How to build direct bookings for your STR business in 2022

Hello, hello, hello one and all. I've got something very special for you today on the Boostly podcast. I recently joined Hostfully for a very special webinar where we talked about direct bookings and trust. It was about an hour long. We dug into five key questions around direct bookings and trust and brand building. The team were very gracious in sending me the raw recording so I could put it in the Boostly spear. So please do go and check out more about Hostfully. You can find out more about their PMP platform that can find more about their guidebook. Just head to booster.co.uk Hostfully this is a really good episode. You're going to get so much from it. When it comes to direct bookings. I would love you as you are watching this on YouTube or listening to this on the podcast, leave your feedback and your takeaways. So jump onto the YouTube channel boostly on YouTube in the comment section. Leave your main takeaways, your main feedback, but most importantly, tell me what you're going to put into practice comments because there's tons of actionable advice on here. Don't forget you can go pick up the book Direct Playbook on Amazon. It's literally under $20 and I promise you, you will get a return of investment on that. So without more being said, let's jump on into the video. We have got the great team from Frederico and Frank from Hostfully on the call with me and there was tons of team Boosting members in the chat at the same time, which was amazing to to have you on there. So thank you very much. If you want to keep up to date with all of the events, webinars, the guest spots that I'm doing, just go to boostly.co.uk forward/ical. So I C A L. You should know what Boostly is by now. How to spell that. All right, let's jump over and let's dig straight in with the show.

Hello, good morning, good afternoon everyone. Just wanted to thank you and for, you know, joining in on today's webinar, we have the wonderful Mark here from Boostly and my colleague Federico and I. My name is Frank, I'm the director of business development here.

Yeah, again.

So again, everyone, good morning, good afternoon, good evening everyone. Not too sure where everyone is based. So again, a big hello and a welcome from your friends over here at Hostfully and Boostly. So right now we have Federico, he is our manager of business development and we're also graciously joined by the wonderful and fantastic and all knowing Mark Simpson, the founder of Boostly and I'm Frank and I'm the director of Business development here at hostfolio. So this is going to kind of be a slightly different webinar from others. We're really going to make it a bit more open ended I guess and conversant. So we chatted on some Facebook groups, we posted on some social media and emailed some of our users to ask them if they had any questions for Mark. So kind of a fun ask me anything webinar if you will. We also already had some fun questions that we've received in advance. So we'll be reviewing those top five questions during the webinar. But again remember you have the Questions tab, the Chat tab. Feel free to just go in there, ask any question that you would like for us to answer. So we'll try to get through as many as possible. So before we get started with some kind of mind blowing insights from Mark, I just wanted to let you know a little bit about hostfully for those that aren't familiar. We're a vacation rental company and we really just focus on helping you run your business from tip to tail. So we strive to help vacation rental companies and property managers make more money, increase revenue, streamline the automate your day to day operations and improve your overall traveler experience. So now hopefully has two platforms. These are both completely standalone platforms. We have the property management platform and then the digital guidebook, both of them fully integrated. So you're of course more than welcome to use both of them together. But you also have the option to use just the property management software and just the digital guidebook. On the property management software side we have a direct integration with major OTAs, Airbnb, VRBO, booking.com and a bunch of other channels as well. And really we work as a channel manager for those of you you so hostfully will be your central place to manage and will be the hub in managing all of your reservations. We have great pipeline feature. This is unique to the industry as well. And here is where we can see all of all of our guests and just really where they are in the process of their booking and basically manage operations in different ways than other softwares. We have a really nice out of the box direct booking website available to all those users and especially in this day and age and we'll talk about more of that with about that we want as many direct bookings as possible and not be so heavily reliant on those other channels. We also included our software has automated messages, both email and text message reports, analytics, payment processors. And then we also have a wonderful new unified inbox where with a whole lot of fun features to help you run your vacation rental business. And then we have the Guidebook platform and this is really unique and it's a beautiful platform where we focus on enhancing the guest experience. We make it easy to share information to the guest about their trip. Check in details, directions, house manual, all your favorite recommendations. Again, this aims in boosting your guest experience. You like what I did there, Mark? It cuts down on communication and it also has the ability to get you more five star reviews. Also it's a great upselling feature to increase your overall income. And right over here with the guidebooks we have, Erica, she's a client of ours, basically said this, you know, the same view as many other of our clients here. She states that the guidebook totally blew her away. We saved her a ton of time. And also with the guidebook, it's more professional than a Word document or a PDF that you believe on the living room table. So if you haven't tested out our guidebooks yet, we have free trials on all of our subscriptions and also one free guidebook for everyone who does want to use that kick the tires, test it out, let me know. We'll be sending out a follow up email as well, so you'll have all my contact information there if you want some more information. Hostflare has also been winning awards. We're super excited and it's been great. We won Matt Landau's VRMV Keystone Award. Their first year they had it as the best vacation rental software. And then really again they just released the Keystone award winners for 2021 and we won that again making us back to back winners for that. So we're really excited. One of our main evaluators, Terry White, which a lot of us also know very well, said that Hostfully is one of the best softwares period that I have ever seen. And then we also have incredible platform, beautiful guidebooks. But we also have great reports and webinars. We have a variety of reports available on our website which I encourage you all to check out at your leisure. It's hostfully.com 2020-20-2021 report and it has a good selection of reports, future booking reports, multi channel distribution reports, other reports that have great insight can be useful for your business. So again I encourage you just to check those out directly on our website. And we have ton to offer there along with blog posts and articles. If you don't want any additional information. I mean if you do want any additional information on any of our products, please feel free to reach out to me directly. We're always able to coordinate a schedule or a one on one demo with you. But that's really enough about Hostfully. I'm going to go ahead and hand this over to Mark with Boostly again. Mark, we're super excited to have you with us today. You've been a great partner, great supporter and a friend of ours for a while and Hostfully has also been a sponsor for the Boostly podcast for quite some time time now. We love everything that Mark's doing and talking about. You know, we'll talk about more how you can manage your business and increase direct bookings, tips on marketing, the whole nine yards. So on that note, Mark, I'd love to hand this over to you and to see if there is any intro. I guess if you want to share an intro about yourself you can give a couple of minutes and then we'll kick it off with the first question which again really broad. What's your main tip for increasing direct bookings? But go ahead. Floor is yours.

