Being in the wedding business, I’m sure you have to wear multiple hats every day. One day you’re a sales coordinator, the next you’re a wedding planner, And today – you’re a marketing representative! Now, you might be asking yourself how to promote a wedding venue? Here is where you’ll understand the easiest and most effective way to promote a wedding venue in 10 easy steps.
1. Get Featured on Directories
Make Use of Free Directories
The easiest first step is to make sure you’re listed in the featured local & national wedding venue directories; however it’s important to understand the costs involved. Some local/national directories are free to be featured on, and others cost a yearly membership fee.
Here’s a list of 74 free websites to start!
Should you decide to pay to be featured, make sure to record how many brides come through each directory. It helps to know the average cost of each bride’s information – and from there decide if there are more efficient ways to get leads!
I’ve seen too many wedding venues waste thousands of dollars on WeddingWire & The Knot when they could have used that money way more effectively!
Capitalize on Google MyBusiness
Google MyBusiness is easily the top directory tool for every wedding business. Watch what happens when I Google “wedding venue in Minneapolis”:
After the “Google Ads” featured section, we see the Google Map feature known as the “Map Pack.”
If your website is listed at the top, it means your wedding venue has a lot of reviews and useful posts on your Google MyBusiness account. You could even show up on the map pack higher in the results than WeddingWire.
Obviously there are tons of couples who will end up on the main wedding sites to find a venue, but almost every couple is going to search on Google before ever using these sites.
Find Out How We Can Help Grow Your Business
Let’s discuss your marketing needs, and we’ll help you put together a digital marketing strategy that will generate more leads and save you time.
2. Design a Visually Compelling Brochure to Stand Out
Sharing amenities and pricing details is often done too quickly in the sales process. In order to properly promote a wedding venue, you’ll need to be deliberate with your information by presenting it through a professionally designed brochure.
What sets you apart from your competitors is what you should highlight. Take for example Asheville Luxury Elopement. This brochure was designed to highlight what they can do better than anyone else.
This mountain elopement service promotes its weekday micro-weddings & elopements right away, alongside gorgeous aesthetically compelling visuals that would make any bride say, “I want that.”
The brochure is one of your best sales tools. As long as brides are getting these in a timely manner, they should help you book more weddings. Learn about sending out automatic brochures here.
3. Invest In a Sales Driven Website
One of the first and most important tools at your disposal is your website. It’s super important
The site is both aesthetically pleasing, and is also sales driven.
What does a “sales driven” site look like? Take Sugar Hollow Retreat, located in the heart of the Smoky Mountains. This gorgeous website has been designed to do one thing: get an email & phone number of a bride with a “Call To Action.”
CTAs on Your Website
Get Your Free Brochure
The website has been designed to drive all the incoming traffic to focus on the Call To Action (CTA), which in this case is “Get Your Free Brochure.” With this goal driven objective, there’s always a chance of turning your traffic into a potential wedding sale!
All you need is the bride’s email and/or phone number. From there, you & your sales team can reach out and book the wedding! The bride will have your beautifully designed brochure with pricing info, and you’ll be able to answer any questions they have!
Schedule a Visit
According to a Johnson Jones Group 2019 data survey, after a phone call with a bride, your chance of booking that wedding is roughly 10%.
After a visit to a venue, the booking chances increase to about 35%.
It’s obvious then, the most effective & efficient way to book a bride is get her to show up at your venue! So let’s make that as easy as possible!
Your menu MUST have an easy to find button to book a visit. Whether it’s set up with Calendly or your Google Calendar, brides should have an easy time getting a date to visit. The easier it is, the more bookings you’ll get, it’s that simple!
Now you’ve got a general understanding of what goes into a sales driven website. There’s a lot more I don’t have the time to cover – but you can see more about designing a professional wedding venue website here!
4. Promote Your Wedding Venue on Google
Humor me here – let’s say you want to hire a plumber, electrician, or other property service professional. You may head over to Thumbtack or Angie’s List, but most likely you’re going to first search on Google: “Plumber near me”
This is the same with any bride starting her wedding planning. When deciding on a wedding venue, the first and easiest step for her is to Google: “wedding venues near me” or “wedding venues in (location)” – This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. Showing up at the top of the Google search results can be the difference when booking a wedding.
Increase Organic Traffic to Your Website with SEO
SEO marketing can be your best friend or your worst nightmare. It’s all about adding traffic to your wedding venue website by ranking for relevant search keywords on Google.
The trick to making SEO work to promote your wedding venue: make sure your website is showing up on the first page of that Google search engine results. It has to be the first page because there is a 90% drop off rate on Google’s second page results.
All that traffic is there to be captured – and you can do that through blogs!
Keywords
Keywords are crucial to SEO and Google rankings. A keyword is simply the word(s) used in a Google search. Here are some relevant examples of wedding venue keywords:
- Wedding venues near me
- Places to get married in New York
- Beach wedding venues
- Mountain wedding venues
- All-inclusive wedding venues
These are keywords where your wedding venue has the greatest chance of converting a bride into a wedding. If your New York wedding venue website is showing up as the #1 result for “places to get married in New York,” you’re likely to get tons of traffic from those search results alone.
You get what a keyword is, here’s how to promote a wedding venue using keywords:
Blogs
Ranking for keywords can be tricky, especially if it’s a super competitive search term, however blogs are the easiest and most efficient way to rank for any reasonable wedding industry keyword.
The trick is to write one blog for one keyword. For example this blog has been optimized for the keyword “How To Elope in Tennessee.” The purpose of this blog is to have it rank as the #1 result when someone searches for “elope in Tennessee” or “how to elope in Tennessee.”
Every click on this blog adds to the overall traffic to the wedding venue website. The more traffic, the better your website performs overall.
