Wedding Business Solutions

Mark Chapman - What's different about online advertising now?

• Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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Are you still advertising like it’s 2005? Have you considered the shift towards AI and platforms like TikTok for attracting today’s couples? In this episode, we discuss the evolving landscape of advertising for wedding professionals and how Performance Max and other strategies can amplify your reach. Explore how your engagement strategy on your website can make lasting impressions on prospective clients.

Listen to this new episode for insights into how modern advertising tactics can help you engage with couples effectively and turn casual browsers into your next clients.

About Mark:  

Mark Chapman is the President of The I Do Society and the wedding industry's leader in paid advertising. His team helps your wedding business reach and convert your ideal couple with Google Ads, Meta Ads and TikTok Ads.   

   For more information visit: http://theidosociety.com/  

   Have a free, 30-minute discovery call with Mark, click this link and mention my name: https://calendly.com/the-i-do-society/membership-inquiry-meeting  

If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or visit my website Podcast.AlanBerg.com 

Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review (thanks, it really does make a difference). If you want to get notifications of new episodes and upcoming workshops and webinars, you can sign up at www.ConnectWithAlanBerg.com  

View the full transcript on Alan’s site: https://alanberg.com/blog/



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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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©2025 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com

So what are the changes? What's happening in the world of advertising these days for wedding and event pros? Well, listen to this episode, find out. Hey, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. I am so happy to have my friend Mark Chapman back on again to talk about what's changed since the last time you were on Mark. So, hey, welcome, welcome. How you doing?

Thank you, Alan. Thanks for having me back to talk about advertising. It's my, my passion, my area of expertise. And there's so much going on in the world of advertising right now and.

And things have changed. Things do feel different. I've been in advertising, you know, for 30 years in the wedding and event industry. And it's, we have to adapt to the customers, adapt to what's happening. But a lot of people, what did I see on Facebook? Somebody said, you have to stop advertising. Like it's 2005.

Yeah, it is no longer 2005, but.

It'S not even 2015 or even 2020 at this point. Right. You have to do. So what do you see and what's the biggest change that you're seeing right now?

You know, something that happened a couple months ago shocked me. Someone said, let me TikTok that. And what they meant was, they're going to search on TikTok for how to learn about it and to find it. And it really blew my mind where I was like, oh, shoot, you know? And let me preface this by saying Google is still the major search engine where so much great activity happens with advertising. But other platforms are starting to creep up there and really get more popular in terms of how couples and brides are searching for what they want to learn about as they're planning their wedding.

Well, the other thing I've been reading about is how they're using AI for searching. And although the search engines have put AI into it. So if you do Google search, you're going to see AI not in every search, but in certain searches. And maybe we could talk about that, but also that they're using ChatGPT or they're using Perplexity or they're using a guy. Use Perplexity now for a search where I need factual information, whereas I use chat GPT if I want reasoning and I want to have this conversation with it. But there was something the other day, I forget what it was my wife and I was something. And I didn't go to Google, I went to Perplexity and it went out. And if you watch it, it's going to tell you how it's thinking.

Right. It goes and it says, okay, I'm going to do. This is what you're looking for. I'm going to. It's really wild. And then it searches 12 different sites, gives you all the different things go, okay, that's better for me right now than Google. So, yeah, how does that affect now people who are relying on Google Ads?

You know, interestingly, Google, you mentioned Google putting AI answers at the top of search results when you're. When people are searching for a small local business is the majority of searches in the wedding industry. Google does not put the AI results there. Google wants the advertising dollar. They want to show the map. And it's actually, it's all still good as of right now. So I don't foresee anything big happening in that sense. So Google's good.

But people of course are using like you're saying AI to summarize information. But when we think about like venues, bridal stores, local photographers and DJs, they still search on Google and none of the AI comes up. And what's happening more on Google is showing the map and how close and how relevant anyway, like physically geographically relevant you are to that business. And that's still all good.

Right. So if they're searching local like that, I also heard if they're searching for somebody specifically by name, like if I'm looking for the I Do Society or if I'm looking for Mark Chapman, I'm not going to get an AI result. Correct?

Correct. That's right.

Okay, but if I'm searching for a. An expert on advertising for wedding businesses, I might. In no location.

Yeah, you might. It depends on like the, you know, Google's obviously learning this and hashing it all out, like what people respond best to. Because at the end of the day, Google's a business and it has to serve ads. And so how the ads are being served are really wild too. Which put a pin in this for later in our conversation. Different campaign types in Google Ads are becoming more effective for businesses in the wedding industry. In the past, just search where you put keywords in your ad comes up in keywords. But now there's other campaign types.

One's called Performance Max. That puts your ads all over the Internet in different ways, like YouTube in Gmail, on search and things like that. So we're doing a lot of testing with Performance Max. And that is something that may interact with AI in the future.

