[00:00:00] Hi, it's Karen here.
And as usual, I am joined by Saffy the dog. Who I have tried to distract this week by giving her a chew on her sofa. And Ralphie is in another room with his chew. It's always safer to have the two of them in separate rooms when they have something rather than nice to eat. I'm the founder and owner of the Bed and Breakfast Academy.
I help aspiring and existing B&B owners to create a B&B lifestyle. You're going to love living and to attract guests who become loyal and repeat customers. If you're new to this podcast, hello, I've been running B&B Academy since 2006, and I also ran my own B&B, Hopton House, here in Shropshire for 17 years. I have changed many hundreds of B&B owners over the years, pre-COVID.
I ran classroom training courses, but now I deliver all of my training online, apart from [00:01:00] the occasional tourism marketing course, which I run locally. The great advantage of training online is that you can do the training at your own pace, and I'm able to deliver much more consistent content. Welcome back to this 52 weeks to taking control of your B&B marketing series. In today's marketing tip, which is number nine, we'll discuss how understanding your ideal bed and breakfast guests can simplify your marketing efforts. Even if you haven't set up or bought your B&B yet, this is still important to know. It's crucial for aspiring B&B owners to have a clear image of the ideal guest. This knowledge will help you create a B&B that your guests will enjoy.
And just as importantly, one that you will love running. I'm aiming to deliver 52 ideas for you on [00:02:00] how to market your bed and breakfast in just a short time each week. Just taking those tiny steps to take more control of your own marketing and hopefully generate more direct income. If you're wondering where tips number six, seven, and eight were, they were all included in an email I sent out a couple of weeks ago. If you're not already on my email list, please head along to my website where you can sign up. I send an email once every one to two weeks with details about the latest blog and podcast. The tips I sent referred you to other blog posts that I've got. Number six was six reasons to write people off for your bed and breakfast. Number seven was how does Pinterest work? And why you need it for your B&B. And number eight was three reasons why email marketing is important for your bed and breakfast. So if you head over to my website, you will find them there on the blog somewhere.
If you [00:03:00] prefer to listen to the podcast, I go into a bit more detail with examples and you'll find those wherever you listen to your podcasts, whether that be Apple or Spotify or wherever else you listen.
So what is an ideal B&B guest or IBG for short? This is the person who loves everything about you and your business. They keep coming back to stay. They tell all their friends about your B&B. And to market your business really well, it's important to get crystal clear on who your ideal B&B guest is and to get to know everything about them. Whenever you write your blog, you send your newsletter, you post on Facebook or Instagram, you have your IBG in mind. Imagine you're talking just to them. It becomes much easier to know what to post and write about. When you're talking to, for example, a dog [00:04:00] owner who loves long walks in the countryside or a parent who wants a nice B&B to stay at whilst also looking for something to do with their children at half term.
If you haven't set up or bought your B&B yet, if you've yet to start on that journey, then it's essential that you get clear on your goals for running a B&B. And some of these would include getting clear on why you want to run a B&B, understanding what sort of B&B you dream of having, knowing the type of B&B owner you want to be, what sort of lifestyle do you want it to be, and who your ideal B&B guest is. The chew didn't last very long. Saffy's gone to her blanket and started chewing it. Which she only does when I'm about to record a podcast. So anyway, knowing all of this information upfront will significantly improve your chances of creating a B&B that your guests will [00:05:00] love.
And you're going to love running. And if you need to borrow money to get your dream business up and running, it will also significantly improve your chances of creating a successful business plan. I cover these important first steps in the first steps of running a B&B mini workshop, which you can find on my website. If you head to the menu bar at the top, it's there. And also there you'll find where I go into detail about all the information you need before you start running your B&B in the setting up, running, and marketing Airbnb main course. So quick points about ideal B&B guests. So while a huge percentage of my guests, probably over 80%, I don't know exactly, I never kept exact figures, fell into my ideal B&B guests category, I also attracted other guests who didn't fit the mould at all. And quite often, they loved the B&B too. [00:06:00] My ideal guest tended to be couples, maybe in their mid-forties to mid-seventies. They liked walking, they liked the countryside, they quite often had a dog. But quite often they would send their kids to stay as well. They were grown-up kids, not the younger kids, and they would love it as well.
