Bed and Breakfast Advertising Tips
Research shows that the vast majority of people looking for bed and breakfast accommodation only look online to find somewhere to stay. For this reason, advertising online is without a doubt one of the best ways to market and advertise a B&B. If you ignore online advertising for your B&B or guest house, you could be ignoring most of your potential guests.
Free B&B AdvertisingA great way to advertise your B&B online for free is to get a free trial on the iknow accommodation directory. iknow attracts thousands of visitors from search engines every day and these visitors go on to book B&Bs online, or contact the B&B owners direct by phone or email. If the free trial generates you lots of new bookings then great, if it doesn’t then you haven’t lost anything. If you don’t think the free advert is working for you, simply tell us and we’ll remove your advert, no obligation and no cost. It’s that simple. Request a free trial on iknow.
It’s also possible to advertise your B&B online for free with Google Local. Listing your B&B on Google Local ensures that when people type a phrase into Google such as “B&B in York”, a red pin with the name and address of your B&B will appear. Next to it will be a link to your website which they can click for more information. Google Local also enables people to find you with Google Maps. This is the easiest way to get your B&B at the top of Google. Listing your website on Google Local is easy and free, just visit www.google.co.uk/placesforbusiness
How to Advertise your B&B SuccessfullyWhether you’re creating content for your own website, or for your advert on iknow, there are three key things you can do to make your advertising successful:
- Have good quality photographs. A picture tells a thousand words and guests will decide if they like your property in a few seconds based on photographs. With your iknow advert you can have up to 16 visible photos which you can easily change as and when you like. So, you could show blue skies behind your guest house in summer and snow on the roof in winter, a sumptuous bedroom or the country kitchen, it’s entirely up to you.
- Write good, inspiring content. Our team of expert copywriters will create an advert that showcases all the best features of your B&B. However, if you’d prefer to write the advert yourself using your inside knowledge, you’re welcome to do this.
- Include all the important information. You know what makes your B&B special, whether it’s your fantastic home cooked breakfasts, or the fact that you have great tourist attractions on your doorstep. So make sure that you include all these details in your advert and give your guests even more reasons to book and stay with you.
With any B&B marketing strategy, you’ll want to know how effective it is to make sure that it’s worth the money you’re spending on it. For some kinds of marketing, such as traditional newspaper advertising, it’s impossible to know how many people saw your advert and how many people booked a stay in your B&B as a result of seeing your advert.
With an advert on iknow, you will know exactly how many people have looked at your advert, how many people have called or emailed you after seeing the advert, how many people have clicked through to your website and how many people have booked it online. You have access to your own control panel, so you can see all the stats whenever you want.
Attract Visitors to Your Website from GoogleAttracting visitors to your website from Google is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO involves editing your website and building links between other websites and yours. This can be expensive to do, but if it’s done correctly it can generate you lots of visitors from search engines.
If you take a free advert with iknow, it will actually help your own website to appear at the top of Google. How? Well your free advert will include a link to your website. This link sends some of the strength from the iknow website through to your own website, which helps your SEO and means that your own website will rank higher in Google for more phrases. Which means more visitors for you. Please note that we only link to good quality websites. But then if your website isn’t great, you probably don’t want your potential guests to see it anyway.
Another way to attract visitors to your website from Google is with Pay Per Click (PPC). These are the paid listings that appear in a yellow box at the top of the Google results page and also down the right hand side. You can pay Google to appear in these positions and can cost anything from a few pence to a couple of pounds every time someone clicks through to your website. If you would like to try this, go to www.google.co.uk/ads/
How to Advertise Your B&B on the Internet Without a WebsiteGetting a website for your B&B or guest house is a great idea and could cost as little as a couple of hundred pounds for a decent one. However, even if you don’t have a website, you can still advertise your B&B online with iknow. If you advertise your B&B on the iknow accommodation directory, guests can either phone you to make a booking, or they can send you an email enquiry and you can phone or email them back. You don’t even need to know anything about computers, because if you ever want to change your online advert, you can just call or email us and we’ll make the changes for you free of charge, as often as you like.
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