So it's pushing out to people based upon behavior. Then is it, is it kind of Retargeting. If you've searched over here now, you're going to see it everywhere.

That's a great question. It's like the Performance Max campaigns know all about people because a lot of people are logged into a Google account in some way. They have Gmail or something. So it knows all about you and it knows where you spend your time.

Time.

So it's pushing ads out to people based on who they are in the right place at the right time. Which is pretty cool, right?

So retargeting for those who don't know, I'll give you an example. I clicked and bought a pair of pants the other day from an ad that showed up in one of my feeds. Instagram or Facebook. That's where I spent most of my time. And now every other ad is for pants now. Right? Everyone. And not just pants. Right.

But. But it's also specifically for the one that came up that intrigued me was it was for people that are shorter, which is me. It's hard to find pants that I don't have to then bring to the tailor to have shortened. Right. Because the waist is fine, the legs are fine, but you know, my legs are not getting any longer. You're short.

King Alan Berg Sort kids.

That's the phrase. That's it. I can be a lot of things. Taller is not one of them. So it intrigued me because it said, you know, they had pants with a 28 inch length. I'm like, oh, okay, I don't have to go by the 30s and then have two inches taken off of them. That's going to save me money. I'll pay a little more for the pants because of that.

Well, of course, now every other one, although interestingly today one showed up for the tall people and I had to say, no, not for me. Not, not relevant for me. I got my friend Steve Bolar, who's 6 8, he might be interested in that. But sorry, that's not for me. So the algorithm didn't work on those. But. But that's what retargeting is, is like once, once you're searching for something or you know, I look for a printer at Staples website and that printer is just everywhere. Now Staples is showing up everywhere.

That's retargeting based upon behavior. So how is, how is Max different than that?

How is Performance Max different than retargeting? So Performance Max reaches people sort of at the top of the funnel. Like retargeting is when you are tracking people who have been to your website or interacted with your business in some way and you say, hey Google, hey meta, hey TikTok, go show a follow up ad to those people who know something about me already. Performance Max campaigns reach people who don't know anything about you just yet. And one of the cool benefits of that is that we know that as couples are planning their weddings and as they're choosing who's going to come to the wedding, who they're going to hire, they need to see you multiple times in multiple places. That's just how it is. If they don't know anything about you, it's what I call a cold audience. They don't know you, they don't like you, they don't trust you. So advertising, it can be really difficult because you need to convince them that you're amazing and convince them to give you their personal information and book a call with you.

So but Performance Max does a really good job of making sure that you show up in different places around their, their experience on the Internet. And if you do a performance Max campaign, well, where you're not spammy and you're not pushy and you're not like book now I'm the most amazing, it can really do a great job to just help those couples remember that you exist multiple times. And that is so, so, so important for advertising because again, it's a cold audience. They don't know you, they don't like you, they don't trust you. And to get them to click and convert on your website, they need that know like and trust. And Performance Max helps that a lot.

So when you're, you're creating a campaign for somebody for Performance Max, obviously these are different formats, different sizes, different things like that.

That's right.

Is it important to be consistent in the look so that even just the look becomes familiar?

Yeah, you can, you can use images, you can use videos, use text, of course, in your Performance Max campaign. So you want it to be your brand voice, you want it to be your, you upload your logo, you want your images to match, of course, what's on your website. So there's consistency in, in those visuals. Absolutely. It is important to consider what it looks like as well as what it says.

Right. Because I saw the other day in my spam folder because I have to check it every day because sometimes real stuff goes there, including some of my own things, which is kind of wild. And there are some names that are becoming familiar that are spamming me. Right. They're trying to sell me their mailing lists or whatever, but they're using the same person's air quotes, person's name. And it's getting to the point where like, do I know that person? Right. I've seen that name so much becoming familiar. Right.

And then the other one that's always weird and I'm wondering how they get this is. It will be names of people I know or things like that will show up with the spam. So now you're wondering, okay, now how are they, how are they getting all of that in there? But that's a whole nother, whole nother discussion there. Yeah. So let's talk about kind of best practices. Right. Best practices for this. So if you're going to do social ads, you're going to do Google Ads.

What are some of the. The must have. Like these are the basics we can go off onto creative and stuff like that. But what are some of the things that everybody needs to know? Because some people are just, you know, shotgunning and they don't, they're. They're wasting money.

Here's one. I think one of the biggest shocking things that, that people overlook is that being seen in multiple places multiple times is so important. So when we work with folks, we require that they run a Google Ads campaign so that they're found in people search, whether that's performance Max or Google Search. People, when they're searching, they're looking for a solution to the problem answer to their question, but they're searching and like they may click on an ad or click on an organic result or click on the map and then they go back and look at what other venues exist in that area. Because that's the phase that they're in. They're in that discovery phase. If you'd say I'm only going to run Google Ads and that's it, and I'm going to make. And if it doesn't work, that means advertising doesn't work for me.

