THE BOOK DIRECT VIRTUAL SUMMIT - Tuesday 25th June

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 tea is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely. If you want my respect, you better butt direct.

Mmm.

Here are the words in the podcast. That's what comes next. Hello, I am Chris Turner, the freestyle rapper. And if you are in the hospitality industry and your website is not generating bookings, you need to check out boostlead.co.uk, and this is a freestyle, completely made up, improvised on the spot about why. Let's drop that beat, let's do this. I never lie, I tell the truth me. You gotta go and take a look@boostly.co.uk wanna get the guest stay but they're looking at your website and just move away. Well this way you get more heads on beds because they're gonna get on the website and guess like yeah I should put direct cause it looks so nice and I can inspect. Web design is the answer. That is what you need. Beat booking, Airbnb succeed and let me tell you what to you from me, you know that Boost Lee got the money back guarantee. Yeah, you really need your when it comes to web design, they're the market leader and best of all you can do it now. Give them a call on the website.

Wow. Yeah.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening and welcome to everybody. We've got Julie tuning in. I've just literally sent you a message, Julie. We've got Sandy over in Houston, we've got Laurie over in Nash, Vegas, We've got Plexi had deal Mark tuning in all the way in Australia, which is phenomenal work. Nadine's over in Vegas. Lizzie. Where is Lizzie? Large today from a glorious sunny Devon, sunning in the garden. No football till later anyway. We've got little Charlie at football later on before the England game this evening. We've got Laguna Beach, Fort Lauderdale at the moment. We've got a lot of people over.

In.

Over in the US of A. More than what we have in the in the uk, which is pretty cool. All right, so let's just very quickly come on over to the group as we always do. Hope you are all well. So as we know this week we all of his training this week is happening in Here, which is fantastic. If you miss anything and the replays it will be in this group. Do not forget, we are also doing Boostly Bingo. Boostly Bingo is happening all this week and as you can see from here, if you watch the replay of yesterday, you can tick off Launch Party live. If you have taken a selfie or uploaded a picture to Instagram and tagged in Boost Lee, then you can go ahead and tick off that one. If you have recommended or invited somebody to join, then you can go ahead and tick on that one. And if you are tuning in live or even when you're watching the replay on this live later on, you can tick off this one as well. Subscribe to the channel so if, let's say, let's just say you've done all of the ones so far, you can have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 already ticked off over halfway with just four more to go. We've got some cool prizes lined up on that one and I'll tell you more about that throughout the week. Let's just see if we had any new people join. So we had Jared joined today, Angela, Mariana, Liz, Katrina, Ellery, Becca, Karen, Regina, Joan, Andrea, Mark, Midal, Serena, CJ Surrenders, Zul, Stan, Pauline, Thomas, Jenny, Aaron. Okay, so there's a lot of people who are interested, obviously if you are watching this right now over on one of the other social media channels and you are thinking, well, what exactly is this all about? How do I get in this group? Just come on to Facebook, type in that old chat there, book direct virtual summit request to join and we will get you in as soon as possible. Let's just do a quick poll right now. I do think that we have got more people tuning over from the UK so over in the US and Canada over the pond than we do over in the uk. We've got Mel down in South Africa. Welcome Melanie, fantastic to have you as always. But just drop in where you're tuning in from. We've got about 80 people in total tuning in all over the channels and this week this, sorry, is where we get started. Right now we have got some fantastic training and some speakers that are about to about to come up. We're going to kick off with Mr. Paul Anderson aka the social media hotelier. Then we're going to go with Kate from Touch Day about how to tell a story and then we're going to finish with Aperto which is all about upsells. So go ahead and make sure that you're getting comfy. We've got two hours of quality Training coming up and I want to see as many of you as possible joining in and I would love to know your questions as you go because in the Facebook group we have the experts who will be able to come in and answer. Paul is with us. Kate is going to be with us when she wakes up because she's over all in the way in New Zealand. And the team from Aperto will also be able to jump in as well to answer any questions that you have now. I guarantee there will be questions. Now if they can't get to you, just make sure that when you do a question you do hashtag help or hashtag question, help or question. Okay, super simple in the comments. Let me just do it now. For example, if you're watching the video, let's just say there's a comment here. Just put question, hashtag help and I'll make sure that the expert gets to you if they can, on the live. But Mr. Paul Anderson is very good. He does get back straight away. Now, before we go any further, the winner of yesterday's Spin the Wheel live. Well, that was Julie Madison. Julie, round of applause, You won yesterday. I've already informed Jody Odlin who is going to make sure you get a.

Copy of the Hospitable Host book.

And I thought let's get started, shall we with Spin the Wheel here again. So we are going to do it one more time. So as you can see on my screen now, I have got Spin the Wheel. What I would like for you all to do please is give me a number between one and 10 and I'm going to give you two minutes to do so. You've got two minutes to get this in. At the end of that two minutes, I'm going to spin the wheel, okay? And it's going to spin around and it's either going to land on numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10. Now, if you have guessed that number, that doesn't mean that you are automatically a winner. No, no, no. What it means you have to do is send me a message on the Facebook. Now when you send me a message on the Facebook, just say, hey, Mark, I was Tuesday's lucky winner. Number whatever it was. Yesterday it was 8. What I do is I take all of your messages. At the end of the day, it will probably be after the England football game. I might get it done beforehand, depends on the kids. And I will just put all names into a hat pick and that one person will win a copy of Hospitable Host Book. Number three, Jody has donated another one again, so fantastic. Lovely book, lovely project and a lovely team behind it. So you've got one more minute now to get your numbers in. Drop your numbers in between one and eight as quick as you can do. I haven't seen any number ones yet. I want to see a number. We haven't seen a number sixes. We've seen tens, so we're missing numbers ones and sixes. Once you've done that, please go ahead and tap these love heart emoji buttons as many, many, many times as possible for me if you can. And we've got 30 seconds left. While we've got 30 seconds left. Let me just thank for, thank the sponsors of this week because this week is totally free for you. There is no Upsell from Boostly coming in any way, shape or form. But to do this we needed the help of some of my biz besties. So I reached out to the the teams at Future Stay at social media hotelier, Mr. Craig, Web SEO Price Labs and one of our speakers today, Upper which are the, which are the masters of upsells and they very kindly have helped put this together. So thank you from me and thank you from everybody. All right, shall we do this? Your final, final chance to get your lucky numbers in. We are going to spin the wheel.

In five, in four, in three, two, one.

That lucky number is number two. Okay? Number two is that lucky old number there. Now, if you have got it, remember, it doesn't mean that you have automatically won it, it just means that you get to send me a message on Facebook and just say, hey, Mark, I was lucky number two. That's literally all you need to do. I will go ahead and take everybody that messages me and then I will let you know later on today. Okay, shall we get started? We are going to have a lot of fun in these next couple of hours. I will dip in, in and out of the sessions and I will just make sure that you're all there, make sure we show some love. But to start off with, we've got the phenomenal Paul Anderson. Now, this is not Paul's first time, this is not Paul's second time. This is Paul third time being part of us and being part of the virtual summits that we have been running. For those of you that are part of Boostly, Paul is no stranger. He was a host and a customer first and now he has sprouted his own wings and he is teaching hosts and hospitality owners all over the world how to use Instagram and the cool thing about this session is that he is going to share with you seven deadly sins that hosts are making when it comes to Instagram. Now please make sure that you get your pens and your papers out. This is a fantastic session and Paul is going to jump on and he's going to share with you all of his knowledge that he has learned and he's going to show you some case studies as well. But before we get started, can we please tap that love heart emoji button as many, many, many, many, many times as possible? Show Paul some love. And who is ready to kick start this? Who is ready to get going? I need a hashtag hell yeah in the comment section. Let's see if we can get at least four hashtag hell yes. Maybe even Cheeky five and we will get going. Laurie has said over in Nashville he is the best. That is why I took private lessons. Renata said, hey, Wendy's giving us the fire. Paul is there in the chat. Paula said, yo yo yo, let's go. Okay everybody, let's do this, shall we? Introducing the one and only Mr. Social Media Hotelier. Thank you very much for helping put this together this week and for this amazing session that's coming up. I'll be back in about 30 minutes introducing our next speaker, but let's get started.

