The Excitement Starts Here

"Our next Marketing to the High-End Bride is all about how luxury brands are finally getting serious about the web."

-- weddingprof.com

Last week I blogged about how technical knowledge doesn’t give engineers a pass when it comes to creating an effective sales pitch. Getting people excited about your product is Job 1. That’s something consumer marketers already get since they usually don’t have the luxury of a clear-cut technical advantage to fall back on. And even when they do, most consumers probably don’t want it explained to them anyway.

So every once in while here is what even the geekiest of us technology marketers should do — try our hand at a real honest-to-goodness consumer marketing project. Take the technology out of the equation and see how good we really are at building a brand when all we have is whatever customer experience we ourselves can create using words, images and events.

And to make the challenge even more interesting, try doing that with a very small marketing budget -- where your actions (for good or bad) have the clearest impact on results.

Suppose, for example, your wife runs a small wedding invitations boutique and she turns to you one day and says, “Honey, would you help me with my marketing?” That's what happened to me. You can find her website here. Alternatively, you can just Google “invitations Boston” -- you won’t have to look far down the list.

Besides the website -- which itself includes several key elements missing from most competitors’ sites -- the campaign contains a number of differentiating features. The most interesting is “Marketing to the High-End Bride.” That’s a breakfast workshop held twice a year at a luxury Boston venue. Rather than going after brides directly, this event is oriented toward other wedding professionals (particularly high-end venues) who can and do provide a continuous stream of referrals. Typically these referrals are high net worth couples who are less apt to discount. They are also accustomed to lots of service and less prone to hassle with putting their wedding invitations together themselves online.

The event is always a sellout (100-130, depending on venue size). It is private, by invitation-only, and you must prepay. Producing the event affords multiple touch points using our proprietary list of 500+ Boston area wedding related contacts. The touch points include multiple print and electronic newsletters and invitations, the website and of course the event itself.

So, rather than doing what most wedding vendors do -- calling venues and requesting to get on their referral lists -- we are getting calls from high-end venues asking if they can host our next event, which will be number 10.

Essentially, this campaign has everything you would expect from a mid-size or even large consumer products company -- except that there are no net out-of-pocket costs. You just need to think of it, and know how to do it.