Marketing Strategies for your Rustenburg Guest House
We have explained the importance of a marketing plan in our article Marketing your Rustenburg Guest House and the significance of marketing to your target audience by communicating to them your unique value proposition.
There are several strategies any guest house owner can deploy to reach his target and get his message across.
Website Design and Content
A properly designed website is essential for any guest house. It is the showroom of your guest house. Potential customers need certain information to make a decision on where they want to stay. Clean crisp photos, videos and graphics will are necessary to give them a good idea of what to expect. Well-written text describing all the facilities and things to do at the guest house or nearby will assist in their decision to make a booking. Ensure all information your customers need is available.
ShowMe Online Media is a very professional website design company and caters for all needs and budgets. Invest in a proper website. It will be the first impressions a potential guest will have of your guest house. Make it count.
A website on its own will not necessarily bring in the business. People first need to find your website. Most people these days uses the internet to find accommodation.
Website – Search Engine Optimisation
A website should have certain keywords in its text for search engines like Google to know what your website is all about and where to rank your website on its search results.
Good design companies like ShowMe Online Media normally includes a proper search engine optimisation (SEO) when designing the website.
Proper SEO wouldn’t necessarily guarantee a number one spot on Google and it can take several years due to competition with other guest houses’ websites with similarly good SEOs.
Community Website Listings
Community websites like ShowMe Rustenburg receives voluminous amounts of traffic through publishing information about tourist attraction, local businesses, accommodation, upcoming events and entertainment, local news etc. This enable community websites to compete with highly ranked websites in many different categories i.e. accommodation for example.
You can advertise your business on ShowMe Rustenburg for a fraction of the cost of printed, social or internet media. Furthermore you can submit articles or news relating to your business, upcoming events, and photos of past events at no extra cost. You would be surprised at the volume of traffic this type of content can drive to your own website.
Website – Google Adwords
Everyone can’t be number one on accommodation or guest houses searches, so Google has introduced Adwords. Adwords allow businesses to pay for their ranking and have their Websites appear on the first page of Google results. Prices are determined by the competitiveness of the search word and bidding offers from other guest houses. ‘Rustenburg accommodation’ for instance is a highly competitive search word and therefore very pricey. This is an effective way to drive traffic but very expensive.
Social Media
You can create accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest etc. for your guest house but to drive traffic to your website you need followers and to get followers takes time and lots of money. You can target certain people by boosting or advertising a post of your facilities but this is also a very expensive way to drive traffic.
Accommodation Listings
You can market your guest house on one of several big accommodation listing websites. These website have been running for years and normally have a very good search engine ranking. Normally they will take a fixed percentage of the bookings made through their websites for your guest house. This is also costly but effective.
Lamp-post and external banner advertising
This is a great method to target local people should you have a wedding venue or conference facilities. It is a great method to make the locals aware of your brand and facilities. Unfortunately, its shortcoming is that when a need for a wedding venue arises, people turn to the internet. They don’t go around driving looking for wedding venue details on lamp-posts. It is also quite expensive.
Local Newspapers
Similar to lamp-post advertisement, advertising in local newspapers are great reaching a local audience. This is a very expensive method of advertising and very ineffective if your target audience is located in every other location outside of Rustenburg and never receive a copy of our local newspapers.
For more on what ShowMe can do for your business – click here.