Last month we ran a short survey among our readers and asked you about your business, how long you’d been trading and your best marketing activities.
The results are in, so this week we wanted to share some of the things you told us.
About You
A wide range of different businesses completed the survey with all the main types of wedding suppliers included – photographers, planners, dress boutiques, florists, stationers. Plus some of the latest wave of wedding businesses such as bloggers and bunting hire.
About half of those who replied were fairly new start-ups who’d been trading less than 2 years.
Almost all those who took part are based in the UK
How Many People?
Most of you are the sole person in the business.
Even among the more established businesses, half have chosen to stay as a one person band. As would be expected, most dress shops employed more than one person, but among the other types of suppliers, there was no clear pattern.
Social Media
Facebook just pipped Twitter as your most popular social media channel. None of the others came close.
Marketing
We asked each business to tell us which 3 marketing activities brought them must customers.
Social Media was a clear winner with referrals the next most important, followed by wedding fairs.
This was even more marked among the newer businesses with 29% giving social media as an important source of business.
The established businesses were slightly more likely to make use of paid marketing like wedding fairs and advertising (online or print).
But overall, most of you rely on word of mouth marketing whether online or not.
Your Challenges
We asked you about the greatest challenges facing your business. As this was an open question the replies were very varied but the three most common themes were:
- raising brand awareness
- finding the time to do everything
- growing sales
One person mentioned the weather! There’s not much we can do about that one, but we will be bringing you help for the others. Watch this space!
Thank you to everyone who took part. We’ll be using the information you gave us to make sure we bring you the articles and advice you need most.