Constantly adding blogs or new pages to your wedding venue website will help rank for keywords much more quickly. We recommend one blog per month for our clients.
There’s a ton to understand about SEO, so I’ve included a little bit more about SEO if you’re looking to do more research!
Promote Your Wedding Venue with Google Ads
So we’ve covered the basics of SEO and organic traffic, but now it’s time to get into the real deal of promoting a wedding venue.
It’s tempting to simply rely on WeddingWire or The Knot. Let me tell you why I’m not a big fan of either of those two directories.
Once you sign up, you’re instantly bombarded by pushy salespeople trying to persuade you to spend hundreds more dollars in exchange for a promise of more wedding leads.
In the end, you MIGHT get a handful of leads, but there’s still a chance they’ll have tiny budgets, or alternative requirements that you cannot accommodate. Maybe I’m being a bit over-dramatic here, but it’s really just not worth the money.
We started to see measurable proof of success with our clients once we switched over to Google Ads:
Every “Conversion” is a bride who downloaded a wedding brochure, and left us a name, number, & email. From there the wedding venue is able to reach out to the bride directly!
Google Ads works because it’s keyword-based, allowing your wedding venue to actually stand out ABOVE competing sites:
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There is tons of info to help you begin to learn how to use Google Ads. Ultimately, if you take all the funding allocated to WeddingWire or The Knot, and instead use it to create a Google Ads campaign, the results will speak for themselves. Depending on your location, you can expect to spend about $1-$3 per click.
Alternatively, you can work with a wedding marketing agency that can optimize your ads and make them even more profitable – and you don’t have to lift a finger!
5. Promote by Building Subscribers
Build a subscriber base through blogs! Adding a “Subscribe” feature to your informative and well-written blogs can help you build an organic audience interested in the information you’re providing for your niche.
Every time you create a new blog, you’ll instantly have an audience ready to both engage and share your content for you!
6. Frequently Update Visual Content of Your Venue
Trends come and go far more frequently than you might think. Updating images, videos. And branded content on your website will help promote your wedding venue as fresh and trendy.
Wedding trends have shifted radically over the last century, and you can even notice differences from the early 2000s! Here’s a bit more on wedding trends.
Photos by Elizabeth Hasier Photography
As you refresh your brochure, your website, and your branding, you’ll be optimizing your site for new brides to gawk at! You don’t want to get stuck in the past with outdated content.
As you refresh your brochure, your website, and your branding, you’ll be optimizing your site for new brides to gawk at! You don’t want to get stuck in the past with outdated content.
7. Videos Tours, & Walkthroughs
Video is a crucial part of promoting any wedding venue. Here’s what a successful walkthrough video & virtual walkthrough looks like from Charles Krug Weddings:
Here are a few ideas to get started with video:
- Create a promotional video from previous featured weddings. This could be used in Google Ads campaigns, and/or right on your home page!
- Hire a videographer to shoot a professionally developed virtual walkthrough
- Offer virtual tours using the walkthrough as a visual aid
- Consider shooting a “behind the scenes” video featuring your whole team. This will help humanize your brand and help brides get a better understanding of your wedding venue!
It’s also useful to have a PDF of a floorplan available for interested brides to see the space from a bird’s eye view.
Find Out How We Can Help Grow Your Business
Let’s discuss your marketing needs, and we’ll help you put together a digital marketing strategy that will generate more leads and save you time.
8. Build Relationships & Partner with Local Vendors
Having a great relationship with local wedding vendors can help promote your wedding venue locally and offline. When you foster these kinds of relationships, it builds trust among vendors, and that’s no small thing!
A wedding photographer could easily recommend your wedding venue to a client. You might be able to even get your venue listed on a photographer’s featured venues page! The same goes for wedding officiants, caterers, videographers, & more!
9. Trade Shows
Registering a spot at a local wedding expo, or an industry trade show is never a bad idea. While it may take some time, energy, and resources to successfully be featured in one of these trade shows, the return can be exponential.
Upsides to Trade Shows:
- Connections with local wedding vendors
- Access to brides face to face
- Ideas from other wedding competitors
10. Reputability with Reviews
Build Trust
Back in 2019, WeddingWire published a piece describing how reviews, testimonials, and images are the most influential factors for couples showing interest in a wedding venue.
The study also states how your venue’s chances of being considered for a wedding increases when there are both positive and negative reviews for a venue, rather than no reviews at all.
Establishing your online reputation and reliability is key to booking weddings. Having a list of verified reviews, customer testimonials, and a sense of overall satisfaction with your services will lead to organic references from former brides who’ve already gotten married at your venue!
A recommended minimum of 10 Google MyBusiness reviews, plus a few on the testimonials on the directories you’re listed on could make all the difference when building and establishing trust in the industry.
Leverage Testimonials and Reviews
Continuing to build reviews helps, but ultimately it’s what you do with them that matters.
When you get a negative review, it’s crucial that you respond. Often couples will search specifically for negative reviews, and the response the venue had to it. The way you respond can be a huge selling point for your wedding venue.
We also recommend adding a few reviews to your website home page. It never hurts to build a little bit of confidence from the successes you’ve already made!
Continuing to Promote Your Wedding Venue
Marketing your wedding venue is a never ending endeavor. Trends come and go, but people will never stop getting married! As you continue to learn about advertising in the digital world, you’ll find it’s either super easy & intuitive, or a total alien language that you cannot and will not understand.
For those of you who would rather rely on experts to do this work, check out Johnson Jones Group Wedding Marketing and get a free marketing assessment. We’ll help identify pain points and strategies you can put in to move forward.
We can help
- Build a website
- Run your Google Ads
- Write your content
- Promote your wedding venue on Google
- And finally – book you more brides!