It is always a delight to be invited to speak at Boostly events and this is no exception. Before I begin, I'd like to thank Mark and the team for asking me back for a third time. Thank you very much indeed. I'm always incredibly grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the short term accommodation community at large. So I'd also like to thank you for tuning in today. I know your time is precious, so thank you for giving some of it to me. The next 25 minutes or so will be jam packed with value bombs. In case this is the first ever video of mine that you've watched before and you have no idea who I am. My name is Paul Anderson. I'm an accommodation business owner and an Instagram marketing expert who funnels around 30% of his website traffic from Instagram. As the social media hotelier, it's my job to help short term accommodation businesses to drive website traffic and enhance brand awareness through one on one coaching, my InstaBook program, webinars, boot camps and summits just like this one, I've helped thousands of hosts successfully gain more direct bookings, enhance their marketing strategies and drive return on investment by leveraging Instagram and bending it to their will. Today I'm going to Share with you the seven deadly sins that all my one on one clients, all the new students on the InstaBook program, and most hosts are committing when using Instagram to market their businesses. I'll also show you how to save yourselves from the hell that is limited engagement which leads to strangled reach, which defeats the whole purpose of using Instagram as a marketing business tool, which is to enhance brand awareness and funnel potential guests onto our booking pages. As a side note, I have to confess, I committed all of these sins when I started to try to leverage the power of Instagram. I've since seen the light, so let me show you the way. First, you need a new perspective from which to understand why these common and easily made errors are holding back your efforts to successfully market your short term accommodation businesses on Instagram. Seeing Instagram through the lens that I'm going to give you has been incredibly instrumental in my cloud successes, from doubling followers in just a couple of short months to tripling website visits in just four weeks, and even taking 2,000 pound bookings with, would you believe, fewer than 400 followers. So that's where I'm going to kick things off today. How does Instagram work and how can we leverage this into the marketing strategies for our short term? It's absolutely fundamental that you begin to reframe what you might think. Instagram and for that matter, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, what they actually are, they are not social media platforms. Social media platforms no longer exist. Instagram is an advertising agency, pure and simple, and our relationship with it is purely transactional. Here's how it works. We create and publish content. Instagram then shows it to a few people. Some people may consume and engage with that content, so Instagram shows it to more people just like them. That bit is key. Instagram shows it to more people that are just like or similar to those who first engaged these new viewers, then engage with it and Instagram shows it to yet more people. Until interest and engagement dries up and the algorithm stop putting it into people's feeds. This process is controlled by Instagram's algorithms. There are thousands of them. And the algorithm's sole purpose in life is to show content to accounts and people that will value it. This is to keep them on the platform for as long as possible. Why do they want people on the platform for longer? To put as much paid advertising in front of them as possible. 98% of Meta's income, that's Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp comes from ad revenue. That's it. That's the business model. So what does it mean for us? It means that the algorithms are our friends. If we create content that our ideal guests will appreciate, people who fit the profile of our ideal guests will consume and engage with that content, and then the algorithms will show this content to more people. Who would you believe fit the profile of our ideal guests? Our relationship with Instagram is therefore transactional. We create content that keeps people on the platform and the algorithm shows this content to more people just like those who engage with it. This is called reach. Literally, the longer we can keep people looking at our content, the more reach we will gain. And we gain brand awareness by reaching non followers. We can then use this content to direct and to funnel our ideal guests onto our profiles. When our profiles are optimized to target our ideal guests, they will then follow our accounts, or better yet, hit the link that's in our bio and land on our websites or our booking pages. So the aim of the game is to lead our ideal guests from a compelling post to a targeted profile through the link in our bio and onto our booking pages. It's through the lens of this new perspective that I'd like you to view what I consider to be the seven deadly sins of Instagram and to hear the confessions of a professional Instagram marketer. First up, using landscape images. Look, I get it. You invest in stunning pro photos for your accommodation business. They shine on your website, your listings rock, and they perform well on Facebook. So why aren't they delivering for you on Instagram? Because the overwhelming majority of people consume Instagram content on a cell phone. If you publish landscape shots, Instagram will crop them or add black bands top and bottom to fit them into a square. If you use square images, some of what's termed the screen real estate is left unused. Graphics on Instagram need to grab attention and they need to stop. The scroll images that are black bandit are far from eye catching and they require the viewer to zoom in to see any detail on home feeds. Square images also allow for some of the next post in the scroll to be visible beneath yours. So what I hear you ask. Well, brand awareness is about reaching people who don't yet know you exist. Non followers. If Instagram puts your square image post into the feed of a non follower, it'll be surrounded by posts from accounts that that person does follow. So if the post beneath yours is created by an account that this person is passionate about, maybe Taylor Swift, guess what they're going to do? They're going to spot Taylor's post. They're going to scroll right past your content and straight onto what they are definitely interested in the next post. It's then highly unlikely that the algorithms will ever show your content to that person again because they've actively scrolled past you to Taylor Swift the Salvation Use portrait images. These are 1080 pixels wide and 1350 high. A photographer would say the dimension ratio is 4 to 5 because photographers go across the hall before they go up a stairs. Using a portrait image will dominate the entire cell phone screen real estate and prevent Taylor Swift from even getting a look in and pulling attention away from you. Number two Putting links in captions and on images Instagram permits only one place for permanently clickable links and that's in your bio. A URL or a web link in a caption or on an image is unclickable and visually unappealing. Plus, it's not possible to copy and paste a caption from a cell phone. The overwhelming majority of consumers on Instagram consume content on a cell phone. Putting a URL or a phone number for that matter is anywhere else other than in your profile's bio requires the viewer to take out a pencil and paper and transcribe it. HTTPs www.bitlyRL123ABC Thrower 6 to start, they then have to faithfully type that URL into a web browser somewhere else, not make any errors along the way, and only then have they arrived on your website. In this age of limited attention, take it from me, it inhounding this is a very easy sin to absolve yourselves from. Just don't do it. And those of you with VAS handling your Instagram, tell them not to do it on Instagram. They do it all the time. Tell them that it's fine on Facebook but not Instagram. Number three Profile pictures Profile pictures are the very first thing that someone notices when they arrive on an Instagram profile. That's just a fact. The three to eight seconds you have to create a first impression. Yep, that's all you get these days. It starts with a profile picture. Also fact is that for example on an iPhone 14 they're just 1.7cm in diameter. That's barely 2/3 of an inch across and they can't be zoomed in. So the sin committed here is that more often than not accommodation businesses are using a shot of the outside of a building or a beautifully made bed, or a logo with a website address around it. Established 1998 maybe with a phone number. Nobody is going to be able to see that level of detail and Neither will they be interested in doing so. So here's what you do instead. First, decide if you're comfortable being the face of your brand. After all, people buy from people, right? If you are, take a headshot from the shoulders up and head to pfpmaker.com this is a free online resource that will remove the background of the photo and help you to brand that background. It's awesome, it's free and I highly recommend it. If you're not comfortable doing that, convert your logo into an icon and use that. Here's an example of what I mean by turning a logo into an icon. So here's Google's logo and here's the icon. Like them. You want to be eye catching, instantly recognizable and remove all the fluff like your website's URL or the year you were founded, whatever that happens to be Number four, your name field. This is not so much a sin, this one more a massive opportunity that is missed by so many businesses and not just short term accommodation businesses. The name field is the section of your profile in bold. It's just under your profile image and just above the bio that tells people who you host, how you host them and what you want them to do next. When we register an account with Instagram, the platform automatically populates this field with the name you gave Instagram when you registered. More often than not, this is the name of our business. Sounds good, right? Wrong. The name field is the first place Instagram's algorithms would look when returning a response to a search query. And people use Instagram all the time to search for goods and services and experiences, all manner of things, including places to stay, just like Google. So this is where your SEO goes. Let me give you an example. I recently took on a new client, the lovely Dr. Kishore, who owns two cabins in the Smokies. His name field used to say Cloud 9 luxury rentals. It now says Family Vacation Mountain Cabins, Sevierville, Smokies, Tennessee. Here's another. Chris Ditterick owns Merlo Cabin in Canada. Can you guess what his name field was before he hired me as his Instagram coach? Yep, just Merlo Cabin. The thing is, no one was ever going to discover him through a search on Instagram unless they searched for Merlo Cabin, which they wouldn't do unless they already knew his business. So one of the first things Chris and I did to his account was to change the name Field to Family Vacation Mountain Cabin in Canada. So if the name field in your Instagram profile isn't SEO focused, if it doesn't include words that your ideal guest is going to use when searching for your business. Make it so. Just remember these two important things. You are permitted up to 64 characters and you are permitted just two edits in this section in any given two week period. So draft it out somewhere else and then copy it in. Be sure to get this right, because once you've used your two edits, you're stuck with it for another two weeks. So Number five Giveaways and Engagement Groups Here's a cautionary tale for you. One of the newest students in my Instabook program, let's call him Michael to save his blushes, enrolled on the program with an eye catching 12 and a half thousand followers. Ooh, said everybody in the group. What's he doing here? He's smashing this. Michael had used several giveaways over the previous years and these have proved highly successful in growing his account. Here's how his giveaways worked. He teamed up with a much larger destination marketing account. The giveaway involved liking the post they used to promote the giveaway, following their accounts and commenting on the post. Those who did this were then entered into a draw to win a luxury weekend away at his property. It was a high value prize. So what happened? Thousands of people did exactly that. They liked the post, they commented on it, and they followed his account. Someone then won the weekend away and Michael was over the moon that he had massively grown his account's followers. The thing is, very few people were actually interested in paying money to stay with Michael. They'd followed his account just to be in with a chance of winning something. They weren't interested in the content he was publishing. So quite innocently, they ghosted him. Michael's posts now enjoy around 25 to 30 likes on average. Granted, 25 likes on a post was something that I dreamed of when I started out on Instagram. But Michael, as far as the algorithms are concerned, is now effectively being ignored by his followers. His engagement rate is around 1/4 of 1%. That's around a tenth of what can normally be expected of an account of this size. So the algorithms see his content as low value. Not many followers are engaging with it, so the algorithm isn't showing it to many people. The algorithms aren't giving him the reach that he thought he deserved. The solution? Don't do giveaways unless you want your account to become bloated with followers who are in it just to win something and will never likely book with you. The same applies to engagement posts. These are groups whereby everyone follows each other and once a week they like and comment on each other's posts. There are some awesome Facebook communities for short term accommodation businesses out there. I'm thinking of two in particular that have a weekly post to coordinate this engagement. Hosts put a link to their recent content into the Facebook thread. They like and comment on three other posts and everyone else follows suit. This achieves the following Instagram's algorithms see that the accounts enjoying and engaging with this content are other short term accommodation businesses. So guess what? They show this content to more short term accommodation business accounts. Not ideal guests, not to people who are interested in booking estate. Moreover, any data we might be harvesting from the insights that Instagram provides us to understand what is working so we can double down on it and importantly know what is not performing so we can discard it. All that data is massively skewed. Yes, engagement pods create spikes in engagement and therefore spikes in reach. But the engagement is contrived, it's not genuine and the added reach will be to other accommodation businesses and not our next potential guests. So please don't waste your time with giveaways or engagement pods. Either or both will do nothing but long term damage to the return on investment you get from your content marketing. And this brings me neatly onto deadly sin number six, the belief that follow account is the ultimate goal of marketing our short term accommodation businesses on Instagram. I totally understand why hosts are obsessed with how many followers they have. The more followers we have then the more people are enjoying our content, right? After all, everything we see from the Instagram gurus is about growth. How to grow 5,000 followers in three easy months. All that gain followers with this simple hack. Let me tell you this, followers are not greenbacks. They're great for the ego, but they ain't cash. They're not return on investment, they're not income and they're not profits. So look straight up, just ignore your follower count. If you create content that helps your ideal guest to decide to book a stay with you, then your followers will naturally grow over time and there'll be followers who are genuinely interested in you, in your content, in your business and in making a reservation with you. So I'd much prefer to have 125 followers who want to book a stay with me. Have 12 and a half thousand like Michael who couldn't care less about my content or my short term accommodation business. Here's an example to back this up. The previous client of mine, Ray