Why a Defined Niche for your STR will Generate more Bookings with Nihal Salah

00:00:00 - Jenn Boyles

Many short term rental property managers fear that narrowing their focus might limit their potential bookings, leading to a constant battle for visibility and bookings. This often results in a generic approach that fails to connect with the right guest, leaving your properties underbooked and your efforts unrecognized. Join me today where we will unravel the secrets of defining your niche and getting to know your ideal guest inside out.

You are listening to the Direct Direct Booking Success Podcast, bringing you all the information you need for your short term rental to stand out from the crowd. I'm your host, Jenn Boyles. As an owner and manager myself, I know how hard it can be to navigate the hospitality industry. I'm here to help so you too can have direct booking success.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Direct Booking Success Podcast. I'm Jenn Boyles, your host. In today's episode, I'm excited to dive into the art of niching down and understanding your ideal guest with our special guest, Nihal Salah. Now, Nihal is an STR customer educational specialist at Yapstone and brings over 15 years of b two B marketing experience across a variety of industries from HR tech to blockchain. So since joining the hospitality industry, her passion for travel and adventure has fueled her dedication to helping short term rental property managers and owners drive revenue through educational content. And today she'll share her insights on why finding a niche is crucial, how to define your ideal guest and the transformative power of targeted marketing. Whether you're a seasoned property manager or just starting out, this episode is packed with practical advice and expert tips to help you achieve direct booking success. So welcome. Thank you for coming. Let's start with your background. We've all fallen in this industry. So how did it happen for you?

00:02:20 - Nihal Salah

Traveling way too much now there's no such thing as traveling way too much. So I've been in marketing for the past 17 years. I hate to admit that because it just makes me realize how old I am now. But for me, marketing has always been about serving people. I think that's what true marketing and good marketing is about, serving and educating your audience. And I am just a very, very curious person. So I have worked in a number of industries over the years. I worked with everything from large corporations to startups to public sector organizations just because I absolutely love learning. But one of the things that I started to do a lot more of recently is traveling. So for example, in 2023, I traveled for about five months out of the year with my dog Rosa, who I love to bet and I have to bring up on every podcast. And we probably stayed at about eleven different short term vacation rentals over that period. And I just absolutely fell in love with it. And I had all sorts of different experiences. I had some that I booked direct with and some that I booked via Airbnb or booking.com and some that I returned to stayed with them maybe in the first month and went back to. And it was just a fascinating experience. And I just got really curious about who are the people behind the properties I'm staying at. Some of them I would meet in person, others that would just be all messaging online, some would be over the phone communication. And a friend of mine who now is the CMO of Yapstone, a residual, we worked together in a company. We worked together twice before actually. He ended up in the industry. I'll let him one day tell his story and asked me if I wanted to join him doing what I love most, which is kind customer education. I said, well, hey, if it means I get to interview lots of experts and learn from them, then why not? So here I am.

00:04:17 - Jenn Boyles

Well, it's wonderful, wonderful to have you here. And we'll talk more about Yapstone too, because I want to talk about how it can help. So let's talk about niching. How have you found that when you're staying in these places and you're looking for them online, whether it's on the online travel agents or it's direct, how are you finding that they are standing out? Or maybe the other side of the question is how are they not standing out?

00:04:44 - Nihal Salah

Well, for me, the ones that I did end up booking through the booking platforms, they can't stand out for me because I'm part of a very particular niche. Though I am a dog owner with a reactive rescue dog and for short term vacation rental owners, that could be a very lucrative niche because we love our dogs two bits, but far too much money on them. But we have very, very specific needs. So I want a property where the next door neighbors don't have dogs in the garden because that would drive my dog crazy. I'm looking for a property that will allow my dog on the signature, even if you have to put cover on or whatever. There are very specific things, things that I'm looking for in a property. And the problem with the OTA, so the online travel agents like Airbnb.com, they only have that filter of dog friendly and often that just means dog tolerant. So that's kind of one of the key differences while we're traveling across the UK. So a particular area in the UK, and I was very fixated on that area, then if I couldn't find any direct booking options, I would go for the platform. But I always felt that it was a bit of a letdown and a way of a compromise. I always felt compromised because I'm just a box that they've ticked that says pet friendly as opposed to a property that is set up specifically to cater to people like me, which, by the way, I'm happy to pay a premium for where they understand me and my needs and my dog's needs inside out because they know who I am. Right. As their target audience. So it's very, very different. But the whole experience from the point of booking to staying is very, very different.

