How to Craft a Quality Event Venue Marketing Plan

Are the rooms of your newly renovated hotel feeling a little empty? Are the wedding bells at your wedding venue too quiet? Is your baseball field in the middle of a cornfield filled with more, uhm, spirits than spirited play? The idea that if you build it, they will come only works in the movies, unfortunately. That’s why developing an event venue marketing plan is critical for showcasing the true potential of any venue.  

Let’s assume you’ve already got a business plan in place and built out your venue marketing strategy that’s going to guide your marketing plan for the months to come. (If not, we’ll wait…). 

Now, it’s time to lay out the tactics you’ll take to achieve your business’ most important goals. Whether you’re just getting started with a new event venue or you’re ready to overhaul your strategy for the new year, we’ve got you covered with this guide to creating your event venue marketing plan. 

What should you include in an event venue marketing plan? 

The goal of any event venue marketing plan is to ensure you’re communicating the right messages to your audience and spending your marketing budget with a maximum return on your investment.  

But there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for marketing success. A downtown venue focused on weddings is going to market its space differently than a luxury resort in the Mediterranean. For some venues, their entire revenue stream may depend entirely on events, while for others, like a boutique or independent hotel, hosting events may only be a part of the revenue equation.  

In that case, an event venue marketing plan would be complimentary to the overall marketing strategy for your hotel. But your event venue marketing plan doesn’t need to follow the same playbook as your hotel’s marketing plan (and probably shouldn’t!). Building out a separate event venue marketing plan allows you to tailor your tactics and spending to that part of your business. 

What you need before starting your event venue marketing plan 

Ugh, homework. Fear not, though, this prep work is worth doing before setting your plan for the year. Think of it this way: If your marketing plan tells you how you’re going to market the venue space, then these three steps will tell you the who, what, when, where, and why. 

• Business goals 
• Target demographic and market information 
• Marketing Strategy 

For a new business, you may not have done all this work yet, but it’s worth it to keep your teams focused on the big-picture goals. For the venues that have been around the block (literally) for a while, you’ve probably got a lot of this work done — but it’s always worth reviewing and refreshing what needs to be updated!  

Let’s quickly look at each one of these prep steps before diving into the planning. 

The business goals 

Every business needs its own mission and value statements that provide the north star for where the company is headed. From there, leaders create goals for the company to set the agenda, oftentimes on a quarterly or yearly basis.  

A hotel, for example, may have new revenue targets the business is trying to hit this year — and events are responsible for a part of that number. Or there may be a new market leadership that wants to break into to grow revenue, like attracting local businesses to the event spaces. Or perhaps there’s an initiative to open a new venue space on the hotel’s property that the marketing campaigns need to help promote.  

Your marketing plan is one piece of the larger business puzzle. If what you’re planning to do isn’t supporting one of these broader business goals, you may want to ask if it’s worth spending your time and budget on. Trust us: it’s easy in marketing to get sidetracked by creativity, which is why planning your activities with larger business goals in mind is crucial.  

Make sure you come to an agreement with leadership on the metrics to measure your marketing success: it can be small things like a % increase in organic traffic or big things like a successful open house event to showcase your space in the first quarter of the year. Knowing your key performance indicators (KPIs) will guide what you do later on. 

The target demographic and market information 

Once you know why you’re bothering to market your event venue and what the larger goals are, you can start to think about who you’re going to market to and where you’re going to market.   

Every business has an ideal customer — or customers — for their event venue space. By creating an ideal customer profile, you can better understand who you’re trying to market to.  

 You can start creating your ideal customer profile by asking questions like: 

• What have our best customers in the past had in common?  
• What event types are we best suited to host?  
• What attributes do our ideal customers share (jobs, interests, values)? 
• If targeting corporate customers, which industries and business sizes are worth targeting? 

The more you know about who you’re trying to market your space to, the easier it will be to come up with the most effective message.

In the world of digital marketing, you don’t just need to know who you’re marketing to, though. With the world at your fingertips thanks to the internet, you need to know where to run your ads to avoid diluting your message (and your budget).  