Thank you Mark, first and foremost, thank you very much. I am a massive, massive fan of hostflit. It's no secret, it's no shock you guys winning the awards because you do have not only the guidebook which I think the guidebook in 2020 really helped a lot of hosts in need. Obviously having the free guidebook was amazing. We've spread it around our community and when the times certain countries weren't allowing for the physical copy, these digital guidebooks give everybody a kick up the bum to sort of get one. Obviously you're not, you know, you're not been around longer than 2020. I just gave it a kick up the boom for everybody to get one. And I know I can see so many people now in the chat who's with us who have utilized it, enabled it into the business and it works. I mean I have, I have been on the other end of this. I was a guest and I stayed in a property in Spain and they sent me through a digital guidebook. I opened it up, it was a hostfully one which was lovely. Collected my email, did all the things that, you know, I talk and prepare, preach about. So it really is a nice little matchup. And yeah, I've been so happy to work with years with sportscast podcasts and sponsors and all that stuff and to do today is really cool. And the reason why I love doing these, reason why I love doing these Little webinars, whether it's an hour or whatever, how long we've got, I like to do things a little bit different. So I want to reward the people that have tuned in live. So every single one of us that's tuning in live with us now, I want to give you as many opportunities as possible to ask questions when it comes to, comes to this topic, because this topic has just grown and grown and grown and grown, especially over the last 18 months. Loads of people want to chat now about direct bookings, which is great for me because my mission is to help 1 million hosts increase their direct bookings and cut down on their over Reliance on Airbnb, booking.com, the Expedia Group, the Booking Holidays group and Airbnb. Because the problem is that there are so many people who are still relying on them. And when I say reliant, more than 80% is a, is a very high majority of hosts, property managers that I speak to that are more than 80% of their income comes in from third parties. And everything that I'm going to talk about today, everything that I'm going to share with you is simple stuff. It's just a simple case of you don't know what you don't know. And I just do these webinars, I do these podcasts, I do all these, these things to help a host. And all I ask from the people that tune in live or listening back on the replay, don't try and do all of it. I'm going to give you loads today. Just try and pick one thing and put it into action tomorrow and then just do small little steps like that because you will start to start to do it. So those of us are of us live now. So Zoran and Miranda and Debbie and Isabella and Alison and David and Zyz, Caroline, Gillian, Brad, Stuart, David, Fede, Antonio, Mel, Darrell, Meria, Julie, Steve, Surrender, keep them coming. Okay, Leo, Kate, Deborah, Fernanda, James, Ellie, Jeremy, Lizzy and Brad. Please don't sit on your hands here. What I would love for you to do is to get chatting in the questions box. The chat box isn't enabled, but the questions tab is. So put any questions you've got, let me know anything. I'm going to ask a tons of things and I want to make sure that I can help you as much as possible because I do like to reward the people who tune in live. So we've got five things, the most common questions that have come in, but I will make time for your questions at the end. And who knows? I may answer them in these next five things. But make sure you've got a pen and paper ready. Make sure you make this as interactive as possible and also as well, what I want to do is I want to share with one person in here something very special. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a little giveaway during this live video live webinar. So make sure you're ready for that and we'll do that at any point. So make sure you're ready for it and if we're good and we can get started.

