4 Effective Ways To Boost Your Direct Bookings For Your Hotel, Guesthouse or Rental Property

Foreign. Much. To everybody that has registered and to everybody that has been asking questions over the course of the last few days, it's been great to interact with you. And hopefully over the course of the next hour, we'll be able to show you some new things or just go over all things that you may already know. A little bit of Housekeeping. This is Zoom, that we are using the webinar service. And if you have any questions at any point, you'll notice to the right or to the left of me, to the right of you, you will see a chat box. And this is where we would like for you to interact with Simon and I. You can ask questions, you can let us know where you are in the world. You know, we'll ask things for you and that's where you can respond. The first thing that I need to know, which would be a massive help to Simon and myself, would be can you hear us? Okay, can you see us? Okay, so in the chat box, which is to your right, to my left, if you could just type a little message and please let me know if you can hear us. Okay. So if somebody could please do that. We've got 40 people that are in. Barbara, thank you very much. Kelly, Caffeine, all good. I can hear you very well. Yeah. Yes, I can hear you clearly, loud and clear. Fantastic. Second question from me, while we're just letting people come into the. Into the webinar, where are you watching? So let us know where you're watching in the world. What's the name of your property? If you just comment and chat on that, that would be. That would be great. We're just going to let other people come in. So while we're doing that, Simon, would you just like to introduce yourself what you do at Bonanza? And I will then introduce myself after that. So away you go.

Yeah, sure. I've been working in the travel industry pretty much my whole career. I started working at the online travel agents. I was working@hotels.com and Expedia and I moved on to Orbit as well. Ebookers worked there for a period of time and then I worked at Rocco Forte Hotels. So on the hotel side and now I work at Hotel Bonanza and I work on the marketing. I basically handle all of the. I'm the CMO and all the marketing for them. And today just going to be talking to you about a few things. Google AdWords, matching options and some offline booking information.

Fantastic. Okay, so a little bit about me. My name is Mark Simpson and I founded a company called Blue Boost Lee, which is short for Boost Hospitality. Two years ago. I have grown up in hospitality. My parents, my family founded a 14 bedroom farm stay property years ago. It's in Scarborough, it's called the Granary. So the granary farm stay. I grew up there with my brothers and sisters. Got to about 1920 and I did what everybody did in our little village. We tried to escape and my escape was going to America and doing soccer coaching. So I started doing that for a number of years and then started doing a bit more traveling and doesn't matter, wherever I went to in the world, I always ended up falling back into hospitality. Whether it was working in a hotel, working in a bar, restaurant, you name it, it was just what I was doing. Came back to England in 2009 and then in 2012 I ended up moving back to the farm because at that point my parents been running the business about 25 years. They've always just relied on word of mouth bookings. They had a very basic website, weren't on any social media, on forms of any Internet. And after 25 years they needed to start to put themselves out there. The business was doing well, but it was going stagnated and they needed one of me, all my brothers and sisters to come back in. I came in and just, you know, got straight into it. I had learned from my travels about sales and marketing and Google and TripAdvisor and all that sort of things. And I was able to put that skills into the granary and we were able to grow crazy. It went really, really well. You know, direct bookings came up, we got into the top three of TripAdvisor in the local area and it got to about 2016 and I started to realize that there was a lot of people in the local area in Scarborough who needed a bit of help, who were struggling with how to get their business seen online, how to increase direct bookings, how to use email marketing. And I just basically mentioned to a few people at a local hospitality association meeting one day that I was thinking of starting a side business or helping hospitality owners. And that was October 2016. And here I am now today. Where it's a business is what I do. I help hospitality owners all around the world within the hospitality community, Facebook group through my website, which is boostly.co.uk just show simple tips. There's a couple that I'm going to show you today and there's loads more on there on how you can significantly increase your direct bookings. And the best thing is it doesn't have to be rocket science. There's tips and tricks out there that anybody can follow. Doesn't matter what you think your ability is. So that's what we're going to do. Thank you very much, Hannah. Hannah has very correctly pointed out that those of you that are new to Zoom, the chat window doesn't automatically open. You've got to hover over it. Click on the chat and then you can leave your comments and questions in there. Sharon, thank you very much for joining people from all over the world. It is amazing, just scrolling up and down. We've got people from Lancashire, we've got people from Victoria, Australia, from Greece. So amazing. Thank you very much. So just throughout this webinar, if you've got any questions, please put it into the comment section the last 15 minutes of this session. Today we're going to go over any questions that you may have even after this webinar is finished. If you've got any follow up questions, please feel free to reach out to Simon or I and we'll be able to answer them as best as possible. So the way that it's going to go, both Simon and myself have got two tips. Simon's going to go first, then I'm going to go and Simon, then me. And that's how the general running order will go. By the end of it, you'll have four potential tips that you can do to boost your direct bookings. If you can just get one thing from today, I know I'll be made up and I know Simon will be as well. So hopefully you've all got a pen and paper handy. If you've got any printouts that have been sent to you, any cheat sheets, please print them off and get them to hand. Make notes and questions you can ask later on. All right, Simon, all over to you. You've got the reins, you can share your screen and off you go, the floor is yours.

