Marketing Your Wedding Venue Series by VenueApp : Blogging
/
1. Start A Blog: Many venues are leery to start a blog, thinking that the time commitment is not worth the value they receive and at first that certainly seems so. As I speak to wedding professionals about blogging, one of my favorite sayings is that it is a marathon (yes, this pertains to SEO as well). Blogging is about consistency and producing quality content that builds on itself over time. I would suggest 2 posts a week to get the most bang for the buck. There are a number of platforms, but Wordpress is the easiest to use and customizable, so your site will reflect your brand.
2. Content Creation: Another concern that I hear a lot is that venues don’t have anything to blog about. This is an easy one, there is so much going on around your property that once you get started you may have a hard time deciding what to blog first! We like blog series as they allow you to concentrate on subject for multiple posts and it keeps your readers coming back.
Creating great content for your blog also allows you to spread that content to other places, including Facebook, twitter, features on your newsletter and it allows your ambassadors will help promote through social media as well.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
• What are the most frequently asked questions that you get from prospects?
• What are some things to do in the area?
• Do you have recommended vendors?
• Has your venue been featured in any magazines or popular blogs?
• Ask photographers for some images of past real weddings to feature.
• What makes your venue uniques series?
• Is your venue offering any promotions?
• Make sure to do a post on your new mobile app!
Need more?... just reach out to us and we can help!
3. SEO: Blogging will have the added effect of drawing people to your brand through search engine optimization. Creating content that is specific to your venue and your geographic location will add to your PageRank with Google. This brings your site to the top of search engines when people search for terms related to you and your venue. The title of the post and the first few sentences of the first paragraph are particularly indexable, so make sure to call out some key terms in these places.
4. Photography: Nothing is shared more online than images, so make sure to post an image with each and every blog post. To improve your chance of the image being found in a search, name the photo file with relevant keywords (yes, that means the .jpeg). Images draw a visitors attention and should be highlighting a unique feature of your property.
Make sure to feature all the weddings that happen on your property and keep lists of the vendors that participated in each event. Photography teams shoot- ing at your location should be quite amiable in sharing images with you in a timely manner (make sure to provide them with credit). Use a Dropbox account to get and share images and you will be able to access them from any device.
5. Social Media: You’re producing content and pushing it out into the world, make certain that it is super easy for visitors to your site to share that with their friends and fans! We’ve used Shareaholic on a number of blogs and have found it easy to install and effective. Make certain there is a link on your blog to your other social media properties like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
Bonus Tip: Analytics
We will be doing a full post on making sure that you’re measuring what you are doing and tracking success- es. Setting up Google analytics for your wedding venue could be one of the more important tools you can use. You will be able to know where your visitors are coming from, how they search to land there and what type of device they are using to look at your content. Be sure to follow our series to see this most important post!
Download Marketing Your Wedding Venue Series by VenueApp : Blogging
Marketing Your Wedding Venue Series by VenueApp : Facebook