How to Increase Your Direct Bookings Without Relying on Booking Engines With Ben Porter-Smith

Sam.

Okay.

Welcome to the Boost Hospitality podcast. My name is Mark Simpson and in this episode we are going to talk about direct bookings. Now, for those of you that are tuning in that don't know what a direct booking is, it is all when a guest books with you and not via a third party. And in this season I've been talking about lots of things around serviced accommodation, but this is the one that I've been looking forward to doing the most because this is where my world comes in to this. As always, it is not just me. On this episode, I asked Ben Portersmith to join me. Ben has a digital marketing agency. As well as having a property portfolio, he likes to practice what he preaches. So he uses his properties, his rental properties around Dumbarton to practice little tactics and tips to increase his bookings. And when they work, he then tells his clients about them. And it's a phenomenal tactic.

I love it.

It's what I've done at the granary to grow my business Boostly. And what we wanted to do, we wanted to put together an episode that will help everybody pick up some tactics and tips. So what we're going to talk about in this episode, we're going to talk about email market and we're going to talk about your customer avatar, your pictures. We're going to talk about what the main thing that he notices that rental accommodation people are doing wrong right now. And we also talk about Google and a whole other things. So this is one for everybody to tune in on. So sit back, enjoy, listen, and as you are going along, if there's anything you want to give me feedback on, go onto Twitter, it's Ostleruk or you can catch me on Instagram Ostleruk.

Send me a message with your feedback.

And let me know what you're doing to increase your direct bookings. Okay, let's get on with the show.

Hi, welcome back to the Boost Hospitality podcast. We are on season six, episode 12 and this episode is one that I've been waiting to do for a long time. It's all about direct bookings, how you can increase your owner bookings where you don't have to rely on booking.com or Airbnb to fill your properties and get heads on bets. And as always, I've got somebody to help me record this episode. We've got a gentleman by the name of Ben Porter Smith of BPS Digital. We're going to find out more about him and we're going to talk about the topics of today. But before we start as Always. I would really appreciate your feedback. If you want to send me a Facebook message, go to boostly uk. If you're on the Twitter, it's Ostleruk. And again on the Instagram, it's boostleighuk. Send a message, let us know your feedback and then go and leave a review on the itunes. Just sort of bump this podcast up those rankings. So without further ado, let me bring Ben in. Ben, if you could just spend a couple of minutes, tell him a little bit more about you and a little bit more about your story and how you became a digital marketing expert at bps.

Yeah, of course. So thank you, Mark, for bringing me on. As Mark was saying, I've been especially excited for this episode as well because Mark and I both operate in very similar fields. We both know our stuff about marketing, but primarily when it comes to lending property. With marketing and how we can eliminate the massive, massive cost that you incur from booking.com and Airbnb and all of those unwanted fees that disrupt your business, we want to put more money into your pocket. So a little bit about me. I'm Ben and I run a digital marketing agency called BPS Digital. Now, what BPS Digital was brought in to do is re sculpt the way that a lot of people look at marketing. So I focus my efforts primarily on startup businesses or people with low amounts of capital and those who don't necessarily know how to get into the marketing world because there's so many reasons that people don't and there's so many reasons that people think that the marketing world is intimidating or there's too much, too much advice going on or it's too expensive. And I know that. I know that. So when I was in my late teens, I started my first business and I started it with 150 quid in my bank. And in the first year I managed to get it to a 10,000 pound turnover. Now, 10,000 pounds is not a huge amount of money. I know this, but I was young at the time and the capital, sorry, the capital that I started with wasn't a great amount. So I thought, okay, here's a problem. We've got a lot of marketing requirements, a lot of marketing needs. Nobody knows who I am or who my business is. How can I start to spread the word with such little funds in my bank? And how can I get out there organically? So I use things like Facebook, I use things like email marketing, I use things like flyers, business cards, word of mouth, and I used my website, all of this very, very Low overhead to start to grow a business. So it came from literally nothing with £150 budget to something that I was very, very proud of. So overall, BPS Digital is here to change the perception that you have to get ripped off in marketing or you have to spend thousands of pounds in paid advertising or a countless number of reasons why people are scared to get into marketing their business, when in actual fact there's so many things that you can practice today that will change the way that you look at that and change the way your customers look at your business. So yeah, I went on a little bit there, but that summarizes what BPS Digital is about and where my passion lies.

