Today we're joined by Glampitect's in-house marketing expert, Moray Donaldson.
With a university degree in International Marketing and experience in social media marketing for glamping sites and other businesses, Moray is able to offer some excellent insight into what you need to do to ensure your glamping site stands out in the online sphere.
We spoke about the different content you should be posting on social media, the importance of brand guidelines and the pros and cons of external booking channels. We highly recommend you listen, particularly if you're not a social media wizard like Moray!
Links
Contact
Today we're joined by Glampitect's in-house marketing expert, Moray Donaldson.
With a university degree in International Marketing and experience in social media marketing for glamping sites and other businesses, Moray is able to offer some excellent insight into what you need to do to ensure your glamping site stands out in the online sphere.
We spoke about the different content you should be posting on social media, the importance of brand guidelines and the pros and cons of external booking channels. We highly recommend you listen, particularly if you're not a social media wizard like Moray!
Links
Contact
There's lots of different material on Instagram. But if you're wanting to transfer that engagement into people spending money, Facebook is the way to go. I think it's always worthwhile to set up your social media as soon as possible. Whether you have a glamping site or not, make sure you have some form of social media to post content. I would always recommend having a booking facility on your website for the fact that you don't have to pay for it. Essentially, that's what it comes down to. And sites like Airbnb, Expedia will always take a cut of your profit.
Nick Purslow:Hello, and welcome to Episode Four of the Glampitect podcast. Today I interviewed Glampitect's in house marketing expert Moray Donaldson. Moray's really switched on when it comes to websites and social media. So, it was great to get his insight on what glamping site owners need to do in order to get their marketing right. I hope today's episode is particularly useful for those of you who aren't necessarily social media experts. If the advice in this episode is enough to get you going, then great. But if you need some more information, please don't hesitate to get in touch to see how we can help. Social Media Marketing is so, so important in bringing guests to your site. So, it's really important that you take the time to get an understanding of exactly what it entails. Now, before we get stuck in, I want to say a big thank you to all those who have listened so far. We're starting to gather a bit of momentum. Now we've got some really good feedback from the first few episodes. I do just have one favour to ask though. If you have Apple Podcasts, and you've taken any value from the podcast episodes so far, it'd be amazing if you could leave us a rating and review on the apple podcast app. All you have to do is go to the Glampitect podcast homepage on the app, scroll down and give us a rating out of five. It'll really help us boost up the podcast rankings and allow us to reach a wider audience. If you don't have Apple podcasts and you're listening in another format, please consider sending a link to the podcast to a friend or family member that's considering getting into the glamping business. Thank you once again, and I hope you find this valuable. Hi Moray, how are you doing?
Moray Donaldson:I'm fine. Thank you, Nick. Yourself?
Nick Purslow:Yeah, very good. Thank you. As usual, we'd like to get a bit of a backstory of our guests and how they came to be where they are today. So, if you could just give us a backstory of, you know, where you came from, and how you joined Glampitect and what your role is today, that'll be great.
Moray Donaldson:So, I joined Glampitect in October 2020, after completing master's degree in International Marketing in the University of Edinburgh. Obviously graduate during a global pandemic was not the best thing in the world to try to find a job. So, I was scouring LinkedIn for certain industries interested in tourism, drinks and media sale entries as well were quite popular for me. So, I came across columns of LinkedIn profile for Glampitect, and sent a message. And yeah, he asked me for an interview. I spoke to him on Thursday, Friday, I had an interview ready for the Monday. So, yeah. That's how I got the job after a quick interview there. And actually in the company, I started off doing feasibilities, researching there. But now I've moved more towards the marketing. And I help run the social media channels, create content and do other sorts of marketing for both Glampitect, NC500 and our clients as well.
Nick Purslow:Let's go. So, the marketing side is what we're going to focus on today, we might be back to talk about feasibility studies at some point, but that'll be for another time. So, we're going to split today's discussion into sort of two sections, the first one being social media, and the second one being websites. We do both here for our clients. And we also, you know, put all of our principles into practice for our own sites and social media. A lot of, I mean, a common question that we get from clients who know that they should be posting on social media is, what sort of content should glamping sites be posting on social media?
