A Complete Guide to Venue Marketing: 12 Ideas to Increase Bookings and Revenue

2. Refresh your website

Your website is likely the first impression of your venue. It needs not only to look amazing but also load quickly across desktop and mobile. If your site doesn’t include videos, testimonials, images, and virtual tours, it’s time for a refresh. We recommend business owners review sites quarterly (or more frequently if you have the time!)

Clients today are not the clients of yesterday. A simple photo is not enough to engage today’s client. Clients come to your website expecting a virtual way to tour the event space. They don’t want to schedule time for an in-person meeting if they don’t have to do so. Today’s client is touring venue spaces using virtual tour capabilities available on venue websites to narrow down their list. If a venue does not have a virtual tour option, clients will skip and find the venue that does.

When a venue wonders how to promote a venue, the first answer in today’s market is virtual tours.  If you were to google, “how to market a venue,” you are guaranteed to see virtual tours at the top of the list of solutions.

With Prismm’s virtual tour technology, venues can offer virtual tours of venue spaces to not only market their venue but also increase bookings and revenue.

With Prismm’s Showcase (formerly Allseated Vision), venues receive an interactive website widget that will virtually showcase the venue’s event spaces on their website. Clients can tour the spaces from anywhere in the world and get a real feel for the event space and what their event could look like at the venue without having to schedule an in-person meeting.

Learn more about Prismm’s virtual tour technology here.

3. Get your Google My Business Listing

When considering venue advertising ideas, Google is the first step. Google My Business (GMB) is a free tool that lets you manage how your business appears on Google Search and maps. Claim your listing, and complete all of your venue’s details—including adding your business name, location, and hours; monitoring and replying to customer reviews and adding photos. Legitimizing your business on Google is a building block of a good digital marketing strategy.

4. Follow website SEO best practices

Search engine optimization (SEO) – the approach of making web pages attractive to search engines – is critical for marketing your venue. As best practices evolve and competition to appear for keywords increases, consider working with a trusted SEO specialist to boost your results.

An SEO specialist can help you to understand your event venue market and competitors, find the keywords that apply to your venue’s marketing plan, and help you to create the content needed to rank well on Google and obtain optimal placement in the top search results.

5. Institute a referral program

Whether it’s a happy customer or a local partner, reward them for referring other clients to your venue. A referral program is an easy venue marketing strategy to implement which should yield great success. Consider promoting the referral program through email marketing campaigns with rewards such as gift cards to entice them to the referral. A discount on future service is also an option. These are just some venue marketing examples that harness the power of people who already know and love your space. Remember, the satisfied customers you’ve already served are a marketing channel in their own right.

6. Share high-quality content that stimulates interest

Content marketing revolves around creating and sharing online materials, like videos, blogs, eBooks, and more, that aren’t overt advertisements. The idea is to share relevant information that stimulates interest. If you consistently publish high-quality content that your target audience finds helpful, those efforts can lead to increased organic website traffic.

For content marketing ideas, consider doing write-ups of previous events to highlight planning and execution details along with how your venue played a role in the event.  This promotes the venue’s capabilities while also showcasing previous events.

Another idea for high-quality content on a venue’s website would be to offer education to the industry. Venues are aware of how to plan events, what goes into planning an event at your specific type of venue, and how to work with vendors efficiently – share that knowledge in writing!

Publishing content on your website plays a role in your social media marketing strategy for venues too. Use the content links published on your website to share on social media. These content pieces will help you be a voice and leader in the industry while giving you content to share with your social media followers.

7. Maintain an active social presence

As mentioned above, a presence on social media is important. Extend your reach by sharing photos and original content on social media. But don’t forget to make it easy for others to tag your venue. Whether they’re checking in or sharing selfies taken during the event, your social handles should be simple and reflective of your venue’s name.

It’s also important to interact with other accounts within the events industry. Not only does this tactic help build relationships, it’s critical for brand awareness too.

8. Consider paid PPC and social advertising

Piloting pay-per-click or promoted social media advertising campaigns don’t require a big budget. Marketing ideas for venues should start small with a test budget and experiment with different text, images, audiences, and call-to-actions to see what works. If budget allows, consider working with an expert in this field to help navigate and monitor the campaigns to find what works best for your venue.

9. Showcase high-quality photos

While virtual tours are critical for venue marketing plans, images are still important! In an incredibly visual environment like Instagram, high-quality, visually stunning photos are a must. The right lighting, perspective, and staging take a venue’s appearance from ho-hum to stunning and go a long way in creating a positive first impression. If you want people to visualize their special day at your event venue, advertising just how stunning it can look is essential.

Work with photographers on sourcing the best images to share on social media. Perhaps you can arrange styled shoots at your venue. Alternatively, if your clients consent to it, you can share images from past events that took place in your space. Work with vendors on this type of project so that you have images to share and vendors to tag. This will further expand your reach on social media, help to build relationships in the industry, and give your styled shoots added elements by bringing in the talents of other vendors.

Ensure that all proper photo credits and tags are used in the social media posts so that the photographer and other vendors are credited for their work. Tagging the other vendors allows them to see and share the post, giving you further exposure. Giving vendors incentives with a simple credit on social media goes very far in brand awareness and the ability to book new business.

Beautiful images can also be used on your website. With a mix of virtual tours and high-quality images, prospective clients will have a well-rounded idea of what an event at your venue could be like for their event.

10. Create venue videos

1.9 billion logged-in users visit YouTube every month (half the internet!) and 96 percent of 18-to-24-year-old American internet users use YouTube. Ensure your venue can be found on the second largest search engine by creating professional-looking videos that showcase your venue’s highlights.

Offering video clips on your website is another way to show prospective clients what their event could be like in your event space. While virtual tours allow people to walk the space, the addition of video clips gives another glimpse inside the venue during an event.

Note: It’s important to receive permission from clients that their events are used in your event marketing videos. While likely already part of your event venue contracts, it’s important to ensure that clients understand that video footage and images may be used from their events. If for some reason a client wants their event kept private, it’s better to find that out before you use the creative files in promotional materials.

11. Share social proof

Written and video testimonials, as well as shares of social posts your venue is tagged in, are all examples of social proof – when others recommend or endorse a product, your prospects are more likely to take that recommendation seriously. Incorporate these powerful peer recommendations into your marketing efforts to increase bookings.

A good time to ask for written testimonials is immediately following an event. In any follow-up communication, it’s easy to add in a request for written or video testimonials. A client can send a video file or even easier, reply back with a few sentences as a testimonial.

The vendors you work with will likely provide testimonials too! Consider asking for a testimonial and offer one in return. This is not only a good business practice but a great way to build relationships.

12. Provide digital floorplans and virtual walkthroughs

Make it easy for planners and clients alike to envision how their event would look in your venue with digital floorplans and virtual walk-throughs. As Corbin Ball, a meetings industry technology speaker says, “When used properly, the immersive realism of a VR site inspection of a hotel or a destination can be the next best thing to being there.”

With Prismm’s virtual tour technology, not only can venues offer interactive virtual tours, they can also design layouts for events within the to-scale floorplan. Prismm provides event planning software to design layouts in 2D with the ability to view them in 3D with virtual tours.

With Prismm virtual tours and floorplan design technology, venues can:

• Close more deals with remote clients
• Be on-trend with technological advancement
• Achieve collaborative efficiencies among all parties
• Increase in-house usage with a minimal learning curve
• Deliver accurate event renderings
• Simplify customization and maximize time savings
• Decrease labor redundancies
• Collaborate in realtime with vendor teams and clients