Bed And Breakfast Marketing – Thinking Outside The Bed!

People are always suggesting you “think outside the box”, well when it comes to bed and breakfast marketing I’m going to suggest you think outside the bed!

The appearance of your bed and breakfast (or guest house, country inn, gite, or whatever accommodation you have) is very important, of course. How the building and rooms appear on your website and any brochure or advertising will have a big impact on people’s decision so it’s vital to get that aspect right. If you can afford a professional photographer it’s a worthwhile investment. If you can’t, take a hundred pictures with a digital camera to get one good one if that’s how many it takes!

However, that kind of thing is what you might call “ordinary” bed and breakfast marketing. It’s what everyone does. What are you going to do to stand out from the crowd?

Rather than thinking in generalities, get specific and get targeted. What do I mean? Well most of the time you probably think you’ll stand out by improving your accommodation and making it more appealing to your guests. To an extent that’s correct – there’s certainly nothing wrong with that – but by the time your guests experience it they have already made the decision to come and stay with you.

It will impact on their experience, it will make them decide whether or not to stay with you again or whether to recommend you to friends or colleagues… but that’s after they’ve paid their bill and left.

What you need to be doing is drawing more people in, so you need to think about why people are coming to your area and how to appeal to them. You can break that down into quite small market segments – what’s generally called “niche marketing”. It may not be important at the height of the season if you are in a particularly popular tourist area, but what happens out of season (apart from you having a good rest)?

The tourists might not be around in winter but what about business events locally? Is there a conference or exhibition center? That kind of venue tries to fill its space as often as it can. Can you appeal to the people coming into your area for those kind of things? Perhaps there is a specialist season – like fishing or hunting – that you can take advantage of? You might think that something like a home show, for example, would appeal only to fairly local people who don’t need accommodation… but the exhibitors themselves have to stay somewhere and not all of them turn up in Winnebagos!

The other question of course is how you get to those potential guests? Contacting local businesses and conference organizers is one way but by far the biggest reach will be via the internet. The most effective way to use that particular bed and breakfast marketing tool is with a blog, which we’ll get to in another article soon.