Moray Donaldson:So, I think it's best to break this down into three different categories. You can start off with text, images, and video. So, if we look at text on a social media post. By and large, it's very boring. There's not much to differentiate you from the other company, regardless if it's a glamping company. Posting a text based post, it's not eye catchy, it's literally just words. There's nothing to sort of draw you in. You guess you can make your bold, but it's not exactly exciting. And it's not so engaging. So, we would recommend not doing that if you can avoid it. The next one is pictures and images as they say, images speak better than words. So, you can have this picture here, you can support it with text, and the image itself would be a lot more eye catching. We would always recommend custom graphics as opposed to just taking a picture off the internet. Because that picture on the internet, everyone has access to it. So, someone else could take the exact same picture, post exactly the same as you, and there's absolutely nothing to differentiate you from the other competition. With custom graphic, you can tailor it. So, you can make it exactly what you wanted to see. You can add text on the top of it, you can change the colour schemes, you can do anything. You can edit that, and you can post it as your own content. We watch these videos, these are the most engaging. We see that from our own social media, where we do our daily videos. We can see that those get the most engagement than a post that we do. Because people don't just want to see the business. They want to see behind the business. So, the daily videos that we do, it's us at home or in the workplace, posting content about the business we work for. As much as insightful, people would just like to see what goes on behind the scenes. So, that's a sort of three different types of content you should focus on, as you trigger off in business.
Nick Purslow:You stole the words out of my mouth. I was gonna say how our daily videos that we do in every lockdown, they do get the most engagement, most comments. And it's just getting your name out there every day without being, you know, too spammy. Just a minute or two video every day. And also, it gives you an idea of the people behind the business. So, if you want your potential guests to like you, you can also add a bit of a personal touch to your business as well. And that's what we find in Glampitect. So, we post those daily vids, and all of our stuff all over social. But we also have different strategies for each different social media site. So, the main ones that we use are Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And we don't think, you know, you shouldn't be copying and pasting content. You should be tailoring it specifically to each platform. So, could you give us a bit of a rundown on how those three platforms differentiate from each other, and how you should be tailoring content towards each platform, please?
Moray Donaldson:Sure. So, if we start off with Instagram. Calum, our director has admitted this many times before. That when he started Glampitect and NC500 pods, he only focused on Instagram, or what he likes to call the Instagram generation, which most of us are, if you're roughly our age or mid 20s. As much as Instagram is a great platform, it's not got the facilities to allow people to buy from it. So, I would always recommend using Instagram as a sort of gallery, almost to post media content. Because Instagram focuses on the use of videos and images. You can't just post text based documents or posts. So, it requires you to have media content also alongside it, which is very good because it forces you to have it. Which means you can't just post random bits of text. So, in that instance, Instagram is fantastic, you can get a huge following of it. And there's lots of different ways to promote material on Instagram. But if you're wanting to transfer that engagement into people spending money, Facebook is the way to go. So, with Facebook, you can post links to sites, you can have bookings available through social media especially, on Facebook. And with that, the generation that uses Facebook is slightly older. Now, as much as you may want to target your glamping site having access to the older generation who are more likely to have a slightly higher disposable income, that allows them to spend more money. It's way more beneficial for you wanting to attract people to purchase things, essentially stay at your glamping site. So, that's where they differ for the most part, those two. So yeah, Facebook's the one to go with if you're looking to just transfer people from engagement into sales. LinkedIn as much as that's a good platform, isn't really used as much for the same purpose. So, we would use LinkedIn personally for trying to find collaborations with other businesses. You wouldn't use LinkedIn for sort of promoting stays, for example. Because that's not what people use LinkedIn for. They use it as a professional platform to generate business and also connections, but it's not used for actually buying and selling. So, that's where our strategy differs.
Nick Purslow:So, at Glampitect and NC500 pots, we're big proponents of brand guidelines. A lot of people in the audience might not have heard of brand guidelines before. So, could you just give us a rundown on what they are please and how they can and how clients could use them?
