Bridal Network Inc. is an online media and advertising company, focusing on the wedding industry. It’s primary market is Canada. The challenge here was the development of a quantifiable online marketing strategy for their “retail” properties, primarily their flagship bridal website, bride.ca

Bride.ca has a seemingly straightforward subject matter: wedding planning in Canada. However, typically, in practice this is an overgeneralisation; potential customers (brides-to-be) will almost never begin their web searches looking for something as general as “planning”. As a result an exhaustive amount of research was initially required, to identify current trends, needs and popular areas of immediate need to brides just beginning their wedding planning process, since (a) there is an overabundance of similar services on the Internet (b) brides-to-be are a rather short-lived customer, completing their purchasing cycle in 4-12 months.

Having identified likely entry-points to the target demographic, a comprehensive strategy was developed and is still monitored and managed on a monthly basis. The campaign includes both regional and categorical niches, precise content generation and leverages the competitive advantages of Bridal Network in their particular market (eg. a large wedding vendor network). Initital results have been extremely encouraging and have helped us identify further approaches and fine-tune our overal plan.

For example, try the following “wedding planning searches” on google.ca:

• DIY wedding invitations
• engagement photo ideas
• wedding shoes canada
• winter wedding gowns
• etc etc.

Though web success stories still occur today, the www market has settled down compared to 10 years ago when it seemed like any web idea was a lottery ticket to financial freedom.   After the bubble popped, the market crashed then stabilized. Technologies got more sophisticated and the web development industry matured, so building a proper site became more expensive.

The result? There is a lot more competition than in the past. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for new ideas, there is just less vacancy than there used to be.   With more competition out there, there is more of a chance to get eaten by the big fish of the sea.  That’s why, after all of the time and effort it takes to build a quality website, a lot of e-business ideas can go bust.

So this means that developing an e-business today is pretty much the same as developing a conventional business in terms of time, money, and effort. You need to build it up orgranically, over time, with a real clientel base.

Avoid the abstract

While dealing with the abstract will get you far as an artist, it can be disasterous in the practical world of business. One of the most common mistakes of websites that flop is that they do not have a concrete target market.   They are not talking to real people. Their owners simply had this great global idea, thought they would put it online, and that as soon as the site was launched, the entire web community would flock to check it out.  Well guess what? They open the doors and nobody comes? Why? Not because they have a bad idea necessarily, but because nobody knows it’s there.

On the other hand, a local community centre may post a new section on their site with half the graphics and no cool multimedia, but that section alone may get quadruple the traffic. Success! And it’s because the community centre is addressing real people who already know the organization.

This holds true even with blogs. If you have a blog, don’t blindly post articles based on the possibility that passers-by may read, maybe they will. But if you want sustainability, you need to talk to real people; you need to build a community.

Leave the abstract for art critics of the Louvre.

Word of Mouth

After all the technology and means of advertising options at our disposal today, word of mouth is still hands down the best marketing tool. But how does word of mouth translate to the internet?

The answers is blogs, forums, email, and recommendations by satisfied customers via these internet means.

Join a blog or a forum community and discuss the matters related to your area of business. Make e-buddies and refer to content on your site here and there (in a non-soliciting manner) to prove the point of your arguments.

With word of mouth comes respect for you as a person and your e-business. You end up building community roots. And you’re not just a faceless company, but a person who has something to say with a reputable opinion.

When you build your site organically, it’s not a quick ticket to the top, but it will make your e-business sustainable, and this will pay off over time.  It’s kind of like an investment in real estate or an RRSP.

It is the concern of almost every client: “How do I get my site to rank higher on the search engines so people can find me”.

There are a few fundamentals to take into consideration when addressing this question.

Limited Flash

Flash is good here and there, like a sprinkling of salt and pepper (the odd banner or menu), but never build an entire site in Flash if SEO is one of your primary concerns. A Flash file is like a shell the search engine cannot penetrate. Search engines look for HTML, text, and above all meaningful links. So make sure you have ample amounts of those.

Lots of Text

Ever noticed that when you search for something specific, a whole lot of forums and blog articles tend to come up? There’s a reason for that. Search engines crawl through text. They love ‘chewing’ on it. The more descriptive text you have, the more keywords you are indirectly adding to the mix. From a design perspective, sites meaty in text can look cluttered and may actually turn away web surfers. But if you’re concerned about SEO, try to add as much descriptive text as possible to your site within the limits of a clean design.

Links links links

The good and honest way to build up your rating on the search engines is to have a healthy supply of links on each web page, and to have those links actually trafficked by unique visitors (unique i.p. addresses). When there is a steady follow of horizontal traffic on your site (that is, visitors entering and existing off other sites), you will eventually start climbing the rankings naturally.

Proper coding

There are many html ‘tricks’ your web programmer can do to aid in search engine optimization. Though these are too technical to outline, you might want to ask your programmer for a list of what will be done on your site, and research some of these techniques on the net. Good SEO coding should start from the very first line of code on the site.

Remember that these are general concepts, if we knew the exact science of how to outsmart a search engine, we’d be Google! Nobody except those companies knows the details of how they author their own code.

In the next article, we will look at how to market and build up your site organically.