A complete guide to marketing your Bed and Breakfast.
Thankfully, it isn’t too difficult to formulate a Digital Marketing Plan for your Bed and Breakfast
With just a few intentional and targeted marketing approaches, you can bolster your business’s visibility and attract new customers. Here is a list of effective Bed and breakfast Digital Marketing strategies that I compiled
Key performance indicators & Goals
Email is a great way to passively remind your guests to leave you a review on review sites or on social media. If you don’t have the time to be scheduling and sending emails, use your front desk system to automate clever emails to your guests, asking them to review you.
Drive more direct bookings
Send a quick follow-up email to check how your guests’ stay was and ask if they have any feedback on how you could have improved their experience.
If their response is negative then thank them for their honesty and let them know how you will try to resolve this issue in the future or give them an incentive on their next visit, this small change might mean they decide they will return to stay with you again. If they give positive feedback then ask them to leave you a review on sites like TripAdvisor.
Encourage Guests to Book
You can drive more sales also by encouraging a review by offering an incentive. This includes encouraging a repeat booking such as “Tell us about your stay and next time you stay with us, we’ll take 10% of your bill”. With this, you will not only encourage return visits but also convert your customer into a direct booking
Promote guest loyalty and build Brand engagement
Bed and Breakfast owners need to constantly encourage guest loyalty in order to get repeat bookings from their guests.
This can be encouraged by creating special promotions from your email marketing list. Keep in touch with your guests using pre and post-stay emails and after they leave ensure you offer them some incentive to return.
How can you put it to work at your B&B?
Be careful with images
Showing lovely pictures of your rooms, pool, and breakfast area make plenty of sense. Obviously, you want to draw guests to you with images of the holiday they crave. Make sure you are careful because most spam filters look for image-weighty emails that don’t have the text to back them up.
If you don’t want your email to head straight to the junk folder, make sure you also include some great copy telling readers all about those pictures.
Keep guests updated
If you don’t want to be the emailer who gets unsubscribed, you have to always find ways to create engaging content for your guests and other prospecting customers that might stumble across your piece of content on your website, etc. Create emails with clever subject lines to reel them in.
it’s important to make your efforts subtle and fun. Sure, update them on the weather, the season’s activities, and your current steals, you can even write about the coolest spots to Dine around your bed and breakfast to make it convenient for your guests to know about the location of your bed and breakfast.
Use Data & Analytics software
Keeping track of your email marketing efforts is hard enough without further complicating things by requiring you to go software-less. Instead of winging it, use a smart marketing program that helps you track your opens and click-throughs, easily duplicate blasts and modify them without fluster.
Once you get more comfortable sending emails, you can begin to track consumer behavior with funnels and automation that give you an insight into your guests.
Understanding which guests book at which times, how they behave during times such as the Christmas holidays, and what deals generate the best responses will help you keep rooms full in the future as well.
Send automatic emails requesting that guests leave feedback about their stay if you send an email within 1 to 3 days of checking out, you can include a request for guests to leave a review on your preferred review site.
By offering them a direct link to your profile, you make it easy and convenient for them to provide information for fellow travelers. This proves that you value the customer experience at your property and that you are willing to accept feedback from your customers.
With that out of the way, here are the best email marketing automation tools that we’ve chosen for this comparison:
Sendinblue (www.sendinblue.com)
Sharing more guest experience on popular online review sites
Travelers rely on online reviews sites for honest and objective feedback about a particular hotel or lodging brand before booking their stay. An increasing number of travelers each year consult these sites prior to finalizing their reservations with a hotel online.
Social media Goals for your bed and breakfast
Social media competitions are a useful technique to assist B&Bs in their marketing goals, improve their online presence, and drive direct bookings.
Here are 3 important marketing Goals for hoteliers and how you can use social media competitions to reach them:
Goal #1 Increasing followers
Use a social media competition that requires people to like and follow your account before they can participate. In addition, include an incentive for the participant to share the contest on their own social media accounts. This will increase the visibility of the competition and draw more participants.
Another way to promote your contest is through paid social ads. This works best if you have a reasonable following already, then you can target people who would be most interested in the competition you are offering.
Best competition type to use: Instant Win
With an instant win, your customer is immediately promised something for a simple task. For example, “Free breakfast when you like and share our page.”
Goal #2 Build your email list
Similarly, you can use social media competitions to ask potential customers to provide their names and email address during registration.
Then, even if they do not win, you can follow up with an email campaign offering competition-related discounts such as “Thanks for participating in our competition, we want everyone to be a winner so here’s 10% off your next stay with us”.
Best competition to use: Sweepstakes
With a sweepstake contest, you simply ask participants to comment their name and email before picking a winner at random to receive the prize.
Hoteliers can increase bookings by positioning the prize as something the customer will receive when booking a room at your hotel: “Comment your name and email below for your chance to win a bar tab when you stay at our B&B.”
