Paid Search Marketing For Your Wedding Venue – Reach the right users and fill your calendar.
If you own or manage a wedding venue, attracting potential couples to your venue and booking a valuable show-round is critical for your business to thrive.
Google Ads PPC For Wedding Venues can help you efficiently achieve your goals.
Who is this article for?
This article is for you if:
- You understand that marketing for your venue is essential to reach new customers, and you are either unsure where to start with Google Ads PPC For Your Wedding Venue
- You’ve tried running Google Ads campaigns before but feel like they could be much more effective
- You have an agency running campaigns for you, but you don’t have a clear understanding how the campaigns work, or if you may be wasting some of your marketing budget
- You are interested to know more about the wedding venue search landscape in the UK
Did you know?
On average, in the UK, there are 74,000 people searching for a wedding venue every single month on Google. And that is just for the single phrase “wedding venue”.
So the question is, how can you get those people to come to your website and not a competitor?
Using Google Ads, you can place an advert for your venue, directly in front of those couples.
The tricky part is doing this correctly. 74,000 searches a month is a lot. So how do you reach only the ones which are relevant to you?
With over 15 years’ experience running successful PPC campaigns, with a lot of that time helping wedding venues grow, our guide will help you navigate the market, your marketing strategy and provide some ideas for promoting your wedding venue.
We hope you find this guide useful, and as ever, feel free to reach out to our expert UK team for and specialised help in running your PPC campaigns
Firstly some statistics to set the scene;
- In 2018 there were an estimated 270,000 weddings in the UK Source
- There are over 8,000 registered wedding venues in the UK, with over 800 venues per county on average, that’s a lot of competition source
- On average that would be 33 weddings for each venue every year
- According to hitched.co.uk, in 2019 the average venue hire cost was £5,406. This is a staggering £1.4 billion spent on just wedding venues alone in 2019 source
Wedding venues search statistics from Google;
- On average in the UK, there are 74,000 searches per month for the phrase “wedding venues”.
- When you expand to other search terms such as “wedding venues near me”, the average monthly searches increase to 123,500 – This is a staggering amount of users looking for a venue every month
- These statistics are just for a handful of keywords in Google, when you expand to the full range of related keywords this number increases to over 200,000 per month
- The highest amount of searches are typically in January due to Christmas time proposals – However there is strong demand throughout the year
- “Barn weddings” which is a popular search, is searched on average around 11,500 times per month
About this guide
This guide is dedicated to promoting your wedding venue via pay-per-click adverts on Google, also called PPC advertising.
Simply put, Google is still king in connecting businesses with customers with an estimated 89% of the search market share.
Just think, when did you last use Google to find a product or service you needed? It’s more than speculation, we can see the stats directly above from Google, that potential customers are searching every single day for wedding venues.
For anything from looking for an engagement ring, searching for a wedding venue or looking for a honeymoon destination. Millions of people every day choose to start their journey online at Google.
Other channels such as Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram play a huge role too, but in an online journey, Google is often the starting point.
If you have a service to offer which fulfils the needs of those customers, Google Ads can be a fantastic way to showcase your business. What other advertising medium can you display an advert to a user who has just typed exactly what they want?
Let’s take a look at the guide and some of the critical elements to running a successful advertising campaign. And ultimately how to bring the most relevant customer to your website, and hopefully venue for their day.
How does Google Ads Work?
Google Ads works by allowing you to place an advert in front of potential customers.
You select specific words and phrases (called keywords from here onwards) which you would like to display your advert against.
Then the next time a user searches for that specific word or phrase in Google, your advert can show front and centre.
This gives you great control over your marketing budget, and a huge opportunity to get relevant customers to your website.
If you only want to show an advert when a user searches for “wedding venues in manchester” – No problem, in the Google Ads system, just pick that one phrase
An example is below where a user has searched for “wedding venues manchester” – Businesses who have this keyword in their Google Ads account have then displayed an advert so that users can discover them.
