Does this sound familiar? You've spent all your money and much blood, sweat and many tears to get your glamping or short term rental business finished and ready to launch. You pop it on Airbnb and tumbleweed. No bookings. Cash is running low. What next?

In this episode, Sarah dives deep into why the "build it and they'll come" approach is the fastest route to empty bank accounts and sleepless nights. Plus, she'll share her tried-and-tested strategies to get those commission-free direct bookings rolling in from day one.

You'll discover why starting your marketing BEFORE you open your doors is an absolute must for your business and why you need to get it in front of the RIGHT people at the RIGHT time.

So if you're about to launch your holiday business, market a brand new unit or that shiny new sauna you've added, this episode is for you!

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Key Takeaways:

• Marketing is essential to ensure guests can discover your accommodation; building it simply isn't enough.
• Understanding the booking journey is crucial for effective marketing and attracting guests.
• Relying solely on online travel agents can hinder visibility and lead to financial losses.
• Establishing a pre-launch audience can significantly enhance your marketing effectiveness and booking success at launch.
• Consistent engagement with potential guests helps build trust and increases the likelihood of bookings.
• A comprehensive marketing plan must be implemented well in advance of your opening date to maximise visibility.

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FREE GUIDE: Grab my 7-Step Launch Marketing Blueprint here

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Connect with Sarah:

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LinkedIn

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Are you ready to take more direct bookings?

Take Sarah's FREE quiz here to find out how ready you are with your marketing to ditch the likes of Airbnb! Put your business to the test...

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 a fresh, fresh new series of the Get Fully Booked podcast.

I'm your host, Sarah Orchard.

It's really great to be back.

Thank you to each and every one of you who's listened in to my first two series.

You've left me great reviews and told me your favorite episodes and I really appreciate you spending time in your day with me and sharing your thoughts on the podcast.

Do feel free to share it with more hosts.

And actually leaving a review also helps more people find the podcast.

So if you're enjoying it, do share away in this new series.

I have some amazing guests and I can't wait to share their episodes with you.

But today I'm with you for a solo episode and I'm looking at an issue I see so many times when you're refurbishing a holiday, let building a new or expanding your glamping site.

You sink all your time and money into the build, and then maybe when you get to about two weeks before you're due to open the doors, you think, hey, maybe I should do some marketing to launch this beast that has cost me life and limb to create.

Is that you?

This approach often leads to very empty booking calendars and a lot of sleepless nights as your finances run dry.

And then finally, you're in a desperate dash to Airbnb or another online booking agent to help fill the gaps.

I can almost hear you saying, if I build this beautiful cabin, cottage, treehouse, safari tent, insert your gorgeous accommodation here, they will come.

Well, I'm here to tell you that they won't come just because you've built it.

And that's the harsh reality.

So in today's episode, we're going to look at why the build it and they shall come approach is potentially business suicide.

The top three reasons that guests don't just appear out of thin air and what to do instead to actually get booked out.

So grab a cuppa and if you're mid changeover or heading out to scrub that hot tub, pop me into your ears and let's get started.

So let's start with where this whole idea even comes from.

You might recognise it from the film Field Of Dreams.

If you're old enough, if you build it he will come.

And it's a lovely, romantic idea, isn't it?

And I do think that when we're investing so much time and energy into a build, it's natural that we forget to think about what happens beyond that.

Sometimes it's such a struggle to get planning permission and to get your build over the line.

And it takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears as well as money to get to that stage.

But the reality is that just because you've built it, the guests are not necessarily going to flow through the doors.

You can have the most magical accommodation in the world, you know, with the wood fired hot tub, the sauna, the twinkling lights, the beautiful luxury bathroom, the luxury linens.

But if nobody knows that you exist, then nobody can book.

So this I have built it and they will come mindset often comes from two places.

I find the belief in the build alone.

Don't get me wrong, confidence in your space is great, but it can lead to complacency if you assume that just listing it with a couple of picks means that you're going to be full from the outset.

And the other one, the second one, is platform dependency.

So just relying 100% on Airbnb, booking.com or another specialist agent like Canopy and Stars to do the heavy lifting for you, and that can be fine in the beginning, but ultimately you pay heavily for that and I've talked about that on previous episodes.

Yes, they will do the heavy lifting marketing for you, but you will pay handsomely somewhere between 15 and 25% of your revenue back to them for that pleasure.

And the OTA platforms are crowded and your dream guest might never even see your listing because you can be very small fish in what is a large, I won't even say pond, it's more of an ocean.

So the truth is, building your space, your property is just.

Or your glamping site is just the first step.

And marketing is where the real magic starts to happen.

I thought I'd just share with you a little nugget that blew my mind.

Did you know that over 70% of travelers research off of the booking platforms before making a decision?

That means that they're googling, they're looking on Instagram or TikTok, they're asking their friends and they're checking reviews.

And they've estimated somewhere between 21 and 28 touch points is what we now need with our audiences before they potentially buy.

So ultimately we have to do some marketing and we have to be visible.

So if your only visibility is on your Airbnb listing, you're missing out on most of the buying journey.

That's almost just a very small percentage at the end.

The online travel agents, from the data that I saw, account for about 35% of the sort of purchasing behavior.

So actually you're only talking to a very small minority of the potential audience that is out there.

So marketing is about being present across multiple channels so that when your ideal guests are looking, they see you and pick you.

Okay, so I thought let's dig into three key reasons why this build it and they will come approach is going to fail.

Because people can't book what they can't find.

So without proactive marketing like your website appearing in Google searches, so your SEO, search engine optimization, not being on social media, PR partnerships, email marketing, your space can be a beautiful hidden gem that simply nobody knows about.

