How To Get Your Wedding Venue Marketing Plan Spot On
One of today’s leading industry questions is how do you market your wedding venue effectively? This has become increasingly important given just how competitive and saturated the sector has now become. This is great for people looking to get wed, not so good if you’re one of those wedding venue businesses. There are various ways, however, to get yourself noticed even amidst all the clamour from your competitors. Our bridal marketing agency have provided many a wedding venue marketing plan during their decade-long tenure. We wanted to look at how you can still get your venue noticed, even in such fiercely fought times.
Assess Your Website
It’s all very well having a wonderful venue; but if your website is stuck in the stone ages, then you won’t even get people visiting. The majority of your battle is fought in the webpage arena; if you can get prospective couples to for more than a couple of minutes; then you’ve got your foot in the door. This initial ‘hook’ is something that not enough venues appreciate the importance of. There are several criteria you should be looking at when considering your website, they’re as follows:
Quantity of text.
Are your pages (and especially your homepage) overly laden with paragraphs of text? Do you think they convey the level of beauty and elegance you’d associate with wedding-related themes? If you’re to avoid a high bounce rate (people leaving your site as soon as they’ve clicked onto it)
Visuals
Wedding venues are as much visual as anything else – does your website show this off? When it comes to choosing a wedding venue, couples will first and foremost make decisions with their eyes, always. Have good-quality photos taken by a professional photographer and place them throughout your website to showcase each and every part of your venue and the associated services therein. If hiring a photographer is too expensive, then stage a shoot with your smartphone. Most smartphones now come with exceptionally good cameras, so with the help of some online tips and tricks, you’ll be able to come up with photos of a similar quality to that which a photographer would grant you.
Usibilty
Is your site user-friendly? With a site that’s promoting a service or ‘product’ (which is essentially what a wedding venue is), your end goal should always be to guide the user through to a contact/booking page. Everything else on the site should be contributing to this goal in some way or another. Incorporating little reminders like call-to-actions at the end of blogs is one such trick. Another is making the social links clear and accessible; social media accounts are great ways to bolster the impressiveness of your venue and a well-managed Instagram account, say, will help translate into bookings.
Layout
Look at your site’s layout. This is an important one, focusing on the negative space, that is, the areas where there’s not text, is just as imperative as the content itself. Is your site laid out in an aesthetically-pleasing and interesting way? Or is it just like every other generic website? If need to and you’re able, then get a web developer or a marketing team to take your website and restructure it in a way that’s more modern and more in keeping with the sleek, stylish motifs that are prevalent in the wedding industry, today.
What’s Your Networking Like?
The wedding industry is very much one where it’s not what you know, but who. Whether you see this as something positive or not is largely irrelevant because the fact is, it is. This means in order to build the reputation of your venue, you need to make a concerted effort in establishing your name within industry circles. The best way to do this is through industry-driven publications and B2B magazines. Securing coverage in these kinds of media comes through the use of a PR team. No wedding venue marketing plan is complete without a PR component. PR executives work on behalf of your venue, taking the USP of what it is that you offer, and going to journalists at the desired publications. If you gain appearances in these magazines, people will begin to take notice.
Location-Targeted Marketing
Generally, people look to get married close to where they’re based. There are, of course exceptions to this rule – people having holiday weddings abroad, or a location that they’ve always had as a dream wedding location, even as a child. These are the exception and not the rule, however. The point being that if you run a wedding venue based in Essex, say, driving website traffic is useless if the majority of that is coming from users in the North of Scotland.
Both your social media marketing and your SEO, then, should have a longer-tail focus. Instead of just looking to rank for the keyword ‘Georgian Mansion Wedding Venue’, shift this up to ‘Georgian Mansion in Essex’. The same applies to the hashtags that you utilise on your social media channels. By carefully choosing a mix of more general, more wide-reaching hashtags with the more location-specific ones, you guarantee both a quantity and quality of user being reached. This location targeting is one of the keystones to any wedding venue marketing plan.
Contact US
If you want your calendar to be booked years into the future (every venue’s dream), then you need to be delving a substantial amount of time into your marketing. If you feel that that’s not time you can spare, then don’t worry – that’s where an agency such as ours comes in handy. So, if you’d like to find out more about our marketing services (including advice on your wedding venue marketing plan), then get in touch! Contact VerriBerri today on 01376 386 850. We’d love to have a sit down, look through your venue’s portfolio and work on areas which could be improved. To make your wedding venue business happy, you need to be giving couples the happiest day of their lives. In order to do that, you first have to be seen.
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