Winfield at the Sussex seaside holiday cottage, now focuses exclusively on giving her ideal guest Value and leads them to a profile that's targeted with laser sharp precision. She recently took 2,000 pound booking with fewer than 400 followers. The important thing here is most of her followers want to or have already stayed with Ray. So what metrics do I think you should be focused on? Well, there are two. Really? Well, two and a half. The first one is profile visits. The most common way for hosts to get people off Instagram and onto their websites is through the link in bio. The only way potential guests can get to this link in bio is by visiting our profile. So clearly profile visits are an important metric when measuring the return on invest for your Instagram efforts. The second metric is external link clicks. Once people do visit our profiles, we ultimately want them to hit that link in bio, head to our website or our booking page and give us their undivided attention. I have lost count of the number of direct messages I received from hosts that say, can you help me? My Instagram is doing nothing for me. I don't get any bookings from Instagram. And so the first question I have to ask is, how many external link clicks did you get in the last 30 days? Invariably the response is you have no idea. So measure it, track it, and then you stand the chance of figuring out how to improve it. I did say two and a half. And so this last one is going to sound a little bit contrary given what I just said about follower numbers. But do bear with me. Yes, ignore the total number of followers you have, but do measure how many people start to follow your account over a given period, say 30 days. On its own, this statistic isn't too helpful, but when you measure it against profile visits, the combination is super powerful and super insightful. When someone visits our profile, they will quickly decide to do one of three things. Scroll on because you're not for them. Follow your account because they like what they see and they want to keep an eye on what you're up to. Maybe they have a trip planned to your location in a couple of months time or the holy grail, they hit that link in bio. Now, measuring the proportion of profile visits that results in a follow is a very, very, very strong indication for whether your content, your posts are aligned with your profile. For example, and I exaggerate for effect, if you post about being dog friendly and someone visits your profile because they love the image of a dog that you used, and they're obsessed with accounts that post about dogs, when they arrive on your profile, they're going to see that you mostly post about your short term accommodation business. They visited your account in the hope of seeing more dog photos. They're disappointed, so they move on. Fine. If, however, they arrive on your profile having been excited by your post that has the words Dog Friendly Vacation Rental in insert location emblazoned across the image, when they land on your profile, they're going to be pleased with what they find and will likely follow your account. This is what I mean by the alignment of your profile to your content. So every week or every month, note down how many new followers you've gained. Also note down how many people visited your profile in the same time period. Divide new followers by profile visits and you have a profile conversion rate. You want your profile conversion rate to be at around the 20% mark. That is, for every five people who visit your profile, one of those follow you now, this isn't a direct return on investment metric, but if you've optimized your profile for your ideal guest and your content targets your ideal guest, this percentage will quickly and clearly show you whether your content and your profile are in alignment or not. To show you the power of acting on this metric, another client of mine, Cheryl of Lucky Dreamer Lodge in Belize, targeted the profile for her accommodation business at her ideal guest and then aligned her content to it. In a matter of weeks, she had tripled visits to her website. Granted, she deployed the strategy to Facebook as well as to Instagram, but the principle itself holds true. It's got to be worth quantitatively measuring this alignment and improving on it. Remember, the guest journey goes from the search or a compelling post to a targeted profile to a booking website or a booking page. We want that journey to be as smooth as possible. Your profile conversion rate will show you how smooth or not that journey is. And this brings me to the final sin. Sin number seven Focusing all your energies on trends and hashtags. Quick disclaimer here. Yes, the latest trends and well researched hashtags can improve the reach for a given piece of content. But the most important sin to stop committing is spending time looking for and pursuing hacks. And I mean hacks differently from shortcuts. I mean when we see something like start using these hashtags to boost your engagement because that's what's working really well right now. Or this trending audio will 10x your reach, but it's only going to work for the next six days. The thing is, if you have to jump from mini trend to mini trend to mini trend, the moment that little thing is done, you're done. You're done because there's no substance to your content, you're relying on hacks. Hashtags are the same and I can prove it. First, let me tell you what a hashtag is. A hashtag is an indexing system that was created in 2007 and the algorithms used it to understand the content of content. Think of hashtags like the labels at the top of a stack of books in a library. The equivalent of someone following a particular hashtag is a person who always heads to a particular stack of books when they walk into a library. Instagram is the library and hashtags are the shelf labels. When we use a hashtag in our caption, we are telling Instagram which stack of books our content should live on so that people who go to that stack of books will find it. Back in the day, this is pretty much all Instagram had to go on when trying to match content with accounts that might value it to keep them on the platform for longer and put more paid advertising in front of them. So deploying hashtags successfully 15, 10 or maybe even five years ago could be a very effective mechanism to get our content seen by accounts that were not already following us. Since 2007 we now have SEO, keywording, audio, spoken word analysis, caption analysis, video and graphics analysis, alt text. It goes on and on and on. Then wrap this all up in AI and whilst hashtags can be powerful, the return you'll get from spending time researching them has and continues to be fast diminishing. So here's the proof. In April, May of this year, I ran an experiment and I released an Instagram reel. Every day for 30 days they were all talking head reels, images, talking to camera. None of them had any hashtags at all. As expected, my reach went up a little bit because reels traditionally gain more reach than the other content formats. However, reach to non followers, that is the volume of accounts. Seeing my content for the very first time, brand awareness was more than three and a half times the number that it was in the previous 30 days. Plenty of keywording was in the audio I recorded and in my captions, but not one hashtag was used. My advice then is to focus on what the overall objective of Instagram as a platform is. We know that Instagram wants people to click and it wants them to watch and it wants them to stay on their platform for as long as possible. So if I just always optimize all my efforts to communicating something of value to my ideal guest, then whether something is trending or not, like oh, yellow Captions are doing really well right now. Or make sure you respond to every single comment within 6 minutes, otherwise the algorithms will hate you forever. These will make no significant difference at all. Anytime someone tells me algorithm hacking stuff, I just basically ignore it. Because unless the goal of Instagram is fundamentally changed, all this other stuff is just distraction. Because again, the one thing that matters most is to make something that my ideal guest will appreciate. To create content that's so good they're going to see value in it. And the moment they see it, they know that my business is the perfect fit for their accommodation needs. They will want to learn more. They will want to visit my website to find out. One, can they afford me? Two, do I have vacancies when they want to travel? And three, where is the book now? Button. The algorithms are designed to spot this interest, this value exchange and leverage it for their own needs. It doesn't matter what the algorithm stimulating hack of the day is. Right now they're going to want to distribute this content to more of my ideal guests. And even if it doesn't, this is real talk now. Even if it doesn't spread like wildfire, the 50 people who did see it are supremely likely to be my ideal guest. And they will get the message that I want to give them, I. E. The message that my accommodation is perfect for them and that they are perfect for me. The return on your investment in content marketing on Instagram lies in giving your ideal guest value by entertaining them, by informing them, by giving them something to aspire to without giving your ideal guest a reason to consume your content. It doesn't matter whether you use trending audio on your reel. It doesn't matter how many or how few hashtags you use. It doesn't matter whether your Instagram Reels are 6 seconds or 60 seconds long. Whatever time spent trying to identify and leverage hacks is an exercise in putting lipstick on a pig. If your content doesn't resonate with your ideal guest, they're not going to engage with it. And the algorithms will not show it to people who fit the profile of your ideal guest. So much time is wasted by hosts. When we ask will this post do well with the algorithm or what does the algorithm want from my content? Will the algorithm like and promote my content? Try asking this instead. Will this post do well with my ideal guest? What does my ideal guest want from my content? Will my ideal guest like and promote my content? You answer these questions, then the algorithms will do their jobs for you. Remember, it's the algorithm's sole purpose in life to put content in front of accounts for people who will value that content. Instagram marketing is a long game, so play the long game and stop looking for hacks. The magic lies in doing the work that you're avoiding. The work that you're avoiding is spending serious time to understand who your ideal guest is, what they want to see, building a strategy to speak to them, and then engaging them at that level. When I first drafted this presentation, it started Life as top 10 mistakes hosts make on Instagram. But sadly I'm out of time and so I had to change the title to seven Deadly Sins. I love talking shop, and I'm genuinely quite sad that I can't talk to you today about how to identify and target your ideal guest Persona, how to optimize your bio or align your content to it, or why you shouldn't start your content creation process with an image and then struggle to come up with something to say about it. So yes, there is four far more to achieving results like my one on one clients have and my Instabook students are enjoying right now than just absolving yourself of these seven sins. However, you're in luck. Earlier this year I secured special permission from my one on one clients to pull back the curtain on our private coaching sessions. This has helped me to craft InstaBook, a comprehensive training program that not only shares the secrets of my one on one client successes, but also equips you with everything you need to replicate their results. This isn't just a course, this is a guide through proven strategies, personalized for hosts to empower you to captivate your ideal guests and convert followers into bookings. Yes, this is my very, very short pitch, but don't go just yet. I'm about to offer you a 50% discount as well as extra goodies for those who take swift action. Full transparency and candid honesty is at the heart of everything that I do. So I want you to know that InstaBook moved from its beta version to the full alpha last month. Not all the modules have been published yet, production is steaming ahead at a rate of knots, and all 12 modules will soon be released. I'm working hard to ensure that every piece of content, every strategy, and every insight is not only relevant, but revolutionary, offering you the most current, most impactful methods to transform your Instagram into a powerful booking engine. What sets InstaBooked apart even more is that a third of the modules are designed to transcend Instagram. They apply a across the entire digital marketing landscape from all social media platforms to websites, hero images, blogs, newsletters and more. This foundational knowledge will not only enhance your Instagram game, but elevate your entire digital marketing strategy. When you enroll on Instabook, you're not just signing up for another online course, you will be joining an evolving ecosystem of strategies, insights and support designed to grow with you and your business. Here's what you'll have lifetime access to beyond the 12 core modules, you gain foundational knowledge that applies universally across all digital marketing channels. Access to tools tailored to hosts like My Pillar Ideation Template, Content Calendar, Template Metric Measurement tools and more to streamline your strategy implementation. Exclusive access to an already vibrant Facebook group for Live Zoom sessions, including deep dives into principles, the latest Instagram updates, Live profile audits and Q&As. This group is a hub for accountability, sharing challenges, celebrating wins and accessing additional resources as they become available. All of the video content is downloadable as audio files so you can learn on the go and it's lifetime access that's free. Lifetime access to all course updates and early bird opportunities for future courses, ensuring that InstaBooked remains your indispensable guide to digital marketing. My one on one clients pay me over $2,000 for 10 hours of my time. The investment to join InstaBooked is half of that in $997 or for the Brits here, 797 pounds. Today I'm offering an additional 50% discount. That's less than 500 bucks to join for life. The last time I ran a promotion like this, By Sunrise over 20 hosts had signed up. It's absolutely awesome. The Instabook program works best for hosts who take action. I can't turn your Instagram efforts into a booking machine on my own. The results my clients have enjoyed come from them taking action under my guidance. So I will give a free bonus to the first 10 hosts who seize this 50% offer lifetime access to another 11 video lessons with over three hours of value packed content from all the previous virtual summits and bootcamps including how to design your own social media manager with ChatGPT, creating content pillars, how to craft compelling posts, Instagram stories, Instagram reels, highlights for host. There's value added in there for you. Action taking is so important to success that I'll go one further. I'll also give away a free one on one consultation worth over $280 to the first five hosts who sign up. After this video, I will personally audit Leave your Instagram efforts today on a Live Zoom call and provide bespoke, tailored, actionable steps to swiftly raise your content marketing game. I'm only going to run this discount until the end of the month. It will automatically disappear at 23:59 hours. That's British summertime on the 30th of June. So you have until Sunday night not just to invest in your Instagram success, but to significantly expand your broader audience and elevate your digital marketing prowess. The next step then is to head over to thesocialmediahotelier.com InstaBook, hit enroll now button and use this coupon code boostly. So grab your 50% discount before it's too late. Beat the rush and you'll also gain access to a host of free bonus marketing resources. If you're really quick, you might even be able to look forward to a live one on one consultation with me. If you don't want to shift your marketing into another gear altogether by taking me up on this short lived offer, that's fine. Either way, thank you very much for giving me some of your precious time. Thank you for listening. I've been Paul the Social Media Hotelier and I hope to see you again soon.