So you started out well, you've come from Touchstone education to now going solo with bps. So obviously when you're at Touchstone, you've got a real good property education and you've also got your own property management business. So a lot of the tactics and tips that you're talking about and you're advising your clients with part of you putting it into practice in your business. Which is exactly how I got started with Boost Lee on the back of the granary, which is our family business. You know, you just guinea pig, you just trial and test it and you anything that works, you tell people about. So the question I'm sort of leading to was what was one of the core reasons from sort of transitioning from property into marketing? And as a side sort of question, what has made you do it and why do you feel like it is the right thing to do for you in the next part of what you're trying to do in your career?

Okay, great. So yeah, there's a few good components behind that question. And I would say talking from the experience side of working with Touchstone, you're almost immersed in a family like atmosphere where everybody there and everybody that works there and everybody that shares the knowledge the Touchstone gives are working on their own projects, working on their own property investments. So there's always so much knowledge circulating around that office, whether it's how do I get a rent to rent deal, how do I market my products, how do I, you know, pick up and grow my HMO business? It doesn't matter. And the biggest takeaway from that was that the entrepreneurial world is a very, very real thing. And even having worked at a company and being an employee, you're still very much encouraged to be an entrepreneur. So that aspect of it I loved and I'll circle back to that in a minute. But what made Me transition from property into marketing, I guess, is two things. So obviously Paul Smith, being my father, massively into property. And since we were very, very young, he's taught us to think outside the box, look at other options in which we don't have to follow the conventional system. You don't have to go to school, you don't have to go to uni, you don't have to fight for a post grad job with a thousand other applicants because there is other options out there. And it's, how can you use what's in your head and what's in your pocket to gain knowledge and gain investments in things like property? So we took the, My brother and I took the SA masterclass maybe six, seven years ago now, when it was just kind of when SA was just booming into the market, when it was just becoming a thing. And this, this exact property that I'm talking about at the moment was running as a buy to let initially, and it was making maybe 200, 250 quid a month profit. But then we're experiencing void periods and stuff. Like when the boiler broke, that would set us back nearly a whole year's worth of revenue. So when we went to the essay masterclass, it was just completely, completely mind blowing because then we could see where the real opportunity lay. And not necessarily realizing that we were in a gold mine area was something that was hard to come over because we're saying our first flat was in a place called Dumbarton and it's about 10, 15 minutes away from Loch Lomond. But not knowing much about sa, not knowing necessarily huge amounts about marketing at the time, this was six, seven years ago, you know, we thought, okay, well, what would people want to come to Dumbarton for? Maybe because it's 20, 30 minutes outside of the main city, maybe because it's kind of a contracting area and things like that and, you know, all that stuff. But then we got the market, we got the property on the market, we got it online on the SA market, I mean, not to sell. And all of a sudden we started getting bookings from China, we started getting from Florida, we started getting them from Australia, all around the globe.

And we thought, what is it?

Why are all these people coming? So then we started asking questions and, you know, we're meeting and greeting guests at this point. This was before it all became automated and they were saying, we're coming to see Loch Lomond. I said, geez, oh, you know, we didn't know that Loch Lomond being what it is, was such a Big thing globally. It's a massive, massive global attraction. We didn't actually realize at the time, so that really allowed us to get a great head start. And you know, all of a sudden something that was earning maybe 200 pounds a month profit started to go to a thousand pounds a month profit and then it went to £1,500amonth profit. And we thought, wow, SA really is a big thing. So we took that, we took our learnings from that. And then I got into property management. We started to look at other gold mine areas and what are the kinds of things that, where we could get properties that would offer the same unique features as this one. And then really the transition started to take place when I saw what my brother was doing all right, so my dad massively took me into property and taught me really the fundamentals of being an entrepreneur and that there was always more to life. But my brother on the other hand, went straight into marketing out of school. So since he was 16, he's been working in the world of digital marketing and for a few years he sort of went and did his corporate jobs and he really learned his craft. He focuses specifically on pay per click advertising with Google and it wasn't long before he started to become recognized by Google as a top contributor. I started to see what it was that he was doing in the marketing world. And I was still fairly young at this point, so I thought, okay. Whilst I was thinking of my career paths, I started to get more and more into marketing. And he almost mentored me through stages of marketing, my startup business at the time. And he was showing me different fundamentals of how to get in the consumer eye and how to get your brand out there. And that slowly, slowly, slowly built into me realizing where my real passion was. And my real passion lies in marketing because it's universally applicable to so many different things and every single business needs marketing. That's just a universal fact. So when it came to choosing a career path for myself, it was obvious that was exactly what I wanted to do. And then it just so happens that marketing and property make quite a good combination. And then, you know, and BPS Digital was born. And that's where my kind of.

