Marketing Articles for Innkeepers
In days gone by, Internet Directories were a popular and effective tool for online marketing, but in most cases that’s no longer true. As Search Engines have improved, paid directories have faded into the past, becoming largely irrelevant.
There are, however, some exceptions in each industry. The following resources still offer value for bed and breakfasts and inns.
When marketing a small business, having a limited budget can sometimes prevent you from using some marketing strategies. But, there are plenty of alternatives.
If you don’t have heaps of money to spend on marketing, here are seven outside-the-box ideas to reach customers that are cost-effective and highly effective.
As one might expect, brand reputation is a crucial element of any successful business.
Why?
Because your brand reputation defines the way, consumers will view your business and the goods and services you provide.
Blogging is a tool that many modern, successful businesses use to connect with their audience.
Therefore, many businesses blog about relevant events and related topics within their niche market, allowing them to provide their audience and potential customers with the information they’re already looking for.
An HTML Sitemap is an actual page on a website that can be visited by both humans and Search Engine bots. On this page is published an organized, usually bulleted list of all of the pages of the site, with links to each page. It’s basically a clickable table of contents.
It’s an old tool, but still relevant. Here’s why…
Google has 90% of the Search Engine market share, and most see Google as their top referrer of traffic, far above any other resource – so the 800lbs gorilla gets all of the attention.
The problem is that so often business owners forget (or don’t know) that other resources play a huge role in how highly a website will actually rank in Google. This is a difficult to quantify, but very import benefit in seeking out and being listed on other websites. Your presence in secondary, oft-overlooked resources can heavily influence your presence in the primary Google race.
What do guests really want from an inn or bed and breakfast?
This is the most frequent and fundamental of all questions asked by innkeepers everywhere – at seminars, association meetings, and during offseason sleepless nights. Studies examining the innkeeping industry conclude again and again that service comes first.
And why do I need one?
Before I answer these we’ll start with a very basic understanding of how Google (and all of the other Search Engines) works – their entire business model revolves around delivering content that matches the billions of searches that people perform each and every day. If they can’t deliver the best content, they’ll lose users… and then advertisers… and then no more Google.
