Wedding Fairs are extremely popular with engaged couples planning their wedding. It is often a great way wedding suppliers like photographers, videographers, florists, venue dressers, photo-booth and other niche suppliers get bookings and make sales.
There are two types of wedding fairs to be aware of:
General Wedding Fairs
These wedding fairs attract the highest footfall. They will have highly sophisticated marketing strategies to pull in engaged couples from far and wide and will sell display stands and pitches to venues as well as smaller wedding suppliers. These types of wedding fairs tend to attract a lot of couples at the very start of their wedding planning journey (2 or even 3 years ahead, before they have started short-listing venues) or they attract engaged couples towards the end of their wedding planning journey (6-8 months before their wedding). Engaged couples expect to collect lots of ideas, goodie bags and discounts at these events.
If you are new to the wedding industry and want to learn more about suppliers in your region then attending a general wedding fair like this and pretending to be an engaged person or the parent of a bride or groom, is a great learning exercise.
Exhibitors pay a lot to have a stand or stall at one of these high footfall events. It is great way for suppliers to develop a mailing list which they will then use to target couples with follow-up communication.
These types of wedding fairs however are not usually good for Wedding Celebrants. They are very expensive and you will spend a lot of time explaining what a Wedding Celebrant is to many couples who have not yet even booked their venue and so are not yet ready to think about their ceremony or they have already booked their venue and ceremony a long time ago. Whilst attending this sort of wedding fair is helpful for all Celebrants as you will be educating couples about the option of a Celebrant-led ceremony, it may not lead to any actual bookings for you.
Venue Wedding Fairs
The alternative for a Wedding Celebrant is to consider a local venue's Wedding Fair. These tend to be cheaper, but are still relatively expensive compared to what you might pay for a listing on a wedding planning directory.
The advantages of a local venue wedding fair is that you are more likely to come across engaged couples who have either booked their venue (you are in it) but not yet booked their ceremony or they have shortlisted the venue you are in and so they are not far off from booking their ceremony.
You will get couples who have booked the venue you are in and have already booked their ceremony, this cannot be avoided but you need to have a strategy to ensure you don't waste time with these couples...more about this in a later blog post!
It is ideal go to those venues where you have already delivered a ceremony because you can then talk to couples about these real weddings and you can feature photos from it too. If there is a new venue opening up near you, jump on this and their launch wedding fair as these are often free for you to exhibit.
When considering booking a place at a local venue wedding fair, always ask first to see if registrars will be attending (if they are, you do not want a space next to them, this would be very awkward when you are explaining the advantages of a celebrant-led ceremony to couples...instead the other end of the hall is more ideal).
Also ask the venue if you will be the only wedding celebrant at the wedding fair. If not, then again, just beware. This might be an indication that the venue is actually more interested in maximising their revenue from suppliers at the wedding fair rather than providing a useful service to their existing and potential clients. If a venue includes in their cost being added to a "preferred suppliers" list then the cost of the wedding fair may be worth it.
If you know that other wedding celebrants are exhibiting, then it might be better to have a joint stand together rather than competing with each other to make it better value for you all. In many areas only 1 in 5 or 1 in 6 couples would ever consider a Celebrant and so you need to calculate how many genuinely interested couples might you actually speak to as the footfall at venue wedding fairs will not be very big.
For example: If a venue is expecting 100 couples to visit them at their Wedding Fair in a day, you need to decide if it is worth your money and your time (a whole day) in order to speak to just 20 people who are very likely going to consider other Celebrants online too.
Many couples do like to meet face-to-face the Celebrant they are warming to before they are going to book, and for some Celebrants, announcing that you will be at a certain wedding fair is a good opportunity for couples to meet you before finally booking you. This strategy however, assumes you already have a number of "warmed-up" couples who you can direct mail.
The most common feedback from Celebrants who attend local venue wedding fairs is that whilst they do not get any or many bookings from them, they are nice to do every now and again as it is a wonderful way to meet and network with other wedding suppliers who you end up working with or who may recommend you.
In this next blog post I explore what you need to do to maximise your potential impact if you do decide to exhibit at a local venue wedding fair.