Okay, thank you. Okay, there we go. Okay, well I'll just leave it like this. Thanks very much for your time today. Basically I'm just going to talk about matching Options on Google AdWords. You probably may have used it before Google AdWords. It can get quite expensive but it is quite relevant. And so the problem with Google AdWords is that the default that they use makes it really easy for you. So when you load up your keywords you just go spending and Google does it all for you. However, the default is to set you up with these things called broad matching. So when you add your keywords they all go in as broad matching. And what that means is that Google will basically just decide for you what it shows. And it could be anything. I've seen just completely random searches coming through and this wastes a lot of money. So really, by using making use of matching options, you can reduce the amount of costs and create a lot more relevance in your campaign for the customer and obviously saving money and time and everything in the process. So I'll go on to explaining how matching options work and basically how to do this. So here's a list of the matching options. You've got four different types. Here on the left you've got Broad Match, which is the default. If you load the keywords in, they all go in like this. And as you can see, the actual matching that happens here, it matches with pretty much anything. So the actual keyword that you're using is Women's hats. Buy Ladies hats will be triggered on. And then you have another one called the Broad match modifier. Now, this is slightly more restrained and basically these terms have to contain the actual terms that you're writing in here. So you put a plus sign next to them. You've got plus women's and plus hats. And it has to contain both of those terms. And then the phrase match is similar, but the order is important. So basically the order that you've put them in takes preference. And so if you have the keyword women's hats, what it will do is it will put words before and after, but not in between. And then Exact Match is Exact Match. It's basically matching the exact words that you're putting in there. Now, obviously, if you go with Exact Match and you try and do all of your keywords in Exact Match, you're going to end up with really, really huge campaigns and probably quite unmanageable. So probably what you want to do is the following, really, I mean, essentially what you want to do, the more you get towards the Exact Match area, the cheaper it gets for you and the more relevant for the customer. And so you want gradually to get as much as you can into this Exact Match area as you can. So the benefits of Exact Match really is that they're much more relevant to the user. It's much easier to control budget on them because you know exactly what you're spending on. And you can direct the user to more relevant landing pages because you know exactly what the intention of the user is. You know exactly which landing page to send them to for that specific keyword. And so what does all this mean? I mean, essentially, yes, you can target people more easily, but what you really want to be doing is figuring out what searches they're actually doing and then what keywords are being triggered. And once you have that information, you can start basically building out more relevant campaigns. So take for instance, a phrase like London hotel, if that's triggered on Google, the actual search that the user might have done might have been Hotel London with wheelchair access, which is far more relevant. Now. The cost of London hotel is much higher. The cost of Hotel London with wheelchair access is a lot lower. So basically what you do then is you move your keywords from the phrase group to the exact match group. You create an exact match search out of Hotel London with wheelchair access because you got a sale from it or because you got a click from it. And so what you can actually do, it's pretty easy to do this inside your analytics. So you basically can do there's a specific report called a matched search query report. And what this does is it shows you the actual keyword that you bid it on. So the keyword in your campaign, if it was broad match or phrase match, and then it shows you the actual keyword that was fired, the keyword that the customer used. So you can basically do this each week, get a list of these and use them, use these additional keywords that aren't in your campaign yet to build out exact matches lists. And so basically you find keywords triggered by broader phrase and then you move these to the exact match. There's some other things that you could do inside the campaign as well. Basically you can increase the conversion window. It's actually quite high in the hotel industry. It takes a long time for users to actually convert, much longer than say on Amazon. So the average about 45 days. So I suggest really in your analytics and your AdWords and wherever else, you can really set your conversion window, your cookie window, for at least 90 days or more. And then basically you're capturing more information from your customers. Otherwise you lose this information and you don't really know where to invest. Another thing that you can do then is basically you can start analyzing your customer journey. Because the way Google Analytics works is it's only telling you about the last click that the user actually made. They might have visited your site four times in the time that they were searching. So there are reports that you can do inside to actually look at all these different attribution points. And so again, using the matching options with the multi touch points, you can figure out more information about what the customers are doing and then figure out where the ROI is going in your campaign and where to invest. So this really allows you to basically invest at the inspiration or the booking stage of the journey. So, you know, somebody searching just for hotels and London or whatever, you can invest in that stage or you know, they're also searching for your specific hotel name, then they're likely to book if they actually search for that. So it allows you to basically invest in different stages and understand what's going on in them. And that's really pretty much all there is to matching options. I'm going to pass you over to Mark. Basically this ties into some of what he's talking about because Google AdWords you can also advertising your brand, your brand name and the matching options, they basically help you to make sure that Google isn't showing you under any relevant stuff and they also help you to compete underneath your brand name more easily. So you can use these in that area.

