You already know that social media achieves reach and scale. So, how can Catering Executives leverage it to market Indian weddings on-property?
Post in-the-moment: posting in-the-moment, you can storyboard the entire event. Indian weddings have so many components: baraat + ceremony + lunch (sometimes) + cocktail hour + reception. You can post SO many things throughout the day, to engage your audience and attract new followers.
Post Consistently: Build a repository of images, content and digital assets, and post them regularly. See below for tips on inexpensive ways to automate this.
Post fun/funny content: We all like to laugh and anything that gets someone to have a positive emotional reaction will make the difference between someone scrolling through your content vs. taking a millisecond to like it. For example a caption for the photo below could be:
“The groom channeling his inner Magneto on his wedding day at the <x venue>.”
{Anatomy of a Good Social Media Post}
A caption – try an experiment. Post a photo from an Indian wedding with no caption and 1 month later post the same photo with a caption. I guarantee you’ll get higher engagement with the captioned image.
Engaging captions. No doubt having a caption is better than not having one at all. But you know what’s even better than a caption? An engaging one. Look at the photo below. It could easily have this caption: “Indian wedding at our venue today!”
OR, it could have this caption:
“Donut bars are the new wedding cake and we freshly baked 400 donuts for this Indian wedding! Including vegan donuts too!
The 2nd caption is engaging and in just two sentences communicates so much more: demonstrates that the venue is up to speed on current trends and that the venue has a unique capability – making vegan donuts!
Tag people – the couple, vendors, your property. The people you tagged will like your post as will the fans and followers of those people.
{More Tips for Instagram}
In addition to the above, on Instagram you can add:
- location
- hashtags
Add your venue in the location. Hashtags are the core of how consumers find content they’re interested in. What hashtags do you use?
{Most Popular Indian Wedding Hashtags on Instagram}
- #indian wedding; 2,820,653 posts
- #indianbride; 1,484,315 posts
- #southasianwedding; 145,917 posts
- #indianweddingdecor; 17,232 posts
- #indianweddingvenue; 804 posts
{Facebook}
Did you know that on Facebook you can pre-schedule up to 6 months of content? And it doesn’t cost anything extra. Use that feature as part of your post consistently plan.
Post and Forget.
Post content and forget about it, All the while the posts are engaging your audience while you’ve moved on to achieve your next goal.
{Submit Weddings to Blogs}
I am always on the lookout for fresh content to share on the ShaadiShop blog. And so is every other blog out there. You can proactively reach out to photographers, to request the photos from the weddings you worked on, and submit them along with a brief write-up to blogs.
Use this as an opportunity to market the property where you work (without being too salesy) and market yourself! In the writeup, add context such as:
- how everyone pulled together to move a ceremony indoors due to weather
- how the decor really optimized the gazebo on-property
- how smoothly everything went because you worked with the vendors to create a load in and setup schedule
- what events were involved
- how many vendors
- what else was happening in the area/at the property that day
- the company names of all of the vendors
- talk about the work your team did and any special circumstances such as this was a Punjabi and Gujarati wedding and we combined traditions from both cultures such as <x>, <y>, <z>.
The more detail you include the more engaging the content will be and therefore, the more blogs will be interested in publishing it.
{Benefit: Building Your Brand}
The additional benefit of this is you’re literally building your personal portfolio! Like many Catering Managers seeking to move up in the ranks, this is a great way to do it! You can share these published stories in job interviews and talk about specific scenarios and things you did, and skill sets you conquered in each of these elaborate Indian weddings that you were involved with.
Is this a lot of work? It’s thoughtful work, which makes it hard. But if it was easy then everybody’d be doing it! Set yourself apart and invest in yourself!
{Pinterest for Indian Weddings}
Pinterest is effective for venues. Personally, I’ve found it much more effective for venues compared to Instagram. Plus Pinterest boosts your SEO rankings. Create a Pinterest board for Indian weddings. And for the truly ambitious create Pinterest boards for the different aspects or types of Indian weddings. Talk to your IT department about adding the Pinterest plugin to your work computer and start pinning content to your boards.
