THE BOOK DIRECT VIRTUAL SUMMIT - DAY ONE

All right, three, two, one. Here we go. Welcome to Tuesday. Welcome to the 24th of September. This is where we properly kick start the Book Direct virtual summit. As you are jumping in, as you are getting into this group, as you are getting in on this live video, please do me a massive favor. Number one, let me know hashtag live. If you're with me live, give me a lucky number between 1 and 10 for spin the wheel. And also as well, let me know where you're tuning in from around the world. Please make sure you tag anybody that should be in on this. We're going to get kickstarted in exactly one minute time. I just need to get some people in here. So let's go ahead and get the credits rolling and I'll see you in one minute.

We have some breaking news now. The Boostly podcast is about to begin. Make sure you like this post, comment bookdirect and share this video in Facebook groups. But now let me hand you over to your host, Mark Simpson.

This is a freestyle going off the Dunkin digs.

Ready for my close up good looking let me tell you get more bookings.

Aw that'd be nice.

Giving me tips, tools and advice. Yeah you're gonna get em hun. You're gonna sit back, listen to Mark Simpson having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee cause it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely. If you want my respect you'll better butt direct.

Mmm.

Here are the words in the podcast. That's what comes.

Welcome, welcome, welcome. Who is here with me. Thank you very much for joining. Let me see if this has worked correctly. Let me go back and do this while my lovely thing wants to be able to do it a little bit differently. One minute, we'll be back. Whilst we're getting going let me try and reconnect this as we are doing all of this fun, fun, fun, fun with with Facebook. Let me know who's here with me live. Let me know where you are tuning in from and let me know most importantly who should be here, who who isn't here and then we can get them in on this as well.

So.

Speak amongst yourselves as we do this. Hello everybody who is joining me as we go. For some whatever reason the stream that I had set up is having a little bit of a moment. Let me come back into this group in exactly one minute time.

This is a freestyle going off the dumb.

Ready for my close up. Good Looking let me tell you get more bookings.

Oh that'd be nice.

Giving me tips, tools and advice. Yeah, you're gonna get them hon. You're gonna sit back, listen to Mark having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee cause it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely. If you want my respect.

Sa.

If you want my respect you're better put direct. Here are the words in the podcast. We have some breaking news now. The boostly podcast is about to begin. Make sure you like this post, comment, bookdirect and share this video in Facebook groups. But now let me hand you over to your host, Mark Simpson. This is a freestyle.

I'm going off the dun.

Ready for my close up.

Good looking. Let me tell you get more bookings.

Aw, that'd be nice.

Giving me tips, tools and advice. Yeah, you're gonna get em hun. You're gonna sit back, listen to Mark Simpson.

Whoa.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee cause it's so hard and the tee is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely. If you want my respect you'll better but direct. Here are the words in the podcast. That's what comes next.

All right, we're back. We're here, we're in the group. That's the main thing. Hopefully everybody can see this. Okay. Sorry about that.

Facebook.

Two nights in a row.

You really have like to mess with me two nights in a row. So we are here. Please make sure that you get everybody in on the on the right one. Welcome one and all right, so first and foremost, we've got a jam packed agenda. We have got eight speakers to get in, which is a lot of speakers and I just really wanted to make sure that this is all going to go through smoothly. So first and foremost, number one, can you hear me okay? And can you see me okay? We should all be now live in the Facebook group. Melanie's here, Dylan's here. Fantastic. Apologies if you if you got the wrong one. I want to make sure that everybody is in the right one as we've got a lot to get started on this evening. First and foremost, give me your lucky numbers. Between 1 to 10. We're going to do a spin the wheel with a difference. We are going to get started very soon after that. I'm going to announce the winners of yesterday's spin the wheel and we're Gonna just basically get absolutely cracking because we've got eight sessions, about three hours worth of content. It doesn't matter, number one, if you have to dip in and out. Doesn't matter if you've got school runs, work, dinner, you name it, this is all gonna get recorded and it's gonna stay in this group. So if you're with me live, leave.

Me a hashtag live.

And if you're on the replay, leave a replay. Right now it's 5pm, so seven minutes past five on Tuesday, the 24th in the UK. So it's just after midday over in Eastern time and wherever else here in the world, please work your times out. Thank you very much to everybody who got caught up yesterday. Thank you everybody.

To watch Live.

It was fantastic to see so many of you with me as I try and battle these Facebook demons. But we are here. If you are watching this elsewhere, if you're watching this on LinkedIn, on, on X, wherever it may be, and you're thinking, well, where's all this stuff happening? Come on over to the Facebook group, go on to Facebook and look for book direct virtual summit and we will be in here. Now, before we get going, make sure that you turn on group notifications so.

You don't miss anything over these next.

Two days and also as well invite people into this group. Now, when I say invite, if I open up my screen here, if you click on this little button right now, it will bring up Facebook friends. And if everybody goes and invites one friend, then we'll get past the 2000 mark before the end of today, which.

Will be, which will be fantastic.

Now before we go on, I want to let everybody know the winners of yesterday. We did a couple of cool things. So number one, I brought up the. My AI friend, the clone of me and we got him to pick a lucky number. That was number seven. The winner of that was Gillian and David Cotton. Now you lucky two have won a one on one consultation with Mr. Paul Anderson. I've already informed Paul of your information and he's going to get in contact with you via email over the course.

Of the next couple hours, I assume so.

Fantastic. Well done. I think you should be able to hear this. Congratulations. And also as well, we did something very cool yesterday. So I took everybody that commented yesterday and There were like 270 comments and I put you all into our AI clone and I asked for it to take those 270 comments and to pick a winner at random. And the winner will get a one on one website audit by the amazing Quake Webb, who is one of our speakers today and that was Linda Ferguson. So can we all please say, well David and Jillian Cotton as well. So congratulations. Now let's very quickly before we do today's prize and how we do today, spin the wheel. Let me just very quickly show you the schedule of what is coming up because we've got a lot of people asking me, Mark, what is going on today? Well, if we come over to our touchday guidebook and don't forget, you can get access to this at any time. This is today's session. We've got starting off with Mr. Ger Jones. Ger is going to be doing a session all about the new generation and the generation of bookers. Then we're going to be moving very swiftly on with a first time speaker. We've got Harold Dosh and then we've got Craig, we've got Emma, we've got Laura, we've got Sam, we've got Sean and we're going to headline and we're going to close it all out with Mr. Paul Anderson. Every session takes about 30 minutes to get through. I'll obviously come back between and, and I'll just basically get you all excited about the next speaker, etc.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

Now like I said, it is going to be over three hours in total, I reckon.

I think it's gonna be about three hours.

So, you know, I don't expect you all to last for the full three hours. You can come and dip in and out. We will always be at this link. So wherever you are now in this Facebook group, we will always be coming back here. So if you get lost, you don't know where you are, come back to this Facebook group and we're all in the Facebook. I can see you all in here now. Terry and Caroline and Yvonne and Melanie and, and everybody, which is fantastic. Okay, now let's go and do this. I'm gonna bring back.

Somebody that you'll.

Recognize from yesterday, the Boostly bot. So yesterday we got him up and we got him on screen and he said hello. I wanted to just ask a little bit more questions. Now don't forget, you can go in at any time to the Boostly bottom. Just type Boostly. B o o s T-L-Y.co.uk bot is an LLM model trained solely on Boostly. Every podcast, every video, every training session, every blog post, everything we've ever done, we've packaged it all up and we've trained this bot solely on Boostly so you can come in and ask questions at any time. You can ask about the virtual summits. The virtual summits that have been. You can ask any question. So I thought it'd be really cool to bring him back up and you again. You can go in at any time. Someone please put that domain in the chat. B O S T O Y and here he is. Hey, how can I help you? So let me do this and do this. So hello, can you tell me what you can see? I see someone in a black cap and shirt speaking into a microphone. Behind you there's a wooden panel wall with a neon rocket light, an on air sign, and some shelves with books and decorations. It looks like a great recording or streaming setup. Are you working on a podcast or a live stream? Well, thank you, I. I am now. What can you tell me? And give some advice for everybody watching. How to get the Most out of the Book Direct Virtual Summit to get the Most out of the Book Direct Virtual Summit Engage actively with the sessions. Take notes on key strategies and actionable insights shared by speakers. Participate in discussions, ask questions and connect with other attendees. Utilize resources like digital guidebooks and follow up on any networking opportunities. It's a chance to learn, so immerse yourself fully and apply what resonates with your business goals. What specific topics are you hoping to dive into during this summit? So we're now going to ask for a looking number between one and 10. So do not give me number seven because that was yesterday. Can you please give me a number between 1 and 10 that is not 7? Let's go with number three. It's a solid choice. Is there something specific you're planning to do with this number?

All right.

And there we go. So if you were lucky, number three, if you are number three, if you guessed three out of the number ten between one and ten, then you congratulations, you get to send me a message over on Instagram. Ostleyuk, go and send me that message on Instagram. Say you are looking number three, I'll put your name into a hat, we'll pick out a winner and I'll announce what your prize is tomorrow at the live video. And if you were like, oh, I didn't get a chance to get my lucky number in but make sure you with a sharp at 5pm UK tomorrow. Come on live on the live we'll do spin the wheel with a difference.

With our AI clone.

And if you want to go at any point, at any time to go and chat to the bot, It's b O-O-S-T-O y.co.uk bot okay, before we get going, I just wanted to say firstly and foremost, thank you very, very much to Touch Day for putting together the digital guide. A massive, massive thank you to them and I'm really excited for their session today. And also I want to just say a massive, huge thank you to our sponsors. Touch Day CS Outsource Boom Bestie Social media, hotelier web marketing, Destination asset and supercharge your market. And we literally could not put this on without you. And let's also thank the speakers today.

Can we all please show some love. Super tap that love heart button as.

Many, many, many, many, many, many, many times as possible. And for those that are saying, oh shucks, I didn't get any on time, everybody that leaves a comment today I will put your name into the hat and we'll pick out a bonus winner. So all you have to do is leave a comment and I'll let you know tomorrow who the winners are. So just leave a comment. You can even put comment. It's fine as as Linda did, she literally just left a comment that said comment and she was the winner. But please do pay attention. It's going to be a jam packed three hours that we have got coming up here. Don't forget if you have got a question for our expert speakers throughout this today and tomorrow, just leave help or question in the comments. Put the speaker that you want to get a question from and then put.

Your question in there. Okay?

It doesn't have to be a massive essay but as long as it has a bit of context to it, it will really will help the speakers when they come back to you. We'll pull it out, we'll grab the speaker and then I'll be able to.

Get back to you.

And the final reminder is at any point this week up until Friday and the wrap up party, you've got an opportunity to win a one on one zoom call with me where I'll do a deep dive into your business, help you with marketing, direct bookings and all of that. All you have to do is take a picture of the screen now or whenever over the course of the next couple hours and then upload that to Instagram. Ostleruk. The more times you do it, the the more times your name goes into the hat. We had a lot of people do it yesterday. We had about 100 people yesterday. Do it, do it on Instagram, Facebook. Just make sure you tag in@Boostly UK so I see the tag. If you don't do that. I don't see the tag so I can't put your name in and then I'll put all the names down. Bearing in mind we've got thousands of people signed up this week. Whether you're live or replays, time zones I know is a thing and I'll get it all done on Friday. Like I say, I don't do many one on ones anymore now, uh, just because time is so precious at this present moment in time in my life and so this is something I want to do just to say thank you to everybody that goes that extra yard.

And that extra effort this week.

All right, should we get started, shall we? Now the first speaker is a repeat speaker. Um, the last time that we did a summit he put his hand up for a first ever time to do any sort of speaking event and he was unbelievable. The response was fantastic and so I wanted to get him back again to do, to do round two. He of course Mr. Gur Jones. He is well known within the Boostly community, within the Boostly world, in the team Boostly group. He is always giving help, advice, motivational skills and, and everything else. And you know, he's an absolute pleasure to, to, to get to know but also to watch his journey. I think everybody will agree after you watch his talk is that he should be doing more of this and flexing his skills and I am so looking forward to showcasing this talk to you. Can we all please just put hashtag GOGA G O G E R in the comments right now? As many as you can. Can you please tap this love heart emoji button as many, many, many, many many times as possible but also as well like invite loads of people in here. People need to be seeing this.

All right, we have of course talking about the fantastic Ger Jones.

I'll be back on the other side of this but get comfy, get ready.

Because we're about to begin.

Now if you are ready for this, just give me a hell yeah in the comments and we will get started.