Yeah, wonderful. Thank you, Mark. So again we asked our users, we asked social media, our followers, what are the top five questions? So we got those, we consolidated, consolidated those five. Again, feel free to ask as many questions as you like. We're going to, we would love to answer those for you, but the number one question was what is your main tip for increasing direct bookings? Yeah. And so actually this kind of could guide us walk, start our next conversation. But someone asked, how well does Boostly website work with Hostly? So Boostly is a partner of ours. We'll get into that as well. But that'll kind of just lead us into the conversation with mark.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. Well, my main tip for increasing direct bookings is the same thing that I've applied to Boostly and why, you know, hostfully and Boostly works so well that the main tip to increase in direct bookings and I talk about it a lot in this book, which we'll talk about later on, is relationships. Like if you try and go this alone, as in you just try and shut yourself off from your local community, from local businesses around you, from peers or people in your niche or people in your industry and you try and do it all of yourself and you don't look to create relationships and businesses and partnerships, then you will struggle and suffer. The best way to increase in direct bookings is, is not to do fancy Facebook ads, Google Ads. Don't try and do all of the fancy, fancy amazing things that you've got, SEO and all that sort of things that are going on. The best thing to do seriously is to start building relationships in your local and your niche. So simple, simple way to do this is, and this is why I want to throw the question out to you, everybody that's tuning in and use the questions box. Don't worry, there's no chat and I will use the questions box. So again, just give me a yes or a no in the questions box. Do you live in the area, the city, the town, the location where you rent your properties out. So yes or no, do you live in the area where you rent your properties out? Okay, so for everybody who says yes, your life is going to be a whole lot easier. But it's not impossible if it's a no. Because I know in America and I know in Canada it's more common to live, say in Charlotte, Carolina and have your properties down in Florida. Okay, this is very common. But in the UK and Europe maybe not so much. But this will work either way. So if it's a yes, and what's your main tip to increase in directions? Super simple. Think about your property right now. Think about where you are in the world. Think about the type of people who come to your area and think about your property. So what do I mean by that? My family business was a farm, stay, bed and breakfast and holiday cottages on a 200 acre farm in the middle of the North Yorkshire countryside. All right, so which people will come into our area? It was tourists, families. Okay? Those are very, very common coming to our area. All right. We were very close to Scarborough and Whitby, which is again, very touristy locations in the United Kingdom. Then what I did is I looked to our family business model. It was set up for people who enjoyed the countryside. It was set up for families because we had a working farm. Kids loved coming up, families loved coming up. And then what we did is we go, okay, so our customer avatar, our ideal guest is families. Okay? We know that there's a lot of families that come to our area because it's a very touristy location, it's by the beach. So what I then did is I looked outside of our business. I looked at places to eat, I looked at places to go, family days out. I looked at all of that. And what I did was very simply, I did research. I was very fortunate that our custom avatar matched exactly who we were. It was me, my wife, and hired two young boys and we would go and visit places in the area. Because at the end of the day, your job as a hospitality owner or a property owner is you got to become your local brand ambassador because you're going to have guests ask or wonder where places to visit, places to go, places to check out. And this is why having a digital guidebook is awesome. Because what you can do is you can really build your guest experience and you can put it all into a guidebook. Now when I was doing that, I wasn't just going to visit, keeping myself hush and not saying anything. What I was doing, I was going there and what I was doing afterwards, I was reaching out on social media, I was reaching out on email or phone call, dropping a call in, asking to speak to the owner and just email introducing myself, just saying, listen, we came visit you, we had a great time. I run a hospitality business. We've got 14 krooms, we've got three holiday cottages. We have got hundreds, if not a thousand people come and visit us every single year. I would love to be able to work with you, recommend you to our guests. Is there anything you can do to help the guest out? Vouchers or something like that? And again, what we did with this one place, this working farm, that was like more of a. An experience, place to go. They had a little cafe and working farm, etc. We were able to work out a special discount for our guests. And the really cool thing, which is like the byproduct of that, is that for every person that came to visit, we had like a little chat going. And for every 10 people that visited on the back of us, then we got financial, like, a little kickback on the back of it, which. Which is great. So. And the. The best bit, the best bit, we never had to pay when me and my family went there again, which is awesome. Which is like a nice little thing to have. You know, it's all this thing you do. So that's just not the only one we did. We did it with local cafes and restaurants and all of those cool things. We built up a really nice little relationship and partnership network. And then what that meant was it was a win, win, win. So it was a win for the local business because they were getting referrals and recommendations all the time. It was a win for our guests because we were recommending a place that we like to go to. And when you arrive in a location that you haven't got a clue, you don't want to be trawling and wasting your time on TripAdvisor and Google and looking for places to go. You want to, you know, that's the whole thing about Airbnb. Live like the locals and get the recommendations. And so they were going there, having a great time. And it was a win for us because what was happening is, number one, we were building up a nice little partnership relationship. We were getting a bit of a kickback. Our guests had a great time, so the guest experience was good. But. But the best bit of it was we started to find that. That place, a place that didn't have accommodation, they would start Having parties there, sometimes they even had weddings there. And what would happen is obviously when there's a wedding, the main thing that the bride and the groom ask is, do you have any place that you recommend for accommodation? So guess, guess who was top of mind. Guess who was the go to. They didn't just say, oh, go find someone booking dot com. I said, hang on a second, we've got Mark at the Granary 14 bedroom guest house close by. And we became their recommended place to go. And that is not doing any Facebook ads, Google Ads, SEO, none of that. It was literally a case of building relationships in the local network. And you know, I talk about it a lot in this book as a step by step guide on how to build that out. Because there's going to be some people in here who are watching this now going, well, hang on a second, I don't live in my area where my properties are, so how do I do that? I've got a step by step guide on how to build that out using Facebook groups, you know. So my number one tip, my main tip for bookings is building relationship and partnerships. And if you're thinking, well, it doesn't really fit my business or my niche or da, da, da, I'd done the exact same thing with Boostly, just a different way round, taking it online. And it's worked massively for Boostly, it's worked well for the granary and you can implement it in any business. Just build partnerships, build relationships, become the go to. Hands down, you will, you will, you will strive. And that's like my five, ten minute answer on that one.

Yeah, well, it's a good answer. I learned a lot, that's for sure.

All right, cool.

And then so question number two is people tend to trust the OTAs, right? That's, it's, how do you build that trust so that they book directly with you instead of them? And again, with OTAs like Airbnb and VRBO, they provide you with an inkling of information enough for you to get the booking. But again, building those relationships we were talking about earlier is tough to do via the OTAs. So, yeah, how do you build trust so that they book with you directly moving forward?

I love this question. And just to give everybody a little behind the scene, behind the peak scenes of how you do a webinar, we literally got these questions just before we went live, so we'd quickly go through them. This question came up and it went to my mind because this is literally something I've been talking about on a recent episode of the Boostly podcast. And it's something that I'm doing at the moment with our current sponsor. The current sponsor is iprac. So everybody will have maybe heard of IPRAC or not heard of iprac. So it's a global certification service and system. And what I, what I love about IPRAC and what I love about the trust factor is to do research on the episode that I was doing about, I looked back at what Airbnb did. So all you've got to do is after this webinar, go to Google and type in 2016. Joe Gebbia, who's the other co founder of Airbnb and he did a TED Talk about designing Airbnb for trust. Because when Airbnb were getting going, properly getting going, they had got a lot of hurdles here because they were the plucky new kid on the street. They were trying to take on booking.com, they're trying to take on Verbal, but at the same time they to were trying. They not needed hosts to list their properties on there, but they needed the guests to come on there as well. Okay. Because you've got to understand, back in 2013, 2014, 2015, Expedia dominated the states, booking.com dominated the UK and Europe. And Airbnb with a plucky open dog. So they had to build trust to build their business. Okay. And it's a really insightful TED Talk on how they did this. And they've built that trust for the last five, six years. My biggest thing now for Host in 2022 is that we're the Airbnb of 2016. We've got to rebuild that trust in our guest. So how do you build that trust? Number one, having some form of accreditation is massively important. And IPRAC is probably one of the most globally recognized ones. It's icon. Go check them out. Number two is you've got to be able to build your social proof. Now, social proof in the most simplistic layman's terms is reviews. Okay? You've all got reviews in some way, shape or form if it's on Airbnb or if it's on Facebook or Google, wherever you collect them. Now, when I say reviews, you've got to then showcase them. Now there's a really cool tool called Reviews. It's specifically designed for the hospitality world. R e v y o-os.com I know Christophe who designed it really well. There's other tools like elflight and repurso, etc. But reviews rev y o o S If someone could put that in the chat, that'd be great. Just in case you don't understand my very quick spoken British accent, what these tools are able to do is they're able to pull in your latest reviews in real time from all of the channels and they can present them on your website, your direct booking website. And the reason why this is important is that if you're able to get people onto your website, if you're able to generate traffic to your website, one of the main reasons why they don't stick around and book is because there's no social proof, there's no review. So what they do is they. And this is a major buying factor for your guests. There's some surveys, tons of surveys done on this and it was 89% of people will look for a review or social proof before making a hospitality reservation. A high, high number. That's nearly nine out of every 10 people that look with you will look for a social proof review. So if your website is not showcasing accreditation and social proof, they're going to bounce. And when they leave your website, when they bounce, they never come back because they get sucked in on the mousetrap of Airbnb, TripAdvisor, whatever it may be happening. So two simple ways, social proof and accreditation. And once you get these shout about these, don't just meekly put it somewhere hidden on your website. Say it with loud and proud that you have got these things in place because that will build the trust factor. And again, we talk about the first thing it ties in. It marries really in with number one with the relationships. If you've got somebody that knows, likes and loves and trusts you, saying to a friend or a co worker or somebody else that they know, like trust and love, saying, hey, go and visit here, then all of the other things are eradicated because you've already got that social proof. It's my friend who's recommended here to go here. I'm gonna do it. You know what I mean? So again, if you can marry number one with number two, it just gives you that trust factor above and above and above and beyond.

