What You May Not Have Known About Today’s Grooms:
This website may be called SelltheBride.com, but one thing must be acknowledged: it is more and more about selling the groom. The typical scenario of the groom-to-be sequestered in a waiting room with a television airing the latest football game, while the bride-to-be narrows down the invitation prospects, is no longer.
Grooms were, and are (usually) major financial contributors to weddings and all that they entail. People naturally care to some extent on how their money is spent. But today’s modern groom also cares, and is even passionate about, this special affair and its planning process because of what it means for him.
Rob Punk, blogger at wedbuddy.com, lifts the veil on what grooms-to-be might be thinking, and challenges stereotypes and preconceived notions of men-as-grooms. In fact, he goes on to demonstrate that the belief in such archaic colloquial sentiments of groom-disinterest can be a real hindrance to the wedding entrepreneur. As he writes in his article, Infographic: What Men Really Want, “contrary to what most people might think about men and the lack of interest they have in the wedding planning process, most men today tend to actually want to be involved in someway. In fact, according to a recent poll, 56% of grooms participate in choosing the venue, 1 in 20 men participate in decisions about flowers, and one third of grooms pick up a fork, taste cake options, and help his bride make the right choice for their big day.” Be sure to check out the article to see the fully detailed infographic, with information drawn from sources like the Huffington Post, and The Grooms List.
Aside from this relatively ground-breaking article, unfortunately, doing a Google search for grooms-to-be, or even planning websites for grooms, does not yield very many tangible results. Still, that means when competing for the groom’s attention, a wedding professional will be doing it in a much less crowded space than if it was for the bride’s attention. That means there’s lots of potential. One idea might be to market to groom through the bride. Simply write groom-to-be focused content in spaces where brides-to-be make up the majority (or even tautology) of the reading audience. Undoubtedly the brides-to-be will want to share what they read there with their grooms-to-be.
So, what does this all mean? Grooms, grooms, grooms, we are just going to have to start thinking about how to market to you.