Marketing During Peak Wedding Season – Why it’s Still Important!

A peak wedding season marketing strategy with achievable marketing activities can help you capitalise on this key engagement season and secure future bookings.

When working with clients, I recommend maintaining a base level of year-round consistency in their marketing output as a key to a better customer experience and building credibility, visibility, and trust. We know that the algorithms favour those who are consistent, and restarting marketing from scratch can involve a much higher input to regain visibility.

If the prospect of setting time aside to focus on marketing during peak wedding season overwhelms your to-do list or seems unachievable, then read on as I share five tips to help you stay consistent with your marketing efforts throughout the summer.

Have a marketing plan

This doesn’t need to be a huge document, but having a plan to guide and inform your actions will help you stay on track regarding audience, message, and achieving your sales goals. Your marketing plan will help create and maintain demand, reputation, and competitive advantage.

Not sure where to start? In a nutshell, your marketing plan needs to set out your daily, weekly, and monthly activities that will work towards your goals. For example, your goal could be to increase site traffic by X from Instagram because your data shows that enquiries from this source have a higher conversion rate than enquiries that come from Facebook. Your plan then outlines how, what, and when you engage with this audience and how you will track your results.

Having this in place will help to keep you both on track and motivated during those busy months. It can also save you from putting valuable time, money and energy into marketing activities that don’t provide a high return on investment.

Focus on customer journey

Your customer journey and sales funnel are intertwined and focusing on maximising the touchpoints within the customer journey can help to move prospective clients through the sales funnel.

There will be couples at all stages of the customer journey, from just experiencing their first interactions with your venue brand to weighing up their options. There will be those who are converting, those who have booked, and those who married with you previously. Maintaining consistent marketing communications will help them know, like, and trust your venue brand, as well as keep those excitement levels high for their upcoming wedding.

Weddings provide you with a captive audience to sow the seeds for future sales through positive guest interactions. The wedding day, including any set-up and pack-down, is filled with touchpoints for your clients and guests. Mapping these before the season and building them into team training is a fantastic way of maximising the positive impact of each interaction. Building an above-and-beyond customer service culture where your team sees each member of the guest list as the client will foster word-of-mouth recommendations.

One key marketing tip to help you capitalise on your captive audience: If you offer guest Wi-Fi, use email capture technology to build your mailing list! A monthly email can be relatively quick to put together and is a fantastic way of maintaining visibility and driving traffic to your website.

Get those reviews!

Don’t wait until the end of the season to ask for reviews. Have a prompt to email couples after their wedding congratulating them, thanking them for choosing your venue and asking for a Google review.

This will provide a steady stream of current reviews on Google, and each review can become a social media post in just a few minutes. Post-wedding follow up emails are also an important touchpoint on the customer journey that helps to move them into the advocacy stage.

In addition to adding reviews to Google, share these with third-party platforms to boost your listings and, of course, share soundbites on your social feeds.

Nurture your strategic partnerships and supplier relationships

Now is the time to nurture your strategic partnerships and supplier relationships, and the bonus is that you can do a lot of it while managing weddings on the ground.

Suppliers are fantastic marketing assets, from blog features to site links and referrals to social media presence; positive supplier relationships can have an incredible impact on brand visibility and confidence.

A quick and easy way of nurturing your relationships on the wedding day (other than a cup of tea… which is always greatly received!) is to shout about the amazing team involved in the wedding on social media. From a marketing perspective, you’re ticking the box of creating relevant content, offering inspiration to followers and growing your visibility when the accounts you’ve tagged share with their followers.

Content batching and scheduling

Content batching, you can’t beat it for time efficiency! Writing and scheduling your content pre-summer provides you with a steady stream of fresh content for consumption across your channels with very little input during the busy months.

I recommend scheduling one month in advance if you need to make any changes to the proposed content calendar. However, you can have as many pre-written blog posts and social media captions waiting to be scheduled.

If you find sourcing the right image a time-consuming part of social media scheduling, a top tip is to create content pillar image folders within which you keep photos organised so that you can easily grab the right image for your topic without wading through gallery after gallery.

The list of potential marketing activities goes on; however, I have tried to focus on providing suggestions to help maintain a consistent level of marketing output without ramping up the workload. Consistency is vital to connecting with your target audience and hitting all touchpoints necessary for conversion.

Not sure where to start? Focus on your marketing channels with the highest return on investment for the summer, and then look to expand your focus post-season.

If you are short on time and resources, or marketing just isn’t your thing, outsourcing your marketing for the season might be an excellent option to help you maintain and grow your market position while focusing on managing your venue.