Sorry, Mart. It's just for the record for everyone, because a lot of people is asking is reviews with a Y and oo reviews dot com.

Yeah, you've nailed it. Yeah, that's right. I've just clicked on that link. So it's r e v y o-o s.com and again, if there's any Americans or Canadians or anybody who's not English speaking as your first language and you're literally looking at this guy was speaking very fast with an English accent. I do apologize. So if you can put it in the chat, it makes life so much easier. And iprac I hyphenprac.com sorry, Isabella.

And we'll send Iprac as well. Maybe we'll notify, we'll mention these in our follow up email as well because there seems to be a lot of interest on that. Awesome.

Yep.

All right, fantastic.

Yeah.

And hopefully integrates directly with reviews, one of our newer integrations. So we've heard amazing things about it.

All right, cool.

And then question number three. So it seems like online reputation is important to foster those direct bookings which you just touched on. In terms of reviews. What are your top tips to help improve your brand?

Yeah, and this is where social media comes in. So this is what I would love. Everybody who's in the chat again, I'm going to bring it back to everybody. Everybody in the chat who is currently using. Just give me a yes or a no. Let's see if you can do those. Actually, let's do the thumbs up reaction emoji. So if you've all got the emoji buttons ready, hit the thumbs up button. If you are currently using social media to promote your business, let's see how many thumbs up we get. Nice. So for those that are tapping the thumbs up emoji button in the chat now, in the questions, what social media channel are you using the most? So are you more on Facebook? Are you more on Instagram? Are you on the TikTok? Are you on the LinkedIn? What are you currently using? Instagram? Instagram, yeah, we've got loads of Instagram. Okay, great. So social media is one of the best way of building your brand and building your social media presence. And what we're going to do right now, I said that I'd have a little giveaway. I'll do something with somebody that's tuning into this. And this is only available to those that are in live now with us. We've got 39 people minus three, minuses three on the Facebook, 36 people in. So what I want you for you to do at any point over the next couple of minutes, take a picture of the screen. Okay? Take a picture of the screen in front of you. I want you to post it to Instagram. Okay. And I want you to do is I want for you to document that you are tuning in to this webinar. Just take a picture and upload it to your Instagram stories or your feed and All I need for you to do is do uk. Okay. And then also want for you to tag in Hostly as well. So make sure you don't figure out them, which is, let me just check, what is the handle? It's hostfully with an underscore at the end. All right. Host you an underscore at the end@boostly UK hostly underscore@ the end. Post it up to your stories, tag us to him. I get a little notification and then at the end of it, when I look at it like my Instagram, later on I'll just pick one person at random and I'll send you a signed copy of the book. This book? The book. Direct Playbook.

You want to post it up once more? Mark, hold it up once more.

The book. Oh yeah. Okay, ready? Get your cameras ready. Get your cameras.

There you go.

All about building your brand. It's all about document and documenting. This is what we're going to talk about. I see already three to make sure you're all smiling. There you go. All right, so you've got the picture. So what you do is you open up your Instagram. Really super simple. Instagram is the easiest way to do this, but if you've got Facebook or whatever else you use, so make sure you go in, swipe right, you'll see picture like that, upload that picture and tag in Ooster UK and Hostly. What I'll do is I'll pix me later. Now, why is it important to document over create? Why is it important to document to build your brand? And this is really, really important. And if there's any fans of Gary Vee, you'll know that he's spoken about this many, many, many times. Gary Vaynerchuk. When it comes to being online, so many hosts, so many property managers, but so many businesses fall in the trap of using outdated marketing techniques on social media. So when I mean outdated, I mean newspaper ads or any TV ads or radio ads is where it's all about selling. So every time that they had an advert online in the olden days, they were always selling. And what they've done is they've brought that old fashioned, outdated technique onto social media. The clue is in the name social. Nobody opens up Facebook, nobody opens up Instagram, nobody opens up their maybe LinkedIn, but to buy, it's not Amazon, so don't always sell. So what you need to do is you need to document you, your business, your team and your local area. Because at the end of the day, people aren't really spending 100% of their time inside your properties. Realistically, they're only spending 20% of their time at your properties and spending 80% exploring and checking things out. So what you need to do is you need to become your local brand ambassador. And you do that with social media. And when you use social media, you document over create. The most simplest thing that you can do if you want to get a big impact on this is show up every single day and be consistent for the next 365 days. Post up a post or a story. So an Instagram story is that one that disappears after 24 hours. Do it every single day consistently, and I guarantee you if you do it this time, by March 7, 2023, you'll have had good things happen to your business. It's just about consistency. The problem is not everybody wants to stick it out and do it every single day. It's just a little post once a day. That's all it is. That's all I'm asking. One little post story or post every single day. Start to document your area, whether it's a picture, a video. If you want to get fancy, do a live video or a real and whatever. And what you're going to do is when you go to the places and you're documenting, tag them in. Tag them in on social media. Get their awareness. And this is again, it marries in nicely to number one, is that you start building those relationships. Okay, so all of these little tips that I'm sharing with you, things that you can literally do today, you can literally do it right now to do one of these things. And if you keep being consistent with it, they will help you with the whole goal, which is direct bookings.

