Are you Marketing Mud Throwing?

You're listening to Get Fully Booked with Sarah Orchard.

Are you ready to master your marketing so you can ditch your reliance on the online agents and grow your direct bookings?

I'll be sharing with you exactly what it takes to grow your direct bookings and the simple marketing steps to get more profit in your pocket.

Hi and welcome to the Get Fully Booked podcast.

I'm your hosts, Sarah Orchard.

Thanks for joining me today and I've got a really juicy topic that's going to save you some time stress and maybe even some sleepless nights.

If you're running a short term rental or glamping business and you've been throwing lots of what I like to call marketing mud at the wall, hoping that some of it will stick, then this episode is for you.

So if you grab yourself a coffee, a tea, or a glass of wine, no judgment here.

Let's get started.

So let's start with a confession.

How many of you have thought, if I just do more marketing, send more emails, post more on social media, run more ads, then I'll get more bookings?

It's tempting thought, right?

But more marketing mud is rarely the problem.

In fact, the more marketing that you do might actually be hurting your business.

So if you think about it, if your emails are uninspiring, you know, will sending more of them suddenly make people interested?

No, I don't think so.

What you might end up doing is annoying people and they'll end up unsubscribing and we definitely don't want them to do that.

So do check out episode 26 if your emails aren't being opened and you want a few more tips on that.

But let's get into the sort of what the real issue actually is.

It's not actually the quantity of marketing that you're doing.

It's actually normally down to the quality of the marketing that you're doing and the strategy behind it.

So have you actually got a structured strategy to what you're doing?

I've got an interesting fact for you.

I read a recent study that found that a very large proportion of small businesses, it was estimated at around 67%, lack a formal marketing action plan.

This means that many small businesses are operating without a structured strategy to reach and engage with their ideal guests, their target audience, and a concerning 73% of small businesses surveyed expressed an actual lack of confidence in the effectiveness of their current marketing strategies.

So if you have no marketing strategy, there is definitely no judgment because you're not alone.

I think in all the years that I have and I've been consulting for over 20 years and working with small businesses after I left the corporate world.

I don't think I might have met one business in those 20 years that actually had a marketing strategy.

And very few actually had business plans either.

So, you know, it's, it's not uncommon.

And I think it's because we tend to just launch into going out there and doing our marketing and we probably haven't sat down and put it into a structure.

So I thought I'd share with you today, you know, why, you know, more marketing isn't necessarily better and maybe how you can approach formulating a marketing strategy so that you are not throwing quite so much marketing mud at that wall.

So if you find yourself sending out maybe the same special offer three times in a week, you're posting it all over Facebook groups, you're sticking it on your socials, you're putting it on stories, and you're thinking, like, surely someone's going to bite.

But instead, what you're finding is that your email open rates start to drop, the followers start leaving Instagram, they're unfollowing you, and you're sat there sort of scratching your head, really.

This sounds familiar.

The reality is that the problem isn't that people aren't hearing your message, they are.

It's just maybe not compelling enough for them to take action.

So shouting let's louder or more often won't change that.

It will just switch them right off.

So if your marketing isn't working, the answer isn't to do more of it.

The answer is to do it with a clarity of a plan and a focus on what you want to actually achieve.

And so few businesses sort of start, I think, with the initial steps that are really fundamental to having a marketing strategy.

I know that a marketing strategy and action plan can sound really, really boring.

And I often describe it as, you know, driving your car, you know, without sat nav or maybe with these days it's Google Maps or a similar, a similar mapping option on your phone.

And I, I think that the reality is that so many of us just dive straight into our marketing and that that's what causes the problem.

So let's talk about marketing stickability, because I am loving this mud analogy, by the way, so I'm sorry about that.

So if your marketing mud isn't sticking, it's time to step back and ask yourself some hard questions.

The first question for me is always, do you know who you want to reach?

And I know you hear this time and time again about, like, Customer avatars and, you know, your ideal guest.

But it is often the most common problem that I see.

