How to Use Facebook Lead Ads to Land More Wedding Clients

Planning a wedding is simultaneously stressful and exciting. If your business offers wedding services, venues or catering, you know that better than most. Every couple wants their wedding to be a perfect memory they can draw on for years to come, so every decision—from the food to the decorations—matters.

For any business that advertises to these couples, this brings up a lot of questions:

• What is the best way to advertise to these emotionally invested buyers?
• What online marketing channel is best for wedding advertising?
• How do we compete with the army of competitors and influencer’s that are creating hundreds of venue choices and options?
• Is there a secret marketing sauce that will help me stand out against the grand buffet of wedding options?

Fortunately, after trying different marketing channels like Facebook, Instagram, Bing Ads and Google AdWords for a variety of wedding clients, I have discovered a golden strategy that drives bookings, boosts brand recognition and helps you hit your marketing goals.

Facebook for Wedding Advertising

If you’re not advertising on Facebook, you should be. In recent years, Facebook has developed into an incredibly powerful online advertising platform.

Facebook is constantly leveraging audience data to create initiatives and programs that allow advertisers the ability to select the perfect audiences for their businesses. This is perfect for wedding-focused businesses, because Facebook has an audience targeting option that will allow you to target newly engaged couples.

Think about it, how do most couples announce their engagment? They tell the world by updating their Facebook status to “engaged”!

These couples might as well raise their hands and say “hey everyone, we are getting married and we need to find a venue…and a caterer…and…”

To make things even better, you can even narrow this audience down by the length of time they’ve been engaged: 3 months, 6 months, and a year. This is incredibly helpful, because the buying cycle for most engaged couples is fairly long.

Creating a Compelling Strategy

Many couples treat finding a venue like buying a house and that can take a year or more. On average, couples tour at least 3 or 4 different venues before considering one and they call or inquire on average about 6 or 7. In the face of this kind of competition, it’s critically important to have a compelling strategy.

For me, this is the fun part.

A common strategy that many advertisers use on Facebook is an acquisition campaign that drives customers to a landing page or website and then a remarketing funnel that moves the customer down the funnel with a new ad every few days or so. This can be an excellent strategy, but I found a better one that has worked for a few different clients in this industry: lead ads!

Lead ads look and behave exactly like a standard image ad—with one exception. Instead of sending a user to a landing page, when someone clicks on a lead ad, they are taken directly to a form on Facebook. Facebook even autopopulates the form with the user’s information, so all they have to do is hit submit!

And all your sales team has to do is close them.

In my experience, if your sales team is on the ball and you have an air-tight lead nurture process, many of these Facebook leads will turn into profitable new clients. This is great news, because it means you can take a “high funnel” marketing channel like Facebook and use it to produce low-cost sales.

Just to give you a feel for how this works, here are some results from one of my client’s campaigns.

To help with the process I always have a retargeting strategy that will guide them down the funnel with different targeted offers to help these couples pick their perfect venue sooner than later.

Conclusion

Facebook is one of the easiest, cheapest ways to advertise to engaged couples. In fact, if you’re a wedding business that isn’t advertising on Facebook, you should probably go set up a Facebook Ads account right now.

Trust me, it’s worth it.

The advertising approach we’ve discussed will not only drive more leads, but it will help you stand out from your competitors. Your brand recognition will be enhanced as you strategically and thoughtfully display your images/ad copy on Facebook.

By the way, if you’d like me to take a look at your current Facebook advertising strategy (or give you specific advice on how to use Facebook lead ads to grow your wedding business), let me know here or in the comments. I’d love to help!