But it's just not how couples shop. And I think the shocking thing about the most important fundamental here is like multiple places, multiple times. Because couples are making a huge decision. It's huge. Emotionally, it's huge with their money. And if they just see you once on Google and visit your website, awesome. Google did its job, but it's but our job as businesses in the wedding industry. If we want to convert that cold audience, we've got to be seen multiple places multiple times.

So we require folks to run a Google campaign as well as either a meta campaign, which is Facebook and Instagram, or TikTok too, so that then there's A visual follow up and a different type of ad and they see you again in the Internet in a different way. That I think is so important, Alan, for folks to know to like, not, you know, carry, not give advertising a bad name because, oh, it didn't work because I spent $200. But that's just not how couples shop. And that's unfortunate because it does make. It does mean it's a little bit of money. But if you use advertising, you got to do it that way.

And what's a minimum time frame to really say you've given something a shot?

I would say 90 days. If you have a great ad campaign, it can deliver quickly, you know, so you can obviously get quality leads quickly through advertising. But you know, because of how couples shop, they take their time and that's okay. And especially now, I mean, I'm sure you're hearing this all across the board where couples are just taking longer to make decisions. That is the world we live in. And it's different than it was in the past, but it is what it is. And so how we adapt in our different tools is important.

And we are right now in a year after a presidential election year, which does get wonky. And in all the years I've been doing this, every presidential year got. Presidential election year got wonky. But the year after was kind of a normal wedding year in terms of number of weddings and dollars spent, which meant people booked but they had to book later because if they weren't booking in the year before, they had to be booking later to still get married during that year. That's the good news that if you still have open dates, you know, there's good news, there's still people out there that might come to you later. It's bad news when you're looking at the holes in your calendar and, you know, freaking out a little bit. But yeah, but there you go. But you know, it, it is a time where following up some of the basics, like following up, Right, Yeah.

So when somebody does the ad, right, Whether it's just a straight Google Ad or whether they do the performance max or whatever or the, or the meta, what. What are the options somebody can do? They see that ad, it attracts them. Right. First step, right. You know, my four steps to getting more sales, get their attention, get an inquiry, have a conversation, make a sale. So getting their attention, the ad, did it get their attention? Where should that or where could that go next? So I click on that ad and where does, what happens? Where does it go?

It depends on your business. But in the the post click experience is what you're asking whether you use like a dedicated landing page with an offer, some people use those or some people direct ads their home. One thing that's going to be really important to convert a cold audience on that landing page or your website is that you give them the opportunity to start a conversation with you or ask a question without requiring them to fill out 20 form fields in the contact form. And this is equally as important to any advertising advice that I can share is what happens after the click. And so I'm so glad you asked that because what's working right now really well, let's just jump to that. Websites that have a little chat feature that where someone can ask a question. If you're a bridal store, hey, do you have, do you carry this designer? If you're a venue, hey, do you have this data available? If you are a wedding pro and you don't have pricing on your website, like allow people to chat with you to ask about pricing and I know that how frustrating that is to get that pricing question and then they don't respond after that. And that's fine.

It's not a good fit for them. The takeaway here is like allow people to start a conversation with you without divulging all of their personal information and their physical address and stuff like that. Because if, if we think about their journey and say you are a wedding pro and you're not at the top of the list like a venue, they have filled out probably 20 to 30 different contact forms and given their information so many times. And they have what I call form fatigue. They're tired of doing that. They don't want to do that. They just need to get their wedding planned. So make it easy for them.

That is my big takeaway when it comes to like whatever your website looks like, make it easier for people to contact you.

And we've spoken about this with the phone number not being required. Go back to the last episode we did about that.

Nobody wants your phone call, right?

Well and the other thing is we're dealing right now. We are on the cusp between Gen Y and Gen Z. The youngest Gen Ys are 29, the oldest Gen Z's are 28. Our average wedding couple these days is 28 to 30 years old. There you go. So we know that Gen Y is phone averse. We know that Gen Z is even more phone averse. And yet the other day I was having a discussion online with someone where somebody put up a thing was a Planner reached out to a restaurant about asking if they could handle 100 people.

And the restaurant came back and said, let's have a phone call. And the planner said, I don't think so.

No, thank you.

And. And there were both sides here, people, people supporting the planner, people supporting the restaurant. And I said, the. The restaurant didn't answer the question. And I'm not saying the restaurant couldn't ask for a phone call, but answer the question first and say, sure, we can handle. It depends upon the day of the week and the time. You know, can we have a quick call to talk about that? But first, answer the question. And somebody was going back and forth with me, and they were saying, well, the planner is wrong, right? They're totally wrong.

I said, though, they're the customer, and the customer is never wrong. The customer says, I wanted. I want to communicate. First of all, the customer reached out digitally. They're telling you that right off the bat.

This is my preferred method of communication.

