Marketing Consistency is King

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. Hello. Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Get Fully Booked podcast.

Hi, I'm your host, Sarah Orchard and today I'm bringing you another solo episode. So today I wanted to chat to you about something that I think is really key to your marketing success. It isn't.

The sexiest website isn't having the sexiest website. It isn't about having a huge social media following. It's actually about doing your marketing.

So the biggest issue I see in terms of people's results from their marketing and their sort of business results and their success is a lack of consistency in their marketing. Now, I know from working, I've worked in some really huge multinational businesses. I worked for Avis Car Rental for nine years.

Even big businesses are great at debating strategies. I used to spend so much time in meetings and people used to spend so much time strategizing about what we should do and creating plans.

You know, we created endless plans, but actually a lot of the time organizations, no matter how big or small, struggle to implement. It's actually like making it happen. That is the thing that, you know, that they really struggle with.

So you're not alone in terms of whether you're, you know, a one man band running your, you know, your holiday business or whether you are even like, I was in a team of, there were 300 people in the head office for Europe, UK and Europe.

At Avis, you know, we all struggle with the same, the same business challenges, but it's when the rubber hits the road, that's when the real marketing magic happens. So if you don't make it happen, you know, at the end of the day, nobody really cares.

I always think the harsh reality of being a small business owner is it, you know, it doesn't matter how brilliant your property is and how amazing your guest experience is, if nobody knows about it and you haven't told anyone, nobody really cares. And, you know, you just won't get the business at the end of the day.

And being your own boss is great, but ultimately it also means that the buck stops with us and we actually have to get on and do it. And there's always an excuse. I know, I've been there, you know, I get it, you're Busy, you know, you're trying to do everything.

You know, we have to do everything in our businesses. I've been running a small business now for almost like 17, 18 years. So I obviously left my corporate employment, which I did for 16 years.

But you have a boss, you have objectives, you get told off, you know, in a nice professional way, but you get told off. If you don't do stuff, there is someone looking over your shoulder, making sure that you're doing what you should be doing.

Even in these days of homeworking and people, you know, not working in the office, you're still accountable to a manager, to somebody who is in charge. When it's your business, you know, you are in charge, but you ultimately also have to do all of the things.

And like, you know, there were people doing lots of other functions.

You know, I definitely didn't have to do the books and the finances when I worked at Avis, you know, so in your holiday business, you're doing the operational stuff, you know, in terms of laundry and ordering consumables, you're doing changeovers, you're doing admin, you're being the IT department, the marketing department, the finance department, the chief chef and bottle washer. You know, you are doing everything in your business, and that's hard, you know, and sometimes things have to give.

But I tend to find that the thing that gives the most is marketing, because we'll always use the excuse, and it is an excuse that the guests come first, and therefore we have to focus on all of those little tasks. So. And we often gravitate to the tasks that we find easier.

So, you know, responding to a guest email, doing a little bit of admin, maybe, maybe sometimes you like doing the books, if that's your thing. I know sometimes people avoid that as well.

But ultimately you will find, you know, you'll gravitate to those things, or maybe you're guilty of a bit of procrastinating.

So you will find tasks that will take you away from sitting down and working on your marketing because it's easier to reorganize your pen drawer or realign all of the pegs in the basket or do something that is like, you know, go and set up all the bottles in your store in a neat way with labels. You know, that might be better than actually getting on with your marketing. I've been there, I've done it.

You know, that's the reality that sometimes we will procrastinate and go and do something else because there's the elephant in the room. That's the marketing task that needs to get done. And I'm a marketer, so, you know, I know it can be hard. But here's something for you.

Marketing is like a dripping tap. It, you know, you got to do it for it to fill the bucket and to get the results.

So the key thing is it's not like an instant tap that you just literally open the tap on your marketing.

And it's a bit like when you launch, you know, and this is a common thing that I see that when people launch their businesses, they, you know, their holiday business, they literally like focus. And we all do it.

We focus so much time and energy on the build or the refurbishment, getting it ready, getting all the interiors ready, getting everything else done. And then suddenly it's like, oh, we're opening next week, let's see if we can get some guests in. Oh, well, maybe we'll just bung it on Airbnb.

And that becomes the choice because you haven't done the pre launch marketing. So it isn't like an instant tap. And ultimately the marketing that you do now typically creates results between two to three months down the line.

So if you are never doing your marketing, you're never going to see those results. And the key really is that consistency of actually doing your marketing.

Even small amounts of marketing every week or every month will have a cumulative effect. So if you've got gaps in your calendar next month, panicking now for like three weeks time, two or three weeks time is too late.

