Here at Coconut, we have oodles of experience of marketing wedding venues. It’s a joy to work on these accounts because the topic is so darn happy! It’s also a fairly evergreen topic - we can’t see the cycle of weddings stopping yet...
If you are a wedding venue, you’ll know that weddings are a high stakes game. Everyone involved is delighted to be there (mostly!). There’s a lot of money at play. Plenty of pressure to deliver. Losses to consider and reputational damage to repair if things go wrong.
Marketing strategy for wedding venues
By strategy we mean a holistic and big picture view on achieving your goals. With our marketing hats on that encompasses...
who and where your audiences hang out
what wedding trends are piquing their interest
what your offering is and where it fits in
how and where you are (or aren’t) talking about it
converting your efforts and those audiences into wedding bookings
Wedding venue marketing isn’t something that you can do in your sleep, on zero budget or in a scattergun fashion. It’s worth spending time and money marketing your wedding venue effectively, right from the outset. If you’re already a few years in, stop and take a raincheck. Now! All good marketing activity is rooted in a clearly thought-out strategy, but you can begin again.
How to promote your wedding venue online
Think like a bride to be
We’re focusing here on the digital side of the marketing coin. After all, we don’t go online anymore - we all live online. We’re not delving into the labyrinthine world of Google Adwords or Facebook Ads today. Here we’re discussing low budget activity you can do to achieve initial success.
We won’t completely ignore the print world of wedding magazines either. There’s still a huge market for print press coverage in the wedding sector, but readership is (like all print publications) in decline.
To test our approach, we’re putting ourselves in a bride to be’s white satin shoes and following her customer journey through the online decision making process.
Oh my god, YES I will!
So what comes after the grand proposal? How to find the perfect wedding venue. Where to buy the dream wedding dress, shoes, bridesmaids outfits, table favours… The list, if we’re honest, is endless, but let’s start at the top...
How do people find your wedding venue?
Defining what makes you unique and marrying this (forgive the pun) with your target audience are your two first ports of call.
What’s your wedding venue USP?
Ask yourself…
What makes your venue different from all the rest?
How does it stand out from the competition?
What’s your story that could play a part in the loved up couple’s fairytale?
This could be location, setting, architecture, ambience, decor, food, music, and crucially - the photogenic spots that will make the bride’s heart sing (and the wedding photographer’s!). It’s really important to identify this early on so that your brand comes alive.
Who is your target audience?
Newly engaged couples, obviously. But think about developing a ‘persona’, which details your perfect client.
Age
Job
Income
Location
Interests
Wedding goals
Needs
It’s worth spending some time brainstorming this person (you might end up with two or three variations) and considering what drives them to make decisions. You’ll end up with a handful of personas, across genders and age brackets.
Is your wedding venue website designed to drive sales?
There’s little point in a pretty website that has no underlying SEO strategy, or overarching calls to action. Everything on your website should serve a purpose (for the person looking at it, not necessarily you).
Through this, you’ll need to be totally clear about what you offer. Everything from capacity, to onsite spa facilities, the honeymoon suite, gardens, photogenic spots around the grounds and links with wedding suppliers. Your website will need to convey the experience couples will be giving their guests as well as what they can hope for on the day.
HOT TIP… Use your website to gather email data so that you can begin and nurture a relationship with couples and guests. A pop up box promising special offers and wedding tips will likely tempt customers to part with their email address. More on this later, too!
How well does your website rank on Google?
Tap ‘wedding venues oxfordshire’ or luxury wedding venues’ into Google. Does your website surface? If not, (and allowing for some clever Google insight) you probably have some work to do on search engine optimisation (SEO).
To get a real view on how your website performs in search engines, we’d highly recommend an SEO audit - our trusted partners provide this service for us.
Wherever your SEO is at, the combination of good technical SEO setup and regular keyword centric content creation will set you on the road to a more easily findable website. In turn, it will hold people thanks to the useful, interesting and possibly entertaining content that’s not to be found elsewhere on the web.
Social media for wedding venue marketing
You’ll know that being active on social media is absolutely key, and you’ll also know that it is a time-sapper and a distraction. But why are we all on social? It’s not just about brand building and raising awareness. It’s there to drive people to your website, where they will part with their email address and you can market to them directly through personalised email campaigns.
