How to Optimize Your Website for Event Sales and Catering

When it comes to building a strong website, it’s crucial for you and your team to optimize it for SEO (search engine optimization) and conversions. Your mission is to generate sales for your venue, so maximizing your online presence and having easy to access tools for your visitors should be your main objective.

Once you understand how to monitor your website traffic to ensure the structure and content of your website is where it needs to be, the next task is diving a bit deeper into your content.

Have an attractive and easy to navigate home page

In the world that we live in today, first impressions are critical. If your website takes a while to load, if links are broken or even the images that you’re using are outdated or poor quality, your visitors are likely to take that as a direct representation of your overall business. Ensuring that you have an attractive home page that helps your visitors feel like they’re at your venue will go a long way with keeping them on your site longer, and ultimately turning them into a customer. A few tips to creating a beautiful home page:

• Use high-resolution photos
  If you’re able to, hiring a professional photographer and videographer to come into your venue to take pictures and video content will definitely pay for itself in the long run. We know that you have seconds to get someone’s attention, so attracting them with beautiful, high-resolution photos and videos of your venue, event space and the culinary program will surely go a long way. With 2020 forcing our world to go virtual, a lot of venues took this as an opportunity to spruce up their website and add virtual tours. If your clients can’t come to you for a walk through before they book, then bring the walkthrough to them. Having a website that can make your visitors feel like they’re there with you is always a great enhancement.
• Link to social media
  Staying active on social media is also another great way to stay connected with your guests and show them what your venue is all about. Ensuring that there are easy links to your social media pages, and even adding your Instagram feed to your website to showcase your ongoing “happenings” is an easy way to keep your content relevant and up to date. In addition, having your website and social media pages linked to each other will surely help to generate more leads for your business.
• Add virtual tours
  As mentioned, having an up-to-date virtual tour of your venue is only becoming more necessary as customers are looking for a virtual way to see space when booking future events. These tours can be hard to get since you’ll likely need to have the space closed while filming, but in the end, the finished product will be worth it.
• Be mobile-friendly
  Having a good understanding of your website audience will help to ensure you’re creating the right content. Once you study how visitors navigate through your website and what it is they’re ultimately looking for, you can adjust your CTAs (call-to-action) and event lead forms to high traffic and easy to access areas. If most of your visitors are joining your website from a mobile device, it’s probably smart to ensure that your navigation bar is easily accessible and your event lead forms are in all high traffic areas (you don’t want to lose that lead because they need to click back a few times to get to your form)!

Add forms to pages that get the most traffic

Overall, as a business, you should have a solid understanding of what your main objective is. Are you a restaurant trying to get more reservations or events booked? Or a hotel trying to secure more sales, catering, and room blocks? Once you know what your mission is, you should develop content around that goal with the intention of driving more leads.

Now that you know what your main objective is, and what pages of your website are seeing the most traffic, it’s smart to embed your lead forms where it’s easy for your visitors to fill out your information. When you’re creating new content, whether it be a new event landing page or a new blog post, try A/B testing your lead form and landing page. This will help you to determine which page is easier to navigate and more attractive by the number of lead form submissions you’re receiving. It’ll also help you to see where your visitors are potentially running into a snag. If you’re not a web developer or don’t have easy access to one, there are websites like Unbounce which help you to easily create landing pages for your website that you can A/B test. If you want to learn more, this e-book from Hubspot is an amazing resource.

How to build out your website for optimization

If you’re looking to take that next step with your website, learning about conversion optimization is a great place to start. There are a few areas of a website that will help with lead form conversion: the homepage, blog, landing pages, and pricing page. Most hospitality professionals are scared to list their pricing on their website because there are so many moving parts and factors to consider when booking an event. But, having a starting point and listing out pricing will help both your visitors and your sales team by eliminating those working with particular budgets.

What’s better than a lead form on your website? Tripleseat’s new TripleseatDirect feature. This is Tripleseat’s most recent feature release and streamlines catering and event booking even further. The TripleseatDirect custom event form offers restaurants, hotels, and unique venues the ability for their customers to complete the entire event or catering booking process, from choosing the perfect space and time to selecting their menu and making the initial deposit payment, all online and in just a few clicks.

Having a sales and catering platform with an integrated CRM (customer relationship management) tool and custom lead forms is a helpful way to consolidate and organize your leads. Tripleseat’s custom lead form can be embedded into your website, social media, and email marketing, and other various programs to help generate leads for your business. The lead form is one of Tripleseat’s most powerful tools because it helps bring new event business directly to your restaurant, hotel, or unique venue.

See how easy it is to embed your lead form

Ensuring that your lead forms and contact information are easily accessible at all times on your website and that your site is also mobile-friendly will be key in gathering more leads. Optimizing your content through A/B testing and additional landing pages (event pages, blog posts, etc.), will also help build your SEO, which will drive more traffic to your site. The more new traffic you see, the more important it is to have your lead form easily available for submission.

More resources

If you’re looking to better understand your audience and how to navigate Google Analytics for measuring your web traffic, check out our blog post, Top Tips for Monitoring Your Venue’s Website Traffic. Once you’re a pro at navigating your website traffic, learn more about The 2 Most Important Tools to Help Generate Event Leads with Tripleseat.