I like it. I just want to circle back on one thing that you said, which is, which is, which is pretty cool. So when you were starting to get guests from all over the world, you were, you were meeting them face to face and you were asking them, you know, why you come in here? And they, they told you why. So it's, it's a perfect example. And again, this is always talking about. This episode is about diary bookings, but it's also about knowing your guest and knowing your ideal customer. And again, what you've done there is you've gone face to face, you've greeted them, greet them into the property and had a chat with them. This is one of the things that so many people don't do. Having a chat with the guests when they arrive to find out how they booked, why they booked, and, you know, putting it all together. And then at the other end now doing what you're doing, which is marketing. Okay, so we get 80% of our guests are coming here from here because they want to visit Loch Lomond. So what can we do as a property owner, as a rental owner, as a guest house owner, as a hotel owner to attract more guests who are looking to do the same? And then you've got to start to think about, well, is it X, is it Y? You know, all of them things. But by simply doing the basics of having a chat, meet and greet with your guests, finding out where they're from and why they booked is. Is key. So this episode is all about direct bookings. It's all about how to attract more direct bookings, how to cut down on commission costs. But the question I'd like to ask is, you are obviously heavily in the property world. You're heavily in the marketing world. You're now sort of transitioned into where you've got CL and you've got, obviously, people that you advise on filling their properties. What is the one mistake, the main mistake, that you see so many owners, rental owners make when it comes to marketing their properties?

Okay, so as you just said, I think there's quite a few components to that, but I would have to say, really, the salient point of that question is, what is it that we're not doing, that we should be doing? And I think it all stems from the misconception that you can take a property and you can put it on Airbnb and you can put it on booking.com and just wait for it to fill up. Now, that just isn't the case. There's so many reasons why it's not as straightforward as that. And that's the biggest thing that I teach and the biggest thing that I share with all my clients is that SA is a product just like anything else. So I like to use the analogy that if you took a pair of sneakers and you bung them up on your own website, you bung them up on Amazon or whatever. They're not just going to sell just because they're there physically. You have to think about what it is that you can do to market your product. Just like Nike advertise their sneakers, just like Adidas advertise their new tracksuits, you have to make sure that your essay is getting the attention that it deserves. So the ways in which we can do that is obviously there's quite a lot of components, but the biggest one, I would say is professional imagery. No more iPhone photos. We don't like those because they're not good, they don't fit. It just makes the property look unprofessional. So we need professional images and we really have to get into the why of why. Your essay is above competitors. Because just like every other product based market, your SA has got its competitors. So what we have to do is analyze the service department and we figure out what makes it stand out from those that we're sitting right next to. Because when you're scrolling through Airbnb, when you're on booking.com, your competitors are literally sitting right there next to you. So we need to make RSA stand out. Right? And I usually advise people to do. My favorite shop is the main bedroom with kind of like a centerpiece on the bed and nice lighting and a nice big cover photo or like a canvas above the bed because it's just eye catching. You know, it takes you in straight away to what the property is like. It looks luxurious, it looks comfortable, it looks like somewhere where I would want to stay. I think when people put pictures up of maybe like a nearby piece of scenery or the outside of the property, like, yeah, that's lovely. But that's not saying anything to me as to why I want to stay there. So let's say that's the first component. Second component is analyzing what it is that you have around you. So you've got travel links, you've got shops, restaurants, tourist attractions, unique selling points. You know, what is it about your property that makes it stand out? What is it that we can do to separate it from our competition? So if it's two minutes away from train station, I need to know that because that could be valuable information to me. If it's right off the ma, I need to know that. And you know, so on, so forth. So every unique feature about the property has to be advertised. And I would say the third and final point, the main thing I did Touchstone and the main thing I do still to this date is copywriting. I'd say I'm probably a copywriter by trade, and that's where the digital marketing sort of comes in. And when you write copy, you write sorry for anybody. So that's. Copywriting is a marketing term. So it just means sort of writing pieces of text and stuff like that. And when you write pieces of copy, you have to be passionate. You have to really care about what it is that you're writing. And that goes into the description of your service department. You have to be passionate about it, and you have to be passionate about the area and the type of people that stay there. Because as the consumer, I can tell whether you spend 60 seconds on writing that piece of content or whether you truly sat there and spent 45 minutes telling me about why I should come and stay at your apartment. And really what we want to do, because people will browse, people will click on five, six, seven different apartments before they decide to settle on one. So it's not necessarily about being the first apartment that somebody clicks on. It's more about being the one apartment that that person converts on when they see you. And by converting, I mean, they hit that book button and they take your apartment. So the way you're going to do that is by teaching them exactly why they should stay at your apartment in the description. So just to sort of circle back and summarize that point, it's essay is a product just like anything else, and you have to sell it like you would try and sell another product. And by doing that, it means that you have to care about what it is that you're selling, because when you care about, people can tell that you care. And that will definitely help with your conversion rate.