So ideally your marketing should be something that you do a little bit of every week and then you won't get almost like, you know, you hear people talk about like that feast or famine, it's like that panic of like, oh my God, we need to fill the booking calendar. It's looking really gappy, like really bad. What are we going to do about it?

So, you know, I'd ask you, do you only do your, like your financial admin or your accounting, like your books when you get time, or is that something that you make time for, like, you know, every. Every day, every week. Same with dealing with guest communications, you know, emails from guests.

Do you leave that for like a week and don't reply to them? No, you do it on a daily basis because you know how important it is.

So I wanted to share with you, actually, one of the best pieces of small business advice I ever heard and got was from a guy called Nigel Bottrell. You might have heard of Nigel Bottle. He's a UK entrepreneur, he's a multimillionair there, he's written lots of quite amusing books.

But he said that one of his disciplines in his business was that he sets aside one and a half hours a day, first thing in the morning to work on his business, not in his business. And his view was that if you leave it till later in the day, you don't sort of get to it.

But he comes into the office early and he works on his business. Now, I have applied this principle to my businesses that I have run over the last nearly 20 years.

I can honestly saying I don't allocate an hour and a half every day because that for me, I don't have a huge team in both my businesses. You know, we're very lean small businesses. You know, I have some support for get fully booked, but, you know, I haven't got a big team of people.

Nigel Bot has a big team of people, he's a big company.

So I have just tried to apply that principle that at least two to three times a week I spend an hour and a half on my marketing for my respective businesses. So again, it could be that you just spend 45 minutes or an hour twice a week. That can make a huge difference.

So I'm going to come on to talk about how you apply that and sort of how much time should you be spending on your marketing every week?

Because I get asked this question quite a lot and like I said, if you could work on your business, not in it, so that means working on your marketing for one and a half hours each week. So two 45 minute blocks, it would have a huge impact on the results and the success of your business. So I call that time blocking.

So I put time slots in my diary, I use Outlook, I have, I use a digital calendar because I've come from that sort of business environment where I rely on like Outlook.

But however you work, whether you have a paper diary, put it in your smartphone or you use something like Outlook or, you know, a Gmail like Calendar, but I try and protect that time in my diary. I also pencil that time in because I'm doing changeovers three days a week.

So by having two lots of time where I tend to have an hour And a half I put in, and I put them in first thing in the morning because I'm more productive first thing in the morning. I know that if I get post lunch, I might get the slight slump after lunch and I won't be in the best frame of mind to be doing those tasks.

So that's why if you keep putting your marketing off until later in the day, unless you're an absolute night owl and you love doing stuff late at night, you're unlikely to actually get it done. So it'll be, oh, I'll do that tomorrow, I'll do that next week.

You keep shifting, you know when you're going to work on it, and before you know it, a couple of weeks have gone by, a month's gone by, two months have gone by and you haven't done anything. And that we often feel that with social media.

If I don't time block, I use a lot of that time blocking actually to do the social content for the Hideout, the Hudnall's Hideout Treehouse, which is our business and also forgetfully booked. And I block it and do it in chunks because that is a much more efficient use of my time.

I get myself into that headspace and I start creating that content and scheduling it. So for me, time blocking and scheduling are my friends. You know, they help me to get stuff done.

And I know what happens if you get an emergency on a changeover because a guest has broken something or like I had the other day, the cleaning team didn't turn up and I had to step in and do the cleaning, which wasn't in my day for that day. It actually completely throws you. It completely throws you working.

You know, if you haven't scheduled stuff, you haven't time blocked and worked on it, then just the social posts won't go out that week. And that's no way to run a business.

Also what it does is it also heightens my stress levels through the roof because I feel like I'm constantly firefighting. I'm sure you've probably had that feeling yourself.

You just feel like you're constantly on the back foot thinking about, oh, I need to think about some content, I need to put a story out, I need to put a post out, a real out. Oh my God, look, that business is doing loads of reels. I haven't done any. I'm an awful business owner, I don't deserve to be successful, et cetera.

It all escalates and you start to sort of comparatinitis and look at what everyone else is doing.

But if you've time blocked and then you've scheduled stuff, it actually, no, stress doesn't matter what else happens in the business or if you get a demanding guest or something goes wrong or a delivery doesn't turn up or something gets broken, you can, you know, you can just deal with that. So I'm always working generally with my socials a couple of weeks in advance.

I'll try and schedule at least a week, if not two weeks of content in advance so that I'm not under that constant pressure. But you do need to protect your marketing time. You do need to think about it.

