A brand new Innkeeper remarked to me that they had spent a lot of time prior to buying the Inn discovering why people came there.  With that knowledge, they were going to change their marketing plans to try to attract as many of those people as possible.  As he said, “People can read a book anywhere.  We have to know why they want to come to our Inn.”  This struck me as being on the right track.  Now he needed to expand this planning process to include all of the questions necessary for Innkeepers to devise a comprehensive marketing plan for their Inn.  This topic will explore these five marketing questions in greater depth with the hope that it will help Innkeepers to discover the information that is critical to marketing planning.

1. What?  What is the product?  What exactly are you selling?  Here you need to look closely at your website to make certain that the images that you portray in both pictures and words are exactly the image that you want to convey to your guests (both prospective and repeat).  Are you selling romance or respite or adventure travel?  What happens at your Inn?  What do they do once they get there?  Basically, how do you differentiate your Inn from all of the rest of the places that people can go to for a stay in your area? 
2. Who?  Closely related to the “what” question is who are you?  Who are the Innkeepers?  Not just their names, but who are they as people?  What are their interests?  Guests will tell you all of the time that in a small operation like a Bed and Breakfast, they need to know who you are before they will commit to come.  If your website is silent on the “who you are” question, then you are missing an opportunity to show that there are real people running your Inn and not an anonymous manager.  You do not need to give up all of your privacy, but you need to put faces on your business.  It is the essence of personal marketing. 
3. Where?  This seems like a simplistic question.  It is likely that every Inn’s website tells you where the Inn is located and how to get there.  However, location can often times be a real challenge for Innkeepers, especially if they are not in a so-called destination area.  Google and the other search engines are location driven; you need to have a specific location to get very accurate search results.  So it is not a best inn search, but really a location search.  If you are not in a recognizable search location to most people who are coming to your area, you have to find a way to come up higher in more generic location searches.  If you are located in a historic destination area where people from afar recognize the name of the location, you still need to differentiate your Inn from other Inns in that same location.  Thus, location is not necessarily a simple question, and leads to the next important discussion. 
4. Why?  For marketing purposes, the “why” question is perhaps the most important one.  As our novice Innkeeper put it, “If I don’t know why they were coming to the Inn, how can I possibly figure out a marketing plan to increase occupancy?”  It used to be a little simpler to figure out why people are coming to the Inn.  In the past, when reservations came in over the phone, it was always essential to ask the guests why they were coming to your area.  This enabled you to help them with their plans and gave you the opportunity, with proper record-keeping, to understand in general the reasons why people came to your Inn.  With that information you could change your marketing to try to attract more of those guests.  Without that information, you are stuck with anecdotal information that some guests tell you while they are there.  The problem today, with the majority of reservations coming over the Internet, it is getting very hard to discover why these guests are coming until they get there.  
5. How?  This question is also critical to your marketing plan.  How did they find you?  Again, this was a question that we always were taught to ask on the phone, but it is somewhat harder to discover in the Internet world.  We need to have tracking devices on our various electronic media to determine who is clicking through to our websites, newsletters, etc. and what sites are they coming from.  Yet these tracking devices only tell us who looked, not necessarily who bought!  It is much harder to determine how people found your Inn over the Internet, even if they ultimately choose to call to book.  Most of the time, even when asked, they do not correctly recall which sites they looked at before they decided to make a reservation.  While these tracking difficulties are present with the Internet, you still need to keep as accurate tracking records as possible, because you need as much information as you can get to answer the “How” question.  It is simple essential to your overall success. 

So, before you start your marketing plan for this year, you need to spend some time considering these five simple marketing questions.  I believe that you will find them enlightening, and that, whatever the answers for your Inn, they will make your marketing plan better and improve your bottom line.

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