Are you struggling with marketing your STR hospitality business? This episode of the Get Fully Booked podcast explores the common discomfort many STR hosts and property owners feel towards marketing their business and offers insights on how to embrace it.

Sarah shares her extensive experience in marketing and hospitality, emphasising that promoting your business is essential for growth and success. She encourages listeners to reframe their perception of marketing, viewing it as a way to connect with potential guests rather than something pushy or braggy. By sharing personal anecdotes and practical advice, Sarah aims to empower hosts to take control of their marketing efforts, ultimately leading to more direct bookings and greater profitability.

---

Key Takeaways:

• Marketing is essential for STR hospitality businesses to reach more potential guests and grow your profit.
• Many STR hosts and property managers feel uncomfortable with marketing, but reframing it can change perceptions.
• Using online agents can help initially, but direct bookings significantly increase your profit margins.
• Comparison with other businesses can lead to fear and judgment, impacting your marketing confidence.
• Embracing our mistakes and learning from them is crucial for effective marketing in small businesses.
• Engaging with a community of fellow STR hospitality hosts can provide support and encouragement in our marketing efforts.

---

Connect with Sarah:

Website

Instagram

LinkedIn

---

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 thanks for joining me for this week's episode of the Get Fully Booked podcast.

I'm your host, Sarah Orchard, and today I'm back with a solo episode. So I wanted to share with you today a topic of Share a little bit of the love and help you to fall in love with marketing your business.

Now, don't cringe. This really is so important.

And actually it's something that I hear, like I said, I hear all the time where my members and clients will say to me, oh, I feel really icky about my marketing. I don't like doing it. They've even used the words I hate doing my marketing. So I thought it was worth exploring this topic because it fascinates me.

Now, obviously, I have been in marketing for 30 years. I'm a Chartered Institute of Marketing, Chartered Marketer, and I'm a fellow. So I've been doing this for a long time.

However, I'm always a little bit intrigued and actually always a little bit delighted when I can help through my membership, the Fully Booked Business Club, to get reactions from fellow hosts who then turn around and say things to me like, I love doing my marketing. I really love doing it now. I hated it before, but I love doing it now.

And I think it isn't just about mindset, but it is about thinking about marketing in a different way. And I've explored that a little bit in this first series of my podcast.

So do I'll mention some of the episodes that I think you'll also find interesting because they sort of go quite nicely with this one. But I think the first point is that most of us that are in hospitality feel like we didn't get into hospitality to do marketing.

We ultimately wanted to be a host, although some people fell into hosting without intending to be a host, but we didn't intend to be a marketer. So obviously I'm a little bit unusual in that I'm a marketer first.

And obviously then four years ago, my husband and I, we set up a hospitality business, which is the Hudnalls Hideout Treehouse, which you may have seen on my socials. And if you've been sort of in my world for a But I do have a travel and tourism and sort of Hospitality background.

My mum actually ran a bed and breakfast for I think it was seven years or nine years when I was a teenager. So I've had quite a lot of exposure to hospitality before actually running our own hospitality business.

For many of us, you know, we love looking after our guests, you know, that's what we give, gives us pure joy, although sometimes even they can cause us stress. But the majority of the time that's what we, you know, we wanted to do and we enjoy doing.

So marketing is not something that people will put high up on their wish list.

Now there are a few people who that's not the case, but it's the majority of, you know, people that I've come across in my membership and my clients will tell me that, you know, marketing is something that they don't feel that comfortable with and that's probably why they've sought me out and have come into my membership, is because they want to feel more confident and have better knowledge or know how to do, to do their marketing. But for me, marketing is just telling, you know, more potential guests what you offer.

It's putting it out there so that they can discover you and choose to pick you. So actually it's going to give you more guests to look after and to be happier. So ultimately, hopefully it's a win win situation.

But when we're small business owners, you know, we do have to do the marketing. There's the reality is that most of us don't have the budgets to outsource it to another company.

And there are some people who maybe their partners in marketing or a friend and they might help them out or they might outsource it to a company. But the majority of us have to get to grips with our marketing if we want our business to be out there and discovered.

And interestingly, you know, we don't, we don't hear big organizations like Walmart or John Lewis was a retailer in the uk, sort of saying, you know, I don't think we'll tell people what we have for sale. I don't think we'll promote what we've got on offer.

You know, ultimately all of those businesses are telling people exactly what they have on offer and that's all we're doing as small business owners. So I think some people find it, you know, and they feel it feels braggy or like you say, it's pushy, makes them feel icky.