{Twitter for Indian Weddings}
I have found that Twitter’s not a very effective channel to talk about weddings. Your social media strategy should be as much about what you are going to do as what you’re not going to do. And I don’t recommend spending time on Twitter…at first. I’d try all these other tactics first (and they’re going to occupy your time anyway). Once you’ve explored other media, I’d test Twitter.
{Automate Your Social Media}
Use software to automate your social media. At the moment, Facebook is the only media that let’s you pre-post and schedule content for up to 6 months. But there are third party software companies that allow you to do just that for Pinterest, Instagram, Linkedin, Google Plus and other platforms – it’s very very useful. I have used Buffer and Hootsuite. Those are two of the most popular platforms on the market but there are others.
If you want to become invaluable to your organization, or are simply the type of person who likes to learn new skills, learning social media marketing to market your venue will enhance your work as a Catering Sales Manager.
At ShaadiShop we like to call this type of growth and advancement:
{Conclusion}
Social media marketing is effective in terms of reach and therefore has a lot of economies of scale. And catering managers have all the tools to engage in social media right at their fingertips. Of course you have to work within brand guidelines and workplace policies but you can get over that easily.
In this article we talked about easy ways for Catering Managers to leverage social media to market Indian weddings. Specifically we talked about Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter – their impact, features, and use cases.
If you decide to get your social media marketing on, let us know how it’s going and so we can follow you!
All the best!
{Follow ShaadiShop!}
I hope this article has been helpful to you. If it has, please let me know in the comments; and you might like to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest – whatever your preferred media is, as we frequently publish articles to help make planning an Indian wedding just a little bit easier.
{ShaadiShop Testimonials}
“We just booked a full Indian wedding through ShaadiShop at the Hilton Waterfront Beach Resort. In addition to the business, we appreciate the exposure ShaadiShop creates about our venue, as the couple didn’t know about our resort until ShaadiShop told them about us. Additionally, we appreciate the pre-qualification work that ShaadiShop does to match couples and venues that are a good fit for each other. We had all the info needed to conduct the initial meeting. What a great service for venues to market to the South Asian community!” – Angie Florence, Catering Manager at The Waterfront Beach Resort, Huntington Beach, CA
“We’re so glad we joined ShaadiShop to market this hotel to the South Asian community in the Orange County area. Every wedding we close from their leads returns more than 3x our investment. Moreover, they pre-qualify leads and educate consumers creating a much better sales cycle for our catering team. Venues looking to reach this market, join ShaadiShop!” – Ryan Hurd, Catering Sales Manager, Wyndham Anaheim Garden Grove
“Shaadishop helped me not only find venues but also understand how they work, the fees, and tips that I wouldn’t have otherwise known. Definitely a need service in the desi community. “ Hinna S., Bride
“Cannot say enough good things about the service from Samta and ShaadiShop who helped us research venues for our wedding this year. We wanted a non-hotel venue, and to get married within 6 months. ShaadiShop immediately found us venues, contacted them and educated us about all the things we needed to think about while selecting a venue. They put all the info together in a fabulous, super impressive, spreadsheet that helped us compare venues – seriously amazing and such a great help. Working with them made the whole stressful process MUCH easier and I can’t believe it was all free! ShaadiShop’s website is fantastic and such a great service for South Asians – so glad I found them!” Anjli S., Bride
“We’re so glad we used ShaadiShop to book our venue. The info on the website is amazing and then they gave us such personalized attention! They were such a valuable resource for selecting venues, helping us understand policies and logistics. Their suggestions saved us a lot money too! They really understood us, what we wanted and helped us get it. AND it’s free! So glad there’s a service like this for South Asians. Awesome that there’s something like this for South Asians!” Janki K., Bride
“I worked with ShaadiShop to find a venue for my daughter’s wedding. The website is easy to use and has so much useful information. ShaadiShop made everything easy for me – getting quotes, suggesting venues, explaining fees and policies. Most importantly, my daughter and son-in-law are happy with the venue. ShaadiShop is a great and service for our community. I’m so glad I found them!” Charu S. Bride’s Mother
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