Mark, correct me if I'm wrong, you can also schedule postings, right?

On social media. You can do, yeah, massively, like Facebook, obviously. Facebook owns. Well, Meta owns Instagram. Meta is Facebook, Facebook is Meta. They own Instagram. So because of that, you can have your Facebook business page and you can link it up to your Instagram. And if you've got the business tools which everybody has access to, you can schedule your, your whole month. One of the things that we, we have done and I have created is called Boostly Content Creator. Because I'm one of those annoying people who say you should be posting every single day on Facebook and social media and Instagram and LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever. People come back to me saying, I ain't got the time. I don't know what to post every day. So I said, right well, I'll go and create it. So what I've, what I've done is I've got an agency here in the UK. Every single month they create 30 to 40 pieces of generic content that's dated long form, short form content. And I literally give it to you at the start of the month. You log on and you've got your whole month done for you. You just have to copy paste, personalize it to your business and your brand and post. It takes you an hour and you can do it. So there's never any excuses. And that's brucelycontent. Creator.comboostly content creator.com Again, there's no excuse to not be posting every day on social media. And again, I'm just one of those annoying people that say it and then anybody who comes back to me saying I haven't got the time, I say, well there you go. It's literally five fiverr a month. Five pounds, seven dollars a month. Yeah, yeah. And it's simple.

Just putting on a post, writing a nice little quick blurb about it. I remember you did something, I don't know if it was last year. You did like a vlog a day, right? Or like every day. Your main thing was a vlog. And you did like a thousand of them, right?

Yes. From 2000. Yeah, 2000. Late 2016, 2017. Me and my wife, my two boys, we, we started traveling around the world. We sold our house and you know, I hired, basically managed to Tim Ferriss, outsource my day to day out of the family business. So we went traveling and because of that my wife started up a travel vlog and I was just doing it for them and we did it every day pretty much for a while. We were traveling for three months. When we came back, I was like, you know, I just got the itch, you know, and I started doing it for Bruce Lee and I just kept on going. I did a thousand and then I thought, right, I've done a thousand now. So like just like Casey and I said, I stopped, but I still document on Instagram. That's why I'm on Instagram. I love Instagram, it's my favorite channel. And I just keep doing it from there. It's not a full on vlog every day, but yeah, it's, it's amazing. And again because of that I can't, there's no instant I did that. So this was the result of it. But I know for a fact that the awareness of boosting who I am and what I'm Doing has definitely grown because of that. And now because of that, there's people who started following me and my journey in 2017 that boys have grown up and people have been following since then. And you know, they know them even though I've never met them in real life, maybe they, they know me and my family as a journey and what we're doing because of it, all the places that we've traveled to and whatnot. So yeah, it's definitely a documenting of creating is 100% the way to go.

Fantastic. All right, and now we have question number four. So how do I. So yeah, this is a good question too because all those steps that you're taking, posting on Instagram and on Facebook and doing the vlogs and just interacting with your guests, how would I measure if my marketing campaigns are working and visitors are converting? Is there a third party you would recommend that kind of does the numbers? Obviously you'll check your year over year revenue, but anything in particular?

Yeah, I mean for me personally, and again this is just me personally speaking is that there is no easy trackable version of this. It's not as, it's not as bread and butter as what it was back in like the olden days with newspaper ads. And I remember when we started at the granary, 2011 was when I first came into the business full time. We could put a newspaper ad out and we could track the effectiveness on coupons coming back. That was a simple send it out tracker coming in with Facebook ads and all those things. Yeah, you can get like conversions and all those things where you can track person post bends and whatnot. But to me that's too confusing. I just want to keep things as simple as possible. And I just know if you are doing something 1% extra a day to spread the awareness of what you're doing, building relationships, it will come back. It's not a short term fix. This is not, this is not a quick fix win. And you know you're bringing in six, seven figures like that. It's not that this is a long term game and a medium long term game. And the reason why so many people stop is because it's a pain in the ass. You've got to be consistent with it. It's just like anything. It's just like going to the gym the first day you go, you're not going to get ripped and get a six pack. You've got consistent, consistent behavior every single day. Doing it consistently and just showing up. It will have a benefit for you. There probably are amazing Third party tools, you can spend X amount on a subscription, it'll do all these things. But I like to keep things as simple as possible and also as well where I'm from in the uk. And if there's anybody here from the UK and is from Yorkshire, you'll know that we're very stereotypically tight. We don't like to spend money. So as I always say, you can take the boy out of Yorkshire, but you can't take Yorkshire out the boy. And every tool I share, I try and make it where you don't have to have subscription services, all these things for all these other tools. Just keep it as simple as possible and you know, you will see if it works.

Yeah, one thing that comes up to my mind now is with Hosily, for example, you can create coupons. So you can create a coupon specifically for Facebook and that's a way maybe to track Facebook, Instagram and any other sources.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, good point. And then question number five. So what are your top tips to help improve your brand? And I guess this kind of goes hand in hand with posting and being active and not just stopping after a day and making it a longevity kind of goal.

