Without High Quality Photography, Your Venue Is At A Major Disadvantage
At Event Temple, venues commonly ask us how to get more inquiries. Whether it’s a hotel hoping to attract more meeting business, a restaurant that wants to host more corporate events or a wedding venue that wants to attract more brides, increasing inquiries is always the key to long-term success for every venue. Since our venue management software is great at turning inquiries into bookings and then automating the event planning process, we only win if our customers have inquiries to put into Event Temple. Without inquiries, our customers would go out of business and so would we. We spend a lot of time learning how the best venues out there in each segment attract potential customers through marketing and I’ve recently noticed a common thread among the more successful venues.
The best venues have great photographic evidence of their events.
Have you ever heard the story of how Airbnb took off? Airbnb has been one of the largest disruptors to the hospitality industry in the last 100 years so we did some research into how they became so successful, so quickly. One of the things we learned is that Airbnb actually struggled for quite a long time until they realized that they needed high quality photographs of their hosts’ homes in order to successfully attract customers through their site. Without the photographs, customers weren’t interested in renting the spaces. As a result, Airbnb’s founding team went out and personally photographed the first few listings on the website in New York City. Without high end photos, there is a very good chance that the website wouldn’t have ever taken off.
Recently, the team at Event Temple did our own research, looking at the websites of over 100 venues within Vancouver, BC, Canada. The results were astounding. We found that over 90% of the websites had no photos of live events that actually happened at the hotel/restaurant/wedding venue etc. In many cases, only stock photos were used. Of that 90%, only maybe half had any pictures of the inside of their venues at all and again stock photos were common on the venue’s website. Imagine you visit a hotel’s website and click “meetings” to view their space. You’ll be lucky to see bland pictures of meeting rooms because even those are only shown half of the time. We rarely found photos of the actual events with real clients on any of the venue’s websites.
Why Photos Are So Important
We feel high end photography of actual events happening at your venue are so important. The reason is that without this photographic evidence, it’s hard for potential customers to envision what could be done with your space. As well, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to demonstrate social proof to your potential customer. Did you recently host a large meeting for a group of executives at Coca Cola? Show other corporate clients you work regularly with the biggest names in business. Have you hosted a beautiful wedding at your venue in the last 6 months? Show potential brides what your venue looks like when it’s professionally decorated. Whatever your venue is, seeing is believing and the boring old photos of meeting tables surrounded by chairs in a carpeted and windowless room just don’t do it. Add a few photos however and suddenly those boring old meeting rooms will come to life as clients can picture themselves in your space and also imagine the others who have spent time there before.
In your competitive set, you can be fairly certain that your competitors are not showcasing their meeting and event space properly. You can instantly differentiate yourself with a strong competitive edge simply by showcasing the events that are actually happening at your venue. We recommend it.