Yeah, perfect. We've got three important factors there. And just as a little side note, when Ben is saying sa, he just mean rental accommodation. Rental accommodation, guest house owner, hotel owner. Whatever you are doing, whether you're listening to this, this is what we're talking about. So photos are key here. I love that he focused on that. You can tell massively a picture on a listing site or on a website that's been done with an old iPhone or an old Android phone. The picture is very cliche. A picture speaks a thousand words and it's the first thing that grabs the attention from a potential guest. And when you're listed on all of these websites, doesn't matter whether it's booking.com or Airbnb or a paid listing website or even your own website or your social media, that the images is going to be what captures the eye. And those that have got professional pictures done. Those are the ones that stand out and you can always tell it. And this is my, I would say I would just jump on the back of that tip is get professional photos done. It's yes, it will be a cost, but there's a massive return of investment. And if you haven't yet got the budget and you want to find out how you can get a professional photo shoot for free, then go to boostly.co.ukphotoshoot put it in. That link will take you to a video that I created for the Boostly Academy. It's a free video that I have that will show you how you can get a photo shoot done for free or very, very, very cheap. Then we talked about customer avatar fitting the needs of your ideal guest and Ben spoke about this really well, that if 80% of your guests are staying with you because you've got fantastic access to a train station or fantastic access to a popular tourist spot or a conference, then when you are writing your copy, which bounced on to number three, when you're writing your copy, when you're writing your listing description, if you're writing your About Us page, if you're writing your profile on Facebook, make sure you mention it because this is how you will stand out from all the other accommodation choices that are in your local area, on your wider area. So I like that. Really, really good. So let's sort of move on to the next little bit then. What are your favorite tools that you're using so you're using for you, you're using for your clients? When it comes to marketing, have you got any sort of tactics and tips and tricks and tools that anybody can sort of download or start using that sort of give us a little insight to what you're doing?

Yeah, yeah, A thousand times over, Mark. I mean, you'll be the same as somebody that's obsessed with the digital world, I'm always looking at new pieces of software and new technology that I can use to A, make my life easier, but B, stand out in front of other competitors and stand out to my consumers. So the one thing that I am crazy about is CRM systems. So customer relationship management systems, they are, they have grown my business more than I could fathom because if you use them in the right way, you can really build a relationship with, with your audience without necessarily having to do an awful lot. And that was one of the biggest things I picked up in my corporate career when I was working through various digital companies, was that the fundamental of every, in any business is A CRM System, whether it's HubSpot, Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, that doesn't matter. And if you're not necessarily familiar with what it is I'm talking about, it's. I'd say the main thing behind the customer relationship management software system that allows you to do is automate your process. So I use Toki as my channel manager, which is kind of like a CRM system. It allows me to merge my calendars for my SA apartments and it allows me to send out automated emails to guests. So a good little thing that I like to do is, is I have a little sequence of automated emails and text messages when my guests are coming to my apartment. So when somebody books my system then fires an automated email and it says, thank you for your booking for XML on X date, and it uses their name so that it looks like I've sent the email personally. Then we sign it off with our contact information, tell them that we're looking forward to seeing them and all that kind of stuff. So that brings a nice little kind of initial, hi, welcome. We got your book in. The apartment's going to be ready for you when you get here. And it just breaks down that little barrier of discomfort, especially if they're coming from Europe or America or, you know, even further away. And then midway through their stay, we send them a little email. I don't really do a text message because I feel like text messages can be somewhat invasive. So for this one, I just do an email and I say, hi, hope everything's okay. Let me know if you need anything, if you have any questions. As always, I'm not too far away from the apartment, so if you need anything, let me know. Now, 99 times out of 100, they'll come back and say everything's absolutely perfect, but that one person is going to come back and say, oh, well, actually, I'm finding it hard to work the TV or I can't find the WI FI code or whatever, but they don't want to bother you. And the fact that you now went and proactively asked them what it is that is wrong or if there is any problems, it then breaks down that barrier and allows them to come and talk to you and say, oh, actually, I could do with some help on this. And that's going to do two things. It's going to alleviate the problem there and it's going to keep your guest happy, meaning you get a great result review, but it's also going to build rapport with the customer. So that in the long term, they're going to want to come back and stay with you because they know that you care. And then just before they leave, we send an email that says, hi, thanks for your stay. Once again, if you could please put the keys back in the lockbox. Here's the code again and all that other kind of stuff. But then the most important part is at the bottom of that email, we say, please leave us a review on Airbnb, booking.com Facebook wherever is easiest for you to access. Then we say, if you want to contact us and come back for a direct booking, we can give you X amount off, we can do a special price and you can get in touch with us on this email address, you can follow us on this Facebook page, or you can, you know, whatever, all the avenues of direct contact. So the reason automation is key is because we have quite literally hundreds and hundreds of different people coming into our partners throughout the year. So I can't keep on track of messaging all these people, all these different things at all different times. So what my CRM system, or Talk Heat in this case allows me to do is maintain that personal touch with the customer whilst not actually having to do anything. And I'm copied in on all of the emails, so it copies in my email address and sends it straight to the customer so that I still know that they're firing. And all I have to do is glance at it if I want to and check everything's okay. So is there a tool that I would recommend? Yes, 100%. If you run SA, get a channel manager and if you have a channel manager, get it to do email automations, because that is a huge part you're missing out on if you're not already doing it. And in terms of what you know, potentially other avenues that you could download straight away, things that are great from a customer relationship management point of view would be something like mailchimp. I know it's the biggest email service provider and it's one of the most popular because it's easy to use and there's about a thousand tutorials on YouTube that you can look through and it'll teach you how to build a mailing list for your customers and how to bring their mailing list in and then how to set up campaigns and speak to your customers. Passionate subject for me.