Peace.

Hey guys, my name's Lou and I'm.

The owner of Cotterwald's Retreats. I'm complete novice at Instagram. I just knew my business needed to be on the platform. Paul came recommended, I signed up to his course and I can genuinely say.

I am going from strength to strength.

The pace is pitched perfectly, you're given.

Ample time to go away and implement.

The tips and tricks. And there's also accountability through the live Facebook group as well where you can ask questions in a safe space. So overall, best course of signs up to 10 out of 10. Go for it.

Hi there, I'm Dave.

I'm the owner of Puravia Properties in Costa Rica.

I hired Paul Anderson to help me get onto Instagram. I had zero skills so I need a lot of help. So it's been a fantastic journey. It's been a few days now. I've already got my first booking inquiry. I have close to 80 followers. Highly recommend working with Paul. He will get you where you need to go, wherever stage you are in the journey because he's a pro.

My name is Ruth, I am the owner and manager of Chiquitera Vacation. I've been playing around with Instagram but I knew how much I didn't know and I found Paul and I am so glad that I did. When I started working with Paul I have about a thousand followers Now I'm almost at 3,000 followers. I had had no direct bookings. I didn't even have requests. I now have direct bookings that have come straight through Instagram thanks to the strategy and also the tactics that Paul has teached me. So if you are serious about your vacation rental business and if you're serious about using Instagram as a marketing channel, which is free, you should definitely get in touch with Paul. He will help you no matter what your goals are. And he's a really nice guy and I'm having so much fun playing around with Instagram. Paul and the social media hotelier is worth it. I can't say enough about him. He gives you tons and tons of hints and tips and resources for everything that will help you in all your social media outlets, not just Instagram. So with that, that right there was just worth it. He is just fantastic. We have received some inquiries from potential guests straight from Instagram. Any way you look at, he has increased our Facebook followers, our website people have, we've got more hits on our website. You have to apply what he tells you about Instagram to your other social media accounts. But if you do that, you will see a huge burst in everything which will lead to more money. I believe the money we spent has been well invested. I don't look at it as expense, I look at it as an investment. And I have every confidence that it is going to pay off in many, many ways, but mostly in heads and beds and money in pocket. So I can't say enough about Paul. I highly recommend him. Thanks, Paul.

Hey, it's hero from the Hybrid 52 here. Just wanted to say a few words.

About Insta book by the social media hotelier.

Paul Anderson joined the program around early May.

I think it was late April.

It's a great group.

Love the Facebook group, love the accountability.

Both in the group and so far.

The modules have been excellent. Quite easy to understand, simple to follow. I find Paul very conscious in this explanation and it's easy to understand.

No jargon or anything like that. And what I also love is that.

We start doing the monthly zoom calls with a few in the group, help each other. So it's a great group.

I love it, don't regret joining it.

Well done, Paul.

Thank you very much.

My name's Ray Winfield and I've been following Paul for quite some time before I decided I needed help and I'm so pleased I did because I loved it. And now I have everything that's organized. I know what I'm going to post when I'm going to post it, whereas now it's. It's so much more efficient so I have more time. Not only did it help me with the Instagram, but because of the training and it's also helped me with my website, Google, my business, anything else that you, you're advertising. So it's also helped me make that much more professional, which I'm super happy with.

The skill set that he has and.

The way he is able to impart in detail with very simplistic instructions, I.

Would highly recommend him to anyone.

His manner is so patient and so professional.

His skill level is the best that.

I've seen and I would recommend him 10 out of 10 to anyone who's considering taking Instagram to the next level to optimize their business or whether it's personal use. He knows the program inside and out in every way.

So highly, highly recommend him.

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, respect. You're better but direct. Here are the words in the podcast. That's what comes next.

Wow.

Seven deadly sins. Unbelievable. And an offer as well, which is cool. Like I said, there's no pitch from Boostly this week, but I wanted to open the opportunity to our sponsors and our people who create videos to put some in front of you. And if this sounds like your type of jam, as you know, everybody in watching this now will have know who Paul is. People have gone on to work with him and they've done really, really well out of Instagram. But most importantly, it's not just doing well on Instagram, it's getting bookings on the back end. So if you want to take Paul upon that offer, all the links are in there and I'm sure he's in the comments right now and I'm sure he's going to be putting them in. So go ahead and take advantage of that if you want to get better at Instagram. The thing for me that really stood out was right at the very start and I wrote this down on the pad. Here is the Instagram and social media. Instagram, Facebook meta. It's not social media anymore, it's an ad agency. The stat and I missed it but I think it was like 86 and Paula Bill to confirm 80 of his total revenue comes from ads. So it doesn't come from those little blue ticks. It doesn't come from all those little things that they do. It comes from ads. And it's so right is that their whole purpose is to get more people to stay on the platform. And if you're not producing content that will make it stickable when why should they put you on there? Which is so true. So Seven Deadly Sins, Fantastic session. Can we all please show Paul some love right now in the chat? And again, I'm sure you will find out more about the offer as the week goes on. But if you want to take advantage of it, be the early bird, go for it. Like I say, Boostly, this week is an absolute no pitch zone from us. But I do want to open up the opportunity to our friends who are coming in to do these free sessions for you to put some in front of you. And if you like it, go ahead and sign up to it. All right now, moving swiftly on. Two months ago could have been even last month. Wow. It's been a long time. But a month ago we, I was in Barcelona and I attended a Touch Day event. And this Touch Day event, they love to do fringe events. So the fringe event is to go around the main event, which was to scale Rentals week, and they hide out this cool little cinema right in the middle of Barcelona. And on that day they were doing these little workshops. And one of the sessions was from Kate. Now, Kate is somebody that I've known since 2022, had an amazing background before joining Touch Day. And the one thing that I associate Kate with is that she knows how to put a presentation on, but also knows how to tell a story, knows how to grab attention. And the talk that she did in Barcelona, it really struck a nerve for me the whole week. And again that five days on the thing, a message is saying, the one thing that I took from this whole week was your talk about how to grab the attention, how to keep the attention and how to put the hook at the end.

Right.

Or of, of a click to action at the end. And I said, pretty, pretty please, could you put this together and could you put it in the book Direct Virtual Summit? Could you record it and I can put it on onto here? And she was like, absolutely. So the next video you're going to see is that it's Storytelling 101 at its finest. But most importantly, it's actionable. So you can take it and you can give it a go and you can combine it with Paul's video that he's just done and you can start to have some really compelling social media content that you can put out by the end of today. I'm just throwing it out there as a little challenge. So before you go post him, watch this video come in at the other end and let us know your feedback as you go. So can we please give Paul a big round of applause, show him some love. And let's welcome the amazing Kate from touchday.

