In September 2020, together with hochzeit.click, we conducted a large survey among wedding locations to find out what economic damage they had suffered as a result of the corona pandemic. Because corona is not only hitting the bride and groom hard - the locations are also suffering and are often facing closure if, for example, they have recently invested a lot of money in renovation, conversion or expansion.
The actual working title of this blog article should have been "Do it with your mouth or get it online". A quite provocative working title, which we then rejected because we didn't want to offend anyone. But the core message remains the same: 80% of wedding locations find their couples through word of mouth. And every second couple is already advertised via online platforms such as hochzeits-location.info, hochzeit.click or others.
This is one of the major findings of the survey conducted among Austria's wedding locations in September 2020.
The aim of the survey was to find out what economic impact Corona has on wedding locations. With an average of 225,000 euros per location, the damage is of course enormous. Nevertheless, the majority of locations are very positive about the future - and we thank you for this justified optimism. Everyone who continues to hold the torch high becomes a beacon of hope for the others and so we can carry each other through this time together.
Even though the pandemic demands a lot from each and every one of us, it also has positive aspects that we will hopefully remember in many years' time, when Corona is long gone. Corona has created a whole new sense of solidarity among colleagues in the industry . People help each other and are in the same boat when it comes to finding solutions. Many have also used the lockdowns to carry out renovation work, implement new concepts or study the internet for decoration ideas, new recipes, etc.
In the area of marketing, many locations have also broken away from old patterns and are taking new paths. This is also shown by our survey, in which 34% said that they consider digital marketing (online platforms such as hochzeits-location.info or hochzeit.click, social media, their own website) to be very important and significantly more than half consider digital marketing to be important to very important .
Most people plan to make savings on trade fair appearances, closely followed by radio and print advertising. Both have suffered from poor planning, especially during the crisis. After all, what use is an advertisement that has been planned for a long time if a lockdown comes at exactly the same time that nips any thought of a wedding celebration in the bud. Or restrictions on the number of people attending a wedding fair that cause the number of visitors to plummet.
Your responses regarding capacity occupancy for 2021 gave us hope . One in four of you are already expecting a full house. A fifth of you are already 90% full and only a quarter of you still have more than half of your appointments available.
And the question of how far we can help you with our initiatives has also strengthened our belief that we are on the right track with the TWO.HEARTS cooperation. If everyone does their own thing, we will not be heard. But if we go to our federal government together - with the power of 10 million page views per year and a placement rate of around 15% of every Austrian wedding - then we can make a difference. And this is exactly where we want to continue. Lobbying for the wedding industry, lobbying for the off-season, lobbying for tax relief for bridal couples in 2020/2021, and much more. The coming wedding year 2021 will be very exciting in this respect and a number of great campaigns are already being planned.
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