Just like you would do some of your other tasks like dealing with guest emails, dealing with your finances and your books.

You know, you don't put those off and don't do them for like, you know, six months and then panic because your accountant is chasing you for your, you know, your figures. You do them and it is easy to skip it when you're busy with another task.

But scheduling is definitely something to look at and making sure that you schedule particularly things like socials, you can schedule other stuff like email campaigns, you can schedule blog posts to go out so you can batch create stuff and then, and then schedule it. You know, if you're finding that you find this difficult, find yourself a business buddy.

It's one of the things that I encourage in my membership, the fully booked business club is for people to buddy up and I've got members in different countries and they'll actually sometimes physically meet up in person.

But you know, find a business buddy within a community or someone that you know in your business network or you maybe meet locally through like your tourism organization and get yourself a business buddy that holds you accountable. That can really help get yourself a business mentor, somebody like me. Join, like I said, join a community.

I have a top tier in my membership, the fully booked business club, which is called marketing momentum. And that is all around accountability.

So we do things like co working where we actually sit down for an hour and a half, twice a month and we work together on zoom, holding each other accountable to the tasks that we're going to do.

And it's amazing actually how much more you get done just when you switch off your phone from buzzing, switch off your email notifications, stop looking at the emails coming in from guests or notifications on social media which are terrible for creating disruption and actually like focus on a task.

So like this last week we actually sat down and I think there was quite a few people in the group that said they were going to get their email campaigns done and we did. And we were doing an hour and a half and we got campaigns done plus some other stuff.

So, you know, it just goes to show that if you block out that time and focus, you can, you can get some stuff done. And boy, does it feel rewarding when that happens. And you can think I've ticked that off my list.

I've, you know, I'm only doing one email a month, so, you know, if I keep skipping the times that I'm going to work on it, it's not going to happen and it's not going to go out and those dates aren't going to get shifted because I've not told anyone about them and reminded them about how good the hideout is and that they need to come and stay with us. So I think the key thing is, as I said earlier, the best thing about being a small business owner is that you are your own boss. You know, I am.

I think if I'm honest, I am totally unemployable now. I could not go back to the corporate world. I wouldn't want to.

But I don't think they take me back either because I'm too much of a rebel and I've been too used to running my own business for nearly 20 years. So I definitely wouldn't be very good employee now.

But also the worst thing about being a small business owner is that you are the boss because nobody will check up on you or they just don't care whether you do it or not. I'll be really frank with you. Nobody will give a damn whether you actually do any of your marketing ever.

You know, they won't make you do your homework. This is not school. This is not working for an employer.

So nobody will come and knock on your door unless you're in my top tier of my membership, a marketing momentum. And then I will chase you and make sure that you do it.

But you know, ultimately none of us will get told off for not doing our marketing, not doing our homework. It's not like being at school. So if we don't take responsibility for it, it just doesn't happen.

And I'm not preaching because I often fall off the wagon. And I'm very honest with my community, with my membership. I have a life like everyone else. Things happen. I have animals, I have family.

I have things that go on in my life that sometimes mean that things go off the rails. You know, a few curveballs come in my direction, but by having these simple disciplines of time blocking and batch creation and stuff.

I'd say that probably 75% of the time the marketing happens to maybe 80% sometimes I've had periods when I haven't, you know, things haven't happened as they should have. But, you know, don't beat yourself up about it. Draw a line under it, start again, carry on. There is no point feeling guilty that you haven't done it.

You know, there are more important things in life than your business. You know, ultimately your family, your pets, your children should put them before the pets. But I haven't got kids.

So, you know, ultimately we have things that are more important to us and should be more important to us in our lives. So actually that should take precedence over the marketing.

But if we've done some of these tips that I've shared with you today, some of those things happening shouldn't have an impact on our business and then the success of our business. So just to sort of wrap up, probably being consistent with your marketing is the biggest sort of game changer. I sort of hate that word.

But you know, game changer to getting better marketing results and more direct bookings, it ultimately will make a massive difference. And just employing, think of that Nigel Bottrell mantra.

I try and take that with me all the time when I'm falling off the wagon is, you know, just have two slots, even if it's 45 minutes. And also it teaches you the discipline of not being on social media all the time and feeling like it's taking over your life.

So if you can just employ some of those tips, let me know how you get on. It will make a huge difference, a huge, huge difference to your marketing. So thanks for listening.

I will be back next week with another episode where I'm going to be talking about how you can grow to love your marketing. So hopefully that will be a nice follow on from today's episode. But if you've enjoyed this episode, I'd love it if you could leave me a review.

You know how much US hosts Love 5 star reviews. 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!