27 – How to Market Your B&B

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

In this episode of Suite Spot, we focus our attention on the bed and breakfast segment of the hospitality industry. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Director of Marketing Anne Sandoval to talk about how your bed and breakfast property can stay competitive with the rising threats of Airbnb and vacation rentals. Ryan and Anne give tips on how to modernize your B&B’s marketing strategy and optimize your property’s presence online. They share several examples of how to leverage websites, social media, and online reputation in order to gain market share and grow online revenue. They also speak to the importance of responding to reviews for bed and breakfast property owners and how critical it is to maintain positive reviews online. If you are interested in receiving a consultation for your bed & breakfast property or to submit a topic request for future episodes, call or text 407-984-7455. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Ryan Embree: Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of the Suite Spot. I am your host, Ryan Embree. Got another great episode for you today, and one of the best things about working at Travel Media Group is the type and scales of hotels that we get to interact with on a daily basis. From those 500+ room resorts to those smaller hotels, maybe mid-sized hotels all the way down to properties that might be less than 10 rooms a bed and breakfast for example, which is a great transition into what our episode today is going to lead us and we felt like this was important to focus on, the bed and breakfast market, because they are in a situation that's competition with Airbnb and vacation rentals that are coming up along with the local hotels that are also pushing for market share. So in a competitive landscape like we are in 2019, we thought it fitting to talk about your bed and breakfast property and what you can do to market and grow your revenue. Ryan Embree: So who better to speak with us about marketing for a property than our Director of Marketing Miss Ann Sandoval. Welcome to the show Anne. Anne Sandoval: Thanks so much for having me again, Ryan. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. I wanted to talk to you. Um, you know, right off the bat about kind of where a good starting point is, uh, for these bed and breakfasts owners, um, that might've had this property for years. They haven't had to deal with, again, the competitive landscape of, you know, vacation rentals, airbnb's maybe they condos close to them now are selling for Airbnb's. Where do they start when it comes to creating a marketing strategy? Anne Sandoval: Yeah. So when we talk about a marketing strategy, a lot of these initial tips are going to be really just the foundation of understanding your property and your local area and really taking a look at what your current situation is so that you can then figure out what new strategies you can implement. So you may already be familiar with the answers to these questions about your property, but I think it's important to ask them and revisit them. First, taking a look at what the advantages and disadvantages are about your property and figuring out what guests love and how you can leverage those things. Next, analyzing the competition in your local area. As Ryan was just talking about, there are more and more lodging opportunities for travelers coming to your location, and so it's important to know if you want to get more market share, where is the market share going right now and what properties out there, maybe on Airbnb or maybe more traditional hotels are your biggest competition, and paying attention to what they're doing to market t...