I wanted to know what would be the best methods/tactics to promote a guesthouse? The market is all people who want to visit the city and want some place to stay. Plus the marketing budget can not afford advertising so that is ticked off. I have got some plans myself, just wanted to get ideas from readers of BHW! Thanks!
Ideas about Guerrilla Marketing??
- Thread starter LarryGaz
- Start date
- Dec 26, 2013
- 5,946
- 5,396
Guerrilla marketing usually revolves around hijacking something and for example handing out flyers at an event. You could stretch that to say standing outside your rivals place of business, unauthorised signs etc.
That works ok with bars or restaurants but less so with a guest house, as people tend to book them in advance, so it is unlikely you can find an event to hijack, where people havent already booked somewhere.
So unless you want to move into the sex trade, the only thing i can think of is go to the local bus / rail station etc and perhaps you can find some disorganised backpacker types, who have got to town and have nowhere to stay.
But to be honest guerrilla marketing isnt the best way to market a guest house.
That works ok with bars or restaurants but less so with a guest house, as people tend to book them in advance, so it is unlikely you can find an event to hijack, where people havent already booked somewhere.
So unless you want to move into the sex trade, the only thing i can think of is go to the local bus / rail station etc and perhaps you can find some disorganised backpacker types, who have got to town and have nowhere to stay.
But to be honest guerrilla marketing isnt the best way to market a guest house.
What I wanted to say is that we are planning to do online marketing without much budget. We plan to do content marketing / affiliate programs and other things. Just wanted to know if there are any Black/Gray hat tactics you know about that may be helpful? Something like getting the Emails of those 'Disorganised Backpacker' people you mentioned? Thanks for your reply,btw
- Mar 10, 2010
- 42,695
- 107,139
I would think you could use a tool like scrapebox to find sites to leave your link on with a small advertisement in the comments section.
Should not bee too hard as many of those kinds of sites welcome comments as part of their interaction with their visitors.
Forums should also be huge if you play your cards right by starting out just interacting and then now and then drop your site in there.
FB groups will be similar to forums in how you would want to interact.
You will still pay as there is no inexpensive way to market only you will pay with your time, energy and creativeness as opposed to laying out cash.
- Dec 26, 2013
- 5,946
- 5,396
In addition to what @BassTrackerBoats says if your a local guesthouse you can be very specific about your marketing as you are only targeting people that know your town exists, just try to rank for very specific keyword searches, if you want to get instant results run an adwords campaign, see which keywords convert then pay for seo on them for the long term.
Similarly target influencers on instagram who mention that specific town and buy a shoutout.
None of that will cost the earth.
Similarly target influencers on instagram who mention that specific town and buy a shoutout.
None of that will cost the earth.
- Jun 20, 2013
- 11,506
- 8,918
If you dont have budget for advertising then all i can think about is posting on classified ads and other listing which you can do for free.
Thank you for your replies!
So, not trying to disregard what you said but I have already added these to my plans. I'll basically tell you what I plan to do already. So __
1. Commenting on Blogs (I didn't know any software for that, so thank you for mentioning Scrapebox)
2. Putting listings on Directories/Travel Sites/Vacation Rental Sites and then optimizing them. (any automation??)
3. Using Classified sites (any automation??)
4. Finding current Conversations in Forums/Ask Sites/Social Media sites etc. (using Buzz Bundle - any alternative??)
5. Creating a referral program and contacting influencers/bloggers/podcasters to join and also asking past users to recomment to friends for an incentive
6. Contacting bloggers/YouTubers/Podcasters to feature our story
7. Contacting Influencers on Twitter/Insta for shoutouts (any analytics software that tells me the demographics and the best time/day to post for that particular imfluencer for max impressions?)
8. Putting up all social media profiles and curating content plus using Jarvee for automation
9. Putting up a blog and doing SEO to rank it
Apart from this, is there anything else I can possibly do? IS there any way at all to get the Emails of people who want to visit the city, any way?
Thank You
- Mar 10, 2010
- 42,695
- 107,139
You could use Jarvee to find pertinent FB groups and use one of the services here to scrape emails from those groups.
There is at least one service on BHW that does that and I'm pretty sure there are more that one but I'm not 100% sure off the top of my head.
I reviewed one and got 73K emails and of those about 64K were clean and I emailed those people just fine.