When it comes to wedding venue marketing there are some things to take into consideration. It’s such a niche-specific offering that the marketing strategy must be laser focused, rather than a more broad approach that is often used for different products or services.
The target customer is defined from the start — someone with a wedding to plan and in the market for a place to host the event located in close vicinity to your venue. It doesn’t get any more cut and dry than that. Let me give you an example to show you what we mean by this.
Let’s assume that we were running a marketing campaign for a weight loss supplement. The target customer is someone interested in losing weight, and they can be marketed to from multiple angles.
For example, someone that just joined a gym is highly likely to want to supplement his or her diet with a weight loss product. A person that just ended a relationship might be in the market for a supplement to help them slim down. Even someone planning a wedding is a potential target, as many brides-to-be strive to drop a few pounds before their big day.
When it comes to wedding venue marketing we have a narrow window of targets — those who are in need of a venue for their wedding. They were proposed to, accepted and now it’s time to plan the event.
Now, where do most people turn to when planning a wedding? That’s right — the internet — it’s where you are going to secure most of your bookings. Here are the top three tips for marketing your wedding venue online.
1. Be Extremely Visual with Your Website and Social Media Content
There are typically two main decision makers when it comes to selecting a wedding venue in most situations, and that is the bride and her mother. There are exceptions of course, but when laying out an effective marketing plan we have to think like this in order to command the attention from the largest pool of potential customers.
The number one selling point, initially, for your wedding venue is going to be its visual appeal. Details aside, you aren’t going to receive inquiries or interest unless your venue images blow away the potential customer upon first glance.
Your wedding venue website design needs to be image-rich and your social media feeds need to draw eyeballs. We can help you execute all of this, but the base foundation is professional photography.
A realtor isn’t going to sell a multi-million-dollar home with a listing that features images taken from an iPhone by an amateur photographer. They invest in professional images that “sell” the dream. You need to take the same approach with your wedding venue marketing pictures.
What are the features that set your wedding venue apart from the others? What are the most awe-inspiring aspects that you can turn into images that “sell” without having to say anything?
While Instagram is always going to be a social media network that you can leverage to showcase your venue’s features and amenities, Pinterest is the hidden gem. Pinterest is entirely visual and the majority of its users are female. Its content is heavily wedding-themed as well.
Creating a dedicated board for your wedding venue and keeping it updated with new content is one of the quickest ways to gain momentum. Brides-to-be love to share images, both to let the world know they are about to get married and to seek the approval from friends and family when it comes to the wedding details, including the venue selection.
2. Run Highly Targeted Wedding Venue Advertising Campaigns on Facebook and Google
Facebook and Google are going to always be a source of qualified leads due to the targeting options, and each requires a different approach. Wedding venue advertising must be highly targeted to be effective, and Google and Facebook are two entirely different animals.
You cannot just run ads against a large audience and hope someone that just happens to be planning a wedding will see it. This type of wide-net casting will fail miserably.
To be successful using Google Ads, your wedding venue advertising campaign must target very specific keywords. These keywords must be matched with ad-sets that are optimized for each specific keyword and send clicks to landing pages that are also optimized for the specific keywords.
Google Ads assigns every campaign a Quality Score (QS), which takes the ad copy, keyword(s) and destination landing page into consideration. The more relevant, the higher the score. A high QS will result in more impressions and a lower cost-per-click. This is very important, because click volume will be lower than other industries, so it’s important to attract as much volume as possible.
With Facebook ads, we are able to launch wedding venue advertising campaigns that are a bit more aggressive and creative — and put them in front of a much larger audience.
If someone recently “likes” the Facebook page of a wedding dress designer or a page consisting of wedding cakes don’t you think there is a high probability that they have an upcoming wedding to plan?
You can then target people who “like” certain pages based on their location, as well as their hometown. While someone might not live near your venue currently, they might be from the area originally and are planning on having their wedding back home where the majority of their family and friends live.
With Facebook targeting we can accomplish this and place your ads in front of those with a high probability of needing a wedding venue located within a specified radius of your location.
3. Launch a ‘Buyer-Intent’ Organic Wedding Venue SEO Campaign
SEO is always a solid online marketing strategy, but there is one drawback — it takes time. But, running paid ads across social media and on Google is a great way to not only attract business for your venue immediately, but also to mine data that can be used for the wedding venue SEO campaign.
Google Ads, for example, allow us to test certain keywords before investing the time and money into ranking for them organically. With a small test budget we can drive traffic and see what keywords attract tire-kickers and what ones are responsible for bringing in bookings.
Once we know what keywords and search phrases convert well, we can then target them organically, along with other buyer-intent terms. If your venue has special features and amenities that are highly sought after we can deploy campaigns to rank for those as well.
