How to Start & Run a B&B BandBED2eBook-1 | Page 90

Chapter Five – Marketing your B&B
There are a lot of misconceptions about marketing. Many of these are fostered,
intentionally or otherwise, by marketing people. Because people with “marketing” in
their job title want to preserve an aura of mystique about their profession – and hence
add to their own value – they tend to complicate what they do and obscure it with
jargon. Paradoxically, this has actually devalued marketing in the eyes of the general
public, who think of marketing as something only done by specialized departments in
large companies.
Marketing is really just salesmanship. It is an absolutely essential part of running any
business – whether it is labeled “marketing” or not. Think of it as all the things you
have to do within your business to enable the sales to come in and the business to make
a profit.
So marketing includes getting your décor right for your customers, setting your prices,
how you greet and correspond with your guests, the quality of your breakfast
ingredients, and many other things, as well as the more obviously “marketing” areas of
advertising and promotion. Anything that makes your guests more likely to come
back is marketing. Everything that persuades your guests to pay a little bit more, or
stay a little bit longer, is marketing.
And of course, anything that makes the phone
ring is marketing.
Back to your “positioning” and “target audience”
By now you have looked at the location of your B&B, and the property itself and its
character, size, setting, decor and facilities, and you have decided on your target
market(s). This might include, say, families on a budget wanting to be near the
seafront of the resort, or couples aged 30 and older staying for cultural short breaks, or
foodies staying nearby a renowned restaurant. There is no limit to who your target
audiences are nor where they come from, and they will be different for every reader of
this book. The point is, you have thought all this through and you have identified your
own market.
The next thing is to think yourself into the shoes of each audience type you have
identified. If they were coming to your area, how might they decide where to stay, and
what factors would make them decide to stay with you? This should give you a few
possible leads to pursue. Just to give two specific examples: if your B&B overlooks a
surfing beach in Cornwall and your market includes surfers, then surfing magazines,
local surf shops, surfing associations and clubs, and surfing websites would all be
worth looking at for collaboration or advertising. Alternatively if your market includes
genteel older ladies seeking country weekends, perhaps a small ad in The Lady may
work well.
The examples themselves are not important, and are probably not relevant to you. The
essential thing is (a) to identify your target audience, and (b) to get into their shoes and
try to shadow their thought processes, to identify the areas you can reach them.
How to Start & Run a B&B
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