How not to waste time on social media marketing
It’s one of the most important decisions for the newly hitched pair as they try to secure a date and juggle parental expectations over the whole affair. It’s highly likely that the bride (or groom) to be has a clear idea of what they want and may well have already decided on their ideal wedding before they’ve been asked. Pinterest reports that 70% of their users have pinned wedding related content before getting engaged. More on that later!
With a little steer and forethought you’ll reap the rewards. The thing we say time and again is to vary your messaging dependent on the channel you are active on, i.e. don’t cross post the same material on Insta and Facebook - the audience is not the same so the messages shouldn’t be either.
Test your current output by looking at the raw data - what kinds of posts are getting you the most engagement, and when are your fans looking at your pages? Don’t be scared to shake it up. Using a social media scheduler like Later or Hootsuite can take the guesswork out of this process and free you up from constantly pressing ‘publish’ so you can invest more time in engaging with those on your pages and build a community around them.
Pinterest for wedding venues
Pinterest is an absolute hotbed of brides to be. It’s THE place to share your passion for weddings. As we mentioned earlier, a phenomenal percentage of Pinners have pinned wedding content before they are even engaged, so you’ll want to be there before the event as well as during the venue booking process and contributing inspiration right up to the big day and the thank you notes.
We’ve written a handy blog on how we’ve used Pinterest for one of our wedding venue clients, so hop over for a quickfire read.
Facebook for wedding venues - it’s all about trust
We’re aware that Facebook usage is waning in the face of hot competition from Instagram. But it’s still the place where friendly connections and conversations happen most freely, which we think is critical for wedding venues. Clients need to feel total trust and connection with your venue and Facebook is a good place to start.
Reaching out to your audience organically is ever more challenging as new algorithms push users to buy Facebook advertising. But one way to crack the code, is to encourage conversation between your audience, on your posts. This shows Facebook that the content is valuable.
Don’t risk alienating your audience by posting several times a day, but be selective about your posts. They should not all be a hard sell. Choose your wording carefully and include ‘trigger’ words to play to people’s wedding related emotions.
Use happy photographs to illustrate reviews from happy customers. And think wider, providing more general, informative tips for brides to be. Link up with all your wedding suppliers - bands, balloons, flowers, bridalwear, jewellers and give them a shout-out. They’ll be sure to return the favour.
Instagram for wedding venues
This picture-led platform is ideal for leading your prospective bride around the emotional experience, not just the venue. That is - capture the photogenic stairways and gardens, the quirky amuse bouches and the seat covers, but give equal if not more space to the tearful father, the cheeky bridesmaids and the glowing brides. Creating a beautiful grid is key now that people are more likely to go to an Instagram page than direct to the brand website.
Use hashtags plentifully and carefully, choosing tags that are relevant to your brand. And check those on the banned hashtags list.
User generated content is your winner on Instagram. That is, content that has been created by your happy couples and their guests, that you are tagged in. It’s shown to be trusted far more than brand-generated content. Repost these in Stories so they don’t upset your grid scheme, and bury hashtags within the image to make them searchable without being impossible to read. Encourage your customers to get involved by including your social media handles and any brand hashtags within your other marketing.
Email marketing wedding venues
Someone asked us just this week whether email marketing was worth the effort. As with everything in marketing terms, it depends on your goal. If budget is genuinely limited, assess the time and money spent on capturing email addresses and creating email marketing campaigns versus that spent, for example, on your SEO strategy, and the result each channel generates in terms of website traffic and conversion to bookings.
That said, email marketing still has one of the highest conversion to enquiry/booking/sale rates of all outbound marketing activity, in our experience. And we definitely recommend having it as part of your marketing armoury.
One story, various routes to finding those customers
With so much choice for newly engaged couples to get married these days, having a marketing strategy to complement your target audience and your offering will ensure more of those people cross your threshold. Whether they do that physically, digitally or telephonically in the first instance will depend on how and where you’re reaching them.
Most will not be ready to book today and will need prompts after they’ve visited your venue either digitally or in person. Nurturing them across various digital channels as well as through print press coverage and local advertising will keep your wedding front of mind. In digital terms, we like to think of social media as greasing the wheels, your website putting everything into gear and your email marketing being your most effective conversion to the finish line.
Ready to ramp up your wedding venue marketing?
You’re welcome to pick our brains for half an hour in the first instance - drop us a line or let’s meet for coffee. Or if you’re ready to improve your presence and grow your wedding business, let’s get started.
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