In a nutshell – you pick the phrases (keywords) you feel are most relevant to your business and then you can display your advert when users search for those phrases in Google.
And specifically, Google Ads PPC for your wedding venue allows you to target those keywords geographically.
The list of keywords which you can choose is limitless, but they need to be relevant not just to your business, but to how your customers find your business.
A selection of these keywords you may want to pick could include:
- wedding venues near me
- all inclusive wedding venues
- outdoor wedding venues
- intimate wedding venues
- dog friendly wedding venues
By picking keywords which are highly relevant to your business, you can make your marketing budget work as hard as possible, by reducing the number of times users click on an advert which is not the service which they are looking for.
For example, if your venue does not offer an all-inclusive service, it’s unlikely that should display an advert when a user searches for “all inclusive wedding venues”.
Building a list of highly relevant keywords should be the foundation of your Google Ads campaigns, however the technicalities of successfully reaching the right customers for your business run much deeper.
Building a list of highly relevant keywords should be the foundation of your Google Ads campaigns, however running a successful campaign requires a lot of technical knowledge of the platform.
As well as your keywords, you also need to start considering:
- Where are my customers based, and geographically where should I display my adverts?
- Seasonality and reaching users at the best times of year
- What message resonates best with your audience
- What services do you offer
- Your website and customer service experience
All of these factors feed back into Google Ads and can help you succeed by running a campaign which is highly relevant to the users who see your advert.
By increasing the relevance of your campaign, it may lead to Google reducing the cost per click on your adverts, and in turn making your marketing budget work harder for you.
Read on to discover some of the best practice elements to successfully reaching those customers.
Keywords & User Location
As mentioned, choosing the right keyword list should be the foundation of a successful campaign, but just as important for a geographically sensitive business is the locations where, geographically you show those adverts.
How To “Find” Keywords – Keyword research
If you’d like to research your own keywords, follow our complete guide here to using the Google Keyword Planner.
The keyword planner is a free tool to find what words users type into Google which are relevant to your business, allowing you to pick those keywords to advertise your venue.
Geographical targeting
According to some research, around 80% of couples get married within a 50 mile radius of where they live.
This means that you need to set up your PPC campaigns correctly, to target certain keywords only to users around your catchment area, and certain keywords nationally.
This is another key factor which can make or break your success.
Note: A common mistake we see when reviewing PPC campaigns for wedding venues:
Keywords which don’t specify a location (such as “wedding venues near me”) targeting the whole of the UK.
This means that no matter where your venue is, a user 6 hours drive away may see and click on your advert. Leading to your budget being spent on users who are never likely to convert.
Note:
Google allows you to restrict your advertising down to postcode level.
This means that you could pick a postcode stem (i.e. M21), and only show your advert to users in that postcode – No one else in the world would see your advert except those users.
In the UK, you can restrict your adverts to show at the below options;
- Postcode
- City
- County
- Neighbourhood
- Airport
- TV Region
- University
You can view all of the locations available to target here. Select “latest” to download an excel friendly version of all of the locations available and filter down to your country/region.
Ensure your ads are geo-targeted to only the most relevant users. But also pay attention to keywords which contain the location of your venue – You’ll likely want to target these nationally.
These settings are at the campaign level, so we highly recommend putting your national targeted keywords in one campaign, and your geographically targeted campaigns in another.
This is a core concept of running a geographically targeted Google Ads campaign.
In the first example, a user is searching for a very generic term, so we only want to display an advert for this phrase, to users who are actually located relatively close to your venue.
In the second example, the user is specifying a location in their search – So you should usually target your advert for this keyword nationally.
A user could be located anywhere in the country, but they are specifically looking for a venue around yours.
Keywords & Geographical location – Further examples
It’s time to look again at how we may want to target our keywords geographically to get the best possible performance for our business.