So even though their grown-up children didn't fall into that ideal B&B guest category, they were still great guests at my B&B and they loved it. But almost without exception, on the rare occasion I didn't have a happy guest, I'd already recognised that that didn't really fit my typical guest profile. And I say rare occasion. I believe that I had very few guests who didn't get what I was doing here because of my marketing. I didn't use the OTAs and I made it very clear in my marketing what type of B&B I was and the [00:07:00] type of people who would enjoy being here. And it wasn't because I treated these people any differently. In fact, if I felt a guest wasn't happy at the B&B, I'd invariably overcompensate and always go the extra mile for them.
And another really important point, this isn't about who you will and won't accept at your B&B. Let's be absolutely clear here. Identifying your ideal B&B guest doesn't mean refusing guests who don't fit into that category. Instead, it's about identifying them to make it easier for you to, first of all, create a B&B tailored to their needs and to simplify your marketing. I'm having real problems with the word "simplify" for some reason today. So apologies for that. It's really important to be aware of your local discrimination laws. You must ensure that your marketing strategy and the setup
of the B&B doesn't [00:08:00] discriminate against individuals based on protected characteristics.
And you'll find more about these protected characteristics on the Equality and Human Rights Commission website here in the UK. If you just Google protected characteristics, I'm sure the exact page will come up. And obviously if you're listening in another country, you'll need to find out what the laws are in your own country. So, uh, from legalities back to marketing your B&B. Can you have more than one ideal B&B guest? And the answer is yes. At a B&B, you may have several ideal B&B guests and that's great. But when it comes to marketing, it's a good idea not to have too many or you're just going to make things much more difficult for yourself. Maybe three or four max, ideally less. Knowing your ideal B&B guests and who you're talking to when you're marketing makes your marketing so much easier. [00:09:00] My viewpoint is, and it may be controversial, is when you try to attract everyone, you end up attracting no one. Or fourth year people that you'd actually want to come to your B&B. And actually, this was the biggest mistake I made when I was setting up my B&B and one that cost me a lot of money. I can quantify what it cost me in hard cash, because I spent money on advertising in the wrong publications and I also bought the wrong B&B equipment, which had to be replaced when I finally worked out what I was doing and who I was targeting at the B&B.
But I would have also lost money, which I just can't quantify by putting off guests that might well, otherwise have booked. So I don't know who came to my website, looked at the way I was marketing my B&B and said, no, it's not for us.
And the mistake we make is thinking we need to appeal to everybody. So imagine if you were trying to attract cat owners and dog owners and [00:10:00] people who didn't like pets or couples on a romantic break, as well as families with young children, businessmen who needed peace and quiet. You've got different markets that are potentially not going to work that well together. So by trying to attract everyone, you're going to be putting someone off. If you welcome children, you may put off the romantic break people, honeymooners, or silver surfers. If you welcome dogs, you're going to put people off who don't like dogs.
There's just a couple of examples. But, as another example, by positively welcoming children and making that clear in your marketing, you will be attractive to parents with children who are still traveling with them, and it would be easier for you to market to those potential guests. In fact, the more specific you get, the easier it is to find guests. And the more attractive your B&B becomes to [00:11:00] them. What do I mean by that? Children come in all shapes and sizes. My grandson is a 15-month-old toddler at the moment. And if you specifically target guests with toddlers, for example, offering a B&B that welcomes and specifically caters to them, you'll become much more attractive as a destination to parents of toddlers, rather than, say, parents of teenagers, who have a whole load of different needs in a B&B. And once you start talking about the details of specifics appeal to your ideal B&B guest in your marketing, they will start to remember you and you'll stand out from all the other B&Bs.
Your ideal B&B guests can change over time. You might've been running a B&B for a long time and have a very clear idea of who your ideal B&B guests are. But during the events [00:12:00] of 2020, when we had all the lockdowns and people couldn't travel, many B&Bs saw a shift in the demographic of the type of guests that came to stay once they did reopen. Overseas travel became much more difficult at this time. UK B&Bs were attracting guests who would normally travel overseas and they came with a whole load of different expectations of what they wanted or would get from a holiday. And even without the dramatic shifts that happened due to COVID, B&B guests can change. When we created more contemporary rooms in a separate annex here at the B&B, we saw a change in our market and a very different type of guest coming to stay.
