Bed and Breakfast Marketing

The most effective bed and breakfast marketing tactic you have is to make sure your B & B website (or blog) is doing the very best it can in the search engines.

There’s lots of offline things you can do – newspaper and magazine ads, bed and breakfast directories, trying to get in with business organizations in your area, getting in certain travel brochures or getting on the recommended list of local attractions… I’m sure you’ve tried plenty and you’re always on the look out for any promotional opportunities.

But the fact is, a good position in the search engines can bring more inquiries than all the above put together – and for a lot less money. Result = more profit!

If you haven’t got a bed and breakfast website yet, you really do need to get one. Your potential guests are searching online right now – and they can’t find you!

Sadly, getting into the profitable top ten of the search engines is tough. There’s an unbelievable amount of competition. You need to be doing more than the other guys.

The trouble with a lot of bed and breakfast marketing advice online is that there’s a good deal of misinformation. Some of it is well-meaning enough but some people – some so called web experts – are just plain not telling you the truth.

So before you look at paying someone else to get you a high ranking in Google (for example) let’s look at a few less-than-honest concepts and a few facts.

1. We’ll submit your website to 500 search engines!

You’ll often see people offering to submit your bed and breakfast website to hundreds of search engines for a fee. It’s usually around $100.00. Sounds like a good idea?

Fact: If you submit to Google, Yahoo and Bing you have 95% of searches covered and you can do it yourself – for nothing. See how here.

2. We will optimize your bed and breakfast website and you’re set for life!

A well optimized website will rank highly in the search engines guaranteeing you consistent inquiries. It will only cost you $xx.xx

Fact: This is true. It’s the way it’s expressed that is false. People will quote things like “meta tags” and “h1 tags”. They will tell you that once the work is done it will need just minor updating (for a small additional fee, of course).

The problem is two-fold. First, some optimization is pointless – Google doesn’t even bother with meta tags any more.

Second, optimization of an existing page can provide improvements short-term, but it’s regularly updated pages that do a better job, consistently. This is why blogs have become so powerful. It’s easy to add to a blog and, as the search engines give more and more emphasis to on-page optimization rather than the old code systems, blogs are just getting stronger. Perhaps that’s why I keep going on about them!

3. We guarantee to get you in the top ten at Google!

What could be better? A guarantee of getting you in the top ten at Google will be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars to you.

Fact: You will pay $200.00 or more – probably for a minimum of three consecutive months – to get in the top ten. Still sound profitable? Yes, but what words will you be in the top ten for? This is an area, called “keywords” or “key phrases”, that we’ll get into in more detail later but basically there’s all kinds of different ways to get in the top 10. Don’t think you’re going to get in the top ten if someone searches for “bed and breakfast” or even necessarily for “bed and breakfast in your town”.

They will pick a “keyword” with little competition and target that. You might get in the top ten for “bed and breakfast in Central Hills, Boise, Idaho” but how many people are searching for that? You need to come up in the results for “bed and breakfast Boise Idaho” to make a real impact.

What’s more, without continued work you will drop out of the rankings. Don’t worry though, they’ll be happy to take another $200 a month off you to keep you there .

Guys at forums who spout this stuff mean well – they’re just perhaps a bit out of touch. That’s perfectly understandable as most of them are amateurs and have better things to do with their time.

Companies that take money off you for these things – well that’s a bit different. It’s not illegal, but it is unsavory.

But is this just a question of the pot calling the kettle black? After all, I have bed and breakfast marketing services on offer. What makes me any different?

We’re both in business so you understand that I don’t give my time for nothing. However, if you have a look at my Client Services you will see I don’t make any of the above claims. Why not? Because the ideas I promote are things you can do yourself – not things I will charge you for month after month after month…

You can pay me to set up a blog for you because that’s efficient if you haven’t got a lot of time – but you pay me once and then, after some coaching, you take over.

Even if you want me to consult with you privately you pay me by the week. My solutions will be things that you can do – not things that I can do for you at extra cost.

The best future for your bed and breakfast website is one you can manage for yourself. If I can help you do that, we both win.

Tags: b & b websites, Bed and Breakfast Marketing, Bed and Breakfast Websites, SEO

I’m using the bed and breakfast terms because it’s one I think we’re all familiar with, but Bed-and-Breakfast-Marketing.com is intended to provide helpful articles for all kinds of small and family-run accommodation businesses.

So if you’ve got a gite, a guest house, a country inn, a chambre d’hotes, a family hotel, a boutique B & B or any other kind accommodation (did I miss one?) then I hope what you find here will be of use.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for, please ask.

