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

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?

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 Union, you don't have to fight for a postgrad 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 to, 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 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 buy 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.

Hi, welcome back to the Boost Hospitality podcast. We are on season six, episode 12 and. 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. Ben, if you could just spend a couple of minutes, tell him a little bit more about you, a little bit more about your story and how you became a digital marketing expert at bps.

Thank you, Mark, for bringing me on. As Mark was saying, I've been especially excited for this episode. 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 to get you encourage 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. 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 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, or there's too much advice going on or it's too expensive. And I know that, I know that.

What was one of the core reasons from sort of transitioning from property into marketing? And as a side sort of question, what, 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?

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 union, 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 essay 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, moment was running as a vitalette initially and it was making maybe 200, 250 quid a month profit. But then we're experiencing boy 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.

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 clients 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?

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? I think it all stems from the misconception that you can take a property and you can put it on Airbnb, 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 of 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 gonna 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 advertised on your 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?

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, 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, 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 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, you know, various digital companies, was that the fundamental of every in any business is a CRM system, whether it's HubSpot and FusionSoft, ActiveCampaign, that doesn't matter. And if you're not necessarily familiar with what it is I'm talking about, I'd say the main thing behind the customer relationship management software system that allows you to do is automate your process. So. So I use tokeet 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 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 of.

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 we're coming from Europe or America or, you know, even further away. 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've 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 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 a lockbox, here's the call 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. And 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 you 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 of 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.

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 PM I polled over 100 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 service accommodation, but you've also got people like Bookalette Supercontrol free to book Avivo. All, 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. 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. 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 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 said, it's a personal touch. 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 software 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.

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.

So if you start looking at your serviced 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 little 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 I'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.

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.

It is completely possible to run Google Ads for your hospitality business or, you know, your hotel business or whatever it is that you're doing. It 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.

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 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. 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.uk 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 Booth 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.

Ra.