Hello everybody. Thank you for having me today and for joining this session. I am Kate Stinchcomb Gillis. I'm the CMO Touch Day Digital Guidebooks. I'm a communications consultant for hospitality businesses and I'm a part time host. But I'm here today to talk to you about communicating with guests to tell better stories so that they will love you more. Now, you don't really need me to tell you that stories are being told everywhere. And perhaps you don't need me to tell you that whenever you say anything as a business that you are also telling a story that whatever you say is adding to the perception of the outside world of you and your business. Now, these icons you'll be familiar with many. You'll see Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, WhatsApp, email, radio, webs, websites and newspapers. That is just a handful of the places that your business could possibly be telling stories or having stories told about it today. And the point here is that you tell the best stories when you control the story. The moment you lose control of that story, it's in the hands of whoever wants to tell it. So take control of the stories that you tell. And that's in the marketing that you do and in how you communicate with your customers. And remembering that today, pretty much everything you do is out in the public domain. So be safe and sensible in what you say and share. Be respectful always. But also just tell a good, good damn yarn and get people engaged with what you do. Because when you tell better stories, you're going to generate greater awareness around your business. You're going to create a sense of intrigue, you're going to drive more action. And that action could be signing up to your newsletter. It could be encouraging people to click through to your website. It could be actually driving people to click your inquiry button or your book now button. It means when you tell stories that you're continuing to sow the seed about staying with you. You can't tell one story and think that somebody's going to instantly book your place. These days it doesn't work like that. I'm not sure it ever did, but it definitely doesn't work like that now. So Continuing the storytelling also helps you convert more bookings. And once that person is a guest, whether they're an imminent guest or a past guest, it continues to keep the excitement going and to keep the memories alive and warm about how they feel about your business. The crux of this is that when you make people feel something, they are more inclined to do something. You don't need me to tell you that if I tell you to do something, you're very unlikely to do it. Whereas if I make you feel something about something, you're more inclined to take an action. So that's the, that's my pitch in terms of why it's important to tell good stories and how valuable good storytelling can be to your business and how communicating humanly, personably, respectfully, is always going to land you on the positive side of guest relations. But let's talk about who we're talking to and where we're talking to them and what action we want people to take as a result of your stories. So the audience, who is your audience? Is that some mass sphere of people who you potentially want to come and stay at your place? Or do you very sensibly have a guest Persona or guest avatar, as perhaps Mark refers to it, and you really know who your ideal customer is. If you do, that's the perfect place to start because then you'll know the kinds of things that they want to hear about, the kinds of things that are going to sway them to stay with you or take notice of what you have to offer. And you'll be able to talk to them in a language that they understand. Now, the channel that you choose to talk to them in. Now this could be, if we're talking about a pre, pre guest experience, this is a marketing exercise, Then you could have a listing on an ota, you could have your own direct booking website, you might have social media channels, you might have a newsletter. All of these things will form part of your brand communications. And you know, in the textbooks, textbook world, then you'd have a brand communication strategy. But we don't all work in a textbook world and textbooks change. So think about this as recognizing who your ideal customer is and knowing where they hang out online and what it is you want to say to them in each of those places. As a marketeer, we call those places channels, website, social media channels, listings and emails, and so on and so forth. So you know who you're trying to reach. You know where they're hanging out and where you're trying to reach them. You've probably now Got an idea of the kinds of stories you want to tell? We'll get onto how you tell them in a minute. And then as a result of seeing your stories or stories over time, you need to have an idea of what action you want them to take. So let's have a look at that in more detail. Audience they could be an Enquirer, they could be someone who's newly booked, they could be an imminent guest, which is anybody by the way, between having booked and their arrival date, that's a big void of time. With some people, they could be a current guest, which means they could have just arrived, they could be mid stay or they could be about to leave. They could be a previous guest, which also as many as a spectrum. They could have just left, they could have left a week ago, they could have stayed with you last year. This is not to make audience complex, but it's to make you think about a guest as more than just somebody who stays in your place. Because when you think about them like that and you think about putting yourself in their shoes, you'll see, think about the different things to say to them and how to say those things to them and you'll build up a picture of the kind of storytelling you can do and the kind of information and communication you can share at different stages in the journey. And then you can start to think about how you create that content, potentially how you automate that information sharing and ultimately how you get those people coming back to you time and time again. Channel we touched on a few of these. There's an extra couple in here. Lots of people using WhatsApp these days for communicating with customers and also using text as another layer of reaching people. Now again, we'd said it before, top of the funnel. If you marketing speak top of the funnel, people who have never heard of you before and you're trying to reach them, then you're more likely to find them through the OTAs, the listing sites, through your own website, through perhaps you'll find them in Facebook groups, or perhaps you'll find them at your local networking group. These are all places where you need to be telling great stories about your business. And that great storytelling shouldn't stop because of the journey and the very many different types of stages of the audience that we've just covered. Now, the action is quite often where as hosts, I think we get lost, we get caught up in information sharing rather than the action we want the person to take with the information we're providing them. So before you tell a story, before you Share some information with a guest. Be really, really clear about what outcome you want as a result of it. Is it that you want them to buy? Is it that you just want them to read? Do you want them to watch? Do you need them to tell you that they've read and understood? Are you encouraging them to share it onwards with the rest of their guest group? Or do you need them to actually take an action? If you don't know that, then they're not going to know that. So have that front of mind whenever you write a story or a piece of communication, maybe even surface that action and what you want them to do really high up. So there's no doubt in what's required. And should they be skim readers, as many of us are in this noisy world, it will be the thing that gets seen rather than lost. Okay, Storytelling. Who is familiar with this model of storytelling? This is how I was taught to read, to write stories at school. Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Hurrah, great, whatever. In my latter years at school, this is also how I was taught to write essays and it was how I was taught to write exam answers. Tell them how you're going to answer the question, answer the question. Remind them how you answered the question. Now in today's world, this could work for your business proposition. It could work for your brand pitch, your elevator pitch. It could work for every social media post you ever write. Write, definitely for every blog post you ever write. It is a universal model. And to go into a little bit more detail for you, what is the beginning? It is, and this is just to reinforce this, the innate nature of this model. It is how most newspaper stories are written. It has a beginning which is the who, what, where, when, why and the how. So the five W's and the H. Certainly having always wanted to be a journalist and yet ending up in public relations, it's how I was taught to write every press release and it's how I tell people to write press releases now. So in two or three sentences you want to get across, you want to impart what it is you want them to know. What's the thing? When's it happening? Why is it happening? Where is it happening? Who is it for? Or who's it involving and how can I get involved? You can apply those open ended questions to anything you're trying to communicate. And if you, if you don't need all six of them, fine, that is totally fine. But you should be able to get four or five of them into every story that you tell the middle talked about that slightly. It's the details that flesh out the story. In an essay concept, it's the five things that help you answer the question, but you've gone into detail. In a newspaper story, it's you know exactly on what street this event happened, or it's what the extent of the event was and what it meant for attendees. Not every story you tell needs to have a huge middle section. Certainly not a social media post, but a blog post. This would be the bulk of the content. An email communication would ideally be as light as possible because people don't have acres of time to sit and digest email content. They just want the snappy bits, the bullet points, if you like. And the end is just that summary. Again, it's nice to have, but it's not crucial. So again, if you're providing a short communication or punchy communication, you don't necessarily need this. If your opening sentence or two has done been sufficiently succinct in summarising what it is you need them to know. Now I'm going to show you that you can flip this model to put it in a bit of context for you. Same beginning, middle, end structure. We're still incorporating a similar amount of information, we're just telling the story in a slightly different way. And to demonstrate this model, these models, because they're quite similar, I'm just going to read you an excerpt from a story. This is a story of a five year sojourn that I and my family made on a Greek island called Foo. It was originally intended to be a mildly nostalgic account of the natural history of the island, but I made a grave mistake by introducing my family into the book in the first few pages. Having got themselves on paper, they then proceeded to establish themselves and invite various friends to share the chapters. It was only with the greatest difficulty, and by exercising considerable cunning that I managed to retain a few pages here and there which I could devote exclusively to animals. Now, that is an excerpt from My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell, a book I really didn't enjoy as a child, but I have enjoyed reading to my own children and as an adult I find it quite funny. But that particular excerpt is a brilliant example of these two models. It presents a situation, it excites, you know, oh, a story about somebody's five year stay in Corfu. I mean, I quite fancy that myself. It creates a complication or it disturbs, it creates a disturbance in the middle and it resolves and reassures us at the end because he managed, after all, to wedge in some stories about animals, not just about his family. So in 100, 150 words, perhaps it has covered both of these models, actually. And the situation model on the left, you can replace the word situation with character. So he is presenting a situation. This is, you know, the story of their life on Corfu. It could have been a story about his family. He could have said, this is about a story about me and my family's life on Corfu. It's interchangeable. Whether you present the people first or the situation first, whether you choose to add in a complication or whether you choose to create a disturbance, entirely up to you. Whether you provide a resolution or whether you provide assurance is also entirely up to you. These are really common storytelling models. They're used by people in our industry all the time to show their ideal customer, their audience, that they know they're talking to them and to draw them in. So for operators who offer family villa holidays, then the family or the children are always upfront because immediately the audience recognises themselves. In marketing terms, we have a phrase, it's called people like me. Now, if I see people like me in marketing, copy content or advertising, I'm more likely to respond to it than if I don't. So that's the concept that's at play there. The complication is about you understanding what you, as an organization, as a business, as a brand, offer to the guest, which overcomes their complication. So, Tan, can the person, the guest, see themselves in the situation or the characters that you've presented in your story? Can the guest see their complication, the issues that disturb them, that worry them about going on holiday? Can they see those in the stories that you're telling? Do they like the assurance, the resolution that your story provides to the them in. And when you put it all together, can they see themselves? Do they recognise their issues? Do they like the idea of your solution? And if you. If they do, if all of that is a yes, yes, yes, then they are far more likely to respond to your story, far more likely to pay attention to what you're saying, far more likely to take the action that you are desiring them to take. That is 1, 2, 3 models on storytelling and a couple of contextual examples of how to put them into play or where you'll find them out in the ether. But I do have one really important story to leave you with today, and I say it's important because we live in a global world and that's not me talking jargon. That is me recognising that we travel internationally and we live in multicultural places now. And whilst a huge proportion of the world speaks English, we also have our own dialects, we have our own colloquialisms, but we don't all recognize each other's or understand each other's. So as much as it's important to have your own brand voice, your own tone of voice, your own personality in what you say and how you say it and how you communicate with people, it's really important to recognise when you too are using jargon, internal speak, colloquialisms that are very specific to where you are in the world or words that are dialectal. So only used where you are in the world. And this is really important for communication because if you recognize that your customer doesn't speak your language, then they're not going to be able to take the actions that you would need them to do. So I will just leave you with this. All there really is to say now is thank you, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. Touchday is a tool that is designed to help you communicate better with your customers. It is the replacement for the paper binder in your houses, cottages, villas. But it is also so much more than a PDF or canva replacement, than an email replacement. You can do messaging, you can do upsells, you can scale it really easily and quickly if you're a large operator. And I encourage you to go and find out more@touchday.com if you'd like to keep in touch with me. You'll find me on LinkedIn with that really really long name and fairly easy to find. And Mark can always point you in my direction if you need a hand. Thanks again. Have a great day.

This is a freestyle going off the dumb.

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 better but direct.

Mmm.

