The Top 20 Resources For Wedding Venues

Do you own, manage or work at a wedding venue? Are you looking to improve your business? Would you like to streamline your operations or increase your bookings? If so, we’ve created this guide just for you!

I have recently been doing some online research and I’ve found that there aren’t many resources made specifically for wedding venues. At Event Temple, we work with wedding venues all over the world as as such, we wanted to assemble our top 20 resources for wedding venue owners, managers and staff members to improve their business. So, without further adieu, here is the list!

The Wedding MBA, one of the top conventions for wedding venues to attend.

The Top 20 Resources For Wedding Venues:

1. The Wedding MBA: The Wedding MBA is a three day annual “professionals only” industry convention that takes place in Las Vegas, Nevada. The event is segmented off by vendor type (venues, photographers, DJs, etc) and there is normally 6–8 venue-specific speakers at the event each year.
2. Catersource: Catersource is a four day conference that is also held annually in Las Vegas. You’ll typically find less wedding-specific venues here than at the WeddingMBA, however much of the educational content is still highly relevant for wedding venues. The event normally features speakers specializing in sales and marketing for hotels and venues.
3. Book More Brides: Book More Brides is an online educational resource for wedding professionals featuring both free and paid course content. We’ve worked extensively with Book More Brides and have found their content on marketing, sales and business strategy to be among the very best in the industry. We highly recommend checking them out.
4. Bride Appeal: Bride Appeal is another online educational resource that we highly recommend. Their articles are often venue specific and they understand the subtle challenges that come along with running a venue. We recommend Bride Appeal in conjunction with Book More Brides.
5. Volution’s Guide: Volution’s guide to marketing your wedding industry website is one of the best we’ve found. Although the guide covers nearly every type of wedding vendor, all of the techniques and strategies listed apply to wedding venues very well. This is a great guide if you are looking to get more inquiries from your existing website!
6. ILEA: ILEA, or the International Live Events Association (formerly ISES), has thousands of members internationally and has a chapter in just about every major US and Canadian city. The best part about ILEA is that 56% of their members are event planners and producers. These are the perfect people to meet since they can bring potential customers to your venue.
7. NACE: NACE stands for the National Association For Catering and Events. NACE holds an annual expo as well as regular member events throughout many cities in the United States. We recommend checking out their blog and resource library in addition to their local events.
8. MPI: MPI or Meeting Planners International is a fantastic and little-known resource for wedding venues. While some MPI events are certainly catered toward the Meetings and Incentives Industry, many are also more geared toward the Event industry and that includes weddings. We’ve found that their events really vary by chapter, so we recommend checking one out for yourself to see if yours is “wedding oriented” or not.
9. Facebook Wedding Venues Groups: This is a great place to find wedding venues to network with in your area. Many times, when other venues are all booked up, they’ll turn potential customers away if they are unable to book them in for the upcoming year. In that case, we’ve seen firsthand that it can definitely pay off to have a good relationship with your competition. Facebook groups provide an easy, private way to make those connections.
10. The Knot: In our venue management software, we’ve studied the marketing campaigns of hundreds of users in the wedding industry and analyzed what paid advertising works to increase business. By far, The Knot has consistently proven to be the top performing directory for wedding venues to get leads and generate more bookings.
11. WeddingWire: WeddingWire’s blog in addition to WeddingWire World (their annual event) are both great resources for wedding professionals to increase their sales, streamline their business and learn about modern marketing techniques. WeddingWire is also an excellent potential source for advertising your venue to potential brides and grooms getting married.
12. Wedding Spot: WeddingSpot is one of our favourite new directories because they are at the top of many google searches when couples are looking for local wedding venues (they rank well on google nationwide). As a result, we think they may be an excellent newcomer in the world of wedding venue advertising and we think they’re worth a shot.
13. BrideBook.co.uk: We really enjoyed Bride Books’ “Top 10 Social Media Marketing Tips For Wedding Venue Professionals”, because the content was extremely useful and we believe it will get you good results in a fairly short amount of time. Bride Book also has some excellent articles on how to boost your SEO or get PR for your wedding venue.
14. Unique Venues: Unique venues is probably our favourite resource for “outside the box” venues and they also publish education specifically made for wedding and event venues fairly frequently. Our favourite article is the one on “How to Market Your Wedding Venue” which provides some easy, actionable tips that should begin to pay off almost immediately.
15. Social Tables: The Social Tables Blog is a great resource for venues and their article on “Marketing Your Venue” is fantastic. We love the idea of photographing real people, having real events at your venue and also the concept of a “virtual video tour” to help customers better envision your wedding venue before doing a site visit. Although it’s marketed more generally towards event venues, we feel its’ still a great resource.
16. Cvent: Cvent is one of our favourite “event industry” blogs and regularly posts updates on industry trends ranging from holograms to virtual reality. There are quite a few articles addressed specifically to venues though so check it out. It’s not wedding-focussed at all though, but many of our venues have still mentioned that they visit it regularly.
17. Event Manager Blog: The Event Manager Blog is one of our favourite online sites for learning how to utilize social media in marketing your venue. We feel they’ve done an excellent job of outlining some of the methods to really make your venue shine online. Although it’s not venue specific, many of the tactics applied here should be useful to your venue.
18. VenueLook: Venue Look has some fantastic articles, and our favourite is “How To Promote Your Venue In Innovative Ways”. The site provides strategies on advertising in bridal magazines, marketing at bridal shows, promoting your business through blogs, social media and more. It’s not as in depth as some of the resources we listed, but certainly just as helpful!
19. WIPA: WIPA or the Wedding International Professionals Association is a non-profit association run by it’s members that includes hotels and wedding venues. They have chapters throughout most of the country and have some fantastic live events, meetups and member’s only webinars.
20. Event Temple: Last but not least, don’t forget about Event Temple! We’re not only the industry’s leading wedding venue management software company, but we also regularly update our content to provide you with information on how to market your venue, streamline your operations, keep up to date with industry trends and more. If you liked this article, please visit www.eventtemple.com and subscribe to our newsletter.

The Knot, the best paid form of online advertising for Wedding Venues we’ve found, outside of SEO

Where are the rest?

One of the reasons we decided to compile this list of our top 20 favourite resources for wedding venues was because there just isn’t very much information online written specifically for the unique needs of wedding venues. At Event Temple, we initially set out to specialize in creating the world’s best software for managing your wedding venue, but over time, we’ve also learned a lot from working with some of the best venues in the country and internationally as well. We’ve seen where the best venues spend their marketing dollars in order to maximize their bookings and revenue. We’ve also studied how the leading venues have streamlined their organizations to cut down on administrative headaches, mistakes and to consistently gain 5 star reviews. As we result, we wanted to share what we’ve learned with you. Our goal is to become one of the best resources for venue-specific information on the internet. If you’d like to learn more, you can sign up for our mailing list at www.eventtemple.com