What are you offering to your guests to book direct during the Coronavirus crisis?

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Podcast. My name is Mark Simpson. I'm the founder of Boostly. We're in season eight, episode 19. This whole season is about giving you productive, proactive marketing tactics and tips that you can put into practice to get through this Corona virus crisis that is hitting the hospitality industry. Today we do another marketing review live was with Sabrina Spellman of Rosberg House which is a bed and breakfast vacation rental in Kansas in USA. She's had the business for 15 plus years. We really delve into the website, social media, how Google's looking at the business and we also give some really good advice on the benefits of booking direct. There are so many people that tune into this live on my Facebook page that weren't doing this one simple thing that everybody should be doing and I really want for you to look out for it in this episode and then go and tell somebody about it. See if we can all together put this tactic into place and we can improve our direct bookings on the back of it. Before we get started, I just want to say thank you to our sponsors which are hostfully, hostfully design really cool digital guidebooks that you can send to your guest pre post or during stay. These guidebooks right now are proven so crucial because it's giving people advice on where they can go or things that they can go and see during the coronavirus crisis. But most importantly it will mean that you no longer have to rely on that little printout that you leave on.

The table that you hope that they.

Read with the WI fi code on and all those sort of things. It can be all done digitally and.

It can all be sent out with a link.

So it's, it's super simple to do. You get one free guidebook when you go to hostfully.com if you want to upgrade and add more and get their Pro features, put Boostly 2M in the promo code and you get two months free. So before you jump in, go check out that. Then go and have a look at Rosberg House which is the website that we talked about. Also go and check out Sabrina's Facebook page which is Rosberghouse. But most importantly, make some notes, put a plan, see what you're going to do to improve your marketing and then implement them into your business. When you do at Boostly uk, come.

And tell me what you do as you are coming in and watching this live or on the replay. Let us know what you have been doing over the course of the last few days to get bookings. Whether it's now if you, you know, if you're open for key workers or for the future. So 2000 and late 2020, early 2021. You know, we have seen bookings that are coming in. We've had a lot of people that have been really switched on and opening up their calendars for 2021. We've had people that have been really promoting the change, not cancel model that we're trying to do in the hospitality world. And you know, instead of having people cancel, we're just moving them to later on in the year. So let us know what you've been doing in the comments. I will go back on every single one like I do every night and I'll just have a little look at what you're all putting in. So let's get started. I want to make this as actionable and as practical as possible. Let's dig in. So as I did last night, I'm going to share my screen. So Sabrina actually won this marketing review, part of being in the hospitality community. Just like Harry did the night previously the episode previously tonight what I wanted to do is I wanted to Double down on TripAdvisor. I've spotted something on TripAdvisor and it just confirmed something to me in my research for doing this marketing review what Sabrina isn't doing. And I'm looking forward to showing you this because I pretty much guarantee there'll be at least one person watching this that will also be suffering this as well. So Sabrina based out of Lindsborg, Kansas in usa. She's got the Roseberg house or Rosberg house. Sabrina, if you are tuning in, please make yourself known. Say hi if anybody knows Sabrina and you know that she's not on this call yet. Give her a little tag, let her know that we're doing this so she can jump on. So how many years has Sabrina had the business? 14 years. So Harry and Colin last night, 16 years. Sabrina 14 years. We've had people that have had the business for well over a decade. Is amazing. Which of this best describe your property? It's a B and B and it's also a vacation rental as well. Tell me more about the business. What is your unique selling point? I have a five room B and B but I also rent it out as a vacation rental. What is the breakdown of your guests? Who do you mostly attract? Which is leisure or leisure as they say in America? Why is the average nightly stay at your property 12 nights. So again following a kind of theme here with Harry from the night before, what is the Facebook business page? So it's OSBERGHOUSE So everybody, we're going to go check out Rosberg House. If someone could put that into the comments. Osberghouse. R O S B E R G H O U R the name of the website is Rosberg House. That is the domain. Who designed your website? I did. How many visitors do you get a month to your website? Less than 500. When was the website created? It was in 2017. So, you know, coming on three years old now, do you have access to Google Analytics? Yes. Great. Again, let me know in the comments section. Do you have access to Google Analytics? Do you know how