I’m going to be exploring all kinds of bed and breakfast promotion and marketing ideas but I won’t know precisely what you need help with unless you tell me – so please do. Leave a comment or get in touch directly. Ask the question that is giving you most grief and let’s see if we can’t help you sort it out!

I would also like to hear from you if you have had an idea which has helped improve your accommodation business. Maybe you want to keep it to yourself – that’s fair enough – but if you would like to share and help other people having the same challenges as you, you’ll get a nice write-up and we’ll feature your blog or website – which at the very least will help your position in the search engines.

Drop me a line – I’ll let everyone else know how smart you are!

.

Tags: bed and breakfast, chambre d'hotes, family hotel, gite, guest house

Any bed and breakfast marketing should have two targets – 1. finding new guests and 2. getting previous guests to rebook.

It sounds kind of obvious but it’s clearly a lot more profitable to service an existing, satisfied client than it is to attract new ones.

So apart from making sure everything about their stay is as close to perfect as it can be, what else can you do?

You will, of course, gather details from your guests. Name and address, telephone number and now, where possible, email. You have to be careful here – people are very protective of their email address so you can’t make it something that is “required” but rather something that is voluntary. Along the lines of “please let us have your email address if you would like us to inform you of special money-saving offers”.

A lot of people might just be “passing trade” and you will never see them again – but many are potential re-bookings and if you don’t ask, you won’t get!

You must make sure you only ever email them with quality offers. Don’t send out any old junk just for the purposes of keeping in touch. If you know birthdays or anniversaries then send them an e-card maybe – but don’t use their email for idle gossip. Don’t add them to “friends” on social websites.

Treat that email address with the respect it deserves. They were kind enough to give you the opportunity to contact them at a later date – effectively they have given you the chance to sell to them in future. You can lose that right in an instant, or you can turn them into a very profitable long-term guest.

Your blog or website gives you an even greater bed and breakfast marketing opportunity – the chance to make offers to people who have never been to stay with you.

A well run blog or website will attract people from all over. It is a B & B promotions tool which is becoming increasingly important. You can use it to make offers directly to people who visit your site but it can go further than that.

How? By trying to gather their email addresses as well.

You can do it by asking people to send you their email address but people are less and less likely to do this. It also isn’t very efficient from a management point of view.

Far more efficient is to use a mailing list management company.

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to cost you an arm and a leg. Even if you have more than 1,000 potential customers it will cost you less than $10 a month.

But let’s give you some detail of how this works.

You sign up with a mailing list management company. The people I use are called Your Mailing List Provider. Sign up is free. There are paid-for accounts but you won’t need one of those yet.

The mailing list company will give you some code to put on your blog or website that will allow you to collect people’s name and email addresses. It’s a small form, just like that one on the top right of this page where it says “Bed and Breakfast Marketing News”.

The management company handle pretty much everything for you. When you have an offer to send out you just log into your account, compose one email, then the software will send that email, personalized, to each person on your list!

With the company I use you can send up to 1,000 messages a month before you have to pay. If you have 500 people on your list you could send them each two emails a month – and still do it for nothing – now that’s efficient.

I probably wouldn’t recommend contacting people twice in a month – unless you have something really special going on – but you can see the advantages I’m sure. Instead of having to manage all this yourself you leave it to someone else. You can even add those emails you get from your guest.

There are plenty of options available at Your Mailing List Provider and although it’s not complicated I would recommend you have a good read through and send a few test emails before you set it all up. It will work equally well on a traditional bed and breakfast website as on a blog.

To add extra punch and encourage sign-ups to your bed and breakfast mailing list you might want to offer a small gift. It should be perceived as something of value. I offer an ebook because that’s appropriate to my business. You might want to offer a discount for first visit, or cheaper rate for children. It’s true you might make a little less profit  but it’s still more money than if they didn’t come at all!

.

Tags: bed and breakfast, chambre d'hotes, family hotel, gite, guest house

Getting into the search engines is an increasingly important part of your bed and breakfast marketing. If you aren’t doing well in Google, Yahoo, Bing and the rest then dozens or even hundreds of potential guests are going to your rivals.

SEO is bandied around all the time as an important part of what you should be doing but, let’s face it, you either don’t know what SEO means or, frankly, have better things to do with your time than learning all that internet code stuff!

I couldn’t agree more, so let’s keep the explanation short and get onto some simple practical things you can do.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which simply means making your site as search-engine friendly as possible. The better the search engines understand your bed and breakfast website, the better it’s chances of ranking high in the results.

First let’s look at submitting your site to the search engines. It’s something people often pay for. Don’t.

