Bridal Expo….. Is it really worth it?
 

My wedding and event videography company is one month old. My husband and me have 2 HD Sony HVR V1U ,wireless mics, good website , professional editing experience (Adobe Premier Pro CS3).
We marketing our company as much as we can with local businesses, local magazines…… but still not getting any responses from clients.
We spent so much money… but don’t see any results. We have a "Brides Night Out" (Bridal Expo) coming up in next month. Can you really get clients from Bridal Expo?

What is the best way to represent yourself at this type of event? Is it really worth it?

Kate,
I believe it can be good for you IF 2 things are in place.
#1 if you have good samples that grab quickly and let go quickly combined with a good presence. This I'll call presentation.
#2 depending on the show and on your market, your prices might be a large factor.
When my services were inexpensive, we cleaned up at bridal shows. Now that we raised our prices a bit, we get crickets. We get rave reviews of our work, alot of conversation but no bookings. We still do them because they're cheap enough to get into, and we keep in front of other vendors, but it can be hit or miss.
Bill

I found that the bridal shows were the only way to get work here. After a while the referals from past customers and photographers kick in, but I would definitely start with the shows.
Hopefully you can cover the cost of the show from your first wedding, I know some of them can be pretty expensive. Around here they are around $400-500, which I think is pretty reasonable.

The show that I do every year runs around $650 (not including marketing materials and booth supplies). I've found that you really have to be prepared to market yourself at a wedding show. If you just sit back and wait for people to talk to you, you're going to waste your money.

Only 650? is that the average price you pay for a bridal expo? Here in belgium the major ones cost at least 2500 dollar for a weekend.

Bridal Shows
 

The show we do every year runs about $1800. Its the only big one around and we have gotten a majority of our business from it each year. Each year referrals and name recognition become a larger percentage but we continue to do the show to keep things busy...

It depends
 

We have done many shows. We did one particular show three times, well close to 2000.00 for the three shows. And I got two weddings from it, so I broke even.

Then I did this one show early in January, and one person picked my card up, and I've booked four from that referral chain.

So I would say some shows are worth it and some aren't. What I did was contact some vendors I knew and asked them. You will still get a variety of answers, but you'll learn that way.

As for marketing, a nice demo, a website, and constant marketing are your best tools. Bridal shows are a lot of work, but they are a good way of marketing. Shows are also a way to measure yourself against your competition. Especially those who bring their gear.

Yeah, about $500-700. $2500 is pretty spendy.

My Wife & I are pretty much at the same point as you & your husband.
We attended our first show in Feb, I believe the exposure to our new
fledgling business was well worth the cost involved.. Now we know of about
4 other shows in our area and from talking to the others which shows are worth the investment & which are probably not.. Web traffic on our site increased 80% the month after the show from handing out our business cards alone.. This lead to another discovery
I had initially done up our web page and while very happy with it It was not being hit by
the search engines and Web Bots, This lead to the hireing of a pro to redo the site, his cost was very reasonable $300 and although I liked my original design better, since implimenting his, traffic accross the web site is up 150% and jobs are now comming in off the site wheras before the site was basicially useless..

AS for the show You don't really need to take a lot, a banner for the booth, maybe a poster I had both made for less then $150 dollars, WE bought some nice plush fabric
to spruce up our display booth to make it a bit different from the others. Have a good demo dvd, multiple examples of your work to display on a DVD player with a TV /monitor of a decent size you can also use a laptop for this but I like to output it to a nice size display. and as mentioned
get out there and talk to people, Probably the hardest Part :). We had Candies & chocolates at our display and offered a raffel draw for a free Slideshow to be done with photos supplied by the bride. On the ballots we had a spot for E-mail addresses, as well the company running the event supplied a e-mail list of all the registered bride attending, this allowed for a follow up a few
weeks to a month later, which netted a couple of Jobs. So was it worth it in My opinion Deffinately.. I would not do every show around but a couple of shows in your respective market each year certainly won't hurt exposure wise... I even had one job referred by one of the other Videographers we met with at the show as he was booked solid and sent his propect over to us, that wouldn't have happened if we hadn't gone to the show. Our total cost to do the first was around $1000 for the 3 days but we had a lot of first time expenses, banner, poster,Fabric, Ect that we now have for other shows. The actual cost for our booth & hydro was aroung $550 for the 3 days.. Very reasonable in my opinion.

550 for three days! I'm moving to Canada.

I think it can be quite varied. We did one in the UK, had big fancy banners, large telly showing demos and not one booking. Not even any web traffic.

All of our bookings have come from visual bride or google.

Give it time, 1 month is not long at all, took us months to get anything and the time of the year can vary. This is prime wedding season in the UK but most booked us late last year with only a couple of last minute bookings.

Recommendations also are a big thing. Check out various wedding forums and brides will ask who to use and listen to some total stranger.

But that said a tweaked sample DVD also seemed to do the trick as well.

550 for three days! I'm moving to Canada

Well 2 afternoon's really 3 day's of my time LOL

Yep I thought that was pretty decent the show Setup fri evening at 7-11PM
& Ran Sat from 12 -6 & Sunday 12-6 again. A 8 X 10 booth the smallest availible was $475
that included 1 table Hydro for one Quad outlet was $65 and then because I was on a corner I wanted an extra table to define our area, the extra table was $45. I was really
quite happy with the whole deal, I was fortunate to get put right accross from one of our areas More sought after D.J.'s so lots of traffic was stopping to talk to him and once they were slowed down it was a lot easier for us to get thier attention so it worked out real well
for us.

Here in Auckland, New Zealand. There are 3 wedding shows per year and the average cost to get in the show is about $800USD for ONE day, and the average wedding video price is around $2000USD......
Damn.....

Anyway, thx for sharing. We are going to our 1st show in Sept.

Travis has hit upon the most important thing to consider; having a plan for marketing your services once at the show. To just show up and expect business to walk up and book you is a very poor strategy.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make, everyone from run-and-gun videographers to huge corporations, is to fail to have an objective for a trade show. I am in charge of marketing for the company that I work for, and we exhibit at large shows and small, domestic and foreign. For each show we establish an objective so we have some means of measuring ROI.

At some shows we are targeting existing dealers and distributors. At others we are aiming for consumers. At some we are establishing and/or maintaining presence amongst competitors. At others we are prospecting for new dealers/distributors. Now, there will always be some of each of these things, but we determine which one we want to use as our primary focus.

So the materials, graphics, etc we bring to each show are conceived accordingly. Also our plans of approaching the people who visit our booth are carefully thought out. Usually you'll want to qualify each person to see if they are a prospective client. If so, to what degree? And then you'll want a plan of how to dispence with each type of client. (Everything from "Well, thanks for stopping by to see us today" to "would you like to sit down to discuss your particulars?")

If you set a goal (distribute 500 flyers; book X number of weddings, establish some sort of partnership with other vendors) you'll have a much better way to gauge if the show was worth the investment of time materials and money.

I watched a photographer do just that this past year. He just sat there for the whole show, doing some sort of paperwork. When brides came by his booth and started looking at his stuff he sometimes wouldn't even acknowledge they were there. Crazy. I think he was frustrated with us because we are "go getters" and I will sometimes even "politely" chase down a couple that has walked past our booth without stopping. We've booked a few weddings with couples that I've chased down.