Amazing. Yeah, thank you very, very much for that. Now if anybody's got any questions, please can you put that in the comments section, the chat section, the chat box, Please let me know that a. Can you see Simon's screen? Okay then was that all right? Also as well, please let us know if you've got any questions about Google AdWords and the matching options. Okay. Simon, have you stopped sharing your screen when you get a chance? So while Simon is figuring it out, I'm going to talk about. There we go. Thank you very much. So today I'm going to talk about the first thing is about bidding on Brandt and this is really keen and this is what I want to just focus everybody on right now. So there's first question from me in the chat for the 42 people and don't worry, we're going to mix it up between complicated and simple. Complicated and simple. Sharon, I know you just said that the screen was mine doll. Seem a bit complicated. Don't worry, we're going to give you some actionable advice even if you take one. So for the 42 people that are watching when I say the words bidding on brand name, does anybody know what that means in the chat box? Anybody that's watching? Barbara? No. Barbara again. Jan. Sharon. No. Sharon. Not a clue. A lot of no's. Great. I'm going to show you all and you can all do it. Now I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to show you a few examples. Bidding on brand name is a Google term or it's just a marketing term and what it means is that. So like I said at the start, my family business is the Granary Farm Stay in Scarborough. Our brand name is De Granary. Now, there are online travel agents out there and I'm not going to name names who are cheeky with this and the reason why. And again, this is coming back to one of the questions that I asked when you all signed up was what is your biggest pain point right now when it comes to marketing your business? And I had a lot of people come back to me and just saying, marketing, preventing everybody going to the, to other websites to book instead of coming directly to me. Now, one of the things that they do, one of the things that booking agents will do, is that they will bid on your brand name. So I found this by doing Google searches. And I'm going to show you a couple of Google searches when I share my screen with you, okay? And this is something that you can do straight after the webinar. Don't do it now because you're going to miss the good stuff. Do it afterwards. All right? And I found by just Googling the granary in our local area, which is Scarborough, that when a Google search comes up, you'll see that there's different results and they've got ad next to them. And that means that's a Google AdWords. That's what Simon was just talking about. That is that company has paid Google to appear at the top of the search. Now, what these online travel agents do is that they bid on your brand name so that when somebody would search for your hotel, your guest house, your rental, doesn't matter what you've got in your area, instead of your website coming at the top of Google, they do. Now, when I mention this to people, the first reaction a lot of people put was, well, who's actually going to be searching my name? And you'll be surprised. Number one, it could be a customer that has stayed with you in the past, maybe two or three years ago, has forgotten your website name, has forgotten your phone number, wants to come back and revisit you, your town, your area. It could be somebody who has been recommended to you. So it could be a friend, a family member, a work colleague. When somebody has left your property, they've got home, they've gone into work going, I had an amazing stay. Barbara, you should go check it out. It's called the Granary in Scarborough. They go onto Google, boom, boom, boom. They think that this is amazing. I want a trip to the seaside, I want a trip here. But instead of your website coming up, the first thing that they see is people bidding on your brand name. So Instead of whining about it or complaining about it, I'm going to show you how to fight fiery fire. But first, let me share my screen with you. Bear with me one second. So you're going to see my screen and you're also going to see my. Simon, could you do me a massive favor? Can you just mute your audio? I can hear all the keyboard types. Thank you very much. All right, so here we go. Let me play this. Bidding on brand. What is bid on brand? Now this is an example of bidding on brand out in the wild. So this is a Google search and I just went and did a random one in a local area, the White Lodge Hotel in Filey, which you can see here. So when this is the properties website, okay? And as you can See, Expedia and Booking.com have run Google Ads on their name. And this is the key part here, is that when they're running Google Ads on their names, they're able to manipulate what the guest or the potential guest sees. So look at these. Best price, guarantee, no reservation costs, great rates, save money, etc. Etc. Now, if you're a potential guest or if you are a potential visitor, which one would you rather click on? Are you going to click on the official website to get the direct booking or are you going to go in through here? I think we all know what the answer is going to be. So can everybody see this? Okay, can everybody see my screen? Now? While Simon was talking in the first bit, I did go off and I looked at everybody who has commented in the chat box right here, and I've gone to find a random one. So, Eva, Smugglers Cove, are you still with us? I'm going to show you right now your property, so please let me know if this is yours or not. All I've done is I've googled Smugglers Cove in Canada. All right? So I'm going to come out of here and I'm going to go into a Google search. So, okay, please let me know. Can everybody see my screen? Eva, is this your property? The Smugglers Cove in. In a thing. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so as you can see here, I've done a Google search and this is your website now. A beautiful place in Nova Scotia. When somebody has googled Smugglers Cove in Canada, which somebody could easily do, Booking.com and Expedia are bidding on your brand name at the moment. So if I'm a potential guest and I want to come and see you, they're going to get drawn in by now. This is what we're going to do. This is what I'm going to show you to do. And I'm going to show every single person in here how to set this up in Google AdWords. So if you're thinking, oh my gosh, this is happening to me, but how do I do it? This is what it's going to look like. Now, I just went and found a random one. I googled the Marriott Hotel in Sunderland, but look at what they're doing here. So with Google AdWords, you are able to to again manipulate the search results. So when someone types in the Marriott Hotel, Sunderland or types in your business name in wherever you are based, look at the wording you can get here. It pays to book direct. All right, now if you were a potential guest or a potential customer and you see that, you're going to click on that, which is obviously what you're going to do because it pays to book direct, you're going to go on to that site. A recent survey or a recent stat done on human behavior. Now, the human has an attention span of less than five seconds. It's official. We have attention span less of a goldfish. All right, People will just go for the first thing that they see and the first thing that they will click. Now, when I did this for the granary and when we change this around, we noticed overnight within 48 hours and we started doing this method. I'm going to show you that our direct bookings were going up and it was no coincidence at all. It's just simply because we were pointing people to our website instead of letting other people take our ad spot away that our diet bookings are going up. So quick comment now hit the chat button. Would you like me to show you how to set this up? That anybody can set this up in Google AdWords? Yes. No. Kelly.

Yes.

