Our Inns

We’ve been talking up to now about getting your online advertising going, but what about advertising in print?

Print advertising has a number of quite different characteristics than online advertising which are useful to look at before you get the chequebook out and buy some advertising.

Firstly, it’s almost never free and usually costs a significant amount of cash even for a fairly small advert. Typically you’re looking at a minimum of £60 for the equivalent of a classified advert and it’s typically around £500 to get into one of the holiday brochures with an equally small advert.

Second, it’s limited in size. That £500 may only get you about 100 words and one photo.

Thirdly, it’s time sensitive. This means that if you advertise in a newspaper you’re usually advertising for one day, perhaps for a week in a magazine and a few months in a holiday brochure.

Finally, the lead time can be substantial. To get into the 2009 holiday brochures you need to have your advert with the company by June 2008. That in itself can cause problems if you’re starting up as you may not have that one perfect photo yet.

If you’ve lots of properties to advertise then you can obviously spread the cost between them and perhaps go for a larger advert covering them all. However, even then the photos that you use must be chosen to make your property stand out. As with our example here, your photo should very much be “in your face” as you’ll be competing with page after page of photos of cute holiday cottages in the brochures.

OK, so it’s expensive, the information you can print is limited, it’s time sensitive and there’s a long lead time, but does it work? That’s perhaps the biggest problem: you won’t know ’til you spend the money and try it out. There aren’t any free trial periods for the brochures so you can find yourself out £500 with no return or alternatively out £500 with very substantial numbers of bookings. On the whole, print advertising tends to work fairly well for self-catering properties but poorly for B&B properties. Nobody seems to know why that should be but it’s clear that a typical B&B is going to need up to 40 times the number of bookings as a typical self-catering place so possibly it’s just down to there not being that number of people looking at the brochures these days.

However, if you’ve decided to try it out, what should you do and where should you advertise?

For a quick hit, the best places are magazines focusing on your area as you’re going to reach an audience that’s interested in your general location to begin with so you just need to tell them a little about your place. In general, the tighter the focus on holidays and on your area, the better. For example, say you’re based in France. You could advertise in something like National Geographic’s Traveler if they’re doing a special issue on your area but even then as it’s a general travel magazine you’re not going to have the focus on people interested in your area as you’d get from the much lower circulation of something like French Property News. Not only is it going to be substantially cheaper to advertise in French Property News but you’re going to reach an audience that is already interested in France so part of the job of selling is already done.

Lead time for magazines like this is around one to two months and you generally get offers. Bearing in mind the time sensitivity aspect, you should aim your advertising at issues that will be on the street when you’d expect people to book your place. For self-catering places, this is usually 3 to 6 months in advance of the peak season, for B&B around 1 to 2 months in advance.

For a more sustained burst, something like Chez Nous for around £500 will put your property in the brochures for around 6 to 9 months. This publication doesn’t work well for B&B so only consider it if you do self-catering. One good alternative for this is to get into the travel agents brochures directly which you can do via some wholesale sales places. These look incredibly expensive as they charge you commission of from 25% to 35% but they seem to be one of the few ways you can get your property in front of travel agents. I’ll be covering these later.

For both straight-forward advertising and hitting the brochures, you need to work on the text of your advert. You’ve only got around 100 words to play with so every word needs to count. Whilst it must be easy to read, it also needs to have all those important key words in the text. Likewise, make it easy for people to contact you for more information: quote your website, your e-mail address and a low-cost phone number that they can use. That last one is very important as many bookings are made in working hours and a lot of people can’t phone internationally from work so you need to have a local number that they can use (UK local rate numbers are free from our services page). Check that all the contact details are correct!

If you’re using a photo, it needs to be perfect and one that’ll grab their attention. Ideally the photo shouldn’t have any clouds in the sky and the sun should be in the perfect position to get everything lit to perfection. What’ll grab their attention depends on where you’re advertising. Taking Chez Nous, you’ll find page after page of photos of cute Breton cottages on their Brittany pages and, frankly, few of them seem to have made any effort to make their place stand out from the crowd. If you make that effort, you’ll be rewarded with bookings.

For the online advertising option, why not sign up for our free trial? Unlike many, we’ll not constantly pester you to upgrade to the paid version.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Advertising, Owners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.