No Nos and Must-Dos in hosting wedding planners

You’re keen to market your venue through wedding planners (good decision), but how do you do this most effectively – how do you get it right and what should you avoid?

Here’s my quick checklist based on a lot of years experience being one of these wedding planners:

We’re a very lucky lot – wedding and event planners are invited to a lot of venue launches, showcases and the like, so the reality is that we can’t possibly attend them all. You need a hook and to be eye catching and you need to lay on something special and unique to your location.

A wedding planner from London is not going to respond well to an invite to “pop in for a cup of tea” next time you’re in Scotland – it’s not going to happen.  Think of hosting a lunch or a dinner if you can (and if you’re far from your target client base, an overnight) most certainly if you’re inviting a select and small group. The impression is set from the initial invite so be sure to make this impressive both in wording and design – if you lay on an event for planners it’s a chance to make the venue shine and pull in your team of partners who should see the opportunity to impress also by providing flowers, music and more.  Think about seasonality and logistics – summer is best avoided as most planners are flat out delivering client events and are too busy to come to extra showcases – weekday evenings are generally popular.

Keep to weddings – if you’re planning on hosting a larger event I would still recommend to keep this to the wedding market – perhaps it’s a bigger event hosting other sectors of the wedding industry such as press or bloggers and that’s fine but I would avoid mixing corporate audiences with wedding ones  – our needs are very different and I’ve never seen an event work very well in this style. Wedding planners similarly don’t want to be packaged up with brides either – whilst we love working with them, we much prefer visiting potential venues as a separate thing and invites for Saturday/Sunday wedding shows to planners are generally not a success. If you want to really target this market, you need to consider hosting something specific for this audience.

We do know each other – and very well – we’re a friendly, collaborative bunch in the main and very familiar with meeting up with each other at these sorts of occasions – so please don’t overly worry about hosting us to the same event and if we might feel negatively about this – most of us are small companies with very individual styles reflected in the clients we work with.

If you like the idea of opening up your venue to the right wedding planner market and its clients, but don’t know where to start and who to target, it’s something we can help with via our bespoke consulting service. Do get in touch to discuss.

Photo Credits:
Stuart Bebb // Waddesdon Manor