many people visited your website in the last month? In the last quarter? Is. No. Then you need to get this. It's a. It's a free tool and it's super effective. If you don't have the ability to get Google Analytics for your website and you have to go for a website designer and they've not yet done it for you, you need to be getting a new website designer. Just to give you an FYI on that one. Are you happy with your website? So Sabrina from the off said, no, I need to change it. And you know, when I show you the website, you know, without wanting to dig Sabrina out, I'm going to show you why this website needs to change. Which of these companies do you use for online booking engine? So they use wix again, if we've got any WIX users. WIX Hotel. If you've got a website with WIX and you use their booking engine, please let us be known and I will sort of tell you why. To not put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to the pms. Which online travel agents are you listed on again? Booking, Expedia, Airbnb, you know, the Free Amigos, the three most common ones. Do you pay to be listed on any websites? If so, which ones? No. So no paid advertising. Do you email guests after your stay with special offers and news? That's a no. Do you use any software to email guests? So wix do have that ability to. What is your overall occupation levels for the past year? So the past 12 months? 36 to 50%. What percentage of your total bookings are direct? 51 to 75. So even though it's a, it's a, it's a low occupation level. The amount of bookings that are direct is a healthy 75. Sorry, 51. 75% on average. How much money do you spend in commission costs to third parties? So at the lowest rate, 0 to 200 pounds a month. How would you say the Majority of your new bookings come in, they book on the website, which is interesting to know. Which of these marketing channels have you attempted in the past? Email. What do you wish you could have a go at but you don't know how to. So Google Ads, email marketing, SEO. So even though Sabrina's had a go at email marketing, wasn't that confident, maybe had poor results and again, which is why they aren't that confident. I want to give it a go again. What is the one bit of advice you wish you would receive before starting your business? Never list on any of the OTAs again. I'm going to ask you in the comments whether you're watching this live or in the replay, what is the one bit of advice that do you wish that you had had before you started up your business? We've got over 40 people watching this live right now. We get on average about 200 to 300 people. Watch it in the replay. Let us know. I want to see what, what, what, what your advice you wish that you could have had. How would your business profits look like in six months? And again, this was filled in for March 14th when it's all sort of kicked off again. You know, if Sabrina was to have filled this in again, maybe would have looked a little bit differently, but 75% occupancy. And where do you feel that you strug when trying to achieve your goals? Keeping in contact with guests. And again, I think a lot of people here will say that keeping in contact with guests, you know, using that list that you build, making full use of it. There'll be so many people watching this right now that will, that will agree with Sabrina here. And if you do just put in the comments, you know, just say, why do you struggle to keep in touch with guests? You know, have this as an open discussion. What is the biggest pain point in your business right now? Cutting the cost so service doesn't suffer. And that's it. First and foremost what I want to do is I want to dig in to Sabrina's website as she fully admitted that her website was one that she did it herself. It was created over three years ago in 2017. Coming out and looking at it from a first time of you, the website looks like something that somebody has put together themselves. Now I'm not saying that DIY website a bad thing. What you've got to remember, when you have your homepage of your website, more often than not, this is the first impression that you are giving to a guest or a potential guest. You have to envision it as though it's somebody walking in to the Roseburg house for the first time. That is the impression and the feel that you want to give to somebody with the homepage of your website. Now your website looks like a DIY rush job. That's what the homepage of the website looks like. There are some good things and I'm going to focus on the good things very soon. My big recommendation, and you know, I know that you admit it yourself, is that you need to get a new one. And my, my big advice would be I would get somebody to do it for you. I would definitely look at getting a professional to do it. What I would recommend is make sure you get somebody who knows what they're talking about when it comes to websites for the world of hospitality. But what I really would be looking to do and think this is a WIX website. I believe this is a wix website. I would love for you to let me know otherwise. But a WIX website, one of the beauties of a WIX website is that they're free. The reason why Tokeet give you a free website, it's the reason why Most of these PMSs give you a free website is that you feel like you don't have to go and pay someone to get one done. But just like with everything in this world, if you, you get what you pay for and if you buy cheap, you got to buy twice. What I would recommend number