Building Local Connections To Increase Bookings

Okay, welcome back to the Boostly Academy. Thank you. For everybody that is watching us back on the replay, this is a super quick video where I'm going to explain to you everybody that's tuning in and watching, whether it's live or on the replay, some very simple tips that you can do right now to increase your direct bookings, get more email subscribers and build better local connections. So number one, it's all about going offline. So a big thing that I did at the Granary a long, long, long time ago was when I first came back into the business. I really wanted to let everybody know that we were working with local businesses for Granary. For those of you who are new to my world and don't know what it is, it's a farm stay property based in Harwooddale in between Scarborough and Whitby. It was a tea rooms until we closed the tea roomside down, it was a restaurant. So we had loads of people coming in on a day to day basis as well as having the accommodation and the cottages. In fact, you can see it in the background right there. That's the quad bike that's run out of petrol. So what I wanted to do was build local connections. So here's what we did. We had a big blackboard in the conservatory and the conservatory is where people were there for breakfast, people were there for lunch, for dinner. There's people there all the time. And on there we listed all of the local businesses that we recommended and worked with everything from local butchers to other local cafes, to other local restaurants to days out. We had it all on there. Now this was a big part of pushing to work with local businesses and all I did to achieve that is I opened up the local newspaper and I just found local businesses. I went and visited local businesses, I went online and looked to see which ones were the recommended ones and I just started talking to people, just explained who we are, what we do, who we get. So not only do we get a lot of local people, but we also get a lot of travelers and tourists and business people come to stay with us now for one minute, I want you to flip this on their head. Instead of being the hospitality owner, think of being a hospitality guest. Now the last time that you went somewhere totally new and you arrive and you've dumped your bags and you're looking for somewhere to go, 9 out of 10 times you'll either just go on what's in the little guidebook that they give you or what you'll do if there isn't one. Of them is you'll just open up your Google phone or your TripAdvisor and look to see somewhere nearby that's got the best reviews. Now, failing that, you literally just open up your Google map and you go to find a chain. Okay? Now, the reason why this is really good to start building local connections is that you can, for your guests, pull up not only places that you recommend, but other local places that are recommended by maybe your guests or others. Now, you can do this in a number of ways. Number one, you can get one of those big scrapbooks, you know, those big folders, and you can put them all in there. What I find with that, though, yes, it is good, but they go out of date real quickly. People can lose them, spill on and rip them. So what I started to do is I started to put this online and what you can do, and it costs next to nothing. You could even hire somebody on Upwork or Fiverr to create something. But we created a little PDF, a little digital guidebook of places that we recommend locally. Now, what we did is that we went to the owners of these places. Now, these could be cafe, restaurant, bar, make sure that they're local, independently owned. And we went to them and just say, we have got this property. It's got 14 bedrooms, three holiday cottages. We, you know, we get a lot of people come to stay here. We would like to send them to you. Do you have a discount or do you have a discount code or do you have a voucher that we could put in to attract them? Doesn't cost anything. Totally free of charge. We're not going to charge you anything, but we want to send people your way. Any independent business owner that turns this down would be a fool, because what you're basically doing is you're recommending your guests to go there or talking about them. So, like I say, 99.9% of the time, everybody that we asked went, yep, sure, here is either 10% off or it can be a free, free dessert or whatever it could be. It could be something to eat, it could be something to drink, or it could be a local days out, or, you know, Adventure Farm, X, Y and Z. And then what you do is you take that information and you put it in your, you know, your physical scrapbook, or it could be your digital guidebook. Like I say, there's lots of different things that you can do. I think the recommended thing at the moment would be to collect everybody, get it on a Google sheet, get all the names, the information and all of that, put it into a Google sheet. You could then send it off to somebody on upwork or fiverr and they could then turn that into a little PDF or a digital download, turn it into little coupons so they can print off, cut out and take to them. A the guest will love it because they're found in recommended places by local people. Number two, what you can do is it will help the business owner because it's local independent businesses that are getting more business, you know, which is fantastic. And C this is all part of the book direct. The reason why we do this is, is to make sure that more money is coming into local businesses. Then it can be spent in local services, products and businesses and suppliers. Okay? That's the whole reason why we do this. And this little side thing is fantastic. Now here's the best bit. What you can do is you can take that little PDF, okay and you can go onto your website and you can have a pop up appear or you can have for your signup form a little pop up appears when people arrive on your website and say would you like our top 10 places to recommend to go visit in insert local area or would you like coupon codes or coupon vouchers to spend when you come and stay in certain area, leave your email address and we'll send it to you. And that's what's called a lead magnet. Just imagine how many people visit your website right now. Everybody that's passing to your website, imagine how many people escape without you knowing, without them making a booking. With having this, you've got a real good chance of then getting that email address and then doing something with it. You know, if you there's loads of free services out there that you can put onto your website where you can create a free pop up or a free lead magnet. I use sumo.como.com I use it for the booster site, I use it for the granary site and I've used it for a couple of my client websites as well. It's free, it's simple to set up, it's drop and drag create and it links straight into mailchimp. So those are some things that you can be doing right now. If you are finding it struggling in your area to do this then I would try and think a little bit outside the box. I would start to go on Facebook and maybe ask on Facebook groups for recommended places in your area. Try and find out where people are recommended and then reaching out and contacting these people. If you're finding business owners that don't want to have this sort of arrangement, then they have got to drastically rethink their marketing tactics. Because when local businesses help other local businesses and contribute and work together, instead of thinking it's all competition, then it just helps massively in what we're all trying to do here. Okay, I said it was going to be a super quick video. I hope whenever you watch this, whether you're watching this live or whether you're watching it back on the replay or whether you're watching this in the vault, I would love to know if you put this into action and how you put it into action. If you're thinking, well, how do I find somebody on Upwork on Fiverr to do this? There is a video in the vault showing you how to do this. I would love it if you could let me know a little bit more, let me know if you've done this and the results of it. Anyway, this is a little quick video from me. I hope you're all doing well. I hope you, you are all getting something from the training from the vault, whether you're doing it now or if you're doing it whenever you watch this. But this is me signing off. Have a great day, have a great week, have a great month, and I'll speak to you all very, very soon.