But the other thing is the restaurant didn't answer the question first. And then try to continue that maybe changing to the phone, maybe right away, maybe later. And I related a story where I was going to Europe, and I know that square for my credit cards doesn't work in Ireland, doesn't work in the uk actually only works in, in the, in the US and if you have square in Canada, it doesn't work in the US and square in the US doesn't work in Canada unless they've changed that. So I was trying to find somebody that I could take a credit card internationally. PayPal, I have their device, can't do it internationally. There you go. So I reached out to my bank, Chase bank, and I reached out and I said, hey, does your credit card processing work? Your mobile device work internationally? And somebody came back and said, let's have a phone call. And I said, answer the question first.

And if the answer is no, there's nothing to discuss. And if the answer is yes, I would be happy to have a call, but this is a deal breaker. Like, like, like the answer no was. And it turned out it was no. So who. What were we doing here? I think the same thing with the restaurant. If the restaurant, the answer was no. There's no reason for a call if the answer was yes.

And somebody said, well, the fact that the restaurant asked for a call meant that the answer was yes. I said no. My banker asked for a call and the answer was no. Yeah, we can't assume that. And then I saw one just the other day where Their ad on the knot was linking to their website. Their website didn't talk about weddings. Their website, they're, they're, they're banned and they, they do club dates and stuff like that. And now you're going to send people there and there's nothing there about weddings.

Forget the fact that I think there were other things which I told them could be updated on the site. That's a whole nother discuss. But you said, you know, people sending to a homepage versus a landing page. What's your, a dedicated landing page for the ads. What's your preference?

The preference, not the preference, that what works based on data is not my opinion. The example you shared was perfect. Like if you, if you're running an ad for weddings, for your services for weddings, but you do other things too, that's fine. Don't send people who click on your ad for weddings to your homepage that says everything that you do. It's got to go to a dedicated wedding page about your service for weddings. Hands down, 1,000%. Yeah.

Now, now does it have to be a dedicated landing page for the ads or can it be your wedding page or your mitzvah page or your keensay page or whatever?

Over the years it's gone back and forth and honestly it's sort of 50, 50 right now particularly there's a process that we have for venues where we actually have like a, a really great design of a landing page that gives a couple everything they need to learn about the venue and a one page experience to decide if it's for them or not. But for like wedding pros or bridal stores especially, the homepage is the best place because that bride may want to look at like the gallery or like the designers before she makes her appointment or things like that. So there isn't any wrong answer. But the most important thing is that like the experience on the page matches the message of what you put in your ad. If you offered something in your ad or you're talking about how great you are at weddings in your ad, it has to go to a page that supports that message and carries that message through and initiates conversation with people and says, hey, if you want to learn more, there's something you don't see. Here, let me help you. Here's how you can, you can get in touch, chat, text message, fill out the form if you want to. Yeah.

So it's the continuation of the conversation. So it's the continuation of the conversation.

Right. I, I've talked about this, written about this, where marketing is like a relay race. Right. So you put the ad out there, the baton is out there for somebody to grab. They grab it by clicking on it. But now where did it take them? If you take me to their homepage and now I have to guess what you do or I have to choose Again, you've dropped the baton. Right.

Hunt.

Don't make them hunt. Right. And that's another thing. When I'm looking at websites, what are your main services? Now if your main service is weddings and you do corporate or whatever, do I have to click services to find out that you do weddings? That's delaying it. And looking at the page, what's the imagery in this case of this particular band? There was no imagery of a wedding there and I didn't know where to go. Now let's talk about that one page, though. So on that one page, that's going to give them what they need to do to continue the conversation that the ad started to get them to take the next action, which is contacting in that case or making an appointment or whatever they want to do. What are the main elements that you feel should be there?

We've studied this for years and we've tested thousands of landing pages and this is specific to venues. I'll be straightforward about that. So for venues, the main elements are images of the venue and the architecture of the venue. No close ups of couples, no close ups of cakes. You're not a baker, you're not a planner, you're literally a venue. And people are there to find out what does a space look like. So lots of great photos of the space. You're going to have some testimonials and some social proof, we call it.

And those testimonials that you put on the page should be short and sweet. They should have a. If it's a. From. If it's a Google review, like put Google underneath it so people can verify that testimonial. In your Google reviews, it's going to have a succinct, maybe 7 to 10 bullet point list of what makes your venue unique and different. Do you have lodging? Are you all inclusive? Like really tell people and answer those questions about what makes your venue different and unique. And so we've got photos, we've got testimonials, we've got bullet point list.

A little bit about what works really well is tell the story of the venue. Is this a special place that's historic? Is it a family property? Like who. Who are the people behind it? Because even though venues are really a product and people are going to decide if they want that product or not. Like, the people that are there matter a whole lot. And then the last element I would last is having different ways to convert. So in our world, we put three different call to action. Someone can fill out a form if they want to request pricing for their particular date, or they can actually book a tour on that page. We use calendly with a lot of our venues.

