Best Practices

Best practices

• Social Media Advertising - If you are going to advertise, we highly recommend social media advertising.  It's a lot less expensive and has better reach for getting in front of your target audience.  Advertise on Facebook as this does match most target audiences for B&Bs. 

  • You can create your own ad or boost a post.  If you create your own ad, the process on Facebook is easy to do. Follow prompts.  Start with a one week ad and test. We recommend the following

    • Do either 30 sec video ad or 3 to 5 images carousel ad.

    • Copy - first line should be call to action - Check out our specials. 

    • Button link - make sure it goes to your specials page, room descriptions or book direct link depending on the goal of your ad.

• Google Business Page - update your profile with social media links (new as of 2023)

• Explore Asheville - It's free!  Avl TDA spends a lot of money promoting that site so you want to leverage their promotional marketing.  B&Bs get leads from this site!  Can do featured listing ($100/month). Recommendations:

  • Annually meet with our Explore contact, Shelby Pearsall. She will review your profile, help you update and make recommendations on how to optimize.  All specials or special events should be added here.  

  • You can appear in multiple categories -lodging, wedding and even 'places with views' etc. Ask Shelby for details.

• Romantic Asheville - Affordable and can list in more than one category - lodging, wedding

• Social Media - We recommend posting content (which is now searchable on google) at least 2x/week.  Younger audience is on Instagram; older audience is on Facebook; and Facebook groups by interest are very popular. Example: Hallmark Christmas Group is very popular!

• Blog - why we recommend it... Provides organic SEO to your site.  Blogs are for google and people who are searching.  These are not meant to be award winning editorial articles and yes, some visitors do read them.

• Email Newsletter - Still the highest ROI for cost.  Each email to each subscriber is pennies on the dollar and one conversion which means one booking more than pays for the entire cost of the email platform for a year.  Your cost to write the content?  That depends.  Repurpose your blog into the email newsletter.