Good afternoon. I'm Gerain Jones, otherwise known as Geraint Sausagebach Ger or Big G. I run a small development of holiday cottages on Penthean in the beautiful North Wales. I am a keen marketer and love to help others achieve their marketing goals. I breathe, sleep and live for marketing. I set up my own company Brandwen Marketing and Socials 18 months ago and up to now it's going very, very well. I also manage numerous hospitality Facebook groups as well as other local interest groups have been part of boostly for the past four years where I post content tips and news articles on a daily basis. I am also part of Hospitable Hosts, published author, and finally, I'd like to thank Mark for asking me to present this autumn's book Direct Virtual Summit. I hope you enjoy my presentation and it will stretch your mind a bit when it comes to generations and marketing. Following on from my last presentation, hopefully now you know the importance of customer avatar and with some luck you'll have but what you've learned into practice as a hospitality business owner. Marketing so important and understanding the different preferences of each generation can help tailor marketing strategies more effectively. We all have the tools and the capabilities, but knowing when to use them is key to success. Know when to use influencers who benefits from an email campaign? Who to share your latest Eco wins with? Who are we talking to on socials? This presentation is not an answer to the myriad of questions out there, but hopefully it will help you assess your avatar in more detail and try and work out how to reach out to them the best, most beneficial way. Please use this as a starting point and hopefully it'll make you want to explore the subject even further. Have a good look at this slide below and go through each one. I'm sure there's many other things we can add to them. They are all terms that we tend to use in marketing. It's just on various platforms, various places. Some of them we've not heard about before. Not lots of people know about AR or VR. Again, that's going to be so important in the next four or five years. Here's an overview of the five generations in the following slides. How they respond to various marketing approaches ultimately help you understand your ideal customer avatar even more. As you can imagine, there are many, many generations in these and not everybody fits into the relevant boxes. So please use them as a starting point to do some further research. But as far as influences and practice goes, it's a very interesting insight. The five generations as most as we'll know are 1 baby boomers, 2 Gen X, 3 millennials, Gen Y 4 Gen Z or Gen Z as you call them, and then the latest one which is Generation Alpha. Every generation is shaped by different social, cultural environments and life experiences. For example, take Generation X. They grew up with minimum parenting as most had two working parents brought up with MTV in the background. This has led to appreciating a very healthy work life balance and is regarded as being more creative and independent as the other generations. Gen Y puts more priority on experience rather than ownership. They prefer using public transport, taxis or Ubers as we call them now, over car ownership. As you're all aware by now, every customer is unique and with advantage technology such as AI, marketing will eventually become very much a one to one practice powered by customization and personalization. At an individual level, this is where AI is going to be a game changer. But in the meantime, it is widely recognized that mass market that mass market segmentation works well and the theory being that those who were born, grew up within the same period, share the same social cultural experiences, and are more likely to hold similar sets of attitudes, values and behaviors. If we can understand these and get inside their heads, then it will make our journeys as marketers even better and even easier. Baby boomers born 1946 to 1964 they get the name from the high birth rates post World War II and are considered the aging economic powerhouse, subdivided into the early boomers and late boomers. The early boomers were teenagers in the 60s, many being social activists and environmentalists, and hence the age of the hippie was born. The late boomers, by contrast were teenagers in the 70s, a difficult economic time, and hens had to work harder to get where they are today. Also known as Generation Jones. How Baby Boomers React to Marketing Trust and Authority they respond well to marketing that conveys trustworthiness and expertise such as referrals and word of mouth recommendations. More traditional channels. They are more likely to engage with print media, mail shots, direct mail and email newsletters. It's what they're used to. Loyalty programs Boomers do appreciate loyalty rewards and offers that provide long term value such as discounted stays for repeat visits. Finally, customer service. Boomers love personalized, attentive customer service and it is key to gaining their loyalty. And now we have Generation X, born 1965-1980, commonly known as the lost middle child. Gen X are often overshadowed by both baby Boomers and Gen Y and have recently fallen off the radar of many marketers. Teenagers in the turbulent 70s and in the certain 80s and mainly brought up with both parents working or divorced, have made this generation very fiercely independent. Generally, they spend more time with friends rather than family, making strong friendships for life, reinforcing the concept of friends and family. This is where the television program Friends came from, just a group of people working, you know, living and working together. Gen X were the early adopters of tech with their Walkmans, CD players and MP3 players. They entered the workplace at the same time as computers, early Internet. They are highly adaptable, having lived and worked through huge technology shifts. They have a very strong work ethic but sometimes struggle to get up the work ladder as many baby boomers refuse to make way for them holding on to the positions way into their retirement. Because of this, many Gen X have set up their own companies in their 40s, becoming very successful entrepreneurs and now market leaders in some fields. They value independence, quality and a balance between digital and traditional media. Many are at the peak of their careers as well as managing family life very very well. How Gen X Reacts to Marketing Practical Offers they respond well to practical straightforward offers like family friendly packages, value added services, add ons, off season deals, Digital Email Marketing Gen X engages with both email and social media, but they prefer clear no nonsense communication reviews and testimonials. Gen X loves this. It sends out research accommodation options online, so highlighting positive customer reviews and offering detailed descriptions to help them make decisions. They will always ask about where to go, what to see and what to do, Loyalty and personalisation Gen X appreciates rewards for repeat bookings, but also values flexibility such as flexible cancellation policies or adaptable itineraries. Gen Y or Millennials as we call them. Born 1981-1996, coming of age in the new millennium, they are commonly known as Millennials. Generally better educated and culturally more diverse than previous generations, they are the first generation strongly associated with and to embrace social media as a medium for personal use. On social media they are often comparing themselves to their peers and looking for validation. As a result, they trust their peers more than established brands. They do lots of online research followed by purchases mainly on mobile devices. They prefer experiences over ownerships, focusing on accumulating life stories and experiences over wealth and assets. Millennials tend to be more open minded and idealistic and question everything, sometimes creating conflict with older colleagues and older generations. They are the first generation to question sustainability, ethical and eco friendly practices over million profits. They're about what they do now and how it affects others and the world generally. Again, Millennials can be subdivided into two further categories. Older millennials born in the 80s entered now to navigate a tough employment journey, many setting up their own companies. They they tend to have a very clear separation between work and personal life and they tend to keep it separate as well. The younger Millennials on the other hand born in the 90s, experience the more affluent entry into employment, lots more money about more disposable income. They tend to blend their work and personal lives, quite often only working in jobs they enjoy and love and very very picky what they actually take on living the ethos of work should be enjoyable and fulfilling. Millennials are very tech savvy, experience driven and value authenticity over everything else. They tend to prioritize experiences over material possessions which makes travel and accommodation a key part of their spending. So Millennials are really out of good market to tap into how Millennials react to marketing, social media and influencer marketing. Bit of job to say this isn't it? Sometimes Millennials respond well to visual platforms like Instagram, tick tock and YouTube, especially when influence influences or user generated content are evolved. Mobile first approach they really do expect seamless mobile booking experiences and they will do everything on the mobiles responsive websites and apps an absolute priority for them. Sustainability and ethics. They prefer accommodations and places to stay that emphasize sustainability, eco friendly practices and social responsibility. Sometimes overpriced experience centered Millennials are drawn to experiential travel. So marketing that highlights unique local experiences or personalized adventures does resonate very very well. Generation Z born 1997-2012 otherwise known as Gen Z, the first two digital natives. They have no experience of life without the Internet and view digital technology as part of everyday life. Learning, consuming news, shopping, social networking through various devices is the norm for them. They can see no distinction between the online and the offline world. Many Gen Z saw and experienced the struggles of their parents during their upbringing and therefore tend to be very financially conscious. They save money on a regular basis and view economic stability as a major factor in their chosen career. They are willing to give away a great deal of personal information in return for delivery of highly personalised content and offers. We talked about authenticity in the previous generation, but authenticity is a huge buzzword when it comes to this cohort. They prefer to portray a more authentic and candid image of themselves. They hate anything polished and will keep away from brands that promise the earth or brands that are too good to be true. Gen Z are also very passionate about social change as well as sustainability, eco and environmental issues. They are more confident in their views and consciously use brands that promise, deliver and drive change. They really do embrace it so much. They want to. They want that change to happen. They are even more digitally focused than Millennials with a focus on individuality, instant gratification and immersive experiences. They are price conscious but also value quality over anything else. How Gen Z reacts to marketing Short form content they just love short form content. Just look at some Tick Tock. Gen Z prefers short engaging content on platforms such as Tick Tock, Instagram Reels and Snapchat. Again, they will consume content which is not polished, authentic and very regional. They absolutely hate polished material. Peer influence reviews and peer recommendations such as supervisor have a very strong influence on the decision making. They love to do what their peers do and they will always ask their peers what to do all the time. Sustainability and Social Issues they will expect that you have a degree of sustainability and social consciousness in the way you run your business. Tell them about what you do. When it comes to these issues, it really does make a difference. Technology Integration they expect advanced technology in their booking experience and the customer journey such as seamless mobile payments, virtual tours, AI driven recommendations, interactive and immersive gamified booking experiences, AR VR previews of accommodation or interactive content are effective ways to engage them and this is where things become quite new to a lot of us. I'm not sure how many of us use AR or VR. That's going to become huge in the Next I'd say 2, 3 years General Generation Alpha born 2013 up to present 2024 Children of the Future this is where it becomes interesting as we really don't 100% understand understand the market yet. It will be very much a changing game and the oldest of this cohort will still only be 11 years old as we speak. Still young this generation will grow up in a fully 100% immersive digital world, likely surpassing Gen Z's tech savviness. Their preferences will be shaped by emerging technologies, sustainability and inclusivity raised mainly by Gen Y. Their character is mainly shaped by their parenting skills, with much emphasis being on educational values, social values and teaching them about finances at an early stage. They are brought up in a very tech savvy environment and socially inclusive environment. They not only embrace tech and wearables, but they view them as an extension of themselves. Surprisingly, they have a strong influence on their parents buying decisions more than any other previous generation, which is quite surprising really. AI again is standard practice and will be the first generation to fully embrace it. Again, much of this is theory. Only time will play out this final chapter as we are in the final months of 2024. Here are some more additional facts about Gen Alpha. Sometimes the statistics are quite frightening. By 2025 it will be the largest generation in the history of the world. Gen Alpha is the first generation to be immersed in technology during their entire lives. So the lives are basically run by technology. Nothing else comes close to it. Again, Gen Alpha will be the most educated generation of all time. Gen Alpha's Reaction to Marketing they are immersive and visual. This generation will expect highly immersive, interactive and visual marketing possibly driven by augmented reality and virtual reality personalization. AI powered personalization that caters to individual preferences will be critical to reach this cohort. Sustainability and Inclusivity Like Millennials and Gen Z, they will likely be drawn to brands that emphasize ethical practices and inclusivity. So this is, this is one way we must address and go down that line because this is the way forward. Influencers and AI influencer marketing and AI driven content will likely dominate as they mature, along with gamified and interactive booking experiences. So there we have it all. Five generations as we know it. It's up to you now to tailor your marketing strategy accordingly. Have you worked out what generation you are yet? Do you generally follow the trends and the traits of these various generations? What about your partner or your children? What generation are your current avatars? Do you know? Did you know? Do you care? Or is it something that you've never really thought about? It just blows your mind. As I said at the start of the presentation, none of this is set in stone. But many many hours of data collection, analysis and work has gone into subjects such as this by large and small companies alike. This alone tells me that this theory has got some legs. There is some valuable information in this field research which can help us all as marketers. Please please do some of your own further research on the various generations. It's such an interesting topic. Go and speak to ChatGPT or do it the old fashioned way. Ask Google. Just pop in the search engine various generations such as Gen Z, Gen X Millennials and ask about the marketing preferences, what they spend the money on and so on and so on. You're open of the biggest box of frogs ever and you'll keep it will keep you busy for days if weeks or even months. And I tell you the end of it, you'll hate me for it. Kai, thank you for watching our presentation. I hope you enjoyed it and and can take something away from it. You can follow me on various socials, just search for brownware marketing. We're on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube. If you'd like to use Revisit my past presentation on Customer Avatar, please head over to my YouTube channel again. Brandon Marketing subscribe. If you like it, please leave a comment. Philip Kotler's book Marketing 5 helped me tremendously with this presentation and it's well worth read. It really is one for the bookshelf. And to finish we are offering every single one of you watching this a free mini Power Hour. A free free 30 minute chat about anything marketing related. Anything to do with this presentation, the past presentation, anything marketing. If you know me already then you'll appreciate my passion about chatting and putting the world to rights. Just DM me on here or any of my socials that comes to that take up the offer. Happy to do it by phone or by zoom. I sincerely hope you enjoy the rest of the Virtual summit and again a huge thank you to Mark Simmerson, Boostly and all the sponsors for making to happen. Hopefully we'll catch up again in the future at some point. Love you all. Bye for now.

Well done.

Gurr kicking things off in style here on the book Direct Virtual Summit.

Can we all just take a second.

Just to jump into the chat? He was very nervous. It's not something that he's been trained to do, he's learning as he goes but the education and the thought process that goes in behind his presentations with the first one that he did a couple of months ago and today in is fantastic. Hopefully you've got some changes in the types of guests now that are coming through your doors in 2024 and beyond. But let's show him a bit of love in the comments. Can we all just put thanksgur in the comments? As many people as possible. Let's try and get 100 comments in there just to show Gur some love as we move very swiftly on to our next speaker. And the speaker is a first time speaker and is in this group and is part of the the Boostly universe and is somebody that I've been pushing to do something like this for for a while now. So we've got Harrow coming in, he is a UK based guest house owner, he's from the Netherlands as you'll tell from his lovely accent. And I asked a question in our little group chat that we have with the Boostly besties who would like to put their hand up and do some and he did and he was the first one to to get his presentation and over to me the idea of it and he's going to be coming up next so please make sure that you show him some love in the chat, make sure that you watch throughout because it is a quality little talk and please can we all say hi to the one, the only, Mr. Harold Dosh.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you are in the world. Welcome to another presentation for the Bourgeois Summit. I hope the summit has been worth it for you. I've loved it so far and I'm looking forward to the remainder of the week. Thank you also for tuning into this presentation. It might be a little Bit different as I'd like to show the journey we've been running to become a more sustainable business and family home. My name is Harrow, together with Lucy, my wife, we run the Hive at 52 after working in hospitality since 1993 in Rose Ferry. From being a chef to receptionist in a 900 bedroom hotel, operations manager in Variety Hotels, then ending my corporate hotel career as a revenue and sales manager, the Hive 52 was born as my experience in hotels more of an operational role. Lucy also has been working in hotels for 30 plus years, starting off in the head offices of the old Forte Hotel Group, working with Meridian and then moving into hotels and she currently is a financial controller in a local hotel. Now I can hear you think what has a cigarette package got to do with sustainability? Not a lot really, but ask yourself the question is a horrible picture like on the cigarette package enough to changing people's habits or mindsets in our case changing the mindsets for people to, to become more sustainable to think about our planet. Maybe do packages like this stop people smoking? Did it really work to change people's mind or ways of working to stop smoking? Personally, I don't think so. Yeah, maybe some people thought and stop smoking, but personally think, I think it was the complete smoking ban in the UK in 2007 we were not smoking pubs, in clubs, in restaurants. So my thought really is would it help to have some horrible pictures on plastic packaging, like lots of fish mixed up with a lot of plastic in oceans maybe has an impact, maybe some people will start to think about it, but I think it's a bit of a mixture showing what we do to the earth, are we ruining it? And also we need to look at the laws and the rules implemented by our governments. So I think it's a bit of a mixture, but I think the government has a lot to do in trying to get us to think about our environment. So our vision, when we moved up into this house, our mindset was changed. Just prior to that we our children born, our two daughters were born and it really made us think about what we were doing to our planet. We had concerns, it was quite scary what we heard and read about. So we wanted to make sure that we were doing something to make our planet better, to rectify what we were doing with our planet. So we really wanted to start looking after it, do our little bit to improve it for the sake of our children and for the sake of maybe their children to make better choices in regards to our sustainability. So over the years we have made some steps. We have some major steps, we've made some small steps and we still have things to change. We need to change. And we hope that we as you as a race, we can do that together with the help of our governments worldwide. So when you start another business, you look at your business, you look at your market and you do a SWOT analysis. Now, we didn't do that for our journey to become sustainable, but we did do it for our business. So fairly recently I actually looked at the SWOT analysis for our sustainability journey. So we're looking at the strength. Well, we already had the commitment to it. There is an assistant commitment to our sustainability journey which made it a bit easier to start a process with the brand when we start. We started our sustainability journey really before we had the Hive 52. But the Hybrid 52 made us even more eager calling something the Hybrid 52. A lot of people ask us if we keep bees because of the name. Our logo is a bee and a daisy and again people ask us about that. So the environment linking in with bees is very important to us and it actually links the brand with our sustainability journey. What do we offer? Are we offering sustainable service? How do we differentiate us from the competitors? We are working really hard, we're talking about it a lot and we try to help the environment by what we do in the bed and breakfast. We're the dedicated team, but we also trying to be having our guests part of that team. We're explaining what we're doing, they're reading on our website what we're doing. We have signs up in the bedrooms, a little bit about what we're doing. So hopefully us as a B and B, as a business, we can do that together with our guests and be a team. So what do we do? How are we doing it? What practices to reduce our waste or optimize our resources and how we can do that by specifically with cost savings and then obviously the efficiency of our operation, looking at the weaknesses. We're not experts, we read up about it. We use our friend Google. We've got the knowledge, but we're not fully knowledgeable following online courses and things like that. But we're trying and we're trying to learn from our mistakes and we're learning from other things. The cost. So initially we did have a high cost when we moved, then we've taken small stepping and recently we had high cost as well. So let all the steps. There is a lot of steps which doesn't cost any money or is very minimal impact investment as a very small family Business. We have a limited amount of measurements and data. It's hard to purchase programs to do that. There's a cost involved in it. And for us, there's not really a return on investment. But we're trying to look at what we're doing and measure it in our way. Now, the resistance to change is not really from our point of view, but be willing to change. But actually, some of the things we do for our sustainability might impact our guest, and that's where we need to be really careful, is because some guests still don't really feel we need to change to just keep on going with their lives, which is fair enough, we understand that. But, you know, for us, that's sometimes where there could be a problem with our guests. The supply chain. Can we get delivery of the items? What's the cost of it? Do they work? That could create challenges for us. The opportunity. We have seen an increase in demand, not a huge amount of people wanting to book more sustainable businesses. They come by train, they're not using certain things in the house. They drive an electric car. So when you then start talking to them at breakfast, they say, we choose you because you're doing a lot of the sustainability. And that's only going to. That's only going to increase in the years when more people are getting aware of sustainability cost savings. For us, creating some of these solar panels and things like that, which I'll come tell about a bit later, it was maybe a bit of cost saving, but also it's just to help, again, help our environment, to look at our energy cost. But we insulated our house, we've got double glazing, helps with our energy efficiency. We're looking at waste recycling, more recycling, less waste going to the landfill. It will help. It might not save us a lot of money, but it helps partnerships and collaborations. We, earlier this year actually did two presentations about our journey to showcase what a small business can do in changing the way they work. One was with marketing Cheshire, which is great. There's a variety of companies. There are the hotel companies, so that's good because we're here in Cheshire. And the other one was for Groundworks who. It's a company who run a lot of the bit the town bits and things like that. I think they also run the Blue Coin scheme at the Tesco's in New York. Tesco's and I did a presentation for them in Southport, again to a variety of hotel and restaurant businesses. So I got me out there, got my branded T shirt on. So I've talked about the Hive 52. So we're working on that. I don't really have spend a lot of time creating these links, but going forward I'm really keen to do that. The incentives by governments, grants, tax breaks for businesses to adopt sustainability. I think there's not a huge amount about at the moment, but again, we will see an increase in that because it's important that businesses are changing. And then the differentiation in brand, our competitive advantage. People will choose us over a hotel where they don't do any recycling or look at the sustainability. Don't bring the message out. And then the last one, the threats, again, it's the changes by the governments. Different governments have different grants or different rules and regulations. So that has a big impact on it. Now the next one is a big one. It's greenwashing accusations. We are on a sustainability journey. We're not saying that we're carbon neutral, but we're explaining what we're doing. We're trying to improve it and to avoid being accused of greenwashing the competition, the market competition. So it could be a benefit, but also could be that our competitors are actually way ahead of us. They have a bigger budget, bigger hotel, bigger group, or they even more keen than us to change the economic downturns everywhere. Recessions in countries, instability, reduced budget to spend money on big projects. The supply chain could fall as well. Bring up natural disaster where people supplies can't come into a country, or there is just a huge shortage of certain materials. We can't do anything about that. So when did we start, really? We lived in London and West Sussex up to 6. And in May 2006 we moved up to the northwest of England. We moved into a lovely warm and cozy home. We thought a cozy home, which was built in 1876. We thought it was a really warm house. When we viewed it three times. It was lovely and warm, toasty, actually. Too warm really. And we thought, oh, that's nice, nice hand, at least the heating is working and things like that. And then when we moved in at the end of August, it was nice and warm. Then the winter came when we discovered that we had that the heating on because the heat was just going out, it was cold, it was damp. So we started looking at what we could do. Took off the roof, redone the roof, re insulated the roof insulated all the roof spaces. Then we looked at some of the old doors, which was a real shame because they were all wooden doors, original or close to original, but they were just not properly insulated. And we Just couldn't do anything with it. Then over the years, the next few years we insulated all our external walls. We're talking about 11 rooms in total. So that's the kitchen, the dining, the hallway, things like that. So we insulated with the insulator gorge like you see in the picture. And we also started to replace some of our old double glazing units in the property. So then back in 2014 we start thinking about creating a bed and breakfast. We looked at a variety of options, either buying an already readily run bed and breakfast or a bigger house where we can create a B and B. And then we decided to actually create it in our own family home and we created a small three bedroom bed and breakfast. It's really hard trying to be sustainable when you do building work. At the time like we're talking, As I said 10, 12 years ago, it was really not many sustainable building materials so we just had to go with it. But to counteract that, we looked at what we can do purchasing the items for the bed and breakfast. So of course we need to buy new materials like the beds, the linen, the towels and things like that. But we looked at all the furniture. So we reused some of our furniture. We bought second hand or upcycled furniture from charity shops and then just made it into what we liked in the B and B. An example is we've got a leaf table there in the pictures and Lucy who's very good at diy converted that into a desk, TV and working desk for our guest room. When we completed it all, we started purchasing our shampoos and body wash in bulk. So in big five litre containers and then refill our little bottles in the bedrooms we supply fresh milk daily in little bottles. So to avoid the little small milk, plastic milk cups, fresh coffee in the room again to avoid plastic in a little plastic Nescafe or other brands, instant coffee sachets. And also from near the start we offer our guests a little help with our website address and telephone number on there with bee friendly flower seeds just again spread the message about the ecosystem and spreading the message about the Hive. 52 so as you can see over the years we've learned a lot, we tried a lot, we tested a lot of things, we implemented a lot of things and we're still learning and we know that with the still changes the products are getting better, more efficient and things like that. So we keep on changing. So over the years we actually kept chickens when we opened the bnb, but two or three chickens, two or three eggs per week. Wasn't really cutting the mustard. So. And then Mr. Fox came as well. So we ended up with no chickens. He decided not to go with chickens anyway. We use our old towels and old linen for this rack. So part of the towels we used to clean or dry the bedrooms when we clean them or clean the bedrooms with. We used the racks to clean out oily pans. When we cook breakfast, we're looking at ways of how we cook breakfast. We tried a variety of cleaning materials as you see in this picture and we changed and now we actually use our 5 liter bottles taken to a local refill shop where they buy their products in 50 litre barrels or 100 liter barrels. And that's where we then cut them. Our cleaning materials for from. And we're looking at. We've replaced some of our towels and we've in the process of replacing them all with econid towels and econit towels. The same quality, nice and fluffy, but they do dry a lot quicker in the tumble dryer and actually in the guest bedroom as well. We tried to make our own washing powder, which one wasn't a lot of work, but it was a lot of work. And also we figured out that it wasn't cleaning as well as we were hoping for. We have built some bee hotels around for the bees. We changed some of our garden grass into patches of flower beds with bee friendly and wildlife friendly flowers and plants. So it just keeps on going, we keep on developing, it will keep on because things progress. So so far we've done a few big ones before we became a business. So the insulation, the roof and things like that, new windows or some of the new windows, we did some. We were making some small steps, looking at the cleaning materials, looking at for buying food items not in plastic and things like that. And then in 2022 we actually had a bit of money and we decided to go fairly big looking at solar panels and air source heat pumps. We had looked at solar panels before about 10 years ago and it just wasn't. There was something not right with it when we looked at it. The return on investment, the cost and things like that didn't make sense at the time. So in 2022, in late 2022, we had the two air source heat pumps installed and our boiler removed, which was a big step to go without a boiler, a gas boiler for your heating and hot water. And it all came from the air source heat pumps. So far we haven't had any issues with it. Obviously one of the things was that it wasn't A great time to install them because we installed them in October 2022, just about when the energy prices went absolutely through the roof, especially electricity and electricity runs, the air source heat pumps. And then in early 2023, we had 18 solar panels installed on our roof, on two parts of our roof, which worked great. We're very happy with that. And at the same time we actually put about 80% of our rooms in the house. We put smart valves in. The smart valves, they're sometimes a bit temperamental. What is great for us is that especially in the winter when guests have their heating at full, but they also have the window open. It actually tells us when the window is open so we actually can turn the heating off. And it actually has saved us a fair bit of money. At the same time, it's also insulated our two big water tanks and also all the pipeworks in the room where the water tank is. So it was some serious money invested. Have we made any money back on it? Maybe a little bit at start, but it's still in the early stages. So hopefully over the time we will see a return of our investment. So we did invest heavily in 22, 2023 and obviously it's about trying to save some money as well with generating our own electricity. The vision was really still to try and make a better planet and but we did see some benefits installing the solar and air source. And buff very recent last year compared this year compared to last year hasn't been as much but as you can see in the example, so we installed the air source in October 22 and the comparisons 2022 to 2023, it says a saving of 774 kilowatt hours in electricity and a saving of almost 400 pounds. So this is October December 23 compared to 22. By the time 23 came, we had the solar panels installed. So that's where the saving came from. But then when you look at 24, the full year, January to August this year compared to January August last year, we have actually used a lot more electric. And also the cost, I think the cost is actually probably could have been a lot more if we didn't have the solar panels. So I think there is a saving in there. But there is a few reasons why we probably use more electricity. Or we bought an electric car, a small electric car and we actually charging it with a just off the plug. We haven't got any EV charger yet. So that increased the cost a bit, the usage of electricity. We also over the year, over that period, we've sold about 110 rooms more. So we used more electricity, more gas, more hot water, more washing and things like that. And also this year there was a lot less sun hours. So we generated a lot less electricity this year than we did last year. So there's a few, few reasons why. So that's why I think we need to look at a longer period. So over the five years, we hope to see that we actually have saved some money together with actually knowing that we, we're doing something for our planet as well. So what are our plans for the future? What are the challenges? We will continue to model the developments, especially with regards to energy efficiency. Probably we'll be looking at revisiting our windows because some of the windows are four years old. We're hoping to install an eve each for both for us and for the guests. Not two, but just one, but for guest use as well. But for the big investments at the moment, we're not looking at any big investments, but we're just looking at little improvements around the house. We're converting some of our front lawn into more beds. We also installed recently a wildlife pond just to create wildlife. We're not putting any fish in it, but just to get more wildlife to it. And we just do things like that. Then we're looking at completely replacing our towels with eco knit towels. So we all have them, but, you know, some of the old ones were still in good work. In all of that, we planted about 5, 600 bulbs in our garden and we're looking to build two more and also look, look around in the village and actually plant them there. But really the challenges we have is, as it says on the picture, is the government, what's happening with governments, what are the rules, what the grounds, what they're going to do. We're looking at replacing our linen and we really want to try and test it. But some of the eco linen is not the greatest. It's not as comfortable, it's not as luxury as some of the linen we've had. So spinning a really eco friendly but very luxury or good linen, good quality linen. Obviously the challenge is reviews, guest reviews. If the guests are not very keen on what we're doing, then my reviews go down and it has an impact on the business. So it's really trying to find a good middle way and explaining our guests what we're doing so they know in advance that what's happening, if there's something not quite right in their eyes or not, like when they go to the Ritz or something. Like that. So this is working and then making sure that, you know, what we do on sustainability is not impacting on our guest days and our guest reviews. Obviously the other thing is the economy, what's happening there, you know, the challenges we have there, the cost of living and things like that. So it's hard, but we really want to try to find a very good middle way of offering a very good product and a very good service, but still thinking of the environment. So thank you very much. That was my presentation. I hope it was useful. Very interesting to see that as a very small business, you can still make big inroads into your sustainability. And to be honest, we say it's like if everybody does a little bit, our thoughts are if everybody does a little bit, it's probably better than if you're doing a lot. We all need to think about what we're doing and we hope that you've learned something. And if you've got any questions, my details are in there. Contact me or contact to me through any of the socials. Thank you very much and enjoy the summit.