00:06:31 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah. Cause you're wanting people who are looking at you as their ideal guest. Yeah. Right. Now the word niching, I think some property managers really fear this because they think, I don't want to say no to people. I don't want to say no to booking. So can you maybe explain why this fear is unfounded?

00:06:53 - Nihal Salah

I think when you think about who your ideal, or as you say, perfect guest is, right. And you get to know them inside out, that enables you to deliver an optional experience to them. And it's about the small things that you can do. If you're, say, targeting dog owners as a particular niche, you know how important, because you've done your research, you know how important my dog is to me as a guest. Right. So you might do really small things, like in your welcome email, you've already asked me about my dog's name when I booked. And then in the welcome email you mentioned my dog's name, Rosa. That would just make my day. Honestly, it's something so simple. A welcome basket for my dog. When we arrived at the property, I would go raving to my friends about, right, every friend who has a dog or even who doesn't have dogs, right. I would be going, oh my God, I went to this property and they did this and they did this. And then because I had such a good time, I would be going on and on and on about it. So when you start to focus on a very particular group of people who have something in common, really interesting things start to happen. You sell them well, they have an amazing experience. And when they have an amazing experience, they want to come back again, which, by the way, I often do. There's properties in the UK I've been back to like four or five times. They come back again to get the repeat bookings. When you get a repeat booking, it's a lot cheaper from a marketing standpoint to get a repeat guest than it is to get a brand new guest. They go tell their friends about it. So you get referrals through that word of mouth and guess what? That costs you zero and they leave you amazing reviews. So there are so many benefits to focusing and I think the fear people have is oh my God, I'm going to miss out on all this. Other potential problem is I think particularly now where the market is so competitive and there is so many options in terms of accommodation, is that to really stand out you have to be differentiated. And the differentiation is only meaningful when it is specific to a certain group of people who care about something. So you're not really missing out. It feels that way because it feels like you're ignoring all these other potential groups of people that could be booking. But if your property isn't fit for their purpose, they might not have a great experience. They might have an average experience. They're not necessarily going to recommend you to friends and family and they might not leave you a great review. So you don't want average, you want people who your property is a really good fit for. So the other key point is that the price sensitivity of people who are very passionate about whether it's dogs or hobby, like astronomy for example, or photographers or any particular group of people who are quite passionate about something tend to spend quite a bit of money on that passion. So when I think about the places I stayed at when I was traveling with my doll, the properties that had a massive garden or had those touches that were specific to dogs and they accommodated and were very dog welcoming, not just dog tolerant. I was more than happy to pay a premium for it, but if I'm just looking for somewhere to stay, then I'm a lot more price sensitive. So people are a lot less price sensitive when the property is fit for what they really want and what they're really passionate about. And I think that's really one of the key things about focusing down on a particular niche or group of people with a common interest.

00:10:37 - Jenn Boyles

Mm hmm, mm hmm. I completely agree. And the property manager, the owner, their personal interests and experience can really influence the niche that they want to sort of go deep into, can't they?

00:10:51 - Nihal Salah

100%. I mean look, if you're someone who just absolutely hates dogs, then of course I'm not suggesting you market your love, don't necessarily think you have to be very interested in pursuing that hobby or that, but I think you have to have some kind of positive feeling towards it. Right? Rather than. So, yeah, if you don't like dogs, don't try and focus on that niche unless you guess.

