited for professionals.
Most of the DJ’s I’ve met are not website or
literature designers, yet they want to save money so they do it themselves. They
view the cost of creating literature and a website as an expense. The truth is,
having a professionally designed website or sales literature is an income
generator not an expense. Yet many business owners are comfortable cutting
corners.
Joining other wedding professionals in a mad
dash to the lowest price bridal shows has negatively affected the bridal show
market across the country. From 1980 to 1999 we produced a series of shows
called California Bridal Expos. By early 1990, we were generating 3800 brides
and 13,000 people at our two-day events. Our flagship show was at the
Disneyland Hotel and featured over 200 wedding professionals who invested $1350
for a booth in the show. The number of bridal leads participants received
always overwhelmed the wedding professionals who attended the show. Our policy
was to always strive to under promise and over deliver. There is a long list of
wedding pros that started with us in the 1980’s, as small single operator
business and grew to major wedding businesses based on their show success at
the California Bridal Expos.
About 1992, the bottom dwellers started to
appear. A show at a local athletic club popped up and their biggest claim to
fame was booths that required a $400 investment. They only drew a couple
hundred brides but it didn’t matter. Many wedding professionals focused on
price and $400 was less than $1350. Before
you knew it there were three promoters producing six shows, then six prompters
hosting twelve shows, and then fifteen producers trying to host sixty shows. Within
a year or two, Southern California area had five shows every weekend all year
round and the bridal show market in Southern California became challenging for
quality wedding professionals.
Today, you can rent booths in some Southern
California bridal shows for as little as $150 but the old cliché, “You get what
you pay for” rings true. This same scenario has repeated itself across the
nation. Wedding professionals’ keep focusing on price, not value and it’s had a
very strong impact on their business. Now, in Southern California you may have
to have a booth in six shows at $400 each just to see 1500 brides face-to-face
and of course you have the time commitment of six shows.
We would not let the golden goose - the Disneyland
Show - die a slow painful death or become anything less than perfect. We stopped
producing the event in 1999. Competitors
jumped in and attempted to recreate the Disney magic but their commitment to
dollars first, quality second showed. Since 2000, there hasn’t been a quality
bridal show in the best place on earth to have one, the Magic Kingdom.
Advertising Focus
If it’s wrong to focus on price when buying
advertising, what should you focus on?
I suggest, "How much business will this bring me?" or “What type of opportunity
does this advertising offer?”
After all, the reason we buy advertising is
to increase sales, correct? We invest our dollars in exchange for an
opportunity to have qualified people see our advertising and respond.
We invest in advertising to have qualified people
see our message and respond, yet we sabotage ourselves by not analyzing the
opportunity that each advertising medium provides. There are some advertising
opportunities that give a faster ROI than others.
PUSH vs. PULL
First we need to understand that there are
only two ways to advertise, and almost all advertising fits into these two
categories. The categories are PUSH and PULL.
Push advertising is any form of advertising
where you broadcast your message and wait for a response. You have no control
over the message or experience once it’s sent and you must wait for a response.
Push advertising is the most common form of advertising. A message is crafted
and then released to the world.
Magazines, radio, television, social media posts, direct mail pieces and
brochures are all forms of push advertising.
Pull advertising is any form of advertising
where you meet the prospect one-on-one. You completely control the message and
the experience as it’s being delivered. Pull advertising is less common but by
far, when done properly, will offer the fastest ROI. Bridal shows, mixers and networking events
are all forms of pull advertising.
The reason pull advertising is superior to
push advertising is because you have the one-on-one experience with the prospect.
A magazine may offer many hundreds of times more “impressions” of your message,
but one-on-one always gives you the best opportunity to secure the sale. You don’t
have to call, email or reach out to the prospect because you are standing in
front of them face-to-face. Pull
advertising equals huge opportunity.
I sometimes receive questions about Bridal
Shows. If “pull” advertising is so good, how come I didn’t book any business
from the last show?
The answer is easy and it’s a bit like
saying, “I had a car that I didn’t ever maintain. I didn’t change the oil. I
didn’t clean it out and I ran the engine at 150% of capacity whenever I could,
and it died after just 25,000 miles.