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

Thank you very much Kate for that. Kate with a very long name. If you can all please show Kate some love in the comments. Love, heart emojis, all the good things that we do here. Hopefully she is online with Us. I know it's very early where she lives in the world over in New Zealand, but thank you very much for doing that. The thing that struck me was right at the very end is the jargon talk. And I am as culprit as this as anybody. Very Yorkshire accent. I do have my jargon words when I go and speak in America. I get up on stage and I say all these things and I. And I know the room is half laughing along or following along, but there's definitely words that they. They miss out. And I joke about, you know, I turn it into a joke. I say, listen, the organizers are very kindly offered to put subtitles or captions on my talk at the end of this, but it's so true. You got to be able to, you know, check yourself and check the words that you're using. This is why tools like ChatGPT, like AI and all those cool things are very good at helping you not speak with jargon. And again, stories are everything. Stories sell. Beginning, middle, and follow that framework. Take a screenshot of Kate's slide way back at the start and follow that. That's that structure as you go on. I know I do now, since listen to it a month ago, I always look at the. The beginning, the middle, and the end. And I use that framework with the. With the prompts that she gave. And it has definitely helped my writing. I know it has. I can see it in the. In the quality of the content that I personally put out, and hopefully we'll be able to see it in yours as well. So, again, thank you very much, Paul. Thank you very much, Kate. Fantastic. Touch Day. Touch Day are doing so much more now, ever since. Since Barcelona, since I saw him. It seems like every week there's a new integration, there's a new tool they can connect straight up now. Doors can get unlocked with it. It is a. It is a tool that's only getting better and better and better. So go and check them out. Big friends here at Boostly. Thank you very much. All right, now let's move swiftly on to our final speaker of the day and the company that are going to get up and speak, one of the companies that are responsible for this. This event happening. So these events aren't free, believe it or not. They take a lot of time, money, and effort to put together this whole week.

And so I have to go out.

Into the world of my little black book, and I go, who would like to be part of it? And I've known the team at Aperto for a few Years now. CEO Steve Davies, I've met, Gosh, many, many years. We spent a week or a few days in a castle together at the start of this year in a. In a little retreat, which was fantastic. Loved it. And after that, I said, listen, I'm going to do a. A summit at the end of June. Would you like to be part of it? Would you like a per. To be part of it? And I said, what I want as part of it, if you are going to do it, is I need a video and I want education and I want someone to talk about upsells. And so they are the king of upsells or the queen of upsells. Do go and check them out. O P E R T O and we've got a video now. And this video, around about 30 minutes long, is packed with absolute gold on the power of upsells. And I've been saying this for a while, that there's only so much revenue you can bring in from the traditional stay, right? You've only got a certain amount of heads on beds that you can fill. You've only got a certain amount of properties. You are capped. And particularly now with so many people being in this industry and your local area might be absolutely full. So you can't top out on those adrs, those average daily rates anymore. It's not 2021, right? So you've got to figure out in your business, how do you bring in multiple revenue streams? Okay. And it can't just be around the stay. Like, my goal when I work with hosts is the money that they get for their stay, that's going to be the lowest revenue driver in their business. So how do you bring in more revenue? And upsells is a major part of that. So this is why I wanted to finish off Tuesday, close out the first day strong with the team at aperto. So please make sure if you pay attention, get your pens, get your notes ready for what is going to be a quality session. Before we do go any further, can you please just thank everybody for tuning in today? Can you give your pats on the backs, hashtag live if you're with me, if you're on the replay, hashtag replay. After this, I'll come back on, I'll say goodbye to you, and then I'll let you know what's going to be coming up tomorrow in Wednesday's session. So let's kick on with aperto and I'll be back at the end and we'll showcase what's happening tomorrow.

