We are kicking off the RV parks and campgrounds. How do you fix your online reputation and get more customers? Part one, it's more than just remote reviews, folks. we're glad to have you join us either live right now or if you're watching this at a later date, thank you for tuning in and hopefully learning something very useful for your RV park, resort, or campground. All right, in the interest of staying on schedule, we will move right along and get into our presentation, our teaching, our training, our Webby.
First and foremost, who are we? We are Rest & Relax ROI. We partner exclusively with RV parks, resorts, and campgrounds, and we are an ARVC member. That is the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds.
We talk about the M5, which is an RV park centric marketing system, which has a framework that's focused on reputation, resell, reach, and retargeting. What am I doing here? I am your host, Mark Rowan. I grew up in West Virginia on a campground, as a matter of fact. But I've been helping companies with their online presence for over 20 years, some of them campgrounds, some of them not, and been running this marketing agency since 2014.
I do have one wife and four kids who got me this nifty little Father's Day shirt and one dog. Dog did not give me anything for Father's Day, but my kids are three of them are teenagers. So I got going to be a senior, going to be a sophomore, going to be an 8th grader, and going to be 6th grader all rising up. We have a lot of fun together. That's a little bit about me, what's going on with today and what we're doing.
What we're going to leave with today are some of these items here. First of all, we're going to have a better understanding about how to maintain a good online reputation, first and foremost. There are three areas we can upgrade that will improve your reputation, and then there's some action items to put in place about your parks. Those are the things that we're going to get out of this. Stay tuned for all of those things.
Like I said, questions come up at any time. You can drop them in the live chat or if they're watching this on YouTube later, you can drop them in their comments. If it's broke, we need to fix it, right? Just like this old junkie RV, it's not going anywhere. That may be your online presence when it comes to your reputation.
Getting reviews is essential, but it's more than just that. Reviews, I think everyone understands that you need to have those, and they need to be good, and you need to do those type of things. But there's some other common reputation issues that we're going to address. One of those is a website that's working against you. That's a problem, right?
Another thing is you're a little bit too hard to get a hold of. We want to avoid that at all possible. You can't always man the front desk or phone. I've run across that in my conversations. And then the incorrect information about your park, you don't want to have that out floating around the internet, then there's not a consistent way to get reviews.
The reality is your website and your online presence is an opportunity to impress. A campers visit is going to start way before they arrive at a park. Reality is your online experience is just as important as an in person stay. I know that might be twisting some people, but the reality is you already have a bad reputation before people show up, and they might not show up at all. We're going to bring that same energy.
R&R at the park to R&R on the net. That's what we're looking to do. Part one of our reputation improvement series and trainings, we want to look at three years improvement today. The first one is going to be the website. Then we're going to take a look at messaging. And then finally, the front desk is a nice picture there. Some of our guests might recognize it.
Website working for you. That's the first part of our website and our reputation. It's going to be working.
Number one, it's going to be easy to find. It's going to be easy to use. You're going to be easy to talk with. Finally, it's going to generate revenue. As much as we'd like to all pretend that we're on vacation, working in this industry, it's really meant to generate revenue. Your website should be part of that.
First step, easy to find. You've heard of Google, probably, everyone still uses it to find stuff. Part of that equation and being found is your website should load quick. These are Google recommendations. One to 2 seconds for your website to load. If it takes much longer than that, that can definitely be a detriment to people finding your site because Google won't like you much.
Another big factor for your website to be easy to find is fresh, helpful, engaging content. Google actually has a term for this, a phrase, it's QDF. And you're all familiar with that because it means quality deserves freshness.
Google really likes to see websites that are putting out content regularly, fresh, good information. When it comes to the context of an RV park, you're thinking about maybe it's blog posts or just other relevant information that your guests would be looking for when they are visiting your area and your park.
Some best practice optimization. When it comes to online search results, SEO, search engine optimization. There's some things that your website should have going on the site itself.
We might call that on page optimization. First of all, you got title tags. In lay terms, that's just what's the title of the page that someone visited was, your home page or interior page. Make sure that's done right. Your description on your page. Are you putting the right information in your page descriptions that tell Google to identify what that is?
