It can be challenging to attract potential guests if you own a bed & breakfast, inn, or other small property. Making your B&B stand out in the age of digital change can be challenging because Airbnb properties, larger hotels, and other B&Bs provide guests so many options. Additionally, you might not have the team, time, or finances to implement a comprehensive marketing plan like larger hotels. Fortunately, there are some excellent bed and breakfast marketing techniques that can help you grow your company without going over budget.
You’ll need a little bit of ingenuity and a solid grasp of the kinds of people who stay at your hotel which we’re willing to wager you already have to proceed.
Examine these eight pointers for effective bed and breakfast advertising:
Identify Your Specialty
The fundamental question at the heart of any successful bed and breakfast marketing strategy is: Who are you serving? When it comes to answering this question, B&Bs have an advantage over larger hotels. It should be rather easy to identify commonalities among your guests, given that you are probably constantly dealing with them on your property. What would you say about your visitors? Why are they at your bed and breakfast? When they remain, what kind of experience do they hope to have? Are they drawn to certain local activities, events, or attractions?
You must identify your specialty after you have a clear understanding of your target audience. You must understand why visitors would pick your property over all the others. How do you differentiate yourself from other small houses, larger hotels, and local Airbnbs? List at least two specific markets you cater to and three unique selling points that make you stand out from the competitors. These will form the foundation of your marketing plan. Your messaging will be based on your unique selling points, which may also serve as the topics of particular landing pages on your website. Where and how you market, as well as the kinds of discounts, special offers, and extra amenities you provide, will all depend on the specific audiences you cater to.
Collaborate With Local Travel Websites and Your Chamber of Commerce
Compared to a larger hotel or Airbnb, the research process for a stay at a bed and breakfast is frequently a little different. Prospective visitors frequently seek out accommodations that have a particular vibe, have access to particular activities, or are more integrated into the community. Customers may therefore consult chamber of commerce lists, local blogs, or travel websites to find B&Bs that suit their needs. You can ensure that your bed and breakfast appears on all of the pertinent lists, blog roundups, and maps that these organizations provide by developing ties with these websites.
Create a little advertising package to distribute to websites and neighborhood associations to make it very simple for them to promote your bed and breakfast. A brief description of your home, pertinent details on its size, number of rooms, and layout, as well as phone numbers and website contact information, should all be included in this package. Include three to five excellent photos that highlight your property and its worth to visitors. A brief description of the main attributes of the property or neighborhood that you are well-known for, such as your excellent breakfast, historic building, miles of walking trails, newly renovated rooms, or downtown location, can also be included in bulleted form.
Join Forces With Nearby Companies
Not just your chamber of commerce and local travel websites may promote your bed and breakfast. Collaborate with nearby companies that are complementary to yours in order to support one another and establish a co-marketing partnership. Can you serve baked products from a nearby bakery for breakfasts or toiletries from a nearby company in your bathrooms? What about coupons for deals at nearby eateries, activities, or landmarks?
Discounts and tangible goods are a terrific place to start, but as you continue to collaborate with local companies, you may expand these connections even further. Many B&Bs have established mutually advantageous partnerships with nearby businesses, services, and eateries, which result in official referral systems, co-sponsored events, and co-marketing campaigns. You have the freedom to shape the connection anyway you see fit. To test the waters, start small and gradually expand the arrangement as you and the company feel more at ease.
Refresh Your Knowledge of Local SEO
The importance of this step cannot be overstated. Actually, for your bed and breakfast, search engine optimization, or SEO, is more crucial than ever. A potential visitor can easily find a well-optimized website on search engines because it is simple for them to read and crawl. In short, without proper SEO, your potential is severely limited.
Local SEO is crucial for B&Bs. This is the concept of employing keyword phrases and location-based keywords to draw in visitors who are searching for lodging in your area. A straightforward search exercise is a fantastic place to start. Consider yourself a prospective visitor searching for a home similar to yours. Next, go to Google. What are you going to look for? What appears when you search for that phrase? Do you see your rivals? Are there a lot of larger hotels or Airbnb listings? Experiment a few times using various word and phrase combinations that pertain to your area, amenities, property features, local events, or other elements that your guests would find interesting.
Next, enter the phrases you used in a tool such as Google Keyword Planner. Following that, the keyword planner tool provides you with past search statistics for those terms as well as recommendations for additional terms and phrases that users may find useful. You are searching for relatively high volume search phrases with only moderate to medium competition. This implies that you can target these keywords in landing pages, website material, and other content, and you have a good chance of ranking highly for those terms on search engines.
Write down five to ten of the keywords you want to target if you’re new to SEO, and think about how you might use them in your advertising, website, and marketing.To develop targeted message for certain keywords, you may even design unique landing pages for every page on your website. See our comprehensive guides to hotel SEO and hotel content marketing for additional information on this topic.
Invest in Top-Notch Photos and Videos
A significant portion of the research process for travel and hospitality is driven by online images. More than ever, prospective visitors are using their phones to browse through motivational travel photos and visualize the vacation of their dreams. Only if you have a great photo and video marketing strategy can you incorporate your B&B in that process. Investing in expertly taken pictures of your rooms, common spaces, and facilities to post on your website and social media is worthwhile. Drones can also be used to capture low-cost video footage, showcasing the location of your property and offering stunning overhead views.
