How to improve your brand reputation for your business

Welcome to the Boosie Podcast. My name is Mark Simpson and I've got something special for you today. So recently I was invited by Hostfully to come and do a special webinar for them and we talked about direct bookings. We went for a good hour, it was really good. And I reached out to them afterwards and saying, could I please have a copy of that? I would love to turn that hour into a couple of short episodes of the Bruce Lee podcast. And you know, I know a Hostfully well and they said yes. So I have got a little segment of our chat to share with you now. What I love about it is that Hostfully are also sponsoring this episode. So if you're wondering who is Hostfully, then they are one that you should get on your radar. They are the market leaders for the online digital guidebooks. Please, in 2021 get a digital guidebook. The cool thing is this is free. So F R E E. We know you love the free stuff. So go to hostfully.com go get your free digital guidebook. If you ever want to upgrade and get more digital guidebooks then you do have to pay. But it's a very low cost and if you put in Boostly 2M, you'll even get a little discount which is exclusive to team Boostly people. They also do PMS software, property management software. So if you're looking to change and.

You want to get a good one.

They are one of the best multiple award winners. Our website that we create at Boostly links straight into Hostfully. It's fantastic. We love it, it's fun, it's really easy to use, really easy to set up and your guests will love it too. So please do go check them out and do mention that you came from Boostly because they will look you for that. So let's get on with it. You're going to go straight in and what we're going to talk about today will be something very much direct booking related. The next person that you will see will be myself. You'll have David Jacoby and you'll have Brad from Hostfully. So let's get on with the show.

It seems like online reputation is important to foster direct bookings. What are your top tips to help improve your brand?

I mean, we're in an industry, whether we like it or not, that we live and die by our reviews. And obviously every single person who is tuning into this is an amazing host and you give the best experience every single time and you know you've got fantastic reviews. The problem is that we don't showcase them enough specifically on your website. So one thing that I recommend is there's a couple of really cool tools. One that's called Repurso R A P U S O and what this tool does, and there's another one coming out which is specifically for hospitality, I think it's called Reviews, but please do check it out. So anyway, what you can do with these kind of tools is it gathers all of your reviews coming from Airbnb, from your pms, from Google, from Facebook, from, from anywhere on the Internet. And what it does is it clusters.

It all together and you can set.

A filter system so you can say, well, I don't want my one star review showing up, but I, you know, I want my 4 and 5 star review so you can set the filter so say four stars. And what it does, it updates it in real time. So whenever you get a new review come in, it updates and shows it on your website. And again, this is really powerful because one of the main reasons why people leave your website is because they're looking for that social proof. There was an insane stat last year and it hasn't been updated since, but 92% of guests will look for some form of social proof before making that booking. And again, if you want to increase your direct bookings, if you want to get more people onto your website and turn lookers into bookers, you can box off so many of the potential obstacles that are going for a guest mind. But if you're not having reviews and real time reviews on your website, then you're missing out. And the most common thing that I.

See, unfortunately, is that a host will.

Go in, copy and paste a review that was found online and just bang it on the website, so to speak.

And that just looks fake, you know.

As honest as you may be, it literally looks fake. So if you can have it where it looks real, where it's working in real time, they can have a date on there, they can see where it's come from. It's super powerful. And again, the cool thing about Repurso, I believe still it's only $9 a month, so return on investment wise is massive. And again, it's just, it's always working in the background, it works automatically. But. But again, how can you get reviews? How can you get bookings? Now we both know Danny from Optimize your BNB very well. He, I think pretty much pioneered, pioneered this in his book and he talks about it a lot. It's all about the psychological aspect. I'm going to Butcher the way to describe it. So please do go check out his book Optimize my BNB for a better description. But he basically talks about implement implementing that five star service into your guests head right from the very beginning because they don't really know what a five star state is. So if you say to them, hey David, thank you very much, I'm really looking forward to giving you a five star experience when coming to stay out of property. You start implementing that in and obviously you've got to back it up. You can't say you're going to get a five star and they walk into a dump. Supposed to speak but you know, you're obviously everybody in here has got fantastic properties. That's without saying. So you've got to start telling them that and then you know, give them the good service and then ask for a review. That's really key. Don't be timid, don't be, you know, don't be shy. Shy kids don't get sweets. Ask for that review. Don't ask for a five star review.

But just ask for a review.

One of the ways that we, our family business went from zero visibility on TripAdvisor to the top three in the space of 18 months and this is when TripAdvisor was actually relevant. This is back in 2011, 2012, but they were in 2012. That was like the one place you go for reviews. And the way that we got literally from nowhere to the top three in such a short space of time is by asking and what we did on the back of every door because we had a bed and breakfast and rental accommodation on the back of every door in the bnb we had a little laminate and it basically said leave us a review on TripAdvisor. We even had a little QR code. You know, we're ahead of our time because phones back in 2013, 2012 were shocking compared to what they are now. QR codes are everywhere. But we had a little QR code when they scanned it. It took them straight to TripAdvisor to leave a review. And we were just always asking and we're just always subconsciously putting it into the guest mind. And if you ask, you get and you combine that with everything else that we've said, it'll just really help and reap revolution.