The wedding business can be very lucrative for a hotel and in addition to room sales, you are more than likely going to see the highest prices per head compared to any other type of banquet you will have booked at the hotel.

However, many properties do not spend nearly enough marketing on this specific segment of the industry.

Why Book More Weddings?

While a wedding will generally bring in significant food and beverage income for one night as well as room sales, they are also considerably high maintenance. The wedding party and parents, at the very least, all need to be treated like VIPs and the function itself is very labor-intensive. Depending on the level of service, you are booking servers at a 10:1 to 15:1 ratio for a sit-down dinner and 15:1 to 25:1 for a buffet or station dinner, far more servers than you would use for any other type of function.

In addition to the cost of the servers, you generally want a significant management presence at the front desk as well as in banquets. Finally, there is the cost of the setup, which generally involves more banquet housemen to ensure every aspect of the setup is perfect prior to the wedding kicking off. Even more so if flips are required during the function.

Even with all those additional costs, though, weddings are still highly profitable for the hotel. It also happens to be an event where you get to show off everything the property has to offer to a network that is far larger than the individuals in the room at the time of the function. Think about how many of those guests attending the wedding will be firing off social media posts all night long as well as how many of their friends will be liking and sharing those posts. An event of 200 can quickly reach more than 10,000 people! If you are impressive, that is 10,000 potential guests for the hotel either for room sales or in hosting their own banquet.

Improve Your Wedding Venue Marketing

Before you ever get started, you need to know what specific keywords you should be marketing that can be used on your hotel’s website. For the sake of this article, I pulled the keywords that would be relevant for a Dallas hotel and highlighted the best keywords in green…

Wedding Venues Keywords

Volume refers to how many people are searching for this specific term in any given month and the bid is the cost of placing an ad on Google for that specific keyword. The third column is also key, in that it lets you know how many businesses are currently marketing to those potential keywords.

Blogging and Web Pages

Ads are a no brainer here, but you can also build pages on your website as well as create blog entries to attack these different keywords. For instance, if your hotel has enough banquet space to “create” a wedding chapel, build a page called “Dallas Texas Wedding Chapels” with information and photos of different setups the hotel offers to mimic the setup of a wedding chapel. For keywords like “Top Wedding Venues in Dallas,” you can create a blog entry for reviews of your property and how it stacks up against the competition to show how your property is one of the “top wedding venues in Dallas.”

You should also have a dedicated landing page on the website specifically for wedding inquiries that both collects information as well as directing potential clients to the various pages on the website that offer more information on your wedding services. Included in these pages should be snippets of reviews from prior wedding guests, videos, and of course, photos.

Hire a Professional Photographer

Photos are obviously going to be the key selling tool on these pages and on social media, so you are going to want to use a professional to ensure they are done right. In all honesty, though, this should not be an added expense for this project. Most wedding photographers would be more than happy to trade out their services to become a preferred vendor of the hotel. Furthermore, photographers being used during events will generally let you use their photos if you give them credit because it is free adverting for them.

If you don’t have a YouTube channel for the property, that needs to change. In the case of weddings, nothing will be more powerful than a video tour of the wedding as it is happening. Again, this should be professionally done for the best effect.

Blow Up Social Media

Social media will also play a major role in developing a presence as a local wedding venue. Every time a wedding is held on property, you should be flooding your accounts with pictures as well as tagging guests that are willing to share the content on their accounts. As stated above, this offers the potential to reach tens of thousands of guests with every post over and above your own fan base.

You should also clear approval with the wedding party to ensure they don’t mind you posting their pictures on the internet during the function. Here, you can have a banquet manager or other manager take and post videos in real-time or even possibly take the event live on Instagram or Facebook with the permission of the guest.

Combined, all these marketing techniques will create a buzz about your hotel as a local wedding venue and your catering department will be busier than ever!

Need managers that can help improve your marketing efforts? Then let JDI help! Joseph David International is ranked among the top hospitality recruiting companies in the country because we work hard to find the ideal fit for both the client and the candidate. For more information about our hotel management recruiting services, please click here.