It's Time To Up Your STR Marketing Game

Welcome back to the Boostly podcast and I've got a special one for you today. Now you're going to have to make sure you get a pen and paper on this one. You're gonna have to make sure you make notes because there's going to be a lot of marketing spiel thrown at you. Now, the reason being I wanted to get Evan on the podcast. Evan is part of Jarvis ML. Now, this is going to be over the head for a lot of people, but it's important that you listen because the core basis of what Evan is talking about is making sure that your direct booking website is as good as Airbnb. Okay? And there's certain little prompts and hints and tips that he throws into this that you can definitely pay attention to, especially the pop ups one, make sure you pay attention to that. Now, Evan reached out to me about four months ago and said, listen, I need to talk to you about Javas ML. It fits in perfectly with the direct booking journey and what you're trying to do. And I said to him, listen, it's not right time now. I'm currently putting my book together, finishing touches. So he kept patient, he kept pestering and he sent some up through, which was really good. So I uploaded it into the the Team Boostly Academy and it went down well. There's definitely some scope here, so I wanted to put it out to the wider world. And that's why you're going to be listening to or watching one of his little presentations that he put together. So it's going to be on video, it's going to be on audio, it's going to be all of that. You can reach out to Jarvis Evan directly afterwards. But please, please, please, please pay attention to the core message of this, which is ensuring that your guest booking journey is as good as what an OTAs. And if your website isn't there yet, then come and contact Boostie. That's what we do every single day. Our websites are as good as the OTAs. They make sure that they get from 1, 2, 3, discover on the page bookable within three steps. So please do go and do that. Please make sure you watch this. Please make sure you leave your comments in here and if you would like to as well and send this over to Evan, leave your comments with your web page in the comments. So leave your web page in the comments and I'll make sure that he gets a copy. But without further ado, I'm going to flip my screen and the next person you're going to see and Hear from is Evan from Jarvis ML SEO Search.

Engine Optimization Dominance Many of you have a strategy where you put a high price point on an OTA and you brand it well. That that way the guest will think, okay, let's go look on Google. Let's try to find them direct. Even when the guest tries to go direct, they can't escape the OTAs. 90% of first page Google results on any destination will be an OTA. So clearly OTAs are advanced e commerce operations. And finally, they're a one stop shop. They do it all. Flights, cars, hotels, now experiences. They even bundle it all for savings. That's quite tough to compete with. Fourth and most importantly is personalization. Just like all of you get endless sales emails from people like me, well, guests get endless sales emails from people like you. So we live in a time of digital marketing noise. We have to acknowledge that everyone wakes up with a finite amount of cognitive load to tackle their day. And OTAs reduce that load with personalization. Starting with the account, which is a magnet for guests to return more frequently. Each account is personalized with their past bookings, their past searches, and even personalized promotions and discounts tailored to them. Truly a place for them to return every time and start their experience all over again. At least with some historical background so they can move forward. Next is marketing. On an ota, every guest receives personalized emails, personalized text messages, personalized advertisements. Every touch is correlated to each guest's wants and needs. So the guests start to pay attention because the marketing is personalized specifically to them. It's not just random noise, it's tailored to exactly what they want. And third, and most importantly is the personalized booking journey on the real time website for every single guest. Think about it. For all millions of guests looking for their individual location, they each are seeing properties specific to them, with photos specific to them, at price points specific to them. The OTAs are literally spoon feeding guests all types of options based off of their preferences and affinities. So personalizing these booking journeys cuts through the digital noise and prevents guest search exhaustion. That way the guest converts every time. Let's dive a step deeper into personalization and let's use scale as the ota. Personalization is the hottest topic right now in the e commerce world because it's the only way to cut through all that digital noise out there. So imagining scale is the OTA. Here's what scale OTA's ecosystem would look like. Whether it's their phone, a text message, on social media, on their iPad, on the computer, Wherever it is, they're going to see personalized recommendations with a personalized experience across the entire booking funnel. And that's why they became the starting point for every guest search. Because on top of the personalized recommendations, they're also branding it. So when the guest thinks, okay, it's time to book our next vacation, they immediately think of who's had them in their communication ecosystem and the entire time and with great excitement. I'm proud to say that the company I'm with, Jarvis ML, is giving VRMs and short term rental managers the same exact capabilities. This is the only way to swing the pendulum back from the OTAs into the hands of our small businesses. And in order for us to drive these direct bookings, direct repeat bookings. So at the conference, I asked them to raise their hand if they spend money on any of these Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads or email marketing. Every single person in the room raised their hands. And in reality, many of them do a good job. All of them have over 10, 20, 30,000 monthly visitors on their website. Some even have over 100,000 on their website. So they have no problem driving direct guests. But what's the point if their website is not ready to convert them? What's their point if their website is just a generic space with just noise? They're spending all that money on driving the customers and their website is not optimized. So let me give you an example of what an optimized website using Jarvis ML's technology would look like. Why should these two guests have the same booking journey? On the left you