Thank you very much, Harrow, can we all please show some love? I think the takeaway for me is that if we all do little bits, I'll make a big impact. So what are you doing to be more sustainable in within your business? Just drop it in the comments below. If you're doing nothing, don't worry about it. Just take inspiration. This is what this whole week is going to be all about. Taking inspiration not only from Gur's talk, not only from Harrow's talk, but from everybody else that we've got coming up today and tomorrow and obviously on Thursday, we're going to have a get it done day. Right, so Harrow again, first time doing is please show him some love in the comments, say thank you, Harrow, as many times as possible. I'll make sure that he sees every single one of them. Okay, what we've got coming up next is we are going to venture a little bit south of where Gear and Harrow are based and we're going to go to Mr. Craig Webb. Now, I don't invite many people back to the summit because I love to have a fresh perspective, a fresh voice. As a little side note, if you would be up for speaking at a future event, Drop an email marketer.co.uk Just put Summer speaker and give me your pitch because I'm always looking for new voices, but Craig is one that we've invited back because SEO search engine optimization is a topic that comes up so many times. People think they know what it is or people haven't got a clue what it is, but it's very, very, very, very important for your business. And Craig has spoken now a few times and every single time he brings a new perspective to it and he's back again. So can you please shout thank you, Craig, in the comments and please get ready. Little note, and I've said this a number of times and I'll say this many, many times moving forward. Every single video that you see here is recorded and it's going to be stored in this group for this week and it'll be all moved over to the YouTube channel, the Boostly YouTube channel, which you can go and just type in on any search engine boostly YouTube channel and you'll see them all in there and it'll stay there forever and ever and ever. So, again, we're plowing through. We've got more specialists coming up today, but I just want to say, don't worry if you miss anything because we've got it all recorded and stored on all that good stuff. Boostly members, Team Boostly members, you can head over to the courses section of your private educational software right now and you can find all of the recordings that are going to be uploaded into there. So you can do that. If you want to find out more about joining Boostly, just go to b o-o S-T-L y.co.uk. all right, let's move on to the fantastic Mr. Craig Webb.

Hey.

Hey, guys. Hope you're enjoying the week so far and the sessions. So I am Craig, Craig Webb. I run a company called Web Marketing. That's me. And there's a picture of me there. So I was a hotel manager 17 years. I was in hospitality for 32 years. I've done every job in catering hospitality that you could possibly name. So wherever you are in your business, I've probably been there, from kitchen porter to business owner and manager. In 2008, I was running a hotel. It was in admin. We were running on behalf of the banks as a contract to keep it as a going concern. Our job was to get the business sold, but because I wasn't allowed to spend any money and I was like, oh, how can I make money without spending money? You know, we all know you've got to advertise and things like that. So it was kind of the. The dawn of social media was getting big and that sort of thing. So I started turning to those digital marketing things and all the resources I could find to do Free marketing to try to drive sales to the business and save money. So obviously online travel agents were a thing. Wasn't so much Airbnb, but Expedia booking.com were around and I was trying to save money in the middle of the account so that it dropped to the bottom line. Anything I could save would drop to the bottom line, would mean that the business was more sustainable and a better buy for somebody who wanted to buy the hotel. So that's where kind of it all started for me. And then eventually I really focused down on, on SEO as my main, my main job and I did that for the hotels I managed. Back in January last year I quit and went full time running my own digital marketing agency which is what I do now. And I either teach others how to do SEO, we do it for them as a company and we do other things for websites such as building websites, redesigning websites, creating new pages, technical fixes and hosting. So I was going to create a spreadsheet, I did create a spreadsheet showing like the, the impact of saving money on commission by getting direct bookings to the middle of your P and L account. Anyway, Mark from Bosley just last week launched his new website and I thought, oh, this demonstrates even better what I'm trying to demonstrate. So let's, let's look at my. The two hotels I ran in the, in the Cotswolds and chipping Camden, two 28 bedroom hotels, so 56 rooms actually daily rate was I'd say it's about 225. One hotel was slightly higher, one was slightly less. It was an in and a four star spa hotel occupancy. The inn was about 80 odd percent. The hotel spa hotel was about 75. So let's go in the middle there. 79%. Actually Rota Reliance was not huge A because I've done years of work. I was there seven years and I put a lot of work into the website and getting direct bookings. But also we focused around taking bookings where people couldn't book through an ota. So for example weddings, either we teamed up with the local barn wedding venue and got direct bookings through the bridal party or we hosted our own weddings and they would fill the hotels Fridays and Saturdays. We'd have often conferences during the week but when we didn't, of course we also went went out to the OTAs as well. So we had slightly less reliance on the OTAs than perhaps another service accommodation provider. But if for example we had 50% reliance, which would be perfectly reasonable for A for a hotel, we're talking, you know, quarter of a million pounds, $270,000 a year. It would cost that business now, that money there, what if it was invested back into the business, back into your product and back into the bricks and mortar, the fabric of the building. Better beds, better facilities, better services. What if this was over five years? That's a million pounds. Four years. A million pounds. What if it's over ten years? How does your business look differently if this is over a longer period of time when you can continuously reinvest and either pay off your mortgage sooner, have a better loan to value ratio so you get a better interest rate, or you can reinvest in your property and start increasing your average room rate and getting better reviews and more occupancy. Because that's what I did with our savings, always reinvested back into the property. So imagine that over a number of years, what it can do to your business. Now, I know you're probably not selling 56 bedrooms. This was a hotel, you might be doing five accommodation units. So let's make that five. If I can find five, it's after four. I can't make the mouse work. Average daily rate. Now, average daily rate for a decent Airbnb could be a lot higher. It could be 300 a night, even more. Depends how many it sleeps occupancy there. That might be about right. Perhaps 70% for an Airbnb. But I think the reliance for an Airbnb type property, short term rental is even higher. So even just at five listings, you know, £40,000, $46,000 in a year, we could start saving and over the time we can start increasing our average rate, decreasing our reliance on OTAs and increasing our occupancy. So everything tumbles down to the bottom line for a more fit and nimble business that we can run. So anyway, that's what I see as the benefit, the ultimate goal of SEO and getting more direct bookings, and not just through SEO, through email marketing, through social media marketing. We don't just rely on one thing, it all builds the picture. And what people are guilty of is building their wonderful website and launching the website and then doing nothing with it. They're thinking that that's the end of the journey. But unfortunately, it's the start of the journey. If you're not going to do anything with the website, just stay on the OTAs. But by investing a bit in a good website and then either learning a bit of SEO yourself or getting someone else to do it, the sooner you start, the sooner it's paying you back. So when you're thinking, oh, I won't bother, but what if by the time this is getting traction and these little seeds you're planting now, by next year is saving you this sort of money, it's not going to seem that expensive, is it? Because this is building good foundations for the future. Right. So in previous videos like this, I've demonstrated a bit more some details of SEO and how to do it. What I'm going to do in this is talk about Google Analytics and Google Site Kit because people struggle to understand what it is. I'm going to show you how to set it up and how to connect it to your WordPress website. Now, not to let you down, I've also created three 10 to 15 minute videos that are going to be emailed to you over the course of the next week or so, which will have some more detailed training involved. And you can just watch those videos at your leisure and hopefully give you more inspiration and ideas of how you can create content and attract the right audience for you. So let me just give you an idea of a website I was recently working on and it's actually this one. It's number one service department in Belfast. Now, we only started doing the SEO a month ago. Now, what I'm trying to get you to think about is what most people make the mistake of doing at the start is trying to target the really broad, wishy washy keywords that are not really very specific. So accommodation in Belfast, are they looking for a hotel, a tent, a campsite, a yurt, hot tub, a log cabin and a ymca? Who knows? Yeah, even if it was hotel, it doesn't say budget, luxury, romantic. There's nothing specific about the word accommodation, but adding the words together with the type of accommodation, service, accommodation, or it could be service department. Along with the niche we're targeting in this case, pet free or pet friendly. That might be hot tub, it might be romantic, the accommodation might be yurt, it might be self catering. And then with the city, so we talk, we're putting three things together. Location, niche, I. E. Pet free and accommodation type. By putting those three things together, we're being really specific about who we're targeting so we can rank easily on Google. Okay. There are not as many people searching for this search term as there is accommodation in Belfast. But the people that are searching this term, let's say it's a hundred a month, they definitely want your thing, they definitely need what you offer and you're putting yourself right in front of them, directly at the top of Google. Even ahead of booking.com. yeah, because booking.com are not getting this granular with who they're targeting. They're very broad with who they're targeting. So being specific and creating content on your website around that specificity. Did I say that right? Specificity can put you in front of your ideal target audience. Okay, so there's the three things I want you to think about on how to put yourself in front of your audience. And ideally, every page of your site will have a focus that it is trying to do. What's it trying to achieve and who is that page trying to be in front of? What search query does your page answer? And that's what SEO is all about. Okay, now we can get a lot of information from Google Analytics and Google Search Console. I'm going to show you what happens when you set up those accounts and how to set up the accounts. Now sometimes you get emails like this from Google New Pages preventing your site being indexed. And you can open that. It will open up Google Search Console and tell you what the issue is. So in here it said for XX issue, which means it's a a 404 error. For example, you go to a page and it says page not found. So what we can do is actually have a look at them. Now this one you can see it says started. I've already submitted those errors to look at the fixes and ask Google to confirm that they're repaired. But we can look at through the errors that it gives us and understand are they errors, are they not errors and do I need to repair them? So for example, that's a 4xx issue and we can see that it's just a WordPress admin code on a page. We don't need to fix it. It's not an actual page. The customers never see it. It's fine. And that can be the same for other pages, for example, excluded by no index tag. Mostly we set no index tag because we want Google to not index the page. We're telling Google this is not a page and that's why it's important. So Google then builds trust in us and understands that we are operating our website correctly. So for example, this is a hospitality recruitment website and it has some tags attached to job applications which might also pertain to blog posts and that sort of thing and authors on the page. It doesn't matter about this code. So we just no index it. So that's what Google Search Console is. Now let me show you on a WordPress site, how to attach or connect the two things together to make it work. Now, first thing to say is if you already have Google SiteKit on your WordPress website, it will be here top left generally. But it might say you might not be able to see the data. So this is a website we just launched yesterday, Rollstone Manor. So it's only just started gathering data, which is why it looks like that. But if you can't see anything in this back end here, you might need to be given granted access through Google Analytics. Now if you don't know who has access, just set it up again yourself. So the first thing to do if you haven't got SiteKit there's is go to plugins, click on add new plugin, then search and then just say Google SiteKit. Which obviously this is already installed on this site. It will come up looking like this install now just there. Once it's installed you click activate and that already says it's active. So once it's there it will appear up in the top left hand side there. Now if you can't access your site kit like somebody else has set it up and you can't see this data, just scroll down to Tools and reset the site kit. And now you can go through the process from the dashboard of setting up your site kit. So we'll do it now live connect to Google SiteKit and you need to be logged into Chrome. This is really important because Chrome is a Google product, need to be in Google. And it will connect to Google Analytics. So you're basically just giving Google Analytics and Google Search Console permission to add a tag to your website and connect the website to the account. So you click Next, just click next all the way through and agree. At this point you might get a couple of boxes to tick that you accept and accept the terms and conditions. Click yes and off you go and eventually it will take you back to the website and that's just sort of pulling through the data and connecting the accounts. Now it's going to ask us if we want to is it the correct analytics account? Now you might not have these two boxes here, obviously mine's already set up, but it might say you can click the drop down menu and set up a new account and then it will do the rest for you. Just follow the process. But we're already connected. Rollstone Manor complete setup. Okay, so if we go to the dashboard, It's going to give us information about the number of visitors and type of visitors, that sort of thing from different sources. Google Search Console And Google Analytics 1 is kind of analytics is recording more. How many pages they visit, which device they are on, how long they visited for, where the traffic came from. Google Search Console is more about, yes, a little bit of data, historical data, but also whether your pages are all indexed and whether you have a site map. Now, a site map is really important, so you must check you have a site map. Otherwise it means Google cannot crawl through your site and find all the different pages. If you have a WordPress site, it already shows in here the URL. And all you need to do for every WordPress site is type in at the end wp sitemap XML, and add that at the end. And after about 10 minutes you should say success. Okay? And then Google then knows what your page structure all looks like and how to navigate its way through. So that's really, really vital. Step one of any launch of a new website really, really must be done. What else can it do down here in the settings you can add other people use and permissions, you can add, add email address there and it can also tell you core web vitals. Now, this is a relaunch of a new site, so we don't have any data yet, but it will tell you whether a site is slow, whether it's loading. Okay, Whether it works on mobile, whether it doesn't work on mobile. Now, obviously, if Google's telling you that, it means it's important to Google, so we need to try to fix it. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's a bit technical. So that's why Search Console is really important. Now let's go over to Google Analytics and I'm going to look at my own Google Analytics page here. Just because I don't mind sharing the data and because the other page I just showed you, the site was only relaunched yesterday, so there's nothing to show. So in here we're on the home, we know it's connected because there's data showing in the last 30 days. Sometimes you get an error at the top here that says that nothing recorded in the last 40. So that would be concerning. You just double check in your settings that your property it shows in here, your property details, your property id. You can go back to analytics in the website and see if it's the correct property ID connected just to make sure it's working. So what else can we do? Go back to the home. And it loads and obviously that's telling us data over the last 30 days. We can make it seven days, we can make it 90 days and that's telling us whether we're up or down. It can tell us seasonal trends, weekly trends. Are people more looking at the website at the weekend? See, I've got my peaks and troughs here. Yeah, it goes down on a Saturday, went down there on a Sunday, went down there on a Sunday. So for me, Sundays are not great. But we've got peaks here, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Wednesday, so we know that midweek we're good. So if we were doing say a Google Ads campaign, we might turn it off at the weekend because as I'm a B2B business, so we turn it off at the weekend. But your B2C, you might turn your ads on at the weekend to maximize the ROI on the ads. So this is why this data is important. It tells us when visitors are coming and perhaps when we need to be more active ourselves on responding to email inquiries. Right, so let's have a little look. If you click on the reports.

