5 Ways to Get Started Marketing your STR Holiday Business for More Direct Bookings

Sarah Orchard: 00:00:00

You're listening to Get Fully Booked with Sarah Orchard. Are you ready to master your marketing so you can ditch your reliance on the online agents and grow your direct bookings?

I'll be sharing with you exactly what it takes to grow your direct bookings and the simple marketing steps to get more profit in your pocket. Hello and welcome. You're listening to the Get Fully Booked podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Orchard and today I'm bringing you a solo episode.

Do check out last week's episode if you missed it.

I love to speak to guest owners who can share how they've applied the marketing strategies in their business and really just share it in a real life, practical way. No wishy washy ideas that haven't been tried and tested and proven to get results.

So it's always great to talk to a fellow host and learn from what they've been doing. So today I thought I would like to go back to basics and look at the fundamentals of marketing to get your own direct bookings.

So when we launch our business, we tend to get stuck in.

And as I've said previously, I see so many businesses that just launch headlong into posting on social media because a few so called gurus will tell them that that's the only thing you need to do to market your business. I'm afraid I disagree. So let's revisit some of the foundations.

That can mean that you can grow your direct bookings to a level that you want for your business and whatever that percentage looks like for you. If it's 20% or 80%, there's no judgment from me.

You know, my business ethos is all about empowering you so that you can master your marketing to get more direct bookings. If that's what you want. If that's not what you want, you're probably listening to the wrong podcast and you need to go and check some other ones out.

But you know, it's great to have you here. So let's get started. I think for me, the starting point for, you know, growing your direct bookings is knowing who your ideal guest is.

This is a bit of a marketing 101. You know, it is a fundamental that you have to know your ideal guest. You probably hear people talking about guest avatars and Personas.

I don't really care what you call them. I'm not going to get into the semantics of that.

But you know, ultimately the reason why it's so important is if we don't know who we are trying to attract to our business, we're going to miss the mark without this. All of our marketing that we do will miss the target.

So we're literally like spraying and praying and hoping that some of our marketing messaging and you know, the marketing that we're doing actually hits the spot. So marketing is all about communication.

So we are, all we're doing basically is communicating what we have on offer to the right people at the right time for them, in the right way for them so that they take action. It's as simple as that. People like to overcomplicate marketing.

I don't, I want to try and make it as easy to understand as possible and so that it doesn't frighten you, doesn't make you feel like it's not something that you can do or that you've got to rely on the likes of the big OTAs like Airbnb and booking.com to do it for you because you can't do it. Because you most certainly can do it.

I'd like to think about marketing without knowing your ideal guest is a bit like getting into your car to go on a journey and you have no sat nav and you actually have no idea of actually where you're heading. So you just get into the car randomly and you start driving. Have you ever done that? No. I think generally we always know.

Maybe some people have done that.

Maybe if they've like trying to get the kids to go to sleep or something like a baby or a dog even, they might put it in the car and take it for a drive probably around the block. But that's not typical. We tend to get in the car because we're going on a journey and we know exactly where our destination is.

Otherwise if we don't know where we're going and we have no, you know, we have no satnav or we have no map, we haven't planned where we're going, we're going to get lost. And that's exactly what your marketing is like if you don't know who your ideal guest is.

So I have my own unique marketing system which is a seven step marketing system that I've developed over the years of all the years of like near 20 years of working with, with hospitality clients. And it's called the Customer Delight marketing blueprint.

And the first step that we start with, step one is called discover because it spells out delight. And there is a reason for this. It's discovering who your ideal guest is.

Because for me, this is the missing link for so many hosts in their marketing. Typically when I work with a client and I'll be talking to them about their marketing strategy if they have one. That's the problem.

They do not know who they're trying to target. And they'll often say, well, anyone can stay with us. Yes, that is strictly true. However, it's not the best way of approaching your marketing.

If you take that approach, you are literally spraying and praying and hoping that some of those people. And if you just try and appeal to everyone, you've probably heard this expression, if you try and appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.

And it is so true.

I think we fear that if we niche down, we are focusing in on a very small segment of people and therefore it's going to narrow the audience, limit our ability to market and the people that we can attract. And therefore we are actually reducing our audience and then reducing our ability in terms of audience and potential customers.

But that's not the case when you're a small business. The smaller your audience, the better in terms of the effectiveness of your marketing.

The next thing I'd like to talk to you about is, for me, a key starting point is a book. Direct website. So again, we tend to, when we're approaching this, when we're launching our businesses, we tend to often try and see this.

