Photography Credit: Depict Photography (full wedding on the blog next week)
I think that finding the venue for your wedding is one of the most stressful bits of wedding planning! It’s usually the first thing you have to organise…and when you’re right at the beginning of your planning it can be quite a daunting experience. After all they do say that the venue will pretty much shape the whole of your day. Eeeep! No pressure then…
My top tip when it comes to finding a wedding venue would be to think outside the box. If you’re on a budget or you are are not a stately home/hotel/castle kinda bride then avoid the ‘wedding venue guides’ and start looking at pubs, bars, restaurants, community halls, nightclubs, warehouses..whatever! Maybe somewhere that you and your fiancé have spent a lot of time together? Or somewhere you’ve always loved but never really thought about enquiring about hiring? These places will often be cheaper (because they don’t have ‘wedding packages’) and are usually more flexible with what they’ll allow you to do too. Our venue was amazing but looking back I know we could have got somewhere a lot ‘cooler’ for a lot less moolah!
I turned to twitter and facebook to see if any of my followers had some tips to make the whole thing less ickky…
@JackiBruniquel – Make sure there is lots of pretty ambient light for your reception photographs ie fairy lights or up-lighting. Find out if these are included.
@FernhillHotel – Ask if you can have a meal with the venue before booking (if they are doing the catering) so you know if the dishes are to your taste and standard.
@BohoEvents – Always ask if the venue holds more than one wedding at a time, some hold two a day, some even three! Although they will be held at staggered times do you really want to be greeted by another bride on your wedding day?
@pocketfuldreams – Do your research and check out what other people are saying about your desired venues, try specialist sites like tripadvisor or ask on wedding forums, blogs, etc what kind of experience other people have had who got married there.
@foodwisetweet – Stop and think firstly about what you really want your wedding to be rather than pleasing others. Then think of your venue.
Appeal to less people.
Yes that’s right! There is much to be said about trying to put people off your business. I’m not talking about offending people or being controversial just for the sake of it here, but I urge you take a long hard look at your brand and at what kind of clients you want to be working with. Consider specifically targeting your business to a small group of people and guess what? You’ll get to work with the types of people you really want too!
At the end of the day you can never appeal (or be liked by) everyone, so why try to be? Being vanilla or, you know, nice, can in some ways be totally detrimental to a business. These days brides want to really connect with their wedding suppliers or the blogs that they read so don’t be afraid to be yourself – warts and all! If a bride looks at say, two photographer at the same price and she likes both of their photographs equally, how is she going to choose between them? That’s right – it’ll probably be the one she prefers as a person or feels she gets on with better.
For example, Rock n Roll Bride is quite a niche. The types of weddings I feature certainly don’t appeal to the mass wedding market and because of this my blog will never be a ‘popular’ as some of the more traditional or mainstream ones. However this is brilliant for me becuase a) I get to feature the stuff I like (which makes my job much more satisfying), b) the people I work with are ‘my kind of people’ which is awesome and c) although my readership may be small compared with a lot of the big boy blogs, my advertisers know exactly what kind of brides read my blog…and if those are the kinds of weddings that they want to be working on then it’s a big fat bonus all round!