What.

We want to do is learn where the traffic is coming from because that can tell us multiple things. Is our social media working and if so, which social media is working? The advert that you paid the local supplier to be on their website, you paid them 300 pound for a year for a listing. Has it brought you any traffic? Well, using Google Analytics we can tell if it's bought us any traffic. Yeah. So if we look at the traffic overview, We can see what pages people have visited, that sort of thing. And if we click on leads. So it doesn't make too much of a difference whether it's user acquisition or traffic acquisition. For the sake of this, we're interested in where the traffic came from. We can say on here how long, so I know I'm in the way, how far back we go. We can change 30 days, 90 days, 12 months, etc. Let's say 90 days of data. And we can also change how many lines of data we have. I only have five lines, but you can change on here you can add more lines of data. So we can see now that.

In.

That 90 days most of my customers know me, so they've typed in web marketing to find me. 377 are referrals. So that's on another website link back to mine. 357 organic search. So they've just typed in Digital marketing agency Bista, Google Ads Agency Bista, Hospitality marketing agency, Hospitality, SEO training. They're all my services, website hosting. So they might have typed in those key terms and found me naturally social. That might be any social media page. Instagram Facebook, Twitter, etc. But I don't really know whether it's my own social media or somebody else's or wherever. I guess actually mostly it's other people because they don't do social media much. But we, we still can' see at a granular level where that is. And the old Google Analytics, it would show you very clearly and easily to find here. But now all we need to do is just a further step. So if we click the PL plus button and click Traffic, Source, Session, Session, source or medium, have a play with it, see what comes up for you, and you can now see a little bit more information about where the traffic is coming from. Yeah, so we can now see that it was Facebook or a referral from Siteground or this Facebook. Yep. That one, for example, is a, a directory listing for SEO agencies. So if I was paying for that, I'm not, but if I was, I would know they're bringing me traffic and I'd be happy to pay them for it. So that's how that can really help you identify where your advertising spend goes, where your marketing budget is going. And is it working? Yeah, same with socials. If you're putting all your effort on Instagram and your traffic's coming from Facebook, maybe switch your attention to Facebook. Yeah, because social media helps SEO. The more traffic you get, the more authority you get. And Google will reward you for that, that traffic, you know, people share on social media, giving you a wider audience and again, more traffic. So that's a sort of a way that social media as well can help your SEO. And that's why they're all tied together. SEO, email marketing, ppc. PPC is pay per click, Google Ads and doing actual SEO yourself. So over time we can then build a picture of the data and in, in the back of our website we can also see what terms people are searching to find us. So these are the key terms people are adding to find our website. Sorry, this one, Top queries for your site. So with them we know we can start building more content around our top performing pages and that's how we can, you know, rank even further on those things. Right, I'm just going to wrap up. I'm nearly at 30 minutes. So let's go back to what I'm going to do over the next three. Three emails will come out of the next week or two with ten 12 minute training on how to do certain things on SEO. So look out for those if you want to do SEO. Course there'll be a link in the, in the in the emails. But there's a hospitality SEO course there and with the discount for this, this summit is 24 pound a month ink VAT if you're in the UK and there'll be a discount code to use it. All right, so you can just sign up through here. Where is it? Enroll in the hospitality SEO course. It's dead cheap and like I say, 20 odd pound a month and then you can start saving 50,000 pound next year. For me, it's great value for money. I want to keep it as cheap as I possibly can, help as many people as I can and wean you off your reliance on the OTAs. I really hope you, hope you start the journey, whether it's through me or through email marketing training, social media training, all of it helps SEO. Okay. And if you don't have time to do this yourself, obviously we do it. We've got an agency to, to provide the service for you. But the cheapest way of doing it is to learn it. And obviously my course is tailored around hospitality. So by all means get, get a son or a daughter, a cousin, a nephew, subscribe into the course and let them do it for you. Honestly, if they're 15 or over, they could probably do it. All you need to do is turn a computer on. All right, hope you've enjoyed that. I look forward to reaching out over the next few weeks with some emails. Take care. Bye bye.

I thank you very much, Craig. Really, really useful. And again, there are so many people that have worked with Craig through his course or in his one on one program and I've worked with him as well in other side projects. So we, I have been running this year and you can see the sprouts of the spruits of the labor coming in. Again, it's not. SEO is not a quick win in any shape or form compared to other marketing variables that are out there. But it stands the test of time. And I can speak to that from the granary, which was our Farm Stay business that we had and we sold in 2021 and I can see that in Boostly now after so many years. It's, it's impactful and it's crazy. A blog post that we put together or something that we put together way back when, put some good SEO behind it still generates a ton of traffic and drives people into your funnel. So thank you very much, Craig. Can we all put thank you, Craig in the chat and he is online and he will be online to drive you to anywhere that you want to go, you want to go Find out more about his services, his website. He is in the chat below. Sorry, I just took a massive drink before coming back online.

So let's move swiftly, swiftly on, shall we?

We're going to move on to our next speaker and let's jump across the pond to America, let's jump across the pond to New York. Because I wanted to dabble in the world of AI Now, Bestie AI one of our sponsors of this event and you know, the sponsors really do make this happen. It takes a lot to put this together. It takes a lot to spread the awareness and I reach out to a few of my biz besties that are out there in the world and I just say, listen, I need to put this event on. I need to put some, you know, ad spend in so we can get much awareness of it. But to do this, I need some people to come in and help sponsor it and put it all together. And Sam at Bestie came back to me saying, yep, 100. And I've known Sam for a while now. The, the program that he has developed and the company that he has developed is really impacting the industry and AI has been around now for a while, just over a year and a half and it is going to become even more prevalent into your day to day lives and into your guest day to day lives with Apple intelligence which is powered by OpenAI and you've got the, the Amazon Alexas are being powered by cloud, which is another LLM. So they're going to become more and more prevalent and I think in the world of hospitality, the quickest win when it comes to how AI can benefit is through guest communications is the one. Bugbear is the one pain point. You know, who wants to be getting that message at 11 o' clock saying, I've locked myself out, I've lost my key and wi fi codes and how to put the heating on and dishwashers and all of those sort of things. This is where AI can truly come in. And Sam's company has solved that problem. This is one that you're going to want to pay attention to. And again, the replay, the replay will be available over on the YouTube channel and in this group for the whole of this week. Can we please say thank you, Sam? Can we please put hashtag Best EI if you're with us right now, even if you're on the replay. And please can we all say hi and welcome to Mr. Sam Dundas of.

Bestie AI, the co founder of Bestie AI. You can see the little yellow heart emoji that's us. I'm going to start this session by ringing the gong and wherever you are, thank you for tuning in. I may have broken the gong, but that's okay. Today in this session we're going to talk about AI. We're going to talk about the applied use cases of what our customers are using it for, why you should know about Bestie, why we're in business, how we started. Hopefully you can make it through this whole thing and we'll try to keep it as engaging as possible and we'll do it all in one take. So for starters, I thought it would be fun for my team to put together some examples of AI in the wild. So a lot of the time when people think about this buzzword, they wonder what it actually means for their business and how it can help. Obviously the whole guest experience thing comes to mind as a clear use case, but often you get the sort of same demo of what it might say or a sandbox of perfectly put together examples. So instead of that, today we're just going to go through a bunch that my team have put together and react to them in real time and see what we think. So we will start here. Hopefully you can see this screen. So looks like the guest said, okay, good afternoon. We checked at 11 keys are on the box. Okay, so everything you see in green is autopilot. So bestie responded within one minute. So 5:24 to 5:25 and said, good afternoon, thanks for letting us know. Appreciate you. Follow the self checkout instructions. Hope you had a wonderful stay and enjoyed your time in Artemis. Thank you. We'll probably see you next year. And then something in Greek.

Thank you.

I'm glad you enjoyed your stay and see again next year. Okay, so you know, a little bit repetitive but pretty good. Quick response times. All good there. Okay. Another example in Greek. We don't speak. I don't speak Greek. So we'll assume this is good as well. At least the response time was good. Responded within one minute. Here we go. Okay, we're planning on leaving our luggage and wait until the check in time. You can leave your luggage in the locker room on the ground floor until 3pm Guess says is it safe to keep it there? Yes, the locker is safe to keep your luggage. It's a secure location on the ground floor. Thank you so much. You're very welcome. Looking forward to your arrival. I would give this a, I would give this an A. Maybe an A minus. Yeah, that's fair. Okay, next example. So, hello, we've arrived at the front door and I have the key, but the door seems to be stuck at the top. Hey, is there a trick for opening the door? Nevermind. I got in code then key. Okay, well, before Bestie could help, they figured it out themselves, so. But within two minutes. Great to hear you're in. Glad you figured it out. Sometimes those keys can be a bit tricky. Enjoy your stay. I am in and it's lovely. I'm thrilled to hear it. Okay, drop the ball at the start, but I will say it recovered here with a nice message and they figured it all out. So I guess one A B plus. Okay, next time. Next one is in German, so I'm not going to grade or comment on this one because I don't speak German despite. Actually, this is a good opportunity to share a bit more about myself. So I started running properties in Canada myself as a property manager back in 2020 and with my brothers. And we started by purchasing a condo and then putting it on Airbnb and then purchasing another one and putting that on Airbnb and then reaching out to people in the neighborhood to see if we could manage their properties in Calgary, in Canada. And that sort of snowballed into after a couple of months. One of the clients that we were managing properties for asked us if we could manage her properties in Germany, actually in Hamburg. And of course I said yes. And I've told this story before, if you, if you've heard it on the Boostly podcast or elsewhere, it probably sounds repetitive. You haven't heard it. It's kind of funny. But then out of nowhere started managing a portfolio of 35 rentals in three different markets in Germany. But honestly, in this day and age, it's never been easier to do things internationally. You know, we have upwork for people for VAs and finding a photographer and translators and everything worked pretty well. So that's still up and running today, but I still haven't learned anything other than knowing what German looks like. So I'm not going to grade this one. And that's a little bit about me. On to the next example.

Okay.

Hello Suzanne. Okay, we don't have all the context here, but hello Suzanne. You're right. The indoor fireplace is only available between October 15th and April 15th. It's a traditional wood burning fireplace and isn't operational during the warmer months. While you won't be able to enjoy the indoor fireplace, we hope you'll still enjoy your stay at Turkey Ridge. There are plenty of other things to enjoy like the hot tub, outdoor fireplace and the beautiful scenery. Sincerely, unwind luxury vacations. Okay, thank you for the response. Looking forward to your visit, Suzanne. Okay, that's a little serious. We're looking forward to hosting you. Safe travels, Sincerely. If we wanted to add an extra night to our stay, would that be available? Okay, so here's interesting part where AI does have its limitations. Right now we can't pull availability about the property in real time. So what happened here is that Bestie could not respond, so they responded with a draft instead, like a manual sent message. And then they said, okay, thank you. You're very welcome. So I'd give this one a B minus. So whenever Bestie doesn't know how to respond on autopilot. So once again, everything you see here in green is on autopilot. That means the AI responded automatically without any human intervention, directly on the OTA and through the pms. So we integrate with right now uplisting guesty, hostaway, hostfully and owner res and logify. So if you're on any of those six PMSs, you can hook up Bestie and it'll start. If you put it on autopilot, it'll start kicking out messages just like this. And if it doesn't know the answer, if it isn't 100% certain, it will kick out a draft instead. And we'll go over more examples of that. But this sort of back and forth between when is the AI confident enough to respond, it responds and when it doesn't, it kicks a draft. That's pretty common is how everybody's building this right now. I think the big trick is like who's doing the best job at the actual message quality itself. And so I think today it's just showing some empirical examples of what it looks like. And honestly, these are probably a little cherry picked as well because I just asked our prompt engineer to put this together to put together a collage. So I mean, these are probably cherry picked, but I mean they're all still pretty good. And honestly, I think if we had really bad feedback about Autopilot, I'd be hearing about it by now. But we have well over 7000 properties running it consistently. Our biggest customer with 1500 properties is running it on all inquiries and confirmed guests 24 7. And they've been doing that for about three months and they're happy with it. So I think that's important to have real life examples to be able to point to with users that are actually using it. And we'll continue through this because we have 20 minutes together, so we got plenty of time. To kill. Okay, well, if there's any. If there's nothing else that's interesting, we'll move on. Because there's other stuff to show about AI. Yeah, we'll do a few more and then we'll move on. Okay, so here's an example of. Okay, can I get a refund? I have eight girls coming bright and early in the morning and don't have time to deal with the rodent issue. Okay. Bestie couldn't respond to this clearly because in Bloom in they wrote a manual message or it was actually a draft generated by Bestie. My guess is that this one was in fact not a draft because it's pretty custom and it looks like there's an issue going on. So unfortunately, I'm staying somewhere else. I didn't have enough time tomorrow to figure out the rodent issue. Sorry to cancel. This is a very important weekend. Get to come up with a quick solution. Okay. And then autopilot tries to jump in and be helpful. Hey, Grace. Completely understand or. Understand completely. It's a bummer that this happened and I'm sorry we couldn't get things sorted out in time for your important weekend. I hope you have a great time at your new place. So, yeah, pretty good. Yeah. I would give that an A for this. I guess one message, but overall, I guess it wasn't helpful up here. So maybe a B minus actually.

Okay.

All right. So I think that's. That's pretty much it. I mean, another thing about the AI is that it responds in the language native to the person who sent the original message. So in this case, if the guest speaks Mandarin, it'll pop out a response in Mandarin and then you can custom set, you know, if you want a custom signature for each AI message. That's why this is in English. But once again, to no surprise for anybody, I don't know what that means, but it looks like it was positive. Thank God emojis are a universal language.

Spanish?