We can’t stress enough how important it is to correctly geo-target your groups of keywords based on their relevance to your venue.
This time, we’ve taken a wedding venue in Surrey (https://smallfieldplace.com/) as an example to demonstrate the geographical targeting.
A search journey online usually consists of lots of different searches while a user finds inspiration and narrows down their choices.
Using an example search journey a customer may take, starting with the very generic keyword “wedding venues”, down to the final search of a particular venue they want to contact (in this case smallfield place).
We’ve taken live data from the keyword planner and indicated geographically who you want to reach for particular keywords – This will help decide how you build your Google Ads campaigns.
The data below shows how many users search for a particular term nationally, and then within our specified region.
Geo: UK – The number of users searching for that keyword across the entire UK
Geo: Surrey – The number of users searching for that keyword within the County of Surrey
Finally, there is “suggested ad target” – The recommended geo targeting for those keywords if your wedding venue is in Surrey
As you can see, there are on average, 74,000 searches each month across the whole of the UK for “wedding venues”. Generally, any venue in the UK should not be displaying their adverts nationally when there is no location in the keyword, due to the geographic nature of weddings.
It is a much better strategy to target these “generic” keywords (i.e. wedding venues), only to users who are geographically relevant to your business – And you can do this directly in Google Ads using the campaign settings.
In this case, there are 1,600 people per month searching for “wedding venues” within the county of Surrey. This would be a much more sensible way to organise your keywords: To only target those people searching on the generic terms around your venue.
For the more specific keywords, i.e. “wedding venues in surrey” – These keywords should be targeted nationally, so that anyone anywhere in the UK is searching for a venue in Surrey, you will reach these potential customers. This gives you the best opportunity to increase your reach, on the most relevant terms.
Section Summary
Hopefully that gives an overview on the thought process you need to keep in mind when advertising your business on Google. There are lots of options, but for Wedding Venues, there is a great opportunity in that they can be geographically targeted and controlled to reach only the relevant users to you.
Remember:
- Research your keywords thoroughly
- Do some test searches on Google like a potential couple would and look at some of your competitors
- Think of the location which you want to target – But also just as importantly, the locations you do not want to target.
Before we continue, reach out to our team at any point for help with your advertisers, using the form at the bottom of this article.
Next, we’ll take a look at
- A copy messaging considerations
- Seasonality & marketing budgets
- Keywords and the size of your venue
- Your website & offering
- Services which you provide and relevance
- Don’t forget your website & service
- Tracking and collecting the best information possible
- Wedding venue example websites and contact forms
Ad Copy messaging
According to The Telegraph, the average wedding takes 12 months to plan, and the average engagement is around 18 months. This needs to be taken into consideration when planning your Google Ads campaigns, if a user is searching right now for a wedding venue, should you display an advert for availability this summer? Or next winter? Or do you have late availability which needs to be pushed in the ad messaging?
This all needs to be taken into account when deciding on your ad messaging strategy.
Work on a marketing calendar which looks at least 12 months in advance so that you can plan your ad copy messaging well in advance
Take a look at the chart below, this is the search trends across a year – The blue line shows the trend of users searching for “summer weddings” and the orange line shows users searching for “wedding venues”.
Notice how there is generally a spike around Christmas time with the orange line, and then a large drop of “summer weddings” from August onwards.
During the summer months when search trends are high for “summer weddings”, it’s likely that these users will be looking for a wedding at least a year ahead of the planned date – So take this into account when writing ad copy messaging so that you resonate with couples and the way they are searching.
Seasonality & budget
The amount of potential customers searching changes throughout the year as mentioned above, and historically follows a pattern which spikes from the end of December and into January, largely due to a lot of engagements happening around Christmas time in the UK.
There is also a spike around autumn which is expected to be people researching venues before proposing. While covid had a devastating impact on the wedding industry along with others, volume has recovered into 2021 and 2022 with search volume reflecting the pent up demand of couples looking to marry.