I’ll never buy that brand again… The truth is, you screwed it up. You did
the wrong things in the wrong ways and you destroyed a good car. It’s not the car manufacturers fault.
It’s the same for most wedding magazines. We
know that over 95% of all brides buy a wedding magazine yet many wedding
professionals report that they invested in a magazine add with little or no
response. So the question is, if 95% of your brides buy a wedding publication
and you have an advertisement in the publication, doesn’t it make sense that
you would receive some response?
Every time I teach a Bridal Business Boot
Camp I ask the attendees if they have ever purchased magazine advertising and
not received the response they expected. At virtually every Boot Camp there are
a ton of hands that shoot up and people tell me about magazine advertising that
didn’t work for them. They typically say things like:
- · I didn’t get any calls
- · I don’t think the publisher distributed enough copies
- · There were to many competitors
- · The brides are only shopping for price
And while these are all real concerns, I
believe the reason your magazine advertising doesn’t work is much simpler to
understand. The reason most magazine advertising doesn’t work for wedding
professionals is that their ads are just bad. They are horribly produced,
horribly laid out and sell the wrong thing. The add looks like every other add.
It says the same thing as every other add and it typically features a link to a
website that the bride soon discovers is as bad as the magazine add.
It’s pretty much the same for bridal shows.
You don’t get the response you expected because you screwed up and did the
wrong thing. I’ll bet you took a beautiful opportunity for face-to-face
interaction (pull) and replaced it with a brochure you stuck in their hand
(push) and then made some type of vow, commitment, and promise to reach out to
them later.
That’s a huge FAIL. In a future post I’ll
explain why your bridal show and magazine experience failed. I’ll bet we can
fix both and help you book a ton of wedding.
We All Struggle To Get Our Message Out
Let me give you an example of an advertising
struggle we have everyday:
We have mixers with wedding planners that we
call Bridal Business Academies. I'm not going to go into the details because I
want to stay focused on why your advertising fails, but as way of example, here
are a few features of our Bridal Business Academies.
•
Hundreds of wedding planners apply to attend
free training.
•
We bring in top-notch trainers and provide
training, free lunch and a mixer.
•
We typically have over 150 planner applications
for the 60 available spots.
•
At the mixer 50 wedding professionals
reserve tables and meet the planners
Understanding that 72% of all high-end
brides have wedding planners, it's not much of a stretch to think that if I'm a
wedding photographer and I meet and get to know 60 high-end wedding planners,
I'm going to book some business.
The truth is if I'm a wedding photographer
and I knew 60 wedding planners at ANY
LEVEL, I’ll book some business.
We also know that:
•
Wedding planners NEVER refer to people they
don't know.
•
Wedding Planners NEVER refer to people they
don't trust.
•
Access to the high-end bride almost ALWAYS
comes from a qualified planner.
So, in short, meeting and getting to know 60
quality-wedding planners is a very good thing and for the most part is a “no
brainer I should always want to do.”
As a wedding professional, there’s simply no
good reason that I would not want to have an ongoing relationship with great
wedding planners.
When we announce that we are hosting a Bridal
Business Academy and solicit for wedding professionals, we receive hundreds
of inquires from wedding professionals asking how they can participate AND one
of the first questions they always ask
is, "How Much?"
The problem is, they completely focus on the
money and many miss the OPORTUNITY. They have an opportunity to meet 60 Wedding
Planners. They have the opportunity to book a ton of business. If I’m going to
get 10 – 20 weddings from one source of advertising does it matter if the
investment is $800 or $1800? Of course it doesn’t!
Let's think this through. I want to give you
a hypothetical situation:
I'm a wedding photographer with an average
wedding package of $3800 and a high-end package of $8500. I participate in an
$800 bridal show.
At the show I meet 500 brides and because I
bought Chris Evans book "How to Double Your Business In 12 Months",
(Kings Hill Publishing on Amazon – shameless plug) and I do everything
correctly, I book 35 visits with brides and ultimately sell 26 weddings at an
average of $3800.
