Just starting a bed and breakfast inn, is not enough to make it successful, draw customers or make great profits.You can only make good profits if you market and advertise the bed and breakfast business seriously and make sure to get lots of publicity and acknowledgment as the best serving inn in the area.
Advertising and promotion play a vital role in making any business successful and only with proper marketing you can hope to get people to use your bed and breakfast inn which in turn would help you run the establishment. Various marketing strategies can help a great deal in getting you the attention your bed and breakfast inn needs to take off a good start.
In this article, we have put together some marketing tips and strategies that will help you to properly advertise and promote your bed and breakfast.
Marketing Your B&B Business
- Get your business listed in as many travel and guidebooks as possible for maximum exposure. Make contact with local travel and reservation agents and become a part of their regular referrals to get more business. In turn, you will have to pay anything from 10 to 35% commission off your room rate for their referral services.
- You will have to advertise your bed and breakfast and make yourself in local telephone listings and local newspapers for better access. After coming to a new place, tourists check out the telephone listings and newspapers and it can help to get you business with the right advertisements.
- Have a small sign posted either in your front yard or on the front of your house. While it shouldn’t be too big, yet it should put the message across very clearly stating “Bed and Breakfast” along with the contact number. This can help people who are driving by and seeking a bed and breakfast.
- Contact your local travel agencies and list your services with them. A brochure or a short description of what you offer will most give travel agents an idea for sending visitors your way. Along with this, listing your services in a number of national travel magazines can help to attract more customers.
- Seek public relations opportunities such as feature stories on television and newspapers for a vacationing audience or some related topic. Send your press releases to your local media as it may lead to valuable and inexpensive exposure on the local as well as national level.
- Word of mouth publicity and advertising is the best as in a hospitality business such as this, the more you satisfy or delight the customers, and the more likely they are to refer you. Satisfied customers act like marketing agents and if you send back happy customers, he can send you a new customer.
- Keep in touch with your customer via post mail or email and periodically send letters informing them about your new services or what changes you have made to the bed and breakfast to make it more appealing for customers this will ensure that when they visit again, they will definitely choose your bed and breakfast.
Being a bed and breakfast owner is not all about keeping a neat house and offering good services. It is a complete career with numerous challenges from running a business to planning and implementing marketing strategies to providing a full array of hospitality services to make the venture successful. Marketing is an integral part of running any business and constructive and positive marketing can help to maintain a thriving and rewarding business.