If your event venue draws largely from the local area, you may want to restrict your advertising to local searches and local traditional media sources. But if your venue attracts an out-of-state or even an out-of-country clientele, you may wish to identify those locations in your research and target those locations as well. Perhaps Germany has fallen in love with your ranch-style hotel in Montana as a destination wedding location. If you know this, you may want to increase those bookings with ads in German next year. 

Improve local marketing efforts with a Google Business Profile to control key information about your venue in search engines.

Lastly, there’s always an element of keeping up with the Joneses in marketing. If your venue is in an area with comparable spaces, it’s worth doing some competitive analysis to see who they’re targeting with their advertising and how they’re positioning their event space. At the very least, the information can help to differentiate your event venue offering from the competition, making it easier for your venue to stand out from the crowd.  

Putting together your event venue marketing plan  

Homework time is over. Now, the fun begins. Let’s start crafting your marketing strategy by getting the basics down on paper.  

• What spaces and services are you offering? It may seem obvious, but it’s always worth codifying exactly what you’re selling. Ensure you have critical information like standing and seated capacities for each space. And, if your venue offers in-house services like event planning, catering, or other upsells, know what those entail as well. 
• What is the pricing of each space or service? For event venues, pricing can get complicated really fast. Your pricing might fluctuate depending on the time of day, week, year, or whether Mercury is in retrograde. You’ll likely also have minimum spending requirements for each event. Once you add in services and bundles, the pricing sheet can get pretty crowded. Even if you don’t openly advertise your prices, knowing the price for events can help you set your marketing budget later.  
• What are you going to do to promote the spaces and services? You know what they say: the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Nevertheless, it’s important to plan what you’re going to do to promote your venue, even if things need to change in a few months. From ads in trade magazines to influencer marketing on Instagram, what is your marketing team going to do to get the message out about your venue? (We’ll dive into this more in a moment.) 
• Who is responsible for each part of the strategy? You know what else they say: the best-laid plans aren’t going to lay themselves. The last thing you want is for your shiny new plans to fall flat in the mud because there’s no one to actually do the things. Do you have the people and expertise in-house already to accomplish each part of your plan? Or do you need to bring in new talent or find outside help to get it done?  
• How much of a budget will you have to accomplish your goals? You know what they don’t say but they should: the best-paid plans aren’t going to pay for themselves. Having a budget helps you plan your spending strategically and can give you a needed reality check on some of the more…luxe ideas in your marketing plan. 
• What technology do we have or need to acquire to make the plan happen?
  Technology is a crucial component of any marketing plan. In fact, if you look closely, you’ll notice that most marketers are just 3 SaaS products stacked on top of each other in a trench coat — that’s how vital technology is for us. Depending on your budget, team, and planned activities, you’ll probably need some of the following technology: a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to manage your contacts; email marketing software to contact your…contacts; a website and content management system (CMS) to create web pages and blog posts; and, social media management software to simplify dealing with your posts, likes, and comments.

You may also opt for specialized event planning and event design software to manage bookings, guest lists, and floor plans. Technology tailored to events can offer a lot of overlapping features with the above list, while also offering added benefits, such as a seamless hand-off from marketing to sales.  

With all your proverbial ducks in a row (or swans, if you’ve got a real swanky joint), now you can start to break things down by each channel. 

Make your marketing plan manageable  

Let’s get really, really granular about where you’re going to spend your time, effort, and budget to make your marketing plan a reality. 

One simple way is to create campaigns. Each campaign can have a particular goal and target audience in mind. For example, you may want to run a campaign to increase bookings for winter weddings at your ski resort in the Rockies. For this campaign, you should know: 

• Your target audience (brides-to-be in the western U.S. with a love of the outdoors) 
• Your call-to-action (a discounted venue booking rate during certain months) 
• Your campaign timeframe (January- March) 

With these things in mind, you can plan the content and activities for each of your marketing channels to bring the campaign to life. 

