How the Marketing Machine Turns on After You Announce an Engagement

Your beloved asked the much longed for question and now you are engaged! You can’t wait for your big day when you say “I do” … and retailers, service providers and venues can’t wait to take your money so that you can turn your big day into your ultimate dream day. You may not notice it right away because you have wedding on the brain anyway, but suddenly every ad you see online is about something that you need for your wedding and your mailbox (both literal and virtual) is full of mailers that advertise wedding services and must-haves at you. In fact, probably the only place you’re not actively seeing more advertising for wedding related expenses is on your television – and frankly it’s only a matter of time until that’s responsive as well. But how did the marketing machine kick into gear as soon as you got engaged? Today, we’ll explain how everybody is smartly marketing at you because of your new big situation.

You Just Wanted to Get Some Information or Share Your Joy

The reality is that marketers can only be as smart as you let them be, but you don’t have to let too much slip for marketers to “get a beat on you.” Chances are that shortly after you got engaged you did one of three things that spiraled the avalanche of wedding related marketing material.

You Announced Your Engagement on Social Media: We don’t blame you. When you’re happy, you want to share your happiness with the world. But be aware that no matter how secure your privacy settings are on most social networks, almost anything you do, say or post can ultimately be conveyed to marketers in one form or another. In a worst case scenario, you immediately changed your social network settings from “single” or “in a relationship” to “engaged.” Cue the barrage of ads in your feeds, sidebars and banner spots. As soon as you make a change like that in what is essentially the social network’s database you can actively be queried by advertisers who are actually looking for people who have recently gotten engaged. In the case on at least one (wildly popular) social network, advertisers can actually query users across the network (regardless of your privacy settings or friend relationships) who have been engaged for less than a month or for less than six months so that they can target their ads at the types of things you buy or book early in a wedding process.

But even doing something less subtle than changing your status, like simply posting an update that mentions your engagement or fiancé (or a number of other keywords) can trigger the same type of targeting. Again, remember that even the tightest privacy settings typically allow social networks to use your information, including things you post, to feed data to advertisers.

We know that just about everybody mirrors their lives on social media these days, but always keep in mind that no matter what your settings are any information on a social network can ultimately be information that gets used to drive ads at you.

You Signed Up to Get Wedding Information. Oh No!

Maybe you wanted to get some pricing on a venue so you filled out the information form. Or perhaps you needed to make an appointment to try on a wedding dress and you used an online form. Or if you’re ahead of the game you went and tried on the wedding dress and filled out the information or order sheet afterward. All of these are things that you more or less have to do in order to get started on your wedding planning, and all of them are steps that will then make your contact information available to any advertisers who have partnerships with the business or website or any marketing firm that wants to buy all of the contact information from the business or website. There are very few privacy or legal gates that can prevent this from happening, and in most cases you’ve actually been warned in some very small print somewhere that your information will be shared. It hurts and primarily shows up in the increase in both physical and electronic mail that you’re about to start receiving. The good news is that it’s fairly easy to unsubscribe from email as it comes in. The bad news is that it’s actually rather difficult to control physical mail or bulk marketing that comes to your home.

Or…You Just Visited a Website About Weddings or Engagements

Sadly, in this day and age really all that you had to do to begin the onslaught of wedding related marketing is visit a website (pretty much any website) that’s sole focus is wedding related. Marketers use a technology called “remarketing” which allows them to identify individuals or computers that have looked at certain websites and then present their ads to them. More often than not it’s a repeating ad for the website or product that you looked at online, but it can easily be expanded from there. You thought that you were only browsing to get an idea of favors for your wedding, but in actuality you were tipping off retailers and businesses that you (or your computer) are a target rich location.

What Can You Do?

Unfortunately, without going entirely off-grid there’s not much that you can do to avoid the marketing machine, but here are our favorite quick tips for trying to minimize it.

Keep social media mentions to a minimum or avoid them altogether if possible (and make sure your privacy settings are up to date).

Only provide email or other contact information when it’s an absolutely required field on a form. This is good advice in general!

Don’t sign up on lists just to get a discount.

Opt-out of any marketing emails immediately, and if they truly were unsolicited or from somewhere you never did business in the past report them as spam.

The less you do online, the better. Which doesn’t mean avoid online entirely, just be aware of its marketing deluge.

Did we miss a way that the wedding marketing machine kicks into gear that you want to share with us? If so, just tell us about it on one of the social media channels below.