have a family of seven from Beverly Hills with a high spending behavior looking for a quick beach vacation. On the right, you have a retired couple with modest spending behavior and an affinity towards long, quiet mountain cottages. Is there any reason they should see the same properties and have the same journey? Well, on an OTA or a website with Jarvis amount powering the background, this is what they would see. The Beverly Hills family will be served large beach villas at a high price point with specific photos showing swimming pools and beaches. On the other hand, the retired couple, they'll see smaller mountain cottages tailored to longer weekly price points because they're looking for a longer stay. And it's exactly what they're looking for. So in general, OTAs use personalized booking journeys like these to reduce, fix friction, spoon feed every potential guest personalized recommendations and convert the anonymous web traffic to effectively. And let me remind you that Jarvis ML is taking this power and giving it to the individual VRMs direct booking operations. That way all the ad spend, all those dollars you spend on Facebook and email marketing, those anonymous web visitors will turn into existing customers using Jarvis ML's personalized booking journey technology. So now that I've dug deeper into the future of technology and how OTAs are driving direct bookings, I get it's all very intimidating. So I want to give you a few ways to start a crawl, walk, run approach where you can start leveling up. So that way eventually you can add those high level AI and machine learning solutions. Let's start with mobile devices. There's no excuse for your website to not be mobile optimized. There's no excuse. You saw that over 50% of Airbnb's bookings were done via phone. Would you bet that's going to go down? Because I wouldn't. So spend the money, spend the time. Be proud of your mobile website by the time you're done with it and make that a priority. Make that priority number one. Number two is reviews. Go across every ota. Scrape all those reviews that you have and put them on your website. The more you make your direct booking website feel like an OTA where they have all the reviews and all the information in front of them for the guest to make a data backed decision and they'll convert, they'll make those direct bookings because essentially they won't know where they are. Whether it's the OTA or direct website, it's all the same to them as long as it looks all the same to them. Next is security. Too many VRMs have these fill in the blank fields that are just so old school. No one trusts that nowadays. Get rid of those. Use a common solution like Google Pay or PayPal. Even if you have your own solution, whether it's stripe or something else, put those badges that show payment security is there on your website and if there's a problem, you're going to have your guests back and you'll refund them. Put it in words, loud and clear. If you want your guests to trust you, you have to tell them. Fourth and one of my, one of the most important ones here is just give back OTAs. Do it at a large scale so that way guests see that the money is going to something good. But in the time with this crazy regulation and the hotel lobbies going against the short term rental managers and trying to outlaw us, and at the very least give back to your community. Not only is it good for your taxes, but it's also good for pr. Have an entire tab on your website dedicated to showing where Your money is going. That way the guests will feel good booking with you, knowing that some of that money is going back to the local community. Fifth, we have a timed pop up discount. This one is pretty clever. If you have a guest that's clicking around your website for six, seven minutes, that means they want to book, but they just need a slight nudge, a slight sense of urgency to do it. So after seven, eight minutes on your website have a timed pop up that says if you book within the next 10 minutes, we'll give you 10, 15, 20% off. First of all, they're booking direct, so all that money is being made up as if they were booking on an ota. Second, even if you do take a slight hit, you get all their data from the website clicks to keeping them in your marketing funnel. And at the very least you can have you have a nice shot at keeping them as a long term repeat guest. That's huge. And then finally, most importantly, never let a guest hit a dead end. The most common reason a guest bounces from your direct booking website is because they go, they click on a property page and you know that property was close but it wasn't quite the right choice and they scroll down and there's nothing left to click on. They immediately X out, go right back to the ota. I encourage you to have recommendations all over your website, on your homepage immediately. Have featured properties with your hottest properties, your newest ones, whatever. Just something to click on. Every single listing page at the bottom, put set of three to five more options. That way the guest will always have something more to click on and we'll always be in that constant booking loop. And that way you can have a time pop up discount, you can use other strategies to get them to convert, but if they lose, if they leave your website, you're not going to have that chance. So never let a guest hit a dead end. So back to our two questions. Is your booking website as good as an otas? Are you confident with your mobile website booking experience? At the conference the answer was 99% no. But as I would like to say, not yet. I have now given you the tools to start crawling and even walking to start putting up a fight to drive those direct bookings. And as you take these little steps, you'll start to see that you're ready to add these OTA grade solutions such as AI and ML or Jarvis ML where you can personalize every booking journey and start automating manual workloads. Except this time, once you level up, you're going to get to keep the data and the guests. That's huge because data is an asset and it's rising in value rapidly and and it's going to allow you to scale just like a big tech company or an ota. Thank you for watching. My name is Evan Dalgo. I am the head of Predictive Hospitality at Jarvis ML where we predict what guests want before they have the thought. We are e commerce pros and founded by the team that invented Google Ads machine learning platform. They invented the game. So if you want some guidance on how to improve your website or how to level up your operations, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. Thank you for your time and I look forward to speaking with you soon.