An external factor may have an effect on the type of guests visiting you. Maybe a long-distance walker's opened up, so you attract more walkers or one-night stays. We're on the heart of Wells railway line here and we're just a couple of minutes [00:13:00] walk from a request stop. And a few years ago, they opened a trail, which is where you could walk from station to station. And that seriously increased the number of bookings I was getting from people who just wanted to stay one night, which wasn't something that I was offering at the time. So, you know, again, it changed my potential demographic and had I decided to move to one-night stays, which is a whole nother podcast, I could have potentially attracted a lot of business that way.
Well, maybe your own life circumstances or viewpoints have changed. We didn't originally accept dogs at the B&B when we first opened because we had a very elderly rescue dog Tess, who was scared of other dogs and it just wouldn't have been fair to her to have other dogs coming into her territory. But when she died, we adopted Mitsi and Murphy, who were two very easy-going dogs. [00:14:00] Who respectively loved Mitsi and couldn't be bothered about Murphy about other dogs.
We once when Mitsi was older, we had to get up at four o'clock in the morning to let her out and she disappeared for an hour and I was getting really worried. And she's actually gone over to the guest room who also had an elderly dog and who she loved. She absolutely adored Sammy the Greyhound. And she just got into that room, settled down next to the Sammy for the sleep. Well, so I was sitting around pacing with a torch trying to find that. So when we got Mitsi & Murphy, I made the decision to become a dog-friendly B&B and that turned out to be one of the best business decisions I ever made.
So that was a case of changing. The B&B I was running and then changing the marketing. If you are thinking of running a dog-friendly B&B, I wrote a blog post a month or so ago, a few months ago, which is a practical guide to running a dog-friendly B&B. [00:15:00] You'll find that on my blog on my website, B&B academy.co.uk. So even if you've been running your B&B for a long time, it's worth reviewing your marketing messages to check if they are still relevant. So what do you need to know about your B&B guests? I go into this in much more detail in the course, but here are just some of the things. You need to know the approximate age range, are they traveling solo as part of couples or family? Do they typically bring children? What activities do they enjoy when they're away? Hobbies they have. What types of books do your guests like to read? What do they prefer to eat
for breakfast? Or are they just full English people vegan, vegetarian. What aspects of your B&B do your guests often praise? What do they, uh, do when they're away? What complaints do they usually have when they're staying at your B&B? [00:16:00] What features of the local area they love? Do they use social media? Do they have any concerns or worries about staying at a B&B? And if your guests are in the UK, which part of the country do they come from? If they're not in the UK, where in the world are they from?
And the end game really is to create wonderful profiles for your ideal B&B guest. Describe them. I like to give them names. And then whenever you're doing any marketing, bring them to mind and write your marketing. Copy. That's your blog email, your social media caption, as though you are writing it just for them. So, how are you going to find out this information? And this is where we go back to that. These files I've written about in blogs or talked about previously on the podcast. You've got your smile file. You'll find more about that in Take Control of Your B&B Marketing in 2024. [00:17:00] You've got your FAQ file. So how to use frequently asked questions for effective B&B marketing. And then those negative reviews. And that is in the blog and podcast, which is using negative reviews to market your B&B.
You could also think about guests that come and stay with you and look for similarities between them and start to build up a few profiles for your ideal B&B guest. So to wrap up, understanding who your ideal B&B guest is key to simplifying your marketing efforts. Simplifying and speeding up. I seem to have got the hang of the words. Simple. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I knew I was risking that simplify. And creating a B&B that both you and your guests will love. Your IBG is someone hurdles everything about you and your B&B. They return often and recommend you to their friends. Whether they're a dog owner who loves long country walks or a parent looking for half term activities, by speaking to them directly in your [00:18:00] posts and newsletters.
It makes it much easier for you to decide what to write. And just remember that having an IBG doesn't mean refusing guests that don't fit the mould. But instead, tailoring your B&B to meet their needs and supplying your marketing. And while you might have multiple, ideal B&B guests, try to keep this number small to avoid complicating your marketing efforts. Okay. I've finished. Um, Thank you for listening to me today. And I look forward to speaking with you in the next podcast or on the next blog, do head over to my website,bandbacademy.co.uk
For many more blogs. And also a growing library of podcast episodes. And as I said, you can find my main online B&B course, How to set it run and market a B&B, and also the mini workshop, which is the first steps of running a bed and breakfast, which is for those of you who aren't [00:19:00] sure whether running a B&B is for you yet or not. If you are listening to my podcasts on Spotify or apple or somewhere else, please do go ahead and hit the subscribe button.
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Thank you very much and enjoy the rest of your week or weekend whenever you are listening. Bye for now.
