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Today’s Bride Mag social success strategies for lead and relationship building

Written by Nick Pataro

Published: 03/18/2015

This is part two of an interview MagHub recently conducted with Today’s Bride magazine. In our first post, we talked with magazine co-founder, Jim Frericks, about the history and success of the magazine. Today, to wrap things up, we’re publishing our conversation with Denise Wright, Social Media and Content Stylist for the magazine to learn the role social media has played in developing relationships with the publication’s target market.

MagHub: How do you successfully target your niche market?

Denise Wright: We advise our advertisers to take a multi-platform approach to their campaigns, and we adhere to that in our own marketing campaigns. From a print perspective, we promote our bridal shows within the pages of Today’s Bride magazine – often with a promo code or incentive to purchase tickets online. We truly believe a great call-to-action can provide consumers with that extra push they need to take the next step. We also use more traditional marketing methods, such as newspaper, radio, billboards, and postcards that we mail directly to brides, retail locations and advertisers. Our several billboards across Northeast Ohio are consistently one of the top ways brides learn about us. Outside of traditional approaches we’ve used retargeting, Facebook and other social media, along with a new favorite, Pandora.

Something new that we’ve come up with this year is the “Today’s Bride Partner Program,” which essentially just encourages our advertisers to share news of their involvement with Today’s Bride – whether through our special hashtag (#todaysbrideshows) on social media, on their websites or in their physical store locations. We’ve found mutually beneficial success with it during our most recent January bridal show series, and even thereafter. Overall we believe that knowing our audience and finding the best way to get to them has been our ultimate reason for success.

MagHub: We found you on social media. How has this channel changed the way you market?

DW: Success on social media, for us, means being aware of what’s new with local brides and companies. It means having engaged users who will share feedback and “like” the things they’re interested in; in turn, we’re able to continuously provide content that is helpful to them and keeps them interested. Social media provides us a way to reach outside of our office walls, outside of ourselves, and better cater to the needs of our brides and businesses. So, I guess if you want a summary of how social media has changed the way we market, it’s this: it’s made us more aware.

MagHub: What kind of activity or mentality created that success?

DW: While success for some on social media may mean getting hundreds of comments or “going viral” as they say, our definition of success is having social media accounts that brides and companies will continuously come back to – ones they know they can count on for up-to-date postings and helpful advice. We really pride ourselves on having a print publication that brides can refer back to for helpful planning tips – the “nuts and bolts” of planning a wedding – and we like to see that translate on social media as well.

MagHub: What are some ways you generate new advertising sales leads?

DW: We gather information about new businesses based on referrals from our existing companies and through “out-in-the-field” research, but we also find that social prospecting is an exceptional way to learn about new businesses. Basically this just means that we use social media to identify potential prospects (for us, Twitter and LinkedIn seem to host the largest number of those new businesses), and we attempt to engage them through relevant content – whether a response to their question on Twitter or simply sharing helpful marketing and industry articles we find. Because we provide a free publication for consumers, businesses definitely make up the majority of our buying audience; however, we like to keep a social prospecting approach in mind for our brides as well. If you can be one thing on social media, you should be helpful. We are always looking for opportunities to answer brides’ questions, address their feedback and, above all, provide a convenient and enjoyable wedding planning experience for them.

 

POSTED BY Nick Pataro , to contact click here.

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