How are Ottawa brides finding you?

When we ask wedding vendors where most of their brides come from, we often get a one-word response like “Instagram”. However, when we ask them to dig a little deeper into exactly where brides first found out about them, most vendors didn’t have a clue. We can’t really assume that brides are just stumbling across your social profiles or website by fluke – it’s important to know exactly how they find you. Knowing where your perfect client comes from allows you to invest more in what’s working for you (be it Instagram, paid ads, or something else completely) and stop wasting money and time on initiatives that aren’t working.

To give a real-world example, let’s use my experience booking the vendors for my wedding as a case study. As a bride-to-be and a devoted marketer, I took a microscopic look at our process in finding Ottawa wedding vendors. At a high level, I used Instagram heavily to find inspiration and vendors for my wedding, but it wasn’t the only thing I used to make my decisions.

I started my search on Pinterest because that’s the first thing that comes into my head when I thought of “wedding inspiration”. When I searched “Ottawa weddings”, though, barely anything came up. It was super surprising to me that there weren’t very many relevant pins on Pinterest, so I switched my search to Instagram instead.

I found my venue, Stonefields Estate, through Stephanie Mason’s Instagram. Stephanie and I had worked together on an Influencer campaign for Saunders Farm. I loved the venue so much that I went into their tagged photos on Instagram to see more examples of weddings that were held there, and found my decorator and florist; The Gathering Event Company.

After I went to visit Stonefields in person, we were given a list of their preferred vendors. From that list, we booked transportation for our guests and our hotel, the Holiday Inn Kanata.

I received suggestions for photographers from a group of newlywed brides after I showed them my chosen venue. That’s how I ended up finding Laura Kelly Photography, and after reading her website (and falling head over heels for her messaging), I booked a discovery call with her. During our call, she gave me suggestions for a videographer, UpNorth Wedding Films, our officiant from Exceptional Ceremonies, and our DJ, Dynamix Productions.

When my sister-in-law was getting married, she bought her dress at With Love Bridal. I loved the service she received and the experience we all shared there together, so that was the only wedding dress boutique I made an appointment at. It’s also where we bought four dresses for the wedding party. When it came time for suit shopping we asked some recently married men for their recommendations and almost all of them mentioned Jimmy the Suit Guy. Jimmy is kind of an underground Ottawa secret, and doesn’t have a website so we had no choice but to Google his location on Google Maps in order to find him. Thanks to our brother and sister-in-law’s wedding we also found out about and hired Amy and Lauren from Ottawa Makeup Artists and Shelby from Showpony Hair.

Lastly, my fiancé and I went to the Ottawa Wedding Show where we found our wedding cake baker, Batter Up Bakery, and our calligrapher Avi Scribbles, who we actually first found through a styled shoot that our neighbours Adam and Kass, of Machete Premium Cuts and the newly debuted Moonchild Lettering Co, modelled in.

Altogether, we chose our wedding vendors from five different places: social media, word of mouth, referrals, preferred vendor lists, and a wedding show. On top of that, we checked Google, The Knot, and WeddingWire for reviews on each of them. While I used Instagram quite a bit for examples and to find the type of vendors I was looking for, it wasn’t the only place I checked. If you dig deeper you can see that I found vendors on Instagram in very specific places, not just generally “on Instagram”. This really goes to show how important word of mouth and vendor referrals are to your business, even in this digital age.

A big part of marketing is attribution, aka finding out where your clients are coming from. Google Analytics, a Facebook Pixel, and other tracking tools can help you figure out how people are finding you. The more data you have, the more you can analyze what you should be investing in, and what is taking up all of your time with no results.

If you’re struggling with figuring out where your clients are coming from, or want your website to start doing some of the heavy lifting, Something Blue can help!

xo,
Julia