Then image alt tags might sound a little techy like this whole little section here, because we could talk about optimization for hours on end, but that's not our main focus. But Google can't find images unless you put all tags in there. Google at this point is not reading the content of an image without these things that give a picture of a lake on your park. You want to label that and alt tag parks, beautiful lake or something. Then when these things are put together, your ability to come up for relevant searches are much better.
Is it best to use image all tags on your website? Is it? It definitely is, thanks to that question. And I was the first chat that came in, so I just went right ahead and answered it because I'm awesome.
So we're going to keep rolling on to website easy to use so not only someone finds it, how easy is it to use after the fact they find your beautiful site. Number one, mobile friendly. At this point, everyone's got a phone attached to their hip. you want all the important parts viewable on your cell phone or anybody else's cell phone for that matter.
And closely related to that is a responsive design. Whether they have that phone, a laptop, a tablet, they're at work searching, obviously during their lunch break trying to find their next vacation spot. But it looks good no matter what that's responsive. And then the other thing about easy to use is the questions that a guest might have are being answered. It's saving you time and them time if you're answering as many questions as possible.
You're going to be easy to talk to. Don't hide from the people that want to visit you. Everyone's got to have a contact form, right? That's the beginner stage. Give us a way to send an email without the email.
We know that if an email is out on a website just naked and afraid for anybody to see, it will eventually get picked up and you'll get spammed. Definitely use that contact form to your advantage and for your customers.
Your phone number: not only just having a phone number but ideally it's going to be tracked so that you can record and report on that. That's definitely a way to go to take full advantage of a phone number on your website.
Then your social account links get the social and SEO juice. We talked about optimization a little bit before correct links. It does help to have social websites when it comes to optimizing and being found on the internet. In addition I've seen too many people with links to social accounts and there's no links or they are bad links. Just make sure your links work.
Web chat: this is huge and our company can attest to how much this is growing. People look for this. It is the fastest growing way to respond to guests quickly. Have that on your site, make it easily available for people to jump on, ask a quick question if they need to if they can't find all that. You got all the information already there, then hopefully they can find it easily. But if they have something they can't find, they can quickly get an answer.
Continue on with the website and making sure that it is going to have a good reputation for you because your site is awesome. This is more for you really but it's going to generate revenue. This definitely goes alongside of that. Online booking is a benefit for the end user so not only is it convenient for the guests but you're going to have upfront money, right? Who doesn't want to have some revenue upfront. You want to look for that. There's lots of great options for online booking these days. Look how that might be put into use for your own operation.
Then you have upsell opportunities: additional goods and services that your park has available. It could be firewood like this beautiful picture. Either someone orders it even before they get there or when they're on site they can jump on your website or maybe you have a mobile app where they can order these types of things or maybe have special activities like water, special water rides or things of that nature that are an up charge. Make it available to purchase through your site. Not only are these things generating revenue for you but they're also making a good experience for your guests. You are making it easy for them to purchase.
Merch: fans love it. Give the people what they want. People love taking vacations, right? And this reality is sometimes they'll identify heavily with your own park or the area that they are visiting because they're at your park. You can have some great stuff that people want to buy not only when they're on site but look at the possibility of doing that through an online store or something. Even when they go home, they potentially buy stuff because they had such a great time.
We've got an action item as well here. We're going to have three action items today is we have three main sections, right? That was our website. And the action item for that is add web chat to your website. So 42% of users prefer live chat over email or social. That is growing. More and more people are wanting to utilize a web chat when it's available on a site. And we definitely recommend that you implement that if at all possible.
Here are some: there's WordPress. A lot of people use WordPress today for their websites online. But there's a bunch of solutions already built out that you might be able to plug and play with your current web developer or maybe you run it yourself. There's Intercom and Zendesk. There are a couple of huge names in the industry. We actually have an option, so we'd love to talk to you about it if it's something that you want to take action on. That was the first step of online reputation, making sure it's in place is your website.
We're going to move on to the next major area to optimize, and that's sending and receiving messages. Or this title says Receive and Send.
Social profiles. First and foremost, your Google Business Profile that's now called and recently changed the name. And then text messages. A lot of people send texts today, so we're going to look at those.