The feature of your campaign could be hiring an influencer to have their wedding at your resort during the winter months and post about the experience to their followers. From there, you can bring that message and content out to your other channels, such as: 

• A page on your website detailing the promotional offer and highlighting the winter wedding experience 
• Writing an article for a wedding magazine that shares the influencer’s wedding adventure at your resort 
• Boosting the influencer’s posts with a paid social media campaign  
• Creating a pamphlet on winter weddings at the resort to have at the concierge desk 

It’s important to keep track of how each piece of your campaign is performing. Some things might fall flat: you may need to cut back on poor-performing ads or rethink the landing page if it’s not converting.  

Instagram-worthy photos can be a great investment for marketing any venue type. Photo by Asad Photo Maldives

Have a plan for your plan

You probably have a few campaigns you’re planning to run at the same time to promote your spaces to different prospective audiences. And each of those campaigns will use most, if not all, of the marketing channels you use: your website, social media, digital advertising, and traditional advertising. It can quickly get overwhelming. To help keep an eye on everything, it’s a good idea to create a monthly or quarterly editorial calendar that shows you what needs to happen and when for each campaign in each channel. 

For example, if your conference center venue is running a campaign in February for corporate events for the life sciences industry, you might note down what’s happening in each channel on a calendar: 

• Feb 1: Launch the life sciences industry landing page
• Feb 2: Create ads for a paid LinkedIn ad campaign targeting life sciences
• Feb 3: Send promotional email to life sciences prospects
• Feb 5: Publish a blog post on creating a successful conference for the pharmaceutical industry
• Feb 7: Launch paid LinkedIn ad campaign
• Feb 11: Launch ad campaign on PharmaTimes Online magazine

You get the idea, right? Once you add in your other campaigns and any other important events/activities, you’ve got yourself a calendar to conquer the world (or, your local area, at least). 

4 easy ways to level up your event venue marketing plan

In our attention economy, getting people to notice the hard work you put into your marketing can feel impossible. That’s why it’s important to go beyond the basics to get your event venue noticed by the right people. To that end, we’ve put together 4 ways you can take your event venue marketing plan to the next level.  

• Trade in boring pictures for virtual 3D tours on your website

Static photos and 2D-floor plans can only do so much to capture the true potential of your event spaces. With the recent advances in spatial design technology, you can instead bring your space to life with dynamic 3D visuals. 

Event design software like Prismm lets you capture a 3D digital twin of your space and share it on your website. That way, when your marketing campaigns bring people to your site, they can virtually walk through the space on their own — from anywhere in the world — and start imagining their dream event in your venue.   

Add immersive virtual tours to your digital marketing strategy.

• Hold open houses for your event planner and vendor networks

Whether your event space is new, newly renovated, or under new management, it’s always a good idea to get in the good graces of the hard-working people who make events happen. Hosting networking events with local event planners and vendors can be a great way to bring more attention to the spaces and offerings of your venue.  

• Invest in word-of-mouth marketing
  

A good review from a former customer is worth its weight in gold. People tend to trust the words of their peers over the marketing messaging. So, getting more people talking about your venue is a great way to boost interest from prospective customers. You can do this by sending out an email asking for an honest review on Google, Yelp, or other review sites. You can also incentivize referrals for past customers who send their friends and family your way for events.

• Showcase different events in each of your spaces

Your venue spaces can take on many different looks depending on the type of event, but do your prospective customers know how versatile the spaces can be? To help you broaden your venue’s appeal for more event types, use an event design platform like Prismm to showcase different possible layouts for different event types in each of your spaces.  

From wedding receptions and user conferences to TED Talks and silent raves, Prismm allows you to save different layouts for each event type, filled with life-like replicas of your venue’s actual furniture and fixtures. It’s the best way to convince that corporate event planner you’ve been marketing to that your venue is for more than weddings. 

Make 3D event design technology part of your marketing plan

Hopefully, you’re well on your way to a solid event venue marketing plan for the year by now. If this is the year you’re hoping to accelerate your event business’ growth, then look at what 3D event design technology from Prismm can do to help you market and sell your space with confidence.  

Creating an immersive digital twin of your venue spaces with Prismm makes virtual tours and personalizing layouts for prospects effortless. The only limit for showcasing the potential of your space with Prismm is your imagination (and the walls, I suppose).