Tim. Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, amazing. All right, let me see if I can do this. And bear with me. I've done these webinars before, but I've never done it where I've had to quickly change screens. So bear with me while I set this up. Now, again, a quick question would be to everybody who has done Google AdWords in the past, put your hand up, say yes if you've done Google AdWords in the past. No if you've never done it. And Barbara, fantastic little question there. Does Google AdWords cost money? Yes. But what I'm going to show you is how you can do this and spend very little in the process. Maybe you're looking at $60, $90 max a month. But if you can take one person going to booking.com or Expedia and you have to pay 15% commission on a $300 or a 300 pound booking and goes direct to you, think of the savings that you're going to make. Does that make sense? No. And I've lost your screen. Please let me know if you can see my screen. Yeah, Jan, you can see the screen. Great, Tim, thank you. Bevan Kelly Screen still looks good, so you hopefully should see Google AdWords when it loads up. It should be loading right now. Thank you, Internet. So I'm just going to show you the process and what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you the most basic way of doing this and how anybody can start. Now, just like with anything, there's more advanced ways of doing all of this. If you want to know more advanced tips on doing Google or getting better at all of this, come and find me afterwards. You can subscribe, send me an email market and just Type in Google AdWords tips or you can send me a message on Facebook. I'm easy to be found as facebook.com MrMarksimpson and you can ask me any questions about this because this is one of the key things while we're just waiting for lovely Google AdWords to load up. All right, is everybody still with me if this all makes sense? If you're enjoying this, put your hand up, type yes. If you're getting something from this, great. Thank you. Bob, Jan, Philip, Hans and Eva. Especially Eva. After you've watched this, you can go on and do it straight away and you can block those people that are taking your direct bookings. So hopefully that sounds alright. First things first, create a Google AdWords account. It is easy, it is free to create, alright? All you've got to do is go to adwords.google.com and click on Create account. Easiest thing in the world to do. Set up your billing and you're away. You don't have to spend any money at this point. The thing about Google AdWords and Simon will confirm with me. Can one do something with white right hand details? I don't really know what that means, Tim, but come back to me, okay? So the cool thing about Google AdWords is that it is pay per click, alright? Pay per click basically means that you only get charged on a click, alright? And that's really what I want to focus on here. So if I'm saying you're going to spend $100 a month, but yet only one or two people click on your ad. You'll only get billed for that one or two people, but we'll focus on that later on. So what happens is when you come into Google AdWords, you'll see all these options come up. What we're going to do is we are going to create a campaign which is really simple to do. So you've got all of these options. You can pretty much ignore all of these. You're going to come into create campaign. Can1 do something with the right hand details1 the search terms where others come up under the organic listing. Tim, I'm afraid I don't really follow. If you want to send me in more detail in an email, I'm more than happy to look after it afterwards. So you come to campaigns, click on the plus button and then what you're going to do is you're then going to click on new campaigns. You will see that there are a load of options. Search, display, shopping, video, universal. Ignore all of them apart from search. All right, don't worry if you are missing anything on here, don't worry if you're not writing enough notes down on here. This is being recorded and a recording will be sent to you tomorrow or on Wednesday so you can watch this back. All right? But for the time being, if you're struggling with anything, don't worry because the recording will be sent to you. So you click on search and ignore all of these and you're going to go website traffic. I'm going to try to go as slow as possible for everybody so you can all keep up here. We're going to put in your website. So for me I'm going to put in granary.co.uk that's our business. I've got this little bars in the way. I'm going to move this up here so when it's done, it's loading, it goes to the step. So what we're going to call it, I'm going to call it bid on brand Granary. Really simple. So I can get all of this information, the search network and ad display network. Now I think that's maybe what Tim's talking about, the right hand side. Now for this I'm just gonna say for the basics, click no. So when it says add display network because that's gonna add more cost to your campaign, just click no for now. When you get more advanced with Google, if you get better with Google, then you can start to look into different options. But I want to keep this simple. Locations. Now we've got people tuning in from all over the world here. All right. When it comes to the location, I'm just going to set United Kingdom because that's where we're based. And you may want to do the same if you get a lot of international visitors. So if you get people visit you from all over the world, you may want to just change that to all countries and territory. It just purely depends on your customer avatar, who your customers are, where they come from, languages. Absolutely same. The budget, the all important budget question, how much money should I put on this? Now, when it says enter the average, you want to spend a day. If you just put a pound then it'll be 30 pound a month. If you put 2 pound it'll be 60 pound a month, 3 pound 90amonth. But like I said, you only get charged for the click. It's just how it gets set up. Alright, so just in case you're thinking, christ, I don't have to spend 200 pounds a month doing this, the answer is no. Just put in what you're comfortable with. For now, we are creating the basics. You can amend this at any point. It's the beauty of Google Adwords and if you are commenting at the moment, I do apologize, I've just minimized commenting so I can just focus on getting this for you. I will come back to them. How do you want to focus on Again, keep all of this as is by default. All right, you can come back and edit it. The more you get experience with this, the start and end dates, obviously it's going to start today and we want to keep this going forever because I always want to be stopping booking.com bidding on my brand name. These other sections here, audiences, site links, extensions, call out extensions, call extensions. I'm just going to leave all of them blank bar one. And then we're going to, you know, if you want more advice on these extensions, come and see me afterwards. Find me on Facebook, send me an email, I'll explain in more detail. The call extension is really cool because on mobile you can put your telephone number in the ad and when they're on their phone. So I don't know if you can see me now they're on their mobile phone, they can click on the ad, click on the call and it will call you directly. So for a hospitality business, for a hotel, say that you're an hour away, you're coming through and you need a place to stay, they'll do a search instead of