So just like click the book a tour button and they book their tour, if that's okay for your venue. Or click to text to ask a simple question. Because some people don't want to fill out a form. A tour might be too much for some couple, but maybe there's like, oh, I just want to ask a question. So those three different ways for someone to convert on the landing page work really well to meet the needs of the couple wherever they're at. Because every couple's at a different space, and that's okay.

What about pricing?

We do, in our world, we require that all of our people that work with us put pricing on at least a starting price in the landing page or like an average cost for the venue on the landing page. There's different people in the industry who have different thoughts about that. I think that what we've experienced is that you get more quality leads, maybe fewer quantity, but if you have more quality leads in your funnel, it's easier for you to manage those leads than trying to chase everyone down who's not the right fit for you.

Right. And it's better for the client as well, because if the. If they're out of the budget, then they shouldn't reach out. They're entitled to have a beautiful wedding. It doesn't have to be at your Absolutely. Right now. I don't like starting prices. I've started, I've written about this because it is the cheapest thing you have and the thing you don't want to sell.

I prefer price ranges because it's called anchoring. And then you can put the most popular. And when people say to me, well, I don't have a price range, I said, everybody's got a price range. Everybody that's ever booked you for anything has a price, therefore you have a price range. And you can have different price ranges for in season, out of season, weekend, not whatever. But a price range is vague enough to give them an idea of what you cost and not specific enough so that they still have to reach out to get their price. So if you said, you know, beautiful weddings here from May through October the most, you know, whatever your busy season is. Right.

Range from 18,000 to 42,000, with our most popular options averaging or starting at 23,000, 28,000, whatever. The. The again, one of the disadvantages to me of a starting price is you might lose a higher end wedding because they think you're not capable of doing that.

So Interesting.

Yeah. So I like the idea of price range because we've all thought about this, right? You're buying something you've never bought, you have no idea what it costs, and you go, can you give me an idea what that costs? And they say, well, I need to know more. It's like, I know, but can you give me an idea? Right? And we've all been there. This is not an age thing. And when you're buying something you bought before, like I just bought a new laptop, I had an idea what it cost. It actually ended up costing less than I thought, believe it or not, that six years later my MacBook with every box checked, cost less than it did six years ago.

Which is kind of crazy.

Which is great. Not a lot less. I'm not going to say a lot less, but I expected it to be more. So I said it's going to be about $3,000. It was 2,800. Okay, there you go. I knew that already, but the first time I bought a MacBook, I had no idea. And it says they start at 1395.

Back then when you walk out the.

Door at 3000 plus.

$3000.

Yeah.

Right. With, with everything on there right now I have that idea. And that's called framing. Right. We've bought something before. Like if you need a new headset or I need new AirPods, I got an idea what that costs. I might be wrong a little bit. Right.

But you're buying something you've never bought before. That idea of that. Now I like people to have that on their website because we know that Gen Y and Gen Z have grown up in a world where they can find pricing for just about anything online. Yeah, that's their world. So the idea of going on and not seeing any price, what you don't know is who you're losing because there's no price there. What you do know is the people that are reaching out that can't afford you because you said, hey, come on in. And do you really want to have tours? Especially if you're going to have the, the book a tour button. Do you really want to have tours with people only to find out later that they can't afford it, and yes, I know there's somebody listening that's going, yeah, but I'm able to talk them up from, you know, from 15,000 to 18,000.

Right. You talk them into the bottom of your range. Isn't it better to take someone who's in your range and talk them up for better results that are more than to talk them into your range, better use of your time?

So I agree 1000%. Ellen, like the pudding. When I say starting pricing, like, that's like the bare minimum. Like, most of what we do is like, there is, there is a range, there's different seasonality to it. And we, we prefer more robust information about pricing on that landing page than less. What I found is there's a lot of resistance to folks in the industry or folks that we work with who are like, you know what, I've got my strategy. And like, I'm not, I'm not, not going to force anything on anyone. But to your point, like, and I want to actually, really quickly before we wrap this, this thought up, like, when we talk about pricing, when you have referrals and warm leads or someone, a planner or someone else is giving you that lead and you don't have pricing on your website, but like, they felt the form anyway, like, they found out your pricing from someone else.

And so in my context with the world of advertising, if it's a cold audience and they don't know anything about you yet, that pricing information is so important because if they don't know anything about you, they don't like you, they don't trust you. If they don't have a framework for pricing, they're not going to convert and they're not going to become a quality lead. So that, that's my soapbox when it comes to like that and advertising.

Well, but again, it's a consumer behavior, right? Like you, you'll never see the person that came to your site and left because there wasn't the price there. And if you just ask yourself, have you ever looked on a site, there was no pricing and then you went to look at another site and there was pricing and you never came back, right? Yeah, Right. So, you know, I have it with these, the Google Ads, I'll just use the pants. Because that one just came up, right. Another one came up and it said specifically Forbes, people of shorter stature. I'm like, cool, but give me an idea. The other one told me it was, you know, $79 or whatever it was for the pants. Well, then I get there and I see that it's in $150 or whatever, which is like double what the other ones were.