Paying $80.00 to have your bed and breakfast website submitted to 500 search engines might seem like a good idea but you would be better off keeping your cash. Submit to Google, Yahoo and Bing and you’ve got 95% of search engines covered because most of the others take their results from those three anyway!

Here are the links. Click each, fill in the blanks. You only need to do it once. Yahoo may require you to sign up for a free account if you don’t have one. It’s worth it to get into their results so just do it and ignore it from then on.

Add to Google / Add to Bing / Add to Yahoo

Now this in itself does not guarantee you will actually get listed (don’t believe anyone who says they will guarantee it). It will take time and you’ll need to be patient. It’s also true that your site might get picked up if you don’t submit – but why take the risk? Five minutes, job done.

You can speed up the chances of getting into Google by registering for their Webmaster Tools. It requires a bit of code knowledge but it’s not too complicated and it will give you some useful statistics if you are interested. I would recommend you give it a try – or get whoever did your website to do it for you – if you are not already in Google’s rankings. If you are, don’t worry about it.

By the way, if you want to know which of your pages are in Google, go to Google and put site:yourwebsite.com (change yourwebsite.com to the actual name of your website) and it will show you them. Don’t expect them all to be there – that hardly ever happens. If you get no results it means that Goolge has yet to list your site.

If your site is listed then for all practical purposes improving your SEO is about keeping your message on target and adding relevant content when you can. This is true of all your bed and breakfast marketing.

If your B & B is in Boise, Idaho you’re not going to be recommending guests to visit sights of interest in Sacramento, California! So don’t do it with your website. If you have other interests like lace making or monster truck racing, put them on a different website – not on your bed and breakfast one. Mixed messages don’t just confuse people, they confuse the search engines. The search engines like to see lots and lots of information about related subjects. Make sure you keep your content on subject.

You might have heard people mention meta tags. People who know a little bit about SEO chuck the phrase around. Forget it. A few years ago they were important (they’re little bits of hidden html code) but these days they’re not relevant enough to worry about.

If you don’t yet have a website I would strongly recommend you get a blog. Search engine optimization is something that a bed and breakfast blog is very good at and the best news is that it can be part of it’s background function. You can set it up once and then forget about it. Every time you add something to your blog it will automatically go and give Google, Yahoo, Bing and others a quick nudge to tell them what you’ve done. Very handy!

Even if you have a website I think you should add a blog. If you want to know why I think they’re the best tool for your bed and breakfast marketing then just sign up for my newsletter (top right) and read the free ebook.

Tags: Bed and Breakfast Marketing, search engines, SEO

How to start a bed and breakfast? Easy questions first then!

Bed and breakfast business - ready to go!

But seriously. It’s a big question. If you are an established guest house owner then excuse me for going over stuff you already know – it would be great if you could leave a comment if you think there’s something important I’ve missed!

There will be plenty of people visiting who would love to open a bed and breakfast and have lots of great ideas but who just want to check a few things, or get some extra info. We all need a bit of help from time to time, right?

So let’s look at a few of the things you need to get sorted out when you go to buy a bed and breakfast or you are about to open for the first time.

We’ll assume that you are determined to run your own b & b. That you realize that although it can be a lot of fun, and very rewarding from both a personal and financial point of view, it’s going to be hard work sometimes.

If I told you it was all going to be champagne and roses I wouldn’t be doing you any favors. Sometimes you’re going to be up early, working late and people will tick you off!

But for those that love the relative freedom of having their own bed and breakfast and who like working with people and helping them have a good time, this can be a simple business if set up properly. It’s not always easy – folks are like that – but 95% of what you do can be pre-planned so you can reduce the chances of unpleasant surprises.

For example. When you start looking for bed and breakfast to buy you need to consider whether you want one that’s already established, or a residential property with potential.

An established b & b is going to be easy to walk into and carry on, but you’ll pay a premium. A property with potential may be cheaper but will probably need at least some changes to make it work well. Are those changes permitted under planning regs for that area? Are you actually allowed to run a business in that area? Do you have to make provision for a fire escape or disabled access?

It could be that suddenly that beautiful old place you wanted to do up requires thousands more spent on it than you thought.

If you’ve answered the property question, what about the location? Is it by a beautiful lake in the middle of the mountains? Sounds dreamy but does anyone actually go there?

On the other hand, if it’s in a busy town where there is lots of passing traffic, are there also well-known motel chains that you will have trouble competing with?

First and foremost a profitable bed and breakfast needs plenty of guests!

With that in mind, how are you going to attract customers? Being cheapest is often not a good idea. People go to the motel chains when all they want is cheap. You might have trouble competing there. Better to check out the competition that offers a similar level of service. You provide a personal touch that the chains can’t match. How much are people paying for that in your area?

