Start-up guest houses always have an impressive opening. To attract guests and clients, marketing strategies are used to ensure full capacity for the place. But the question is how long can they survive marketing their guesthouses without spending more than the budget they have?
There are many ways on how you can promote your guest house’s promotions, most especially the B&B deals. It’s only a matter of a little creativity and a dash of connections to make this work.
You have to keep in mind that a successful business is accompanied with great strategies. Budgeting is the best explanation why the business stays on top. Once in a while, you have to ignore the fact that you a have a budget to work for all your marketing needs. Many guest houses survived the economy by creating zero budget plans in marketing.
Most guesthouses have their own website which is the main client attractor. Effective theme and wordings are used to generate interest from the readers. Themes can be chosen from the thousands of list in the internet. Select a theme that is widget friendly. Use these widgets for your B&B promotions, which will appear on the sidebars of your website. The widgets will surely catch the reader’s attention no matter if they are reading other articles.
Blog hopping is known to be useful, too. By leaving comments to related websites and blogs, you’re leaving trackbacks for the readers to follow. Other social media sites are also recognized as enormous attractor. A fan page of your guest house in social site e.g. Facebook will surely add hits to your business. You might consider links exchange as well with other websites. Just ensure that your website is linked to related blogs to generate target readers. Choose any from travel, tourism, hotel, and airline websites for this.
For long time B&B promotion, you can design materials like banners, brochures, and leaflets. Print only enough amounts that will last till the end of the promotion, this will save you from extra, re-print cost and paper waste.
Attending social functions is proven helpful. There are many event organizers who assist businesses to gain popularity in the economy and generate better clients. The only investment you will need in events like this is your name card and ability to encourage other people that they’ll get better discounts when they go to your guest house.
Blogger Joyce Ira
Describing oneself is always the most difficult part in writing. You’re always lost for words to say about who you are and what you do. So let me try my best to make a sweet and short introduction of who Joyce Ira is. I am a committed educator in an international school, a full-time mom and wife to my loving husband and children, a frustrated writer who loves to rant on many things around me, a queen in my own kitchen especially on weekends, a nature-lover who appreciates the beauty and energy the world gives, and a traveller who adores to see different places, experiencing great culture exchange. I believe that every person is unique with special abilities, our purposes varies from our day to day life and from what we do. In my own opinion, life is short so we should never make it complicated for we only have one time to live it in the fullest. I know I am not perfect but my imperfections make me a better person. Ciao!
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Joyce this was a great article that I would love more of our Zambian clients to read! You say, "You have to keep in mind that a successful business is accompanied with great strategies" but there seems to be a lot of strategy lacking in the majority of travel accommodation providers that I have come across in Africa. What can we do about? How can we educate people to plan, strategise and get it right? If we did, in the process we would raise the profile of Africa as a wonderful destination with quality accommodation and services?
Hi Sara,
Thanks!
Marketing is such a broad topic. Being able to work in an advertising and marketing company for 2 years, I was able to learn many things.
First, you have to learn the 5 P's, which are:
1. Product
2. Price
3. Place
4. Promotion
5. People
Being able to understand the 5 P's, you can easily streamline the needs of your target customers to the services/products that you offer.
Second, be pro-active in marketing your guest house. There maybe many strategies around us but not all of them will work for everything. I suggest that extra research will give you more information on how you can be ahead of the others.
Last, Africa is such a beautiful continent to visit. There are many places to discover and yet so little information we can get. I think, if we help hand-in-hand together with other same businesses, we will be able to achieve what we aim for. And of course with the government's help, we can easily promote Africa's golden culture and heritage.