Tag Archives: Wedding Suppliers

Wedding Fairs – The Right Mindset and Preparation

Posted on 03/21/2011 by admin
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I often go to Wedding Fairs to keep up with trends and ideas and generally see what people are selling and what brides are going for and interested in, after all the only way to know your customer really well is to get close to them. Whilst walking round the wedding fair I am a completely amazed at how many suppliers go to Wedding Fairs with the sole purpose of manically selling to the brides at the fair! This is all very well but imagine if you are a bride and you go into a wedding fair and there are 50 or so wedding suppliers desperately trying to sell to you as soon as you get through the door. The poor bride may have only got engaged a couple of weeks before and my be just there to gather a few ideas and think about what kind of wedding she wants to plan, she may be getting married abroad or the other side of the country, may be planning a big or small or wedding or may just not have a single clue so she REALLY will not appreciate the hard sell!

On the other hand, I’ve seen the suppliers that are completely opposite to this, they sit on their chair near their table/stand and they hardly say anything unless a bride starts to ask questions, then they answer the questions with knowledge and enthusiasm and the bride smiles…… and walks off never to be seen again! In this scenario it IS possible to be TOO nice, after all your not there to just impart information you ARE there to actually sell, otherwise why bother going?

I’ve also been to wedding fairs where the people manning the stand spent the entire time either talking to each other or being on the phone and I don’t think they actually spoke to a SINGLE bride! I wonder how many sales THEY got? I’ve also walked round fairs where the stand holders were miserable to the point of being rude and I’ve gone away thinking that they would have actually done themselves and all the brides a favour if they’d have just stayed at home.

One of the many things I’ll cover in my next Teleclass is how to get into the right mindset for a wedding fair and to get straight in your head the EXACT reason you are there! Yes, it is of course to make sales but there is definitely a way to do it that can make it much more pleasurable for both YOU and the bride!

So – next time you do a Wedding Fair, get your head right, put on a smile, be friendly, and don’t be desperate!

 

Claire xox

 

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Untargeted Marketing, Otherwise Known as Flushing Your Money Down The Toilet….

Posted on 02/24/2011 by admin
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The other day I heard someone suggest to a small wedding business that they should sponsor a local community magazine as a way of marketing…  Let just think about this for a minute….

Now I’m one of those people that assumes theres nothing in community magazine that I’m interested in and it goes straight in the recycling bin so the first thing you have to take into consideration is that a proportion of people wont even seen your ad or sponsorship.

The next thing you have to take into consideration is that (we’re assuming you are a wedding supplier and looking for business from brides to be) a lot of the people reading the magazine will be married or single and are not looking for wedding suppliers, and this will apply to a LOT of the readers!

Ok, lets assume that several people in the community AND reading magazine are actually planning to get married….. Let me put it this way, a bride to be comes home from a hard days work, flops on the sofa and picks up her local community magazine. She scans through the local magazine to get up to date on local happenings and maybe. just maybe she notices the magazine is sponsored by someone that makes wedding cakes, she looks at this with interest and makes a mental note that when she comes to ordering a wedding cake she will have a look at this supplier, then she closes the magazine and gets on with the rest of her evening. A month or so later she is in a position to book a wedding cake maker and she remembers she saw a local one in the community magazine, but the magazine has long been recycled and she cant remember who it is and so she gets on the net and finds her cake maker.

OK – one in 20 people that advertise in this way may actually get some work out of it but 19 out of 20 people wont! So – would you rather put your money into something that 19 out 20 people find successful and 1 doesn’t, or something that 1 person in 20 find successful but 19 don’t? Well, I for one hate wasting money so I know what I’d rather do. Of course people will tell you that those reading the magazine will KNOW people that ARE getting married – this is true! But how many times have you seen something in a magazine and thought it was relevant to someone you knew and resolved to show it to them only to realise a few months down the line the article or advert was still sat on your coffee table?

In order to get business the easy way you need to show your product or service to a targetted audience – in other words you need to tell people that ARE looking for what you are offering and they are looking WHEN you are telling them – if you put your money into marketing any other way then you may as well stand on your front door with a loud haler and shout at passers-by – it will be just as effective!


Claire x0x


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Are you ‘different’ enough to survive the Wedding Industry???

Posted on 02/23/2011 by admin
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Whenever I walk around local wedding fairs to have a look at what people are selling and how people are selling it you tend to see the same thing over and over again and I go to fairs from the perspective of a bride (no, I’m not getting married) but without sounding too sad and pathetic I try and put myself in the mind of the bride and walk around to see what appeals and what doesn’t. Of course not all brides have the same taste as me so the products themselves will appear to some brides and not others but some Wedding Suppliers are indeed ‘different’. This has got nothing to do with what they are selling, this has to do with the people selling them.

