A little advice please

[EmmaLou80]

Hi Everyone,

I have been reading this forum over the last couple of months and you all give such good advice and I was wondering if you could assist me at all.

We (My business partner and I) have recently launched our website which is designed to help couples save money when planning their wedding.

It features special offers from all types of wedding related suppliers in the UK. Each offer provides a company description, Logo, Offer description and then a link through to the suppliers website.

We have been offering free advertising space in order to raise our profile and currently have over 10 offers on the site.

One of the main features of our website is our email alert which we are hoping to be able to send on a weekly/monthly (not too sure yet) in which we will also email the top 20 offers to all of our subscribers too.

We will not be offering this until we have a large number of Brides/Grooms registered to receive this alert to ensure that the suppliers offer is being sent to a wide audience.

We are taking out an advert in a national wedding magazine next month and are currently listed on 8 wedding directories.

As we are both still working full time and we didn't want to take out any business loans etc, we are funding this all (Advertising & Website design/build etc) ourselves so we do need to be economical.

Can anyone offer any advice on how we could get our name out there to Brides & Grooms and alert them to this service we are offering?

We would be very interested to hear of any PR company recommendations too as so far, with the quotes we have received, this idea has been too expensive to consider.

Many thanks in advance for any help or advice.

(I wasn't sure if I could include our website address so have left this out but please let me know if we are and I will post it)

Emma

 

[Kernowman]

I have a question to ask first Emma and that is where is your income derived from this website?

 

[EmmaLou80]

Hi Kernowman,

We will be charging the wedding suppliers to advertise their offer on our website so this is where our income will come from. We are also adding a directory to our website in the next few days so this too will provide income.

Many thanks,
Emma

 

[Kernowman]

One good source of business is your local newspapers. Very often they do features for weddings and their planning, so ask your local papers (they are usually Group publications as well) when they are going to do their next feature and ask for an inclusion or do an advertorial if you are good at copywriting.

It is very difficult to pinpoint wedding planners at an early stage. Bit of a long shot, but maybe talk to some independent jewellers to tip you the wink when couples buy their engagement rings, or get yourself some reciprocal links to holiday websites where they specialise in honeymoons, or wedding photographers perhaps, wedding car hire too?

 

[crossdaz]

You'll have to get a lot of advertisers and to get a lot of advertisers you'll have to have something to offer them - regular subscribers to your newsletters.

To get regular subscribers to your newsletters you'll need a lot of advertisers with offers.

Can you see the problem here?

 

[Bri]

I'll follow this one with interest and see how it pans out.

 

[EmmaLou80]

That's great advice Kernowman - Thank you very much! I will get looking into both of those ideas. I work quite near to Hatton Gardens so it may be worth taking a trip. Thank you!

Crossdaz - I do see the problem - it's very tricky. We have been offering free advertising to encourage suppliers (which has worked very well!) so it may be a case of offering more free advertising space until it fully takes off (Fingers crossed!). Then it's just the job of targeting the subscribers!

Many thanks again for the advice - I do really appreciate it.

Emma

 

[Chris Ashdown]

I would suggest to keep the free directory so you have the fullest lists to bring in more people

To make money offer extended links to their web site and or a extended page on your site

 

[OldWelshGuy]

we built our Florida site by allowing people to advertise free, then tracking all the enquirties they got. we then mailed those who hit a decent level of say 50 enquiries. those that didn't get to that level, we allowed to stay in anyhow, as we wouldn't want them to pay for something that wasn't working.

It worked out well in the end.