You know, all of those descriptors I've heard over the years, it just generally makes them feel uncomfortable that they're almost Almost like showing off. And funnily enough, it's quite a British thing.

So for any of you listening who's in my sort of UK audience, it's quite a British thing to not want to show off or to be too pushy and, you know, in people's faces.

So maybe it's just a British thing, but ultimately, you know, we do need to tell people and we should feel proud of what we have to offer and be telling people about it. So I think some of that is just reframing how we think about marketing and what we're doing in our business.

But secondly, you know, marketing is ultimately vital for our business success. If you want to explore this idea more, check out episode one of this podcast where I talked about the money is in the marketing.

And I explored a little bit about why marketing has such a bad reputation.

Because obviously, as a professional marketer and someone who's, you know, a chartered marketer, which means I have to continually show my skills every year I have to prove that I'm still capable and qualified to do marketing, marketing for other people's businesses. And I'm a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing in the uk.

It does always make me quite sad that marketing sometimes has such a bad reputation. But I explore that in more in episode one. So do go and check that out.

But, you know, marketing, ultimately all it's doing is getting us to our business goals and our financial success that we want. You know, that's why we're doing it. We're not doing it for vanity. We're not doing it to be showing off.

We're doing it because ultimately commercially it gets us in our business to where we want it to be. So I'd love for you to share with me, maybe send me a dm, connect with me on Instagram. I'm etfully booked.

You know, go and send me a message and tell me, you know, why you love doing your marketing or why you don't love doing your marketing, because I would love to hear a few more.

Like I said, I've heard lots of reasons in the past, but I'd love to hear from my audience on this podcast, you know, how you feel currently about your marketing and how that makes you. Makes you feel.

So I thought it'd be good to sort of maybe talk a little bit about why we feel the way we do and maybe helping you to sort of embrace the journey of learning to do your marketing. And it may be something that you really don't want to do.

Maybe you just decide that you're going to use an agent like Airbnb, you know, booking.com, etc. Any of those, and they are doing your marketing for you.

So that is definitely, you know, if you really feel like you don't want to dip your toe into the marketing arena at all, obviously you can get them to do it for you, but you pay a handsome price for that in terms of commission. But, you know, that is what they're doing for you. They are acting as your marketing department, and they are doing your marketing.

They're your marketing manager. They're out there doing it for you. So I thought it'd be good to sort of think about, you know, why do we.

Why do we avoid our marketing and what's that due to? I think sometimes it's a little bit of a fear, a fear of failure. You know, if we trust.

Put our trust in someone like Airbnb or booking.com or, you know, someone else to promote our business for us, we can blame them if it doesn't work. And we'd hope that they know what they're doing so they won't be a failure. There could be an element of judgment.

You know, we feel like other people will be like we have comparator nitis will be. You know, we judge ourselves against how other people are marketing their businesses.

You know, they're posting more, they're doing reels, they're really successful. Look how big their following is. Look how busy their booking calendar is. Oh, my God, I'm doing a really bad job job.

So we sort of have that element of judgment and sort of comparison. And we maybe also feel a little bit like, what if we get it wrong? Because ultimately, that does have some financial consequences for our business.

So we might fear that if we get it wrong that, you know, we'll have an empty booking calendar. You know, obviously that has a financial impact.

And often I work with hosts who have maybe started off with an agent like Airbnb, and then they decide that as their confidence and their business grows and maybe they've got more to grips with the operational side of the business, that they have more. And maybe their personal circumstances change.

Maybe they leave a job or have more time or the kids grow up and leave home and that, you know, they have more time to. To do the marketing themselves, and then they want to, you know, they want to take that on and they have the, you know, the capacity to do it.

And sometimes starting with an agent is a great way to hit the ground running. You know, like I said, no judgment.

I Always think, you know, if you haven't got the time to invest in learning how to do your own marketing, there is nothing wrong with using an online agent. They're doing the heavy lifting for you. They're helping you to get in front of the right customers.

But obviously, you know that I'm also a huge fan in the fact that there's a huge financial benefit of having that more profit in your pocket if you can actually, you know, do the marketing yourself.

As I've said, you know, we've saved, or I've saved our business, the Hudnalls Hideout Treehouse 65,000 sterling, which is about $85,000 in the first three years of business. That's just three years of what we would have paid an agent if all of our bookings had gone through an agent rather than 100% direct.

So that, you know, the financial gain can be huge. But ultimately, you know, we have to get the know how and the confidence to do the marketing.