But your job is to make it easy for your dream guests to discover you.

So ask yourself, if someone searches for a romantic cabin getaway near Birmingham, would they find you?

I think we also need to fully grasp how travel bookers plan and buy.

And when I say travel bookers, I don't mean travel agents, I mean you and I planning our whole holiday trips.

You know, how do we, how do, what's our sort of our booking journey?

So depending on when you're listening to this podcast.

So the booking window is the gap between when someone books and they actually stay with you.

Now that's over two months.

Now we have all seen a shift to more last minute bookings in the current sort of tight economic climate.

However, my point is that if you do not get round to finally putting your marketing out there until 14 days before you open your doors to your first guests, it's way too late.

Think about that 82 days and I'm going to come on to share a bit more about the customer buying sort of journey and booking journey.

But those 82 days, if you only open up your bookings 14 days before you've missed the boat.

And this also doesn't, as I said, it doesn't take into account that a person will also be researching their trip and looking for inspiration.

So they've all Expedia have also Estimated that people spend 33 days on the inspiration stage where they're sort of just looking for ideas and then 38 days of actual research for their trip.

That's scary.

So doing too little too late does set you up for failure.

Now that doesn't mean you have to have your website finished three to four months before you launch, because that's unrealistic.

You've got an awful lot of other things on your plate.

But launching an is a key part of your marketing strategy and it does need a plan.

So I thought it'd be useful to look at what does work instead.

And I've got some tips here to help you hit the ground running.

So the first thing, and you have heard me talk about this before, is get crystal clear on your dream guest.

You have to know who you're marketing to.

Is it romantic couples?

Is it adventure seeking families?

Is, is it pet obsessed travelers?

The clearer you are, the easier it is to attract them and repel the ones that are not a good fit.

And you really do need to be laser focused, I think specifically when you're launching and you're up against it from a time frame point of view.

So the more focused you can be, the better.

The second tip would be to build a pre launch audience.

It's one of the things I did when we launched the Hudnall's Hideout.

I started marketing really from the moment we broke ground.

I didn't go out doing a huge amount of marketing right at the very beginning because we didn't have a lot to share.

But I opened up our social channels.

I started more importantly growing our email list.

So I put up a landing page, which I did with mailchimp.

You can do that quite easily.

You do not need a website to do it.

You don't even need your domain name to do it.

I had my logo and I basically set up a landing page where I could collect email addresses for people who were interested in this exciting treehouse that was coming.

They didn't even know what it looked like, but people signed up.

So at the point where we went live, we had 500 people on our email list.

I did a launch promotion with an offer and I got 50 bookings in 19 days from the moment that I hit go.

And that's when the website and the booking system went live.

And that was 19 days before we opened on the 14th of February.

So, you know, you can do things with a tight time frame, but only if you have done the pre work and you actually have, you know, built your audience up in advance.

So you know, start teasing on social media, start getting people excited about what's coming.

And my third point is you have to get good at storytelling.

You have to be seen post regularly, share behind the scenes, talk about what makes your space different, what you're up to.

Even people can be very interested in the actual build process.

I had one of my club members saying that they were putting a new roof on a barn he was converting and that like went ballistic on social.

You'd think it was the most boring thing in the world.

But people were fascinated with what he was doing and he got lots of traction with it.

But most importantly, you need to keep showing up.

So you know, marketing is like dating.

You wouldn't propose to someone on the first date.

The same thing with our guests.

They need multiple touch points before they'll be ready to book.

And they do need to see us regularly showing up.

It helps us build trust and credibility and it also gets them excited about what's coming.

And remember that path to purchase the average trip consideration window is 71 days.

That's the inspiration and research stage.

And then the average booking window, booking to actually staying with you is another 73 days.

So we've got 144 days that people are planning a trip.

And that was from an expedia research.

So it's not me saying that it was based on some hard, hard research and hard facts.

But that's why your marketing needs to be out there way before the two weeks before you accept your first guests.

But it doesn't necessarily have to be out there in masses of volume.

And I, you know, I strongly believe that those that leave it to the last minute are the ones that will struggle.

And if you've put these foundations in place, you will have that strong foundation for your business to grow on.

So let's recap.

Let just building your space, whatever that is, whether you're converting and refurbishing a holiday let or you're converting a barn or you're building a glamping site, that is not enough.

If you want to get fully booked, you need to show up early.

You need to showcase your experience and consistently put your marketing out there.

That's what great marketing does.

It helps people find you, trust you and say yes to your great new place.

Now if you need help with your launch marketing plan, I've got something for you.

I've got a free guide which is my seven step launch marketing blueprint.

It's got a handy checklist and it also has an outline for a teaser email campaign, some social media content to help you launch.

So it's basically got some things that you can just lift and use for your launch.

Marketing Also good if you are expanding your business and you're relaunch, maybe you're launching a new unit or even if you're opening after being closed for the off season, a really good opportunity to put these things in place to get people excited and get people hitting your website and making those bookings.

So if you'd like a copy of that free guide, my seven step launch marketing blueprint, head to my website get-fully booked.com everything and you'll find the guide there.

Plus some other fabulous freebies that I have for you.

So if this episode gave you a little aha moment, I'd love it if you could share it with a fellow host or Glampsite owner who needs to hear it too.

Thanks for listening in today.

I will be back next week with my first Series three guest which is Fiona Rees from traveltonic who will be sharing how to get your business into the media.

It's packed full of great tips so I hope you'll join me for that one.

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.

It's so good to be back and I will 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.