So I totally agree. Automated email triggers are the one. There are a lot of pms, there's a lot of channel managers out there. You may be with one or you may be watching this and thinking of Going with somebody new. There's a full blog on the Boostly website. Boostly b o o s t-l y.co.uk.

P.

I polled over a hundred people in the hospitality community, asked them who they were using the pros and the cons, took it, put it all together, put it on a blog so you can have a look and make your own decision. One of the key things as Ben alluded to was automated emails, email triggers. And I would probably say that out of all the big ones like you mentioned to keep for service accommodation, but you've also got people like Bookalette Supercontrol free to book Avivo, all the big guys now are getting email triggers or they are getting email triggers. My advice would be to anybody who has got this feature and is not yet fully taken advantage of it is to box off some time and get this set up. But don't just get this set up, don't just have whatever there is. When Ben was talking about copywriting, when Ben was talking about creating copy, he means this as well because this is the most important thing. This is the message that you've been granted permission to go into their inbox. This is what they are going to read. And these are already somebody that have got over that know like and trust thing because they've already given you money, they've already given you the booking. So this is a fantastic opportunity to not only do the guest experience, which is what Ben was talking about and again they don't know that you've automated this so by doing that great, but also use it pre stay to maybe get an upsell, maybe let them know something that they don't already know. One of the big things that I teach in the Boostly Academy, which is my private training group, I show people how to create a bespoke Google map where you can pinpoint where local pubs, bars, places to go around you. And all they have to do is they click on that link and it opens up their Google Map on their Android or on their Apple and it's saved in there. So as they're driving in they can look for key points to where your property is because you got to think of it as a guest. When they first arrive at a place that they've never been to, specifically if you're in say a city center or your heart find that will be a major way of helping to find you. And that's like one thing that you can do on the automation. And again, post stay really key because when a guest leaves your property and say that's 24, 48 hours. The stay is still fresh in their memory. So it's a fantastic time to say, listen, I know you maybe didn't get the chance as you were driving home, but now you're back, now you're settled, you're in work or wherever. You've got a couple of minutes. Please go to our Facebook page. Please go to our Google Business page and leave a review. Because as we all know, reviews are massively important for us to appear higher in the search results. So yes, really good tips there. Mailchimp as well. If anybody wants a tutorial on how to set up Mailchimp, just go to the Boostly YouTube channel. There's a full tutorial on how to get it set up and it's sort of ties in nicely with the next way that I wanted to go with this chat. Talking about email marketing. Now, I don't know if you've noticed this, Ben, but I've noticed that since the GDPR came in last year, like the new rules and the new changes, a lot of people are scared of doing email marketing. What are your thoughts on email marketing? Is it still effective post gdpr and how are you showing people on how they can do this and how they can grow their email list and the importance of doing so?

