How to promote your hospitality business with Facebook Groups

Before we start today's episode of the Boosted podcast, I have got some exciting news to share with you. For the month of July, I am giving away one month trial of the boostly content creator. Now, you may be asking and you may be thinking, well, what is the boostly content creator host that I have come into contact with in the five years of doing Boostly? And when I say to them, you need to be posting every single day on social media, you need to be emailing, emailing your guest and your list, they always say to me, I haven't got the time. And I can't think of a better month to promote the boostly content creator than July. Because right now everybody around the world is busy, busy, busy, busy. And they haven't got the time to think about the marketing or the social media or the emails, when in fact the best time to do marketing is when you're at your busiest because that means that you always have a pipeline coming through. So I created the boostly content creator for busy hosts. Now what do you get? Every single month you get 30 to 40 pieces of fresh social media content that you can use for your social media channels. LinkedIn, Instagram, et cetera. You also get video templates which are designed to stop the scroll on social media, which is really powerful. Email templates designed by expert copywriters that are working so well. Georgina Bearman messaged up in our Facebook group to say that she used one of the email templates and got free bookings, direct bookings instantly, which more than covered the cost. You also now get website headline generator tools. You get a money back guarantee and you can cancel anytime. The price is only five pound a month. And right now when you sign up, you go into the boostlycontentcreator.com you add to your basket in the coupon code section, you type in July and you get the first month free. Now that is only available for the month of July. After that it's five pound. If you don't want to continue, you can just cancel at any time. But please make sure that you go and you use the boostly content creator. My goal is a month in the month of July is to get 1,000 new hosts to register and sign up. This is how powerful I know this tool is because the email templates in itself are providing a massive return of investment and I would love for you to come and join. This is for new members only. Just go to boostlycontent creator.com add it to your basket, put in coupon code July and I'll see you on the other side. Right now we've got that out of the way. Let's get on with today's podcast episode. Okay, welcome back to the Boostly podcast and I'm doing a live case study here for Boostly Tune up. If you have been watching, listening and you are interested in for me to help you tune up your marketing, your systems, your structures in place, then email marketbooster.co uk. If I get enough people message me saying tune up, then I will turn this into a product in the future. Right now I'm testing it with the lovely Janek and Tim of Casa for you and Javier. They've one apartment that they've been struggling to rent out and I'm just going in and just giving everything a tune up. We're going to be delving into two types of marketing practices, proactive and reactive. So far, the main thing that we've been doing is we've been focusing on the essentials. So because we've got six weeks to get this property booked out, we're going to focus on the platforms that have already got thousands and millions of people going on every single day looking for accommodation. So we've filtered that down, we've worked out what they are. We've got Mikazoo, which is a Dutch site. We have Airbnb, we have Booking. Those are the three main ones that we're going to focus on. Again, go back to the very first episode in this series. You'll notice I did a bit of a training called booster.co.uk listingsites and you can go watch that video now on YouTube and you can put that into practice. So we found out what the most important and the most search for locations were. So then we went to go and update the Airbnb, optimize the page. We made it much more appealing, we made it much more visible. And as also as well, we, we made it look like your neck and Tim were a property management company for they knew what they were doing. And again, we made sure that the branding was there and we're encouraging people to run a Google search. I will talk about the importance of that in a future episode. Then we did the same thing on booking.com we utilized the really good Channel Manager part of Logify to mark up the prices. So then what we could do is we could add in last minute discounts and we also added in 360 pictures, changed the pictures around and just added a little bit more. Then we sort of discussed the Logify website, the pros and cons of that. And then we delved into the dynamic pricing software tool, which is Price Labs, and how we can use that to manipulate Airbnb and the likes. So now what we're going to do now we've got those working and those are being reactive, as in those are going out to the world and we're going to see what comes back of it. We can go and be proactive. Bearing in mind if you watch the episode on mailchimp, we are now trying to build our email list. Janek is busy doing that. Now, what I want to do is I want to utilize the largest social media network to go and find potential guests on on Facebook groups. So if I share my screen again, I've. I've had a little look. So what I wanted to do is I went into groups, which is here, and I wanted to do a little bit of research. So I typed in Javier. Okay, I went into groups, and as you can see, there are lots of different groups in here. Now what I want to do is I want to find between three to 10 Facebook groups to post in. Now, you're going to be looking for a few aspects here. You're going to be looking for niche, and you're going to be looking for location, and you are going to be looking for accommodation. Okay, so niche location, accommodation. Now, who are the niche? Now, what are the majority of the guests that Janek and Tim casa for you? They seem to get now? A lot of them. They get a lot of Dutch people because obviously they are Dutch and they communicate primarily in Dutch, but they also communicate