And I'm like, kind of wish I knew that before coming. Right?

Like, yeah, you wasted your time.

Now it might be fine if I expected to spend $150 for pants, but the anchor was set with the other one at 79. Right. And then there's another one that came up at 19. I'm like, okay, there's a catch here. There's definitely a catch here. Well, the catch is you, you sign up and then monthly they're going to send you stuff or something like that. It was like, okay, tell me that up front. Right?

Yeah.

So. Or what is it in the apps in app purchases, right? Like, you get the app for free, but then it's in app purchases, right? There you go. All right. So going back to these calls to action. Right? Well, no, actually, I want to go back to what you said about the description of. Tell me a little bit about the venue. And this is where I've been using AI with my clients actually, with their social proof.

Yeah. Up.

Uploading as many of your reviews as you can. And if you ask ChatGPT, write me, write me a short paragraph that describes the kind of results a couple can expect when they choose our venue. Use the you voice, right, and speak about results and then edit it. Always, always edit that. Right. But that will come up with that short paragraph for you. Not in your words because you're biased. Right? You're going to talk about your service.

We love our service. Our service is great. And your reviews are raving about your food. It's going to come up and say, well, people love their service. What they really rave about is their food.

Right?

So that's an interesting way if you're, if you're one of those people that's stuck with what are my words here? Right? The social proof. Hugely important. The short, like you said. But this is another way to use social proof because it's your content, right? People gave it to you. They said, this is what we've experienced. And the beauty of it is they're talking about the results they've already experienced. So when that this writes this, it's not writing about, like, the promise. We think we could do this for you.

No, this is what we actually do.

And it's proven. I love that. I love the idea. There's so many uses for chat, GPT, and especially, like, what you're saying is like summarizing and condensing things that are not your perspective. Because as A business owner. We are all too close to our own businesses to see them for what they're at. But how great do if we have a bunch of reviews on ChatGPT to put those together? Because if, if I see another website that says have the wedding of your dreams as the headline of the website, I think I'm gonna lose my mind. Like, no, stop.

Like it is so important to tell what makes you different. What do you offer that someone can't get anywhere else? And you make that the headline of your website and sometimes it's a tool like ChatGPT that helps you discover that from your reviews.

Absolutely. I think we all need to do that. I've done it myself. I've also taken the wording on my website, run it through and said could you update this for a Gen Y, Gen Z audience? Because I wrote it and I thought it was fine. Fortunately it didn't change that much, which was good, right? I do not tell it to write it for Gen Z because then I can't read it because then too much. Well again I was told I had risen. I had to find out that that was actually good. So all right, there you're.

But what was no cap. I still don't. What's no cap? I forget what that is. I have to look. I actually have a slangomatic generational translator I bought because it came up my feed. So but, but the idea here of using using your social proof with your. Or using ChatGPT with, with your own content and I've spoken about this on a podcast a year ago I didn't use it. I didn't use AI at all because I'm a content creator.

I've just published my 12th book. My 13th one is in public is, is in production now. They were doing the layout and stuff like that. I have over 300 podcasts. I can create content. Like I, I'm okay with that, right? But when I learned how to use it with my own content and with my clients content, competitive analysis. Upload your own reviews, upload your competitors reviews and ask it to tell you what's different about your results versus theirs. Because your venue, your DJ services, your photography services, your invitation services don't look that much different when you list out the bullets.

But when you list out what makes us different in the eyes of our customers. Now even though you all have five star reviews, they all have five star reviews. It looks different there. So. All right, so let's go back to the, the calls to action. I love that you said give them multiple Ways to contact you, because we need to do that. Also, that we need to give them a soft way to contact you that doesn't say, book us now, book a tour. You're given the option to book a tour if it's a venue, but it's not the only thing that you're asking for.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

And not a phone call.

Yeah. And here's what giving multiple calls to action does, Alan. And there was a day 10 years ago where I would tell you absolutely no, one call to action is the only thing to do. Blah, blah, blah. We are in a different world. And I am excited to have as well. But the presence of multiple calls to action builds a subconscious sense of trust where people are more likely to fill out that form and give you their personal information if they know they could text you if they wanted to, if they knew they could book a tour if they wanted to. And it's fascinating how that works.

It's like, hey, if the doors of this, this business, this venue are open, I contact them however I want to. But you know what? I probably know the most direct answer to getting what I need is going to fill out this form. They're going to fill out the form more simply by having those other options there. It's psychological. It's awesome.

And they're signaling to you. This is the best way to contact me because they reached out. Now, you and I have spoken about this, and I changed it on my form. In the. In the phone field, it says put your phone number if you prefer texting. Yeah, I did that there. And I do get text, and they're there. But.