Pretty good. Hey, we're going golfing. Good weather. Glad to hear. Enjoying the house, hope you enjoy a great stay, etc. Etc. Hebrew? Oh no, is that Hebrew? Yeah, that's Hebrew, but it works. Okay, I think that's pretty much it. Okay, this is good. We'll do one more. Best way to get to your apartment. The best way is by using Athens metro and train systems and convenient and affordable options, especially with luggage. You could take the metro to that station. It's a short walk from the apartment. The journey takes about 40 minutes and costs about €10.

Thanks.

We'll do that.

Looking forward to hosting you. Hey, can I please ask, is the washing machine a washer dryer and if not, what clothes drying facilities are there? The washing machine is not a washer dryer. The apartment has a rack to dry clothes. I actually this is a probably a big thing in Europe because I installed a bunch of single purpose washer dryer, dual purpose washer dryers when I went to Germany to check out the properties for the first time. And I didn't know that was a thing, but I guess it is. It's not that common in Canada or in the us but clearly is in Europe or not here, but anyway. Okay, so that is, that is everything. I think we've hammered this one. Home Autopilot is pretty good. That's how I was going to start. This presentation was talking about practical uses of AI. I think that between whether it's guest messaging on Autopilot or Draft mode, they're both pretty good additions to save you time and make things easier. We offer this directly embedded into the PMS that you use, which makes us a bit different than others other solutions out there. So you just one click tap a button and then it augments your unified inbox. You don't have to use a third party app, you can just use your unified inbox within the PMS and then bestie augments it with AI, with drafts, with a sentiment score, with a summary of a conversation, all that stuff right into your inbox. And we're like pretty big on trying to build this over the long term and build a high quality product over the long term. And so we are pretty confident in its capability. Obviously as a growing startup, nothing's perfect, but we offer two week free trials or in some cases one week free trials depending on the PMS you're on. And pretty competitive pricing I think for everything that we deliver. And it's only going to get better. So we talked about Autopilot. I thought this example was also kind of funny because this is a good example of Autopilot working and then it being not sure and then kicking out a draft instead. So this UI, what you're seeing is part of the bestie app. So we have a mobile version and a web version that if you aren't using your PMS and you want to use our system instead, you can do that. And in this case it was funny because we thought the AI was the AI, thought that the person was calling, maybe calling the host sugar. But anyway, Sugar question mark. Yeah, the kitchen has sugar. Let me know if There are any other questions. Great. So I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the impact this has had on businesses that we've been working with. So this is that one customer I mentioned that is been running Autopilot across all of their, I think it's 1500 properties now. And so that's about 500 messages a day on autopilot. They sent about 1800 upselling offers, which we'll get to in a sec. And, and it's had a massive impact on response time. So we started working with them back in February of this year and ended it in, I mean, so far in September, it's at seven minutes. So their average response time went from 45 minutes to seven minutes. All using autopilot on all guests 24 7. They're also still using Draft mode, which kind of shows you the amount of times that the Autopilot doesn't know how to respond. So it's honestly like most of the time it's doing like in this case it looks like 90% of the responses are AI and then about maybe less than 10% are drafts, which kind of varies depending on the PMS. But overall I think the, you know, the Autopilot is very conservative, but it's still, I would say like across the board, maybe 50 or 60% of all messages are being automatically responded to. The rest are, are just going to probably be drafts because of limitations to the API or we don't have enough data through the pms. But you can add and you know, I'm not going to give you the whole demo on Bestie. This is sort of just highlights, but there are ways that you can add guidebooks or, you know, SOPs and put things directly into the app for the AI to get smarter. We have all that stuff. We've only been around about a year, but within that time and for my couple of years operating, I sort of get an intuitive sense for what's important for what needs to be baked into the product and what it actually takes to make it reliable. And so anyway, that's the impact from response time. Now we're going to shift gears and talk a little bit more about other use cases. So we've talking about messaging, talked a little bit about the impact there. We've launched this auto task detection and generation. So it's pretty cool. You can basically load up any. All of your reviews will show up directly in Bestie, all of the public and private feedback from all of your Airbnb and booking.com reviews and then Bestie will read through them and automatically generate draft tasks. So in this case, overall, it's a great location. Super convenient for baseball and football games and also has lots of little coffee shops within walking distance. The complex itself has great amenities we took advantage of during our stay, including a basketball court, gym, rooftop lounge. Wow. This is a. An in depth review and game room. Are they, you know, is that a description or a review of the property? A few quick things, easy things to make the stay more pleasant for future guests would be removing the chair, cheap mattress protectors from the beds and upgrading to more comfortable ones that don't make such so much noise when trying to sleep. Oh yeah, like those like Dexter style mattress protectors that are like water beds. That's brutal. Also providing more towels and some washcloths for the guests would. Would be nice or whatever. We'll be back to stay. Okay, so the detected tasks were replace mattress protectors with more comfortable ones. They didn't mention the cheap part. That's nice. And provide additional towels and washcloths.

Okay.

Pretty straightforward. So the idea is here is that you can load up, go into any, you know, I'll show you a live version. So you pull up an apartment name, any apartment, and you can see all of the reviews that have come in recently and this will go ongoing. This is only available for Guesting and Hostaway users at the moment, but it is live. So this is pretty cool. You can generate tasks that go directly back into your pms so they get drafted here and you can just one click tap and then just assign it to someone from your team and then that will create a task in Guesty or Hostaway and it'll just fill this out for you and you can just assign it to the right person. We also have a task management system from Conversations Real time through the Chrome extension, which is pretty popular for guestian Hostaway users as well. But everything else I'm showing you is live on all on all PMSs. But this is another one where you can see why is our reviews going down in certain properties or going up or what's the feedback targeted down to one get your team to go through here. No more reading through reviews. Pretty cool. Just in the last two minutes here we have a review responder which is the same sort of thing. Review comes in responding to it. But I just wanted to show you our upselling tools which are pretty popular. So a booking booster which is basically gonna. This isn't even AI. This is just one of our automations that will automatically go through your calendar every day and Try to fill gap nights. So you just turn on some settings on what discount you want to offer, what days, then every day it'll go through and try to find those upsells for you, send the messages and you can track all of those through the ROI dashboard of Bestie and then you can also see all the conversations and confirm that it actually did generate you that extra revenue. So same thing for early check ins, we have something for retargeting so you can automatically have Bestie reach out to previous guests and that is AI, not just for the sake of it, but the AI actually reads through that conversation. If they stayed for an anniversary or a special occasion or anything, the AI will pick up on that and then write that in the icebreaker message and say hey, really hope you enjoyed your stay with us six months ago. Would you like to stay again? It'll check that unit to see if it's available and then do it offer. Send an offer to come back and stay. Okay. And this being the boostly ecosystem, we can't finish the presentation without talking about direct bookings. So I wanted to end today sharing a new feature that is our chat widget so you can configure Bestie onto your website. And then this is a video of me giving a video of a loom. So hopefully it's not confusing. Pay attention to the Sam in the bottom left corner, not the Sam in the middle of the screen. The idea is that this is hooked up to your booking engine. This is available on Hostaway and Gusty and you can just type in semantically anything you want. And I'm looking for a two bedroom apartment available October 1st to 5th in Breckenridge. And then Bestie is going to instantly generate a bunch of recommendations with properties that are available and then I can just type in what's the pricing for option one and then it'll come back to me right away with the prices and then the AI is also aware of what screen you're on. So now when you're within the listing you can ask questions and then the AI will respond instantly. And the cool thing about this is this will ping you and your team. So it's like a hybrid chat where you can jump in and answer questions as a human and collect their information and hopefully get them to convert. This is sort of in beta right now, but it is available to all guestian Hostway users. Well congratulations, you survived 20 minutes of me yelling into the screen. Once again, my name is Sam. I'm the co founder of Bestie. I'm calling in here from our office in New York City to find us. You can look me up on LinkedIn. Dundas is my name will be at the VRWS summit, the vacation Rental World Summit in Porto in a couple weeks. We'll also be at Verma International in Phoenix. We will be at darm, the Data and Revenue Management Conference and we will also be at host Chella in November in Miami. So thank you so much for listening and watching and hopefully this was helpful and please reach out you can go to our website getbesty AI G E T B E S T Y AI if you want to learn more, book a demo or chat directly with me or someone from my team. And once again thank you so much for listening and I hope to meet you some point along the way. Take care.

This is what I love about Sam is he just gets straight down to brass tacks. He shows what it's doing, not what it's going to do. And I love that about Sam. I love this about get bestie and you know they are transforming businesses, saving so much money on having to employ so many staff members. When you can get this and it's done quick, fast, effective and keeps the whole guest experience happy. They've got so much more coming but what I love you just showed what they are doing. Go visit out the website, go check it out. Please say thank you Sam in the comments. Hashtag thank you Sam. Hashtag guest Bestie, all the good things. Any questions for any of our expert speakers? Then please do go ahead and drop it in the chat. Remember hashtag help if you want any help or hashtag questions if you've got a question and we will get it in front of the expert and hopefully we'll jump in if not today or some point this week to to answer right we're moving very swiftly along let bring it back to the UK and this is to the fantastic Touch Day. Now touchday have put together the event guide for this week and if you don't know what the event guide is look in the Facebook group, the bug Direct Virtual Summit Facebook group because it gives you all of the agenda for this week, everything that we're doing, all of the links and much more. And I asked touchday if they could put a video together on giving you help and advice on why you need a digital guidebook. But most importantly I think BY now in 2024 everybody has a digital guidebook in some way shape form. How to glow it up, how to make it as best as possible. Touchday have been our recommended Go to guidebook people now for time. And they've got countless upon countless upon countless testimonials and you all know who they are. But I wanted to put this together from the fantastic Emma as part of the marketing team at touchday, just to.

Go, this is your guidebook.

This is how to make it epic. So can we all please say thank you, touchday in the comments? Hashtag thank you, touchday, as many as you can. And let's very swiftly introduce the fantastic Emma Cole of touchday.

