If you’re looking into marketing for wedding venues, there is a lot to take into consideration these days, especially when advertising online. You must look at your marketing efforts as a business of their own; they are what is going to generate you the most revenue. You have to be dynamic and know exactly what you’re doing. In this article we will cover how to set up a successful marketing plan for wedding venues.

Set Your Marketing Goals

The first step to meeting your marketing goals is setting them. What are you looking to do? Of course you want to increase your revenue with more conversions. How do you plan to go about it? Well, you want to set SMART Goals. SMART marketing is a framework for successful goal setting. It stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely.

  • Specific: What are you looking to achieve? Are you trying to improve the quality of your leads? Promoting a Specific Wedding Package? Increasing business from specific couples (ex. Same sex weddings)?
  • Measurable: What is the ideal cost per acquisition for a new customer? How much more revenue are you bringing in from your leads converting?
  • Attainable: Make sure your goals are realistic. Not necessarily easy, but something you can actually do. Are you looking to become a key wedding destination in your area?
  • Realistic: As mentioned above, your goals must be things you can accomplish. Wanting to be a key wedding destination in your market is attainable, while setting a goal like “being the number one wedding venue in the United States” is not.
  • Timely: Make sure you set timelines for your goals. If the plan is to lower the cost per conversion (CPC) from your leads for the year, build out a 12 month outlook and track CPC. Keep in mind, wedding venues have a conversion rate of 82%. You’ll want to plan your marketing budget around your goals and your timeline.

Once you figure out what you want to accomplish through your wedding venue marketing campaigns, it’s time to take the steps to complete your goals.

Optimize Your Website

Due to the very nature of wedding venues, the website is the lifeblood of the business. Word of mouth isn’t nearly as effective at promoting your business as its website is. The reason for that is simple – show, don’t tell. You’re going to want to load your website with beautiful photos of your venue and real life events you’ve hosted. Here are some tips for optimizing your website:

1. Make Your Website Easy to Navigate

Rule number one of developing a website for your business, it should be easy to navigate. You don’t want to lose potential customers to a bad sitemap, make sure all your relevant information and photos are easy to find. What’s your maximum capacity? What features separate you from other wedding venues? Are you promoting an outdoor section? Do you have a photo gallery of your venue? Do you specialize in anything? This is all information that should be easy for a bride or groom looking for a potential venue to find.

2. Reduce Load Times

While we all love beautiful high-resolution images and videos, when a user enters a site that takes a long time to load, they are likely to abandon it. We recommend you optimize your visual multimedia to load quickly. This means reducing the size of your video and photo files.

3. Put a Call to Action on Every page

An example of a successful CTA.

optimizing your wedding venues website

4. Your Website must have a clear CTA visible at all times!

There is nothing more important in marketing than your call-to-action (CTA). This should be prominently featured on every page of your website. This will increase your chances of lead generation, by reminding the user to take the action you wish them to. You’re more than likely looking to collect their information, thus, your CTA should lead to a contact form form.

Get Your SEO in Order

Now the work begins. SEO is a major part of website optimization, you can have the best website in the world, but if no one is finding it, it’s all for naught. Using tools like Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends, decide on what are the best options for your site. We suggest looking to rank for words with decent search volume and low competition. Google Keyword Planner is a powerful tool to help market your wedding venue.

Google Ads for Wedding Venues

(Photo Credit: Google) One aspect of keyword planning that should not be overlooked is using long-tail keywords. These are keywords that usually consist of 3-4 words that target a specific audience intention. For example, should your bridal salon be based in Miami, try ranking for something like “Miami Wedding Venues''. These specific keywords are not just easier to rank for, but target people who already know what they’re looking for, bringing you closer to a conversion. Once your keyword selection is completed, begin integrating it throughout your website’s content. Off-page SEO is also something that you should take into account. Keywords are the tip of the iceberg, you should also be focusing on getting backlinks that build authority and promote your website. There are a few different kinds of viable backlinks.

  • Natural links: Links provided by other page owners, sharing your content on their own website
  • Manually Built Links: Having customers and Influencers share your links.
  • Self-Created Links: adding a backlink in an online directory, forum, blog signature, or a press release with optimized text.

