The B and B Lady: advertising and promotion questions

Marketing your bed and breakfast requires a multi-pronged approach. Yo u want to combine your internet presence, conventional advertising, brochures, and customer service to get the word out about what a great guest experience you provide.

Hi, my name is Gerald. My wife and I are looking to start a B&B and we want to really do our homework. We looked through the messages on here and couldn't see anything relating to our questions, so we thought we would be bold enough to ask. We will spend some money on a simple website. The questions we have are:

Obviously, with a 2 bedroom B&B you can't advertise all over the place. What are the best places to advertise or promote your B&B?

How good are the directories?

What are the good ones / not-so-good ones? Who would you recommend and why?

How much weight do you give advertising on the directories?

What should you look for in choosing a diectory?

What should we be careful of?

We are grateful to any feedback you can give us.
_________________
Gerald & Rachael

Comments

Hi Gerald and Rachel, welcome to B&B Talk. Congratulations on being bold and adventurous.

Directories choices can seem overwhelming, so its a great question to ask. There are several well established directories and then there are an ever gowing number of startups. The big directories that have been in the game a while are worth the money. They show up well in the search engines and can send quite a bit of traffic your way. Be careful of the new startups that seem to offer the same as the big directories but at a third of the price. Sure they offer descriptions and pictures, but what they don't deliver much of is traffic. They are cheaper but actually more costly because they deliver fewer guests per dollar.

One of the best ways to pick a few directories (whether national or local) is to go to Google and do a search for "your area bed and breakfast" (without the quotes) and replace "your area" with the most popular name for your region. It might be your city or town name, or it might be a larger vacation description like thousand islands or whatever applies. Any directory that shows up in the top 5 of the results, is likely to send a fair amount of traffic your way.

You can find quite a few more details in this article on choosing a bed and breakfast directory (disclaimer: I wrote the article)

I bet that www.bedandbreakfast.com , www.bbonline.com and www.lanierbb.com and some directories specific for your region are the ones that will show up.

Beware of any directory that devotes more energy to telling innkeepers why they should sign up, than they do providing a service to travellers. The only way they can serve your needs is if they are completely focused on the needs of your potential guests.

Hope this helps.

Posted by: Steve Wirt | September 12, 2007 12:09 PM