There are two types of wedding fairs to be aware of:
- General Wedding Fairs - located in exhibition spaces and large chain hotels
- Venue Wedding Fairs - located in specific wedding venues
General Wedding Fairs
These wedding fairs attract the highest footfall. They will have highly sophisticated marketing strategies to pull in engaged couples from far and wide and will sell display stands and pitches to venues as well as smaller wedding suppliers. These types of wedding fairs tend to attract a lot of couples at the very start of their wedding planning journey (2 or even 3 years ahead, before they have started short-listing venues) or they attract engaged couples towards the end of their wedding planning journey (6-8 months before their wedding). Engaged couples expect to collect lots of ideas, goodie bags and discounts at these events.
If you are new to the wedding industry and want to learn more about suppliers in your region then attending a general wedding fair like this and pretending to be an engaged person or the parent of a bride or groom, is a great learning exercise.
Exhibitors pay a lot to have a stand or stall at one of these high footfall events. It is great way for suppliers to develop a mailing list which they will then use to target couples with follow-up communication.
These types of wedding fairs however are not usually good for Wedding Celebrants. They are very expensive and you will spend a lot of time explaining what a Wedding Celebrant is to many couples who have not yet even booked their venue and so are not yet ready to think about their ceremony or they have already booked their venue and ceremony a long time ago. Whilst attending this sort of wedding fair is helpful for all Celebrants as you will be educating couples about the option of a Celebrant-led ceremony, it may not lead to any actual bookings for you.
Venue Wedding Fairs
The alternative for a Wedding Celebrant is to consider a local venue's Wedding Fair. These tend to be cheaper, but are still relatively expensive compared to what you might pay for a listing on a wedding planning directory.
The advantages of a local venue wedding fair is that you are more likely to come across engaged couples who have either booked their venue (you are in it) but not yet booked their ceremony or they have shortlisted the venue you are in and so they are not far off from booking their ceremony.
You will get couples who have booked the venue you are in and have already booked their ceremony, this cannot be avoided but you need to have a strategy to ensure you don't waste time with these couples...more about this in a later blog post!
It is ideal go to those venues where you have already delivered a ceremony because you can then talk to couples about these real weddings and you can feature photos from it too. If there is a new venue opening up near you, jump on this and their launch wedding fair as these are often free for you to exhibit.
When considering booking a place at a local venue wedding fair, always ask first to see if registrars will be attending (if they are, you do not want a space next to them, this would be very awkward when you are explaining the advantages of a celebrant-led ceremony to couples...instead the other end of the hall is more ideal).
Also ask the venue if you will be the only wedding celebrant at the wedding fair. If not, then again, just beware. This might be an indication that the venue is actually more interested in maximising their revenue from suppliers at the wedding fair rather than providing a useful service to their existing and potential clients. If a venue includes in their cost being added to a "preferred suppliers" list then the cost of the wedding fair may be worth it.
If you know that other wedding celebrants are exhibiting, then it might be better to have a joint stand together rather than competing with each other to make it better value for you all. In many areas only 1 in 5 or 1 in 6 couples would ever consider a Celebrant and so you need to calculate how many genuinely interested couples might you actually speak to as the footfall at venue wedding fairs will not be very big.
For example: If a venue is expecting 100 couples to visit them at their Wedding Fair in a day, you need to decide if it is worth your money and your time (a whole day) in order to speak to just 20 people who are very likely going to consider other Celebrants online too.
Many couples do like to meet face-to-face the Celebrant they are warming to before they are going to book, and for some Celebrants, announcing that you will be at a certain wedding fair is a good opportunity for couples to meet you before finally booking you. This strategy however, assumes you already have a number of "warmed-up" couples who you can direct mail.
The most common feedback from Celebrants who attend local venue wedding fairs is that whilst they do not get any or many bookings from them, they are nice to do every now and again as it is a wonderful way to meet and network with other wedding suppliers who you end up working with or who may recommend you.
In this next blog post I explore what you need to do to maximise your potential impact if you do decide to exhibit at a local venue wedding fair.
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