00:11:16 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah, you mentioned astronomy. So if you owned or managed a property that you yourself loved astronomy, and your property was a perfect place for stargazing and you had your telescope there or whatnot, now I know we're talking about a very expensive piece of kit, but that is something that could help you find the right people to make your guests in your niche, wouldn't it?

00:11:42 - Nihal Salah

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a really valid point to just think about your own interests and what your property is set up for. I was mentioning to you that our mo Ada is an astronomer. He's a very astronomy enthusiast and he has a very expensive telescope. I have no clue how it works or what exactly it does other than capture beautiful images of the stars and everything, but he will go out of his way to find places where there is low light pollution, dark skies, so he can get captured the best images and he will pay a premium for that. And interestingly, when I was speaking to him about this, he was explaining to me that you don't need, like a lot of astronomy enthusiasts will have their own equipment, so you don't necessarily need to supply it, but they spend a lot of time sitting outside, you know, with their telescopes. So give them some camping chairs and maybe some blankets because in colder weather you get better images and a kettle that they can use outside, for instance, that doesn't cost. If you are in areas where events like eclipses can be seen, just go and look up what are the key events that you could potentially do some marketing around to attract that need to your property? Lots of Facebook groups you could be joining any kind of hobby. You'll find a community online that you can tap into to understand what matters to them. What would they need if they were traveling and they wanted to travel for that hobby? And what are the key events that they would be traveling and going out of their way full and I guess.

00:13:25 - Jenn Boyles

Trying to figure out if someone's just starting out and they're like, I love this idea, but maybe dogs aren't the right fit, or whatever's not the right fit. It's trying to find that perfect fit though, isn't it? That's what you're wanting to do. And it's not just saying that you can have one. You could have a couple of different niches or ideal guests that you could call in, but it's finding out that is a perfect fit for your property, but also you and your area. So can you share some maybe effective strategies for sort of targeting once you've got that niche about targeting and attracting those ideal guests?

00:14:03 - Nihal Salah

Yeah. So I think Nihal spots on in terms of, you don't necessarily just need to focus on one. You can have, I would say, up to three. Otherwise it gets complicated and burdensome to do the masking properly. But you need to think about everything from the messaging, the words you're using to describe your property or headline, right? The description of your property, how you're talking about the local area and everything that you talk about, Jen, in terms of the SEO side of things or what are the keywords that people will be looking for? And again, the online forums and online communities and going onto Google Keyword Planner, which is a free tool, you can get all of this data for free quite easily. Right. Another amazing tool for that stage of the process is I think it's Ask The Public. Ask the public? Yeah, Ask The Public is fantastic because if you type in a topic, it will give you a list of all of the questions that people have searched online for, the when questions, the what questions, the how questions, the who question. So suddenly you have all of this incredible data at your fingertips that you can use then to inform the topics that you talk about on your blogs, the content that you're posting on social media. Because data is really key here, right? Look at your booking history, look at your booking history and look at the guests who left really good reviews. What does their profile look like? Were they families coming on a family holiday? Or were they couples trying to escape on a romantic weekend getaway? Or were they, I don't know, digital nomads. Who were they? Look at your reviews. Who left the most positive reviews? What did they love most about your property? All of that can be fed back into your marketing, into how you're marketing and where you're marketing as well. And understanding people's why. Like, what is it that motivated them to take that trip in the first place? All of that can really help inform how you go about putting together a really simple but effective marketing strategy to reach those particular groups of people that you're interested in reaching. And I think finding the perfect guest takes time to figure this out. So I'm definitely not saying reject bookings from people who don't fit that profile right now. Right. I think it's important that you get the guests to make sure that they have a good experience and that you can cater to their need I think it's the journey that you go on, and over time, you understand more and more about those groups that you want to target, and then you can get a lot more refined and on point with your mastering.

00:16:42 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Now, we're not saying anything about declining bookings, not by any means, but for the direct side of things, the more you lean into your chosen niche and your ideal guest, then more of those people will book and you'll fill your calendar with more and more of those bookings. Now, let's turn to the guest experience, the experience that they have when they come to you. How can property managers use their knowledge of that niche to create a more personalized and memorable guest experience?

