Forecast Predicts a Massive Increase in Weddings in 2022

Weddings have started to rebound from the disruption in 2020 and 2021. It is a great opportunity to scale your marketing and create new packages for all sizes and budgets to capture the needs of your community.

Milestone has compiled research on how the virus impacted weddings and events and what the trend looks like for 2022.

• US weddings are expected to come in at 1,930,000 in 2021 and top 2,500,000 million in 2022.
• The Washington Post reported that 47% of couples who planned to marry in 2020 postponed their weddings.
• In 2021 spending averaging $22,500 with 2022 expected to cost $24,300.

Source: https://wedding.report/index.cfm/action/blog/view/post/pid/1606/title/2021_Covid_19_Wedding_Market_Update

• Searches for “Wedding Venues Near Me” Up 200% from Pandemic Lows

Milestone Research on Digital RFPs for Weddings

Milestone analyzed 308 hospitality websites from Jan 2019 till October 2021, covering more than 206M visits and found that wedding digital RFPs are up 33% year-on-year in 2021

What Drives More Weddings to A Property?

The most effective hotels and wedding venue properties deploy an omnichannel approach for promoting their wedding business, venues, services, and packages. This strategy drives awareness, engagement, and conversion across customer touchpoints, including a wedding module with RFPs, wedding packages and a voice search module with FAQs on the website as well as landing pages to align with paid campaigns, email marketing campaigns, and, local SEO.

Through the implementation of schema, keywords, FAQs, and social outreach, Milestone can raise awareness of your wedding business, engage with the right messaging and drive traffic to the RFP page for conversion. There is also an opportunity to capture postponed receptions for people who had private weddings during Covid. A robust omnichannel approach puts your message across all digital channels and lets you control the user journey.

How to Create New Wedding-Focused Packages

1. Define vaccination, testing, and masking protocols for staff and guidance for couples planning weddings.
2. Review and update booking and cancellation policies and fees with regard to cancellation due to Covid resurgence impact.
3. Create more outdoor wedding space (60% of weddings were outdoors in 2020, up 16% during pandemic, and still a good idea for health and safety in 2021 and 2022).
4. Maximize weekend venue space with shorter parties and quick resets, start earlier and go later to accommodate additional demand.
5. Establish service for mid-week and evening weddings (pre-pandemic, weddings occurred every day in Japan).
6. Redevelop approved vendor lists as many small businesses went under in pandemic.
7. Pre-book and package vendors to ensure basic services for couples, like justices of the peace, flowers, photographers, and DJs, arrange to get leads from them.
8. During the pandemic, there were micro-weddings of 10 or fewer people, post-pandemic plan for more mini weddings of 40 or fewer, advise couples to reduce guest count to offset the price increases.
9. Make sure your site has prominent RFP inquiry features, set an autoresponder, set tracking.
10. Increase paid spending to market open days and times
11. Target and email new wedding options to couples in the 25 to 40 demographics.

How to Measure Impact of Wedding Marketing Campaign

How to measure your performance (KPIs)

• Increase in visits to RFP page
• Increase in organic traffic from keywords related to weddings
• Growth in email database
• Increase in completed RFPs and signed contracts

Now is the time for you to get out in front of and capture those planning wedding versus any of the other hotels in your market. Start talking about what makes you special and communicate that in your target market. Our recommendations are about the digital experience that leads to the best physical experience. It’s about making sure you show you understand your customer’s needs and constraints, and then they will better appreciate what you have to offer to make their wedding a memorable one.

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