4 and 5 definitely do marry up together very, very well, as in showing up daily, etc. But top tips to improve your brand? Well, one thing that you can do is you can definitely utilize the people who know, like love and trust you. What do I mean by utilize? As in letting them know that you are a business and a brand. One of the big misconceptions with Airbnb still to this day in 2022 is that everybody just assumes that it's somebody's second property, somebody's spare couch or spare room. They don't realize that there is businesses and brands behind this. So you have to start again showcasing it. So when somebody lands on your Airbnb listing, for example, you've got a profile, so why not change it so that the first line on that bio instead of it just saying, hey, I'm Mark, I'm from Scarborough. Just say, you know, we are, we are a property management company. You know, here's our amazing reviews. Go check them out. Start to get it into the guest's head that you are a business and a brand when they land in your property. So when they arrive, okay, can you have any branded material lying around, whether it be a little folded card or something, you know, something on the, on the fridge, etc. Can you start to build that? It all depends on how far you want to go. I know there's an amazing company in the UK and they've got their business name plastered on the walls. You know, they'll go for the high end, luxury sort of feel. They've got different style and theme rooms and the business and the brand name is everywhere on there. So it's very obvious, I mean, when people are taking pictures on social media, the brand names behind them in the background of all the shots. Again, what we did, our family business, we wanted to spread the awareness using social media. So we created a hashtag. And this hashtag, even though we've now sold our family business and we've moved on, hashtag Farmee is all over the world. It's a very prominent hashtag. We created it. So basically a Farmee is a selfie on a farm. We created hashtag Farmee and we spread it everywhere. It was on our menus when guests came down for breakfast and when the guests came down for evening meal or tea rooms, we had the hashtag Farmee name on there. We had on the back of the doors. We said post your pictures and your videos on your social media with Facebook or Instagram or wherever it was and use Farmy to spread the awareness. So we build that brand that way and we just encouraged our guests to share and post and tag us in. Because when you, when guests can take a picture online and they can tag you in and brand you, tag you in, that's so powerful because their friend or family member or co worker will see that, will click on it and go check, check you out. The main time when somebody will use social media is when they are on vacation or staycation or workcation. Because you love to show off on social media. You don't show off and post like your day to day stuff. Most people, they do it when they go on vacation. So you might as well take advantage of that fact. And if any way, shape or form you can get them to tag them in, it's like you're working with 100 or a thousand mini influencers on social media by doing that. And that is how you improve your brand.

Wonderful. And then there are. I did see a few more questions coming through. Welcome back, Federico.

Nice to have you. Yeah. What I would say to anybody is if you've got questions after I know that the chat is scrolled and scrolled down, if you've got any instant questions that come on the back of that again, I love to reward the people that tune in with us live. So if you are in here that one of the 36 people that are with us right now live with us. Ask your question. Anything that comes off the back of what I've said, anything that you want to kick back on me or come back at me at, or anything that's top of mind, please do pop it. Please do pop it in there. Because like I say, if any way that I can give help to anybody directly in here, ones that's jumped on with us, I'd love to be able to help. And let me know if it makes sense. Let me know if what I'm saying makes sense, if there's something you can implement or anything that you can do. And also as well, give me a little thumbs up if you've done that picture on Instagram, because I will go and check it out later in those little emojis as well.

Yeah, we got a really nice, really good question from SIPgroup. What time responsibilities does an owner face when replacing a funnel like Evolve with direct bookings?

What time responsibilities does an owner face when replacing a funnel like Evolve with direct bookings? Steve, I need you to come back and give a little bit of context around that question because I don't really get the question that you're asking. I'm sure it's a good one, but please come back in on the top of the chat. I think he's still with us and just retype that in. That would be. That would be lovely.

Yes. I think what he's saying is what kind of responsibilities will the owner of the property manager now have instead of having Evolve kind of take care of business, if you were to do like direct bookings like payment processor and insurance and all that stuff?

Well, this is where you need a pmp. This is where you need a pmp. This is where you need, hopefully. Because again, my, my biggest tip maybe at the start was relationships, but I was just assuming that everybody in here has got a pmp, right? Because if you haven't yet got a pmp, if you haven't yet got a property management platform or a PMS property management software, then you need to get one if you want to increase your diary bookings. Because when you do, life becomes 10, 100 times more easier because then you can link it up to Stripe and you can link it up to all of these cool instructions. Again, I say this a lot, almost bore people who have seen me talk time and time again. Now, 2011, when I first came into the family business, the technology was nowhere near what it is now. Eleven years later, my family was still using pen and paper for their Bookings diary, literally pen and paper. The amount of double bookings that we got. It was crazy having to tip X out. I don't know if tip X is a thing in America, but we have to tip X out. If somebody canceled on, you know, I had to change their stay. That's how, that's how behind the times were. So we had to get it online and when we brought in this software, it was amazing. Now 11 years later, it is so, so, so much better. And the tools you got with a hostfully is phenomenal. And then you add in the things like the guidebook and stuff, it just makes life so much easier.

Oh for sure. Especially when you were taking like just in terms of evolving your brand doing the like the guidebook alone can, can bring your brand into a completely different professional level. But of course you have my email. You're going to get an email from us, so definitely feel free to book a one on one. And then Steve responded, yeah, that, that all takes time. Evolve, charges, all depends.

It all depends on what you want to get out of this. Is this literally your hobby? Is this just a spare room? Is this just a spare warehouse that you've got and this, you've got your main career, you've got your main business. Your focus is all in here. And this is just on the side. If this is you, if that speaks to you right now, then yeah, go with a property management company because it doesn't make sense. You put in the time and effort into it. Who I'm speaking to and who I'm helping is not you, Steve. I am looking to help the people who are hosts and property managers who. This is your business, this is your life, this is that your full focus. Because my goal, my mission is to help 1 million hosts cut down on their overalliance and booking.com and Airbnb. Okay? And so if you, if this is you and I'm speaking to you and you and, and Steve, if this is you, please like let me know. If this is your full time business, this is what you want to do. Because at the end of the day, when you rely on evolve or when you rely on Airbnb and booking.com for 90, 90/% of your income coming in, you are building your house on someone else's land. You are playing in someone else's sandpit and all it takes is that and it could and in swarov and it could really mess you up. All right, so what you need to do as a business owner, and again, if I'm teaching you to suck eggs. I apologize. But when you are a business owner, you've got to do everything in your power to build up your own database, your own list, your own customers, your own guests. Because when you do that, it all becomes easier. Your own payment structures, your own systems and structures. If you go, well, that sounds like a lot of work. That's just life as a business owner, it's not easy. Yeah, I. We are very lucky in hospitality. We are so lucky. Because you can start today. I can go right now. It's Monday. By Friday, I could go get a property. I could go to a landlord and get a property off him. I can rent it off him and I could put it on Airbnb booking dot com. I can get a couple of pictures on my iPhone up over the weekend. By Monday, I could have bookings, I could have revenue. Guaranteed revenue to come in. That's. That is a blessing, right? I do website design. Boostly does website design hostly, but it's obviously a PMP and a guidebook. There's no website that Hostfully and Boostly can go and list our services on and be guaranteed to get in revenue. Because the hospitality industry is so in demand. Okay. And that's a blessing because it's so easy to get revenue. It's a curse. Because when you are so easy to get something to get revenue from, you become over aligned, you become lazy and just go, that's all right. Or get on Airbnb. Don't worry about it. I'll just do it that way. And if you keep going down that route and you are 80%, 90% reliant on Airbnb, let's just say. And what happens? Say your password gets hacked, so you get three or four crappy reviews in a row and you just drop off the face of the algorithm. Say that they close your account, which does happen. You are literally betting everything on one platform. And so this is why what I'm talking about here is so important. Because what it does, it means your business will be here in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, however long you want it for, whatever your goals are. So this is why it's super important to do. Yep.