If you want to be different and really stand out in the wedding industry then you have to be ‘extraordinary’ and do things that none of your competitors do. If you ask any supplier what makes them different from everyone else then they will say things such as good quality products, great service etc etc – EVERYONE  says this so in fact they are not being different at all, they are being just like everyone else.

In order to rise above everyone else you need to raise the bar! When I was wedding planning I found online these gorgeous silver frogs with little gold crowns – they were really cute and tasteful and they cost me about £30 each so not cheap. Every time I signed a new client (which was generally worth about £3k to me) I would send the couple one of the frogs to thank them for choosing to do business with me and they loved them!

How many of you send your previous clients anniversary cards every year? Do you send thank you gifts for referrals received? One of my lovely clients send gorgeous hand made cards that she writes and send by snail mail to new clients (snail mail in this age of everything electronic can be incredibly effective!)  Do you go out of your way to make your clients feel really good about their decision to work with you? If you do they will be falling over themselves to get everyone else to choose you as well.

The key to going the extra mile it consistency – come up with extraordinary acts that you can do EVERY SINGLE TIME!!!! And do them!

I’d love to hear your comments about what you are going to start doing thats extraordinary in your business!


Claire x0x


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You need to know what your brides REALLY want to buy…

Posted on 01/08/2011 by admin
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When I’m talking to new clients I always like to start by asking the question above, what are your brides buying? Of course I get the usual answers of Wedding Planning, Invitations, a Wedding Video, Photography but are any of those answers correct? Well actually they are not, and that’s where lots of Wedding Suppliers marketing starts going wrong….


Everyone knows Dyson cleaners right? They are definitely one of the giant success stories of recent years, these strange looking, heavily price tagged hoovers have completely blown their competition away and one of the ways they’ve done this is because they identified EXACTLY what they target market wanted and delivered it in every bit of marketing they did with their fantastic slogan “The only vacuum cleaner in the world to maintain 100% suction, 100% of the time”  The slogan is genius and addresses exactly what their customers want but what are people actually buying when they buy a hoover? They don’t actually want to buy a hoover, nobody does, what people actually want is a clean home……. Lets face it, if someone tomorrow invented a system where all you had to do was press a button and all the dust and dirt immediately vanished from your house we’d all get it the minute we woke up wouldn’t we, and I’m pretty sure that most of us wouldn’t even care what it cost, hoovers would never come out of the cupboards ever again. So when we are shopping for a new hoover, we are NOT buying a hoover, we are buying the promise of a new home, just as when we buy a car we are NOT buying a car but a safe, reliable, comfortable way to get from A to B, the reasons for buying particularly cars may vary such as economy, status symbol etc but once again, if someone made teleporting a possibility tomorrow we’d not touch the car again!

So – what are your brides REALLY buying? A wedding is supposed to be the best, happiest day of your life so a bride buys things that she think will make that happen, everything she is buying is to enhance and make real that perfect wedding day that she has in mind.


When I started my wedding planning company I was constantly hearing from brides that they didn’t need a planner because they were doing it themselves and wanted to save the money, this was because I was trying to sell Wedding Planning, of course I was, I was a wedding planner after all right?? Wrong – I quickly reviewed my sales method and took on board the fact that I WASN’T selling wedding planning – what I was actually selling was an outcome! I was selling complete peace of mind for the wedding day, I was selling a wedding day that was going to go perfectly and all the bride and groom had to do was turn up, relax and enjoy the day, worry about nothing and know it was all taken care of, I was selling the happiness of all the guests, the knowledge for the bride and groom that all their guests would be catered for and looked after impeccably, my bride and groom wanted unique and special touches on the wedding day that none of their guests had ever seen before…… now THAT’S what my clients wanted, all of those things, NOT a wedding planner……..


So – have a think about what you are selling, whether you currently think its invitations, favours, flowers, photography, videography or planning, sit down and get clear about what you are REALLY selling and you will see your sales soar……


Claire xox


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How Can You Make Multiple Sales to Each bride?

Posted on 12/07/2010 by admin
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When talking to Wedding suppliers I constantly hear them say that the wedding industry is difficult because brides (hopefully) only get married once, therefore you are constantly looking for new customers. This is true……. or is it?

Have you ever noticed at weddings that there are always loads of other people there that are getting married within a year or so, or have just got engaged etc?  Your potential for sales with every single bride you deal with is enormous and you should take full advantage of this by keeping yourself prominent in the brides mind even after the wedding! Of course you can only take advantage of this fantastic opportunity if you’ve already done an exceptional job in the first place so I can’t stress enough how important excellent customer service is but thats for a whole nother blog……..