having to go through the website and do all that booking Via your booking engine. They can call you straight from the ad, which is amazing. I always have this in and again Google will charge you for the call, which is, which is great. So that's the only one. I will show you the other two, call out the other two extensions, come find me afterwards and I'll explain that in more detail and how you can find out more about that. So once you've set the campaign, we want to set up the ad group. Now I'm just going to quickly look at the chat here. Questions, questions, questions. Okay, great. Does everybody follow? Please put your hand up. If you follow in, if you understand this. Is this all coming through? All okay, thank you, Barbara. Thank you Bob, Phil, Paul, thank you very much. Alright, so the ad group is the all important bit. And this goes to what Simon was just saying just recently. If I just put in here the granary Scarborough. Quick, who, let's see who was listening when Simon was doing his bit. What do I need to put in here to have it as a phrase match or an exact match or a broad match? How do I keep my cost down? What do I have to put in here? Can anybody tell me in the chat? Is there any. There we go, exact brackets, square brackets. Excellent people, thank you very much. So we're going to do exact match and that is with the brackets. Now if I had it as a broad match, anybody that was typing in Scarborough would be able to be charged on that keyword. I don't want that. This is called bidding on brands, alright? And this is what nobody at Google ever told me. Doesn't matter how much money I gave them over the years. And I was setting this up, nobody did this. I found this out by myself. So I'm showing you now so you can do it. So this is the granary Scarborough and this is really important. All right? You do property name in your town, especially if your hotel name or your property name is quite generic. So the Blacksmiths. I was working with a pub in Scarborough called the Blacksmiths. There's blacksmiths all over the uk. I couldn't just put the Blacksmiths because it wouldn't mean nothing to nobody. I had to put in the Blacksmith Scarborough because again that is what people were typing in Google. Now if you're stuck at this point at what you think somebody might be putting in on Google, open up a, open up a Google search and then just type in your property name in the town that you're in and go and see what potential people are putting. So if you start, go, if I go into Google now. And I'm, I am freestyling here, so I do apologize. Thank you, Simon. When you come back on. That's a great, great little point there. Okay, so if you're stuck at what people are typing in, Come on Google, don't fail me now. There we go. So what you can see here is what people are typing in on the Google. Alright, so you can do that as well. The most important thing with keywords before I move on any further is this, is that if you've got a property like ours which different people might type in different search results. If you go to the next line, Here we go and I put this in. So for every line that you do, it's pulling up different variations. So our property, the granary, people sometimes call it the granary for some reason. Some people sometimes spell it E, R Y Scarborough, which again, madness. But people do it. I'm making sure I do the exact phrase every single time. So for any time that you do a line, it adds it as another keyword. So think about what you can do for your property. So the only time your ad will appear is when somebody puts in those words in there. So again, think about. So if we go back to Eva's example of the Smugglers Cove. So Smugglers Cove Canada or Smugglers Cove, Nova Scotia, you put them in in these different sections here. Now I'm not going to go into too much detail. I think that's pretty much explained it. I don't want to keep going on and on and on about this, but once you've done that, click, save and continue and it will go to the next area. Now this is the most important part because now we set up who sees it. Now we've got to get the click and this is what you can do here. So you come into creating your ad. This will take no more than five minutes. So first section you're going to put in where you want to send people to granary.co.uk the headline which you can see here, so it does this in real time. So you want to mention your property and where it is. And this is what I find has worked really well. Official website or official hotel website? What I found in my surveys, my studying that I've done is that people do want to book direct. The reason why they don't is because of the tactics that I've explained there. Booking.com draw people in with best rates guaranteed, blah blah blah or they just don't know where the official hotel website is. As soon as you land on booking.com, they create a mousetrap, alright? You don't want them to go near that trap. You want them coming to your own mousetrap, which is your own website. So just point people to it, tell them official hotel website and people will come. And in here you explain why. So you could put best rates when you book direct. Yorkshire farm stay property and you get 80 characters to really put that point home. So with the wording, be creative, don't just match everything that I wanted to, but the most important thing is here, tell them it's your official property, give them the reasons why they need to click through. Like I say, fight fire with fire. When I showed that example here, where's here? So with the White Lodge Hotel, again, they were doing best price, guarantee, no reservation costs, great rates. So again, it all comes back to what you're doing at your property to give incentives for people to book with you directly, which everybody should be doing. Whether that's early check in, whether that's free breakfast, free wi fi, it doesn't matter. What you do, be putting it in there. Now for us, obviously in the UK we've got rate things like rate parity, but if I've got a special promo code on my website, then anybody who books via my website puts in that promo code, they get a better rate than anywhere else. That's how to get around that. Again, if you want some little tips and tricks on how you can increase your direct bookings. If Everybody goes to boostlead.co.uk There's a little guide on there of other little tips and tricks that you can do with incentives, what you can do to get more direct bookings, which is, which is really key. So again, that's what you need to do. Once you've got your copy done, click the done button. And what I love about Google is that you don't just have to have one copy going at once, you can have several copies go in at once. Okay, so you can duplicate it. Barbara. Sorry, I missed that. Then what about plural or shouldn't we bother? Yeah, again, anything advanced tactics like that, come and find me afterwards, I'll be able to answer them. Alright, so once you've done all of that and you've done all the copy and all the ad sets, click on save and continue. You're going to click on the review settings, click continue to campaign and that's done. Google will then go and have a look at it. They will go and see if it's something that they think is okay, which most of the time it is, and then after a couple of hours, you'll see that it is live. Right. Any questions regarding that, please keep hold of it. We'll come back to the end and we will give it a go. But still, Simon, if you'd like to unmute yourself. What was that thing that you mentioned as we were talking? Sorry.

