WEEK 12 A: Analyzing Online Marketing

Facebook Ads

As far as ads that pop up on my Facebook home screen on my personal account I see the Ad that I have for Weddings all the time. I don’t click on it or like it because we pay for that, so there’s no reason for me to like it. Ads that I see usually have to do with fitness and fitness clothing. These call to actions are to purchase goods at a discounted rate. I look at the reviews that others have left before I click on the ads because I don’t want to continue to see them. I only follow the ad if it’s something I’m truly interested in. I’m more likely to click on a Facebook ad than I am with an Instagram ad.

With traditional advertising I feel like you don't really have a choice on whether or not you are going to see it, it's just stuck on your screen for a few days until the algorithm takes the hint that you are not interested. With facebook it stays in front of you until their campaign is over but they give you just enough information that you have to click on the add to find out more. I think facebook is slightly more effective for me. 

Businesses similar to mine.. 

I viewed the Grand Traditions Estate and their Instagram has a lot of really pretty wedding photos of both the venue and wedding party. Their pictures are top notch, but they are also a higher price point than we are so I assume their couples can afford better photos. 

The Inn at Rancho Santa Fe has really elaborate weddings but their weddings were not highlighted at all on Facebook or Instagram.The ad that they were currently running is for a christmas dinner the call to action button is "Interested". I found that to be interesting, they do more posts about what is happening around their property and spa specials. May be they don’t need to advertise as much on social media platforms and focus more on wedding sites so they can market to a higher price point. But if I was a bride looking for a place The Inn would not jump out at me. The photo’s they have on their actual website are quite stunning though.

San Diego Ranch Wedding- The Bradford Ranch has a pretty good face book it starts with photos, reviews, videos, events and posts. The posts are all neat and not too cluttered. They do a nice job of posting every two weeks or more frequent. Only downfall is that they do not have much traction on their comments. Their call to action button was "Learn More".

The Park Hyatt Aviara on Twitter does not have a wedding call to action. The hotel itself has an overall call to action that is “Join us for…”. I would say this is a photographic advertisement site but they do a decent job of keeping up with twitter and having really nice photos, which they should because they are a chain. I don’t think their twitter account is terribly effective. But it’s pretty!

Week 11 B

 After further research Linked In is not something that Twin Oaks Weddings is going to look into for the time being. Our golf course has a Yelp page that we do not pay for so we have limited access to what we can post on there. We have a few wedding reviews, but from our experiance getting reviews on WeddingWire and the Knot are more important. These sites generate more leads than Yelp. For golf though - Yelp is very helpful. I can't post any deals for weddings on Yelp but I did post one in WeddingWire - 

I have been better about posting on Google+ and getting involved with various wedding communities. The communities are so massive that it's a bit of a turn off and not many of our prefered vendors or local competitors really use Google+. I know it's good to use for SEO and good placement, it's just kind of confusing. 

We have had several Groupon deals for our golf side and it's great because everyone knows about groupon. It's called Intro2Golf, that gets a lot of traction. The down fall of groupon is that they take a large chunk of the money from the sale. Another thing that is bad about Groupon from our experience is that it is hard to get a coupon taken down. Until recently we did not know that we had a deal floating around in New Mexico for a course that had already closed for the season. I had to tell the guest the bad news that we were already closed and that the coupon was old but we would still honor it of course. It took about a month to get through to Groupon and have them remove the deal. We had already requested for it to be taken down the previous year but that never happened. Not sure if we just had terrible luck with them or if this is a common experience. On a personal level when I see good groupons to salons i just call and ask if I should buy the groupon or if they will honor the deal so they get the full amount of money. 

I attempted to post a deal on RetailMeNot for the Golf Course about our 20/30 club, but it looks like it did not make it. I need to further research how to get an add on there.  

Twitter Week 8 Post B

The two lists that I created are Wedding Planners and San Diego photographers. I picked the wedding planners because they are well known in the area and have a large following if I can see what they are tweeting about then I can have a better idea of what is trending. I follow the photographers to also see what is trending and hope that they have posted some of the pictures they have taken at our venue. It’s surprisingly hard to get photographers to send photo’s of events they have done.

My tweets are most viewed on Wednesday and Saturdays, I thought they would have a higher following on Fridays. I linked my instagram to Twitter so whenever I use #weddingsattwinoaks the photos automatically go to Twitter as an original post and the picture looks nice. I do this so my twitter is updating as often as instagram. 

The words I used to find my list members were “weddings, at twin oaks, san diego photographers, san marcos weddings, san diego wedding planners, wedding planners” for the most part these were all very helpful key terms. Unfortunately people have not really tweeted about us, but I also just set up this Twitter account when I enrolled in this class so we had no activity on this platform.

  

Week 11: Tapping into the Other Medias A

The marketing tools that I believe are important for my business are Yelp, Google+, LinkedIn and coupons.

We currently use Yelp, but it's a shared account with our golf course so we don't have a dedicated wedding yelp page.Having a dedicated Yelp wedding page would not do a hole lot for us because there are already websites out there like weddingwire.com and theknot.com.

I will start putting more effort in to Google+ because I think if could help boost publicity. If we get more of a presence and build an alliance with photographers then that could bring a lot of brides in. If brides see amazing pictures then they may contact that photographer inquiring about the photographer and what the venue is. It would also be good to see how other wedding venues sell and market their venue.
This is our google+ site https://plus.google.com/114182860726320774798

We advertise on various websites and use coupons when we need to boost weddings on certain weekends. Sometimes they work other times not so much. They usually don't work that well because they are geared towards couples that are having last minute weddings and we don't have to many of those.

If we use a LinkedIn account that could possibly be a way for wedding coordinators to find use and have their clients tour our site. But LinkedIn is geared towards 45+ and most of our couples are between 23-35. But I plan to look into LinkedIn and see whether or not other venues use it.

Week 10 B: Blog comments

I was able to send out my wedding open house invite flyer.

I commented on
Derek Kendall Holmes
Jennifer York 
Sophia Ludyjan

Week 10: Email Marketing

I don't think that having a news letter for the wedding site would really do much to grow business. Mainly because in theory people only get married once. Because it's a one time event they are only our customer for six months to a year. What we have to say at this moment in time may not matter to half of our email list in a month.

The only way I could see a news letter being some what helpful is if wedding planners subscribed to us. But even then the wedding market is so saturated with other blogs and market monsters such as theknot.com and weddingwire.com that I don't know how we could compete. Maybe we could send out seasonal advertisements, but then that gets tricky because people that have already booked with us will want to know why they are not receiving the same deal. Other than that we could possibly send out an extension of our wedding blog and post wedding success stories and how their wedding was different.

While email blasts don't work for the wedding side of our business, the golf side sends out weekly and monthly email blasts. These emails contain information about discounts, course of the month, tournaments and various golf information. It's good that the golf courses do this because it keeps golfers coming back and paying attention to their email.

Week 9: B Categories

The categories that we typically write about on our blog are about engagement stories and vendors we love. Engagement stories allow us to show our personal side of the story writing. Most couples just give us a very basic story of how they met, their not typically bloggers so they don't give it that spice we can. By having up to date engagement stories this shows that we are continuously getting new business.
Another category that we write about are vendors we love. By advertising for our vendors and the wonderful services they provide at our venue they recommend us in return, or at least that's the hope.
 

I responded to:
Skylar Hunter, Katie Nolte and Sherri Moore