Moray Donaldson:Sure. So, a brand guideline essentially boils down to a set of rules and principles that your business will follow, when it comes to marketing. It utilises the free assets you have at your disposal to ensure that you get the best return and produce the best content. What that means, in essence, it's quite complicated, is that you follow the same set of rules that are self imposed to produce content. Now this can cover anything from the colours that you use. So, primary, secondary colours. So, if you look at the Glampitect social media, for example, we use primarily grey, blue, and white. And these are the cards you've identified as part of our logo. And they're also the cards that we use vastly in our content. We like them because they stand out, but they also help support each other as primary and secondary colours. You can look at the size of the text. So, when do you use full caps? When do you use lowercase? When do you have the text stand out? How bold was the text? Whether it's in italics or not? Whether the text is centred? And we can apply this to a lot of stuff. So, if you look at our Instagram page, for example, you'll see the logo for Glampitect done in either one of the two ways. It's usually either white if the background allows for it. So, whether it's a darker background, or is on a colour, that isn't part of our logo. Because it won't stand out if you've got the blue on the blue. If you have a white background, we'll more often than not use the two tone colours that we have. And you expand this to everything. So, it can even include things like the tone of voice that you use when rating and promoting content. Because you want to keep this consistent. The reason that we do this is because there's a couple reasons behind it. First off, it keeps your post eye catching by having it uniform, and using the same colours, the same text rules that you've self imposed. It means that as soon as someone sees a part of that post, they'll recognise as being part of your company's posting. Following on from that, when it actually comes to creating the content, it means that us here, the marketing team at Glampitect, have a benchmark. So, we know that these rules will produce a set quality of work. And it means that that is the minimum benchmark we have to reach. Now we set that bar quite high for ourselves. But it's paid dividends knowing that we get conversions from it, we have people engaging with our posts, we have a reach that we never thought we would get if we hadn't thought of brand guildeline. So, that's a sort of whistlestop tour of what brand guideline is. Nick Purslow: Yes, I know you personally have spent time working on clients and partners, brand guidelines for their social media as well. And it's something that, you know, you don't just knock out in two minutes, you know, you spend a lot of time prepping and working on it. Would you say there needs to be a balance between preparation and going 100 miles per hour? Because a common theme in setting up a glamping site is there is a need for stepping back and preparing in all sorts of areas. And one of those is social media. But there's also a need to just get on with it and start posting rather than spending whole time planning. How do you find the balance between prepping content and making sure you have a sort of strategy and just go ahead with it and putting stuff out there and getting results? Oh, to start, before I even answer that question, I think it's always worthwhile to set up your social media as soon as possible. Whether you have a glamping site or not, make sure you have some form of social media to post content. Now, just because you don't have a physical site there, doesn't mean you cannot post content. There's a lot of ways you can do this. One thing that we've seen people do in the past and we actually actively promote people do is sort of have consumer engaging posts. So, have a poll on Instagram, for example, and get the vote on what type of kettle you're going to put in the pods, show them the development of the land, show the pods getting delivered, and then make people feel more engaged with the content that you're posting, and your business. So, that's where I would suggest doing that. And the earlier you start up, the earlier you can start creating a brand guideline. Now, moving on to your question, you don't have to follow a brand guideline as rigidly as we do here. We stick to a very rigid structure, when it comes to our brand guideline. Your brand guideline could be as simple as saying, "Oh, this is gonna be the colours that I use." And that's it. As long as the colours, for example, are consistent, people will still recognise it as your content. As long as the way you use those colours is consistent, they're still gonna recognise it as your content. The main ones I would say to focus on is your colours and your logo. If you can put your logo on something, people instantly recognise it. With regards to how fast you should do this, you can spend as much or as little time as you want on it. If all you're wanting to do is just generate a quick profile, you're not worried about getting an instant following, then focus on just doing the colours like I said. Because that's probably going to be the most important one. If you're wanting to expand that, you can come back and revisit it and tweak it and then constantly update it and see how the consumers engage with it. Because it's going to be different for every single user. Not everyone is going to be responding to the content you produce, the same way as everyone else. So, your target market might have a different view on how you do this. So listen to what they want, and then adjust as you need to. But we have probably known this for a while now. And we sort of found the rhythm and the structure that we enjoy. And we know we get engagement from this stuff, so stick with it as rigidly as we do.