Think beyond the expertly taken pictures you offer and provide opportunities for visitors to share their own breathtaking photos for the most impact. 84% of millennials and 73% of non-millennials are likely or very likely to base their travel plans on the vacation pictures or social media posts of others, per a study by Amp Agency. Many people find inspiration in these photos, which highlight aspects of your property that you might not have considered photographing. Create unique opportunities for users to share their photos and videos with online contests, or think about including a feed on your website for photos that tag your bed and breakfast. When users post photographs online, be sure to interact with them and provide comments.
Make Your Website and Reservation Procedure Simpler
Your website must have straightforward booking procedures, easy navigation, and clean, unambiguous language in addition to eye-catching graphics. Keep in mind that big hotels and Airbnb, both of which offer smooth and simple user experiences, can be your competitors. Once more, navigate your website as though you were a prospective visitor. Are you able to locate the information you require? What about responses to every query you have? What difficulties or problems do you encounter during the booking process? Is it possible to do the entire exercise using a mobile device? Jot down your suggestions for improving the process’s speed and ease as you test it out.
Here are some suggestions to make using your website easier:
- Remove lengthy passages of text. Condense the information into brief, bulleted lists and, if at all possible, use images and videos to illustrate the points.
- Reduce the complexity of your navigation to just the most often used components (create a heat map of your website using a tool like Crazy Egg to determine which aspects are most relevant to your visitors). You can relocate less crucial components to your footer.
- Create distinct landing pages for every main concept or feature. You should have a separate page for your restaurant, spa, event venue, and unique experiences. This facilitates visitor navigation and aids in SEO.
- Make sure your website is responsive, meaning it changes according to the screen size and browser of the user.
Use Automated Emails and Special Offers to Cultivate Prospective Visitors
An very useful tool for your marketing outreach are your email lists, which include both current and previous visitors as well as future guests. You always have access to your email lists and can get in touch with anybody on them at any time, unlike social media followers. This implies that even before a potential guest chooses to stay with you, you can give them with worthwhile experiences.
To increase your chances of obtaining contact information, you may, for instance, use a form or popup on your website to ask visitors for their email addresses and the day and month they want to stay. Just make sure you’re giving that email address anything of worth. Can you send them an email promising discounts? or details about what’s going on in the area during the month they intend to visit? In order to provide prospective guests with a customized experience while they are researching properties, you may target your email marketing efforts by tagging guests with their stay date in your email system
Follow up with the information that prospective guests frequently request before to making a reservation or staying once you have their email address. During their visit, send them your breakfast menu, emphasizing the seasonal products you’re using. Provide local attraction information and maps. Emphasize the deals and bundles that might be of interest to them. Additionally, consider whether you’re answering all of the guest’s queries and how much value you’re adding to each email. The visitor will have all the information they need to think about staying at your B&B again, even if they decide not to.
Adapt your Marketing Strategies for Bed and Breakfasts to the Demand of the Season
During slow months, several big hotels can operate at 60% capacity and still make a lot of money. But every room matters at a bed and breakfast. To determine when these sluggish times occur, you need a solid inventory management system. You also need to have a plan in place for how to market during these times in advance. Can you, for instance, provide modest incentives, such as a welcome box filled with robes, slippers, and hot cocoa, during the quiet winter months? When the children return to school, how about a guided tour of the foliage?
Examine your bookings from the last several years and local event calendars to see how your demand may change. To get the most out of your marketing budget, your offers and promotion should anticipate those sluggish months and consider any local events that increase demand.
Conclusion
The capacity to provide a distinctive fusion of individualized comfort, regional charm, and personal hospitality characterizes the modern bed and breakfast experience. In the end, running a successful bed and breakfast requires more than just offering a place to stay and food; you also need to provide a unique and personal experience that gives visitors a sense of belonging to the neighborhood.
You may transform your passion into a successful business by adopting the successful B&B tips of providing excellent service, considerate facilities, and a love for your community. The real strength of a bed and breakfast is its capacity to provide a genuine, unique experience that creates enduring memories and draws customers back time and time again in an era of impersonal hotels.
FAQ
What distinguishes a hotel from a bed and breakfast?
A B&B provides a more intimate, customized experience. A B&B offers a distinctive, homey ambiance, frequently with a live-in host and a shared breakfast, whereas hotels concentrate on uniform services and amenities.
How do you open your own bed and breakfast?
In order to establish a profitable bed and breakfast, you need first draft a business strategy, look into local zoning and licensing regulations, obtain funding, and then concentrate on remodeling and furnishing your establishment to provide a distinctive and welcoming visitor experience.
What are some pointers for a profitable bed and breakfast?
Great hospitality is essential to success. Prioritize establishing a friendly environment, making tailored suggestions, providing distinctive facilities, and delivering a delectable breakfast.
In a crowded market, how can you differentiate yourself?
Choose a niche! You may be a pet-friendly retreat, a historic retreat, or a bed and breakfast for artists. Attracting your prospective guests also requires a decent website, a strong social media presence, and high-quality images.
