Promotion of a restaurant as a venue for weddings and other special events is a creative and long process. But it's definitely worth the effort. Hosting a wedding or other celebration you immediately attract a wide audience, which, with the right approach, you can convert into loyal customers of your restaurant.
Banquet Hall Promotion
So, weddings and other events are an opportunity to reach a large audience. The guests at your party in the restaurant are your potential customers. If you are located in a large city perhaps many of them did not even know about the existence of your restaurant before.
If they like the cuisine and the level of your service, they are more likely to be your visitors. If, in addition to the kitchen, you manage to impress your guests with the high level of the event, they will probably want to celebrate their own special occasion with you. Not necessarily a wedding, it can be an anniversary, a corporate event, etc.
Moreover, a huge circle of people who did not even attend the event will learn about you. These are friends and acquaintances of the guests, their social media followers with whom the latter will certainly share their impressions.
So the benefits are clear. What should be done to attract newlyweds to a restaurant and how to create a celebration for them so unforgettable that they can use word of mouth and reactions in social networks to the full?
Establish your venue as a wedding location
Even if you have a small establishment and, it would seem, there is no opportunity to host crowded events, you can position yourself as a restaurant for a small wedding. Today, many couples prefer to celebrate their special day in a narrow circle of the closest people and are looking for this not a large hall with a pretentious design, but a cozy atmospheric place.
Online promotion
Most of today's youth are from the digital generation who are online 74% of the time. The first thing a young couple does after their engagement is to google about everything related to organizing weddings in their city. Based on that, your online presence directly determines the number of reservations for a banquet hall, since before ordering a restaurant for a wedding, most couples study all the offers available on the Internet.
Add restaurant information to Google My Business. Already added? Great, make sure that there is information about the possibility of hosting special events and a photo of the restaurant with the appropriate design.
Encourage customers to leave reviews of you wherever possible.
Add your establishment to all kinds of wedding-themed online catalogs.
Create a separate page on your restaurant website dedicated to organizing events with a detailed description of your proposal, a photo gallery, reviews and a request form.
Promote yourself as a wedding location on your social media pages. Avoid dry posts like “We take orders for weddings, banquets ...”. Post live content - behind-the-scenes photos and videos about how you are preparing for the event, details of the hall decoration, the work of the staff in the kitchen and in the hall, as well as thanks from the newlyweds. Anything that might be of interest to your potential customers.
Offline Promotion
A restaurant is usually the number one item on the lists of future newlyweds, but there are still places where brides and grooms have time to check in before looking for a banquet hall. These are wedding salons, jewelry stores, photo and video studios.
Get to know and partner with wedding-themed businesses in the same price range as you. This partnership is mutually beneficial. For example, if a couple first negotiates with a photographer, but has not yet decided on a restaurant, she may recommend your establishment.
Where to look for partners? On the same directory websites. But the easiest and fastest contact is through social networks. Like and subscribe to the pages of potential partners, invite them to do the same. The more “friends” you have from the wedding industry, the more professional your page looks.