95 – How to Attract Weddings to Your Hotel

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

After years of postponing, couples are eager to tie the knot and the demand for weddings is skyrocketing. Host Ryan Embree discusses how hotels can position themselves to capture market share and secure bookings from both engaged couples and wedding guests. Listen now! Suite Spot Podcast · 95 - How to Attract Weddings to Your Hotel Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Ryan Embree: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Suite Spot. This is your host Ryan Embree, and we've got a great episode for you today. For a subject matter that hoteliers have really been missing out on the past two years, and I'm sure guests and travelers have as well. And that's weddings. The pandemic obviously had a huge impact on group business and that included weddings. We saw a lot of couples postpone their weddings to later in the year or later down the line. And it's having a huge impact on occupancy. But now as we see ourselves getting further and further through this pandemic and see that kind of light at the end of the tunnel, we see more and more people now reaching out. And those couples that postponed, they're ready to get married and we're seeing those guests now feel more and more comfortable coming and staying at our hotel. Ryan Embree: So that's what this episode is all about: how to attract more weddings to your hotel and how to leverage your digital marketing and doing it. So before we get started in this episode, a couple quick stats on what we're seeing with weddings. So this is according to the Knot, "wedding venues near me," search terms are up 200% since the thick of the pandemic and there are forecasted to be 2.6 million weddings in 2022. I am sure the hoteliers listening to this are very, very happy to hear that news and those statistics. And that means a lot of occupancy opportunity. But again, these guests, these brides, these grooms, when they decide to potentially make a wedding block or even pick your hotel as their wedding venue, they're going to be doing more research than ever. They're gonna be doing their due diligence, especially when the stakes are this high, when it's your wedding day, you know, you think about it. Ryan Embree: So, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna kind of break this episode up into two unique sections. The first would be to how to actually use digital marketing to attract the happy couple, right? The brides and grooms that are looking to potentially either again, pick your hotel as the wedding venue itself if you have location and venue space for them, or even if they're looking for a wedding block, but there's also the other side to it, of our wedding guests and what guests that might not have traveled over the past two years are gonna be looking for in order to make them feel comfortable. Because as we'll talk about later, if, if they do not feel comfortable, there is no wedding block discount that's going to make them stay at your hotel versus picking a competitor. No discount offered there that, again, is gonna give you the upper hand. Ryan Embree: So we're gonna talk about those two ways and we're gonna kind of break it down into what our digital marketing expertise here at Travel Media Group is: social media, reputation management, and responding to reviews. So we'll start with reputation management when it comes to attracting brides and grooms, and the best way that we can do that is through word of mouth. Through case studies, testimonials from past couples that maybe have used our hotel as a wedding venue and are very, very happy with the experience that they received. The more recent, obviously, the better,