Situation
Stacy Becker of Celebrations!, a fine stationery and wedding invitation business, came to us wanting to stand out from the crowd. In a highly competitive business, Stacy needed her business to be noticed at the wedding expos and be clearly different from her competing advertisers. Business typically hopping from January’s annual wedding expo until summer, there were 4 to 5 months of the year that were relatively dead.
Stacy had created her own marketing materials some time earlier: a brochure, business cards, hand-out for the tradeshows, various ads and the web site.
Program
Advertising, Collateral Development, Creative Strategy
Our work with Stacy began with her overall marketing message. We planned out the marketing activities for the subsequent 12 months, starting with the collateral, ads, and then her trade show presence.
We took her brochure and combined it with her hand-out, to make a piece that would stand out. As many can admit to being guilty of, both were overloaded with far too much information for anyone to effectively absorb. While incredibly informative, it was simply too much, too early in the business transaction.
We helped Stacy to hone down the content to some basic points for her new 8.5 x 11 brochure. One challenge with the wedding expo presence was that the brides would come in, get bags and just fill them up - and everything was about the same size. We created a bookmark that was 12 inches tall and 3 inches wide to fit in the brochure so that it would stick out of the top of whatever wad of paper the bride was holding.
In addition to business cards, and mostly in place of them, we suggested to Stacy that she get her own invitations but instead of being samples, they would be samples – that are business cards – that would invite the bride to meet with her.
We also redid her ads to be more celebratory and succinct.
Overall Results
“Everything worked! I’m so busy! I can’t believe it! Thank you so much!” Stacy says. Her business has seen a steady stream of business since the program implementation, and continues to through the typically slower times.