in English and Spanish. But the majority of our guests are Dutch come into the area. Now with lockdowns and things reopening, there are a lot of Dutch people now starting to come, but they aren't really arriving until the end of July, start of August. The people that a majority who are going to be traveling to the area right now will be Spanish, or it will be people that are already living in Spain looking for a quick summer break. So what we want to be doing here is we want to be doing a couple of things. Number one, find the groups. Now, I've done a couple of different variations of searches. I've found a couple of really interesting groups. The next thing, what I would do after finding these would go and look at the rules. I want to make sure that I am allowed to post for vacation rentals in these groups. You can normally find that in the about section. Those that have got groups that are, let's just say, better moderated, they will Crystal clear. State what you can and can't do. So that will help you filter it down. So I've got 10 groups there on my screen. I, I'm going to filter that down between three and five. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to create in a Google Doc or on notes on my phone or a computer, some text. Now I'm going to be creating one version in Dutch and I'm going to be creating one version in English and I'm also going to collect and grab some images. Now you want the images to be that is going to appeal to your customer avatar. Now this apartment can sleep up to six adults. It can be used for families. But what we're noticing is that the families are still in school for the majority here in Spain. And the people that are looking to travel here are groups of friends, maybe a couple of couples. Again, no parties or any nonsense like that. But those are the people that are starting to travel. So what we're going to do is we are going to, in the pictures put things that will appeal to them. So the beach, you know, you can maybe have a nice scenic shot of Javier. Have obviously I've got to have a picture of the apartment, picture the living area and you know, again, really do set the scene. So what I mean by set the scene, go back and look at the videos that we did with overlooked to overbooked, how they tell you how to stage your pictures and all of that loveliness. So we've done that with wine bottles etc. So again, once you've done that, we're going to go into the group and what's really important here, you'll have your copy. So you can copy it, you can paste it in. Make sure that you amend the text. Don't have the text the same in every single group because Facebook will see that and they will do you on spamming. Okay. It's happened to me before, it's not nice. So make sure that you amend the text, make sure you amend the pictures. Don't just do copy and paste in everyone. And what you can do, pick three to five groups, go and post in there. And what I would do is I would set up a Google sheet. So a quick little Google sheet. Let's do this one and create a Google sheet. Okay. And then I would just call it Facebook groups Casa for you. And what you're going to do here, I would do the URL. I would do the name of the group, amount of people, number in the group and date posted. So if, for example, let's just use Cheap Holiday Rentals Spain as the first one. So that is the URL. It's Cheap Holiday Rentals Spain. The amount of people in that group, I believe it was 3,000. Let's just put 3K. And if I posted on the date that I posted it in, put that in there. Okay, now again, what you would then do is say in two or three days time, you would go back in and you would post again, Post again with a little message, change up the copy, change up the images slightly and make it stand out. But also what I would do when I go back into the group, I would filter it because there may be people asking for recommendations of places to visit, etc. So you can bounce onto a comment or you can be proactive with the post. And again, that would take five to ten minutes once every couple of days. Five to ten minutes once every couple of days. Everybody can fit that into the schedule. And again, if you can pick three to five Facebook groups that you actively show up in every few days, over time you will be known as the person, the go to person. So what you could also do, which is what I like to do, look at some questions. Because not everybody will go into these groups looking for a place to stay. Some will be asking for recommendations on where to visit. Again, in the comment, jump in and just say, hey, this is Janek of Casa for you. You're looking for a place to take the family a day trip. There's some caves nearby. There's the zoo, which is da da da da da. The beach is fantastic. There's a go kart, there's paintball. You can drop a couple of those things in and people will start to recognize. And then what they will do is then they will be able to engage with you more. And it might become to the point where you become the go to person from simply just helping people out where people will go. Okay, Jeanette, well, what do you have? What do you do? And that's the beauty of Facebook groups and the social aspect of it. Again, you don't have to spend every single waking hour in there because you haven't got the time, but once every few days, popping into three to five Facebook groups and doing that and keeping a track of it. And in our Google sheet that we've just created there, you'll be able to keep it monitored and systematic. So again, focus on where the people are at in these Facebook groups. Some have got 3,300, some's got 30,000. So it's really beneficial to do it. And again, it's a great place to get started. Doesn't take a lot of time, and who knows what can come out of the back of it. These could be direct bookings, future guests coming back and back and back. So this is just one very, very simple proactive tip over the course of the coming days, in the coming episodes, I'm going to show and share with you more. Okay, I'll be back soon. Thank you very much for stopping by. I'll be back tomorrow with another podcast for Boostly. And thank you very much for everybody who has helped spread the word of Boosted Podcast. It means a lot. Please do go and rate, review and subscribe and I'll be back tomorrow.