Okay, cool. So yes, email marketing always has been and still is the most effective marketing tool that any of us as marketers use and any sort of small, medium or large business use. Because as Mark says, it's a personal touch. It's you've been given permission to go directly into their inbox. And I love that expression because it's so true. Because when you post on Facebook, when you post on your website, you're always talking to a mass consumer audience. So you're trying to put out a message generalized to what you think your audience might like. But when it comes to email marketing, you can pinpoint and segment your customers. So I know who to talk to, what to talk about, and when they're going to want me to talk about it. So it's an effective tool because it gives you an in to what the customer is thinking. You can run feedback surveys and you can run analytics reports from email marketing to see what's wrong with your email, what's good about the email, what people like, what they didn't like. And a huge, huge part of marketing is analyzing the data that you have because it allows us to improve. So when GDPR came in, yeah, it was a big scaremonger. I remember at the time I was actually an infusionsoft conference. Infusionsoft, for those of you who don't know, is probably one of the biggest small to medium business customer relationship management softwares out there. So GDPR was a huge thing for them because a big part of CRM is the emailing feature. And when GDPR came in, I didn't think that it was really a massive problem because the key thing that GDPR stops is people purchasing mailing lists from one another. So from a personal point of view, you can kind of have more of a peace of mind that your own data is protected. If you give your email to somebody or you give your phone number to somebody, they're not legally allowed anymore to just go ahead and say, hey, who wants to buy this? You know, you can take my whole list for X amount of money. And from a marketing point of view, from a business point of view, it's not obligatory, but it is beneficial to do what's called a double opt in. Now, all a double opt in is, is when somebody's signing up to your mailing list or when they're buying a product from you and you say, would you like to hear about sort of, you know, what's going on with us, what's going on with our company, or new and exciting offers for you is a pretty common one. Check this box and let us know that you're okay with it. So that's the customer confirming twice that is double opt in and showing you that they're happy to get their email over to you. Now, for a customer to go through that stage means that they have to be interested in what it is that you're saying, because otherwise they could just say, no, I don't want to hear from you. So what you now know is that everybody in your emailing list is interested in what you have to say. So you'll start to find that your open rates go up, your click through rates go up. And this is all stuff to show that the customer is engaged and excited to hear what it is that you have to say. So I'd say the biggest thing for GDPR with me was knowing that I was actually getting customers coming to my mailing list that were interested in what I had to say. Less time wasted on buying leads through lead generation or putting into paid advertising and bringing in email addresses that really weren't relevant or interested in my product. So I think, I hope that answers that question. Well, no, really good.

I think you nailed it perfectly there in that. Well, you'd like to think that now, buying email lists isn't what people are doing. We all know I'm still getting spammy emails. I'm sure you're still getting spammy emails. The amount of people that land in my inbox are saying, get this SEO report or da da da da da. It's still happening. But I think that for everybody here, like Ben was saying, if you've got a good signup form and if it clearly states why people will be signing up for this form, and again, mailchimp have done this really well, then you know that the people that are signing up to your email list, whether they've stayed with you or not, then it's somebody that wants to hear more about you. And this is something that is coming more and more common on all the platforms. It's not the amount of followers, it's not the amount of subscribers, it's the quality of that subscriber that is the key part here. You'd rather have an email list of 10 people and when you send out an email, 10 people open them, than having an email list of a thousand people and when you send out a list, only 10 people will open them because you know that those 10 people engaged. They want to know more about you, they want to know more about your property, they want to know about the local area and those will be more the ones that will come and stay with you. So I think what's key look as GDPR is like one big spring clean. If it meant that you used to have a thousand people on your subscriber list and now you're down to 100. Good, you've got rid of 900 people who would never come and stay with you again. These 100 people are the ones to focus on, but the main thing is do somewhat with it. There is nothing as frustrating as getting one email a year from an email address that you signed up to around Black Friday sales or Boxing Day sales, those are the prime ones that will just get unsubscribed, binned off report for spam if you consistently. And when I say consistently, I don't mean every day, but once a month have emails going out and talking about maybe a link to the Facebook post that you put out that month where it's a nice picture of the property or something you've done or an event coming up. You know, it doesn't take a lot to create templates or a copy for your email, but if you can do it once a month, then you're keeping in touch. And Ben said this right at the Very start of our chat, when we were chatting, it's about keeping present, it's about keeping a fourth of mind. Is when that guest looks to then go on holiday or a staycation or come back for business, then you're the place that it remembers. Because you can be very naive when it comes to this. Just because a guest stayed with you in January 2017 doesn't mean that they're still going to remember your name, your business, your website, your location. Try and think of a place that you stayed at in 2016, 2017. You probably remember the town, but you won't remember much else. The ones that you keep in touch with on a regular basis, whether it's on social media, like what we're doing now, whether it's on email or whatever, those are the ones that will keep coming back and back and back and back. Because we are in an age of information overload. We get thrown so many things at us, whether it's on one of this, a tv, a billboard, a phone. So you just got to make sure that you just keep him present and talking about keeping at the forefront in the mind. You mentioned off air some things that you're doing in your property that work really well. One of the things that you mentioned is keeping things lying around the property for them to take. That will help remind them of you and your business. Can you sort of elaborate on that and just sort of what you're doing to sort of keep you present in mind once a guest has left the property?

