Marketing without a Strategy is like Driving without SatNav!

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 and welcome back to series two of the Get Fully Booked podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Orchard.

So, firstly, a huge thank you to everyone who's listened to the first series and reviewed the episodes. I'm really thrilled that you've been enjoying them.

And as always, do reach out to me on Instagram getfullybooked if you have any suggestions for future episodes. I'd love to hear from you. Or tag me with your favourite episodes so far. I'd love to know which one you've enjoyed the most.

So today I wanted to chat about something that I know many short term rental or glamping business owners really struggle with. And perhaps you don't even realise that you need it. And what is that? That is a marketing strategy.

Now, if you've been in my Get Fully Booked world for a while, you'll know that one of my passions is making marketing simple. No fluff or fancy jargon. And the word strategy does sound very grown up, professional, business like, maybe sounds a little bit complicated.

But hey, you are the CEO of your own ship. You run a small business and therefore you do need to think about things like business plans and marketing strategies.

And it's really important to understand this business concept. So to me, running a business without a marketing strategy is like getting into your car to drive to a new destination with no map.

Probably I'm old enough to remember proper printed maps or no sat nav. But you know, how often do you do that? You don't get into the car not knowing where you're headed to.

I mean, these days I don't actually get into my car without my trusty Google Maps. And by the way, this podcast is not sponsored by Google Maps.

I promise there are other mapping options out there, but you know, you just wouldn't do it. And actually, your business needs a destination. You need to have goals. You need to understand what you're actually trying to achieve.

And you know, so many business owners just dive straight into actually the doing.

And that can be anything, not just marketing, but any of the operational tasks as well, without fully understanding what their actual business plan and their goals are.

And if you're feeling like you lack direction, you're confused as to what you're actually trying to achieve, particularly if you feel like that about your marketing, that's a sign that you don't have a clear marketing strategy. You don't know what you're actually trying to achieve from the marketing that you're doing.

So I thought I'd start firstly with, what is a marketing strategy?

So put quite simply, your marketing strategy is the missing link between your business goals and how you're going to get there using your marketing activity. So if you have a goal, so you have set some goals for your business, but you haven't got a plan, I mean, for me there's a saying that says, a goal without a plan is just a wish. And that's very true, because actually, without a plan of how you're going to get there, you don't really know.

You can have aspirations of what you want to achieve, you can have goals, but ultimately you're not going to have a plan of how to get there. You're not going to have that sat nav or that Google Maps telling you exactly which turns to take and which direction to go.

So you're going to be a bit floundering around doing lots of random things that you're probably going to be quite disappointed that they don't get the results that you were hoping for. So your marketing strategy is your business's plan for reaching your prospective guests or consumers.

So whoever you know your customers and turning them into your guests. So it is your plan for reaching those prospective customers and actually getting them to book and turning them into guests. It's as simple as that.

So you can see that it's vital to know which customers you're trying to attract in the first place, and then using your messaging to communicate what you offer to them, to create appeal and to get them to take action and turn into bookings.

So if you need a little bit more help with how do you do that, and if you feel that your marketing messaging has been missing the mark and isn't actually converting, say, like website visitors and your social followers actually into guests, so not into bookings. Take a listen to episode 13 of the podcast where I talk about that in a bit more detail. So I think you'll find that episode quite useful.

So what is a marketing plan? So what's the difference between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan?

Because often the terms get used, I think, interchangeably, and I think that's part of the confusion, because the two terms do get used, literally almost swapped out with each other and I think there is actually a key difference between your marketing strategy and your actual action plan.

So I like to call it your marketing action plan because your strategy is what you're going to do and the marketing plan or the marketing action plan is how you're going to do it. So you can see the flow. It's just three simple levels.

It goes from your business goals and your business plan to your marketing strategy and then your marketing action plan. And it's all about taking action. So it's really vital that we align any of the marketing that we do back to our top level business goals.

And as I said, so many short term rental, hospitality and glamping business owners get stuck into doing the marketing.

I see it all the time when people are, if they're launching, they maybe don't even have a business plan and they haven't set some targets for their new business.

Or even if you've been in business for a few years and everyone is just going at it great guns, doing lots of marketing activity, being super busy or ignoring it completely.

And you know, ultimately they don't know who they're actually marketing to and they don't know what they're trying to achieve from that marketing activity.

So we see lots of random acts of marketing, random posting on socials, hopping on all the latest reel trends, doing erratic email sending with no end goal in mind, or maybe just not emailing at all.

And all of that is destined to get you really poor results because as you can see, it doesn't align back to what you're actually trying to achieve financially. And maybe it's not just financial, it can also be your business plan can be about what you want to achieve, financial, a lifestyle.

And you know, maybe you've gone into running your hospitality, short term rental glamping business, you know, because you want a different lifestyle, you've maybe ditched corporate. So therefore your plan is all encompassing.

It's not just financial, it can be operational and also sort of your own personal lifestyle goals and does reflect your longer term vision of where you want your business to be in say three years time, five years time, ten years time. It should have also an exit strategy. You know, you should have as part of your business plan a clear ish view of what your exit strategy is as well.

What's your plan? Are you going to be doing this to the day you drop dead or are you planning on selling the business? Are you going to hand it over to a family member?

Do you want to sell it in X number of years, what are your plans to also exit the business. And that's often, maybe that's a thought for another podcast episode, but it very rarely gets thought about.

So if you're just doing lots of random marketing activity, I often call it marketing mud throwing because it literally is like throwing mud at the wall and hoping that some of this stuff will stick. It does tend to result in poor results and is unlikely to move the needle in terms of getting you closer to your direct booking goals.

