I love sharing travel stories and hearing others’ hilarious, unique, and adventurous tales from around the globe. And I often say to people, “once you’ve been to India, you’ve seen it all”. And the same can be said for the small village of people that work together to produce Indian weddings.
- You’re dealing with large budgets (relative to social catering events).
- Outside catering and the logistics, safety and branding matters around that.
- Coordinating with more that 10 vendors to produce seamless events.
- multiple events with function space occupancy 1/2 or full day.
- Creating a fantastic, welcoming, safe environment for hundreds of guests.
And all the work you did leading up to the event:
- Prospecting
- Stewardship (site visits, follow up)
- Negotiation
- Contracting
- Organizing/coordination
So, how can Catering Executives leverage their experiences and skill building with Indian weddings to build their personal portfolios?
{Use Social Media}
Leverage social media to market yourself. During and after an Indian or any South Asian wedding is happening on-property post about it from your company accounts – Facebook, Instagram etc. If you’re allowed, post it to your personal Linkedin and/or Facebook page. The KEY is the caption and what you say about it.
Linkedin is as you know a professional network, so you’d want to caption with something about the impact of the event on your career or job:
- a new skill set
- something you learned
- how your hard work paid of
- impact on propelling your career
{Real Post Examples}
You don’t want to say something generic like this, “woohoo Indian wedding” on Linkedin.
You do want to say, “This year our Catering team emphasized growing in new markets and today’s #IndianWedding, is proof our efforts are paying off”.
ProTip: If you haven’t check out our detailed post on how Catering Executives can effectively leverage social media to market Indian weddings at their venue.
{Submit Your Work 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 blogs to submit weddings you’ve worked on to be featured.
What would that entail?
- Connect with the photographer for each wedding and request to submit the wedding to 1-2 blogs
- Include a brief write up to the photographer, to be submitted to the blog, in which you not only talk about the work you and your team did but how great the photography team was too.
- submit the photos 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.
The awesome thing about being featured on blogs is you can share it everywhere – on your personal Linkedin and Facebook profiles, your company can share it to their Linkedin and Facebook profiles, you can share these published articles during 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.
{Write Case Studies}
Document experiences and new skills acquired with case studies. Case studies are great because they’re short, relevant, and tell your story. Case studies have 3 components:
- The Situation
- What You Did
- Outcome
Good case studies share tangible and measurable info ie:
- topline revenue that exceeded goals or broke records
- excellent profit margins
- impact on revenue for other departments such as room block and F&B outlets
- impact on KPIs that Directors of Sales and Marketing, Directors of Catering and General Managers such as impact on RevPar, RevPas, whether it was a direct booking or from a 3rd party and ROI on marketing efforts (MCPB).
Here’s an example of a case study we wrote for ourselves.
{Benefits To You}
Whether you’re looking forward to a promotion, a new job, or role expansion you’ll have a portfolio of experiences to substantiate your resume.
Build your portfolio consistently. Work on it all the time. If you work on this when you’re applying for that new job it’s too late because we forget details and lose access to info.
Disclaimer: ShaadiShop never suggest nor condone engaging in practices that are outside of or do not follow your company’s policies.
{Take Aways}
We know you’re busy so this article presented some quick and doable tips for how you can distinguish yourself and build your personal portfolio that will take you to your next role. Indian weddings are a challenge and a wonderful experience to be to share on your resume.
With the amalgam of soft and hard skills required they’re a wonderful way to showcase your skills, talent, experience, expertise growth and how you are continuously invaluable to your organization.
This article is part of ShaadiShop’s series
{Some FYIs}
Shaadi = Marriage/wedding in Hindi/Urdu, which are two major languages spoken in South Asia
South Asian refers to people from: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives
South Asian is not to be confused with Southeast Asian which is a completely different region of the world.
South Asian is a more encompassing term as it refers to everyone in that region vs. Indian.
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.
Contact us: sales@shaadishop.co
The #1 Destination For Venues to Market Indian Weddings!
Contact Us for info on advertising with us.
{Testimonials}
“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!”
Thanks!
Ryan Hurd
Catering Sales Manager
Wyndham Anaheim Garden Grove
“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 Sales Manager
Hilton Waterfront Beach Resort
“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 Shah, Bride
“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. And best of all, it was free!!”
Hinna Shaikh, Bride
cover image: Global Photography