The Money is in the Marketing

Sarah Orchard: 00:00:23

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 to the very first ever episode of the Get Fully Booked podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Orchard and this has been on my business wishlist for quite a while. So I'm super excited to be here with you today and I hope you enjoy this first episode. Now I'm starting with a bit of a controversial topic. Brave I know! I'm going to be diving into why marketing has such a bad reputation. I hear so many of my members and clients say, "oh, I feel so icky about marketing my business". They don't feel comfortable doing it. So I thought we needed to deal with this little elephant in the room from the start so that you can get to your business goals and master your marketing for more direct booking.

So I really, really want to try and tackle this one. So this should be quite entertaining in terms of this debate about marketing and why it has such a bad reputation.

So why does it have such a bad reputation?

I think people have like the visual of intrusive ads and like spammy emails, maybe overly pushy salespeople that pester you when you haven't really given them permission to market to you. Maybe manipulative marketing tactics that have been used on you in the past. Generally it makes people feel uncomfortable.

And I think for me, the key thing about good marketing is that it is about consent. It is about permission-based marketing.

The best marketing is marketing that is two things. One is that it's permission-based. So you have things, like for emails, you have consent or they're your past guests, so you know that they are happy to be talked to about your business and what you do.

And it's also about being relevant and timely.

If marketing is delivered at the right time and in the right way for your audience, it is never received in a bad way. So I think we need to reframe how we think about it and bad marketing, which is done at the wrong time with pushy tactics, not permission-based, definitely not good. But I'm hoping that with my help and support, the marketing that you do will always be good marketing and not bad marketing so that you can maybe reframe marketing a little bit in your head.

And I think this leads on to my second point really is if you are in business, you are in marketing and sales, because ultimately you don't want to be the best kept secret on the internet in terms of not being found as a business. And you need to be found, you need to be telling people what you do, because otherwise they will not buy from you. Ultimately, when you run a business, no matter what it is as a small business, but particularly if you're a holiday or hospitality business.

So whether you're a short term rental, holiday let, glamping business, boutique bed and breakfast, you know, ultimately people need to know that you exist so that they can buy from you.

And one of the biggest challenges, and it's a typical thing I see when I do a marketing strategy session with a client, one to one, is that he key issue for them is that visibility, it's that being seen, that brand awareness, we call it as sort of marketers, which sounds very, you know, like grand, but ultimately it's about being visible, about being found by people when they are looking for what you do, because you can have an amazing guest experience but if nobody knows that you exist, you're not going to be full, you're not going to get the bookings at the end of the day. And it is probably one of the hardest things is visibility and being found online. And just so many holiday businesses are completely invisible to their ideal guests. So those people are out there, they are actively looking for what you do and they want to spend money with you, but they don't know that you exist.

So marketing's job is the bridge between what you offer and those that need it and therefore you are fulfilling a need for an individual.

People buy for four main reasons. I would say they have a need, problem, pain or desire.

Now, people probably, when they're going on a holiday, don't necessarily have problem, but they probably have a desire or a need. A need to get away from the kids for a few nights because they're driving them mad! The desire to treat themselves or to celebrate an anniversary or a special occasion. A need to get away as a family and have some quality family time, and get away from your work, for example. So people's behavior is driven by that need and you are simply fulfilling that need with what you offer. So I think if you start to think about your marketing in that way, rather than thinking about it as something that is overtly pushy or, not well received, for the person that's receiving it, if they are at the end of their tether with the kids and they just want some couple time, and they want to go away. And you happen to offer, like we do, a luxury treehouse, which is couples only, no dogs, no children, and that they can come away and have that experience. You know, they are not looking at what we do in a negative light. They're looking at it in a really positive light in terms of what that creates for them, in terms of memories, how it improves their relationship, how it just helps them to reconnect with each other and have some quality time together.

So that's not a negative thing. That's a really positive thing. So I think you need to think about just reframing what marketing actually does, when it's done well.

And obviously, as I said, if you avoid those mistakes at the beginning, in terms of it being not permission-based and not relevant to the audience, and you're trying to sell them something that they don't want, that's obviously negative, but if it's something that someone is desiring. And they're looking for, they have a need.

Marketing is literally just that bridge. And ultimately it will define your success as well. So marketing and sales go hand in hand, and they ultimately define whether your business stays in business.

So I thought I'd just share an interesting fact with you.

Did you know that the average marketing return on investment (ROI) is five to one? So for every pound or dollar that you put in to your marketing, you should get a five fold return.

So that's pretty impressive in terms of what it can do for your business.