The below chart shows an index of users searching throughout the year, from 2017 to mid-2022 starting from week 1 (the first week in January) to week 52 (the last week in December) – We can see the volume each year follows a very similar trend, however with 2022 being significantly down due to covid restrictions.
It’s important to take into account this seasonality when looking at your marketing budget, to plan for capturing demand and highest intent.
If you have a limited budget, you may want to direct some towards busier periods, but also try to remain advertising throughout the year to capture as many as possible.
The size of your venue
While a lot of wedding venues can cater for a wide range of guest numbers, take into account the size of your venue and which keywords you may want to include or exclude when creating your adverts.
If you have a minimum guest number, you may not want to show your advert when a user searches for “intimate wedding venues”, or “wedding venues for 30 people”.
And in the same case, if your venue is more intimate and caters to smaller guests numbers, you may want to exclude keywords such as “large wedding venues”.
These are all small tweaks that go into planning a cost effective ppc campaign, but these small considerations can add up to a substantial change in performance and make your marketing budget product a higher return on your investment.
If you run PPC within an agency already, you can use this information to dig deeper into your own performance and help input on strategy and efficiency.
Services which you provide
Again, this one is about keywords too. What services does your venue offer and what phrases do you want to show your advert against?
Is it venue only, all-inclusive, catering options possible, or something else?
People search for these kinds of terms every month and it’s easy to show your advert against them.
So including or excluding some of these keywords to align with the services you offer is another key component to your campaigns, and helps increase relevance to users and reduce wasted click and wasted marketing budget.
Don’t forget your website & customer service
Some companies just expect that because they have a website and a contact form, then the job is complete.
However, that’s far from the truth.
Having an easy to navigate website, which presents your venue to users in an appealing way, having relevant information and your offer available, and then finally, a simple and reassuring way for those potential customers to contact you is critical.
Think about how many times you’ve clicked on a link to go to a website, and not been brought to the page that you were looking for. Or the information is overcomplicated or overwhelming.
Think about what couples want when researching a venue, they will be doing lots of research, and on lots of different venues – So you need to show your venue in its best light, with just enough information to get people to explore more.
Click on the link below to see some examples of what we consider good and not so good websites for wedding venues. Though the truth will be in the data you get through.
Examples Of Wedding Venue Websites
Communicating with couples – More important than advertising?
You can pay for, and direct all of the relevant traffic to your website, but if you don’t follow up personally with people in a timely and professional manner, you’ll be losing out against some of your competition. Take a look below and consider how you follow up with clients.
As we are sure you know, we can’t express how important it is to create good first impressions with couples. And this isn’t just for the sake of creating a good impression at the start. This should be the foundation for your relationship with your customers.
Setting off on the right foot from day 1 really can make a lasting impression on your business by building a strong and trusting relationship, which can ultimately lead to more business in the future where couples can be more likely to leave a review for a business they feel connected to.
According to Zendesk, 79% of people trust online reviews as much as friends and family when researching.
You may be surprised, but in our own testing contacting venues, quite frequently we only received a generic email and no follow-up phone call.
Take a moment and think of your end to end experience when a customer reaches your website, to the first contact with your team. Is it better for customers to receive an email, get a phone call or both? And are you collecting the right information at the point of contact to enable a useful informed conversation with your potential customer?
Marketing can be great, but just as important is the interaction with your team and getting the customer to decide to invest their dreams in your venue.
Takeaway thoughts
Google Ads can be a great tool to reach potential customers – It works for a lot of businesses already as this is the way Google makes a lot of its revenue. However it can also be easy to spend your budget on clicks which aren’t relevant.
You need to have a clear strategy on the keywords and areas you need to target, and also a competent ads specialist who can implement that strategy.
We hope you find the info and tools above useful, either if you are starting out, or already running campaigns.
As ever, reach out directly to our team for any help with running your Google ads.
