When it comes to having a successful wedding, couples are looking for more than just the venue. They want options and ideas that will help them plan their dream day. As a venue owner, you might think that only a wedding planner can offer this help. But that’s not true! In fact, as a venue owner, I spent a great deal of time advising my couples on a range of topics related to planning a wedding at my locations. In fact, you are an expert on how weddings work at sites like yours! That’s why I believe a blog is a great way to leverage your expertise to increase awareness for your venue and show off weddings you have hosted in the past. So, I’ve put together some tips on building an effective blog for your wedding venue business!
Again, Why You Need a Blog on Your Wedding Venue Website
People spend a lot of time on social media, thinking that buying ads or posting there will increase awareness. But truthfully, most people are getting their information from good, old-fashioned internet searches.
So if it’s the early days of your business and you don’t have a lot of website visits, a blog can help bring you traffic and establish your expertise and trustworthiness. A venue-oriented blog written for couples is also a great way to provide helpful content as you grow your backlog of weddings on your property. In other words, you can still write about things couples need without having a bunch of weddings to show off.
Okay, so you put keywords into your website copy and your meta descriptions, that should be enough, right? Maybe. But here’s what else a blog does.
Blog posts put more search keywords into the internet world, increasing your likelihood of getting caught in your couple’s worldwide casting net. You can’t stuff enough keywords into your website copy without it being too text-heavy. Blog posts are the workaround.
Also, when posting regularly, even if it’s only once a month, the search engine elves assume that you have the most up-to-date information to help answer the searcher’s question. That means your post or page will get a higher ranking than a website that hasn’t been recently updated or a post that’s older than yours.
Types of blog articles a wedding venue can publish.
To use your blog to attract couples, you have to realize that they don’t even know you exist. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need to worry about attracting them, right? So, you have to have a reason or way for them to find you and that reason is to answer a question they have. But to do it well, you have to make the post about your couple and their needs. And you have to remember those needs are different depending on where the couple is on their Buyer’s Journey.
So, when you come up with a blog plan, think about what stage of the journey your article will be helpful in. Here are those stages:
Awareness Stage – Couples have just gotten engaged and are aware they need to figure out where to have their wedding. At this time, they are looking for help deciding which kind of venue they should get married at.
Consideration Stage – The couple has narrowed their ideas down, has a list of their needs and requirements, and is now looking for options that fit their venue wish list.
Decision Stage – The couple is almost ready to book but now needs to make the final decision.
Now, remember from my book, to get from the Awareness Stage down to the list of finalists, your messaging and branding has to create one or all three of these feelings:
· Trust
· Belonging
· Fear (or lack thereof)
This means that you have to be thoughtful not only in what you post, but what you say and how you say it so that you can be intentional about the result you want.
Here are a few types of posts you can create to help.
Practical Planning Tips & Advice. You can share with couples to help them prepare for their wedding day at your rural location. For example, after watching dozens of weddings with hundreds of women in high heels struggling every summer to walk on the grass, I wrote an article once about the importance of proper footwear at an outdoor venue. I also included tips for couples on letting their guests know ahead of time what the terrain would be like and making some fashion suggestions.
Wedding Design & Decoration Ideas. You can constantly repurpose photographs from your past weddings, even if you haven’t hosted many yet, by combining them into articles focused on one aspect of wedding decorating or design. These are a form of blog posts called a roundup. Using my previous example, you could have a post like, “Best Bridal Footwear for an Outdoor Wedding.” And in the post, you can show pictures of past weddings at your venue and shoe styles worn by real brides.
Real Wedding Profiles. This post is the go-to for most venues and usually the only blog post most venues do. This post is an article about one couple and their wedding at your location. A post like this is a chance to show an entire wedding theme for prospective couples, but it is also a way to strengthen your relationship with the vendors and the couple themselves. Plus, these posts give you chances to backlink to other vendors and their websites, increasing your own site’s authority in searches.
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Hook them with the headline.
Now, you know that it doesn’t matter how great an article is if the headline isn’t interesting enough to get you to click the link. That’s why crafting a catchy headline for your blog post is so important.
