Congrats to Hardy Farm for their 100th wedding!

We have been working with our client, Hardy Farm, for the past 3 years. We are really excited that they are celebrating their 100th hosted wedding in just two weeks! The owners, Deborah and Greg Link, have done an amazing job of making capital improvements and continuing to move the vision of the property forward. The farm has received national recognition from Martha Stewart, Country Living, The Venue Report, 100 Layer Cake and many more, which speaks to the quality of experience that couples have when getting married there.

The first 100 wedding events is just the start, 2017 is already booked out and couples are already securing prime 2018 dates. Hardy Farm has a bright future and we are looking forward to continuing our valued relationship!

Fun to look at our case study with them that we put out 2 1/2 years ago!

marketing a b&b

Hardy Farm is nationally ranked among the top 11 rustic wedding venues by Martha Stewart Weddings:  Martha Stewart 11 Rustic Wedding Venues to Book

Hardy Farm is nationally ranked by Country Living magazine among the top 30 most beautiful barns for weddings:  Country Living's 30 of the Country's Most Beautiful Barns for Weddings 

Hardy Farm is nationally ranked among the top 22 barn wedding venues by The Venue Report:  22 Incredible Barn Venues

Hardy Farm is nationally ranked among the top 10 Barn Wedding Venues by 100 Layer Cake: Top 10 Barn Wedding Venues 

Marketing to Engaged Couples : Social Hubs

What is a social hub?

Through blog posts, photos and tweets, consumers are engaging brands in conversation. In response, smart marketers are utilizing these conversations as a marketing tool by inspiring social savvy consumers to co-create and share authentic content about their brands. Many brands are moving away from marketing at their customers and are embracing the opportunity to market with them. Think of your customers as potential influencers, brand ambassadors, and join the conversation. See a wedding venue social hub in action an how it can bring your companies website to life!

Millennials spend 18 hours consuming media every day

Millennials are a generation accustomed to constant communication and instant gratification. According to Kana, individuals between the ages of 25 and 34 years old check their smartphone, on average, once every 9 minutes and 55 seconds. Always connected, these media mavens are the most voracious consumers of content and use social media to stay connected to friends and family, news and pop culture, as well as industry trends and brands.

Millennials engage with user-generated content 5 hours out of every day and site peers as their biggest influence

So what are millennials doing when they’re checking their phone every 10 minutes? They’re engaging with content created by their peers. Millennials spend about 30% of their total media time on content created by their peers and say they trust peer reviews and input from friends more than they trust professional reviews, according to a study conducted by Crowdtap.

The average American millennial has a Facebook friend group of 360, according to Statista. On average, a wedding has 144 guests, each with their own personal cameras and sharing devices. Assuming each guest has 360 friends on Facebook, one unique photo or status tagging your brand from every guest has the potential to be seen by a total of 51,840 potential customers. This kind of content exposure is called social reach and these numbers are hard to ignore.

The content created by your customers and potential customers is called user-generated content and is arguably the most powerful marketing tool that you can leverage. Your blog and social media presence humanizes your brand, but user-generated content humanizes your brand through the mouths of your influencers.

People are already talking about your industry and your brand – Join the conversation

Search the hashtag #wedding on Twitter and you’ll uncover hundreds of tweets by brides, guests and wedding vendors. These are conversations that you can join to increase brand awareness. Try searching for other related industry terms, especially ones that are relevant to your core customer base. You may find that some of these conversations already mention your brand!

Monitoring conversations about your brand and your industry is called social listening and it’s imperative to interacting with customers and partners. It’s one of the best ways to learn more about your customers’ wants, needs, reservations and motivations.

Simplify social listening by collecting all content in one place

Leveraging a social listening platform makes it easy for brands to monitor industry related conversations, particularly ones that mention their brand, in one place. The goal is to identify what sparks influencers to become brand advocates - talking up your brand to friends and family - then to partner with those influencers to create more authentic content and drive conversations that have the opportunity to influence a more targeted customer base.

Tide Creative is excited to announce that we’re offering a social listening platform to wedding vendors! No need to scour Facebook, Twitter and Instagram separately. Our platform enables you to monitor user-generated content surrounding your brand in one place. We call this a social hub and we’re offering two different packages.  

Social Hub:  $1000 setup and $20/month

Social Hub with Geo-Targeting:  $1000 setup and $40/month

For more information or to set up your social hub, contact us at: info@tidecreative.com

wedding venue marketing

wedding in maine

Why Your Brand Needs A Style Guide

With branding, consistency is key. Establishing a visual brand identity gives your company a voice in the world. That voice should sound (and look) consistent across all media platforms, not only to make your brand easily identifiable, but to also to build up trust between your business and the consumer. The easiest way to keep things visually consistent, especially as your business grows, is having a brand style guide. Listing all of your basic brand elements and acting as the singular point of reference for any future design projects and the designers that might be work on them. Having a style guide can save everyone time, money and frustration.

What’s included in a branding style guide can vary a lot depending on the size of the company.  Most small businesses can benefit greatly from just having a simple, visual one-page reference, while larger companies require more robust corporate identity guidelines.

At the most basic level a style guide should include these elements:

Your Logo & Tagline/Slogan

Include all versions of your logo: color, reversed, black and white. Also include any approved alternate logo arrangements such as stacked vs. one line, or a shortened or iconic version used for social media perhaps.

Color Scheme

The colors used by a brand should be spelled out with as much detail as possible. That means offering up not only hex codes for web use, but also equivalent CMYK and even Pantone color values for print projects.

Fonts

Every brand should have a consistent set of fonts being used in all of their marketing materials, online and off. Listing out these fonts, with examples and character sets, is hugely important. This should include the fonts used in your logo, font’s that should be used as header/body copy and any suggested web fonts.

Photos, Textures/Patterns, Icons, and Other Imagery

Here you will want to include any custom textures, patterns or graphic elements that have been designed to be used in association with your brand as backgrounds or highlights through places on your website and/or marketing materials. You could also include any specifics about the style of photos and imagery that you would like associated with your brand. That way if any stock imagery is needed for marketing down the road it will have the same look and feel as the rest of your imagery does. We are happy to give your existing brand a style guide of it’s own or help you with a whole new branding package! Take a look at our work and contact us today!