00:17:17 - Nihal Salah

It's everything from the moment you press the book, right and put in your payment details. I think it's that first message that you receive. I'm going to go up on a motorcycle trip to the north of Spain. Right. So again, motorcycling enthusiasts, that's another niche for you. And we booked a property. There weren't many available, and we booked a property through Airbnb. And I just got really impersonal. The confirmation message that you receive once you've booked it was just really impersonal. They didn't ask us anything about why we were there or anything like that. So being that every touch point, every single little interaction with your guests is an opportunity to have an impact and just give them an experience. And they don't necessarily have to register it consciously, but when they go away and they tell their friends and family about their holiday, they'll say, you had an amazing time. And the hosts are really great. And they might not necessarily be able to pinpoint why, but it's just overall, they just felt that they had a really, really good experience. So everything from that first confirmation, getting the names of the people who were staying, not just. Not just for kind of compliance purposes, but just to understand and to maybe if you ask, why are you coming? Say, for example, I say, okay, me and my husband are coming up to celebrate our anniversary. Imagine how I would feel if I arrived at that property and there was a card, a handwritten card thing, happy anniversary to Nihal and your partner. I would just be blown away by that. And that cost, what, $2?

00:18:47 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah, yeah.

00:18:48 - Nihal Salah

Nothing. It's such a small investment, but it would have such a big impact on. I just go in there, oh, my God, that's so sweet that they thought of that. So then you think about inside the property again, if you like the example of the dog niche, right? So I would love to be able to have somewhere where I could clean my dog's feet before I go into the house because I don't want a dirty dog in my own house. I certainly don't want to be dirtying a host house. So just simple things like that. Having a welcome basket with dog treats, not just human treats, and maybe my dog's name on the dog basket. Again, it's just like really small things that can make a huge difference. Asking questions about the types of activities that I'm looking to do and then leaving some personalized recommendations. Having a really great guidebook where you share a lot of interesting, useful, handy details would save me a ton of time doing research. Again, I keep using the dog example because that's my world, right? I go on lots of dog walks. From the questions you've asked me that I have a reactive dog, then maybe you would be suggesting some routes where it's buy it. Oh, my God, I would love you forever for that. Because the worst experience for a dog owner with a reactive dog is walking with lots of other dog and people, right? So it just all goes back to, if you understand who your audience is and what really matters to them, it will become so simple to make those small adjustments with every touch point, from that point of communication to their experience when they're staying, to communication that you send when, after the stay. I have never, by the way, had a message from a host after I stayed, other than please leave a review. That was just like, thank you so much for coming. I really hope that you've had a wonderful time, you and Rosa, and let us know any feedback, and we hope to see you again soon. Again, that would make a huge difference. And I would go and I would refer that host on in their properties to others.

00:20:46 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah, no, you've got some great ideas there. Really some great ideas, because the ideas are to cost money. It's not. It's just a little bit of time, a little bit of effort. But I think what you get back will be tenfold. So thank you so much for that. That was just amazing, listening to you and listening to all of your tips and ideas. Now I want to talk about Yapstone. Okay. I know it's a bit of an odd segue here, but I just want to bring it to everyone's attention because I think that Yapstone is a payment processor. And I'll ask you to explain a bit more, but I I think that when we're setting up our direct booking websites and our PM's and whatnot. When we get to that stage that we realize we need a payment processor, people think of Paypal and they think of stripe, but they don't necessarily know that there are actually industry specific payment processors out there. So can you tell us a little bit about Yapstone?