Well, we see this as a sort of a big startup cost, so two mindsets. I think we get people that think, I'm going to do this really professionally and I'm going to use a pro person to create me a website.

And we have others that go, this is an expense that I don't want to spend. So what is the cheapest way possible that I can do this? Or maybe get a friend to do it? Maybe one of your kids.

Maybe I'll get a template or maybe I'll just, you know, I'll just have a Facebook page, or I'll just be on social media and I won't actually do anything in terms of having a website. Major, major false economy. Your website is your best marketing investment that you will ever make in your business.

And ultimately you own it, you control it, which you don't do with any of the other. Like if you're using an agent like an OTA like Airbnb, you have no control over what they do with their business.

They're constantly changing it, making it either harder or more expensive for you to potentially use their platform. Or if you're using social media, say you're on TikTok or Instagram, you're building your house on someone else's land.

People use that expression all the time. However, it is incredibly true because who knows what those platforms are going to do, who knows whether they'll be around in five years time.

Whereas the only two things in terms of your marketing assets that you own and you truly own is going to be your website and your email list.

So getting a friend to do your website can be, can be quite risky in the long term because I have met clients who have basically that friend has decided that they are moving to another country or they no longer want to do anything to do with websites and then they just walk away and you're left there with something that you don't know how to edit. It's a bit like a white elephant. It's sort of sitting there looking semi pretty.

But ultimately you, you know, you don't know how to do anything with it. So, you know, you're probably gonna have to start again, which is going to cost you a lot more money in the long term.

So to give you an Idea, we get 23% of our bookings from Google.

As I've mentioned previously, we get between 65 and sort of about 60 and 80,000 visits a year to the Hudnall's Hideout Treehous website, which is my holiday business, and 23% of our bookings, which is our top source, come from Google.

So that web traffic, which is free because I've optimized the website so search engine optimization, SEO, you probably hear that expression a lot, actually pays dividend. We're quite big on social, but ultimately our biggest source of bookings, that's nearly a quarter, come from Google.

So as I said, if you had, I've mentioned this, you know, if you have a bricks and mortar high street store, what you want is footfall.

You want people to come into your, you know, walk up the street, come into your shop and you want your shop window to look as good as possible to lure them in. That's exactly what your website is. It is your online digital shop front.

And you want people to ultimately be, you know, to make that website sticky so that people stay on it. They like what they see, they get all the information that they want and they make that booking directly with you.

So a sort of a key fact really about, you know, websites and why they're such a great investment is I've mentioned about, you know, building your house on somebody else's land. You know, is your landlord on your side? You know, if you're using Facebook or you're using, you know, maybe you've used someone else.

Like I said to build it. You know, are they on your side? They're not. They're not you. They're not your business. And it is quite a risky business strategy.

If it's your website, it's your rules.

You can decide exactly what you do with it, whether you build it and ignore it, because you were just absolutely relieved that you got it done and it done and dusted. But ultimately, you're in control. It is your business.

You are firmly in control, which you're not with the other options in terms of social media or relying on an OTA like Airbnb or booking.com cottages.com, sykes, etc. So the last thing I want to sort of talk about today is building your own marketing machine.

And I've talked about it a little bit, but I think the key thing really, in terms of getting direct bookings is taking back control, is giving you that control over your business. So knowing who your ideal guests are and where they look for holiday inspiration. So, you know, do they go onto Google?

Are they on social media platforms? Which ones they might not be. I've got one of my club members went through my bootcamp program and she came to the revelation.

Ideal guest was a real revelation for her. And she suddenly said to me, sarah, my guests aren't on social media because of their profile. They don't use Facebook, they don't use Instagram.

I've been spending hours on social and it's stresses me out and I hate doing it. And now I'm just relieved that I know that my guests are not on there. So her focus has very much been on blogging.

Well, her website, SEO, blogging, and thinking about where her audience actually hangs out. And it's definitely not on social media.

So, you know, building your marketing machine is about that first step of knowing who your ideal guest is, but then also thinking about with your website, for me, that is like your biggest investment, your best investment, making sure that that's optimized so that you get found. I think the other top tip I'd like to share with you today is start collecting emails from day one.

We actually, when we launched the Hideout, we literally opened our email signups. When we broke ground when we started building, which was nine months before we opened, and we'd built up a list of. It wasn't huge.