Nick Purslow:Yeah, I think that's important. Experimentation is necessary, because as much as you might have a set target market, in your head, you don't know necessarily what's going to work and what isn't. So, I think you've got to put stuff out there, see what engagement it gets, you know, what financial returns it brings in and try and optimise. And eventually, you'll get into a groove. And you'll have a much better idea of what will do well, and what won't. Yeah, experimentation is the key, I think. And the last part that we're going to discuss on the social media side is paid marketing. Few different types of paid marketing you can do, you can pay for social media ads, you can also run Google ads. Do you advocate using paid marketing for glamping sites?
Moray Donaldson:So, we'll split it into two. Because as you identified as paid social, and as Google ads. So, we're focusing on Google ads to start with. It is very dependent on what you're envisioning your site to become. So, if you're wanting it to be a nationally recognised brand, then yes, 100%, Google Ads is the way to go. Because you need to get your name over there, essentially. You need to be able to have.
Nick Purslow:Yeah, just for the benefit of the audience, Google ads are where you pay Google to get your website at the top of the search results when people search certain things.
Moray Donaldson:Yeah, exactly. So, if you've ever googled something, and you've seen an Ad button or ads icon next to the website, they've paid to be there. And it's reflective of what you searched. So, yeah. In that instance, if you're wanting to become the biggest and the best in UK, then by all means Google Ads is the way forward for you. If you're focusing on a wee town in Shetland, and that's your glamping site, you don't need to focus on Google ads at all. Because your target market is so small. And usually locals or people in the rough area of the Highlands, who can travel a couple of hours to get to you. And that's maybe as far afield as you can go. In regards to paid social on platforms like Facebook, or Instagram, I would highly advise against that. For the being that these platforms are free to use. You do not need to invest money in them to be recognised. If you wanted to increase your following, your reach, your engagement, there's more free channels available to you than it is to Google. So, utilising Facebook groups. If you go to an area specific Facebook group, like the Scottish Highlands Facebook group, for example, there's probably hundreds of thousands of people in that social media group. If you were then to push the content in that, that is, a couple 100,000 people that will see that post? No, not everyone's gonna visit. But even if you get 0.1% of that 200,000 as a rough estimate or as a sort of guideline for that, then that is heck of a lot of people that are going to come to your site and see the post. So, that is your target market. And you can do that throughout the country as well. If you're wanting to do Google ads, you can also run it alongside free social media ads. That's personally what I stand at. Some people may disagree with me, but having done this for people in the past, that's what I sort of have advised and suggested they do.
Nick Purslow:Yeah, massively agree on Facebook groups. They are really, really good. Because I mean, quite often, if someone posts something new in the group, you get a Facebook notification for it. And they tend to see a lot of engagement, a lot of clicks if you post it in a specific group and we at Glampitect have actually set up a couple on Facebook. So we'll put those in the description for anyone who wants to set up a glamping site. Yeah, you can. There's a lot of content that goes in there that you might find useful. We'll put that in the description. Right, moving into part two, we're going to discuss websites, we think that, I mean, are a necessity rather than as a nice thing to have. So Moray, why do you think every glamping site needs a website?
Moray Donaldson:Every glamping site should have some form of website. There's features on there such as like local amenities. So, if you're in the middle of nowhere, it says, "You can see these are the shops you have nearby", "These are the facilities you have nearby." And sometimes it can be difficult to have all this information on one social media platform. Because it becomes really cluttered. And it's all on social media. And it becomes more difficult to find the right stuff that you want to as a guest. And on the website, you can tailor it specifically to what you wanted to see. And you're not restricted by the social media rules and regulations in terms of what you can see on there, where you can post. And there's a lot of features you can have on a website that you cannot have on social media. So yeah, that's what I would say. Especially since you can have a social media and your website work in tandem with each other, you can drive content to one from the other. And that's also a really important thing to consider as well, when setting up your sites.
Nick Purslow:What would you say is an absolute must to have on the websites? What should they look like? Also, what features should they include?