But adding the text widget to my site is really what increased my text because I've had in. In the. In the wording on the site, it said call me, text me, email me. And they've been links for years. But when I added the widget that is like a chat widget, but it's a text widget, it says it's text. And the reason is it's not live. Right. Like, I may not respond to you right away because I'm likely on a plane, I'm likely on a stage or something like that.

I don't want to set that expectation. But I also get Facebook Messages, Instagram messages, LinkedIn messages. You know, I get these other messages as well. And there I'm going to respond that way because that's how you're signaling to me. Will I change that? Sometimes? And then sometimes not. Sometimes it'd just be like, hey, we're having A conversation here and that, that was kind of my point to that restaurant and planner thing was the planner started a conversation by emailing. The restaurant chose to add friction by trying to change that too soon. So, so let's, let's just reiterate something we've spoken about already.

That contact form on that landing page, what are the fields?

Name and then email address, phone number, what else is there for a free venue? Wedding date like preferred wedding date's pretty important obviously because that's connecting if the venue is available. And then we've actually had a new one Alan which is really fun. We did a lot of testing and we decided this was the way to go. We added a dropdown to indicate to ask the person filling out the form to tell the venue who they are and where they're at in their journey. So the examples are I'm not engaged yet. I am help, I'm searching, I'm helping someone else find a venue. I'm engaged and I'm looking to tour multiple different venues or venue XYZ is at the top of my list. I want to book a tour now.

So typically we would say adding more form fields is no bueno. Like you create a lot of friction. This one where we did testing, we added this and we tested it across many landing pages and what we found was that the conversion rate in the landing page stayed the same but the venue got more information about who was filling out the form. So because some venues have these automations where they're like oh, congratulations on your engagement. Well like if you're not engaged yet and they just told you that, oops. And so giving more context of who the person is allowed the allows the venue to see. But where we started this conversation was about phone numbers and form fields. Fields and like we do not require the phone number to be filled in but we, we say fill in the phone number if you prefer to be texted and that indicates to the person receiving the lead, hey, this is that, this is this lead's preferred method of communication.

Text them, do not Send them a 10 page email. Send them a text message and say.

Hello, be a human right now do you give them a box to tell something? Is there like an open field?

We don't, we found that that drop down of like who are you and where are you at your journey is enough.

Yeah, okay, okay, I like that. And if you do have automations they can trigger different things. Like if it's, I'm helping someone, your automation could be oh it's so great that you're helping, you're helping your, you know, your, your friends, family, whatever. Yeah, do that. So I love that because it's, and I think it's also the way you word it. You word it in a very friendly way and instead of very data driven, even though it is data driven for us, but in a very friendly way. And I think that's important in a lot of the wording and a lot of what I see on people's sites is still too formal. And we are not in a formal world even for corporate.

We're not in a formal world. You're dealing again, you're older. Gen Ys now are 40 years old. So there's a good chance that who you're dealing with at a corporate, for a holiday party, whatever, because people listen, don't just do weddings that that person is pretty likely going to be a Gen Y. They might be a Gen X. Right. But they might be a younger Gen X with gen Y tendencies. Right.

We can go get into all that kind of stuff over there. One more thing for the venue. Wedding date. Do you have a thing to indicate that they're flexible on their date?

It's, yeah, it's not like a form field where you have to pick a specific date. It's, it's like it says preferred wedding date and they type it in. And so it ends up being like they could type in words, they could type in numbers. It allows them to type in whatever they want. Which I know for some CRM systems can be frustrating, but that's about like, I don't know, like that's about us. Right? Like that's making it easy for us. But we, what we want to do is we make it, want to make it easy for that person who came from an ad who doesn't know anything about you. Like don't force them to pick a date that's not actually their date.

So what about, what about a date field? That is a calendar with a box that they can check that says date flex. Flexible.

Interesting.

See I, I, I like that as a visual because they're able to say I'm flexible or not. And if you do that, please have your calendar start with today. Don't have it start with 2000 and you know, 17 or something like that. I had one just recently that it came up like that. And not to get political, but there was something with, you know, people are 150, they're getting Social Security was because the default date was, was 150 years ago. If you don't put A date in. That's what it was. And it was just, it was messing up the data that way.

So you want it, but you don't want me to have to start choosing the year except if it's in the future. Right. Like it should start at 2025. Let's go into it. But these, these are the things that could make you seem out of touch. Right. Like an older. A website that is not mobile friendly.

And I wish I could stop saying that these days, but I still can't stop saying that.

It's 2025 and we still are. Huh?

We still are. You know, it's. I understand the friction for the business. It costs money and time to create a new website. But I like to say that if you think your website is a little out of date, it's costing you more in lost business than the new site's going to cost you.

Sure. I mean, that's what it is. So. All right, so as far as what's different, let's circle back around to the beginning. What's different in advertising these days? You have this performance max over there in terms of these things apply what we spoke about. Instagram, TikTok, Google, Facebook.