Yeah, it's basically from what I understand, the online travel agents, they all hold a list of the hotels that have asked them to stop bidding. And you can just ring them up and say to them, can you stop bidding on us? And they'll do it. So I don't think many people actually know about that. I don't know whether it's a legal requirement, but generally they'll stop, so that's awesome.

So I guess if you just call your account manager, the relevant thing, just say. And I guess if you want to get proof. So either. If you want to get proof, take a screenshot of Google and just say, listen, stop bidding on my brand name. If they don't, then other ways means you can always trademark your name, your business name. Obviously that's a lot longer process, but if you were to trademark it by law, they then can't advertise on your name. So that's another way around it. But, yeah, first things first. The easiest way to go about this, if you do a Google search and you see that someone is bidding on your brand name, call up that property or call up the OTA and just say, please stop bidding on my brand name. If they fail to do so, go down the legal route. But yeah, this is the same for everybody. Doesn't matter whether it's booking.com or Expedia, those are just the examples I find when I've done this search in the past. Trivago, TripAdvisor, Airbnb, you name it, Hostel World are all trying to advertise on our brand name. So that's something that you can do. Hopefully that made sense. Simon, I'm gonna take a break, have a drink and I'm gonna pass it over to you. Lovely.

Thanks, Mark. Just a moment. Yeah, so I just. Just to recap basically on one of the things on my previous subject. So I realized it probably was quite advanced and I didn't do a summary of it. So just quickly, I'll do a quick summary just to show the process of using Broad Match and converting them to exact Match terms. So what you do is you bid on the keyword Hotel London, and you would do that as maybe Broad Match or maybe Phrase Match or with a broad match modifier. And then when the customer triggers that keyword, they actually use the term hotel London with wheelchair access. So you do, then you do a report and analytics on your sales and you do the match type report and it basically tells you which search has got the sales. And so basically once you find that the keyword that has got the sale, hotel London with wheelchair access, you then add that in as an exact match. So next time when it gets triggered, it will use the exact match term instead of any other terms that are in there. So you're basically just moving them out from one bin into another. And if anybody wants any sort of more simple way of explaining that, I can do that later, no problem. So I was going to talk next really about offline bookings. These can be quite useful because essentially the problem with offline bookings is that they obviously happen over telephone or over chat. And Google Analytics is not really tracking that. As an online marketer, you are dealing with return on investment. So when you're looking at your channels in Google Analytics, you want to see which ones are earning the money. And unfortunately, some of the bookings that you have that are going over the telephone, they're not going into analytics, so you can't see them. And so what this allows you to do is basically what I'm going to tell you how to do, is to basically get some of those offline bookings into your analytics so that you can see what drove them and that you can see basically where to invest in them more heavily. And so basically the real issue with this is that the bookings, the reason why offline bookings are often taken over the telephone is because there's more information with them. The customer wants to cover more ground with the hotel before they stay. They're obviously spending a large amount of money, so they tend to call up on the phone. So we obviously lose the marketing attribution for those orders. And some of the keywords and the ads that drive this sort of business are like gold dust. You know, you could have a keyword that maybe cost you two pounds and it drove a ten thousand pound booking. And these are really important. So to know where they're driven from is very, very useful because you can increase them. So there's two ways to do this. Basically, you can use call tracking in Google, they've got a system where, and Mark kind of showed you where you can actually position that call number, but they actually have a system where the analytics ID is recorded in the number itself. So you can tie Back to Analytics, whether the sales are made over the telephone. And you can also get a client id, a thing called a client id. When anybody visits your website, they get a unique ID from Google Analytics. If you store this id, you can then use it in your live chat, you can use it on your telephone calls, you can use it anywhere to tie back what that user is doing. So basically what happens is the user comes to your website, you record their client id, then they go and ring up and go offline and do a booking there. And then when the reserve agent, reservation agent finishes the booking, they get the Google Analytics ID number and then they give it back to you and you input that into analytics and then you get all the information about that customer and what they did before leading up to the booking. Yeah, so basically the reservation desk records the id. You can actually insert the offline orders into analytics manually or automatically. So you could have your reservation agents, they could be collecting this each week and then basically they give you a report and you upload it into analytics and you can create specific custom reports to measure this. And then basically what you can do is you can justify those keywords that are costing you £2, you can increase the budget on them, you can invest in more of those types of keywords in order to increase your larger bookings. Yeah, so that's pretty much it for the offline booking side of things. Just gonna hand back to Mark now.

All right, awesome. Thank you very much. So back to me here. Any questions in the group? Lovely. Alright, so can everybody now see me? Everybody can see me. Just raise your hand if you can. That would be lovely just to. I know, yeah. Okay, thank you very much everybody for that. Right, so the final thing that I'm going to show you today and it's again, it's something that everybody can do and it's something that is so important. We've spoken about just then, how you can use Google to get people to come to your website instead of going elsewhere. But again, when people see you, they have to see your property. And what I see so many times on Hotel Bonanza, on listing sites, on Google, on anywhere, is if you're not doing this right, then what could potentially happen is that instead of people coming and booking with you, they're going to go elsewhere. So I've teased it enough while I'm trying to find it on my computer, but I'm gonna show my screen with everybody. And again, thank you so much everybody for tuning in today. It means a lot. Hopefully you're getting something out of it. So hopefully now you should be able to see my screen. And it's all about photos and getting better pictures. So let me just pull up here, All right. In the, in the chat box. Just please someone tell me that you can see my screen. Yes, no, maybe. Hopefully everybody can save this. Can everybody see my Get Better Photos slideshow? How can I just see a blank window? Let me get out of it. All right. Okay. I want to get the chat box up at the same time because otherwise I will get lost of all of this. Thank you very much. Everybody's just chatting. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Great. All right, so I'm going to go back into that screen right here. All right. And Simon, if you could please let me know for whatever reason, if my screen doesn't show get better photos, that would be amazing. Appreciated.

It's working fine.

