Winner of the Ready to Propose Contest!

The winner of the Barrie Wedding Deals "Ready to Propose" Contest, Kevin Hill, proposed to his girlfriend of two years this past Valentine's Day complete with prizes and secret cameras! Here is how it all went down:

Kevin entered the highly advertised contest through www.BarrieWeddingDeals.com. After being selected as the winner, the Barrie Wedding Deals team met up with Kevin at Blue Mountain, where Chantelle first told him she loves him a year ago on Valentine's Day. We scoped out the area and decided that he should fake an injury so that Chantelle can approach him. Then the photographers would jump out to capture this special moment.

The proposal went perfectly and the beaming Chantelle said "yes". Kevin won a free engagement shoot from our photographers who did an amazing job capturing the best day of their lives, until their wedding of course! It helps to have a beautiful and creative couple, as well as perfect weather for great shots!

Kevin and Chantelle won $300 from Helen's Bridal, $200 from 19 Melrose Flower Studio as well as the bouquet in the above photo, $500 from Casal Catering, $500 from Status Events, $200 from ShineTravel.ca, and $300 from Misty Greer of Century 21! To book the services of these amazing vendors for yourself, please visit www.BarrieWeddingDeals.com.

For more information and pictures of this newly engaged couples, please visit our Facebook page.

Barrie Wedding Deals Bridal Show and Cocktail Party Highlights

The long awaited bridal show and cocktail party was a smashing success on November 17th at the Kempenfelt Conference Centre. The show was scheduled to start at 1:00 pm but guests began showing up and forming a lineup shortly after noon.

The first 50 brides received Christmas style gift bags. Guests were greeted at the door by champagne servers and proceeded inside to get to know the vendors. The bridal show occupied 2 rooms - the main dining room overlooking Lake Simcoe, and the Centre Hall where brides and their guests were able to enjoy complimentary beauty treatments from local salons and spas.

 An unbelievable number of guests visited the booth of Adams Massage Therapy Wellness and Laser Medi-Spa. The massage therapists were busy during the entire bridal show and one luck winner, Janet Hanley enjoyed a professional application of semi permanent eyelash extensions.

The Cam Brown and Dave Chun duo put on an excellent performance for the brides to be, while they enjoyed getting beautified by our experts. You can hire these amazing wedding singers at a very reasonable rate.

Wine tasting and consumption of delicious hors d'oeuvres provided by the Kempenfelt Conference Centre took place in the main dining room overlooking the water.

Between the vast views of the lake, delicious food, and the extremely reasonable $100pp all inclusive price, it is truly difficult to find a better location for your wedding north of Toronto.

Lisa Paivel from the B101 morning show hosted the event and many excellent prizes were awarded including $1000.00 from Helen's Bridal.

Say Yes Bridal Gallery put on an exciting fashion show to showcase all of the latest bridal styles and trends leading into 2014.

Lucky winners Michelle and Jason walked away with $2500.00 cash!

From ticket sales we managed to raise a few hundred dollars for the Furry Friends animal shelter in Barrie!

Backdrop and chair covers provided by Peace of Mind Event Planning and Decor. Lighting and sound by Perpetual Rhythms.

Thank you to everyone who participated, and we hope to see you all again at our next event!

Who is behind www.BarrieWeddingDeals.com?

Did you know that Barrie Wedding Deals was created by a local wedding vendor just like you? It's true, and this is our story.

The Barrie Wedding Deals website was created by Nadia Mantsvetova, a local graphic and web designer who got into the wedding industry by doing photography and creating wedding invitations. As a wedding vendor Nadia explored multiple facets for marketing. After trying multiple large online wedding directories, she was getting nowhere with her marketing at which point she turned to local bridal shows. Although having met several great customers the return on the investment was rather low; a problem experienced by many wedding vendors.

Smaller towns tend to get lost on giant national and international directories and many bridal show guests tend to forget meeting you way before they are ready to book your services for their wedding.

At this point, Nadia who is a bride herself and her fiancé and partner, decided to come up with a new exciting resource specifically designed to connect local vendors with brides and grooms in the north of Toronto area.

This is how Barrie Wedding Deals was born. It grew from a simple idea into a professionally designed and highly optimized website, built to attract hundreds of engaged couples, not just from Barrie, but from surrounding areas all within reach of your business.

Since then, www.BarrieWeddingDeals.com has become a highly popular website with hundreds of registered brides and grooms. Since our launch in April 2013 we have done a number of amazing giveaways including the Luxury Bridal Package through the radio, the social media Diamond Sparkle Contest, and a wedding treasure hunt - all designed to bring exposure to local vendors.

Vendors who have chosen to do additional advertising on www.BarrieWeddingDeals.com have already experienced a huge amount of success, booking numerous 2013 and 2014 weddings.

We are excited to learn that more and more people are hearing about us and our vendors through word of mouth exposure and that www.BarrieWeddingDeals.com is quickly becoming THE place to go for the best local professionals and their offers.

We have decided to take things one step further by hosting our own bridal show on November 17, 2013, at the waterfront Kempenfelt Conference Center. Because our own experience with standard bridal shows has been less than successful, we have created a slightly different and improved formula. We are providing champagne, hors d'oeuvres, beauty treatments, live music, and an exciting honeymoon travel prize for one lucky bride. Aside from the luxuries we are also providing comfort. Nothing is worse than hanging around a stuffy room while having nowhere to sit and put your jacket! This is why our guests will be able to enjoy coat check, and a cocktail lounge: everything they need to stick around and enjoy meeting our vendors in comfort! The best part is that every single vendor at our show can be found on www.BarrieWeddingDeals.com! We are here to remind brides of who you are, and to provide a resource for them to find you long after the show is over!