Yep. I think circling back to like the difference in advertising too, we mentioned TikTok people. Someone said to me like, oh, let me tick tock that. And that like lit up a whole world for me, which was pretty amazing. TikTok just recently launched search ads, which is pretty cool. TikTok also just this last week decided that it wasn't going to force Advertisers to pay $20 a day as its minimum budget. Now you can pay $5 a day. So it's opening of new world for, for small businesses in the wedding industry to get in there and to really wow people with short form video.

And then one of the other big biggest takeaways, I want to make sure that your audience hears about advertising is that when you DIY your ads and you follow whatever Google or Meta or TikTok told you to do, it's a huge, it can be a huge mistake. If you're going to DIY your ads, you need to take time to learn the platforms. And I want to plant one seed of what's called bidding algorithms or bidding strategies. These platforms say, hey, do you want to pay money for sales? Do you want to pay money for leads? Do you want to pay money for traffic? And it's very tempting to say, of course I want to pay money for leads. Like here's my money, get some leads. But what these platforms don't tell you is if you aren't tracking leads already on your website and feeding lead data into the platform before you pay it money, the algorithm can't do it, can't find the people that are going to become a lead because it has no data to build on. So learn the platforms before you DIY it. Spend the time to figure out what these bidding strategies is.

The overarching term is before you put your money there because you're going to put some money into it, you're going to say, I paid Meta for leads, I didn't get any leads. It wasn't Meta's fault, it was yours for not understanding how it works. No judgment, but that's big.

Well, but that's with advertising in general. It's not set it and forget it. Right? No matter what the platform is, it really is. And then it's that handoff to your website or if they get to your storefront on the knot or Wedding Wire or Zoller, whatever it is, you know, you have to complete that. You know, if you have incomplete information, people are going to move on to somebody who's got complete information. I did a webinar on that for Wedding Pro last year for that. We'll be talking about that more because it's going to start affecting the algorithm where the people that have completed the information are going to show up more because they are giving better experience to the users, which is what the platform is trying to do there. And then your website, you know, your website has to have that as well.

Not just this landing page, but you need to have those kind of calls to action on every page. You need to have the great photos on every page. You need to have the social proof on every page. You need to have the you voice talking about results on every page so it all fits together. And then you have to have reasonable expectations about what, what to get from it. And it's really about conversion. I hate when somebody comes and says, oh, that's expensive. Well, you talked about $5 a day versus $20 a day on TikTok, right? So $20 a day is $600 a month.

Is that expensive? I can't tell you that because that, that's an incomplete information to say it's $600 a month, you know, what did it bring you? And then, you know, what does that bring you? Because we have the residuals for all that kind of stuff. So what, you know, $5 a day, I think you had said on a previous one, if you want to Try a platform. It's got to be 10, $15 a day. Right. To get any kind of real good idea.

And this is. I'm glad you asked. Context for why I'm excited about $5 a day on TikTok is because like TikTok should not be your only advertising outlet where you expect to get a bunch of leads because people are not on there necessarily to like find their dream wedding venue. They're excited to learn about venues and look at videos and see the tour and see the drone flyover video and things like that. But $5 a day on TikTok when paired with a really powerful Google Ads campaign that matches when someone searches for barn wedding venue in New Hampshire and they found your barn wedding venue in New Hampshire and then they see your video on TikTok, then it's powerful together. You're right. You have to have a budget of really. We recommend about a thousand dollars a month so that couples do see you in multiple places multiple times.

No matter what type of business you are, they've got to see you a couple times.

Right. And then make sure wherever they can see you that you are up to date with your photos, that you have current reviews. I, I see all the time. I have people that are on the NAD or wedding wire. Some are paid, some are not. And I, I'm going to a client actually this week. And you know, 2021 of one of their profiles is the most recent. No responses.

Look at their Google. They've responded to every Google review. They have current Google reviews. I said, yeah, but you know what happens when you search for Google, search them on Google. It shows the not reviews profile.

Yeah.

And then you can click there to see old reviews. Right. So now all of a sudden you're, you're not, you're not walking a mile in their shoes. So you and I could definitely talk forever about this. That's why you've been on so many times. So is the offer still good if somebody wants 30 minutes with you to find out what they're doing?

Absolutely. If you're DIYing your ads, especially like, let's talk, share your screen with me. I'd love to look at your ad campaigns and say, hey, you know what? This was a wonderful thing. This was maybe a mistake that was made by following Google's advice or whatever. Like, please reach out. Happy to do it. I'm fascinated by it anytime.

Well, we appreciate that now that I put you on the spot for that, but thank you. Thanks for joining. Check out the, check out all the links in the show notes here, but it is the idosociety.com that's correct.

Theidosociety.com There we go.

Mark, thank you for joining me again.

Thanks, Alan


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.

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Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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