Top Local Wedding Sites and Channels

Vow Bride is the local brides magazine published twice a year by the Virginia Pilot. Its site also houses contests, takes wedding announcements and supports contests all year long. Click to enlarge.

The PinkBride now competes across Tennessee with the formidable Chattanooga Times Free Press.

The Elhart Truth beefs up their announcements on a content platform from Content That Works. They showcase larger images of couple than the newspaper can, and the images are younger and more contemporary. Bridal contests also add traffic and leds.

WCTV.TV launched the turnkey Brides365 site on the same platform with $30,000 sold in ten days. But with only the title sponsor left, they need more local content, contests and reworking to rebuild. Turnkey does not mean parked - all these initiatives require real local content and engagement.

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Local online strategies today exist within a competitive environment, and, in the case of the bridal category, competitors are numerous and fierce: Out-of-town bridal event promoters, The Knot, and other local media.

Typically the decision to create a weddings channel or niche site is typically one of three tactical or strategic visions:

First, a site can can simply buy the online address for a wedding expo or contest.

Second, for media with revenues already coming in from the category, a more robust site  that adds content to listings or contests creates additional revenues opportunities and SEO.

Finally, for companies thinking long term about owning the audience relationships in their community, a wedding site is a core strategic move.

When considering a bridal site, keep in mind that what merchants who survive on this category want most are lists of current leads for brides and a chance to interact with them. Leads from contests and wedding announcements, and opportunities to interact face-to-face with current brides in spending-mode are all important.

To create the right site that houses these opportunities, however, media also need to think like brides. The right combination of local content,  functionality, events and contests can create hundreds of thousands in new revenues.

85% of brides plan their weddings online, so the opportunity is there to be had. However, display advertising revenue from these sites, while great to have, is actually incremental and secondary in a robust franchise strategy, where the display positions are often upsold as part of larger buys.

This round-up report looks at four sites  that are profitable to varying degrees.  Two sites - a television station and a newspaper - use the ContentThatWorks' platform, Brides365, with different strategies. Two sites host events and a local bridal magazine, using Real Weddings' formula, also  with tactical differences.

So what do you need in a wedding's channel? Here are key elements from successful sites we looked at:

• Order-taking for engagement and wedding announcements. Wave2Media's Celebrations has a white label standalone version of this, and ContentThatWorks' white label Brides365 also includes it (see example below)

• Share-worthy local content aimed at brides.  A mix of "How to colorize your wedding" stories with local resources and user-generated content works best. Also keep in mind that younger couples and gay couples may be looking for images that reflect their own identities and  contemporary lifestyles.

• Images of local couples who are engaged, and from real local weddings  - the "Real Weddings" formula also provides an opportunity to mix in native ads as value-ads or advertorials.

• Contests (winners and the next contest promoted, so one is always running) 

• The Magazine (if there is one) flip-book and/or content

• Vendor directory, mostly for SEO value

• Advertising positions

Here are exampls of sites from around the country with what is working:

1. Creating a plug-and-play channel at WCTV.TV's Brides 365

Draper-owned CBS television affiliate, Gray Television, Inc. in Tallahassee, FL, has a huge station, WCTV.TV station, whose penetration is 45% of local TV viewers.

Brides365, an online wedding page on Content That Works' platform, was launched  to counter the site’s highly over-represented audience age 55 and older, and to compete with the daily newspaper, which had recently enacted a paywall.

While competing with paid dailies is a top theme at some TV and radio sites, keep in mind that dailies can always later content to leave outside the wall, including content like bridal announcements that are paid and advertiser friendly.

The Brides365 site also kept ContentThatWorks brand, so the site was truly turnkey. Pre-packaged content includes daily bride-oriented content such as tips for timely thank-you's, fashions in brides maids dresses, colored cakes to match the wedding theme, etc.

User-generated info is collected from polls, uploads of UG video content from YouTube, and free, self-service online forms, where brides can enter and publish their wedding and engagement announcements.