Particularly and you know, as I've said previously, if you have limited time available and maybe you have your business as a bit of a side hustle because you've actually got a main employment, actually using an agent might be the best decision because then, you know, they will have a marketing, you know, business plan, the marketing strategy and they will do the marketing for you.

But I just want to draw back to the fact that, you know, remember that marketing is creating that bridge between what you offer and those that need it. And again, if you're a little bit unclear about, you know, even what marketing is, sometimes people make it a bit of a dark art.

Have a listen to my episode one of the podcast where I talk about that basically the money is in the marketing and I help to just reframe how you think about marketing in your business. I wanted to share with you today a really interesting fact.

So if you're sitting here listening today and thinking, oh golly, I don't have a business plan and I don't have a marketing strategy, I've just been like winging it. You are not alone.

So, you know, if you don't have a business plan or a marketing strategy, you are not alone. But maybe question with yourself if you're feeling overwhelmed, headless chicken running around, not sure what marketing you should be doing, not sure whether it's actually moving the needle and getting you closer to your goals.

I can guarantee you the thing that is missing is having that alignment between your goals and having a clear marketing strategy so that you know exactly where to focus your limited time and resources to, you know, to achieve those goals. So my last point I wanted to talk about was a bit of a reflection really. Why is creating a marketing strategy so hard?

Obviously I've come from a corporate background. I did 16 years working for some very big travel brands. I was very classically trained in terms of I've been in marketing for over 30 years.

So I've written many a marketing plan over the years and marketing strategy. But let's face it, business is not something that is taught that widely generally in schools.

It does tend to be a bit more prevalent these days than it probably was when I was at school, which was a long time ago.

I didn't actually come across marketing until I went to university to college and I did a business studies degree and I spent four years studying away and marketing was actually in my second year and I actually did a marketing sort of placement and then specialised in marketing strategy in my final year. So marketing has been something that I have been doing for a very long time, but I hadn't really come across it before.

And I do think that one of the things I noticed is that there are quite a few templates and resources that you can just Google but the majority of them are aimed at, I'd say bigger businesses or what we call business to business. So when a business is selling services to another business, not to end consumers and us hospitality businesses in whichever shape or form we take, we are generally selling to and marketing to end consumers.

So I often think that there is a lot of free stuff out there and you can go on to, YouTube or Google and maybe TikTok and search for stuff and there'll be lots of free, information out there but it's often not actually geared to your particular type of business and I think that can be a bit of a red herring and it can lead you off down lots of little alleyways and you know, detours that probably don't get you.

That sat nav analogy again doesn't get you to your end destination very quickly and you'll probably have quite a lot of pain and getting lost and diversions along the way. So this is one of the reasons why I created my own seven step marketing system which I call the Customer Delight Marketing Blueprint.

Now I created this about 5 years ago mainly because I've been working with clients doing sort of one to one consulting.

Obviously as I said, I was classically trained in terms of, you know, I'm a Chartered Institute of Marketing qualifier, got a diploma from them as well. And I'm also a chartered marketer and you know, I was classically trained in terms of marketing strategy and planning.

That's what I'd been brought up on. But what I, what I found was it was very difficult for my clients sometimes to understand the process.

So what I've done is I've simplified this and created my own seven step system. And it is designed actually for short term rental and glamping businesses. So it's not designed for business to business.

It is designed based on the clients that I've worked, hundreds of clients that I've worked with over the years. And what I've also tried to do is not over complicate it. So there's just a seven simple steps.

And I actually teach this in my live group bootcamp program. So my bootcamp runs every January.

I run it once a year because marketing strategy I think is quite something that is quite difficult to just learn from, say like something on Google. So that's why I teach this in a live group program because you need support to go through it.

I don't think it's particularly complicated to come up with your marketing strategy and your action plan. And it doesn't have to be like a 50 page war and peace document. You can have just a one pager if that suits you.

But like I said, I've simplified it into seven simple steps that I walk people through. And that does give them the structure to be able to think about what marketing activity.

So your marketing action plan, what that should look like based on who you're trying to target in terms of your ideal guests. So I've sort of broken that down, taken my years, 30 odd years of learning and put it into a simple system.

But just to really recap on this episode, if you just to simplify things, if you think about marketing strategy as what you want to do and your marketing plan is how you're going to get there, that is the simplest way to think about it.

But the key thing is that you need to align your marketing strategy and your action plan to your actual goals, your business goals and personal goals and what you're trying to achieve.

So if you're listening in today with a desire to grow your direct bookings this year and fill those pesky calendar gaps, do make sure you check out my free direct booking roadmap quiz because that will show you where you need to focus your marketing efforts soon. If you've, if you've got all this nailed, you know what your business goals are. You've got your marketing strategy well and truly nailed.

But maybe your marketing hasn't quite been getting the results that you want. So do take a look at my free quiz. I'll put the link in the show notes, it's on my website.

It's get-fully-booked.com/quiz and that will give you some pointers in terms of how you can grow your direct bookings and fill those calendar gaps. And this brings me to the end of this episode. But I would love to hear from you. You know, do you have.

You can send me a direct message so that it's nice and private and you're not confessing this to the world, but do let me know whether you've actually got a marketing strategy and plan. If you're struggling with it, what is holding you back? What particularly is making it difficult for you?

Because I would love to know and hopefully I would be able to help you. So thanks for listening today.

I will be back next week with a lovely guest, a fellow host who will be sharing their glamping business marketing journey and how they market to two very different, different types of guests. Now, on paper, these guests are like oil and water.

So it's a really cracking episode and we really dive down deep into attracting different types of guests to your holiday business. It'd be packed with loads of actionable marketing tips and the real life experience of a fellow host.

If you've 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. 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.