Weddings are one of the few industries that are considered “recession proof” – and yet it can often be difficult to find the right brides. In this blog, we’ll go over how to market your wedding business through Design, advertising, SEO, and automation.
The first and most critical item to prioritize is the front end presentation of your business – more specifically, the website. Getting a sales-focused, aesthetic website is the first step to booking more brides!
Web Design
When prioritizing web design, you want to focus on more than just your homepage. Ideally, you’d have a website with 6+ pages, and a minimum of 1 non-navigable landing page.
Nav Bar
Here is a layout of what a typical wedding venue website would look like:
- Home
- About
- Contact
- FAQ
- Blog
- Gallery
- Service Page(s)
Additionally you can add a drop down menu – often labeled as “more”, here you can add in the less sales-focused, less important pages – like Blog, FAQ, About, etc. This will free up space in the nav bar. I’ve attached a few examples below from Rosewood Farms & The Venue at Greenbrier Estate
To learn more about what goes into the web development process, you can check it out here
Wedding Sales CTA
A good call-to-action (CTA) can make all the difference. Here’s a generic list of CTAs by Hubspot. This is key in how to market your wedding business to obtain the clicks you want.
For weddings, and specifically wedding venues, you want to focus on a CTA with a low barrier of entry – meaning something that is not asking too much. I’m going to include two examples buttons below, and you’ll see what I mean
Schedule a Tour
Download a Brochure
Think about it logically. What is easier? What is the path of least resistance?
Downloading a brochure tends to convert significantly higher than scheduling a visit or consultation, often a conversion rate difference of 10-20%.
Scheduling a physical visit to a business will always be a higher barrier of entry. The initial lead is much more likely to convert using a brochure as incentive to gather information. I’ve included an example from 3 Fat Labs Weddings below
Landing Page
We’ll be going over PPC & Google Ads Advertising shortly, but another important aspect of Web Design is a compelling and informative landing page.
A landing page is simply a web-page that is non-navigable from your main site. Your landing page should be designed for one service and one service only. Marketing your wedding business as something else, or creating additional services only distracts the lead from completing the CTA.
Here are a few landing pages from business where we’ve helped market weddings:
Fountain Square Theatre Weddings
You’ll notice on these pages there is one CTA – and one main focus, getting the lead’s information (email, phone number, etc). This is the backbone of lead generation! We use this page as a hub for all paid traffic that is interested in booking a wedding. So let’s break down paid traffic.
Google Ads for Weddings
You’ll often hear the term PPC when referring to Google Ads – this stands for pay-per-click. PPC is one of the best and most effective short term strategies when considering how to market your wedding business.
I want to start off by noting PPC should be used as a short term solution to lead acquisition, and must be partnered with other strategies for a sustainable and cost effective wedding business model.
If you are a new wedding venue, or an entirely new wedding business, you’ll need an influx of traffic. This will not come organically- you’ll need a PPC strategy and approach to generating traffic & leads for your business that’s just starting off.
You will pay for high conversion % traffic to be sent to a landing page, designed specifically to convert these web users into wedding leads!
To learn more about Google Ads, check out this in-depth tutorial featured in our blog:
In that piece, you’ll learn how to set up, run, optimize, and analyze your Google Ads information. Alternatively you can check out our Google Ads Management Services here as well – after all, we are the experts!
SEO
When considering how to market your wedding business, SEO could be another difference maker.
Search Engine Optimization is one of the most effective long term strategies for booking more brides. Developing a keyword strategy, content writing plan, and technical audit are apart of Johnson Jones Group’s recommendations for long term wedding business success
SEO is all about keywords and organic traffic – meaning traffic you don’t have to pay to get on your website!
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!
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.
Sales & Email Automation
The last recommendation on how to market your wedding business focuses mainly on making your life easier.
Since you’re setting yourself up for TONS of new leads/brides to come in – it can often be difficult to track all these deals at one time. Some of our wedding venues get up to 400 leads per month!
Of course only a small percentage of these brides end up booking their wedding with you – but ultimately the process of nurturing a lead into a wedding takes time & effort.
With sales automation, you can easily drag and drop names into a funnel that will send calculated sales emails with an opportunity/urgency focused message. Often this comes in the form of a discount or free offering from your business.
The urgency aspect of the emails are related to the time allotted to the offer. Usually 14 days from when the lead came in. All these emails are funneling leads toward the same goal: schedule a tour (our secondary CTA).
With a competent CRM (customer relationship management) system – and automated sales emails, booking more wedding leads will come naturally!
That just about it for how to market your wedding business. If you have any further questions, just reach out to us and we can answer them for you!
