Photo by: Josh McCullock Photography
In the United States, the wedding industry generates 60 billion dollars a year. That doesn’t even account for the honeymoon! It’s safe to say that the wedding venue market is saturated. If you’re wondering how to market your wedding venue and stand out from the competition, you’re not alone!
From destination beach wedding venues to small, unique wedding venues found in any city imaginable, every couple is looking for something a little different.
If you’re trying to develop an effective marketing approach or determine how to promote your wedding venue, Brandlink Media can help. Our team of skilled digital marketers has been helping wedding venues level up and build better and stronger businesses for many, many years.
Here are 12 tips to keep top of mind as you advertise a wedding venue. Let’s get started!
12 Tips for How to Market Your Wedding Venue
Do you want to learn how to market and promote your wedding venue? Check out some of these helpful tips for an effective approach to marketing your venue.
1. Local SEO
- When people are looking for wedding reception venues, where do they turn? Most people start with Google, the world’s largest search engine.
No matter where someone is located, they’re likely to start Googling terms like ‘wedding reception venues’ and ‘outdoor wedding venues’ as soon as they get engaged. But with so many wedding venues out there, how can you stand out?
For starters, make sure that your Google Business profile is complete. This will give people all the necessary information they need to get in touch with you:
Location
Reviews
Business name
Phone number
Business photos
Website
Hours
This gives Google a solid lexicon of information to help boost your local SEO. If people are searching in a concentrated area or for a particular type of venue — industrial wedding venues in Dallas, for instance—your competition is smaller. You’ll have a greater chance of winning attention! After your Google Business profile is set up for your wedding business, make sure it is fully optimized and kept living and breathing with fresh content. This profile arguably is the single, most important business profile for your wedding venue to have in place.
Partnering with the right company, such as Brandlink, can also help you generate a variety of citations. These crucial citations are essential backlinks that will help boost your ranking and send the right signals to Google to bolster your online visibility for important keywords.
People won’t scroll through pages and pages of Google results. If you don’t show up on the first page, you might as well not be there at all. With the right help, you can get eyes on your venue.
2. Create a Great Wedding Venue Website
These days, your website is the cornerstone of a successful business. People will spend lots of time online before they ever pick up the phone and speak to you. Consider a functional, beautiful website to be your most important salesperson.
If you’re wondering how to promote a wedding venue, the answer is simple: invest in a high-quality website. Most other marketing tips have one purpose, and that is to drive people to your website.
One way to create a website that works for you is to create it with the user experience in mind. When someone lands on the first page of your website, what’s the first thing they’ll see? People are looking for an immersive experience. If you’re wondering how to promote a wedding venue, top-notch photography, evocative language and informative text with a clear call to action is the way to go.
If people can’t navigate your website, they will make assumptions on what it is actually like to work with you as a wedding venue. While this may not seem fair, it’s how it works in many situations.
If you need help designing a website that helps you win business, schedule a free consultation with Brandlink. We help wedding venues create dynamic websites that look beautiful and generate leads.
3. Email Marketing
If you’re wondering how to advertise a wedding venue, consider how you’re getting in contact with people. When you promote your brand on social media, you’re often taking a shotgun approach. You can curate your Instagram feed for your ideal customer. But you can’t personalize it for every single person that visits your page.
That’s why email marketing is beneficial. It allows you to immediately connect with prospects at any time of day or night. It also gives you a chance to offer personalized information, offers and discounts. Once you have someone’s email address, you have a fantastic opportunity to nurture that warm lead and connect with them on a personal level.
You can collect email addresses from people who fill out newsletter sign-up forms, contact forms, and so forth. Most importantly, after someone gives you their email or submits and inquiry, make sure that you have an automated, immediate email response with clear information and a professional design.
4. Solid Logo and Branding for Your Wedding Venue
Your logo and branding sets the tone for everything and should appear cohesive and consistent across all marketing channels. Here is a small sample of the places your logo and brand matter:
Ads
Website
Social media platforms
Emails
Client communications
Handouts, such as brochures or pamphlets
Your brand and logo say a lot about your business. When promoting wedding venues, your goal is to communicate the nature of the venue and give potential customers a true feel for what it’s like to get married at your venue. Are you going for elegant yet modern vibes? Maybe you own a barn wedding venue and want to communicate a laid-back, welcoming aesthetic.
To attract your ideal client, it is crucial to communicate the overall aesthetic of your brand. It can help people decide if your wedding venue is right for them, and if it fits their vision for the big day!
Without solid branding in place, your wedding venue will be nudged out of the running for winning business and you simply won’t be able to secure the precise, ideal client you want booking your space.
5. Marketing Collateral
When deciding how to promote a wedding venue, consider your marketing collateral. When clients pick up a brochure, see an ad or take home swag, what does that collateral really say about your business?
People make important brand associations based on early experiences. For instance, say you got a free T-shirt from a company that was running a promotion. The T-shirt was poorly made, with itchy graphics and colors that bled in the wash. After a single wear, the stitching began to unravel. How likely are you to buy something from that company?
If their free collateral is this bad, you have no reason to invest money in a similarly poor paid experience. That’s precisely why marketing collateral matters.