It was 500 by the time that we launched. However, I did a launch offer and those 500 people, we literally, in 19 days, we got 50 bookings. And that wasn't from.

We did have a social profile, but we didn't have a huge social following. It was purely through driving anticipation and excitement with that email list. And you know, 50 bookings was 30% of our first year's bookings.

So to get that in 19 days from the point where the website opened and people could book online and we knew when we were opening, that was massive.

I see so many businesses that are either building a glamp site or they're opening a short term rental or holiday let and they basically open it and then go, right, okay, now I need to get some bookings.

So you know, I would encourage you to start thinking about collecting email addresses and if you've been in business for a number of years and you're not collecting email addresses, start doing it today. You know, that would be a huge positive step for your marketing and being in control of your, you know, your own marketing machine.

There is a real over reliance on social media and yet I typically see, I spend a lot of time looking at Google Analytics, I probably ought to get out more. But I typically see between 10 and 20% is probably the highest level of web traffic that comes from social.

There are a few unicorn businesses where they might get like 80 or 100% of their web traffic from social. That's not the norm.

I've looked at hundreds and hundreds of holiday businesses from small Boutique Hotels and BnBs through to campsites, glamping sites, holiday cottages, big holiday houses, even wedding venues. And typically most people's social traffic hovers around the sort of 10 to 15% mark.

So, you know, if you're spending three quarters of your time on social media, I'm just saying maybe you can think about spending it somewhere else that might be more lucrative for you in terms of your website and your email marketing.

And as I said, the average click through rate social media is about 0.07%, whereas click through rates on email campaigns are really between 2 and 5%. And the open rates are so much higher than you get in terms of social posts.

So if you like to know a little bit more about email marketing, do check out episode four of this podcast because I talk about it in a bit more detail. I'd love you to check that out.

But you know, please always bear in mind that social media is never free because your time has a value and you've spent hours and hours on it. It has a trade off in terms of where you are focusing your efforts in terms of your marketing.

So there's just a few tips and ways to think about, you know, building that marketing machine building that capability so that you're able take more direct bookings. For me, those are the sort of fundamental areas that you need to focus on.

And as I said, you know, whether your target is to get just like 10 or 20% direct bookings or, you know, 80%, our direct bookings is 100%. We've been 100% direct bookings since the day we opened four years ago at this point.

And I'm quite happy that I've saved a considerable amount of money somewhere in the region of £65,000 or $85,000 that I would have spent on commission with an agent if I had gone down that route. I' much happier that that is actually in my back pocket rather than in their pockets.

Always makes me feel quite happy when I think about that figure and what that means for me and Adrian in terms of our business, running our business. So it can seem quite daunting to start doing your own direct marketing, your own to get direct bookings.

If you have been using an agent, I won't lie to you, you need to invest time and some money. You should be spending about 2% of your turnover. So your gross revenue on your marketing is never free.

But you know, commission is high, you know, 15 to 25% of your turnover. Some agents are, particularly in the UK.

There's one I can think of that charges 25% plus VAT which is also 20% on top of that in terms of what they'll charge you. Yes, you are buying marketing capability. You know, that's what you're paying for.

I like to think that, you know, always think of the commission as you're, you're buying admin and marketing support for your business. So that can be right for you and I would never judge you if you feel that that's the right decision.

Maybe you've got, you know, full time jobs and you're running your holiday business as a bit of a side hustle.

It's not your main income, but it can be totally viable for you to transition away from your reliance on the OTAs and on an agent to doing your own, your own marketing. If you're feeling a little bit daunted about it, do check out my resources on my website. If you go to get fully hyphen book.com forward/everything.

There's a list of loads of freebies and resources on there. I'll put a link in the show notes, but do feel free to dip into all of that to support you on this journey.

If you're looking to grow your direct bookings and that's it for this week's episode. So thank you for listening.

I will be back next week with a fascinating guest, a lady called Lorraine Robinson who has a wealth of hosting experience and marketing experience and she's been running campsites, holiday cottages and glamping cabins. So I know you're going to love her insights and marketing tips that we chat in that episode. So do check that out.

If you've enjoyed this episode, I'd love it if you could leave me a review. You know how much us hosts love those five star reviews. I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to Get Fully Booked with Sarah Orchard.

If you want to see if you are ready to ditch the likes of Airbnb and grow your direct bookings, put your business to the test with my FREE Direct Booking Roadmap Quiz, Head to my website, get-fully-booked.com/quiz and let's get you more direct bookings and more profit in your pocket!

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