All right? Welcome, everyone. Great to have you with us. I hope you've been enjoying the other boosted sessions today. We are very excited to be part of the summit and we are going to kick off with a great session here talking all about how to maximize your revenue using upsells. I am Axel. I have been with a parent for about six years and learned a lot in that time. I currently work as director of solutions engineering, which means that I look at tech stacks all day, every day and figure out how they're going to work to maximize your operations and your revenue, which is really fun. So we're going to talk about the second half of that today. We're going to talk about the revenue and how to make sure you get the most out of every single reservation. Let's dig in. All right, it's quick agenda for today. We're going to talk about what upsells are and why they're important. We're going to talk about some strategies to think about as you're coming up with your what you want to do with upsells. Now I'll talk a little bit about how guest data plays into it and then go through some really practical steps of implementation, best practices that we've learned over the years, as well as how to measure success, of course. And then we'll finish out a little bit of Q and A. All right, so first, what are upsells and why are they important? They're important because we're all here trying to get as much revenue as we can. Getting new properties is hard. It's a lot of work, get new owners on board. But if you can maximize the amount of dollars you can get for each property that you already have, for each reservation you're already getting, then that is an easy shortcut to improving your bottom line. That's why they're important. It can also be really beneficial to guest experience. People get to personalize their state. It can also be really beneficial to your listings because you get to add really unique features to your listings to stand out in the crowd. So there's some really important ways that upsells play in and we'll talk more about that as we go through today. What are upsells? Upsells is any additional service that you are able to offer to your guests that you are hopefully able to charge for. You could provide some free ones too, but generally it is something where you are driving additional dollars to. To the business. We actually split internally, we split upsells into three categories to make it more digestible. What we're Talking about the first one is what we call in house offerings. So anything that you as a business decide to offer and fulfill yourselves would be an in house offering. So this could be the really early ones like early check in and late checkout, which you have full control over, maybe pet fees. But it could also be other things that your business is able to implement and fulfill. So maybe you have someone who is able to do airport transfers. Great. Then you can have that, some in house service. Maybe you have an office where you can do luggage storage. Great in house service. Maybe you have a summer intern who is able to put together beautiful welcome baskets. Or maybe someone is just really great at making charcuterie boards and you want to offer that. Anything that you personally take charge of at offering and fulfilling this in house, you take the full margin that is available on that service or product. Now second category is local partnerships. That's where you form partnerships with other people in the community to offer their services on their behalf, basically. So this could be a bike rental shop around the corner. It could be the fishing charter guy, it could be a walking tour, it could be a private show chef, it could be the golf rental cart. Com, golf cart rental company, whatever it is that you're not personally doing, but that you are introducing the service to others. And then finally we have affiliate commissions, which is truly the most kind of hands off of these three categories where you have basically links to booking websites of attractions and tours and other things like that. There's a handful of websites like this, like Viator or get your guide mount bunch of them. That's basically whenever someone goes from your link and book something, you get a little bit of a kickback from that really, really easy way. Highlight a few things that's in your community. And then when people book, you're making money. Okay, now you know what upsells are. We're going to talk about how to come up with a program for you to actually implement and realize this vision of making more money from your restorations. Okay, so first up, obviously you need to discover your own ideal upsells. This can feel a little bit daunting because how do you come up with things that you want to sell? There's a bunch of different options. I'm sure you experienced some when you traveled, some you liked, some you didn't. And so how do you come up with ones that are relevant to your business? There's a few kind of easy steps. Step number one is learn from your inquiries. If people are asking for things, if they're asking for services, that's one thing. But also if they're asking for things that you're eventually saying no to that you can't actually fulfill, that probably means that you could put a little bit of effort in and for that effort you are charging. So let's say that people are constantly asking for a barbecue. There's no barbecue in these, in a lot of your properties for whatever reason. Then you can say, well, we can deliver a barbecue to your property, but it will be at a fee. Or if people are constantly asking for midstate cleans, but you never offer that because you hadn't set up the processes with your our housekeeping team. Well, if they're asking, then that's something that's worth selling. So look at your inquiries. Learn from that as step number one. Step number two is to look at our upsell ideas checklist. Boom. Easy. Solved the problem for you. There's a bunch of stuff on here. Early check in, late checkout. Those are great because they're all in house, 100% margin. And with some of our solutions, you can also automate the approvals of them based on your availability. Things like that's really cool. Amenities, if you're in multifamily buildings, maybe yourself, pool, spa, gym access, that sort of thing. Maybe a local one you can work with tours, transport, restaurants, all those sorts of things. You can work within the local area. Again, really powerful. You can make it really simple to. You send someone down the street to the local coffee shop five times and you know, they bring a Friday, Friday fees for your staff or something. You can make this, you know, as easier, as hard as you want it to be. We talked about housekeeping services. Some of the other ones that are pet fees at the bottom, they're really, really good. That's something that can set your listing apart too, right? So if you're pet friendly, that's really something that you want to highlight because people are looking specifically for listings where they can bring their pet even if they have to pay for it. They're very used to that. But again, set your listing apart. Even in those OTA listings where there's very overwhelming to make a selection as a guest. The same thing with things like parking. If it's in a place that doesn't necessarily offer parking, but you are able to bring that up as an additional service, great. Definitely offer parking whether it's paid or not. And you know, again, you can look at the area and see what people are asking for, what is on offer, if it's bike or equipment Rentals, baby equipment, pool heating is a great one too. People know they're going to have to pay for it. So make sure that there's an easy way to request it and transact for to get it. Okay, so you've kind of made some, done some discovery. You put down, you know, five or ten things maybe that you want to offer, or it could be two. There's no right or wrong where you start with this. You don't need too many. Honestly, it can get a bit overwhelming, but you'll narrow that down over time. But maybe you've got come up with a bit of list now. Some strategies to think about as you're kind of developing the vision are important, right? Because you need to think about how this will best work. So deciding your approach is really important. And when I talk about the approach, it's kind of that scale from in house to local partnerships to affiliate revenue. And I say that because in House is 100% the Marvel. The margin is yours, but it's all your efforts as well. Affiliate revenue is the opposite. You get a small kickback, but you have to do absolutely nothing. You put the links up and you're done. So you have to decide how much time and effort you as a business can dedicate to this project and then kind of place yourself on that sliding scale and just kind of define your approach from there. From there on, there's a bunch of interesting stuff to think about. So we kind of talked about this already with looking at your inquiries, but leveraging using guest feedback and reviews can be a really good place to not just find inspiration, but also like alter and refine your selection of services over time. Again, there's nothing that about design needs to be static. If you start with a handful of services, it's not enough or there's too many or they run the right ones. Look at that feedback and review to make sure that it's really accurate to what people are asking for. I mentioned this before as well. So if you're listening at park by having things that maybe other listings in the area don't, even if they are paid offerings, but also play to your market, you know, you know your market best. If there's things that people are coming for and you know they're gonna go out and pay for it with someone anyway, might as well pay for it with you. If everyone goes surfing in your market, offer surfboard rentals. If everyone comes for wine tours, make that partnership with the local wine tour company, make sure they do it or start your own wine tour. Company. Anything that really has to do with your market is going to be a really good sell and just be such an obvious purchase for people. Learn from others. This kind of goes back to discovery a little bit too. But obviously looking at other successful businesses in the area, what they're doing in terms of putting together packages, this could be hotels, it could be tour operators, it could, could be other property managers, of course, but there's lots of different areas to kind of look and see what best practices are. And then obviously when you travel yourself, right, learn from others, see what people are doing. Finally, when you're kind of crafting your own messages, obviously you need to make your upsell sound appealing. Some of them are self evident, you know, early check in. Some of them need a little bit more creative copywriting for chat GPT. There's or. And then, and then what. What I really encourage people to put into is if you need to justify a cost. So if someone is saying, oh, is there a crib in the property? And the answer is no, well, you can deliver one. But if you're delivering it, then it would be for a fee. If it's offered in the property, that's a little bit hard to justify. But you're, you're setting it up, you're delivering linens for it. I think that justifies the cost simply with the barbecue we talked about before. Or really anything, even if it's an early check and you say, oh well, why are you charging this? Your property was empty anyway. Well, no, the housekeeping team actually needs to work way harder to make this happen. I mean, we pay them a bit of a bonus to make the property ready in time for you to check in early. So justifying cost can just make people a lot more amenable to make that purchase when they're reading through the description. Other things to consider here, seasonality. So obviously again, you know your market best, but if there is a considerable seasonal aspect to it, then consider adjusting your upsells after that as well. So if you are doing ski equipment rentals, maybe don't list them in the summer. Switching to mountain bikes. Anything really along those lines can just help make it feel more relevant and making sure that the ones that keep which pop up right on top are ones that people want to purchase at the time and doesn't get kind of distracting and feel like you don't know your own guess. Strategically timed offers. We're getting a little bit more into the kind of technology side here. But one really powerful thing in getting people to accept and purchase Upsells is making sure that they see them at the right time. Because if you make a booking and you get a long email with a bunch of stuff that talks about all the options that they have available to them, it's nothing to say that people are ready to make a purchase at that point. We have seen people who start making reservations and upsell booking upsells, things like that, they are less likely to cancel, which is a great little side effect. But really more of the upsells are purchased closer to check in time. So it's a little. So it's really beneficial to have messages that go out to the guests encouraging them with specific items at those specific times of the booking journey. This could also be during this day, right? It doesn't have to be before this day. If they are doing a really long stay. Maybe you want to put in a little note that Minstay Cleans are available. Or if they are coming up on checkout and there is a late checkout available, maybe that deserves a message or even a shoulder knife if there's a gap night you want to fill that might deserve a message. Or if you just notice that people are really spontaneous about their surfboard bookings, then maybe that is something that you send out on the first day after they've checked in. Or if you have a rainy day, maybe send out the message about your rainy day activities. Anything really that you can do to get the right offer in front of the people at the right time. Final point here is kind of a little bit to do with that. But how are you going to do that? Well, hopefully use technology. We are technology companies, we're a little bit biased. But all this stuff is a whole lot easier to do if you are using technology and using it right. So we're going to look at that a little bit more throughout the implementation discussion here later. But things like a mobile app where you can easily see the selection of things that you can purchase, maybe even purchase it in app and don't have to kind of call people and ask for availability and put up obstacles for people to actually get what they want. All right. One other thing that's worth mentioning, especially because we're here on the book Direct Summit with Brucely and we're all about getting those direct bookings is if you have the right tools in place for this, you're not only getting upsell revenue, you're actually also collecting guest data not only on things like preferences, but you're collecting contact details. Right. So if you have contact details, what does that mean that means your database is expanding. That means that you're book direct options are expanding from things like newsletters. Learn all about it in the other sessions. But this is a really powerful tool. If you have a good incentive for people to join your guest journey programs such as upsells and personalizations, then you're also going to get their data. So unmask all your guests emails, phone numbers and you know if they are allowing you to add them to the database and make sure that you're getting that direct booking next time. So you can almost consider direct booking as kind of the fourth category of upsells. That's a bit of a wide definition, apologies if you disagree. But definitely a really powerful addition to this side of the topic. Okay. Talked a lot about why upsells are so great in my opinion, in our company's opinion. But we're going to do a quick little case study just to show why you should hang on for the second half of this presentation. So we're going to look at a customer in the US they've been using DAC, our guest experience tool since 2022 and they kind of went for a fairly kind of set it and forget it approach. Not too many things to fulfill within their program, but they are all in house. And so I'm going to show you their actual numbers and we'll kind of walk through this slide real quick here. So there's 88 units here that's offering upsells. Over the past couple of years there's been 2,400 reservations, give or take, and a thousand of those add purchases, upsell purchases, which is a really good commercial rate. They made about 87,000 during this period, about a year and a half that we're talking about. And the average purchase amount was about $90, which is really quite in line with with our averages across the board. And then if you break that down on a per reservation basis, it's about $37. Not bad, really good enough if you're looking at it on an RI perspective as well. Look at it for monthly and then below that you actually have a list of the top performing upsells. So pet fee number one. That was actually the strategy. That's why we have the dog there on the photo. They went for a strategy of offering pet friendly rentals as a really high value item. Make sure that their cleaning team was equipped to do that charge for every single pets stay and that's netted them over $52,000, which is huge. And again has gone probably to improve Their listing quality as well. They're keeping 100% of the margin there. A little bit of extra work cleaning the property, but not as much as what the difference is in price here and revenue. So really, really good addition to, to their, their bottom line. The other ones you're seeing here, they're all in the same category. Early check in, late checkout, early access backdrop. Basically a check in is making up the balance of, of what they're earning here, which is. It's really indicative of our wider results as well. We see this across dac, across that early checking, late checkout are kind of the, the easiest wins as it comes to upsells. We also have a tool internally. If you are an upgrade customer, you will see that it has the ability to automatically approve an early check in, early checkout if there's a gap of 24 hours before or after the stay. So you don't even have to think about oh, am I able to offer this or not? Which, which is really cool. So that's the rest of this and has led to some pretty powerful results. I said across the board we have some stats as well. This gives a little bit more flavor to that. We have learned that 78% of upsells are sold pre arrival. So to that messaging point, making sure that people have the right offers at the right time, a lot of it happens pre arrival, not all of it. But because early check in, for example, is such a big seller, it's really important to highlight pre arrival that that is available. And then people get excited about their stays and they start booking other things. Right. Again, that $90 charge per upsell is a great result. And we talked about early church and late checkout being the most popular ones. Now. $90 per upsell, it's not per month, it's per upsell. But not everyone is going to buy an upsell. So let's think about how we get there. When you start doing upsells, you're probably not going to have it to the numbers being as good as that. There's a huge differentiator between top performers and low performers when it comes to upsells. So you want to obviously be in the top performing category and there's a bit of work to get there when you launch. When you're a couple of upsells and they haven't been optimized, you haven't taken that feedback into place yet and thought about how you can make things better, then you're probably going to have some lesser results and then you'll work on it over time. So let's look at some best practices for implementation to make sure that you can get to those high performer stages. We have people earn $400 per restoration. It's crazy. So you can really, you can get there, but you have to put in a bit of work. That work entails you're seeing on the screen now. So you want to think about the tools that you have at your disposal to put into place some or most of the following. The showcase is kind of the channel of where you're actually showing off the upsells. So in our situation, we have the DAC guest app or guest web app. You don't have to download anything, but you can pull that up as a guest. You get sent out a link and you can see everything. That's an offer. But you're also getting a full property guide. You're learning about the property, getting excited for the stay, all of that sort of thing. You get your access, instructions, maps, uber integration, all that stuff. But you're also seeing your upsells right there. Super easy. You might want to send this out if you're starting up. If you don't have a tech solution yet, maybe you just want to send it out through an email or a text message or maybe you have like a website where you could just list them out. Those are great starting points. Whatever you can do to make look attractive and make it as easy as possible for people to access the different options and then we'll talk about this in a second. But to actually request or pay for it, really, really key, obviously great photos, great descriptions of the different things goes without saying. Second messaging. We talked about this already but have a way to push this out to the guests at the right time. Third payment. This is actually a really big one. E commerce companies obviously spend billions and billions of dollars on optimizing their art experiences just to get a.01% improvement in conversion. When it comes to someone adding something to a cart to actually making the purchase, tons and tons go into this. This is, this is a big stumbling block because you're getting people to pay, they're excited, they're going to pay quickly and get that done. If you have stumbling blocks there, then they might just drop out and be like, I wasn't that important anyway. With, with operator we have an in app payment where you click. If you want something, it pops up and you can even do Apple pay straight from there or you can type in your credit card, it holds it there for the rest of the stay. If you want to do that. Very, very streamlined. And it also has the ability to, for example, hold an amount in the card until it has been approved by the manager. Things like that. Very, very easy to manage. But if you are doing this in other systems, just think about is it worth splitting out the experience somewhere else to a different payment processor because that gets really complicated or would it be worth paying, paying for a tool that we just make it a bit easier for the guests primarily just to make sure that that conversion is really high. We have industry leading conversion by far which is on the slide before that. So many of the restorations actually buy things because it's easy to pay for some things that might not make sense though sometimes you just might want to pay in person. So think about that too, how you're tracking when you're handing over a lead. Basically someone who wants something. If the fishing charter guy is going to take payment in person, or the walking tour guide is going to take payment in person, or the private chef takes payments with Venmo or whatever it is, how will you track that you actually refer them to them and how will you make sure that they are paying you your commission back or will you take that payment and pay them out? Depends on the strategy of the payments. But something to think about, linking out is the other option here where maybe this is something completely separate like a bank rental company and they have their own booking system. Probably makes sense to link out to them and then either you track how many people you send through through like a UTM parameter or something, or you just have more of an informal agreement on like kind of a quick crow kind of thing between you. But definitely important to think about. Okay. Approvals and notifications, lots of upsells require you to check if it's going to be possible to fulfill or not. So will you need to see if there's availability for the early check in? Will you need to check if you have the welcome basket in stock? Will you need to check if all the surfboards are rented out already? Anything along those lines might require kind of an approval and notification system. So you have to think about how is a request going to get to the right person to check if it's real and possible and then approve it in a timely fashion so that the guest knows they're going to get it. This is a really important thing to be fast, right? So if you have some form of request system like we do, great. If you don't, you're probably going to have to find some really effective way of tracking this and Notifying the right people might be different people, right? Making approvals and being notified when something has been approved might be two different people out there and they might be different for each different upsell that you have. Really important to think about. So if it's late, early check in, maybe the housekeeping team is approving it and obviously fulfilling it. But in other situations, maybe you have the guest relations team is approving something and another team, the airport transfer guy is the one fulfilling it. So very important to think about the flows there. Basically the automated flows that you set up. Fulfillment. This is just doing the thing that you've sold. Maybe the most important thing of all of this. But it really depends on the item. Have a really effective way of making sure that it's being taken care of. Next, incentives. This is quite interesting because you kind of plan this out. You're like, I'm gonna make all this money. But at times you may actually need to incentivize people to do the thing. So if you are doing upsells, get the rest of the company excited about it too. Get your guest relations team excited. Push your upsells. Get your housekeeping team excited to bribe for that early check in. Kick it a little bit, give it back to them. Give something to the people who are there to make sure that these things actually happen. Is would be my. My suggestion also tends to improve employee satisfaction. Keep people on board, all that sort of stuff and just give people a goal to drive for. Finally rev share. So if you are. Again, this kind of goes back to those external vendors. If you are sharing revenues, if someone. One of your. If you're taking payment and paying someone out or if someone else is taking payment and paying you a commission. Just think about how it happens so it doesn't get contentions. Okay. That was lots of stuff. Basically what I'm saying is get creative. Think about all the different options that you have and bring them together in a way that you. That it gets organized and that you're not kind of running around all the time trying to just figure out what was told and what you need to do. Okay. Promises the last really thick slide here. But measuring success is also important. You want to know if this was actually worth doing. So some quick ones here to go through. KPI's dollars generated. That's obvious you want to do that over time. See it go up, hopefully review scores also should be going up if you're getting a more personalized day. I'm optimizing those list things that should be great conversion again, this Is a good way of thinking about how advanced of a tool that I want versus just like sending out an email list of things and they can answer over email and then you go and pay. Take cash basically. Conversion super important to keep an eye on. Has different methods of you doing it over time. Number of automated approvals. This is kind of like what's the strain? Right on. On working on having people approving things in a timely manner. Can you make things more automated? Can you make your processes set up to ensure that all those upsells are always okay, that you don't have to worry about it? So try to push up on those automated approvals. Same thing on effort. How much fulfillment strain are you putting in your team? Is this crazy stuff they're spending hours and hours on actually making happen, then maybe this stuff isn't worth it, but maybe there's some lower hanging fruit in terms of upsells that you can use instead. Margin is a huge one that people don't talk too much about in the industry. But if you're just making a few bucks off of a welcome basket, it's probably not worth it. Right? So really consider margin quite holistically. Not just what are you paying in payment processing fees or how much commission are you getting from the. From the vendor that you're working with if they're paying a commission. But compared to the effort that you took in made to having it happen, was it worth it to really think about that? And then because we are here with boostly direct booking ratio or the increase in indirect bookings, if your strategy is really effective at collecting guest details as well as providing that great experience, we want to see those direct bookings go up. All right, so to wrap up, we talked all about upsells, all about maximizing revenue and hopefully doing that in an organized way that's great for the guests and doesn't put too much additional strain on you and your team, we like to say that there's an upsell for everyone. That kind of goes for both the on the guest side, but also for the operator. Because you can place yourself on that sliding scale where. Where am I? Do I want to do everything and earn the full amount through all the way to those affiliate revenue links where you're doing nothing and still earning a little bit. So you can go and then from there you can obviously go try to test it, the simple ones, or you can get really creative with offering really inspired things, maybe at higher rates and really play around with it over time. Right. And then we talked about this Better guest experience. People are going to love it if they have a really personalized stay. It can really make your listing stand out and it can also drive to, to great reviews on social media and going viral and all these sorts of things. And then ultimately if you have happy guests and they have provided their details to you, you can probably get them to come back as well. So that's upsells. Come and chat with us if you want to learn more. We talk about this all day, every day. As you can tell. We get excited about it and we have some really, really great implementations that are really easy things like apps and stuff that are pre populated with cool stuff. Thanks so much to Boosley and Mark for having us and yeah, scan the QR code to chat with myself or one of the specialists on the team here and we look forward to hearing from you in the near future. Enjoy the rest of the chef sessions and thank you for listening.