Fantastic. So why is it important? And I'm just going to a quick question here. Which listing do you think is better? This of act now I'm not picking on the Diary room at all. It was literally me doing a search on Hotel Bonanza and then me doing another one in York. And I find this. What I've noticed and what I have discovered over all the years of doing this is that a picture sells a thousand words. It's very cheesy, but it is so true. And the reason why it's important is when somebody is doing a search on Google, when they're doing a search on any listing site, when they're doing a search anywhere, what they're. You've only got a short window to properly see sell your property. Okay, and what do I mean by that? So say that somebody comes on to Hotel Bonanza or comes onto any listing site and they do a search to arrive at some point this week for two adults, two nights, and I've just picked on bath random location there. All right. You will notice that when the screen loads up that you've got the pictures coming up on the left hand side. And psychologically, you know how we said that our attention span is getting shorter and shorter. People tune into pictures more than they do the wording. So believe it or not, the study and the searches that have been done over the past is that people will more likely look at the image than they will do at the price. Which is crazy, especially seeing that a lot of the time people focus so much on making sure that their pricing is correct that they totally ignore the pictures. But the picture, the first picture, your unique selling picture, your USP is what I call it. Your Unique selling picture has to be the most important and it has to be consistent over all the channels. So I'm talking social media, Google Business listing, trivago, booking.com, expedia, Airbnb, Hotel Bonanza. The first picture has to be the one that sells your property the best. It's got to when people are scrolling down, entice a click. Now for a farm stay property as the granary is, we're lucky we've got the views and the animals. You know, our main picture has always been one of our Highland cows stood in the lake with the property behind. If you're in the middle of a town and the exterior of your property is not the best, but you've got an amazing bedroom experience or you know something that's really popular now is breakfast shots. So if you've got a bed and breakfast and you do, if you're well known for your breakfasts, do a what's called a lay picture. So your camera's here, the breakfast here, do a top down picture of it. Have that as your main one. If that's what you're well known for. If you've got amazing four poster beds, that's your selling point, that's your niche. So whatever it is, and I don't mind what it is, everybody's different. Get your first picture being the one that people see. This one here, the Middleton's hotel, that is a beautiful image and it just looks like I'm walking up to that property. This one for the Dorium in Bridlington A it's been done on someone's phone. It looks shaky, the beds aren't made and that looks like cleaning products in the right hand side. Again, not having a go at dorium, but that's just what I found yesterday. Even though it's got great reviews, that picture would not make me want to stay there. So what I want to do is I want to show you the final thing that I'm going to show you how to get a professional photo shoot for free, very cheap. And again, all of these tactics that I'm going to show you now are things that I've done in the past for me and for my clients and they've worked really, really well. Because a lot of the times when I say to people get better pictures, the first thing that everybody says to me is I haven't got the money, I haven't got the budget. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you as long as everybody wants to see it show of hands. If you want me to show you how to get a professional photo shoot for free or for very, very cheap. Susan, Barbara, Claudio, Paul, Hannah, Philip, Hans, thank you very much. Everybody raising their hands. All right, first step, find hobbyists in your local area on Facebook. Now let me just explain what this means and I will show you on my screen. Facebook is an amazing tool. We have on Facebook these things called groups and Facebook groups. What I learned very quickly on Facebook is that there's groups for every niche in the world, alright? And particularly photography. So all that I did on Facebook again, and I did this for our property, I went onto Facebook, I came into the search at the top and I would type in photographs of Scara, type that into search, let Facebook do its thing. Now, what you're looking for is you're looking for photography groups in and around your local area. So there's no point doing this if you live in Canada and you're going to look for the uk. This isn't going to work, I'm afraid. What you're looking for is you're looking for local groups of people that are in your area and I'll show you for why in a second when Facebook wants to load up unique Scarborough photography right here. So what I love about hobbyist photographers is that unlike professional photographers who have a business about this is that they don't realize how good they are. They've got all the camera, they've got all the kit and they take beautiful pictures and they post it, but what they don't realize is just how good they really are. And what I did is I would go into this Facebook group and I would find a photographer that I really like and all I would simply do is I would reach out and I would send them a message and I would just say, hey, how you going? I've seen your pictures in this Facebook group, they look amazing. I just wondered if you wanted to come and take some pictures of my property. You can use it for your portfolio. I'm more than happy to pay. Or even I could even maybe exchange you a night stay in the property for free for you. And you know, in exchange to say thank you, I sent that out to five to 10 people. I got one person back. I exchanged a night stay in a property with breakfast and I got an amazing photo shoot done in exchange. Now if I was to go to a local professional and ask for that, and I have asked a local professional that's saving 300 to $500 off pounds. That's step number one. Step number two, this is a really cool one. Reach out to a local college or university and find if they have a media department, go to that media department, speak to the tutor and offer their students to come and take photos of your property so they can use it for their coursework. What I found is that local colleges and local universities are crying out for something like this. They're looking for basically for examples. And we did this with the local college and what we found is that the kit and the technology that they've got and the editing software that they've got is better than most professionals out there because it's all part of that. And it's young kids who are just wanting to find examples so that they can use for their coursework. And we did this and again, we've got some beautiful photos of our business and then around it, they were able to use it for coursework and the deal was that we could use it on our website and social media. All right, two in. How is this looking? Is everybody liking this at the moment? These two steps? Do you want me to keep on going? Show of hands? Yep. Excellent. Thank you very much. Step number three, run. This is a bit more long winded, but bear with me. Run a photography competition on your property. Photographers from all over can come and take pictures. Then you run a competition to find the best one. The winning photographer will get a prize. So this is one where you can get loads and loads of pictures. Again, you're going to be reaching out to hobbyists or even professionals. And you know what I found is that photographers are very competitive, they like to take really good pictures. They want to win stuff. They don't normally get a chance to take part in these sort of competitions. So they will travel, come in from around to do something like this. So make it a competition. And this is a twofer, it's a two for one. Number one, you're going to get great pictures. But number two, you've got engagement for your social media page and you can say you're going to be running a competition, you can upload the photos to your Facebook page and the pr, the free PR around it and the free engagement going to be amazing. So not only then will you get free pictures, you're going to get loads of more attention of your business, which is going to get more likes. And I guess what more likes means more inquiries and more direct bookings. I like this one. It's a bit more long winded, trickier to pull off, but if you can, it is unbelievably Successful. Number four, find local photography groups and see if they want to use your property to enhance their skills. So again, just like with the hobbyists, what you'll find is, is that there are local photography groups, they normally meet up once a month or once every quarter and they take pictures. Find these photography groups, reach out to the organizer and again, ask them if they want to come down and take pictures of your business and they can use for their portfolio. Okay, those are the steps. What does everybody think of that? Is that good? Is that something that you can do? Is there, you know, number one, the first question for me right there would be, have you ever tried any of those tactics? When was the last time you got new pitches done? You know, it's something that so many people don't do. And again, once you get those pictures, so once you get those pictures, make sure that the usp, everybody that sees when you get those pictures, like I say, go back into Facebook, go back into, into your website, go back into every listing site, your booking engine and update them, as a rule of thumb, every 12 to 18 months, you should be getting new pictures. You know, just like your property changes and improves over time, you know, you don't always have the same wallpaper, you don't always have the same things in the same place. You should be updating it. And the reason why so many people don't update their pitches is because of the cost and hopefully those tips can do. Yeah, Mike, really good. Had a quote from a local professional shoot. 600 quid stuck to my own photo. 600 quid. You know, they can charge because they're good. But you know, what I found is that there's good, if not better, hobbyists or local groups that around that can do the same thing and you can save a bit of money in the process. All right, I'm going to bring, I'm going to stop sharing my screen. I'm going to bring Simon back in. If you want to unmute yourself, that'd be great. So thank you everybody for tuning in. And we're now going to give a chance the last five, ten minutes before we sign off for the day just to answer any questions. So if you've got questions in the chat box, please ask, ask them now. I am going to scroll up and see if I can find any from anybody but Simon. Just while I'm doing that, if you could just give a little bit more of an idea of what hotel bonanza plans over the next three months are going to be and how, if anybody can find you if they've got any questions, that'd be great.