Hi there, Boostly world. My name's Emma Cole. I'm head of product marketing at touchday Touchstone Digital Guidebooks. And today I'm going to take you through a whirlwind guidebook glow up. So hopefully give you lots of tips and tricks to wow guests and keep them coming back. So I've been told by Mark, I've got to keep things speedy. I've got to crack on. So I'm going to just jump straight in. Lovely. So here we are. Let's crack on. Nice to be here with you all today. So what are we going to cover? What are we going to run into? So if you're a bit tired, you've had enough and you know all about guidebooks and you're thinking, emma, babe, I'm not that interested. That's fine. Scan the QR code on your screen here and you can sit back, relax and look at a lovely Touch Day guide. That is a guide to the city of Barcelona and which is where I live. And you can sit back and have a little holiday daydream and plan your next trip. So don't worry about it. Just, just have a chill. For the rest of you who are really keen and want to get a bit more stuck in, this is what we're going to cover. So we're going to run through some hacks that help you get up and running really fast and some great ways that you can use touchday's guidebook templates. A lot of the hidden features we have that you might not know about that will make your life easier, save you a bunch of time, and, of course, make things way more interesting and way more engaging for your guests. Most importantly, how to make sure guests read your info. No one reads anything. We're all guilty of this, but there's got to be ways that we can make sure that guests are reading all of the wonderful information that you put together so that they have a great time, but also so that they stop asking you so many questions. And then finally, I've run through some of the great features that we have that kind of take things to the next level. And really, I mean, that's what we all want to do. So let's crack on. No more screen sharing, no more boring slides. I'm going to jump in and just demo this for you and show you how it all works in my touchday account. Awesome. Boom. Here we go. So here I am logged into my TouchStay account and I'm on my templates page. So something that a lot of you maybe don't know is that you can now have a bunch of different templates in your Touchday account. So what does that mean? We have 15 or so templates. That's your short term rental guide for your properties, event guides, destination guides, cleaning guides, super useful for your cleaning cruise. So there's lots of different templates available and you can also create your own now from scratch, which is super nice. Why is this useful? How can this help you? So one of the ways this is useful, you can completely duplicate everything that you've already created. This is one way. So let's say I've got some new properties and I want to completely duplicate that template and those guides copy everything over. It's super easy to do that. You just use our duplicate template feature. You click duplicate template, you give it a new name and then you're off to the races. So instead of having to create everything all over again, you can just duplicate it. It's disconnected from your original templates. Any changes you make won't change on your existing guides and you can have it all nice and separate. Another thing that you can do is you can just add, as I said, add a brand new template. So why would you do that? Let me give you an example. So here you can see I have my house guides and that's two properties that are in Spain. So I've got two guides on that template. I want to add another House guides template this time because I have some properties that I've taken on into my portfolio and they're based in the uk. So I want all of that content to be separate. They don't need to share any information. Different types of houses in different countries, so we want everything separate. How do we do that? So I click Add template. From my nice list of templates, I'm going to choose the short term rental one, which is for the house guides. I call it House Guides because that's just easy for me. That's how my brain works. And then House Guides uk, because they're in the uk. Awesome. I click save. My templates are being created in the background. Lovely, lovely. And do I want to go to my new template? Yes, please, sir. So, over we go. Here is my new template and you can see everything. This is all fresh or brand new, but it's all still in that one touch day. Like it's still the same login, it's still my same overall account, but everything's been separated into a new template. Use the drop down here, you can navigate between all your different templates. So now I'm in House Guides uk, you can see all the content that's already created here ready for me to adjust and make it relevant to my property. So got the welcome things to do before you leave home. Check in arrival information, the WI fi, like all the stuff that guests really basic, sturdy foundation to build your guidebook from. So that's your templates. So it's a really nice way to, you know, depend. If you've got three properties, 500 properties and maybe they're in different places, or maybe you've got 50, like units all in one building. Like, depending what you've got and how things are set up, you can use the system very flexibly to make it work for you. So highly recommend that checking out the new templates and they're even great for like, you know, managing your cleaning crew. If you want a destination guide for people to use as a marketing tool to encourage people to come to your local area. Loads of stuff you can do. What's next? So I'm going to go back into my, My Spain templates. That's where my guides are and they've got all the nice, fun content and I'm in Content Hub. So one thing I want to show you quite quickly, which may sound super basic, but most people don't, a lot of people don't know this. So I'm going to pop in to my welcome topic, which is what people first see. So let me give. What am I talking about? So here is the guest view of your guide. I've got this just open. I always have this open on another screen, but another little hack here. So if you, if you're in Content Hub, right, and you click Preview Guides, it gives you the guides that you can view. So I've clicked Castle Codale. Here we are. It's just loading up. Oh, there are bugs in the Internet today. There we go. And this opens on the desktop view, like, and that's really nice. But when you're working along, maybe you want to think about what is my guest Seeing how do I see this from the guest point of view? So if you just right click and click inspect and here I've just got it open on another screen and here it is already. This is what your guest sees. This is a really nice little hack to size this up to a mobile view. You can choose different views, different device views as well, to see what your guests see and interact with it in that way. So if I click on. Wait, let's go with a start, shall we? Oh, we're not playing ball today. That's fine. Always gremlins in the Internet, isn't it? There we go. Lovely. So here we are, here's all that. So all of these, all of these lines of the content, all of these different categories here, this is what it's looking like for the guest. Looks like just like their lovely app. So here's the nice welcome. I was about to show you all the lovely stuff here. So back into my content hub and let's just. Here we go. So as I was saying, the welcome topic, the welcome category. So I'm going to pop in here and a lot of people just forget that Touch Day is super multimedia. You can have videos, images, links to other section, sections of the guide, except external links. So links to your website, links to your boostly website and links to any of the things that you think your customers, your guests will be interested in. It's super multimedia and you can really bring it to life. So here I've got some nice emojis, I've got links that I can click that take them, the guests to other sections of the guide. There's a nice little photo in here. Hi. And you can add videos as well. So you can change the media, add different things and make it, make it super interactive. So don't forget that you've got all this rich text editing and other multimedia that you can play around with and add. It's, it's just a, you know, don't give your guests a wall of text and videos. Give them images, make it really engaging and interesting. Don't make it boring. There's no room for boring here. What else is good? So if we go back to my. Back into the guest view of the guide here, you'll see the bottom, there's the map, map tab. So this is, this is Barcelona. Here we go. And I got a lot of map pins here. So all of these little pins on the map are a Google place that I've added into the guide because I want people to find all the hidden gems. You don't want tourist traps. You don't want just the random stuff that all the sponsored stuff that's pulled upon Google these days. You actually want to offer quality local recommendation to your guest. So awesome. How do we do that? Super easy. So first of all, you can. Your guests can filter through these two. Super nice. So if you're just worried about which coffee shops to go to, I drink a lot of coffee, I talk very fast. You might be able to tell they're all in here. So it's super nice way of being able to like help your guests navigate, see what we're looking for. But how do you add these into your guide? So a lot of people are manually adding just little topics and just text with recommendations. You don't need to do that. You. We have an integration with Google Places, so let's see. Let's add a nice restaurant, shall we? What I've done here is a bunch of restaurants that we love to go to. Click Add topic. You click Add Google Place. I'm actually going to add a nice brunch place because we all love brunch. Oh, can't spell. There it is. So you type in a name, it brings up the lovely Google place and then all I have to do is choose the tag that I want to apply to it. This, this is in Barcelona, so I'll click Barcelona. I'll come to tags in a minute. I choose the map pin. So eating and drinking. This is like, it's like a little restaurant. Click save and then that will now be populated on my map, which is great. So easy for guests to find. And whenever they click on a pin, they've got information that I've added in, they've got driving directions, really easy for them to get around and really feel like they've got a little concierge in their pocket. Awesome. Now I just mentioned tags, so let me tell you what those are briefly. So as I've said before, you can man. Whether you've got two guides, sorry, two properties, or 500 or however many, it's really easy to manage all of that content in touchday. So how do we do that? We do that with tags. And you just saw me click on that little tag. So what are tags? So when you create a new template and you go into your master content, content hub, every guide that you then add into that template is given the all guides tag. And that means all of the content in here. These are the tags here. If the All Guides tag is applied, it does what it says in the tin and it's applied to all of your guides and that means the content that has that tag applied to it. This is our little weather widget, goes onto all of your guides. If you have information that's only relevant for each guide, you can then create a new tag. I have one for Barcelona house. I have one for the Casa Jane house, which isn't in Barcelona but it's still in Spain. And that's how I tag things to make sure content goes to the right place. So if you have say for your, your welcome category or your welcome topic, it's the same information for all of your properties. You just add the all guides tag and it goes to everything. So no writing things tons of times. It's super simple, very, very easy to manage all your content. So that's kind of the building blocks of touch day and some really hopeful, nice time saving tax in there. What else is really cool and interesting that you might not know about? I'm going to run into a few that are really cool for your guests. So I go back into my guide and I'm back on my home screen here you'll see this little globe and you think, what is this globe? What does this mean? We've got translations, language translations built into your guide. Let me show you how we do that. So if we go into settings, we go into your preferences and here we have languages. So if you just want. Oh, let's turn that off. If you just want everything in English, because you've only got English guests and that's the default, you can just disable that. If you know you've got guests who's speaking lots of different languages coming from all over the world. We've got two options. We've got Google Translate. And what does this look like for the guest? I'll just refresh that. When the guest clicks on the globe on the COVID page of your guide, all the different languages they can translate the guide into, all pulled directly from Google Translate. And it's instant. You don't have to do anything, which is fab. And then we also have the multi language option and we support around 17 or maybe 20 now different languages. And this means that every time you create a topic or add some content into your guide, all you have to do, let me show you, actually much easier, you just add in your own native translations. So what does that look like? So here I have the English. If I wanted to add French, I'd write, I could copy everything, translate it over German, Spanish, any language that you want to add that we support, you can add that in and we will automatically dynamically show the correct language to your guest based on the location of their IP address. So super nice, very personalized feeling for your guest. And this is all just included in your Touchstone guide. So give it a go. Try out the different language options. What else, what else have we got? So back into the guest view we have some really nice interactive dynamic features that guests really love because as I said, no one reads anymore. So how do we make sure that people read? You want to make your guides interesting. People coming back, they want to share it with the other guests and they want to keep using it as a reference tool as I said that that concierge in their pocket. So let's see what nice things do we have to show? So one that's super great. We might already have scrolled past here. I have embedded a podcast episode. So this is about. It's a podcast I listen to about Catalan culture and history, what's going on in the region. And I've just. It's a great way for giving some local flavor or something interesting to your guests. You can add playlists. So any music that you're into, maybe showing off a local band, it's just a super nice way. We support Spotify, Apple Music and a few other music options. So it's just a really nice way of embedding something quite, quite fun and interactive into your guide. Everyone loves the playlist. What else do we have? If I stay in the welcome, you may have seen the. The local weather widget. So we have. Oh we call it the weather widget. We have the weather widget and we have the tide times widget. So here you can. This adapts to the location that your guest is in and this will show them the weather or the little weather forecast. So just like you'd have on your phone normally, but specific to the location that they're in. And the tide times does the same. It tells the tide times, the tide of the times, the time of the tides for the locality where you are. So if you've got a beachside property and people go surfing, it's a great way of helping them make sure they catch all of the waves. Another really useful one that is very book direct relevant. Let's scroll down. So in my guide here under so long Farewell, we have an email. It's called a special topic. It's an email catch capture topic. So it's. We have it here. We call it the, the stay in touch topic. You can change this to whatever you want, but what it does is it captures the information of your guests. So as we all know, don't really get those email addresses of guests anymore. And we want those email addresses so we can stay in touch, offer something interesting to them, post, stay, have a deeper connection with those guests and keep them coming back. And not through the OTAs, but by your direct booking site. So this is really cool. You'll put in the name. So, Emma, let's just put in my name. Touchstay. And then the guest click submit. Nice. And you can, this can be used, you can add them to your newsletter, your emailing list. So you can stay in touch with your newsletter and you can collect all of these responses in your touchday account and then download them as an Excel file file. It's a super nice way of holding onto those guest email addresses. And it's not just the primary guest. If you have a big property and you have, I don't know, a party of 10 and everyone shares the guide around, it's a great way of getting those email addresses and remarketing to those guests as time passes. Super. What else have I got to show you? Hope Mark's like Emma. Keep to time. So I think what we'll go to next is how to make sure guests. Guests are reading your guide. Most important. So all of these features are really nice, right? They're, they're lovely. But how do you make sure guests actually reading them? Yes, your guide looks gorgeous. You've added your photos, your videos, you've got all this amazing information. You've got the WI fi password, you've got the check in, you've got all the key information that you need. People are loving your playlist, but how do you get them to read this? This is where Memo comes in. And Memo is touchday's messaging assistant. What does it do? Put very simply, Memo allows you to send emails and text messages to your guests. So hopefully, even if you don't have their email, because as I said, we don't get those emails. But if you've got their phone number, you're able to build a communication flow within touchday that sends the link of your guidebook to your guests. Not only does it send the link, it's so much more that it can do as well. So we have a whole series of templates that you can use to send post booking, all the different steps, you know, once the booking has been made, right up to the weeks before and anything in between when you want to be sharing and breadcrumbing and slowly dripping information to your guest, build A participation. If you go to our website, Touchstone has a really nice guest comms planet. If you want to think about, well, how should I be sending emails, blah, blah, blah, it's all in there. So don't take my word for it. Go to our website and have a look. And you can send text messages too. So you're probably thinking, well, how does this all work with the guide? So if you think back to that email capture topic I just showed you, guests might not find this in your guide. If it's right at the bottom or, you know, they don't really think, you know, they haven't got to it, that's fine. You can use Memo to send a reminder to them. So what you could, what you could do is create your own custom message here, fill in all this information, choose who you want to send it to and when you can schedule it and then you can drop them in a little message. Hi, we've loved having you stay. Do send us your email address so we can stay in touch. And you can add the link to this section of your guide. So they'll go straight to it. They'll pop in their name, last name and email and that's it. It's just this fabulous way of using our messaging solution and that email capture topic together. And you can use Memo with every feature that I've talked about. So send them that playlist. Send them a text or an email with that playlist. Hey, here's some music to get you excited about your trip. It's a really fantastic way of doing, building anticipation and really keeping people engaged. And I'll show you some nice examples of things that our customers have done. So pop back into here. Lovely. So I'm going to breeze, breeze through all of this jazz. Boom. So Memo, just as I was talking about. So the thing that's great about Memo, yes, you can automate your messaging, set up that messaging flow, use the templates, use the phone numbers or email addresses and get that out to your guests. If you want to learn more about using Memo, scan the QR code here and it will tell you another webinar. I think it's me talking tell you all about how to use Memo and how it can really help with building that guest engagement and developing a deeper connection with them because that's what we all want. And I will keep coming back to text messages. Text messages are kind of your superpower when it comes to, to to hosting and people like what? That's so old school. Text messages, people are busy, their phones are full of notifications, WhatsApp emails, all this stuff with the humble text message, there's no spam filter and there's no need for WI fi access. Text message just comes through to your phone. You don't get that many, generally speaking, because people are using other apps for their day to day messaging. And we see through our guest communication study, go to our website to download that one too, that text messages get a much higher engagement and a higher rate of clicks than emails. Because yes, they're not getting lost, they're not going into spam. You do have that, that phone number of the guest because you're not limited by the OTAs holding onto those emails and you can really manage much more precise and timely communication. Some of the research we found during our guest communication study is that guest guests really like to receive text messages just before they arrive because it's there right on the home screen of their phone. They don't have to go through a bunch of apps to find it. It's right there and very easy and it can really help with building confidence and helping guests feel like, boom, I'm ready to go. I know how to check in. Oh, I've even got a nice playlist. Let's go. So don't skip, don't sleep on the humble text message. It is your friend. And then what else? What I should wrap up with? Well, we have some, as I showed you earlier with the playlists, we call these custom elements. So what other custom elements do we have? We've got walking tools that you can embed into your guide. We can create upsells through embedding a drop form. So if you want to offer, as we have an example here, a nice charcuterie board, or if you want to offer massages, personal chef, anything, a product or a service you want up to upsell, you can drop that template into your guide. The payment gateway is all managed through Jotform and it's a really nice, very friendly way to upsell to guests and increase your revenue. We have the playlists as I spoke about earlier and another nice one is Google Forms. So another way of capturing guest data, pop a Google form. We have Microsoft forms and other types of forms as well. It's a great way for understanding guest preferences, getting information about their car, if they're parking a car, guest rental agreements. There's lots you can do here to capture that information you need from guests, but have it all within the guide. So guests aren't like, oh, where do I need to go? And you haven't got like 15 different places that you're trying to gather and collate information from. Some more examples. Another one with Jotform you can offer speedy check in and early check in. It's another great data capture form that can really help removing friction from the check in process. Very nice. You can drop in calendars, so if you want to add calendly or a Google Calendar, you can drop those in as well. One that's really neat that our customers love is a Matterport 3D tour. So talk about building anticipation with your guests. They can visit your property virtually without ever having to step foot before their trip. So this is a really nice way of really showing off your property. Forget videos and images like here's your 3D right there in person. But virtually tour. And they've got Apple Music too. We've got a bunch of them, so check them out. And how do we bring this all together? So as I said, with memo you can send a text message to your guest, Hey, I know you're looking forward to your trip. Here's a link to your guide. It's got the playlist. Build a bit of anticipation, get excited and just, it's just fun. And that's what these holidays that your guests are going on should be about. It should be fun. But this is also, it's fun for the guest, but you're making sure guests are engaging, they're reading your guides and you are getting them to ask fewer questions. And then a final one that's super, super great that I will leave you with is, oh, we've already talked about the upsells. This is a great way of explaining more about how to manage upsells with your guide. So scan the QR code there for more about that. And the last is our data dashboard. You want to know how your guests feel about your guide. You want to know how guests are interacting with it. You want to know how many people are clicking and when they're clicking. Here we have the beautiful data dashboard for you. You can see at guide level and a few other different ways as well over time when they're clicking, what they're clicking on and how they feel. So that guest sentiment how they feel about your guide. Scan the QR code here to learn more about Data Dashboard. It's been an absolute game changer. Once you've had your guides live for six months or even a couple of weeks, come into Data Dashboard, see how your guests are interacting with your guides and use that to inform all the different choices, you're then going to well, you know, I need to add a new category here or guests aren't finding the check in info. Great, I'll send them a memo, text message with that in. It's how we bring it all together. So Data Dashboard is brand new and it's been super useful so you can really understand how guests are engaging with you. And if you understand how they're engaging with you, you can know what to offer to them and make sure they have a great time. And if they have a great time, they're going to come back. So that's your rapid fire tour of Touch Day. And a lot of the fantastic things that we have that can really help you glow up your guides, blow up your guest experience and really make sure that guests are having a magical time thinking of you when they're planning their next trip and ultimately coming back to book with me directly. Thank you so much. And back over to Mark and the crew.

The one thing that I love about touchday is that they're always looking to evolve. They're always looking to bring in new things that will make their members and their customers like lives easy. And they've got thousands of customers all over the world. And the dashboard is something that is new. I got aware of it, say Q2 of this year and I've been a big fan and I know a lot of people are a big fan of it, but I also know that a lot of you haven't even checked it out yet, so go ahead and use it.

The data never lies.

And I've said this a lot, whether.

It is SEO, how people hit your.

Website, the reviews that are being left, you know, the, the way that your future potential guests are booking, what amenities, data never lies. And we. I'm. I was too stubborn to this, right? I. I admit this. Hardly. I was too stubborn to this. I always knew, for I knew best and I would never trust the numbers. But the data never lies like the, the troop is in the data, as they say. And so what I love about this with touchday is that they're going to tell you how many people are hitting your guidebook, where they're going to, how long to stick around for and all that good stuff. And with the upsells and all of that, it's. It's just lovely to see. So can we please thank Touch Day and especially Emma for doing that? I absolutely love working with them. They're a sponsor to make this event happen and Emma is one of the best humans I know. So they in the comments, hashtag, thank you. Touchday hashtag, thank you, Emma. So we're coming to the end of of Tuesday's session, right, and it has been pretty heavy so far and we've.

Got another full day tomorrow.

And I wanted to end with social media chat because at the end of the day, social media, whether you like it or not, we're all using it. We're here right now looking at it. We're on Facebook, right? We're on Facebook groups or wherever you're watching this in. This is social media and social media plays a big part in it. And the reason why so many people don't like it is because they don't know how to use it or they can't put it into practices that they feel that they can do it in their day to day. And so the final two sessions are going to be around it and it's going to be giving you a massive help on this. And I wanted to enlist two people. So I did mention earlier that I don't really like bringing people back. I want new voices. But Laura and Paul Sessions, last time that we did this went down so well. They were the most requested back and so I thought what better way to headline the Tuesday spot than to get them back talking about social media. Obviously, Paul is the social media hotelier. Laura, you know, she has grown her business through social media. She's raised money with social media. And I think in the UK it's.

Not a massive thing in the us.

Maybe more so, but in the uk, not so. And their expertise and the way they see it, but most importantly how they describe it, is something that I want to be part of this summit. So we're going to go first with Laura and then we're going to go straight into Paul. So for the last hour, wherever you are right now, whatever time this is, whether you're glass of wine time, whether it's beer, whether it's a cup of tea, whether it's whatever you do and make sure that you pay full attention to this, get your pen and papers out and make plenty of notes and obviously, if you need help or guidance, jump in the chat and put hashtag help, hashtag question. And our experts will get to it, maybe not straight away, but they'll try their best to get to it over the course of this week. Don't worry about all of the information that we're giving you because on Thursday we're gonna have a get it done day. What I want for you to do by the end of this is on your notepad that you're making Notes on, put a plan down on what one thing you can do on get it Done day on Thursday. That's it, just one thing. Whether it's something from Gers talk, whether it's something from Harrow's talk, whether it's maybe that having that little look at the AI, maybe it's what Emma mentioned about logging into your dashboard, maybe it's about sustainability, SEO, what Craig was talking about. Or maybe it could be what happens now. Okay, just make a note. What can you get done on Thursday? Right, we're going to start with Laura. Everyone say thank you Laura in the chat and then we're going to move swiftly on to Mr. Paul Anderson. I know we've got a lot of Paul fans in the audience. Please make sure that you all drop in a thank you Paul when he's on as well.

After Paul's session, we're going to put an end to it.

Okay? And then we'll be back tomorrow, 5pm UK for another jam packed day. And I'll put a post in the Facebook group of the schedule, what's coming up and most importantly how you can get involved. For those of you that put your name down for Spin the Wheel With.

A Difference, then we will get a.

Winner drawn on that very, very shortly. And tomorrow, obviously we've got so much. I can't talk about it now because it's got so much. I want to deal with it tomorrow. All right, let's do this, shall we? Introducing the fantastic Laura muse, headlined by Mr. Paul Anderson. And then we will put a wrap to Tuesday. Take care everybody. Let's go.