Try to find other ways to make your bed and breakfast different. Can you offer other services? Guided tours of local attractions maybe. Art or craft courses. If you don’t do it yourself, try to arrange a tie in with crafts people locally. Or vineyard owners. Or stables that offer horse riding. Or hill walking… something that will attract people to you for more than just a bed. That way you have visitors outside the regular tourist seasons.

Just relying on being cheap means you are always looking over your shoulder and always counting pennies. You might be busy but you aren’t making any money. It’s no fun being busy and broke!

While you’re looking at the big picture, don’t forget the details.

It’s a good idea to write yourself a kind of “operations manual” for your bed and breakfast. Start with the things you need to do to get everything ready on a daily basis. Work out an efficient order to do them.

Next, write your rules and regulations. Do you allow pets? Do you allow smoking? Drinking in the garden? Do you allow people to provide their own food? If you provide catering, what choices do you offer?

Next try and think what questions people will ask and have answers for them. Then try to think what could go wrong and put as many contingency plans as possible in place.

You must write it all down. Don’t rely on remembering things. Creating a manual performs several useful functions.

First, you’ll forget things. You might think you won’t but you will, I guarantee it. When you do you will find it extremely frustrating. It will probably happen at a time you need it least, when you are at your busiest. If you have stuff written down you can refer back to it.

It also means you’ll deal with most things in the same way each time, which is efficient for you and means your guests always know where they stand. There’s nothing worse than a confused guest!

If your bed and breakfast has staff – whether straight away or later on – they know what they are supposed to do. If you are not available they have something they can refer to.

You might struggle to put it together initially, you will doubtless modify it with experience, but get something down to start with. It will make things easier in the long run.

You might not be afraid of hard wok but there’s no point making it more difficult than it needs to be!

I could go on forever listing little bits and pieces about how to start a bed and breakfast – and that in itself is perhaps a good point. Get yourself a little notebook or one of those little pocket recorders so that you can make notes any time something occurs to you. It’s that remembering thing again. You’ll think of something while you’re in a store or walking down the street but by the time you get home you just won’t be able to put your finger on it. If you can make a note at the time, it’s another great idea you can work on.

I’m going to stop there for now. We’ll go into individual details as we go on. If you’ve got particular questions please leave a comment or drop me a line. If you are already running a bed and breakfast and you’ve got some ideas to add I would love to hear from you.

Tags: how to start a bed and breakfast, open a bed and breakfast, Running A Bed and Breakfast, start a b & b

Bed and breakfast marketing. Like it or not it’s something you’ve got to do. Sticking up a “rooms to let” sign on your building just ain’t going to do it!

We all want no vacancies - but how?

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 the phone book is getting more and more expensive every year. Then there’s newspaper or magazine space – it 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 – absolutely vital – 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.

Do it yourself? Well yes, if you’ve got the time to do it properly. There’s going to be a bit of a learning curve with some software, and you can’t be expected to have all the expertise of a professional designer but you should be able to produce something fairly cheaply, fairly easily…

Or not.

The problem with free or cheap websites is that’s how they tend to look – and is that really how you want to come across? How does that reflect on your business? Look, I know your partner and your mother will tell you you’ve done a great job but have you, really? I’ll tell you the acid test – is it bringing in customers?

If you’ve had a site running for three months or more and it’s not bringing in customers there’s something wrong. It’s OK, you’re not the only one. Most people make the same set of mistakes. It’s just not your area of expertise. How can you be expected to learn this stuff in a few weeks when the pros take years?

Anyway don’t worry about it. You can fix it. Very cost-effectively too. That’s what this blog is all about.

Every week I’ll be adding more info that will make your life easier and your accommodation more profitable. Doesn’t matter if it’s a B & B, guest house, gite, country inn, chambre d’hotes or family hotel, these rules work for all of them.

To kick things off I’ve got a free ebook for you. Just sign up for my occasional newsletter and download a copy that you can read on your computer in a couple of minutes from now. It’s got some ideas you can put into action today. Right now.

Whether you’ve got a website for your bed and breakfast or not, it has information you really should read. Yes I want you to sign up for my newsletter but that’s free too and I won’t bombard you with garbage, just keep you up to date with stuff you ought to know. If I don’t live up to my promises just cancel, any time. OK?

Tags: bed and breakfast, chambre d'hotes, country inn, family hotel, gite, guest house

If you want someone to spend their vacation in your bed and breakfast, guest house, gite, chambre d’hotes or family hotel you need to differentiate yourself from those around you.