one would be to spend this downtime, to spend this lockdown period looking and putting the research in at getting a new website done. I would look to do if I were you would be to get in a walkthrough tour done. Now I don't know if you have got one because it doesn't stand out. But one of these walkthrough tours in a property like yours, from what I can see from the pictures, you've definitely got that old school, you know, American vibe to it. I mean the outside of the building is like so colorful and it's so stand out and that's the brand. I think that with a walkthrough tour to match then it would really, really make your property stand out from anywhere in the local area, anywhere in the local county, but even the state. I'm going to go on why your business stands out from everywhere else and I'm going to talk about in a second. I really think if you're looking at here it just needs so much more. I mean I've just scrolled down here and that's the end of the website, that's the end of the homepage. And I say this a lot. You want to have 80% of the all of your website information on that homepage, because what you will find is that people won't dig and look around all the places. So, yeah, that would be the main thing that I would say to you right now. It doesn't have to be a lot to get a good website. I wouldn't be looking to spend any more than $1,000. Literally, I wouldn't. Because you can get such good websites done now and not have to spend a lot of money doing it. Now, I know right now, $1,000 may seem, well, will be a lot of money and sounds like a lot of money, but you're future proofing the whole market in here by doing so. So when we do come on the other side, you can get even more people booking through your website. You can get even more people, you can still stay with, with your PMS potentially. And this is something that I'm going to circle back to in a second. I think that a front end website, a really good website will do you a lot of good. Now, there's some things that I do like and this is again, something that Tudor Farmhouse didn't do. On the homepage of the website, it's. It states clearly the benefits of booking direct. Why book with us, deal direct with the owners, best price guaranteed with no booking fees ever, local knowledge, secure payment options. Now, I would be adding in something in here which would be early check in. Again, a nice little benefit from booking for the OTAs. All of the good work you do here, you outweigh it with this down here. So you've got the widget for TripAdvisor that will link off to Toadvisor and you've got these, these things here. These are the widgets from booking.com. amazing work you've done here. Talking about book Direct, Book direct and save you out, do yourself. You undo the good work by having these widgets in. So I would remove these straight away. I've spoken about this at length. Booking.com, tripAdvisor, Airbnb are super clever with these awards that they give out. They don't do it to tell you a good job, they do it because this is branding. This is branding. You put the certificates in your property, that's branding for them. So they know they, the guests know that you're with them. By doing it here, they know that you're on booking.com and they'll just go, oh, that's booking.com, i'll go and check out them because of the marketing and the things that they do. And again, with TripAdvisor, by having this widget on here, you may think this is good social proof for you, but when they click onto there, it will load up TripAdvisor. And when they go on to TripAdvisor, TripAdvisor are throwing up so many different options. Instead of your property, it's encouraging them to the user, the guest, to book with everybody else, book you. So I would definitely move in them straight away. You talk more about book direct. You tell people about why they should book direct, but keep pushing people to your booking engine. 87% of people, they all agree on a poor user experience. They will leave the website and never come back. And it's just, it's just fact. As soon as somebody leaves your site, they just don't come back. Because when they go through to booking.com and TripAdvisor and media and Airbnb, these big companies, they spend millions hiring core teams to just focus on the user experience. They spend so much time and effort focusing on every single click, doing a B testing, and really making sure that their whole process is like a mousetrap, you know, so as soon as somebody goes onto booking.com they grab you like a mousetrap and they won't let you go. Let's just say I'm going to set a scenario here where you've got check in is 1pm now it's 1pm if somebody books direct with you, okay? Now you have that same check in time all over the Internet. Now, what my advice would be is keep your check in time at 1pm I'm not saying move it forwards an hour to 12pm Because I don't want to rush your cleaning process. We don't want to do that. But what you're going to do is you're going to keep your check in time at 1pm when people book direct, but you're going to move it back to, say, 3 or 4pm on booking.com, airbnb, etc. What you're doing is you're punishing people for booking via a third party. And then in the email confirmation that goes out to everybody when they book, it gets sent from your pms, they get sent out on a confirmation. You're going to have the following type of script, and you can personalize it for you and how you talk, but it would go along the lines