But before you think that your headline has to be all sexy & captivating, headlines are also SEO opportunities, especially if your post is a how-to or roundup. I like to think of the headline as the long-tail keyword search term your couples are typing into the search bar.
Let’s use this article you’re reading, for example. The headline pretty much answers the question (or variations of), “How do I attract couples to my wedding venue website?”
Here’s another example of a headline for a real wedding profile. Most vendors post a blog article headline like this:
“Jack and Melissa Brown’s Wedding”
This is great, except who is “Jack & Melissa Brown”? Remember, you have to assume that no one knows you yet, and they probably definitely don’t know Jack or Melissa. Instead, you want to try something like this:
“Tasty Love Story Inspires a Delicious Wedding Theme: See how this couple celebrated with a taco bar at their reception.”
This example has a headline and sub-headline with some power keywords and a little curiosity factor.
In the body of this article, you can include some personal details from the couple that you learned when you worked with them, like how they met at a Taco Tuesday night at the local college bar, for example. But then don’t forget to be helpful and sprinkle in some real, practical tips for other couples thinking of doing the same at their wedding.
Share what the couple did to incorporate their theme into their wedding day and share what you and your venue did to help make it happen. Maybe you have a particular area on the property just for food trucks that was pretty key. Or perhaps it’s your flexible decoration policy. In a blog post, you can talk about your venture features without making it all about you. You make it about the couple.
This means you need to have the “Who” – the couple and the “How” for your future couple.
The personal details also show that you are a venue owner who cares about their couples because obviously, you took the time to get to know them & took an interest in helping them create their perfect day. This is a way to build trust.
And then, of course, you want to post several pictures of their wedding at your venue, so that other couples can imagine themselves being married at your location. This creates the feeling of belonging.
How long should the post be? I suggest 500 words minimum, 900 words maximum. You want enough copy for details, keywords and to give credit to the vendors in the photos. But you also want to remember that couples will likely just be browsing the images.
More Tips to Make Your Posts Sweet & Sticky
Here are some final tips to help make your posts work even better.
Don’t forget to credit and backlink to the photographers! First, photographers get screwed a lot in the wedding industry because people share & reshare pictures without telling everyone who took them.
Add the Alt-Text to the images to improve SEO. Since search engines can’t see pictures, alt-text describes the photos to the bots. Plus, alt text is an accessibility feature of the internet, letting people who can’t see images still get the breadth of your content. When creating your alt text, include your venue name in the description. An example is, “Pink, two-layer gluten-free wedding cake on wood table at Mystic Meadows wedding venue.”
Show smiling, happy faces! Get the oxytocin flowing in your visitors by showing happy faces in your posts. Oxytocin is the “trust hormone” our body releases when we feel safe. And when we see people who are having the time of their lives at your location, our brain takes the cue and says, “If they trust them, so can we.”
Don’t forget your CTA. Your call to action can be as simple as a single line that connects the reader to your contact page for more information or to book a tour.
You don’t have to publish weekly, but you do have to publish consistently. I suggest monthly as a minimum. However, once you see how easy it is to create new posts based on these ideas, you may have enough posts to do something once a week. See my free gift for a 12-Month calendar with ideas.
Add a Pin It Button. You go through all the trouble of collecting the photos, writing the blog, and inspiring the readers but then what? Maybe they right-click and save the images. Perhaps they don’t. But if you ad a Pin It Button to your website, you make it super easy for someone to save the image to their own Pinterest board with the link back to you and your website! Now, imagine someone else sees this image on Pinterest while doing their wedding searches, and they re-pin the same image. Can you see how this can help increase your venue’s awareness?
Conclusion
“Wonderful advice, Amee! Thank you. It’s too bad that I can’t write to save my life.”
Yes, this is a genuine problem for most people. Well, there are lots of freelancers who can help you with that. If you give them the details, they can write the articles for you, usually under $100 per article. I use resources like Upwork or Fiverr to find freelance writers when I need an extra hand.
In the end, blogging is a great way to attract visitors and build awareness of your wedding venue. Your blog should be helpful, engaging, and inspiring for any couple at any stage in the Buyer’s Journey. I’ve created this 12-month content planner with ideas you can use to generate posts that will garner more views on your website and keep readers coming back every month! Just click the link below to download a copy.