Every experience someone has with your company needs to be top-notch. If it’s not, then customers will often make decisions that favor other brands.
6. Email Signature
When your client receives an email from you, what does your email signature look like? Subconsciously or not, potential clients are judging every aspect of your brand. Your email signature tells a story, too.
When you’re marketing a wedding venue, every piece of the puzzle communicates something about the overall quality of your brand. When you include a well-designed email signature block, potential clients notice. It also helps create a cohesive look that matches your logo and other branding materials.
7. Social Media
These days, digital marketing is always changing. There are so many creative options.
Instagram and TikTok are blowing up. They serve as more than personal entertainment platforms. Instead, they’re lucrative opportunities for businesses to leverage visual and video content to advertise.
To get the most out of your social media marketing, make sure to utilize beautiful customized social templates and have a consistent and defined strategy in place . This will allow you to create cohesive story posts every day that tell the story of your venue with messaging that resonates.
Make sure to use the best imagery or video footage from your venue, too! This will help you promote the wedding venue and showcase your best weddings and events to attract more of your ideal client.
Reviews from happy customers are also extremely helpful to share. Your potential customer wants to know about the experiences of others. Positive reviews from happy clients should be shared through social media, included on your website and kept permanently living on your Google Business profile.
For busy business owners who understand the important role social media plays in marketing their wedding venue but lack the time needed to make these channels work for them, Brandlink is here to help. From social media management to simple social refreshes that help position your company better through these mediums, we can devise a plan and implement a strategy so that your brand stays at the forefront.
8. Killer Photography
As a wedding venue, professional photography will help you advertise the aesthetic of your space. Potential brides and grooms need to be able to envision themselves getting married at your location.
Potential customers also want to be able to see photos of the architecture, interior space and special features of the venue as a blank slate. The photos of your venue are going to be a major selling point, so make sure you partner with someone who can help you do it right!
Brandlink supports our clients with photography and videography.
9. Virtual Tour of Your Wedding Venue
If you move into a new apartment, you’re going to want a tour. Pictures aren’t enough! You need to be able to walk through the space, virtually or otherwise. In this post-pandemic era, people expect to take a virtual tour and appreciate the convenience of it.
Touring is truly the only way to get a feel for the space. Since a virtual tour is such a fantastic value-add, you can also promote this as a lead magnet and collect emails of potential interested customers in exchange for sending a link to the virtual tour.
Brandlink can help you to create branded, dynamic videos and a virtual tour that gives potential clients a great sense for what your venue can offer them. We can also set up an email automation to make it easy for you to collect leads with ease.
10. Wedding Collection
Having a stellar wedding gallery showcasing weddings that have taken place at your venue is crucial. Potential customers will request to see other weddings and having those galleries organized and easily accessible to send and share is a must.
If you lack hours in the day to collect imagery from photographers who have photographed events at your venue and keep these galleries organized so that you can use them to the fullest to market your wedding venue, Brandlink can help. We offer wedding collection services and presentation portals to keep your content organized and accessible so your sales team can utilize with ease.
People want to see what other weddings look like in your space. It’s a critical sales tool.
11. How to Advertise Your Wedding Venue
To fall in love with your wedding venue, people need to know it exists. Referrals and strong SEO are great, but they aren’t everything. Also, never assume everyone knows about your venue no matter how established you are. There is a constant influx of couples entering the market and rest assured, a small fraction may know about you but you’re also competing with many, many others vying for their attention.
Focus on local advertising opportunities. For instance, there are great advertising resources that are tailored to geographic locations, such as Brides of North Texas, Brides of Austin, Brides of Houston (just a few noteworthy local media brands in the Texas market), that offer valuable multimedia exposure that drives continuous brand awareness and gives you an opportunity to turn their audience into your customer. These channels also publish informative articles online that are high ranking in search engines that help wedding venues get discovered and win business.
Advertising your wedding venue also helps you stay in front of an audience that may already be interested. It takes repeat exposure to generally win the business of a new client. After seeing your brand continuously through strategic advertising, you separate yourself from the competition and put yourself in a position to win even more business. These local media brands have built credibility with their audiences already who trust the recommendations and endorsements they make. It’s a great way to ride their coattails and get the greatest exposure possible!
12. Website Event Tracking
One of the most important aspects of marketing your wedding venue is to know what is working and what is not. Tracking interactions on your website and understanding how people are using your site and converting on your site is important.
You will need to iterate constantly to succeed. Sometimes, certain language or user experience flows will succeed. Others will not. That’s why Brandlink helps you set up the tools needed to understand how well your website is working for you, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console and tag manager + event tracking.
Understanding the metrics is key to understanding what digital marketing strategies work.
How to Market Your Wedding Venue
If you’re wondering how to market your wedding venue, Brandlink Media can help! From very simple strategies to more advanced practices, we aim to help wedding businesses look their very best online, attract their target client with precision and ultimately win business.
If you’re interested in top-notch marketing support for your wedding venue, contact us today!
[email protected] or call the office at 405.607.2092
to talk with us today (fun fact: a real, live human answers our phone).
We can’t wait to create something great for you.