So, typically, if you're thinking about how much money to spend on your marketing, you're looking at about 2% of your turnover or your gross revenue, is what you should be spending on your marketing. But your ROI, in terms of your return on that investment, in terms of that funds that you're spending. So if, say, you're putting $2,000 or pounds into your marketing, you should be getting £10,000 pounds or dollars worth of revenue in return.

I don't know about you, I'd be pretty happy with that!

That's a pretty good return on investment.

So my last point that I thought I'd cover today is I'd like us to think about marketing in terms of defining your success. Because I often find that people don't make the connection between marketing and your business goals. Like it's somehow on two different planets or something.

For me, when I do a marketing strategy with a client or people that go through bootcamp programme, is we start with the business goals.

We start with both your financial and your personal, maybe lifestyle and personal goals that you have for your business and we work back from that because marketing actually enables you to deliver those goals. Marketing's pure job, whatever we think of it and how you frame marketing, it's definitely not just about putting ads out there or doing some stuff on social media. Ultimately, marketing's job is to help you get to your business goals. It's to make you create that success so you know, it gets you the sales and the direct bookings that your business is looking for. It helps to make your business predictable.

If you're using your marketing to grow, your direct bookings can save you considerable amounts of money, that ends up being profit in your pocket rather than in the pocket of an OTA, someone like Airbnb or booking.com.

So to give you an example, in my business, The Hudnalls Hideout treehouse, which is our holiday business, my marketing over the the first three years of our business has saved us £65,000 / $85,000 approximately, of revenue. That because we've got 100% direct bookings. That would have been in the pockets of an OTA, or an agent.

So for me, doing my own marketing and getting those direct bookings gives my business not only better profitability and more revenue and money into our business that we can then choose what we do with that, and obviously with advice from our accountant, how we manage and run our business. But ultimately, that is money in our business that we can decide upon. It just makes our business so much more predictable.

And for me, that is the massive mindset shift in terms of thinking about your marketing is that it is getting you to your business goals. And business goals don't have to be just pure financial, they can be personal as well in terms of your lifestyle. You can choose how busy you want to be and how busy do you want your booking calendar to be?

We were trading in the first year, three years actually, at 96% occupancy. We were 100% booked, basically. So we had a few gaps with the odd little night here and there, but we were open all year round. We closed for Christmas week only and we were trading at 96%. So, that occupancy level is great. However, it's exhausting. Three changeovers a week, back to back all year round.

Anyone who runs a holiday business that's open all year round, you know how that feels. So ultimately, we made a decision as we went into year four, we wanted a bit more time for us. We wanted a bit more time, so we backed off a bit. And that's the point. Your marketing can flex it up and down. So we decided we wanted to be at about 80% / 85% occupancy, still pretty good, still 100% direct. But we did not want to be operating at that level of occupancy because we were not taking holidays. We were just squeezing in little weekend breaks, we check guests in on a Friday and then we'd head off for a couple of nights. That's not the same as having a proper holiday. So this year we made a decision to have four holidays. We blocked out time in the calendar. We wanted to close the business because we couldn't relax if we had other people running it, because we were always worried that something might go wrong. And we decided that was our choice.

The point is, your business, your rules, you're in control.

And then when you're doing your own marketing, you're also in control about how much you promote or don't! So, for example, we've got a few gaps in our calendar towards the tail of the year. I'm probably not going to try very hard to shift those. You might laugh at that, but I actually quite fancy a breather.

So when it's your business, you can decide.

You can decide how many months you operate, how much the calendar you want to book out, and how busy you want to be. Your business, your rules.

And actually by being in control of your marketing is, you can decide what that looks like for you.

It could be that you're doing it for a set number of years and that you want to retire. So often I'll have conversations with clients about their exit strategy, and that might seem like a weird thing to discuss when you've only been, like we've been in business four years, but we've already planned our exit strategy. We know what our longer term game plan is because that affects how we approach the marketing in the business. It can also affect, for example, if you want to sell the business, if it's linked to your name or maybe to your location, so that can restrict you selling the business on in the future or growing the business. So having that long term view of your goals and also of your exit strategy will influence your marketing. And how you do it. But ultimately, your marketing delivers your goals. And it delivers the financial success that you're looking for.

So it is definitely not a dirty word. So that brings me to the end of this episode.

Thank you so much for listening.

I will be back next week with a guest host who will be sharing their holiday business marketing journey and what's been working well for them. It will be packed with loads of actionable marketing tips and real life experience. Definitely not loads of theory.

So if you 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 time.

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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