Bridal Network : The Wedding Marketing Engine

users

291,253

dress views

668,474

store searches

266,531

vendor referrals

19,230

ads & banners

0

Since 2001, Bridal Network Inc has designed, developed & delivered digital marketing solutions for the wedding industry.

We operate a number of websites and an app, some specifically for the Canadian market, others for the North American market in general. We also develop custom solutions for 3rd party operators in weddings - shops, distributors, trade shows and publishers.

All our products are powered by our proprietary ad & content delivery engine. Developed completely in-house, the platform provides detailed transactional tracking, logging & reporting and adds context to wedding marketing, analysing behavioural trends and relationships, for brides, vendors & service providers. Our wedding data extends back to 2001!

Our Story - 20+ Years of Online Wedding Tech

Pioneering Weddings-on-the-Web : The 90s - Dreamweavers.com

Our team has been in the online wedding space continuously, since the very beginning. Our original project and precursor to the Bridal Network was the dreamweavers.com website, first launched way back in 1997.

Dreamweavers was a full-fledged wedding "portal" - the business model du-jour in the 90s. It had one of the first bridal "gown galleries" on the web, a full directory, personalised planning tools and all the other goodies a bride expected.

The site was exremely popular, easily the market leader in Canada and one a top-10 wedding property in North America. It was also our test-bed for many of the concepts that later coalesced into the Bridal Network platform.

The Pay-per-Click 00s
The Bridal Network

The Bridal Network platform was launched in November 2001. It encapsulated all the lessons of the 90s into a powerful but lightweight, flexible, accessible and fast performanced-based transactional engine, for both advertising & content delivery.

To this day, it remains the only performance-based advertising platform, for the wedding industry, with all the features later popularised by Google and Facebook ads, but tailored to the specific flavours of weddings:

Pay-per-click, bid-for-position business listings
CPM + CPC banner ads and text-ads, across content networks
CPC Bridal Fashion galleries (bid your dresses higher)
Pay-per-booking event promotions

Content is King : The 10s - Bride.ca

We launched Bride.Canada (bride.ca) in the Fall of 2009 as a complete wedding planning resource, specifically for Canadian brides - and it promptly became the top wedding planning website in Canada.

Besides the powerful PPC wedding services directory, the site featured a great blog and the first searchable "Gown Gallery" and store locator for Canadian brides.

Bride.Canada has evolved continuously since and remains an exrtemely popular & contextual advertising platform and audience builder.

The (non-responsive) second generation UI is beginning to show its age though, so for 2019 (ten years after the original launch!) a major facelift is in the works!

Going Mobile - and Vertical
The Dressfinder+

The mobile revolution has changed online content for ever, splitting delivery to a multitude of devices, while the focus has become very narrow. What used to be a "portal" must now become a collection of distinct, highly specialised verticals.

We started on 2017, by spinning off the Bride.ca "Gown Gallery" section into the standalone Dressfinder app and responsive website. The site's success has been immediate & very gratifying. In 2018, 70% of Canadian brides, plus 60,000 US brides will look for the wedding dress on the dressfinder.

Next Up: The "Venue Finder" ;)

Philosophy - The Bridal Network Advantage

Focused on Technology

Online marketing is much much more than mere "placing ads on websites". Whether you are delivering content or advertising, not taking advantage of the full possibilities presented by technology is like using a horse to pull your fancy sports car along :)

The Bridal Network marketing engine delivers the full power of the digital medium:

Tracking: Know what your campaigns are doing at all times, in detail.
Flexibility: Start-Stop-Change-Adapt your campaigns at any time.
Intelligence: Not just numbers, but also context. How do your results compare to the rest of the market?

Focused on Value

Our platform is transactional. This means that we charge not for time or space, but for actual results delivered: you pay per click, per view, per email, per appointment etc - or you pay nothing!

In addition, for most of our products, you can set your own advertising rates. In general. the higher you bid your ad rate, the higher the delivery - so yo ucan "throttle" your campaigns until you find your sweetspot: maximum results within your budget.

Business Listings: Can be free, or pay-per-click, bidding the CPC rate for rankings.
Content (like dresses): Can be free, or pay-per-view bidding the CPM rate for higher rankings.
Ads: Can be pay-per-click, pay-per-view or both. The highers to eCPM (effective CPM) the more frequent the delivery.

This model extends to all our products: emails, appointments, dials from the directory, event promotions, even push notifications on mobile.