It’s Not About the Leads: What It Means to Have a Wedding Featured on Carats & Cake

Are you playing a numbers game?

The events hosted at a property are the lifeblood of any marketing program. The amazing work the catering and sales teams put into delivering extraordinarily beautiful events in various styles and at various price points is a crucial contributor to inquiries that usher in future bookings. Interestingly, booking volume is one of the results used to evaluate catering and sales managers. While increasing revenue might be more intuitive as a result, the percentage of available dates booked often matters most. It’s no surprise, then, that hospitality marketing has become a numbers game over the years. 

Are your qualified leads providing real value?

Inside the hospitality industry, qualified leads are the key investment for marketing. Those leads are driven by dollars spent on digital advertisements, influencer marketing, advertorials, paid wedding placements, social promotion, and other strategies that make up an overall marketing budget. Yet views and clicks, which are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of traditional marketing approaches, often only deliver leads that must be nurtured, negotiated, and eventually contracted for an event date with a property. Depending on the property, booking a full year of available dates could require hundreds or even thousands of leads that would ultimately boil down to a pool of customers who would work with the venue for years to come. 

Showcasing “real wedding” content is, of course, vital for hospitality marketing. You can see an example of that content in action in our recent post, “One Venue, Three Ways: Grand Velas Riviera Nayarit.” At Carats & Cake, we believe that paying for a guaranteed number of leads via third-party sites is no longer the strategy that contributes meaningfully to faster bookings. Since we launched in 2013, we have learned so much about the teams that pull off events and how those groups of vendors all sharing a wedding collectively can ladder up to viral moments of brand collaboration. Those moments elevate and differentiate a property’s marketing strategy, motivating customers to reach out with true and clear intentions to book.

Do your prospective customers know what’s possible?

By positioning the venue—where more than 60% of an event’s spend is on average—as part of a larger collective of companies working together (as you can see on Marriott Bonvoy’s page) the venue doesn’t have to stand alone. The collective power is a benefit that demonstrates how dreams can be brought to life. For customers, seeing a venue in the context of a larger group of vendors can make it shine even brighter as it removes some of the guessing game of “Will this be possible?” even after they’ve toured the property.

To that end, a property’s brand page on Carats & Cake is a digital portfolio of its team members’ work that can be referenced in real-time during a tour. For catering and sales managers, it’s a digital “front door” specific to special events (versus sharing a venue’s homepage, typically crafted towards room booking, experiences, and dining). These pages are where properties and property groups can really tell their brand story as it applies to being a part of a couple’s special day.

The Carats & Cake special treatment

Carats & Cake has a vendor community of more than 40,000, and more than 40 million impressions across its channels per month. As an extension of Carats & Cake, venue pages are featured throughout the website and promoted socially with tags for the venue, couple, and other vendors. This unique distribution creates a network and virality that extends far beyond our direct consumers, amplifying the reach of those brand pages. Lastly, because of Carats & Cake’s brand recognition, we can secure content from photographers and videographers that can otherwise be difficult to obtain the rights to, ensuring the highest level of quality while removing much of the heavy lifting (within content creation and distribution) for venues. 

If you’re interested in creating viral moments for your property via real wedding content and custom marketing collateral generated by the Carats & Cake team, our platform is available— just reach out to business@caratsandcake.com for more information.