Yes, we're really working at the moment on a lot of our direct marketing online and setting up the website for conversion really so that we can really get the bookings through quickly. I mean, as you know, the online travel agents, they're quite hard to compete against. They've got very deep pockets. So, you know, it's not, it's not one area that we're going to be competing with them head on, as any new player would be. So we're going to be really getting very granular and we're going to be doing a lot of remarketing, real time marketing, that kind of thing. And yes, it's exciting stuff. Over the next six months, we've got a lot of new features planned for the website on the Facebook page. We've actually just launched a new deal system where if you upload any deals onto our website, discounts, incentives, that kind of thing, then you'll likely get featured on our Facebook page which is going to be broadcasted out to all our users.

Amazing.

Lots of different things going on.

Awesome. Okay, so I've just scrolled up and one of the questions that I saw from Mike. Thank you very much, Mike. Some great points and bits and bobs as the webinar has been going on. So the question was, should we have something as specific as our business name? Wouldn't we be better off typing in something like BNB in Scarborough? The simple answer to that is that BNB Scarborough, for example, that's something that's more generic, that is something that more people would type in. So you're going to be A, paying more for your cost per click. B, you're going to have more competition on that keyword. All right, the reason why bidding on your business name in your town is cheap, cost effective is because Google will charge you less for that click than if they would be bidding on BNB and Scarborough. Now if you want to find out more about bidding and how much each cost per click costs or anything like that, you go to Google AdWords, type in keyword planner. So Google AdWords keyword planner, you can get a full list and you can run over a few different types of search results. Again, that is a bit more advanced. That is where a bit more cost will come in. So if you just want to keep it simple right now, bid on your brand name, keep it low and help if there's any more questions. I mean, there's loads of thank yous are coming in, which is great. Thank you so much for everybody that's tuning in all, all over the world. Not just, you know, the uk, but we've got people all over Europe, Australia, America as well. This is being recorded. There will be a copy of this webinar sent out to everybody who registered. So don't worry if you couldn't keep up, you'll be able to catch up. Is there going to be another webinar? That's a good question. Only if you want it. You know, I think this is something that I'm so glad that Hotel Bonanza wanted to do because it really does help them stand out from every other hotel online travel agent out there. And I think, you know, if we can do this more, that would be amazing. There's so many other things that we can show you. If you want to find out more about me and about this, which is Boostly, I have got a five step guide on how anybody can boost their direct bookings and it's all done by email. So you can go and get that. If you go to www.and I'll type in the chat here, www.boostly.co.uk email you can go get a five step guide on how anybody can boost their diary bookings. We go over what we went over today as well as some few other tips and also as well there's a Facebook group called the Hospitality Community. It would be amazing if everybody who is watching this today could come on in and say hi. We've got nearly a thousand people, thousand hospitality owners from all over the world. I want to get to a thousand before the end of June, so it'd be amazing if everybody watching this can come on over and say hi. This week we are doing, I'm doing a little bit of training which is how to run the perfect Facebook competition. So if you would like to find out more about that, click on that link and come and join Aaron. Send me a message Mark at Boosley afterwards and I'll show you some other advanced little tips and tricks. But yeah, amazing. Thank you so much for tuning in, everybody. I can see questions and chat are still coming in. If you've got anything afterwards, please reach out to Simon or I afterwards and we'll be able to ask you answer those questions. Simon, anything else you want to say before we depart for the day or is you good?

Just one last thing on the. On your subject, actually the, on the bidding on the brand names. Essentially when someone searches for your brand name, they've probably all done the research, they know where they want to go. So it's right at the end of their journey and it's a really great way of picking them up really cheap, really quick at the end. And this is why the OTAs do it. This is why the online travel agents do it, because they want to do no work. They want you to do all the work, and then they want us come in at the end and scoop up that booking. So that's why they bid on your brand names. So by bidding on your brand name, basically it's just going to kind of protect that stage of the booking and get you more bookings.

Achievement. Awesome. All right, everybody, thank you very much. Go and enjoy the rest of your day. Go and please let us know what tips you take on, what you put into practice and let us know what the results are. I love doing these webinars like this where we show you things. But what I love more is when people send us messages afterwards saying, I tried this tip and I got this result, so please keep in touch. Thank you very much. And I'm going to end this webinar now.