Sep 10 2010
B & B Marketing – Fill Those Beds
Bed and breakfast marketing. Like it or not it’s something you’ve got to do. But marketing is complicated right? Promotions, advertising campaigns, all that jargon? And where is the budget supposed to come from?
You realize you’ve got to let people know you’re out there, but how? The phone book is getting very expensive to advertise in – and less and less effective. Newspaper or magazine space costs an arm and a leg and is very hit and miss.
The easy option is the internet then. Stick up a website and you’ll be beating the customers off with a stick, right?
Wrong.
Yes, you’ve got to have some kind of internet presence – otherwise you will lose out badly to your competition – but just putting up any old site is either a waste of time or money. With bed and breakfast website designers charging from $500 upwards it’s not loose change you’re throwing away either.
The good news is that getting it right is not as difficult as you might think. Getting something working really effectively for your bed and breakfast or guest house can be done surprisingly quickly and remarkably cheaply. The secret is not to think “website”, the secret is to think “blog” – or more particularly using blog software like WordPress to create a CMS, a content management system.
Bed and breakfast website designers don’t want you to know this but you can set up a stylish blog / CMS in a day or so. It will look good and it will cost you next to nothing. There are free blogs available but you don’t get your own domain name and someone else is ultimately in control. That’s probably not an ideal situation and, when you can run a professional blog for under $10 a month, why bother?
So why a blog and not a traditional website? Well if you’re looking for effective bed and breakfast marketing you want something that’s relatively easy to handle yourself, low cost, does well in the search engines and appeals to your customers. A blog / CMS fulfills all these criteria – and more.
If your site is not producing the results you expected, or if you don’t yet have a site, it’s definitely something you should be looking into in more detail. My free ebook “Fill Your Beds” explains the basic concepts and how to set it up. You can get your copy over on the top right of this page.
If you need more help, have a look at “How To Win on the World Wide Web“. It’s got step-by-step instructions. Finally, if you’d rather have a pro put it together for you (and still save money on “ordinary” web design, have a look here.