Earlier this month, Steven Dunston and Jeff Logan attended the Montana Bed and Breakfast Association conference in Kalispell. Jeff gave a presentation, “Get Going with Google”, which generated many great questions and an informative discussion. While there, they had the chance to visit all member inns in the region during the annual Poker Run — members and vendors get a card each time they visit an inn, and the winner gets a prize. Jeff and Steven almost won with two aces, but felt like winners because they were able to see first-hand many of the inns we promote.

More than twenty members were in attendance at the MTTBA conference, which is a great turn out for a small association. One of the most interesting presentations was given by the Montana State Travel Bureau. Their new website, visitmt.com, prominently features Bed and Breakfasts in the lodging section. Right now, they are marketing specifically to “geotravelers” – people looking for a unique travel experience that is geographically-driven. These are people who would rather head out to the mountains than down to Disney Land, and to catch their eye requires a new type of marketing.

The SEO department at InsideOut has been developing a marketing system for just this type of clientele. By encouraging inns to create blogs, written either by the innkeepers themselves or by our team at InsideOut, we are able to write about area activities and attractions on the inns’ websites. Thus a person who is interested in hiking and does an online search for hiking in Montana will land on a hiking blog for one of our inns. They may not have been thinking about lodging, and may never have considered staying in a Bed and Breakfast, but suddenly they find themselves reading about a great hike and discover that they are on a Bed and Breakfast’s website. It works.

Over 10 vendors showed up for this conference; pictured is Reservation Nexus. We see David, Ty, Jeff and Dave at a lot of the conferences, and it is always great to catch up with them on new services they are offering our clients.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 10:54 am and is filed under Conferences. 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.