I understand, if you booked 26 wedding from
a single show you would have heart palpitations but this is my hypothetical so
let's use really high numbers and make the show a killer success.
500 brides / 35 Visits / 26 Bookings - 26 x
$3800 = $98,800 gross.
$800 Investment = 1235% ROI.
Bottom line, invest $800 and make $98,800
Now let's compare a Bridal Show against a Bridal Business Academy
I meet 60 planners but I only hit it off
with 16. Over the next year each planner ends up booking me for 1 wedding
but because the bride has more money, I sell my $8500 package.
16 brides / 16 Bookings - 16 x $8500 =
$136,000 gross.
$525 Investment = %2590 ROI.
Bottom line, invest $525 and make $136,000
Or we can look at Failure.
I only meet one planner and I only book one
wedding and it's my lowest end package.
1 Bride / 1 Booking - 1x $3800 = $3800 gross.
$525 Investment = 732% ROI.
Bottom line, invest $525 and make $3800
Even with failure,
I'm getting my investment back over seven times!
I understand that the average wedding
professional doesn’t book $98,000 in business off a bridal show but the truth
is, you should. Don’t let the
simple fact that most wedding professionals do the wrong thing; in the wrong
way taint your opinion about the value of face-to-face communication with the
brides at a bridal show. Even with multiple shows in each markets face-to-face
communication offers incredible opportunity for a great ROI.
In Los Angeles we had a wedding professional
that owned a chain of tuxedo shops.
Exhibitors would walk in the door of the show and always be amazed that
he bought six booths at the front of every show. He had a staff of 12 people
all highly trained and ready to go. He spent thousands of dollars on his
display and across all our shows he invested about $58,000 in booth rental
every season. The other exhibitors would say, “Look at that, he has so much
money he can buy six booths up front.”
But if you asked him he would say, “The reason
I have so much money is because I buy six booths up front and staff the booth
with a trained staff.” You never found him at Kinko’s at 3am making copies
because the show he registered for 8 months ago some how snuck up on him.
There were many formalwear companies that
exhibited at the bridal shows but there was only one that you had to pass on
the way in and the way out. He had a great display and a full staff and while
he invested many times what his competitors did, he made far more sales than
all his competitors combined. He always knew the opportunity for success at
every event and had a plan to maximize it!
When it comes to advertising many wedding
professionals make three basic mistakes.
- They focus on the investment, not the opportunity
- They don’t follow-up and follow-through and make it great
- They follow the pack and do not lead.
I think we’ve done a fairly good job of
discussing having the wrong focus of your advertising so let’s discuss poor
follow-up and follow-through.
Poor follow-up and follow-through is an
epidemic in the wedding industry. Sometimes reaching a wedding professional can
be the hardest part of a bride’s day. Having worked in this industry for over
30 years I can say that getting wedding professionals to talk on the phone is
one of the hardest things we do. I challenge you to take any list of more than
25 wedding professionals whom you do not know and do a test. Sit down some
morning and call every wedding professional on the list. I will bet that 99% of
the time you get an answering machine and unless you leave a message like, “Hi
I’m Susan, I have $500 and I want to hand it to you,” you won’t get a call
back.
If you have your business line ringing
through to your cell phone and you can’t answer the phone because little Tommy
is throwing a fit, at least call back within an hour or so! Every call is an OPPORTUNITY for your
business. You may not want to avail yourself of the opportunity but how do you
know until you call back? You’re not going to close every bride that phones you
but the truth is, you’ve invested money in advertising but if you don’t answer
your phone, you’ve wasted your money.
The same goes for email and calling out to
the bride. We routinely send emails to
wedding professionals and quite often we receive a return email from some spam
guard company they have signed up with that requires us to submit a CAPTCH form
and prove we are human.
Typically the message is something like,
“Hi, I’m protecting myself from spam so please resubmit your information.” REALLY, you think a bride is going to chase
you down to get information? I think it’s more likely she will simply contact
one of the other 350 florists on The Knott? You’ve spent money to get the bride
to contact you, you should be available.
Did you know that the average bride makes a
buying decision after seven contacts yet the average wedding professional stops
following up after two contacts? That’s a statistical fact and if you want to
know the wedding professionals who are following up more than twice, simply
look for the busiest wedding professionals in your market.
