Your website is your most significant online ad. When you set up and maintain it correctly, you can capture the attention of your best-fit clients. Better yet, you hold it long enough to convert them into loyal customers.
Doing this can be tricky since you’re competing with major players in the events industry online. But it’s not impossible. To succeed, you must ensure your site is better designed, seamlessly-optimized, more user-friendly, and more compelling than your competitors’. How to achieve this?
Here are our top tips to help you upgrade your booking website and boost your online visibility. We’ll help you work towards standing above your competition and becoming one of the go-to events venues for clients worldwide.
The Power of a Formidable Website
Nearly 76% of consumers look at a business’s online presence before engaging with them. So having an impressive website is more crucial to the success of any business these days than ever before. A well-built business website helps you create a solid online presence and offers the following benefits.
Helps With Branding
A good business website helps you build and showcase your brand online. It allows you to share who you are, what you do, and what you represent or stand for. This way, target customers can connect and purchase from you.
Also, it’s the best platform to share information about your products and other business processes. You can advertise all your offerings and provide updates to potential and existing customers on any relevant changes, whether it’s a product update or a new service.
Boosts Credibility
When your website is appealing, up-to-date, and contains quality information, it shows you are professional and legitimate. It gives you a competitive edge as potential clients will trust and choose to work with you over similar businesses whose sites are poorly maintained or non-existent.
Helps With Marketing
Websites are the anchor for most digital marketing activities. You can market your spaces on several online platforms and then direct clients to complete bookings on your site. You can also collect essential client information and insights to help with other targeted marketing activities, such as email marketing.
Improves Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A search engine-optimized website ranks high on search engine results. This puts your business in front of more people, allowing them to visit your site and discover your offerings.
Lead Generation
Every new visitor on your website is a lead that can turn into a customer. The more relevant visitors your site receives, the higher your chances of converting them and increasing your customer base.
7 Tips to Upgrade Your Venue Booking Website
Websites that work well for event space businesses are often well-designed, user-friendly, compelling, and optimized for search engines and mobile. There are several tips you can consider to ensure your website meets these criteria so you attract your ideal clients and get them to book your venues.
Here are our top suggestions for upgrading your booking website and setting it up to succeed.
Use Different Media to Showcase Your Spaces
Appealingly showcase your event spaces so prospects can see what you offer. There are three ways to do this.
1. Use Quality Images of Your Venues
A high-quality picture is worth more than a thousand words in the event world. And, by high-quality, we mean high-resolution, sharp, and relevant images. These help to showcase your space’s unique features clearly so prospects can get a feel of your venue.
Striking and flattering images on your website improves its aesthetics and triggers emotional reactions from your site visitors, keeping them engaged.
Preferably, use professionally-taken photos of various event set-ups in different spaces. This way, interested clients will start getting ideas and inspiration on how they'll use your space.
Videos
Quality videos bring your venue to life. They allow you to offer virtual tours of different spaces, enabling prospects to visualize how their events will unfold within the spaces you offer.
When creating video content for your website, highlight all the possibilities a venue can offer, including various set-ups, décor, and lighting options. Besides helping to portray the ambiance and energy of your venues, such tips capture your audience’s imagination, keeping them immersed in your message.
Floor Plans
Most event organizers find floor plans helpful and look out for them when searching for event venues online. They allow them to create mental maps of their events in your space to gauge suitability. Including floor plans on your site will put you ahead of the curve, and, if you want to stand out, make your floor plans interactive.
With interactive floor plans, event organizers can create actual maps of their events, making it easy to find and book the perfect venue. This keeps them on your site longer. It encourages them to continue investing in your venue emotionally as they begin to more clearly visualize their event at your venue.
Several event sales solutions can help you create interactive floor plans in minutes.
All these media combined help increase engagement on your booking website and boost its conversion rates. But you have to keep them balanced to achieve your desired results. Too much media all in one place might overwhelm your audience.
To achieve the perfect balance, present the media venue-wise. For example, you can have the photos, video, and floor plans of room or venue one together, then rooms two, three, four, and so on.
Provide Detailed Info About Your Spaces
Without compelling descriptions about your event venue and all the rentals, your booking website isn't complete. Add short, catchy descriptions to your media to ensure potential clients get a comprehensive view of your offers.
You also want to clarify essential information event organizers and other prospects need to know before booking a venue. This includes the size and capacity of different rooms or venues, amenities, rental price, and for which type or style of event they’re best.These could be conference rooms, wedding venues, corporate party reception venues, or any other event.
Be as transparent and accurate as possible with this information to help potential clients make the best decisions. You’ll earn their trust and loyalty this way. Don’t forget to include clear directions about your venue’s location and contact information.
Further, introduce a streamlined search option to make it easy for potential customers to find specific information on your site. Many prospects are searching for incredibly specific things like wedding venues in a city or a wedding spot for a few attendees. They shouldn’t have to go through your entire site to find what they’re looking for.
A quick search on your site should yield specific information to help meet their search intent fast.
Add a Venue Availability Widget
Make it simple for potential customers to see your venue’s real-time availability by displaying your availability information prominently on your website. You can do this by adding a venue availability widget. Or integrating your booking calendar directly into your website.
With this, prospects can view open dates or times and make decisions that work with their schedule. They’ll be more likely to reserve their event date when they have all the information readily available to them.
