Running A Bed And Breakfast - Brochure Or Blog?

When you are running a bed and breakfast it's nice to look forward to the day when

you have built your reputation and guests come back to you year after year. Not only that, they recommend their friends too! It's good business. It's far more profitable for a bed and breakfast business to re-book guests than it is to find new ones. Unfortunately, if you rely solely on that, your b & B won't last long. Drawing in new people is an absolute must. Your ongoing bed and breakfast marketing plan need to be something you have in mind all the time.

We all have budgets though. We can't just advertise here, there and everywhere. When you run a bed and breakfast you need to run a tight ship. You need to know where you are going to get the best bang for your buck!

A brochure to advertise your b & b (or guest house, gite, country inn, chambre d'hotes etc.) is usually seen as a good marketing tool. It can be, but you have to consider where you can put it and how far it can reach. If you have a local tourist office who will stock it, that's great targeting. Likewise if you have tourist attractions near your bed and breakfast. In return you take some of their brochures to hand to your guests. It's a win, win situation.

But showering them around everywhere is just a waste of money. With modern digital printing methods you can have much lower print runs than before but it's still not something that's cheap. You can't go throwing them around like confetti.

So how else do you advertise? Well anyone running a bed and breakfast today simply must have an internet presence of some kind. Bed and breakfast websites are common but the most powerful tool is your own bed and breakfast blog. They're cheap to set up, have negligible running costs and, most importantly, you don't have to rely on outside contractors or agencies. After a little initial help you can run your own.

A well run B & B blog gives you virtually global reach. Using clever marketing tactics it costs no more to put it in front of a thousand people than it does to put it in front of one. For anyone running a bed and breakfast there is no marketing tool that even comes close in terms of its ability to increase your business.

Does that mean you shouldn't bother with "old fashioned" bed and breakfast brochures? No. It just means you can afford to be more selective. Get just a hundred done and see how they go. If there's more call, get more printed. It's an economical option while your blog does most of the work. Good bed and breakfast marketing is a question of testing, seeing what works and acting on the results - all the while keeping an eye on the pennies. With a blog as the backbone of your marketing you can test other things cheaply and thus more profitably - which is what we're all after!

by: Bob Beacham

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