Your social profiles: do we know or not know that people are on social media a lot? Especially as a generation, I think Gen X and down and maybe even before that. It's probably spending too much time on social. People are on it. We don't want to miss them or their messages when they're on there.
Here's a little stat for you. 20 billion messages are sent each month just on businesses and their profiles. Make sure people are accustomed now to sending and receiving messages on Facebook Messenger. When it comes to businesses, are you utilizing that and taking advantage Instagram, direct messages for that? 81% of users are saying that Instagram helps them in their research when they're buying.
When people are looking for where they're going to go and where they're going to stay, they're checking out Instagram, they might be asking questions. The idea is make sure you're using that. There are other platforms that your guests could potentially be on. Make sure that you know where their guests are at and if you can, communicate back and forth with them when they're on those platforms. Definitely Facebook, Instagram, start with those for sure.
We're going to move on to Google My Business, which, like I said, technically is called Google Business Profile. Now, they've rebranded this like 20 times and however many, that's a little bit of exaggeration, but not a lot. I mean, it has been rebranded several times. We all know where it is.
It's the search results for local businesses. The reality about GPB, it's not GMB, is that they want you, the user, to be on their platform as long as possible. They'll put your information on there, your business information, but they'd rather you stay as much as possible, right? That means while they have a website link and all that, it's not real prominent necessarily.
People will find and click on it, right? But at the same time, things like the message will allow guests to directly message you from my search result. Make sure that that's turned on so that you can take advantage of people asking questions, because it's all that speed of use and easy to get in contact with, the idea that we're looking at with this portion of online reputation management.
Another piece of this whole GMB, or GPB as it's now called, is the ability that someone can call you from the profile. You can actually use software to turn on a feature that if they were to call and for whatever reason, we're not able to pick up, somebody at the front desk was busy, whatever the case may be. You can actually have a text message sent from that GMB call that you missed or you were busy signal, whatever the case, and you can follow up that way. That's another way that you can improve the experience of your customers and your guests by turning that feature on.
We just got a little bit into the SMS and text messaging, but then there's just the whole idea of this by itself. So just the ability to send and receive. I'm sure all of our phones are, like within arms link right now. Mine is right over here. Everyone's carrying them all the time, like I mentioned before. People are used to sending and receiving text messages for just about everything now.
Are you using it as a part to communicate? There's the reality that when people opt in, you can send them alerts and information that are really important, whether it's weather, health, safety, closures, whatever the case may be, that could be super helpful for anybody that's connected to your park.
Then there's the marketing end of it. When you begin having these conversations, then you can offer people, whether it's a loyalty or a holiday or a birthday or anything like that, you can begin to set up these things that communicate with your guests and bring them back. Once someone knows you and likes you and has a great time with your park, then the reality is it's a lot easier to bring them back. You want to try to connect with them when you can.
We're going to take action once again when it comes to messaging. So the idea here, it's fairly simple. Respond to messages as quickly as possible. This is some data that's out there: that 24 hours in reality is too slow. If it takes you 24 hours more to respond to someone's message on whatever platform it is, people have moved on more than likely.
46% of customers expect a response under 4 hours. I'm sure that increases year to year as we become less and less patient. That's just the reality that's out there. Here's the negative side in the travel industry, only 27% of businesses are responding when these messages come through on these different platforms.
There's a lot of room for improvement here. Don't let those messages fall on the wayside because that's potential business. The average business response is 5 hours. If you find yourself going beyond that time frame, you're going under the regular response rate for any business, much less travel. That's something that I'm sure every business can continually improve on and that will help your online repetition immensely. It's having good response times to messages.
We're moving into part three of our three part training. We've already talked about the website, we talked about messaging, now we're talking about front desk automation. You might think, well, isn't that once people get there, sort of, but also before people get there, your front desk is important. We're talking about the reality that voicemail is handled, a call tree, we can have a kiosk potentially. Then we can also have an auto front desk which will talk a little bit about.
The reality of voicemail and call tree. I mean, this is the basics, real basic. We talked about some other basics when it came to online reputation with your website, this is even more basic. If you don't have a voicemail, at the very least I'm not sure what's happening.
