Marketing a Bed & Breakfast in the Off Season

Q: With a very short season in Bed & Breakfast how would you start in marketing the business?

A: Well, the truth is that people travel all the time and when they travel they need a place to stay, so it’s kind of confusing to say there’s a “short season” for Bed and Breakfasts. Where you find customers might vary a bit based on season, but I suspect there’s always customers to be had.

There are several marketing tactics that might work for you, and I think considering them will lead to many more.

• For your city, town or geographic region, you need to come up as the first link in Google when people search for Bed and Breakfast in your area. In fact you want to rank highly for several geographically related areas. For example, a Bed & Breakfast might want to come up first for “Dublin Bed and Breakfast”, “Addison Park Bed & Breakfast” and “Dublin University Bed and Breakfast” so they are the first folks people find when they look online for B&B lodging in the area. How do you do that? Well School for Startups has several courses and entrepreneur guides that cover how to build a website google likes, and how to search engine optimize it and search engine market it. It’s cheap, it’s easy, and it’s fast if you do it right. Here are some links to get you started.
• You need to define your promise to your customers clearly. Since you want year round business, you should make that part of your promise. “Dublin’s best bed and breakfast year round” is a good promise for a Dublin Bed and Breakfast that wants year round business. Every web page, every article, every ad should make your promise clear. Your promise is what attracts people to you so you can close them. It can’t be at all ambiguous or fuzzy.
• You need to figure out who your customers are, and how they found you, so you can put yourself there more often and more visably. You also need to find out where else your customers might have looked for you. Without knowing who your customers are I can’t tell you where to find more of them . . . and unless you know where you get them from and why they come to you . . . you can’t find more of them either. Right off hand, I’d say that if you get customers flying in from the US, Craigslist.com, Orbitz.com or Travelocity might be great places to promote your business to customers.
• You may want to look close to home for some of your lodgers. Your community has guests flying in year round, right? People come home for Christmas, fly in for Easter, attend graduations, christenings and funerals. How many people in your community know who you are and what you do? You can reach out to them in many ways. You can join local business development and networking groups. You can start a local business development or social networking group that meets at your bed and breakfast, perhaps using a tool like Meetup.com to find new members. You can contact churches, schools, and other local social groups and offer their members information about lodging with you, or special rates for lodging longer than a week.

If you set off in one or more of the general directions indicated by those four suggestions, I believe you’ll find yourself with more lodgers in short order.

As you work on increasing your revenue through marketing, remember to keep things very quick, very cheap and very straightforward. Don’t feel the need to do “just anything” that might work, and don’t mangle your B&B into something that is a hassle to run just to get new customers.

Spend a week or two looking for something you can do which is fast, cheap and looks likely to be effective. Much of good marketing is finding the easy way to get the customers you want.

Good Hunting