Hi everybody. Welcome to the Virtual Summit. My name is Laura and this evening I'm going to be sharing with you how to unlock the power of social media for you and your business. So if you don't know who I am and we've never met before, here's a little bit about me. So why am I talking to you about social media? Well, since starting in property in 2012, social media has really changed the landscape of our business. We've raised up 4,000, sorry, over £4 million in investor finance, which is through the power of social media. By documenting our journey and using other hints and tips that I'm going to share with you in this presentation. We also have a lettings and management business. I have a marketing business which I've had for the last couple of years and I help small businesses create more leads and once I've got them leads, make them profitable. I've also got two podcasts which is the social Property Paner Podcast and the Peak District Podcast. We are a multi award winning hospitality business so we've only been running for two years but we've got quite a few accolades to go with that which I'm really, really pleased about and a majority of that has become through because of the things that we have done on social media. Really honoured to be a published author and I was a part of Hospitable Host 3 which launched earlier this year which was really a really amazing experience for me. I've been a speaker for the last seven years now in the realms of social media and how to help your property business and hospitality business and done a bit of mentoring. I also run the short term Rental network which is is something that I launched in January this year. Just felt there was a real, a real lack of support for local hospitality businesses in the Peak District. So I created it myself with the support of Boostley and also visit Peak District and Derbyshire and we also have a renewable energy business. Marketing is definitely been in my blood for many years. I'm an equine nutritionist by trade but also went into many asset, many avenues of marketing for the equestrian companies that I also worked for. So that's a little bit about me. These are our fabulous holiday homes. So we have one in Buxton in the Pete district, which is the one with brass bath, which is an old manor house that we lovingly restored and we split it up into eight apartments so we've got two one beds, three five beds and one three bed penthouse duplex. But the whole aim of that was quality experience but also making it so it's a scroll stopper. So everything about our holiday let's is scroll stopping and why it's because I always had the first thing a pointer call in my mind was social media media. But we do back that up with the service, the service and the quality that we offer our guests and the experiences. Also on the right hand side there you've got Candle House which is our former candle factory that we restored and we have got quite a few accolades. We've got five star by Visit England with gold award for each of our apartments. This year we also won bronze for tourism in the tourism awards for Derbyshire for Team of the Year and we also won new Tourism Business of the Year which I was so pleased about. We also this year have got the sustainability quality mark from the Peak District for us trying to be as sustainable in our business as possible. And we were also shortlisted for the Woody Stilettos boutique stage of 2024. So that's me in a little nutshell. But what am I here to talk to you about this evening? So I want to talk to you about why social media. Why social media is an instrumental part of your business, of your growth, of your acquisition, of your customers and most importantly, profit. So you can use social media for many different things and I'm going to go cover a bit more of a holistic approach to it this evening instead of just talking to you about filling the beds. And the reason why is because all these things, I'm going to talk to you about things that have helped me, my hospitality business and my property business make us be really successful. So social media is one of the reasons that we were able to purchase them in the in the first place by connecting with investors and people working with us for the last seven or eight years now. So social media is a way of you to contact investors, It's a way for you to contact mentors and trainers, but also become one. If that is something that you aspire to be, you can become a mentor and a trainer within your specialism. It's also a great way to get deals. So contacting homeowners, landlords and agents, if you want to scale your, your short term rental business, this is definitely something that you can do. I know there's a different phrase in in the US but that's kind of what we call it in the UK and also management and sales. So one filling the rooms, heads on beds. How do we fill our str businesses? You can do this by the power of social media. And also if you want to scale a management business, how do you acquire other land, other str owners, operators, how do you connect with them? And one key thing about social media is it builds the know like and trust. So anyone who's seen me speak before will see that I always put this on. It's kind of cut off slightly in 2023 in January, which has slightly just cut off the global active users for Facebook alone is 2,957 million people and that is just on Facebook alone. If you could just tap into a fraction of that, it really just sends your business skyrocketing. But the only way that you're going to do that is by utilizing social media in the right way. Also there has been a massive growth in the video sector. So people who want to watch video. I am a massive addict of tick tock. I will what if I am going somewhere on a holiday or if I'm going to London and I want to know the best places to go, I want to know the secret bars. I search for them on Tik Tok. And as you can see here, number five across from last year alone to this year, Tick Tock has grown by 19.7% which is absolutely crazy. So the hours watched, so it's grown 3 hours and 51 minutes. That's just insane. Where else can you get air time like that? By utilizing these channels. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, tick Tock to really connect with your guest. If they are going anywhere now, they want to search, they will search on social media. They won't really search on Google anymore and shoot me down in flames. But I never search on Google. If I'm going somewhere for a review, I search on Tick Tock. I might search on YouTube, I'll search on Instagram. They're the places that I search for. Why? Because it's real. Tick Tock is the realest platform out there. And when people are searching now, they're searching because they want to see the behind the scenes, they want to see the real stuff. They're not potentially looking on Instagram as much because they don't want to see the polished finish, they want to see the real reviews. And this is why social media is such a powerful tool to utilize in your business. This is one of my favorite things. So why use social media? Why not just go networking? Well if you're a little bit like me, I have a very busy life. I have two young children, I've got two dogs, I've got one dog now, sorry, you know, I don't want to be a slave to the hours all the time. And hospitality is a very full on business. Any businesses, if you are a business owner, 9 to 5 does not exist. Okay, so what's the best way to to build up relationships with people? Well, it's through a one to many strategy. So social media is a one to many strategy. So I might put one bit of content out onto social media but it's seen by hundreds if not thousands of people. If I did that every day for a week, the potential reach of my content is way beyond me. Going out and networking and putting ads out into magazines, scenes and things. Them days are gone, they still work. But this is the future and this is how you're going to create profit quick. So obviously it's original. I've got a four step system which I'm not going to go into all of this this evening because I don't have, we don't have the right allocation of time. Understanding you and your brand is very Important of how you're to going perceive yourself in the mat, how you're positioning yourself in the market. You must understand the types of people that you are talking to. But we're not going to go into them. Two things this evening what I really want to get through is the social media platforms and how to create and carve engaging content. So there's loads of social media platforms out there and you know, there's more and more, more all the time. Some of my favorites. I've always been a Facebooker because I'm a baby boomer. I love Facebook, I love TikTok. I use Instagram. I wouldn't say I loved Instagram personally, but everyone's different and that's the point. What I love, you might despise and vice versa and that's absolutely fine. But the key thing is where are your clients? Where do your clients hang out? Now I know my clients hang out on Facebook and the and they search for reviews and things to do on TikTok and that's why it's really important that you have nailed down your guest avatar. Information consistency is key. You being consistent on social media is absolutely critical for your people who are watching, your followers, your community, your cheerleaders. Being consistent really is critical to building up a great brand. You are known to be reliable, you're giving out great content and you're building up that know like and trust. Not a lot of people think that. The thing that we see a of lot of is people go on social media and they'll just post anything and they've not thought about what is the outcome of this. They've not optimized the post. So please don't waste your time just posting anything just to get something out there. It really has to be thought about and these points before I do any post. So I sit down and do my social media once a month. I sit down, I do a full day, I get it all out there and I schedule it all. So it's done for me. I don't do it every day. I'll do the odd video and things like that. That's not, you know, that's not a problem. But in regards to the, the content that I'm putting out to my guest avatar, it's really thought about. So I just want to go through this tick sheet of every time you put out social media posts that you work through this and at least you've gone through it and gone. Do you know what? Yes, I have done this. There is one thing on here as well which is all about claiming your page name. So for example, if you're on Facebook and you go into the URL at the top, don't just let it be a lot of numbers and syllables, just make sure you go into the back end of all your social media, whether it's Facebook, Instagram. So when it does come up in the URL, it'll say supercharged marketing. Supercharged marketing or Muse escapes. Because all these things that we're doing to optimize the social media posts feed into the Google ecosystem and it's basically a better way of you being found. If everything that you are putting out there is congruent and consistent and is optimized to the best of your ability, you don't need to go and spend hundreds if not thousands of pounds on SEO. A marketing expert. These are things you can do yourself for free. So keywords, using them consistently in absolutely everything you do, whether it's a social media post, a YouTube video, you're changing the content of your website. All these keywords need to be consistent. The profiles on your social media. So the home pages, the about us pages, all these things have to have consistent keywords because what that does is it feeds into the Google ecosystem and if somebody searches luxury five star peak district, I would like to say that I come up quite highly. Go into your Facebook profiles and amend the about section and make sure that you're keywords are in there because it will 100% improve your rankings. Be very clear and consistent, sorry, clear and concise with any message that you put out on social media, whether it's your email marketing, whether it's a newsletter, what is the message. Be clear about what that message is and don't drone on in loads of words people don't read. If anyone's in hospitality, we all know guests don't read the cherry pick the bits of information that they want and unfortunately for us, one of them things is when they're checking in. But the information has got to be consistent, it's got to be clear and concise and please just post things of value. There's nothing worse than just posting for posting sake because that's really going to affect your algorithm. It needs to be clear and concise and valuable content to your guest avatar. And that's why it's important that we know who these people are and experiment with different types of posts. What works for me, a live video walking round might not work for you. And just try, you know, they'll might recognize, you know, they'll resonate with your audience and work out what's working for you. Also search your competitors and see what's working for them, what are they getting good engagement on, what are they not. And maybe that's something that you can utilize yourself. Keyword, keyword research is important and these are a couple of things that you can use. There's some that include AI to help you. So you can obviously use the Google Keyword Planner which is free. I use SE SME, semrush and just make sure that you can cancel the free trial because it is quite expensive. And the good thing is you'll put a keyword and it'll give you loads of recommendations. It'll see it, it'll show you how much that word's been searched. Then you can use a bit of AI. So harreps you can actually put in keywords and it'll bring up competitor data as well. You can use Keyword Tools, which is a really cool tool to use and it'll give you options and it'll recommendations for you and your business. And you can also use Clear Scope, which again is an AI generated system and it basically will search the Internet and it will optimize your content to the best of its ability. If anyone's seen this before, engaging content is all about ada. Now, ADA is attention, interest, desire in action. For every single post you put out, what is, what attention are you bringing to that post? What you know, what's the interest, how does it work? How do I get there? That looks really interesting to me. And desire. I want to go, I want to go stay in that at Foxloak range. I want to get in that brass bath. And how do they do it? Book now on my website, contact us directly. So for every single social media post you put out there, make sure that you go through this ada. Attention, interest, desire and action. Does your social media content tick these four boxes? If it doesn't, don't post it. Now creating engaging content, there's four key areas. You can entertain people, you can comment, convince people, you can educate them, or you can inspire them. So these are literally the four key key areas of content. So how are we going to do that? This is a really cool tool that is really great. So if you can see down the side, you've got emotional and rational awareness and purchase. So depending on what type of content, if you want someone to buy, want to inspire somebody, you want to make somebody laugh, this actually shows you the type of content that you can put out there. So if you want to entertain somebody and it's quite emotional. You could create some quizzes, you could do some competitions, you could do some brand videos if you're wanting to get someone to purchase. Maybe you could do case studies. No one likes anything. Anything better than social proof. Social proof of your reviews. Social proof that people been there. User generated content. This is content that your own guests has, crew have created and posted it on social media. There is nothing better for a hospitality business than using user generated content and also reviews. They are the biggest draw for anybody because it's not your opinion, it's somebody else's. So when we're posting, what is the objective? You must have an objective. Is it that you want to attract someone to your website to book? Is it that you want to do an upsell or a service, sell them a different service? Is it that we're trying to build rapport with our end user? Maybe they're not ready to buy right now, but maybe they want, we want need to build up that know like and trust. Are you positioning yourself as an expert? So if you're wanting to go down training the training angle, how are you going to position yourself in the market? Are you wanting to attract investors? Are you want to grow your short term rental business? Do you need investor funds to do that? Is this going to help your SEO rankings? Are you using all of your keywords and how are we going to improve? Are we improving? Improving the customer experience and the user experience. That's meaning that if a guest goes, you've done an amazing social media post and they go on your website but they can't book. You've just broken all that hard work. So basically all of these things need to really hit home. And this is what the objective has got to be is that you're touching all these seven points. You should always start with the end the of in mind. So a little challenge for you all I'd love you to do. I'd love you all to write a social media post. Taking the information that I've sent you to you this evening and start with the end in mind. So when you're doing this social media post, is it that you want to. So we've recently done a Paranormal activity evening. Another multiple streams of income for our business because we're going into the quiet period of the year. So I want to create, I want to sell tickets for my event. So my social media post has got to be, it's got to attract people, it's got to be interesting, it's got to hit home why they should book with us and it needs to be a call to action here. Click on the link, book your ticket, and if you go key ticket now, you get a free upgrade to a bottle of. A bottle of Prosecco, whatever that may be. So please, tonight, do a little challenge. Do a social media post. Start with the end in mind and definitely go through the attention, interests, desire and action. So where do we get content from? It's all right, me, Laura, sitting here telling me it's all about content, but where do we get it from? So I'm not a weirdo, but I do have a little black book in my car and literally any question I ever get asked about property from a guest, you could even go down, go into your airbnb account or booking.com and any question that you've been asked from a guest, you could download all that information and then that can be your content. So customer pain points, what are your customer questions? What are the, you know, what are you frequently asked questions? Create content around that ask, answer the question before they've even asked you it, because you're overcoming an objection. The point with sales is you've got to overcome all the objections to make it an easy purchase. And if we're doing that through the power of social media, it's an easy transaction for us. Share with people why you're doing, why do you do what you do, how do you do what you do and what do you offer? There are three key things, things for all your social media why, how, and what. And share your expertise with people. There's people who have been in this industry way longer than I have, and they've got way more experience. And I would like to say they've got a lot of hidden gems that they could share with with me if you're looking to do mentorship. So it's all about these things that you need to consider. The AI revolution is definitely here. And these are six hacks that I've got for you. So chat GPT, please don't put stuff on chat GPT, copy it and then put it on social media. Please don't do that, but use it to create your content pillars, to create some posts, but you must always make sure you put your personal stamp on it. And Lumen 5, it utilizes AR in content. It basically takes text and creates video. It's insane. Social bakers, you've also got Q, rival iq and obviously you've got Canva, which has got really great AI elements now as well. So take a picture of that, check them out, let me know. Put on my Facebook page what your feedback on these was but mainly for what we do. Social proof, Roof is king, queen and everything in between. Please don't post on social media and ghost the people who are actually trying to engage with you. There's nothing worse. So whenever you post for the next 30 minutes, you must make sure that you are around to respond to people's questions, comments, likes and with with our industry, so much can be fabricated on social media these days. Instagram, you know, the perfect Instagram picture. But behind the scenes could be chaos. So giving social proof of what you are doing really hits home. You're authentic and this is the thing that differentiates you between you and a big Holly let business. You are a real person doing real stuff every day in your business, managing your teams and this is how we do stuff. These are our guest room reviews and this is our user generated content. So these just a couple of my posts over the years and one of the biggest, if you're looking for investment, it's not just all about sunshine and rainbows. It's telling people when things go wrong and they go really wrong sometimes. How do you overcome that? So the one right at the front there, the holy goddamn one. I won't go into too much detail but basically Foxloak Range was the hardest project me and my husband ever did. Like, it nearly bankrupt us, it nearly like completely flawed us and to the point of not knowing if we'd ever get back up. And I shared that on social media and from that we got an additional five investors who wanted to invest with us. Why? Because we'd shared the struggles and we'd shown people how we can overcome it. And that's what people want. They want real life stuff. They don't just want the fluffy. This is amazing. They want when stuff goes wrong, how do you overcome it? A guest has left and broke X. How are you going to overcome it? Like people like that stuff, they really, really do because it makes you a real person. Lead magnets are critical to building up your email database. So if you are interested, I've got on my marketing survival guide. So to build up my social media business, for example, people will download this, they'll go into my email database. I do it for everything. I do it for my Holly business, I do it for my solar business. This is the best way you need to get people off social media. Once you've got them engaged, you need to collect their details. That's the whole point of posting on social media, is to collect people's details. Because God forbid you get put in Facebook jail, your account is shut down, you've got no contact details for them. People who have been following you around social media. So please make sure you get their email addresses because once you have that email address and they've consented for you to have it and market to them, you can do so much more. And that's where you make social media profitable. Always put a call to action on all your social media media posts. What do you want that person to do next? That is key. Don't just do a post and nothing. Go to my website, book direct, follow me on this, do that. Where do you want them to go? Download this, tell them, I really hope you've enjoyed my session and if you would like to engage with me after, please join my Facebook page, which is supercharged marketing. And we also have a community of about 1300 people which is called Supercharger property business with social media. And you know, drop me an email, search us on web if you'd like to work with us any further. We can help you with starting off posting on social media. If you're wanting to convert them leads into actual staying guests. That's kind of where we, we, that is our specialism. We have grown our business from last year alone we had 17, we took £17,000 worth of direct bookings. This year we're up in the region of 50. So that is a massive jump and that is all through the power of social media marketing, email marketing and connecting with our guests. So please take a picture, please connect. I really hope you've enjoyed it. This and that is me, Laura Muse. Thank you very much and enjoy your evening.