With sites like Brightlocal&Reddit, as well as no shortage of social media influencers and forums, you have more backlinking options than ever!

Use Google Ads For Marketing For Wedding Venues

When marketing your business, Google Ads is no longer an option, but rather a necessity. While SEO is important, it can take months to pay dividends, while Google Ads gives you immediate entry into the market.

  • Use the keywords you got from Google Keyword Planner when doing your SEO research to create keyword symbiosis on your website. Again, you want to focus on specific keywords to your niche, local keywords, and things that set you apart from your competitors as a value add. You’re going to want to focus on keywords that are less expensive with lower levels of competition. This is where people tend to make rookie mistakes.
  • Instead of trying to promote “wedding hall” which sees a high level of competition and a higher cost-per-click (CPC), try adding your city. For example “Miami Wedding Venue” has a low competitive rating and a CPC of $2.53 at the high end. Say you’re looking to promote your wedding venue’s new outdoor area, “outdoor wedding venue” sees up to 100k monthly searches with a low competitive rating and a CPC of only $2.12 at the top end. Use your keyword selection to plan your budget. See how many leads and conversions you can get with different keywords, then you can adjust and set your budget accordingly.
  • Another important factor in PPC advertising is geotargeting. If you’re looking to dominate your local market and be one of the premier wedding venues for your area, make sure you geotarget your state or city. This way you draw targets looking for wedding venues in your area.

An example of Google’s Geotargeting system, specifically targeting the state of Florida.

Google Ads Geotargeting Wedding Venue Marketing

Make sure to take advantage of Google’s geotargeting capabilities. (Photo Credit: Google)

Utilize Social Media ASAP

Another absolute necessity in marketing for wedding venues these days is social media. This should not be overlooked and it is important to utilize as part of your marketing plan. You’re going to want to utilize both organic and paid social media for your business. Social Media is a key tool in promoting your wedding venue.

Social media for wedding venues

(photo credit: instagram)

  • For organic posts, it’s important to post quality content consistently to help build a strong brand presence. Instagram is an especially popular channel for marketing for wedding venues as it really lets you show your business off with beautiful photos of weddings and the venue itself. It’s important to stay on top of social media trends and use hashtags to help your business get discovered.
  • Equally as important to advertising your business on social media are paid ads. Using Facebook Ads manager you can target Facebook and Instagram while harnessing their powerful targeting systeming. You can specifically target people in your city who have been recently engaged and have disposable income, as they are more likely to utilize your services.

You can target on social media using Facebook ads manager down to demographics and time engaged.

Facebook Ads for Wedding Venues

(Photo Credit: Facebook)

Build Landing Pages For Your Ads

You should always make sure your aforementioned ads are taking potential customers to landing pages and not your main site. Landing pages are standalone pages that exist separately from your site and are designed to make the user carry out an action, typically making direct contact with you through a phone call or a form fill. Landing pages help increase conversion as they put all the relevant information in front of the user without unnecessary distraction from extraneous content. It’s great to get eyes on your website, but if a potential target ends up reading your blog and clicking away from the site without filling out a contact form, what was their visit really good for?

Use Third Party Platforms

There are some very promising third-party sites on which you can promote your wedding venue. Chief among them is The Knot, which sees 6.1 million monthly unique visitors almost double that of its closest competitor, Wedding Wire. The Knot allows you to provide all the requisite photos and information about your venue to people specifically looking for a wedding venue in their area. It also has its own Customer Relationship Management system so that they can contact you directly. Best of all, it’s home to thousands of real life wedding reviews, so customer testimonials do a lot of the work for you!The Knot is the most popular third-party advertising site for wedding venues in the world.

Marketing For Wedding Venues The Knot

Pacific54: Marketing for Wedding Venues Done Right

Pacific54 has a great wealth of experience in helping businesses convert their advertising to real revenue, especially with wedding venues. We are an aggressive digital marketing agency that builds campaigns from inception, through execution and provides dynamic campaign maintenance to maximize your return on investment. Contact Pacific54 today to get started with us!

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