If you’re a wedding venue owner or manager, chances are you know how essential marketing is for your business growth. Word of mouth recommendations are great but if you’re trying to fill your event schedule, you need more than referrals. But knowing that your venue needs marketing and starting the process of marketing are two very different things. That’s where your wedding venue marketing plan comes in.

If you’re looking to see how the experts here at Johnson Jones Group put together a marketing plan, you can download our Wedding Venue Marketing Plan Sample and take a look for yourself.

What is a Wedding Venue Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is a comprehensive document or strategy that outlines an organization’s marketing objectives, goals, tactics, and activities for a specific period, typically over the course of a year. It serves as a roadmap for the marketing department or team to follow in order to achieve its objectives and reach its target audience effectively.

Typically, they include:

• A summary of your marketing efforts
• A business overview
• A definition of your target audience
• Detailed market analysis
• Overall marketing goals
• Marketing Strategies
• Marketing Budget
• Timeline

A marketing plan is a critical tool for wedding venues of any size. It helps ensure that marketing efforts are coordinated, strategic, and aligned with the overall business objectives, ultimately leading to more effective and efficient marketing campaigns.

Do I Need a Wedding Venue Marketing Plan?

In the competitive world of wedding venues, having a strategic marketing plan is the key to standing out. A well-structured marketing plan helps guide the allocation of resources, defines marketing strategies, and provides a framework for measuring the success of marketing efforts.

No matter what your marketing goals are or what size venue you manage, a marketing plan is absolutely essential for managing successful marketing campaigns.

How to Create Your Own Wedding Venue Marketing Plan

So by now it should be pretty apparent that your wedding venue needs a marketing plan. But where should you start?

Well, follow along with this guide and we’ll touch on the most important steps you need to follow to create your own wedding venue marketing plan.

1. Understanding Your Venue

To start, you should conduct a comprehensive analysis of your wedding venue. Identify its unique selling points, such as scenic views, exceptional catering services, or versatile event spaces. Understanding what sets your venue apart is crucial for effective marketing. Understanding what sets your venue apart from competitors enables you to highlight these features in your marketing materials, making your venue more appealing to potential clients and helping you stand apart from your competitors.

2. Defining Your Target Audience

Determine your ideal clientele. Are you catering to traditional couples, eco-conscious partners, or luxury-seekers? This knowledge allows you to tailor your marketing efforts to reach the right audience effectively. For instance, if your venue is known for its rustic charm, you can target couples who are interested in rustic or bohemian-themed weddings.

3. Perform a Competitive Analysis

One of the best sources of information about your marketing you can use is your competition. By understanding your competition and seeing how they leverage different marketing channels, you can find gaps opportunities for you to do the same with your venue. For instance, you can google “wedding venues near me” to look at how your competitors are using Google Ads, and what SEO strategies they are taking advantage of. You can also learn what unique selling points your competition is using so that you can position yourself differently.

4. Define Your Marketing Goals

So now that you are armed with the knowledge of how to market your venue and who you are marketing to, it’s time to define what goals you’re trying to accomplish with your campaign. For a wedding venue, these goals could be increasing inquiries, getting more brochure downloads, scheduling more venue tours, etc. Whatever your goal is, your marketing strategy should work to accomplish it.

5. Marketing Strategies

Now it’s time to start defining your actual marketing strategies. Once you’ve solidified your overall marketing goal you can start identifying the marketing channels that will best achieve that goal. These can include:

• SEO strategies to increase overall site visitors
• Local SEO to establish yourself in the Google Map Pack
• Google Ads to target your exact demographic
• Social Media advertising to boost your brand awareness

Once you’ve decided on your marketing channels you can get to work putting together the exact tactics you plan on leveraging in order to maximize your results.

6. Set Your Timeline

Now that you have your unique selling points, an understanding of your market, solid marketing goals, multi-channel marketing strategies, you’ll need to set it to a timeline for your wedding venue marketing plan. You can do a short term plan (1-2 months, but it is often more effective to see how your marketing efforts play out over a longer term (3-6 months).

That doesn’t mean that you just set and forget your marketing. Throughout your campaigns you can make adjustments to strategies, spend, and even your goals to best suit what your venue needs.

7. Establish Your Budget

Now that you’ve decided what marketing channels you’re going to be targeting and a timeline, you have to set your budget. We recommend investing between 10% – 20% of your gross revenue into marketing if you’re looking to grow your wedding venue. Which channels receive what allocation of that budget will depend on your marketing goals, but as a baseline we recommend using the 70-20-10 rule. Put 70% of your budget into strategies you know will work, 20% into new strategies that will help you grow, and 10% into experimentation.

To break that down a little further, if you have a marketing budget of $10,000, you could spend:

• $7,000 on your CRM, Google Ads and content marketing
• $2,000 on advertising new features or services you’re trying out
• $1,000 on testing out a social media or influencer marketing

There’s no hard and fast rule for setting your budget, and remember, being flexible with your budget and strategies over the course of the campaign will help you stay agile and on top of your marketing efforts.

Download Our Sample Wedding Venue Marketing Plan and Level Up Your Marketing

Need a bit of help envisioning how you should put your marketing plan together? Download our sample marketing plan below and learn how the pros at Johnson Jones Group jumpstart our clients’ success.