Welcome, welcome one and all. It is fantastic to be back at yet another Bruce Lee event. If you've seen any of my previous Bruce Lee trainings, you'll already know the deal. This is where hosts turn their Instagram into booking machines for those that are new. I'm Paul Anderson. I'm a host. I'm a marketing consultant and a strategist. I've been fortunate enough to help many in our community turn their social engagement into real bookings. So thank you, Mr. Simpson, and thank you, Boostly, for affording me the opportunity to give something back. And thank you all for tuning in. When Mark asked me to sponsor this awesome summit, I did not hesitate. Boostly has been a game changer for me, both as a host and as a marketer. And today I'm excited to share my blueprint to turn your Instagram into actual profits. Then. And I have to be honest here, I thought after 17 of these videos for Mark, what haven't I already said? And then it hit me. No matter where you are on your Instagram journey, the same mindset shift is essential for success. Likes aren't cash. So today, whether you're just getting started or fine tuning your approach, I'm going to show you exactly how to turn those vanity metrics into bookings and real revenue. All right, let's get started. If you saw my presentation back at the March Summit, you'll know that it was all about actionable insights and case studies. Today, it's the same format, but on steroids. So get your pen and paper ready or note down where you can catch the replay, because we're going to be diving in thick and fast. You do not want to miss a thing. Let's go. It's an ugly truth, but it is a truth. Likes aren't cash. It doesn't matter if you've got 100, 1,000 or 10,000 followers. If no one's booking, you're wasting your time. That's the real problem. And it's costing you money every single day. Too many business owners, especially in the hospitality and accommodation space, chase vanity metrics. You might be racking up likes, gaining followers and increasing your reach on Instagram, but here's the problem. None of that pays the bills. Let me give you a real example. One of my students, Dina Harania, owns Amari Villa in Kefalonia. When she first came to me, her Instagram presence was enviable. Solid follower numbers, strong engagement and decent reach. On the surface, it seemed like everything was going great. But despite all of that, there was zero return on investment, no additional bookings, and no extra revenue. And that's the issue we're going to fix today. So why is this issue so serious? Because when you're chasing down likes and followers without a clear strategy, you're bleeding time, money, and energy. You're grinding, putting in the hours, maybe even burning yourself out, but you're seeing zero results where it really counts. Bookings and revenue. Here's the thing. I get it. I'm a host, too. I've been there. I've chased those vanity metrics, I've celebrated the likes and followers, only to realize that none of that pays the bills that struggle. My own frustrations from a few years back is what pushed me to figure out what actually works. When Dena came to me, she was just like you. Plenty of followers, but no bookings. She'd hired a social media manager, burned money, but still nothing. She was Frustrated. And here's the thing. When we switched her strategy, she went from 0 to 15,000 pounds in bookings tracked from Instagram in just three months. Same Instagram, different result. Without a real strategy, you're stuck chasing fleeting trends and cheap hacks. Sure, you might get a quick spike in likes or engagement, but once that trend dies, so does your traffic. And you're left asking yourself, why isn't this working? Okay, so you know the problem now, but how do we solve it? Let me show you. Dina's story proves that this isn't just theory. Dina's journey goes from frustration to real results. It's about understanding Instagram not as a social media platform, but as a top of funnel advertising space. Dina's transformation began with a mindset shift. Here's the secret I shared with her. Instagram is not a social media platform. It's an advertising agency. Meta, who own Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, is making billions of ads. And we are just one piece of that pie. By understanding the game that Meta plays, you can turn Instagram into your own booking generating machine. Dina cracked the code with a strategy that we built together. No more random posts, just laser targeted content. And we let the algorithms do the rest. Let me break it down for you. Last year, meta made around $150 billion and 98% of that came from advertising. Their entire business model revolves around one thing. Keeping users on the platform for as long as possible so they can show them more ads and make more money. It then follows that the algorithm's only job is to show your content to the people most likely to engage with it. If your content gets them to engage, great, you'll reach more people. If not, your post gets buried. The better you tailor your posts, the more people will see them and the longer they will stay engaged. And that's how you win. So how do Instagram's algorithms figure out who's likely to engage to whom to serve up this content? They track everything. What post users linger on, comment on, share, and the accounts they interact with the most. Personal details, location data, content preferences, device information, information from advertisers and even other companies about user activity, even off the platform. The best statistic I could find on this is sadly six years old from 2018, but it still packs a punch. In 2018, an estimated 52,000. I'll say that again, 52,000 data points were collected on each and every user. Throw in the advent of AI and the nuanced data that the algorithms can now infer is, to some, the Stuff of dystopian nightmares. They use this data to predict who will find your content valuable and pushes your post to those people. So the more your content matches their interests and their past behavior, the more likely they are to engage. That's exactly what the algorithms are looking for. Engagement keeps users on the platform for longer, which means more ads and ultimately more money for meta. So this is where I introduced the concept of the ideal guest Persona into Dina's story. We didn't just target any traveler, we targeted her ideal guest. Down to the smallest details, specific demographics, interests, needs, all sorts. That ideal Persona became the cornerstone of her entire strategy. Every move we made was about targeting that person. If we ever had a doubt about what to post or how to position something, we'd ask, who's the ideal guest and what do they need from Dena's content? Once we knew exactly who we were speaking to, we could then tailor every piece of content directly to that person. And here's the key. Deena's strategy wasn't about posting a lot. Deena's been posting just three times a week, but every post is laser targeted. As a result, Instagram's algorithms took notice of where the engagement was coming from and began pushing her content to more users who matched her ideal guest profile. It's quality content that speaks directly to the right audience and drives results, not volume. And guess what? After just three months of implementing the strategy that followed, Dena didn't just see a small uptick. She pulled in a solid £15,000 in bookings, all tracked from Instagram. This wasn't tactics. This wasn't because of a trend or chasing the hacker of the day. It wasn't magic. It was strategy. After defining Dina's ideal guest Persona, we moved on to my elevator pitch exercise. The foundation of her messaging. Its goal, to clarify the key value propositions for her villa and ensure her message hit home with her ideal guest. Here's how it works. We imagine Dina in an elevator with her ideal guest and their friend. She overhears them talking about visiting Kefalonia, but not knowing where to stay. Dina would now have 30 seconds and just three points to make to convince them to book. This exercise really is a game changer, so be sure to jot this next bit down. I then asked Dina, what three things would you say to convince your ideal guest to book with you? Not five, not six, just three. After some back and forth, we locked in these essential points. Number one, proximity to Beach Amari Villa is just minutes away from some of Kefalonia's best beaches. Number two, capacity. The villa has five bedrooms hosting up to nine guests. Perfect for families or group getaways. Number three, there is a fully gated private pool ideal for family relaxation and safety. These three points became the foundations for what came next. They shaped her bio and a pin post to keep her messaging clear and focused as we move forwards. Once the elevator pitch was crafted, the next step in Dina's journey was to optimize her Instagram profile. Why? Because we only have between three and eight seconds to grab a viewer's attention, which makes the first impression crucial before jumping into the content creation. We therefore had to ensure her profile would convert visitors into followers and ultimately into paying guests. We updated her profile picture to a logo using her brand's colors and fonts. Demi made sure every post followed the same branding and you can literally see, you can feel the change. Her fee transformed from a mix of random visuals to a sleek, cohesive brand experience. This is critical because the surest path from post to profit is post to profile through the link in the bio and onto a booking page or a listing. Then you make the sale with a kick ass website. Brancohusion makes this transition seamless. So when our ideal guest hits the booking page, they only have three questions. Are there vacancies when I want to travel? Can I afford it? And where is that book now? Button consistency made her brand instantly recognizable as subtle yet key element to successfully turning lookers into bookers. We then upgraded her name field to Amare Villa, Kefalonia, Greece. This tweak made her profile easier to find in searches and gave visitors a clear idea of what she offered. We rewrote Dina's bio to focus on the key selling points. Would you believe from her elevator pitch? The bio now reads boutique luxury five bed villa with pool and sea views, perfect for families, sleeps nine and romantic escapes. Click below and start planning your stay. This bio clearly communicates the value of her villa to her ideal guests, making it easy for those potential guests to quickly understand why her property was a perfect choice in their vacation. Last but not least, we streamlined her highlights. We removed unnecessary highlights. She had a world of them out there and we simplified them to focus on the most important information for her ideal guest. We give her ideal guest decision making information. We boiled it down to guest reviews so Dina showcases positive feedback from previous guests to build trust. And a couple of FAQ style highlights to answer key guest questions directly. Dina's elevator pitch didn't just stop there. I told you it was awesome. We used the three points to create three pin post designed to instantly capture attention. These posts the first things that any visitor to Dina's profile will see. So they had to stand out and had to highlight the villa's most important selling points. These posts reflected the exact points we had identified in her elevator pitch, ensuring that the most important information was front and center. This makes it easy for Dina's ideal guest to immediately see why Amari Villa is the perfect choice to satisfy their vacation needs. So with Dina's profile and pin post sorted, the next step was to move towards content creation. So he crafted content pillars, the supporting structures of any strategic content. These pillars aren't unique to Dena. They can apply to any short term accommodation business. So you may want to have your pencils and paper to hand again here. What is the goal of having content pillars? The goal of content pillars is for each and every post to give value and speak directly to the ideal guest. Content pillars are simple really. They're buckets of topics to keep your content structured, consistent and valuable. Always targeting what your ideal guest needs to know. Here are the five key content pillars I recommend. Service in space. What is it you sell and where? What will make your property stand out to your ideal guest? And what services do you offer that your ideal guest will always appreciate? Number two Nourishment. People need nourishment all the time. Whether it's restaurant recommendations, dining options or kitchen facilities, guests want to know their options. Number three Local activities. What will your ideal guest enjoy doing in your local area or even on your property during their stay? Number four Reviews and testimonials. Building trust with social proof is incredibly powerful. Sharing reviews from real guests boosts credibility and reassures potential guests that they're making the right choice. And finally, of course, book Direct. Teach your audience why booking Direct saves them money and gives them a better experience. With these pillars in place, we then fill each of them with content ideas, all aligned with Dina's property, Amare Villa and her ideal guest Persona. We brainstormed ideas for posts and enlisted them under the appropriate pillar or pillars, subtopics, if you will. Yep, it really is that simple. Five Pillars Brainstorm ideas and then slot them in. By organizing her content in this way, Dina eliminated the guesswork. Every post has a purpose. Every post speaks directly to her ideal guest. The result? Consistent engagement, more bookings and less time wasted scrambling for ideas to post ad hoc. We're making massive progress. So please stay with me. Because once the content pillars and the topics were in place, Dina and I Could finally build a content calendar. No more guessing, no more scrambling for ideas. This calendar makes sure that our posts are consistent, relevant, always on target, and could be created well ahead of being published. The template I use with clients lifts the traditional content creation process right on its head. Instead of starting with an image and then figuring out what to say about it, we reversed it. Like a magazine editor, we started with a message first and here's why. The value is in the message, the image and the hook just support it. Think about it. Magazines don't create articles around pictures. They write or source value driven content in the form of articles, and then they add the images and headlines to hook the reader in. The article is the core. The headline and the image are just tools to grab attention. So how do we apply this to Dena's content creation process? We schedule posts by rotating through the five pillars. With the system we were building, Dena decided that she could create three posts per week. And we plugged each pillar into the calendar. Using that rhythm, she had a clear structure every time she sat down to create every post. Creation begins with a clear message based on one of the subtopics listed in the content pillars. The message had to speak directly to her. Ideal guest needs value first. Always after the message is clear, we then craft the hook. This first line is designed to stop the scroll and grab more attention. And finally, and only once we finish the writing, we select or create an image to enhance the message, not to drive it. The image simply supports the value that we deliver by flipping the process and focusing on the message first. Dina's post became far more impactful. If you're watching this on the replay, you're going to want to rewind and hear this again. Flip the process, start with the caption, then find a scroll stopping image that supports what you've written. Add a hook at the front and a call to action at the end and you're done. For Dina, every post then fit nicely into the larger strategy of speaking directly to her ideal guest. No more random posts, no more guesswork. Just consistent, value driven content that engages her audience and is leading to more bookings. But that's not all. With the content calendar set up, we then introduce batch creation to streamline the production of multiple posts at once. This not only made Dina's content creation more efficient, but it also focused Dina's mind on one pillar or one topic at a time, eliminating distractions and any need to multitask. Here's how Dena does it. When it's time for Dina to create Content, she zeros in on just one pillar. This allows her to maintain focus and produce multiple posts without bouncing between topics. For example, she might choose the service and space pillar and create six posts highlighting the villa's unique features. So Dina would start by writing the value driven message for several posts within that pillar. For instance, she would draft six posts about the villa's amenities, space, breathtaking views, all in one go, keeping her focused on just writing. And on just one pillar. After the content is written, Dina will then part the post and maybe go and do something else altogether. And when she returns, Dina will sit down, shift her focus entirely to designing graphics or sourcing images. No more bouncing between 25 tabs or multiple software tools at once. The process is streamlined. Just writing, then just visuals, all with her mind. On just one pillar, one subject, nothing else. Once the text for the caption and the visuals are finalized, Dina then adds an attention grabbing hook and a clear call to action to to each one of these draft posts. This batch creation process streamlines everything. It's not just about efficiency, it's about freeing up time to work on what really matters. Growing your business. With three posts per week to publish, Dina can produce a week's or even a month's worth of content in just one or two focus sessions. This has freed up more time for her to work on the rest of her business whilst ensuring her Instagram remains consistent. Always engages the ideal guest Persona without the chaos of scrambling for ideas or multitasking. It gets better still. How would Dina know that she was hitting her mark? How could she improve the process, the results, or even both? Would you believe I had ready made answers to those questions? Alongside each row of her content creation calendar was a system to track the performance of each post next to the draft of that very post. So Dina tracks key metrics 24 hours after each post is published. Things like reach, likes, comments, shares, saves, profile visits follows. So over time, Dina could then sort these posts using these performance metrics, I. E. She could establish which posts in a given time frame drove the most people to her profile. Which post reached the most people? This allows us to see which posts resonates most with our ideal guests for a variety of metrics depending on what Dena wants to achieve further down the line. So once sorted, Dina focuses on the top 50 or 60% of high performing posts. These are then recycled, repurposed or even just reused. Finally, Dena can keep her feed effective without constantly churning out brand new new content. The added benefit is that if a post didn't Perform well. Dena had two choices. She could analyze why it didn't do very well if the message didn't quite land or the hook, for example, wasn't engaging enough. We use that data to tweak and improve it for future content. Or if a post wasn't worth salvaging and it got absolute crickets, it gets dropped. This saves Dina a massive amount of time and energy wasted on content that won't drive results. The system allows Dena to double down on what works and cut out what doesn't, making her content sharper, more targeted and far more likely to convert. Recording performance data doesn't just improve Dina's content strategy, it also gives her the freedom to experiment with a solid foundation of what she knows to be high performing content. She now has the space and confidence to try out those new trends, adapt to algorithm changes, and test new ideas without risk. By working on all this with dena for just five hours together, we transformed her strategy into £15,000 direct bookings from Instagram in just a few months. And that's just the beginning. With this continually improving system, her potential for return on investment will only improve. The power of this process is that it gives her freedom to experiment knowing that her core strategy is solid. And that's Dina's story so far. By defining her ideal guest in granular detail, we could then optimize her profile, refine the messaging with my elevator pitch exercise, and establish precisely what that ideal guest wanted or needed to know to decide to book with her. Organizing this information into five content pillars then allowed Dina to create a sustainable schedule of content ideas and plug them into a content calendar. Knowing that this would keep her message on point and her feed dynamic and varied, we flipped her creative workflow on its head and then increased her efficiency by introducing batch creation so that she saved heaps of time whilst knowing her posts were instantly more engaging and would drive traffic to her optimized profile through the link in bio and onto her booking page. As Dena continues to use the data she records to refine, test and adapt her content, I'm super excited to see where this story goes and just how much more she can build on this foundation. To go from zero bookings and no inquiries to landing 15,000 pounds of tracked bookings from Instagram in just three months is quite something. Personally, I think she's only really just getting started. So you've seen the impact a well executed strategy can have if you're ready to turn your Instagram into a booking machine. I'm excited to introduce the likes on Cash Winter Sprinter starting this November. This is a six week high touch experience where I will work directly with just seven hosts. Why only seven? Well, besides this enabling me to give you the focused attention you need to transform your Instagram into a booking engine. Seven also happens to be my lucky number, though it does have a little bit of magic to it. After all, over these six weeks here's what you'll get. Two one on one coaching sessions and weekly training modules to build your bespoke strategy with lifetime access to all these materials and those created in all the future sprints. Weekly small group zoom calls to overcome challenges and maintain momentum. If you miss one, no harm done. These will all be recorded and available to review forever Lifetime access to my signature InstaBook program so that you can continue to refine your approach long after the Sprint and maintain access to community led support direct WhatsApp support. Any questions, any challenges or wins? I'll be just a message away. And there's the exclusive micro Facebook group access to a private group just for the sprinters, fostering deeper engagement, real time feedback and sharing strategies with like minded hosts on the same journey as you. Here's a structure we'll use to follow DeNA's proven path to success. Weeks one and two after our first one on one session, we'll define your ideal guest, optimize your profile and set up metrics to measure your return on investment. Weeks three and four we'll create laser targeted pinned posts, establish your content pillars and learn the secrets to crafting compelling posts that speak directly to your ideal guest. In weeks five and six we'll dive straight into structuring your content calendar batch creation and then analyze performance metrics to drive continuous improvement. We'll wrap up before Christmas with a second private one on one session to lock in your long term strategy, ensuring that you're ready to scale your results. Just imagine, by the end of these six weeks your Instagram will be fully optimized and ready to deliver bookings without the guesswork. Just in time for the holidays. You will have a strategy that keeps working for you long after this sprint ends. So if you're looking for results like Dina's, this is your chance. There are only seven spots and they will fill quickly. I'm closing access by Sunday 29th September or as soon as the last spot is taken. The investment is 1997 pounds or 24.97 US dollars so that just two bookings will likely cover the entire cost. After that it's all pure profit Dina made £15,000 with just three posts a week. Using this strategy, you don't need to post every day, you just need the right plan. To join this winter cohort, go to thesocialmediahotelier.com forward/lac for likes are cash or scan this QR code. I'll personally reach out to welcome you in and we'll get your first one on one session scheduled in just six weeks. You'll go from shooting in the dark to shooting fish in a barrel. You'll know exactly what to post, when to post, and how to turn Instagram lookers into real world bookers. This Sprint is designed to deliver results and fast. Here's the deal. You need an Instagram account. You must have posted something at some point and you'll need to show up and do the work. If you're serious about turning your Instagram into a reliable booking machine, this is the time to act. This isn't about learning tactics. You'll be building a content strategy that will work on autopilot long after this sprint ends. There are only seven spots, so don't wait until next year when the price goes up and you'll have missed out on months of extra bookings. Stop wasting time chasing likes that won't pay your bills. Stop second guessing what to post and start turning your Instagram into a machine that generates bookings and improves with every post. This is your chance to make the shift. You've seen how it's done. This system works if you work it. There are only seven spots and this is where the serious players step up to turn their Instagram into a booking machine. Thank you for listening and thank you for giving me your valuable time. I would be so stoked to lead you through this Sprint and build a bespoke booking machine that serves you long after we have crossed the finish line. I've been Paul the social media hotelier. I'll catch you next time. Peace.

To the Batmobile.

Let's go.

If you want my respect, you're better but direct. Here are the words in the podcast. That's what comes next.

Sa.

It.