You don’t have to do it all to still have Direct Booking Success

Ep#15 - You don't have to do it all to still have Direct Booking Success

I learned a lot, and I hope you did too, but just in case you missed my presentation, you still don't have to do it all to have direct booking success. I thought that I would speak about that today.

We often see others doing this or that, and we think we need to be doing all of those things. But then, you know, we have a family occasion, or we get sick and don't have the time we thought we did. And then we start to feel bad and, you know, get angry with ourselves and then get overwhelmed with everything we want to be doing and then stop. If you ever felt like that, I have; I always want to do more than I physically can at some, always biting off more than I can chew.

So let's break it down. How can you still have direct booking success if you don't or can't do everything out there in marketing? Well, first things first. What does immediate booking success mean to you? It means different things to different people. Direct booking success to you could mean being a hundred percent book direct.

It can mean that you want to scale back your reliance on OTAs, the online travel agents like Airbnb. Or maybe you want to take some time off during the school holidays and pay someone else to mind your business while you leave. So how can you get the success you want?

First off, you need a plan. This is your marketing plan that I'm speaking about. Have you ever heard the expression to do with sewing? Measure twice. Cut once the planning stage in anything is essential. If you want direct booking success, it is crucial. So let's go through the steps to look at, which I use in my Direct Booking Success Group program.

I always start with aligning your brand, thinking through what's coming up and when you need to generate bookings, Let's look at the next three months, only any longer, and it just gets too overwhelming, and many things can change in six months. So let's look at the next three months. This consists of your offer, your messaging, and your ideal guest.

So your offer, think about what you want to focus on. Is it a weekend getaway for couples? Is it something over half term for families? Think about your messaging. How are you going to communicate this? What wording and visuals are you going to use? Your ideal guest? Who is this offer for? Whom do you want to book?

Write down all your answers for the first part of this plan. And now, let's move on to building your online reputation and how you plan to achieve those direct bookings. So let's look at your content plan. What content do you need to support? What I've mentioned in the first part, Remember this is just for the next three months.

And social media. What platforms are you going to use? How many times a week are you going to post? What type of posts are you going to create? Please answer all of these questions and write them down. This is where you can look at the time you must devote to your marketing and what you want to accomplish.

You don't have to post daily on Facebook, do reels on Instagram, and dance around on TikTok three times a week. You don't have to do all of that. Let's make it realistic and tailored for you. The third part of the plan is increasing your visibility. This is where everything else you can do your marketing, other than social media.

So think SEO, blogging, and email marketing are so important for your success. Many people will stop at social media, but it is off of social media that can make a difference to your direct bookings. Look at each of these areas and think about what you will do again, only for the next three months.

You might not be able to write a blog every month, but you could see yourself doing one in the three months. Email marketing might be where you want to put your efforts in the next few months. Perhaps you want to email every two weeks. Whatever it is, it needs to be doable for you. And the final step is to follow this plan.

Please don’t spend the time putting it all together and then not look at it and follow what you set out. You don't have to do everything you don't have to do at all. You don't have to do everything you see everyone else doing, but you need to think about what you can do before you overcommit yourself.

Having a plan to follow means reducing the overwhelm and making it manageable. You don't have to be doing what you see everyone else doing. If the marketing you are doing is working, then great. And if it fits into your life, the daily tasks you need to do, that is even better.

The point here is that you have to do it. Having a plan means nothing if you aren't going to follow it through, and we aren't done yet. I've told you what areas to look at to create your plan. I've told you how important it is to make it manageable for you to ensure you follow it. The next bit is to track review and improve.

Tracking your stats is something that needs to be done every month. So like social media, break it down by platform. Note the number of your connections or followers and your email list. Make a note of how many subscribers you have on your list. Of course, we want these numbers to increase every month, but I don't want you to get hung up on the numbers.

There might not be a massive increase from this month to the next, and that's okay. At the end of the three months, we'll review more extensively and analyse what's happening. But for now, we want the numbers. Just make it a thing that you do every month. Maybe the first of the month, you jot down the numbers, head over to your Google Analytics account, and note the number of website users you've had that month.

The number of sessions. That will include people who've come back to look at your website repeatedly. The bounce rate that's the right in which the users, you know, website, you leave your website. The moment they've landed on it, they bounce right off. And the session duration shows how long users stay on their site.

And, of course, the longer, the better. Also, note down how many direct bookings have come that month, and at the end of the three months, I want you to stop. Please take a few hours and analyse the results of your marketing effort, and then improve on what you've, what you've done, and improve on it for the next three months, asking yourself these questions.

What do I want to achieve in the next three months? What do I want to continue doing as is? What do I want to change? And look at every section of the plan you put together three months ago. Go back to align your brand. Look at what was in your plan. Did you follow it? What are the stats from the three months telling you?

Did you get the direct bookings with your ideal guest that you wanted? Was the offer you put out there right? Then, look at the next three months. Do you have another offer you'd like to focus on? Are you going to focus on the same thing? What about the messaging for your ideal guest? Are you keeping things the same, or do you need to do something?

Once you've analysed the stats and decided what to do for the next three months, move on to building your online reputation. What worked there, and what didn't work? Look at your stats and see the results of your actions. Maybe you found that you're putting so much time and effort into using Instagram, but you're posting on Facebook.

They were the ones that got the traction. What do you want to do? Do you want to keep things the same or change your plan for the next three months and then consider increasing your visibility? How did the keywords do in your SEO in the last few months? Have a look at the stats you've had from your Google Analytics.

How did your blogs do? How were your emails received with those on the list? Ask yourself, what do you want to continue with, and what do you want to change? Perhaps your life's calmed down, and you can devote more time to marketing. Perhaps you've got a big family wedding, and you know your time will be more limited.

Don't beat yourself up about what you can do in the time you'll have. It is always better to be consistent than to start and stop. The biggest time-saving tip I can leave you with is batch and schedule.

Sit down and write three emails, not one. Create a month of social posts, not just one post at a time. And then schedule them. Schedule your social media posts, and plan your emails. Could you not do things as you need them? Do them in advance. So these tasks aren't taking up room in your head. This will save you so much time and cut the overwhelm you might be feeling.

So this was probably a lot to take in today, and if you have any questions, get in touch. Could you send me a DM on Instagram? I'm at Direct booking success. Get in touch if you'd like to talk to me about how my direct Booking success group program could help you put that plan together. The whole aim of the program is that you will come out of it with your unique plan to follow along with the skills and knowledge to put everything you want into action.