WCTV.TV created multi-media packages to be sold both by reps to established accounts and by a rep dedicated to new accounts in a ten day sale.

Packages included:
• An exclusive title sponsorship who receive the premium leaderboard plus airtime, and impressions on the larger site for $850 per month.
• The secondary right hand cubes were priced at $195 a month and up, based on number of impressions on the larger site and ranking on the page, with the top ads being the most expensive.

All sponsors received a vendor directory listing, and no directory listings were sold a la carte, so that only sponsors are visible anywhere on the site.  All sponsorships were sold on long term commitments in return for first right to renewals for that category.

Initially the strategy worked - selling out $30,000 in a ten day sale.  But a year later only the title sponsor is happy with the annual commitment - mostly because of the 2 to 3 leads from wedding and engagement announcements coming exclusively to their venue.

So just popping up a turnkey site is not a complete solution. Best practice is to  focus on adding great local content such as "Real Weddings" and using the site to host events,  magazines and contests. A flat rate all year also does not accommodate the seasonality of the wedding season, so upselling to premium products such as booths, magazines and contests in the top months also works to create a better budgetary flow for advertisers.

2. Semi-customer channel - Elkhart Truth's Weddings and Engagements

A more customized and integrated version of this same wedding channel can be seen at the ElkhartTruth, which has used the extra content to expand it's listings into a full online content area. Instead of a separate brand, they incorporate the channel inside the Elkhart Truth's own site, keeping media's own navigation bar, look and feel. Local content is heavily mixed in, along with more contemporary photos of local couples. See how online, the large format images and less staged photography looks contemporary and age appropriate:

This channel also houses their wedding contests, so the strategy is more integrated.

3. Sites that support  new brands, events and magazines

The Chattanoog Times Free Press still delivers the most revenues from the brides category of any media we looked at, with their signature event, "Bridal Affair". See their model in "Grow your own six figure wedding expo here."

But they face a significant competitor,  The Pink Bride, which promotes itself as Tennessee's Leading Wedding Resource.  The Pink Bride, powered by RealWeddings, also produces expos, and its site is worth looking at as a model: 

It's key content area,  "Real Weddings,"  portrays an unlimited number of images from a local wedding on each page,  giving brides to be a chance to scroll through ideas from some real local weddings. 

 "Inspirations and Tips"  has some national content of the "Tips to have a rustic wedding" variety, but also a lot of local content, branded on this site as "The Pink Press." 

The site also sells tickets to the expo online  - and other stuff:

The Virginia Pilot has its own comprehensive magazine-based wedding brand strategy housed on a uniquely branded site, VOWBride.com that also uses "Real Weddings" and "Inspirations &Tips" but looks completely different (see top image)  and is branded with its twice yearly magazine, Vow Bride. 

A column, Kim's White Album, showcases a local couple's story with a list of what they bought and who they used to create their wedding - a great piece of content for brides that also serves as advertising leads.

Note that the Virginia Pilot's own self-serve engagement announcements, which export to print, are separate. The newspaper uses the Celebrations platform developed by Wave2Media.

Finally, Boston Magazine also has a weddings channel that houses content from it's twice annual publication Boston Weddings, and dispenses with the need for a flip book. See a compact version of their magazine formula here.

Show me the money

As noted above,  there are incremental revenues to be had from advertising on a wedding channel. However, revenues are only incremental or part of another package. The real strategic play is in developing the relationship with an audience of brides, which can be leveraged into magazines, announcements, and events.

What merchants want are eads for brides and a chance to interact with them. So the highest value to the merchants - and what they will pay the most for - comes from combining opportunities to meet-and-greet brides at expos, showcase their wares in magazines and directories that help with SEO, and obtain leads from contests announcements. Highest and best use of creating a wedding channel is to charge up all these efforts.

See also our Green Paper on building a wedding franchise here.

More Resources:

ContentThatWorks

Wave2media

Keywords