Why Your Wedding Business Needs a Facebook Fan Page

With Social Networking, Facebook and Twitter being household names, it's surprising that many wedding related businesses still have not embraced the trend and created a Facebook Fan Page!

Many small business owners still believe that Facebook is just for connecting with old friends and not for business. I bet you'd change your mind if you knew that many of your favorite businesses have very active Facebook pages with huge numbers of fans. Here are a few favorites: Target: 906,567 fans, Whole Foods 199,789 fans and Old Navy 417,795 fans.

If you're still not convinced, here's a list of 5 reasons why you need to create your Facebook fan page today...

• Facebook has more than 400 million users. 35 million users update their status every day. 50% of active users log on to Facebook each day. More than 20 millions users become fans of Pages each day.
• Facebook pages are public pages and can be viewed by anyone.  Content on your page can be indexed by search engines and your page will show up in organic search results.  When I googled our company name, our facebook page showed up on page 1, 2 and 3 of the search results.
• When a facebook user becomes a fan, this information is announced in their news feed for all their friends to see! 
• Messages can be sent to all fans with one quick email.  A fan page is great way to build a network and database of customers (or potential customers) all with a common interest.
• You can easily link your blog to your fan page. Each time you update your blog the post will be show as a note on the wall of your fan page. This note will then be posted on the news feed of all your fans.

Sounds too good to be true - but within just a few minutes you can create your fan page and start to attract new customers today.

5 Ways To Help Brides Overcome Their Fear of Spending and Charge What You Are Worth

In this tough economy, most of us have met with couples who just can not justify spending more of their hard earned wedding budget on our services! Many couples feel guilty about spending such a large amount of money on themselves and some are just not able to spend as much as they'd like to.

With wedding spending down by 10.2% in 2009 (as reported by The Wedding Report)  we've all thought about lowering our prices.  In fact most wedding professionals think that the easiest way to book more business in a tight economy is to lower their price. What most people don't think about is the effect this will have on their business once the economy recovers - as well as what charging rock bottom rates will do to their self esteem!

So before you rush and do something drastic - read on.  The good news is that there are many easy ways to justify your price and the necessity of your services:

1. Create a payment (or prepayment) plan and make it easy for brides to do business with you.  Consider breaking down your fee into 3 payments: one due when the contract is signed, one 2 weeks before the wedding and the final payment on the day of the wedding. If you are a photographer or videographer you could even break your payment down into 4 payments with the final payment due when they collect their finished program.
2. Consider reducing the initial deposit.  Take a tip from you local car dealership as they do this all the time. Offers like "just $999 due at signing" make it easy for car buyers to walk off the lot with a brand new car with a small down payment and monthly payments. Remember that marketing and business strategies can easily be borrowed from other industries.
3. Stress the quality of your services. Have you won any awards? Have you worked with any high profile clients?  Have you received any local media attention? Positive publicity of any kind will only help solidify your worth and justify your price.
4. Although all brides understand that their wedding is a once in a lifetime event, it never hurts to mention it again. If you offer photo or video services, remind the couple that they'll have these memories for years to come and they'll be treasured by their children, grandparents as well as relatives and friends who were unable to attend the wedding.
5.  Find out what elements of your services or products are most important to the couple. Create a custom "no frills" package which offers exactly what they want and leave out all the extra's. Remember - every car dealer offers a standard model without any extra's. 

Implement a few of our strategies and you'll be able to charge what your services are really worth while keeping the wedding couple smiling!

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