It's the thing that really means that the marketing is missing the mark and you're having to throw all of this mud in the first place.

So if your marketing is aimed at everyone, it's probably resonating with no one because you're just talking generic.

You know, you've got to be specific.

You've got to know who your ideal guest is because you need to be talking directly to them.

And that leads on to my second point.

Because if your messaging is not, you know, connecting with your audience, your ideal guests are not feeling that you understand what's important to them.

They are not going to want to buy from you.

Simple as.

So do you know how they want to feel during their stay?

You know, what are they looking to get from their stay?

And I've got a big clue for you.

It isn't a long list of your amenities in your property that is not going to going to sway them.

You know, I often talk about pain points.

You know, that is what motivates people.

They have a pain problem, need or desire.

That's what makes them want to book a stay.

They are going away for a reason.

They want to get something out of it.

So if you need some help with your marketing messaging, do go and Check out episode 13 of this podcast because I talk about why your marketing messaging might be missing the mark and I talk a lot more about customer pain points and how you identify these.

So go and check out that episode.

I think you'll find that ties in really nicely with this one and hopefully we'll give you some tips.

So the third thing is, are you using the best methods to reach your audience?

And again, this is where throwing more mud, like multiple mud doesn't work.

You've got to know which marketing activity and which marketing tactics are going to be right at the stage that your ideal guest is at.

And you've got to know how to reach them.

So if your ideal guests are not, you know, they're not on Instagram, don't waste time and hours and hours posting on social media.

If you're trying to get corporate stays, maybe you need to be hanging out on LinkedIn.

You've got to be where your guests are.

I was talking to somebody yesterday actually, because I'm not a huge fan of TikTok and yet I know that I need to embrace it.

So sometimes as hosts, we have to get over ourselves in terms of maybe not liking a certain social media platform, maybe not liking email marketing, maybe not liking creating blogs.

We have to find a way to create the content that is going to connect and put it in the places where our ideal guests are.

So we have to just get over ourselves sometimes with things that we don't like doing or platforms that we don't like using because that's actually where our ideal guests are hanging out.

So the key takeaway that I want to get across for you today is stop throwing more marketing mud at the wall and start throwing the right mud.

So this means speaking directly to your ideal guests, not putting out generic messages for everyone, crafting those messages around what your ideal guests actually want, think about their pain points and using the marketing tool, channels and tactics that work best for that particular ideal guest and putting it all together in a plan so that you actually keep on track and you actually do the marketing, not just frantically throwing mud at the wall when you notice some gaps in your booking calendar and you start to panic or bookings seem really slow.

When you take the time to get these elements right, you will see better results with a lot less effort.

So you know, that's what we all want really.

So that's it.

That's short and sweet today, but I'd like you to think like before you hit send on your next email campaign or post your 10th Instagram story of the week, take a moment to revisit.

Do you have a marketing strategy?

Are you clear on your business goals, your marketing goals and your ideal guests and who you want to reach?

And remembering that marketing isn't, you know, more marketing isn't actually better.

Better marketing is better.

And if you feel that this is all really, really overwhelming and you don't have a clue where to start, I have a couple of ways that I can help you.

Every January I run a live bootcamp program where I help you develop your own marketing strategy.

But I only run that once a year.

But I also offer I don't know if you know this one to one VIP Marketing strategy day.

So if you would like to to map out your individual marketing strategy for your business, do hop over to my website get-fullly booked.com as I would truly like to help you find the right marketing mud.

So thanks for tuning in today and until next time, happy hosting and happy marketing.

And in the meantime, if you enjoyed this episode, I'd love it if you could leave me a review.

You know how much us hosts love those five star reviews.

I'll see you next time.

Thank you for listening.

To Get Fully Booked with Sarah Orchard.

If you want to see if you are ready to ditch the likes of Airbnb and grow your direct bookings, put your business to the test with my free direct booking Roadmap quiz.

Head to my website, get fully booked.com quiz and let's get you more direct bookings and more profit in your pocket.