Moray Donaldson:With regards to what they should look like, they should reflect your brand guideline. So, make sure you use the same colours, the same logos, the same fonts that you've used in your other content. Because it's just reinforcing the idea that it's yours. That is your colour, that is your logo, that is your text, your tone of voice, even. Things you should include in it, always a booking facility. Some form of gallery that you can upload, user generated content too, which you can also post on social media platforms. You can have a map of a local area saying, "Half a mile from our site, you've got this lovely local village where there's a nice sort of shop." You've got lovely restaurants, if you don't want to cook that evening. Sight facilities include everything that your site has. Because this is the thing that people look for when they go around paying. We see some really luxury sites throughout the UK, not saying what they do and don't have on their glamping site. People go there and realise they need to bring their own towels, or bedding is not included, stuff like that. You need to say that so people know what to expect when they arrive. So, that's where some of the main things should be and you should have on your site as well.
Nick Purslow:Yeah, if you're working in tandem of social media, I like to think of it as social media being more of a steady stream of info, whereas the websites are sort of directory that you can find all the information you need on there on top of an actual booking facility where people can actually book to stay your site. Moray Donaldson:Yep. having booking facilities on your own website, NC500 pods, Glampitect, sort of Resident glamping site. We also use external booking channels like Airbnb and Expedia. And is that something you'd recommend for most glamping sites?
Moray Donaldson:So partially, I would always recommend having a booking facility on your website for the fact that you don't have to pay for it, essentially. That's what it comes down to. And sites like Airbnb, Expedia will always take a cut of your profit or the booking fee from that. Or they will charge guests more to book with them through your site. So, the only way you can offset this is by charging them more on the sites which if they only know your site through Airbnb or Expedia, or any other sort of channel manager, it may put them off. Because they're paying more than what they thought they would. And by all means, use them together. But don't just rely on a single booking channel to do this. We use a software called Beds24. And it allows us to have all of our booking channels linked. So, that's one of our website. And the third party providers through booking channels, always linked together through this, so you can't double book. So, there's no risk of that happening. There's no risk of having an angry customer saying"Oh, I thought I was booked with someone else's." That just can't happen with the software that we use. And there's a monthly rate for that as well. I can't remember what it is off my head. But it's pennies compared to what you can make if it sets up properly. So, yeah. And booking channels are all well and good. But you do have to pay for them. And that pay can get quite expensive, especially if the guest cancels. Because they'll ask for a refund. But the booking channels still keep that fee. So you've lost out on that money. And the client will expect a full refund for just the partial one. So, that's something to always bear in mind.
Nick Purslow:So if possible, it's always best to direct to your website's own booking facility,
Moray Donaldson:If possible, yeah. But we understand that you have to sort of build up that customer base to do that. So, they're aware of the website in the first place. And that's where your marketing comes into place that you already covered. So, I wouldn't say booking channels are a bad idea. I would say just don't focus too heavily on it because it will cost you quite a lot of money in the long run.
Nick Purslow:Okay, just to round things off. Moray, you're part of the in-house websites and marketing team. If anyone wants to know more about how they can market their social, their glamping site and they can get in touch. What exactly do we offer on the websites and marketing side?
Moray Donaldson:So, we offer website creation as one of our services. And with that comes website audits which can sort of fine tune the website that you want to create. We will do a full brand guidelines for you. So we will go really in depth of that. And if we need to change anything for the domain, we can always do that as well. We will set up your social media accounts for you, we can run them as much as you want. So we offer three levels, we offer level one, two and three. Level One is where we'll create it for you, and give you a post template a week. And you can push that, you can reply to all the comments and you can run it yourself that way. We can do a 50-50 split, where we will generate content for you, but you'll also generate content yourself. And then lastly, we can sort of what we like to call 90-10 split. So 90%, we'll run the social media, we will generate all the content for it as well. All you have to do is let us know of any deals that you have coming up, any sort of incentives you want to run, anything like that. And you also just need to reply to comments, we'll put the comments into quite the place for you. And then you can just reply to individual messages if you have any specific requirements as well.
Nick Purslow:Brilliant, and we'll put all the contact links in the description for you to get in touch if anyone wants our services or just wants to know more. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Glampitect podcast. Please do leave us a rating review if you found it valuable. And I look forward to you joining us next week.