Hey Everyone. Our Style Me Pretty Team has been working long hours getting ready for the relaunch of our Little Black Book. While the actual vendor guide is very important to us, it’s a small part of a much larger offering for LBB members. Since I know you’ll all have a lot of questions, I’d like to outline some of the biggest changes and remind everyone of how SMP’s vendor guide works.
Sub-Categories have Become “Services”
In the past, vendors were asked to choose a high level category plus a sub-category for their listing. Additional sub-categories would cost vendors more money. We’re replacing the concept of a sub-category with the concept of “services.”
What is a service? And how much does it cost? Unlike adding a sub-category, adding services is free for LBB members. You simply tell us what services you offer and — if we’re listing them in the Little Black Book — you’ll show up when brides and grooms search for those services.
Services will show up in our guide as filters on the left hand side of a desktop page. Clicking on a service, will filter results to show all of the vendors that perform that service. If a bride selects multiple services, we’ll show vendors that perform any of the services you’ve selected.
As part of our ongoing attempts to make our guide better, we’ll review “services” throughout the year to ensure we’re listing new service offerings relevant to brides and vendors. (Of course, we do reserve the right to remove your listing or services if your website doesn’t actually promote that service.)
No More Regional Listings
We decided to stop selling Regional Listings. Only 5% of our vendor base decided to buy them in 2017 and 2018. We felt like regions were adding little benefit and a lot of complexity. Currently, there are still ways to search for vendors by Region. However, we’re planning on removing this in Q2 of 2019 as we work to continually refresh our vendor guide.
We thought long and hard about going to all city-level listings. However, there are still some large parts of the U.S. where our most granular listing is a state-level listing. Comparable International listings begin at country-level listings.
How Filtering and Ranking of Listings Works
Just as they were able to do, before Abby and I brought SMP back, brides and grooms can still narrow their US vendor search to the city, state or region of their choice. If your listing overlaps with their search area, you’ll be included in the results. Ranking works based on how closely your listing matches the granularity of the search. For example, if you buy a Massachusetts listing (state level) and the couple is searching in Massachusetts, you’ll show up before Vendors who bought a Boston (city level) listing. However, if the couple narrows the scope of their search to Boston – Boston based listings will show up first.
Abby and I are proud to be part of this team — a team who has worked tirelessly on behalf of brides, grooms and wedding professionals around the world — to create our 2019 LBB Offering. I’m confident that in our new plans, we have something for everyone. Or as my lovely wife would say, “We’ve got y’all covered!”