00:21:47 - Nihal Salah

Sure. So Yapstone is a payment gateway or payment service provider. So in really simple terms, it enables you to accept payments securely from guests. And Yapsun have actually been around for 25 years, so they've been in this space for a long time. There's two forms. One is called vacation rent payments and that is essentially US and Canada. And then we've got holiday rent payment, HRP, which is our UK European. I think one of the advantages of a payment processor that has that domain expertise and the experience in short term rental is that everything from when you run into any kind of challenges, you're dealing with a team that understands your specific needs as a vacation rental property owner or manager. So they are able to tailor everything in terms of the onboarding and implementation process to make sure that you are set up in a way that is fit for your specific business. The other key thing, which is more of a challenge, I think, in the US than it is in the UK and Europe, but is for example, chargeback, which can be incredibly disruptive for business. So we have a dedicated chargeback team, which I thought was really cool actually, when I first joined Yapstone, and they've got like an 80% win rate, so they widen a huge amount of the chargeback disputes, which, like I said, it can be quite time consuming for property owners and managers if they have to deal with those themselves. So, yeah, so we're a specialist payment gateway. Been in the sector for about 25 years.

00:23:27 - Jenn Boyles

Great. And if people want to find out more about Yapstone, where should they go?

00:23:32 - Nihal Salah

Yapstone.com.

00:23:34 - Jenn Boyles

Well, that's easy. That's easy, yeah.

00:23:36 - Nihal Salah

Yapstone.com and then we've got holidayrentpayment.com, which is our UK European product. And then for the US it's vacationrentpayment.com.

00:23:45 - Jenn Boyles

Great. Yeah, I guess you have to keep the two, the two separate there for regulations and whatnot. Because what I've realized, coming over from England to Canada, not having been here for 20 years, but I've been here a year now, is that things are very different on the regulation side and the legal side, things that I hadn't even thought of. But I want to thank you, Nihal so much for coming on today and sharing your expertise in marketing, sharing your experience of being a traveler and a guest, especially with your beautiful dog, Rosa. You've given us a lot to think about. And when we're talking about that, we can do for our guests in these niches. One thing I know you mentioned is something that I did not know, is that when we're talking about astronomers and stargazing, that cold weather is a better time to be looking at the stars. And as somebody who's not in that world, I have no idea about that. So it really goes to show, once you know that niche and who's perfect for it, lean into all those details because they'll realize that you get them. And like you said, you'll pay a premium for these extra sort of. Not necessarily extra amenities or whatnot, but just that extra value that knowing that that niche brings 100%.

00:25:06 - Nihal Salah

And one last thing that I'll mention is when age mentioned that cold weather is better for stargazing, I immediately went, ooh, opportunity. Because you're going to book in the quiet period, property owners should be marketing you because in wintertime, unless you're near a ski station, people don't really want to be booking. I mean, you're much more likely to be booked up during summer if you're not winter sports or so forth. So that's another opportunity, is that there are potentially niches out there where you could be generating bookings from these groups of people in quieter periods. So it kind of generates more income, more revenue.

00:25:48 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah, no, it's a win win. So don't be thinking that this is narrowing your field. It's actually opening it up and making you more revenue and having more control over who is coming to stay. Better reviews, more returned guests. It's just, it's a win, win, win. So thank you so much, Nihal, for coming on today and sharing your expertise. It's been a joy.

00:26:10 - Nihal Salah

Thank you.

00:26:11 - Jenn Boyles

Jen, did you know that the Direct Direct Booking Success Summit is back? This is my fourth year of running this global virtual event, and I wanna see you there. It's probably the most fun you can have in your pajamas. So head to the waitlist to sign up. Direct Booking Success. coming up on the next episode of Direct Direct Booking Success podcast, imagine finally having a way to simplify your marketing effort, save your precious time, and still see amazing results. Imagine feeling in control and confident that your marketing is working for you, even when you're busy with the day to day demands of managing your properties. Listen up next week. That's what I'm going to be talking about. Until then, go out and take action for your own Direct Booking Success.

00:27:01 - Nihal Salah

I'll see you next time.

00:27:04 - Jenn Boyles

Hey, thanks for listening to the Direct Booking Success Podcast. For more information about this episode and others, head to the website directbookingsuccess.com podcast. See you next time.