Many people’s first thought is that if they’re less expensive they will do more business. Not necessarily so. Whilst there is always a place for cheap accommodation it is also an area of intense competition. Huge motel chains site themselves by major intersections for precisely this reason.

You also have to consider profitability. You are doing this on a much smaller scale. You probably have few, if any staff. You don’t have the economies of scale. As a friend of mine put it, it’s easy to be busy and broke!

Yes it’s important to be competitive, but being competitive must be by comparison with other bed and breakfasts, or other accommodation that has the personal contact that your does. Not cheaper come what may.

There are modern motels where you can check in, sleep the night and check out again without seeing another human being. The person who stays in these is doing it 90% on price and 10% on convenience. They are likely on a business trip and hardly remember the name of the town or city they stayed last night, or the name of the motel chain that provided the bed.

As a bed and breakfast owner, or gite, or whatever, you will struggle to capture this market. If your are in a fairly remote area you may occasionally get a traveling businessman but that’s almost certainly either because it was getting late and they needed to find somewhere, or because it was the boss and he or she wasn’t too concerned about price!

These are bonuses you take when available but unlikely to be your target market.

Your bed and breakfast or chambre d’hotes needs to take advantage of the opportunity to greet people. To make a connection. If you’re a gite or holiday villa owner you want the same family to come back on vacation next year. Many people go to the same area year after year. If you can convince them to come to you then it’s relatively easy money.

But why should they come to you? What makes your guest house stand out? What makes your bed and breakfast the place they want to stay at? What makes your gite the one they recommend to their friends?

We’ll be getting into this in much more detail in future posts but it starts from the moment they arrive. Do you go out to the car to greet them? Do you help with their luggage? Do you show them where everything is and how things work – without being too pushy? Are there all the things they would expect to find?

With gites or vacation villas in particualr – where people are going to be spending a week or more – is there plenty of information about places to go and things to do? French gites often provide a small basket of local produce as a welcome gift. It’s just one example of going that bit further so that your guests’ vacation starts off on a high.

After a long journey they are probably a bit tired, if you can lift their spirits they will certainly remember it. That’s a big chunk of your job done, right there.

Tags: bed and breakfast, chambre d'hotes, gite, guest house, marketing

So you’ve got a bed and breakfast business (or you’re thinking about setting one up?). Everything is in place. The only thing you’re lacking is those lovely guests.

That’s the purpose of this blog. To show you ways to fill your beds – and your bank account!

I’m not going to pretend it’s easy. Whether it’s a bed and breakfast, guest house, gite, chambre d’hotes, family hotel – or any kind of vacation accommodation I’ve missed off that list – there’s usually plenty of competition. What we’re going to do here is show you ways to separate yourself from that competition.

I’ll probably cover some stuff you already know but hopefully there will be plenty that you don’t, or a different angle on things. We’ll be covering all kinds of things to bring the guests into your bed and breakfast and to keep them coming back. It’s a lot cheaper to service existing clients than to find new ones.

We’ll be spending a lot of the time looking at how to use the internet to promote your bed and breakfast business. Whether you like it or not, the world wide web has become a powerful tool. If you aren’t using it you are loosing out to your competition  – because you can bet they are.

Why should you listen to me?

I have over twenty five years advertising and marketing experience. These days I work for myself, as a professional blogger, from our home in France. We’re also in the process of converting some old animal buildings into a gite – and you’ll be able to keep up with progress so you can see that I know what I’m talking about.

I’ve helped a number different small guest house, gite and chambre d’hotes businesses to increase their occupancy and thus their profits. Most prefer to remain anonymous but one or two are happy to share how I’ve helped them so you can see “real world” examples of what I’m suggesting.

What am I selling?

We’re all in business right? Or you’re thinking about getting into the bed and breakfast business soon. I make my living on the internet. I am in the process of writing a book which I believe will be of tremendous benefit to you and when it’s ready I’ll offer it here on this blog – you can buy it or not, that’s up to you.

The blog will nevertheless continue to have all kinds of useful information added. It will continue to be available for free.

I’m also starting a free newsletter. I’m not going to bombard you with information but some people prefer to have stuff delivered to their email. If that’s you, just let me have your name and email address in the boxes on the right. I respect the trust you put in me by letting me have your email and I will never share your information with anyone.

If you have any questions, fire them over. You can comment on individual posts – in which case we’ll all learn – or you can contact me privately using the form here.

OK. I think that will do for the intro. More info to help you profit from your bed and breakfast soon!

Tags: bed and breakfast, chambre d'hotes, gite, guest house, marketing, promotion