of, hey, name, thank you very much for Your booking. Just to confirm these are your dates, the price of your stay is here and then you put pretty much in bold or capitals, Important check in information. Please read and reply. So you want them to read it and reply and bold capital it will grab their attention. Check in time. If you have booked directly with us, your check in time is 1pm and you can even have in brackets direct is email, phone or via our website. If you have booked via a third party, I.e. booking.com, Airbnb, et cetera, your check in time is, is 3:00pm, 4:00pm, whatever you're going to put it. If you would prefer to have an earlier check in time, please contact us as soon as possible on this telephone number. Now, the reason why this works is that people don't like to be punished. People like to have all of the benefits, they want to have all of the features. You know, the reason why so many people book via these third parties is that they are very clear with the market and message. Best rates guaranteed, you know, da da da da da. All the nonsense that we know is not true. Find more ways than just best rates of appealing to your guests. So we've gone through the website. I think we can pretty much all agree that the website is the place that I really would be stressing to make amendments as soon as possible. Let's just go quickly over to social media again. What I really love is that you've got this same image, this main image of your property is the main one that people see. It really does sell it. You're making full use of the COVID photos. I would have a little re look at the pictures that you're using because they look blurry or they just don't fit the screen, etc. But at least you're making full use of them. So well done. The profile pic again, I mentioned this with Tudor Farm House Hotel last night. I would get this picture being of you and your family. You know, when you have a B and B, you've got a very sociable business, they meet you, you know. So what I would be doing with your social media is putting your profile picture here, keeping it personal, keeping it social. So have your picture in here. I like that you're doing the don't cancel your travel, change the date, save tourism. This is, this is all real cool. The problem is that post was done nearly a month ago. We need to be a bit more consistent. And again, Sabrina, you're a member of social media sorted. You've got 30 plus days worth of content for you. Right there, that's in it. You can go and grab it, use it, post it and put it into your business. So again I'd be looking to do that, make it a bit more personal. And the beauty of this will be people don't come and stay at the Rosberg for the, the amazing structure of the house, you know, the painting and all of that. They don't come because you've got comfy beds. They, they're coming because of you. And I know this because everybody can go and find this for themselves. But you've got certain keywords that get picked out when you've got reviews left on TripAdvisor. Alright? And you can go and find this out right now. So if you go to your TripAdvisor page and this is what I wanted to show everybody when you come down, a certain section here which is popular mentions or popular keywords. And I'm always looking for the reviews that are left that mention the hosts. And as you can see here, Sabrina. So you've got things like breakfast, buzzer, Maiden Lincoln Room, Swedish pancakes. So breakfast gets a good mention and then you've got Sabrina. So that means that you as the host is getting special shout outs on these reviews, which is exactly what you want. They look so good, they almost look like drawings. In fact, I can't tell if that's a drawing or not. This is another shout to why I would be getting one of those walkthrough videos. I don't know if there's anybody in the date or in your area that does those virtual reality walkthroughs, but you've got such a distinct building, you've got such a unique layout here that I'd be showing it off and it would be the first thing that I would be talking about. And again, the walkthrough video are definitely something that I know booking.com are working on. TripAdvisor, Expedia, Airbnb. So that's where their mindset is at the moment. They're looking to put these virtual reality walkthrough videos in on their listing site. So if that's where their mindset's at the moment, would be looking for you as host be looking to do this as well. So the reason why I wanted to look at these keywords was just to see what people love most about staying with you. And guess what, it's you. Put a little bit more about you, let's put more about your family, let's put more about what you're doing in on the business page. And just share about it a bit more because people will come and come back and stay with you because of, because of you, because of the stories and you know, and what you're doing. Just have a quick look on Google Search, Google business page, listing that first image. All important, really well. I love how you've got this as the consistent image throughout, which is great. Again, you've got reviews on here, which is awesome. Which really does help. And just to get more visibility, you know, from the great work that you've been doing on TripAdvisor, you're ranked number one of three B and Bs in the area that you're in. So keep that up. If I was to suggest anything else would be, come and have a look down at the bottom like we do all the time and