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The WeddingSalon.com is one of the leading “Wedding” event organizers and Showcase vendors in the nation. Led by visionary Tatiana Byron and her amazing staff of hardworking professionals, The Wedding Salon has made it their mission to plan, promote, and execute “The Wedding Event of the Year” in various major metropolitan cities around the country.  From Miami, to Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, Tatiana and her crew bring “the best of the best” in Wedding vendors to each local event for local brides to interact with and be introduced to, for their dream day services.

The beauty in how the Wedding Salon operates is in their innovative and openness.  The marketing director, Grazia, does an amazing job of coordinating various groups and initiatives, while working tirelessly with Tatiana and the staff on solidifying other logistics of the event.

We’ve had the awesome opportunity of helping them promote and roll out Chicago’s first Wedding event of the year in October and I wanted to give you guys the inside scoop on what we’ve been busy doing on our end of the “social” spectrum to assist with the buzz-building and awareness creation.

Objective:  Increase Brand & Bridge awareness

The main goal when promoting online is to create a massive “buzz” and “mentions” on various channels.  From social media to industry blogs to press releases (free and/or paid) the goal is to get the specific term/keyword or event floating around in the webosphere.  From brand awareness to bridge awareness (which references the bridge between Online and Offline means) below are the things we plan to do, and have done, to help create this “buzz” online.

1. Commenting to Connect

Part of our overall strategy has been to slowly “backdoor” promote the Wedding Salon brand and the event on other sites.  The easiest and most convenient way to do this is to visit industry specific blogs and obviously leave comments as a rep or supporter of the Wedding Salon.  Anika did some market research to find out what blogs were relevant to the wedding industry that we could hang out at and do some connecting.

These are the blogs she located and reached out to.  Some of them still need to be visited but we divided the list into smaller segments to strategically visit them throughout the month.  From first visit to repeat vist, our goal is to establish somewhat of a “visibility” connection to present the Wedding Salon in an inviting light.

2. Custom Facebook Landing Page:

The first order of operation for the Brand Awareness campaign was to customize the Chicago event onto the Wedding Salon Facebook page. We’re able to do this with ease because we already have an existing service of custom Facebook pages.  There are numerous reasons why this is a MAJOR benefit, but the most obvious one is the event promotions.  When folks on twitter or the blogosphere check out the Wedding Salon they’ll often check their Facebook page, so we needed it to reflect the event  What do you think?

 

3. Radius Reach

This is where the “bridge” concept is blatantly clear.  For our radius reach approach, I had Anika identity 3 specific categories relevant to the event.  Once we agreed upon those categories, her next step was to plug in 10 slots under each category with the appropriate company/organization all within a 20-30 mile radius from the center point, which is the location of the event.

Once we’ve compiled this list into a database for easy reference, our plan of action is a simple 2 step process.  We call each organization and ask to speak with the “wedding director” or person responsible for working with the brides Because in our database we also have their Twitter handle, our goal is to connect via twitter as well.  A combination of Twitter mentions and direct calling is a great way to bridge the social media online with the direct local marketing.

4. Twitter Outreach

Although, part of our Radius Reach is twitter interaction, it’s important to note that the phone calls are only a one time approach.  When we’re able to get the other party on the phone we have 1 shot to pitch an invite.  With twitter, we’re able to ease into the relationship and drop the invite much later in the interaction.  That’s why our Twitter outreach is separate step in and of itself.

5. Featured Interview(s)

This is something that we’ve done in the past for other events.  Our goal here is to get a vendor on Skype, conduct an interview with them to hear more of their story and allow the attendees to get to know them better.  This gives the public a sneak peak into the upcoming event.  A really amazing tool that we use for “PR” purposes when conducting and showcasing the interviews is called TweetPerView.  

This awesome tool allows the functionality of giving the viewer the option of tweeting out the video info before they view the video.  This allows for additional social media PR through Twitter and if done properly, you’ll be able to ping yourself, the video, AND the other person being interviewed.  (NOTE:  TweetPerView was one of the 5 twitter power tools that we featured in our Advanced Twitter Training Course:  Twitter Massive Influence.)  An example of TPV in action is below

 

Conclusion

These are 5 different ways that we’ve been able to help and start engaging in a “social” manner on behalf of our friends at the Wedding Salon.  There are always new innovative ways that we come up with to engage and grab the attention of people to shift their focus from us to the folks we help.  As we put them into play, I’ll certainly share them to help you with ideas to use with your business and/or clients.

Thanks for checking out the blog and stopping by

If you also promote online and use different tools and strategies, feel free to share them in the comments section below.

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2 Comments for #WeddingSalonCHI socially strategizes for local event: A Social PR approach

admin

Thank you Becky We made phone calls today and were able to get some great responses…I think to limit “social media” to FB, TW, LNKDIN is to do an injustice to the actual power of other means of marketing…hopefully this info is helpful to people and they can use it

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