Ensure Your Venue’s Inquiry and Booking Forms Are Visible
The primary goal of your space booking website is to get more clients and increase your income. You’ll struggle to achieve this goal if your event venue inquiry and booking forms aren't visible or are too complicated to fill out.
To ensure your forms stand out, use a different color to highlight these sections of your website so potential clients find them easily. Also, ensure the forms capture essential and relevant information only, such as name, contact info, event date, event details, and the request or inquiry. The more straightforward and easy your form is to fill out, the better.
We recommend checking them regularly to ensure they work well.
As for booking, automate the entire online booking process. Make it possible for potential clients to identify their most fitting event venue, check availability, pick a date and time, and then reserve it instantly. You also want to offer multiple secure payment options to make it easy and convenient for clients to pay for bookings online.
Start a Blog
Starting a blog for your event venue booking website upgrades it to a relationship-building tool. A well-maintained blog helps position your event venue business as an ally to your target audience.
Whether that’s professional event planners, wedding planners, or groups of friends planning private parties, you can create free resources to help them hold successful events. This shows your dedication to ensuring clients meet their event objectives.
It’s the perfect way to warm up leads and make conversions a no-brainer.If you share content with practical tips your audience can use to make their tasks easier, even better. Potential clients will trust your website and everything you offer. This will also build your authority as a reliable event host.
Besides warming up leads, an up-to-date SEO blog can boost your business’s visibility online. You’ll rank high on search engines for various search terms, and more prospects will visit your site.
Improve User Experience
If potential clients visit your website and find it difficult to use, they’ll bounce without taking any action. To prevent this from happening, you need to pay close attention to different aspects of your site and improve your prospect’s user experience.
Here are a few steps you can take to upgrade your website so potential clients have a better experience.
Use White Space
White space is an essential part of a good business website design. It makes your site’s content more legible, enabling users to focus on what’s important. Enough white space also makes your site feel fresh and modern.
It’s best practice to include enough (not too much) white space around your images, titles, and texts.
Optimize Page Speed
Waiting too long for a web page to load can be frustrating. It increases your site’s bounce rate as most users will leave and search for better, faster options. You can optimize your booking site’s speed by compressing your images before loading them on your site.
You can also use various website speed tools to analyze your site’s speed and get specific suggestions to increase it.
Use Proper Formatting
Most users scan through a site’s content before engaging with it. Having blocks of text throughout your website can be challenging to scan or read, leading to a poor user experience. Visitors might leave your site without knowing what you offer.
Instead, mix things up by segmenting essential information with bullet points. Bullet points enable users to quickly get the info they want, including features and benefits. They can use this to gauge if a site will solve their problems before engaging with it further. Proper formatting also makes your site more visually appealing.
Optimize Your Call-To-Action (CTA) Buttons
Your call-to-action buttons act as visual cues for users to take specific actions. Ensure they’re clearly marked and functioning well so visitors get directed to the location they seek to visit when they click them.
Some best practices to consider when optimizing your CTA buttons include:
- Using action words or verbs to motivate users to take action
- Use a different color for your CTAs. Think about the psychology of color here to pick a color that complements the rest of your pages but still triggers specific emotions to match the words you use to nudge the reader to take action.
- Include CTA buttons throughout your website. You can even add multiple on one page. It may seem overkill but you want to make it as easy as possible for potential clients to book your venue.
Use Hyperlink Differentiation
The hyperlinks on your booking website are other visual cues that matter as they assist with site navigation. Ensure they’re easily identifiable by using differently colored text and underlining them to draw your audience’s attention. This will signal that there’s a link they can click on to move on to the next page.
Find and Fix Broken Links Regularly
Make it a habit to find and fix any broken links on your site. Broken links annoy potential customers, making them rethink spending time on your site.
Optimize Your Website for Search Engines and Mobile
To optimize your website for search engines, include keywords your target audience uses when searching for information connected to your offers throughout your site. This helps tailor your site’s message and attract the right audience.
Specifically, you want to use the keywords naturally on well-designed and compelling headings so your website stands out. These headings should be scannable while also speaking to your reader’s needs directly.
Both search engines and readers should be able to quickly tell what your site is about by performing a simple scan. If you have a blog, strategically place relevant keywords throughout your articles to rank high on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Additionally, the majority of people mainly access the internet with their phone. So, if you want to stay relevant and accessible, it’s a good idea to optimize your website for mobile screens. This requires you to keep mobile-responsiveness in mind in your web design.
Check how your site's content, images, and CTAs load on mobile devices, and make sure it’s all readable and clickable. Doing this is crucial if you want to retain customers because a negative mobile experience drives customers away.A recent study found that 62% of customers are less likely to work with you again after a bad mobile experience than if they have a positive one.
Final Thoughts
All the tips above help you upgrade your website and make it work better. They’re simple yet powerful techniques to help set your business up for ongoing success.
You don’t have to implement them all at once, though. Start with one suggestion and work your way from there. If you are feeling overwhelmed and looking for the easiest tip to implement first, we recommend improving your site’s user experience first. You can start making the simple tweaks we’ve outlined on your booking site today to transform how it looks and feels and get better results.
As a venue manager, you can also benefit from having a venue management tool to simplify your operations. For this, use Perfect Venue – a platform designed to streamline your business activities, including the sales process, and help you operate more efficiently. Book a free demo to see how Perfect Venue can help you today!