And that's obviously things like I created my fully, the fully booked business club, which is my membership, because of that. Because I could see that that was a real barrier.

It was such a consistent thing that kept coming up with my clients when I worked with them and I helped them with their marketing strategy. And then it's like almost like I let them loose and I was like, please, you know, implement what we've discussed and the plan.

Because for me, if the plan just sat there and it didn't actually get put into place, that's like a disaster for me. That's like, you know, I do what I do because I enjoy seeing people getting the results. So ultimately that's why I created my membership.

That's exactly why it was created, so that clients that worked with me could then go into the membership and have ongoing support and get the confidence and they know how to do their marketing. So that's how that all came about, really, to try and help people as that stepping stone.

Because I could see that that was like a really big hurdle for people that, you know, they'd have the strategy and the plan in front of them, but they'd still be like paralyzed by the, you know, what if? And like comparing themselves to other people and like that fear of failure. E.T.

i mean, I suppose the good thing is that there is no exact formula that's like good and bad, because there is. Although I have like my seven step marketing system that I use where I've simplified the marketing process for hosts, for holiday businesses.

Ultimately everyone's business is different. Everyone's goals are different. So there can be some fundamental pillars to the marketing that we do, but ultimately there's no exact formula.

But that's good because that means that you shouldn't really compare yourselves to other people because actually your marketing will be different because your, your ideal guest might be different, your business circumstances, your goals will be different. But, you know, the bad news is also there's no silver bullet either.

So there's no like exact formula or silver bullet that I can say that if you do X, Y and Z, you'll get, you know, A, B and C. It doesn't work like that.

But ultimately, I think part of the journey of running a small business, you know, I've been, like I said, I've been in running small businesses for nearly 20 years now. We may mistakes, you know, things we get wrong, things don't go as we planned.

Whenever you're planning your marketing out, you know, you have to make some assumptions. You have to write down goals, but you have to make some assumptions of you're going to do X, Y and Z and this is what will happen.

And then part of that is learning what works, what doesn't work.

And that's why it's quite important sometimes to surround yourself, you know, to use resources like this, like this podcast and others, and to be in communities and groups of fellow hosts who can share their experiences. Because I think otherwise. Working in a small business can be very lonely sometimes. Like I do now with the Hudnalls Hideout, I work with my husband.

Aid it can be hard working with your partner. So not only working and get fully booked on my own can be isolating. I have a small team of people that I work with that makes a difference.

I love running my membership with all of my hosts because that means that I'm surrounded myself by a community of positive, ambitious fellow hosts who share ideas and we cheer each other on. So, you know, I think part of running a small business is embracing all of those challenges.

I definitely would not want to go back to work in like corporate. And I know that so many people I speak to have maybe hospitality sometimes can be like a second career people often have.

It always amazes me some of the very varied and different things that my members have done in the past. Lots of weird and wonderful and exciting things that they've done in the past.

And maybe now they've become a host and they're running a hospitality business. And I think, you know, people can be doing it for so many different reasons. And so there definitely is no, like completely Right or wrong answer.

And there definitely is not, you know, one way that one size that fits all. And this is the way that you should be doing it.

So I think we should all embrace the journey and think about, you know, the excitement of learning and seeing the results of the success that we create. You know, I recently put a reel out that did incredibly well.

Not quite gone viral, but, you know, by my categories and my criteria, I'm thinking it's done pretty well. And I'm more excited about the fact that it's reached about 87% non followers, which obviously means we're getting in front of fresh people.

So, you know, these little wins that we get in our business can make us excited. You know, that first email campaign that you send out and you get like a 40% open rate and then you get a couple of bookings from it.

You know, we get a buzz from that. You know, you've created that. You've created that success for your business. You're in control of it.

So hopefully through this podcast and through some of my resources that I have on my website, do check out my everything page. It's got lots of free things in there to help you with actually getting started with your marketing for your holiday business. Enjoy the journey.

I think that's my, my last point. I'd say, you know, maybe approach your marketing with a more playful mindset. That's what I say to my, to my members. Be playful with it.

Don't see it so much as right or wrong. Enjoy experimenting. Enjoy seeing what works.

Enjoy seeing the successes that you can create and the delight that you can create when you then obviously have your guests to stay. That's why we're all doing what we're doing. So thanks for listening.

I will be back next week for the final episode of this first series of my very first podcast series. And I've got a totally inspiring guest. So I'd like you to come and check out episode 10 next week.

A huge thank you to everyone who has supported me so far with this first series and all of my lovely reviews. I really do appreciate it and 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. See you soon. 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!