Yeah, yeah, of course. So if you start looking at your service accommodation unit as a brand, a big thing that Mark was just touching on, and I'm going to touch on in a second, is brand recognition. It's when you think about the Coca Cola logo or the McDonald's logo or any of these big brands that you would recognize without even seeing the name written underneath the logo. That's because they put that brand in your face so many times that now you subconsciously recognize what it is that that brand does and what it represents. So what I like to do with my SA units is we've done loads of different tests for different things, but we like to put useful things around about the apartments, like pens, fridge magnets, stuff that the guest will pick up and put in their handbag or put in their suitcase without even realizing they've done it. So then when that pen's lying around on the desk a month later and they'll look at it and they'll see the name of my apartment again, I think, oh, I had a really lovely time there. So what we're doing is we're getting back into the customer's head when we're not even there. We haven't even made contact. But it's all about the brand recognition. So the more times they see us, each time they think about us. As Mark was saying, when it comes back round to the next time that they want to travel, you're going to be looking at sort of different apartments in different areas to stay. And if there's one thing that I've learned about consumer psychology is that people don't love change. So if they've come somewhere before and they love it, the chances are they're coming back to you next year. So it's really, really crucial that we kind of stay in the eye of the consumer as much as possible. And what we also do is we have little business cards and little flyers just sort of floating about the apartment. There's not any big obvious billboards that say, come back and see me, but there is, you know, just business cards, ways that they can book direct if they want to just email us. That's a bit more personal per se, than then jumping onto booking.com and coming back through that way. But really that's where marketing knowledge comes into a combination of property. Because we're playing what we know about consumer psychology to think about. If SA is a product, how do we continually bring our product back into the mind of the customer? And, you know, that comes down to the simple fact of put a pen on the coffee table with your brand on it. It's honestly as simple as that.

I like it. So a lot of the talking about customer psychology, a lot of the places that people start their search, when it comes for a staycation or a vacation or a business trip, is Google. Now we're all about getting people onto our website, getting them to direct book. But seeing that so many people start their search in Google, do you have any tactics or tips of what people could be doing that when they do start a search, that is their business that stands out, their rental accommodation over everybody else?

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, earlier on Mark was speaking about blogs and there's kind of a few. Again, there's a few components to this. Now it is possible to, just as Mark will know as well as I, that it is possible, completely possible, to run Google Ads for your hospitality business or, you know, your hotel business or whatever it is that you're doing is 100% possible. But I don't always go down that avenue for the Sale for the main reason that booking.com Airbnb, trivago, tripadvisor, all of your massive online travel agents are so big and their marketing budgets are so big that when you type something like, you know, holiday apartment, Loch Lomond, which is probably a common search result for me, then the first four or five results you're gonna get is booking.com, airbnb, trivago, tripadvisor, because they just dominate Google with their massive, massive kind of search result, you know, and they use paid advertising to do that so you can compete. But I wouldn't always go directly along the lines of something as blatantly obvious as holiday apartments or holidays, Loch Lomond, because the big, big channels have got that covered. So what you want to do is sort of think about different search terms that you can use. So if somebody wanted to put in maybe sightseeing Loch Lomond, or if somebody knew sort of a little bit about property, they might type in service accommodation. If you wanted to run Google Ads, think about other ways that people might describe what you're offering as opposed to just the blatant what you would expect somebody to put in. So that's going to help because it's going to keep your, what's called a cost per click down massively. Whereas if you want to compete with Booking.com and Airbnb, you're probably paying, I don't know, what do you think, Mark? Like 20, 30, 40 pounds per click, something like that? A lot of cash anyway. So what I would advise doing from an organic point of view. Now, organic is non paid marketing. I would definitely recommend putting a blog on your website because it's going to help with something called your SEO. So Search Engine optimization optimization. And what that allows you to do is it allows you to stay relevant in the eyes of Google. Right? Google is the number one search engine provider in the world. And the way that they sort of work is when somebody types in a search term into Google. So as Mark was saying, if you were to put in the search term holiday apartment, Loch Lomond or service accommodation, Loch Lomond, Google would then go and compare that with literally millions of sites that it has online that all have that kind of description or they have those keywords in them and it's going to search for the most relevant result to the search terms that you were putting in. So what a blog allows you to do is write content about your product, about your service department, about your local area, about events that are going on in your area, and that allows you to Use things called keywords. Every time you use a keyword, it highlights within Google. So if you're writing a blog about your apartment, you want to use the words service department, lock, Lohman's. You can use them in different variations, but you want to use that as much as you can in an organic way. So it has to blend nicely into what it is that you're saying. But it's also going to play, you know, sort of the other side of the coin is that Google's going to begin to recognize that. So blog away everything that you have to talk about, like your sa, your hotel, whatever, your local area, restaurant openings, events. For me it'd be events at Loch Ormond. Just write about it as much as you can and put it up onto your website. Because the more content you have on your website, the more Google is going to recognize you as a viable search result for the candidate. When they're putting in the search terms.

