5 Things Wedding Venues Need to Stay Ahead of Competitors

hawthorn creative hospitality marketing 5 things wedding venues need to Stay Ahead of Competitors feature

While everyone else takes a bit of a deep breath with the end of the holidays, top wedding venues know there’s no such time for a break. With so many couples getting engaged over the holidays and through Valentine’s Day, this is the window of opportunity you must grab to make sure brides book with you. Have you touched base with recent brides to promote their big days? Have you crossed all the “T”s and dotted all the “I”s to make sure your venue is showing up in all the places recently engaged couples look for wedding information? We’ve rounded up a list of quick and easy suggestions to help you get your venue in front of as many newly engaged couples as possible.

Butter Up Your Former Brides for Word of Mouth

Millennials, even more so than other generations, rely on word of mouth as a primary factor in decision making. Give former brides incentive to share photos of their weddings and tag you and talk you up with a quick user-generated content contest. For example: “Share the most gorgeous shot of your wedding at (your venue) and tag us – the photo with the most likes wins an anniversary champagne basket!”

Hot Off the Presses – Your Wedding Brochure

Print collateral really does make a stunning impression – no matter how digital the world may be. Make sure your brochures and printed marketing collateral are fresh and on trend with the colors, design, and styling set to go big in 2017 – position your venue as a design trendsetter, and demonstrate to your potential couples that you know the wedding trends they’ll want to incorporate into their wedding.

Spit Shine Your Social Media Strategy

We’re not saying you need to have an active presence on every social platform, but making sure your chosen social feeds are shaped up and looking good ensures that if a bride stumbles upon you (thanks to savvy hashtag usage, naturally), she will be impressed. Take a moment to establish an outline of your social media guidelines, including your standards for photography, useful hashtags, brand voice, and posting schedule, all for each platform. Then stick to it to be sure you have fresh, engaging social content being published regularly. Leverage the relationships you’ve nurtured with photographers to see if they’ll share their photos with you – professional photos are your best bet for high levels of engagement.

Content – More Than Blog Posts

Newly engaged brides are probably searching for wedding venues at their desks right now – it’s time to make sure you show up. Engaging, valuable content that answers frequently searched wedding topics is one of the best ways – especially if you’ve done the work to increase your SEO and have mapped out your venue’s target keywords. But blog posts aren’t the only way to produce engaging content. If your website doesn’t have a blog, making use of unique landing pages as a home for the kind of content your brides and grooms are searching for is a win-win solution. So, go ahead and draft that article on “Why a Library Wedding is Perfect for Book Lovers,” and get it up on your site for the reading delight of your prospective clients.

Make It Easy for Prospective Clients to Navigate Your Site

This one is a bigger item to tick off on your to-do list, but making sure your website is as user-friendly as possible might require more than a few tweaks. Between the trend moving toward card design (sometimes called tile design) and the absolute requirement that your site is responsive and mobile-friendly, it may be time for a website redesign. Considering 90 percent of brides report using smartphones for web browsing, you do not want to miss out on bookings due to a dated website.

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