There are a few different kinds of marketing and advertising, but they can be mostly wrapped up under two headings: passive and active.

Passive marketing is my favourite because it actively respects the nature of the wedding industry. People getting married are normal people, who can’t easily be targeted using Facebook and Google ads because Meta and Google don’t know when the wedding is or even if they are having one. The “Engaged” status is nice, but the context is lacking. Weddings are a luxury spend, they are not necessary: people can get married without a wedding. Weddings are very personal in taste, and taste is hard to account for in an algorithm.

So passive marketing is about putting yourself out there, leaving a fishing line in the water if you like, and waiting for the right fish to swim along.

So this post is about putting yourself out there, and very much so, what there are you putting yourself into.

A recent article on Every confirmed something I’d been thinking for a while. We’re entering a post-Google search world. For almost 25 years we’ve been Google searching anything and everything, and hoping for the best, but less and less we trust the Google results. So we augment them.

Just say you were trying to be found on the boring “Brisbane wedding celebrant” search term. What happens if you drop the word Reddit in front of it? Are you there? Are you active on Reddit?

Do you have a presence on Bing? Almost half of all web searches happen on Bing because it’s the default search engine on Microsoft Windows, Edge, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, Alexa, Apple Siri, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, MSN and AOL.

If you search for yourself on Instagram or Facebook, are you found?

Being shoved in people’s faces via advertising seems lovely, but it really isn’t. But when people want to find you, or someone like you, have you positioned yourself ready to be found?

If not, get in touch, I’d love to help you out.