Goal #3 Grow engagement and drive traffic
Customers are far more likely to engage with this type of fun and competitive content. You can even use campaigns that ask customers to create their own content and tag you, such as Instagram photo competitions.
With your page traffic increasing make sure you have a way to take bookings straight from your Facebook page by integrating a commission-free booking engine to capture your bookings.
Offer prizes that appeal to your target market
If you are a B&B that mainly attracts families and consider offering free kids meals. Make sure to advertise the prize clearly in the headline and that there is a time limit, Don’t ask for complex personal information beyond name and email, customers will be less likely to give out their information if you ask for too much.
More than 70% of social media marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing so be sure to decorate your competition post with a high res image
Schedule weekly Content on Social Media dedicated to researching and make a point of winding down the week for an hour on Friday by Going through business journals and marketing blogs, or use Wednesday as an opportunity for a midweek pick me up to search for new ideas on how to reach your target markets.
Start looking at “small data
Small data is just bite-sized bits of information that you can use to quickly, easily, and effectively enhance your online marketing strategy.
Kinds of small data that you can use to develop your small hotel marketing plan:
-Keyword research
-SEO Ranking
-Competitor Rankings
-Social media comments and online reviews
-Opinions of your small hotel
-Opinions of your competitors
-Channel reports
-Booking popularity based on the day
-Type of traveler that books with you
Here are A few ideas For Weekly Tasks for Your Bed and Breakfast
-Respond to reviews to increase engagement rate
-Social media crossposting
-Schedule appointments with your customers,
-Search Engine optimization to increase traffic to the website
-Update Website images new content consistently
Fill your profile page with searchable information:
Add as much information as possible to your profile page and add as many relevant categories to your page. This information helps Facebook serve up your page to people in various ways across the platform
Blogging is an important tool to not only inform and connect with customers but also to boost your SEO and search return rankings. It’s not necessary to post every day, though you’ll want to create and maintain a regular schedule.
Your blog is not your sales pitch. It’s an opportunity to share expertise relating to your industry, customer needs, and the importance of regular car maintenance. site. It’s also good for search engine optimization.
While it may seem like the internet is a tool for connecting with people all over the world, it is also a very useful tool for connecting with people right in your neighborhood.
You can use Bed and Breakfast strategies to target local customers that search for a Bed and Breakfast near them by:
-Optimizing your site for local SEO
-Using Facebook and Google ads to target customers in your area
-Creating Google Business and Yelp profile pages
-Ensures that all contacts with clients (e-mail, Digital, SMS) provide the client with a
-personalized customer service experience of the highest level
Key Takeaways
The SEO game has changed completely, so you need to make sure that you’re keeping up with the times.
The online booking journey includes many steps for travelers who are planning their trips. While they want to discover the options and destinations available to them online, they don’t want to spend a lot of time searching.
It is difficult for small hotels – particularly those that offer authentic experiences in unique destinations – to secure repeat customers.
One of the most obvious and necessary ways to market and sell your B&B is to partner with online travel agents.
Email marketing continues to be a strong driver for traffic, engagement, and bookings. Small data is just bite-sized bits of information that you can use to quickly, easily, and effectively enhance your online marketing strategy.
Social media is obviously highly saturated so one way to break through and create a little more interest is by running competitions.
If you’re not using video on social media at your business then you are missing out on a huge opportunity to reach potential customers.
Digital marketing builds brand awareness without the need to spend a lot of money, or even any at all.
Dynamic rate marketing allows hoteliers to use their real-time availability and current pricing to be broadcast into various marketing campaigns.
Telling your story should be part of your B&B marketing strategy, as it allows you to capture the attention of your target market and encourages them to book directly with you.
Blogging is beneficial for your B&B in a variety of ways.
Remarketing is a marketing tactic that allows you to reach out to potential guests who have visited your site without finalizing their booking.
Wherever you are, destination marketing techniques will help you increase the number of guests visiting your region.
Millennials are an important generation to capture because they began traveling at a young age and they intend to keep exploring in the years to come.
Mobile marketing strategies often attract travelers who are interested in quick getaways or event-inspired ‘staycations’.
Whether it’s a long holiday weekend or a week-long stretch between Christmas and New Year’s Day, you can capitalize on increased holiday travel at your own small hotel.
Conclusion
When you use this “small data” to enhance your small hotel marketing strategy, you can make a big impact. An online marketing plan that is based on facts and trends will bring an increased number of visitors to your hotel website as well as boost the conversions that you receive.
Do not be afraid to explore more options and ways to market your bed and breakfast, there is so much that you can do with digital marketing and I hope you got some ideas on how to grow your Bed and breakfast here today. Until next time folks.
Written by
Keletso Mphuthi
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