Wedding Business Solutions

Are you having trouble standing out in a crowd?

• Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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Are you having trouble standing out in a crowd?

In a market flooded with elopements and micro-weddings, are you finding it challenging to make your specialized venue easy to find online? Is the term "micro" confusing your potential clients due to varying definitions? In this episode, I discuss strategies to clearly communicate what sets you apart, and how to attract the right customers by speaking their language.

Listen to this new 9-minute episode for practical advice on making your unique offerings stand out and improving your online visibility.

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I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

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©2024 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com

Are you having trouble standing out in a crowd? Listen to this episode. See where I'm going. Hi, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. This is an ask me anything suggestion by Daniel, who said during the pandemic, a lot of venues began to offer elopements and micro weddings out of necessity. One consequence is it's becoming a greater challenge for those of us with specialized micro venues to be easy to find online. Another is the term quotes micro being used for events with up to 100 guests. What suggestions might you consider to help smaller operations like ours to stand out in the crowd? So Daniel, thank you for that suggestion.


And again, Daniel did this through podcast dot allenburg.com dot. There's a button there where you can do ask me anything. And some of these I'm going to tack on to the end of episodes. And some I'm going to do like a full episode here. So I think this brings up a bigger question, Daniel. It's not just for smaller businesses. It's just for businesses in general. Just imagine if you are a, let's say a photographer in a major city in Chicago or in San Francisco or something.


There's so much noise, so many other people that are competing for those same keywords and things, you'll have a similar challenge which is standing out online, especially with SEO. So if that's what you're talking about here, the term micro is being used for a lot of things. That has a couple of implications for you. One is the confusion as to what micro means, because there isn't a definition that's universally accepted. Up to 100 guests to me is not micro. Micro for me is up to 25 guests. That's what micro is. Small might be 50, on the smaller side might be 100.


When the average wedding is about 130 guests or thereabouts, give or take 100, certainly isn't micro up to 100? Way below that. There's a confusion, I think, where you need to be very clear in your marketing and on your website what you mean by micro and speaking the language of the people that you're going after. I did this with somebody yesterday where we were talking on the website and looking at the language, and I said, what are the words and phrases that people use when they reach out to you and they're having a conversation with you about what they need. What words and phrases did they use? Because a lot of times we use industry terms or more generic terms, and they're not the words that people are actually using. The number one way that people search on Google and YouTube. And Google owns YouTube, so it's the two biggest search engines in the world. The number one way people search is with questions. So I like to put those questions on the website and you might even say, what is a micro wedding? And then you can have your definition.


Now you have that phrase. And if somebody is searching for a micro wedding, hopefully you'll show up. Yes, some of those other places might as well. But think about this. If somebody's looking to have a wedding for 25 people or 30 people or 20 or whatever the number you define as micro, and they go look at this other place that can handle 200 people and they say, we do micro weddings up to 100, you're still more likely to get their interest because you're talking, I'm a specialist in what you need, not a generalist. Technically, if your room handles 200, you could handle a wedding of ten. You get lost in there, but you can handle it ten. And I do have clients that have bigger rooms and smaller rooms and bigger spaces and smaller spaces and some multiple, and that's fine.


But the confusion here in terms you're not going to stop somebody else from calling it micro with up to 100 guests, I would hope that's the exception. But what you really need to do is specialize in what you do. Look at the words and phrases that people are using. There are keyword tools out there. You might even be able to get this with chat, GPT and some others and ask for, you know, what are the most common questions. You might do that with Google's AI because they are Google. You could do it with Microsoft's because they are bing and they might be able to tell you some of the more popular phrases. Plus there are keyword tools for that.


But in general trying to stand out, you have to ask yourself, where is my audience looking for me? What are the words and phrases that they're using? What are the visuals that are going to attract them? Because the first step to getting more sales, I talk about this if you're watching on video, I have these cards that I give out at trade shows. These are kind of my six inch circle business cards here. The four steps to more sales are first getting their attention. If they don't know he exists, nothing else happens. Then you get to have a conversation, then you get to, sorry, first you let me step back. You get the attention, you get the inquiry, then you have the conversation, then you have the sale. So attention, inquiry, conversation, sale. If you don't get their attention, nothing else happens.


So if all you're trying to do is get noticed on SEO. So free. Somebody just doing searches, you're competing with everybody else who's looking for those same couples, those same businesses. Depending on what you do, it doesn't matter whether you're a dog grooming business or a wedding or an event business, you're still competing with other people who are trying to get that same customer. So SEO is one way of getting their attention. Those words and phrases have to appear on your site. They have to appear in context because the search engines are getting smarter and they're not just looking for the appearance of the words and phrases, but in the context. So you can't just dump words and phrases and stuff them in there, right? And then once they get there, you need to grab their attention with great visuals, have text that talks to them about the results that they want.


I don't. They're not talking about you. They care about their experience more than yours. Then you have to encourage them to make an inquiry and make it easy to do so. A site that I was reviewing yesterday, there just weren't enough calls to action. It's very common that I see that you have some good information, but you don't actually tell them what to do and make it easy. Or you have buttons that say things like book us now when it's just a contact form or read more, learn more. And you don't know what's going to happen when you click on that.


So standing out is first getting their attention. Now, if you're trying to do everything free, you have to say, this is what I'm going to get. I'm always competing against these other companies that are trying to get things free and companies that are paying for those keywords that are going to show up higher than you in search results anyway. So you need to be able to invest in your business the way that you want people to invest in you. So pick the right platforms. Do pay for ads so you'll get in front of people that don't already know you. Make sure if you're doing social ads and things that you take them to a landing page so that there's a clear message that they clicked on an ad somewhere, it took them to something that continues that conversation. And then there's a contact form on that page so they can contact you right from there.


And then don't forget the social proof. Look at the reviews and look at the words and phrases in those reviews to see what do people say when they talk about your business. If you looked on Weddingwire recently and you look at the top of the reviews, you'll see there's an AI summary. And this has been an age old problem where what happens when everybody has five star reviews or so many companies have 4.84.95 star. How do you really differentiate one five star company from another? And the way that they've figured to do it using AI is the AI does a summary of what's in the reviews and puts that at the top. So now you can see in general in these 1020 5100, 201,000 2000 reviews. This is the common theme of what people love about or say about this company. Hopefully love, but say about this company.


You should be doing the same thing, reading that. Certainly if you're on wedding wire, you can read it there. I had a client yesterday who told me that they dumped all of their stuff into AI and had it do that for them. What is our company? What do people say about us? What do people think about us? And that's a great way to summarize all of these things using chat, GPT or something, where you're summarizing and understanding what people say about you, and then what you want to look for is what makes us different? And how do we express that on our website and in our marketing? And that might help you with the what makes us different? Because it's what people say about you. And then using those words and phrases on your website and in your marketing to say, this is our unique selling proposition. This is the results that people tell us that they've gotten from us. And that should be different words and phrases than other people are using and hopefully attract the kind of people you're looking for because they're looking for those same type of results. So again, thank you, Daniel, for the suggestion.


Everybody, keep those suggestions coming. Go to podcast dot allenburg.com. there's a button right there. Ask me anything. Click that. It's just a quick little form where you tell me what you want me to talk about, whether it's just a simple question or something that can turn into a, you know, a whole topic like this. So thanks for the suggestion. Thanks for listening.



See you on the next episode.


I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or you can  text, use the short form on this page, or call +1.732.422.6362, international 001 732 422 6362. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2024 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com