Awesome. I like that. No focusing really well on Google Ads. Circling back on that, if you go for a generic term, you are going to waste your money. You put a budget of 30 to 90 pound a month and it'll be gone like that because like you say booking.com spend billions on it. If you are going to do Google Ads, figure out for the long tail keywords. And as a little advice, and this is something that everybody can do, run a search on Google. Go for some very generic holidays in Loch Lomond, scroll right to the very bottom of the page and it will tell you searches related to this. This is actual real searches that people are putting in but it's different to the more common ones. And again like with everything, focus on your customer avatar. So if you get a lot of people come and stay with you from abroad to visit Loch Lomond and you're say Dumbarton, then it could be properties near Loch Lomond to stay for international guests. Just run a search in Google, see if people are searching for that are somewhat similar. You can always have a chat with a Google rep, Google Ads rep and you can say how many people on average are searching for X, Y and Z and they'll be able to give you some form of advice. But focus on the long tail. Something that everybody should be doing is bidding on brand. This is so, so crucial because when you get listed on booking.com they have the right to bid on your brand name. If you've ever for anybody who's in the rental world or accommodation world got a guest house, if you go in and type in for example the Granary Scarborough into Google. You will see that booking.com and Expedia and everybody bids on our brand name. And so it doesn't matter how good our website is, Google Ads will always come up at the top because you're paying Google. So we were always losing out on booking because booking.com and XBD and everybody were bidding on our brand name. So we fought fire with fire and we put the keywords granary scara because we knew that's what people were typing in to find us. And instantly, because we were doing bid on brand, the cost per click was really low because it's a very unique name. So it meant we could just shoot straight up above booking.com on our brand name and it meant that we could then manipulate the text. So we fought fire. Fire. We said the best rates. When you book direct, we put words like official property website because people will book directly with you. It's just because like what Ben said, brand recognition, booking.com spend billions making sure they're on billboards, TV ads, doing ads on these all the time so that they people, they're very clever in tricking people into thinking that they are the number one place to go to. They naively think that booking.com let us list their property on there for free or for a very minimal price, like 100 pound a year. That's not the case. It's 15, 20% commission per booking. Anybody who is in August now will be looking at there'll be a couple of grand commission rates. So by bidding on the brand name, you go at the very top and you can get them to go in. So some really good advice. Thank you very much, Ben, for doing this. If anybody wanted to find out more about you, where is the best place to come and find out more and to get in touch?

Yeah. So the best place to really learn about what it is and what I do go to my website is bpsdigital.uk it's not.co.uk, just.uk so bpsdigital.uk well, you're always welcome to send me an email. That's bpspsdigital, just like the website. Yeah, it's been a real pleasure, buddy. Thanks a lot for having me on.

Amazing. All right, this has been the Boost.

Hospitality podcast, season six, episode 12.

If you've got any feedback or anything you want to tell me about it, please let us know. As always, I really, really appreciate every single one of you for tuning in and if you could just do me a massive favor by going to itunes, find the Boost Hospitality podcast. Leave it a thumbs up, five star review that would mean the world. So thank you very much. I'm going to pause it here. We'll be back next week for another episode of the Boost Hospitality podcast.