We plan to continue growing and improving at an even faster rate than we have been. Thank you all for your continued support and we hope to see you at the Barrie Wedding Deals Bridal Show and Cocktail Party!

Learning how to "Internet".

Last week we attended a networking event for wedding vendors hosted by Wedding Wire in Toronto. For those of you who are not familiar with Wedding Wire, it is an American website, much like ours, that services the North American market.

The event itself was quite nice, two hours of open bar and free hors d'oeuvres. We then listened to a presentation from the CMO of Wedding Wire. I thought the presentation was educational and very skillfully designed to contain a lot of information about the advancements of Google and Facebook, search engine optimization, meta tags, mobile apps, and more.

Amusingly it reminded me a bit of a commercial I've seen for an injury law firm where the lawyer is addressing the judge and saying "mumbo jumbo, mumbo jumbo". The judge then asks "mumbo?" And the lawyer answers "jumbo". The message is "leave the law talk to us" or something along those lines.

The marketing strategy behind this type of approach is definitely effective, because the truth is that many wedding vendors are intimidated by technology just like everyone else, and just want to focus on what they want to do best - weddings. It's easy to pass over the online marketing to the professionals, and focus on what you love to do, but you have to be careful about where your money is going and what you are getting in return.

Throughout the event I met a number of wedding vendors and asked them how they liked Wedding Wire, and what they liked about it. This kind of research is also valuable to developing useful features for www.BarrieWeddingDeals.com. A number of people responded that Wedding Wire rates are "not too bad" and they only pay about $60/month. When asked what they were getting in return for that $60/month the answers became a lot more vague. Some vendors stated that they are not in fact sure whether brides were finding them through Wedding Wire at all. One person said that she did track her inquiries and ended up probably breaking even on her advertising investment. Only one person stated that he is quite aware that this is an American site, and likely will not get him much business.

Let me be clear; this blog post is not about bashing Wedding Wire or any other competitive website. Wedding Wire obviously has their stuff together and is a reputable company. This blog post is about finding the right resources for YOUR company. I am not saying that your business would never be found on Wedding Wire, I am just asking you to research your options when it comes to your advertising budget.

One of the problems with Wedding Wire is that it offers everyone the exact same package regardless of your location. Certainly as a wedding vendor your needs would be different in L.A. as opposed to let's say Newmarket, Ontario. It's easy to become dazzled by fancy talk about Google advancements, video builders, apps and promises of search engines. The question you should be asking is how is all this going to market MY business?

At www.BarrieWeddingDeals.com we believe that an educated client is the best client. We spend a lot of time and individual attention with each vendor who has questions, to explain why and how our website will work for you. We are very locally focused and we understand the needs and marketing obstacles that vendors face north of Toronto. We are also happy to let you use our website for free for the entire year of 2013, so you have an adequate amount of time to determine whether this is a valuable tool for your business.

New marketing solutions including bridal show + web packages are underway for 2014 and we promise that they will fit every budget. This business for us is not about making strategic sales and a quick buck, but about developing long lasting relationships with our vendors who trust that our expertise and experience will bring the right audience to their business.

~Nadia Mantsvetova
Founder and Operator of www.BarrieWeddingDeals.com

Wedding Vendors, Get Modern!

The phrase "you have to spend money to make money" has been used so much that it has become a cliche. It's true, if people don't know about you, they will not use your services, and even in a smaller city like Barrie, you can no longer rely on word of mouth advertising.

Having said that, what's even more important to consider is that your marketing is MODERN. When I first moved to Barrie in 2007, I could not believe how many businesses did not even have a website! Because web design and marketing is my specialty, I often questioned this. Many people would say things like "we have enough business" or "we don't need that around here, everyone knows us". As much as that might be true, you cannot maintain this attitude forever. Recently I met a wedding photographer from Orillia at a bridal show. I am a bride-to-be myself by the way, so I do attend these things once in a while to see what they have to offer. I have left a few bridal shows with a thousand business cards in my pocket without remembering whom I had spoken to and who offered what. So when I got home, I started looking up vendors online, including this wedding photographer. I was shocked to find the following. Are you ready?

His website did not have any pictures! Not only that, but he stated that he likes to keep his photography private and that if you want to see them you have to book an appointment, because he likes to do business face to face! What??? So as a bride in Barrie, do I get on the phone, call this person, get in my car, and drive half an our north without even seeing a sample of what he has to offer in hopes of finding what I am looking for, or do I close this website and move on to the next photographer? The choice is obvious. What is most unbelievable is that this person rented a booth at a bridal show for several hundred dollars, spent his afternoon meeting brides, and handed out business cards that led them to this website!

As a wedding business, you are targeting an audience of young brides who don't care if you like things old school, or that you prefer to do things face to face. You are dealing with the next generation of people who are glued to their iphones, can text 100 words a minute and will plan their wedding online long before you get to say hello at a bridal show.

Unfortunately until now, other than occasional bridal shows Simcoe County has been lacking in avenues for local vendors to promote their business. We have identified this problem and are bringing you a solution! Our website www.BarrieWeddingDeals.com offers you a filtered audience of local brides and grooms who are getting married right here. More people are registering every day. They are directly interested in seeing deals from your business and they want to work with you. Furthermore, the website is entirely free for the year of 2013, and the "post a deal" feature cannot be cheaper!

We know that it's hard to keep up with technology these days, so let us help you! If you have questions, we are  here to answer them! We will make sure that your customers find you at www.BarrieWeddingDeals.com!

~Nadia Mantsvetova
Founder