And that kind of goes in hand. Jeremy had kind of a question. He said, what are your tips for someone with only one property? Does a website look good with just one property available? And I guess that answer kind of goes in with what you just suggested.

100%. Because you got to, you know, you want to build a business and a brand, even if it's just one Property. What you want to get out of that property is this is going to be something that you want to do and you want to send somebody to what you want to be able to do with a website. And I had this conversation with a property management company and, sorry, a host, sorry, in Liverpool just two weeks ago. You want to get to a point where you could be in a supermarket and you can see somebody that's maybe a contractor or a traveling worker, healthcare worker or whatever, and they get chatting to them and they say, oh, I'm, I'm just traveling through town, I come here often. Da, da, da, da. You want to be able to confidently give them a business card or just say, hey, check out my website. This is what we do. And you'll be able to send somebody to, there and then to make a book. And you want to be that confident that you can do so you've got to be able to answer right now, are you confident enough to mention, go check out my website and it'll get booked. Are you confident? If you're not confident, then you need to do something about it. So that, that is why it's important. Even with, even with one or two or three or whatever you want to do, however you want to play it. You know, if this is your hobby, this is something you're doing on side. You're literally tuning in on a Monday afternoon or a Monday evening just for fun and giggles, that's cool, that's fine. But if you're doing this because you want to take your business to the next level, you want to increase their bookings, then everything that we're talking about, you should be focusing on doing tomorrow.

Yeah.

Here we have SIS who asks, would you recommend that we use OTAs because of their marketing cloud and increase the price to cover commissions?

Yeah, Ziz has listened to me before, Definitely. And yes, 100%. And I say this a lot. The big misconception of me or the big thing about direct bookings is that people wrongly assume that I'm saying go cold turkey on Airbnb on the OTAs, literally turn off your listings. I'm not saying that at all. Our family business was in the middle of nowhere, literally 200 acre farm, middle of nowhere. Yes, it was close to Scarborough and Whitby, but we weren't coming up on any of the search results. We needed booking.com because we needed their clout because booking.com has got the awareness of international guests X, Y and Z. We needed them so we would never have grown the business to the level we did without them. What we did is that we didn't rely on them. We went on booking.com, we went on Expedia, we went on Airbnb. When it came to the UK, we were on TripAdvisor. We were listed on so many of these niche sites. We were everywhere. And what we did is we spread it around and we never relied on one channel, so we needed them. And just this is why I say, and this is sometimes controversial, depends on who I'm speaking to. I say you never go 100% direct bookings, because what happens if your referrals stop talking about you, happens if your guests stop talking about you and you're screwed. You need to have a healthy balance on each. Just moderation. It's just like anything. It's like when people say about losing weight and diet and stuff, you say you never just cut out cold turkey. You've got to do it all in moderation. It's the same with this. And yes, so this, this is something that I love that what the PMPs are able to do now and again, we never had this before in the past. You can upsmark the price that what you send to the OTAs. I love this. And I put it to, I put it to a test. So for the last two years, I've lived in Spain, very lucky to be able to do so. And in my little town of Javea, I got to know a Dutch couple really well that had got properties. So if they were doing a management model, they had a couple of properties. And I chatted to him in our favorite little coffee shop and I was talking about the upsell and I just said this was becoming May June, and they had a bit of availability in June because it's that little in between stage. Before you get super busy, I just said, just try this. Let's mark it up by 40, 50%. Let's see what happens. Because again, context, we're coming out of lockdown, we're coming out of COVID And all those things were happening and, you know, the, the people were just wanting to get away and we're in a popular touristy destination. We upmarked it by 40, 50%. And then what we did is the closer it got to the date and the booking wasn't there, we started to utilize the, the on booking.com you've got opportunities and vouchers and codes and stuff. So what we did is we upmarked it by 40 and then we put in a, a Coupon code of 20. Okay, so on booking.com we ticked all of our algorithms massively because we had availability. We're offering a big discount and it was just shot straight to the top of the ranking. Okay. And again, so we had a 50% up mark. We put a discount of 20%. So we're still upmarking it by 30%. Even when you've taken off the commission, which is 15%, we're still making an extra 15%. And you know what the cool thing is, is that we could still say on our website, on their direct booking website, best rates when you book direct. And we could do that because with the power of the PMP and the power of the channel manager, you can then upmark yourself by that match and it just covers the cost of it and then you can still come back on it and go best rates when you book direct. And this is another little psychological price hacking tactic that you can use and you can put into play. And again, I've got a full, you know, that's a very quick answer because I know we're coming out of time. I've got a full video on this on the Boostly YouTube channel. So please do go and check it out. Go into YouTube, type in boostly. You can't miss it. It's. There's a full video on it. Great.

And I think, yeah, Fede, just one more question because I think this kind of goes hand in hand. So we can kind of do a twofer. What will be the next big thing in hospitality marketing? Was a question from David.

I saw that from David. Yeah.