You have to remember that for every bride you work for you have a valuable bit of information – their wedding date! This gives you a fantastic opportunity to contact them at least once a year, send them a card celebrating their anniversary and their friends will see the card as well, you can even offer an incentive for every referral they give you, it doesn’t have to be money, it can be vouchers or if you are a cake maker send them a few cup cakes with Thank You on them – I guarantee when they receive them they will go out of their way to find you more customers because they will love receiving your gifts!

One of the nicest gifts I ever received was a gorgeous bottle of Champagne and box of Champagne truffles for recommending a customer to someone. It was fabulous and I was over the moon about it, admittedly the customer meant a lot of financial gain to them, way more than the gift but thats not the point, the point is I literally cannot recommend these people enough now – I’m literally their best salesperson ever and all because of a gift!

A previous client of mine does this kind of marketing fabulously now and every single year she gets masses of orders for anniversary cakes, childrens birthday cakes and christmas cakes from her previous brides – this is virtually NO COST marketing in action at its best and all Wedding Suppliers can do this.

 


Claire x0x

 

If you want your business to grow into the something that brings you the profit you always imagined then sign up for my Wedding Wealth Program NOW, its guaranteed to succeed!


Wedding Fayres – Waste of Time or Goldmine???

Posted on 12/01/2010 by admin
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When I talk to wedding suppliers they always tell me that one of the biggest expenses they have is the amount they spend on Wedding Fayres, this is Great I say but they look at me blankly and tell me that some of the wedding fayres they attend they hardly get any bookings out of and some actually get nothing out of spending a valuable Sunday at a Wedding Fayre!!!!

Back when I was wedding planning I used to hate the thought of doing a Wedding Fayre because I’d usually been working all day Saturday at a wedding and it meant giving up a valuable Sunday so I wanted to make damn sure I was going to get a lot of work out of it!!!  So how I hear you ask do you get a lot of work out of it?

Well the easiest way to explain what to do is to tell you what to definitely NOT do! I’ve spent loads of time at Wedding Fayres, from the very expensive national ones to the very small village ones and the same things apply, so here are my top tips for what NOT to do at a Wedding Fayre:-

  1. Turn up late or go home early.
    How many times have you been at a wedding fayre and the person next to you packs up an hour early? Yes, we all want to get home and we all hate standing around when noone is about but you’ve committed yourself to be there for the duration of the wedding fayre so make the most of it. Packing up early looks unprofessional and is disrespectful to the brides that do turn up at the end of the day, after all, how would you like to go to a shop at 4.30 that you knew closed at 5pm and they already closed? You wouldn’t be impressed at all and more to the point I’m pretty sure you’d make sure you didn’t shop there again!
  2. Eat lunch at your stand.
    Have you ever wanted to ask someone a question when the person had a mouthful of sandwich? II bet you changed your mind and didn’t bother – well so will the brides! I actually went to a Wedding Fayre once and the person on the stand next to me was eating a Pot Noodle for over 30 minutes! lol  I admit I quite like Pot Noodles but can you imagine the mess it made and how it looked? Yuk! lol Once again it shows disrespect to your potential clients and will not make them want to work with you. I’m not saying for one minute that you can’t eat at a wedding fayre, of course you can but move away from your stand if you have to.
  3. Spend the days at on a seat behind your table.
    In body language terms this says I’m not interested in you, I don’t want to talk to you and I don’t want to be here! Ok – maybe you don’t but do you really want your potential customers thinking that?  I know a couple of people that attend wedding fayres regularly and I know they don’t get much business out of it and the whole time they are there they spend texting on their phones or chatting to each other and sat right behind their table out of the way – I kid you not! Are you really surprised they don’t get the business from Wedding Fayres that they should?
  4. You’re there to Sell, Sell, Sell
    The higher the product or service you are selling the less likely you are to make a sale or booking on the day of a wedding fayre, and if thats the reason you are going you’ve got it all wrong. Have you seen the people at Wedding Fayres that are incredibly pushy to the bides and are all buy, buy, buy – is it any wonder everyone just walks straight past them? You need to get clear in your head what you are at the Fayre for – it should be to get leads, nothing more than that and when you get that right you switch off your  ’Buy me now Bride Repeller’ and the whole process becomes much, much easier.


Ok, so those are my top tips for what not to do at a Wedding Fayre so what should you do?  If you want REAL success at Wedding Fairs then I have written a fabulous book on the subject, available in paperback or immediate download find out more here


Claire xoxo