Can we all show Axel and the.

Team at Aperto some love in the comments below? I was just making some notes here and I got some, some stats. So 78% of pre arrival sold, that's massive. So 78% of people, they sold before they arrive. And you think about it, right, you've booked your stay, all right, you're, you're getting ready and if you can have upsells put in front of you, that will just take away the stress and the pain point of having to do all these things, then you're going to do it. And I think about a vacation that we recently went on and we were arriving on, on Sunday and we were arriving after 4 o' clock now where we were going to on a Sunday, no supermarkets are open. So we were staying at a rental north of the island and there was no food. And you know, people in our party had dietary requirements. You couldn't have, you know, gluten, etc. But if the host had given us the option to say, listen, when you arrive, your fridge is going to be stocked. We'll pre fill it. Milk food, except so you can just go in, get the barbecue going, have some food, we would have paid that and we would have paid a premium on that because it would have taken away the stress and the anxiety of having to organize something by getting in late after having a long flight also as well on a Monday was a, was a national holiday, so there's no places open on Monday either. So we had to wait until Tuesday before we could get some like proper food in. So think about that, think about what you can do what you can provide. And you know, Axel demonstrated perfectly about what is beneficial to do an upsell. And the most common ones, early and late checkout, they're massive. An early checkout, we give it away, right? Put a price to it, have it as a. Put a price to it. And just, you know, if there's any confusion with the booking or let's just say that there's something that goes wrong, you can have it there as a break glass in case of emergency. So, for example, let's just say the guest arrives, right, and you've, you provide a swimming pool, but for whatever reason there's a bit of algae in the pool or leaves have got in and the guest complains, you fix it, you deal with it and just say, listen. And if it gets a bit angsty, where they go, oh, I'm really tempted to, you know, go and fume to about this online. You can go, listen, really apologize. What I'm going to do for you, I'm going to give you a, a late checkout, no cost. So you've got that as the, as the glass to break in. Curse of emergency. And talking about early and late checkout, those are the most common upsell things to offer. And the average upsell, I saw that as 96, right? $96 is the average upsell. That's not per stay, that's per the upsell. So I did a bit of math. So let's just say you've got one property and let's just say you have 50 bookings in a year. Now, ideally you're going to have more than 50, but quick maths, if you did everybody that booked of those 50, if you sold that upsell at 96, that's $4,800. £4,800 at the end of the year, right? So you may think in 96, is it worth it? Over a year, that's 4800. If you've got two properties and you do 50 bookings, that's 9600. It, you know, it compounds, you know, it grows and it scales. Free properties, $28,000. So it is definitely worth it to do. Definitely worth it to bring in. And a per O, you know, one of the best at doing this in, in the industry. If you couldn't scan the QR code In time, it's O-P-E-R-T-O.com, go over, go say hi, go say that you came to us from here. Actually, there's a better link. Let me get that better link for you because they gave me this better link. Boostly.co.uk forward/operto. So b O-O-S-T-L y.co.uk forward/opero. They'll sort you out of a special offer. Do go ahead and say thank you and show Axel some love in the chat.

Right, that is the end of Tuesday.

That is the end of day one. We are back tomorrow with more fun, games and prizes, more spin the wheels and all that good stuff. Let me share my screen. What do we got here? Now before I go, this is of course your bingo card. Okay, so we are looking to give away some big prizes at the end of the week, but to do so you've got to join in, take part and play the boostie bingo. So if you attended the launch, you can take that off live. If you've taken a picture and uploaded a selfie to Instagram and tagged in, booster.co.uk has to be this week, take that off. You can still recommend somebody to join this week so all you need to do is invite them in the group, send them over, take that off. So you've attended today's session. Now it can be live or on the replay. I'm going to let you get away with replays. I am going to let you get rid of replays for the launch because I know for some people around the world who just can't tune in at this time, that's absolutely cool. Take that off. You attend tomorrow, Thursday the wrap up, go and subscribe to the YouTube and I'm gonna have a, a post survey to fill in at the end of the week. You do that, you take all these off, you need a full house, email me and then you could be in with a chance to win a massive boostie prizes that will let you know as we go out throughout the, throughout the week. Now let me just see if I can get this to the right one. Here's the schedule for tomorrow, Wednesday 26th June. So we're packed four sessions in tomorrow. We're going to start sharp at 5pm UK with the fantastic Ger Jones, Craig Webb, Phil Kennard, Matt Madras, we're going to talk about all the things here. Okay, so it's a big session. If you thought today was good, just wait until Wednesdays kicks in. So make sure you with a sharp, set your alarms, set all your notifications, we'll be back.

Before we go today, can you please.

Just again show some love to all of the speakers that have been with us. If you're live or on the replay, please do go check out Paul. Go check out what he's doing with the social media hotelier touch day. Thank you again, Kate, with the long name and obviously aperto booster codk. I'll go show our sponsors some love right there. And again, Paul's special offer that he has right. We will be back tomorrow. Those of you that are about to go and watch the England game, I'll be watching. Let me go and get this finished. Go crack up a minute of beer and I'll go ahead and watch that. So we'll be back tomorrow. Thank you very much for tuning in. Have a good night, have a good morning, have a good afternoon wherever you are and I hope you've enjoyed today because tomorrow is going to get even better.

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.