3 Common Mistakes Your B&B Website Must Avoid
We often talk about all the right things to do with your bed and breakfast website, but not so much about mistakes your B&B website must avoid.
Your website is potentially the only piece of dynamic marketing you use for your B&B. Sure, you may advertise in printed directories, on online directories, and you may be listed on B&B review websites and have a sign outside your properties advertising vacancies, but all these forms of marketing are static and inflexible.
Your B&B website, on the other hand, is a flexible marketing solution, offering you the opportunity to modify and grow as your business grows, providing you a place to share recent and relevant news, and even offering the ability to allow your customers to book.
However, this flexibility often leads to problems of overcrowding. Just because your B&B website allows you to throw everything at a potential customer, it doesn’t mean you should. Today, we discuss three overcrowding mistakes your B&B website must avoid.
Too Many Calls-to-Action
The priority goal of your B&B website is to make bookings. Your website is there to get customers through your door. Never forget this.
You must be careful not to create ‘choice paralysis’ within your website. By making it easy for customers to book with one simple call to action, we find that we constantly push them in the right direction, essentially pushing your customers closer to walking through your front door with bags in hand.
When we start throwing multiple calls-to-action at them customers are paralyzed in a state of confusion. Customers don’t need to be told all on the same page how to read reviews and testimonials. Nor do they need to read the report created when your property was inspected. Nor do they need to know about every special offer you may have.
Keep your home page simple with one call to action to check availability and book. If a customer wishes to read reviews or find special offers, they will take it upon themselves to do so by visiting other pages of your website.
Too Much Text, Not Enough Photos
Too much text without enough photos on a single web page is enough to make anybody, or indeed anything, fall asleep.
When booking a B&B, I want to see photos. I’m not very interested in hearing about what the owner has to say because they’re biased. I want to see photos of the rooms and common areas so I can make my own judgement of its cleanliness and ability to meet my requirements.
Try to keep text short and to the point. Don’t tell a story when you can make a statement.
Be sure to include photos of each room if they are different, ensuring they are placed next to the text descriptions of the room.
Ensure your home page includes imagery of the outside of your B&B and the common areas. By doing so, you’ll entice prospects to read more and fall in to the sales funnel of checking availability that we discussed earlier.
Social Media Confusion
Social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, are a fantastic way for you to market your B&B.
They allow you to target a huge variety of audiences and search for specific phrases that people are talking about. For example, searching Twitter for the phrase “traveling to XYZ Town” will potentially give you a list of people traveling to your area in the upcoming days and weeks that you can connect with and offer B&B accommodation to.
However, overloading your website with social media icons can detract from your goal of making bookings.
It’s important then to be careful about your positioning of social media elements. While it’s important to allow your prospects and customers to connect with you, it must be done subtly without detracting from your primary goal of filling your B&B vacancies.
Less is often more. Your primary goal is to encourage visitors to your website to check your availability. By pointing them in this direction only, rather than in multiple directions, your website conversion rate will increase.
How much information do you share on your home page? Do you overload visitors with too many calls to action or do you keep it simple? Let us know by commenting below.
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