The Secret to Successful Wedding Venue Marketing: Virtual Tours

What if every bride-to-be could walk through her dream wedding venue before visiting it in person? What if your wedding venue marketing left a lasting impression that increased bookings twofold?

Believe it or not, that kind of success isn’t far from reach with innovative technologies and visual marketing solutions. Yes, we’re talking wedding venue virtual tours.

Download our free eBook to discover how a virtual tour can have an impact on your digital marketing efforts.

Leave a Lasting Impression with a Wedding Venue Virtual Tour

Booking a wedding venue is a big decision for couples, and it’s easily the most important one in the wedding planning process. The space they choose will be the place where they celebrate the biggest day of their lives.

And let’s face it - most searches usually begin with a local Google inquiry that eventually leads them to the venue’s website. This stage is crucial for wedding venues. When prospective clients land on your venue’s website, that’s going to be their first impression. It’s important that you make that first impression a lasting one.

After all, your goal is to keep calendars full and bookings coming in year-round. For that to happen, first impressions should be meaningful and generate meaningful traction.

But with so many wedding venues to choose from, it is key for your venue to leverage innovative marketing strategies to stand out. Being featured on popular wedding venue sites is one way to increase exposure, but that still limits you to photos and videos.

Wedding virtual tours allow anyone to visualize your space on their laptop, mobile device or VR headset 24/7.

Wedding Venue Virtual Tours Are a Win-Win

Adding a complete 360 virtual tour to your wedding venue marketing mix can pay dividends. The versatility of a virtual tour creates more opportunities, especially for millennials, the generation that is spending the most time wedding planning at the moment.

Consider this: the chance of booking 18-34 year olds increases by 130% with virtual tours.

Virtual tours in general are a win-win for both clients and venues, offering a myriad of benefits:

• Save time and money. Marketing is expensive, and while virtual tours may see like a costly option, they actually churn out more time and money. Virtual tours weed out less interested prospects sooner in their search, and clients may not need to visit your property so often with free access to a virtual space from any device.
• In-person tours are more meaningful. Clients have a pre-existing idea of what your venue is like prior to an in-person visit. In turn, this generates stronger leads with truly meaningful in-person tours.
• Help non-locals plan. Most weddings aren’t local, so offering a virtual tour of your wedding venue helps non-locals plan without having to take so many trips to visit on-site.
• Acts as a unique research tool. Offer access to your venue on a 24/7 basis, helping clients plan and coordinate their event from anywhere, anytime.
• Leaves a strong impression that stands out. Wedding venue virtual tours are still a new concept, and with all marketing efforts, staying ahead of the curve (and the competition) is essential. Virtual tours leave lasting impressions and show that you’re serious about your venue.

How Are Virtual Tours Powerful for Wedding Venues?

While virtual tours offer plenty of benefits to future clients and your venue coordinators, let’s dig into the nitty gritty that really makes a virtual tour so lucrative.

In addition to embedding a virtual tour on your website, they also direct traffic to your website from Google Maps or your venue’s Google My Business page.

This not only saves time for event planners, but also helps couples gain confidence and trust in your venue as they research their options. With the younger generation being more visually oriented, virtual tours result in faster booking times and less requests to revisit the space multiple times.

Millennials are a tech savvy generation, so it’s no surprise they have exceedingly high expectations for websites these days. They have a need to access all information instantly and are the first adapters to virtual content. For that reason, having a virtual tour is a huge advantage in the market for any venue.

Technology is a large part of event planning as it supports every part of the booking process from website interaction to what happens after the on-site meeting. The presence of a virtual tour makes the planning process easier which is a big plus for anyone planning a wedding.

Within a virtual tour, you can highlight some key features such as your beautiful ceremony room, reception are and the grounds so the happy couple can plan and coordinate photo spots and layout.

Additional features such as interactive tags, or hot spots, can be placed around the venue. Those tags can show extra information, pin images and even videos of previous weddings for an additional touch.

Your tour can be easily embedded on the main page of your website and even shared on your various social media. This will ultimately give you the most exposure and attract more authentic traffic to your site.

If you would like to learn more about creating a virtual tour for your venue, contact us today!