just have a look to see what other people are typing in when they're looking in the sort of the Lindsborg area. I'm guessing from this that it's, it's not a big, big town. I will, I will be very honest. My, my geographical knowledge of Kansas isn't the best. It's such a big state. Although I have lived over in the States. What I would be looking to do is I'd be using your social media to talk about what's over here. What's, what's, what's in the area. So what is there to do in Lindsberg? Why do guests come through Lindsberg? What, what is going on around here? Is it because of Selena? Is it because of which witted chair Richard Chart? Like talk, talk about it. Talk about the general area. I always massively advise not to do this for, for one reason. When you've got your website and when you've got your booking engine, you want it to be separate. So the PMS will be with somebody like free to book. I'd recommend free to book for you. For example, Booklet XIVU Super Control. There's so many of them. But the reason why you don't want it to be under the one platform is that for whatever reason, say that you lose access to your WIX account. Say it gets hacked or somebody breaks into it, changes the password, that's it, it's gone. You know, you cannot get access. So that means you'll be able to get access to, to your bookings or just for whatever reason, say the server drops out and you just literally cannot get into it. Then that means you can't get access to your bookings. That means you can't get access to your guests or data or anything. So this is why I always advise for your booking engine, for your property management software. For the most important part, the engine of your business, have it separately. We went through social media, we went through Google, we looked at TripAdvisor, we featured heavily on the website here. I know that they're going to be people that are watching this who are in exactly the same position. They'll have a website that's a couple of years old that they're thinking about changing, they'll be thinking about their booking processes and what they're doing and what they're enticing guests with. Book Direct. This is really what we're all focusing about here. So what I want for you to do in the chat, whether it's live right now or in the replay, put in what you're going to do to your current marketing to fix it. This is a perfect time. You know you're on lockdown, you can't leave the house, you've got time to look at your market and you've got time to improve what you're doing but you need to have a little think about what needs to improve and then look at fixing it. If you're struggling, if you're looking at your current setup and you're thinking, well I don't know what I need to improve on and you want a third party to have a look at it, someone from the outside in let me know. Put audit below. There's a guy fully recommend called Anthony and he's got a agency from Liverpool which is called Profisi and he like many others is not in the office. He's back at the house and he's got some time on his hands and he's doing full 14 page audits of your website, social media, how Google looks at you, links, broken links. He's looking at people in the, in the area and he's giving you some actual advice on what you can be doing to fix it. 90 pounds I think somewhere like 90 pound, 95. They normally charge 400 plus for this service. If you want that you figure in, just let me know. I don't get, I'm not affiliated, I get no monetarily for that but I'm just helping him and helping you guys if you want that. Because I can't currently do any one on one marketing reviews for the next couple of months. So if the main thing that I want to get you to get from this is I want you all to try and pick one to three things that you can be doing potentially with your marketing based on what you've seen with Harry last night, Harry and Colin down at Tudor Farmhouse in Gloucestershire, or with Sabrina over in Kansas and America with her BNB and vacation rental. Have a look at that. Have a look at both of these. Put into plan for yourself and then let's most importantly put a plan on how you're going to fix it before you leave tonight, before you leave this podcast episode, do me a big favor and just share it. Hit that share button and share it with a group on your personal wall. In a group. Share it with one person. Let everybody know about it. The tiny little share button is on the bottom corner of your app. It's on the screen. Just share it in one place. Tell everybody about it, tell them about why you're sharing it, tell them about what we're talking about here. But most importantly, tell them that we're helping the hospitality industry bounce back from here on in. For the rest of the month, nothing but exit strategies, how we're going to look on the other side of this, how we're going to look like with pricing, how we're going to look like with our marketing, how we're going to do X, Y and Z. Thank you for watching, as always. I'll be back tomorrow for the next episode and this is a biggie. This is with Noah Kagan. I've been really looking forward to this interview and it's going to be tomorrow night. For everybody who would like to get a notification just before we go live so you can come and jump on, it's boostly.co.uk DailyBoost if someone could put that in the comments, please, that would be amazing. But for everybody else, thank you so much for tuning in and I shall see you all very soon for another episode.