It’s also time to stop worrying about what
everyone else in your networking club says and do what’s best for your
business. We continually work with wedding professionals who are part of a
group or association and they want to have their advertising the same as some
of their friends. The only issue is their friends are broke all the time and
their advertising doesn’t work either!
I once worked with a wedding reception
facility that invested a significant sum of money with us and we revamped her
literature, presentation, webpage and marketing plan. The number of brides who
called in each week went from 3 or 4 to 15 – 20 within a few months. She booked
over 20 weddings in 90 days once her advertising took hold. Then she went to a
NACE meeting and another facility owner in her group criticized her new look
and said he didn’t think it was professional enough. She immediately came back
from the meeting and cancelled the service. Within a few days she had the old
web page posted. Within a few months she was back at the same spot she was when
we started. To her, the opinion of a respected competitor was more important
than growing her business. It didn’t make sense to me but we honored her
wishes.
You can’t follow the pack and have more
success than everyone else.
The fact is I’ll bet you can think of a
competitor who’s successful and when you truly think about what they do to be
successful, you will find several things they do that others don’t. It’s just
the way it is. Leaders do not follow a pack - they lead it. You need to be a
leader in your advertising.
Advertising Must Generate Face-To-Face Visits
The first step we need to take to start
advertising correctly is to understand that we must see brides face-to-face.
Now I know, there’s always a small minority of wedding pros who handle
destination weddings or book online. If that’s you, God Bless You. Keep at it.
Don’t change a thing. Don’t send me an email complaining…
For the other 99.8% of wedding professionals
who need to meet the bride to book a wedding, your advertising and promotion
MUST focus on generating visits, not selling your product. Once you have the
visit, you can sell the product.
Your advertising must sell the opportunity
to make their wedding dreams come true by meeting with you. It’s just that
simple. It’s a bit like my latest Book “How To Turn Likes Into Sales.” (Kings
Hill Publishing / Amazon) Tons of people
are furiously working to get as many likes or friends as they possible can but
at the end of the day if you have 10000 friends/fans/likes and I have 5
customers, guess who has more money in the bank?
While the world goes crazy for likes on
Facebook, the successful wedding professional stays focused on meeting
potential customers face-to-face and telling their story. That’s why we feel
the Bridal Business Academy is so great. Wedding Professionals meet 60
qualified planners face-to-face and have an opportunity to build a
relationship!
How Do You Fix Your Advertising?
The fastest way to fix your advertising is
to understand that; face-to-face advertising (pull) ALWAYS generates the best
ROI. 92% of all brides know - and have met, EVERYONE that’s providing services
for their wedding. We are in a face-to-face, belly-to-belly business as
explained earlier, bridal shows, mixers and networking events will always
generate the best response - if you work them properly.
To a certain extent, advertising is a state
of mind but it must be based on a solid foundation of real opportunity!
Do you want your advertising to excel? Simply
invest in advertising that puts you face-to-face with the people who can use
your service.
- · If your website doesn’t deliver a solid stream of leads EVERY week.
- · If your advertising doesn’t deliver a solid stream of leads EVERY week.
- · If your phone doesn’t ring with new prospects EVERYDAY.
It’s time to change your advertising so
you’re not just spending money but investing in opportunities that generate
face-to-face, belly-to-belly contacts with the people who need your service.
Your advertising needs to sell the visit,
not the product and you have to build a solid network of quality professionals
who will refer you and you can refer. When an advertising opportunity presents
itself, look at the potential business it will bring. Analyze the realistic
response you can achieve and decide if it fits your mission, goals and message.
Then, if you have positive response for those key factors, go ahead; take a
look at the price…
Chris Evans
PS. -
Is there any reason you shouldn’t jump
at the opportunity to be one of 50 people in your market who can invest in
advertising that puts you in front of 60 qualified planners? One-on-one
relationships with high-end planners can make your business rock!
Don’t wait, call us NOW at 805-852-5384 or
email Chris at chrisevansint@me.com
www.BridalBusinessAcademy.com
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