And then there's also from Jeremy. Any tips on building how to maintain relationship with companies that have travelers, like maybe marketing for those channels. So kind of.

Yeah, well, the first, the first one, I am not Mystic Meg. I wish I could see into the future. If so, I'd be a very rich man because I'd be betting on the lottery and winning it. It's hard to predict what's going to happen. Who would have known it known at the start of 2020, at the end of 2019, what was going to happen the year after? If I was to guesstimate, and this is just my opinion, just guesstimating direct bookings is the future of marketing. Everything that I talk about, everything that I talk about in here is going to be the. It's what has been popular it what is popular and what is going to be popular in the future. If you can start to build relationships and if you can turn your guests, not just guests, but super fans, it is only Going to result in good things for you, your business, your brand and your local area. So start by building up those, those relationships. You know what you want? You want a really good tip that you can do tomorrow, you can do right now that nobody's going to do. But those who do, you will get a massive kick and the guest experience will go through the roof. Let me next time your book a booking comes in, so when you get the ping from hostfully to say, listen, a guest has just booked, call them, call them, trust me, pick up the phone, do something that nobody does anymore, Pick up the phone and have a conversation. Don't chicken out by sending an email. Don't chicken out by sending a text. Pick up and call them and have a human one on one conversation with them. Say, hey Federico, what? Why are you coming to the area? Is there a special occasion? What are you doing? What are you looking to do? How can I make your stay extra special? There's a story behind every booking. It's up to you to find out what that is. And if you do and if you can, and if you can put something behind it, then your guest experience goes through the roof. The more your guest experience goes through the roof, the better your referrals are, the better the social proof will be and all that stuff. So yeah, and the second question, any tips on building them to maintain relationships with companies that have travelers? Jeremy, same thing. When you've got a guest at books and you know that they are associated to traveling agencies, travel businesses, this is so much easier. Pick them up and have a call. A good way to test and look out and spot these bookings. If the booking is more than a week, the booking is more than a week, two weeks. Or if it's got a business domain, good tip that it could be a business. And Again Airbnb and booking.com will tell you if it's a business guest, pick up the phone, have a call. Hey Federico, I see you've come in for two weeks. Why are you coming to the area? Is it for work? And they'll tell you, just listen, say up straight and if you say right, I'm coming forward. Do you come to the area often? How come you booked with us? Why did you book with us? All those open ended questions, did you make the booking or did someone make the booking for you on your behalf? This is the golden one. Traveling nursing company, traveling business, traveling professionals. If somebody booked on their behalf and your next next question is, who was that? Do you have a contact name? Contact number, get that name get that number, drop a call into the head office and you can get past the gatekeeper when you've got a name, trust me, I did cold calling for years. If I had a name, my life was so much easier. Okay, so if I call Hostly Head Towers and I get the receptionist and she's like, oh, who are you? Oh yeah, speaking to, Can I just speak to Federico please? It's about accommodation. Boom, straight through. Just want to introduce yourself. And again, because bearing in mind, even if they're booked with you via an ota, they haven't got a clue who you are, they're just booking it for booking sake. It's a PA or someone in the office who doesn't know anybody in the area. They're just booking it for booking sake. If you can introduce yourself and say, hey, by the way, I've not just got one property, I've got 10 properties in this area and I've got a wealth, I've got a big network of other accommodation. How many, you know, there's so many questions you can ask to go down this route, like how many, how many rooms do you need, how much accommodation do you need? How much do you come into the area? You could get a really big contract on the back of that. And I'll leave you with a story. And this story will give everybody the impotence to start and trying this tomorrow. And this story is in the book, okay? So if you've read the book, you will know the story. And this brings it back to the most niche sort of thing you can imagine. Well, there's a guy that I know and he, he had two properties and he's based in Scotland and he was in a small little town on the outskirts of the big cities, you know, Glasgow and Edinburgh. A small little town. Small little. He had two properties in there. He had tenants, full time tenants who were coming to the end of it and he was kicking them out and he didn't know whether to sell them or whether to put them as a, as a rental. He was at an evening sports training, Football training. Soccer training. We're talking about this before he came online. Soccer training, okay. And his, his teenage son was playing in the youth team of this soccer club. This soccer club wasn't a Premier division, it was like League One. So the drop down from the big leagues, right? And at that training he got chatted to a scout and they got chatting to the scout, talking about what they were doing X, Y and Z. And he just, and he just said, oh yeah, I've got these two properties I don't know whether to sell or do whatever with. And he just said, oh, well, we need some place for a couple of other scouts to stay. And he goes, okay, can you put them up? Yeah, sure. So he basically put him up, right? And the reason why he asked that question, because they normally go into a hotel, but that hotel was full with a wedding. So he housed these scouts up and had a great time, all that jazz. And then what happened from the back of that is the club he was then the go to. So more scouts came in, more scouts came in, more scouts came in. And then he used his accommodation and then he basically filled his whole annual calendar and made a big profit from basically home and scouts traveling, families traveling, whatever for this football club. And it's just off a conversation. So again, this is, this is a great way of doing it, a great way of building it. And that's not just with leisure, this is with business. So look at your local sports teams, look at local clubs. How can you just drop a little message in and just introduce yourself? Because I guarantee you, even your family and your friends, some of them won't even know what you do for a living. And just say, hey, accommodation. Do you know anybody who's coming to the area? Do you know anyone's coming to the area? Great way to start. Again, I've given you a very quick breakdown of that in two minutes. I know we're against the clock. Thank you very much for putting the book link on there. Please go and pick up the book. It's a tenner, $15. You can get the Kindle, the Audible, or the print. Totally up to you. And yeah, if you want to say thank you for one thing, just go and get that book. I guarantee you will get a return of investment on it.

Yeah, for sure. And again, there's so many takeaways on this mark. So thank you very much. And then of course, for those of you that are listening who are just overwhelmed with a wealth of information that you just received, don't worry, we're going to send out an email after this with a link to the video, some more guidance. Again, if you want to take one more screenshot of the book and post it on Instagram, feel free to do that. And again, really, any questions you have, please don't hesitate. To any one of us, we're always happy to help.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, Like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf Making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.