Personal touch

I think I’ve mentioned before that we decided very early on not to sign up for any of the main booking sites, like Airbnb or booking.com. We believe that the personal touch is just as important as whether you have availability, so we wanted to be fully engaged with our guests through their booking journey, giving them advice, and helping them plan their trip, whether it’s for one night or all week. We felt we could market our business ourselves, using our social media accounts and our business networks built up over the years.

We had a very successful first year with the B&B in 2022, and this year has started well, but we know it’s important in any business not to be complacent, so yesterday we took some time out to think about our media/marketing strategy.

It’s a pretty simple affair, but we both work well with some structure, so we took the time and committed pen to paper, noting down our ideas and formulating a plan. It focusses on our Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, supported by our newsletter and website. Word of mouth (or sharing of our content) is also very important to us.

It’s not surprising then that content creation is one of our most discussed topics, with frequent questions around ‘what can we share?’, and ‘what would interest people?’. Instagram is more straight forward than LinkedIn in that respect, so we had to look at the different types of content we could share on each platform.

We are both very mindful that things have to stay fresh and relevant, so we also spent some time this week updating our ‘Places to visit’ page on our website. We still have a lot more we’d like to add here, which we will do over the coming weeks, and continue to add places as we discover and visit them.

It’s great fun when we get it right, and really rewarding when we receive likes and feedback. Here’s hoping our plan comes together and we have a successful 2023. 🥂