The call tree: someone calls and you have a series of options that people can select to see and get to the information they need to. We're not really going to talk about those much more because they've been around for a long time.
We will take a little deeper look at the kiosk though. Here are some things about that. Obviously kiosks would be on site, but this all ties into the reputation and how you can improve this.
We're talking about reducing the workload that you have on your team members, it's less waiting for campers when they check in and then there can be fewer mistakes and human errors and then long term you're looking at lower operating costs. That's definitely an area to improve potentially on the front desk.
We've talked about SMS a few times today. This is another way, as you can see in this photo, we're talking about an immediate and automated response. Once again, if someone calls and you're not able to pick up the phone. You can see in this example on screen here:
"Hey, we missed your call, sorry about that. Is there a way we can help?" Someone says: "Do you have availability for July 4? And the message says, "We do. Click here to book your spot."
There could be a certain amount of automation that you put into place because of this. You can answer some FAQs automatically that people come through. If you're not able to answer the phone in a timely fashion, ask them do you need to reserve a site on the available dates?
The other thing that this really does with implementing an SMS or automated front desk through SMS, you can filter some calls. Not all phone calls you receive as a business are created equally. Some of them you'd rather not talk to because maybe they're actively trying to get you to buy a new playground set. That's not something you want to address right now. Either way you can check in on something like this a couple, three times a day and the ones that have not already automated, like maybe someone just like hey, are you looking to book? And you can just send them a link to your online reservation system automatically and that can take care of itself. In other ones, you might go through and look at it and be like hey, this is a message that needs to be addressed. You can filter that, right?
Here's an action item. This is the final action item of our three part online reputation improvement series of today. Implement call tax back. It's a great way to alleviate some manpower maybe issues. There could be some staffing shortages. I know a lot of people are trying to find the right kind of people to work with, front, test, that sort of thing that this can help alleviate.
The reality is when someone calls and doesn't talk to somebody at that moment 85% of those people don't call back. This is a way to capture that missed opportunity and make it an unmissed opportunity. 67% of people cite that bad service, customer service is the reason they didn't return.
Start out the conversation taking care of people and this whole presentation has been about that. How can you take care of your customer and do as much as you can to make it easy on them so that they can go through and whether it's book or find out information? You don't want them not to return because it's some level of customer service that wasn't done. This is what we're trying to do.
That this type of solution is there when you need it. If you pick up the phone, no worries. But if for whatever reason it can't be done, then you're covered. So there's a couple of places out there that podium and weave offer this type of thing. You can look at those or you could talk to us once again, it's another thing that we have a solution for.
To review, we had three areas of improvement that we addressed and that was the website. And if anybody has questions on these, please drop them in the chat. We will have a Q&A session here in a second if someone has another question.
Messaging: we talked about the areas there that can improve. And then of course, your front desk, we just finished up. That was part one. Any questions from the peanut gallery or otherwise?
We did have a question early on about alt text. So that goes back to the website when optimizing your site to make sure that it's easy to find. With your website, you're going to have pictures of all different kinds of things. Make sure that it's labeled on the back end. If you're using WordPress or some other thing, you'll be able to fill in information. That's called an alt image tag and you'll want to describe what that picture is. That's a helpful thing when it comes to Google search results. Make sure you do that. If you haven't, if you don't know, check with your web site provider. If you don't have one of those, you can talk to us. We do certain things like that.
Any other questions before we move on? Of course, if you're watching this at a later date, please drop your questions in the comments section. The next part will be about a month from now. This is the start of a series of webinars and trainings that we'll make available. Part two, which we'll have a slide in a second on that.
Look for about the same time of the month. It will be the third week of July. We're coming up on the end of June right now. Keep your eyes out for that. We'll be sending information out to our network to let people know about that, as well. I appreciate everybody joining with us today and later on as well.
Please connect with us. We got social media and ours is linked you! If you go to our website, it clicks over to our profiles. We have Instagram, Facebook, we're on LinkedIn as well. Love to connect with you there, if we haven't already.
Next time, part two, how to fix your online reputation and get more customers. This time it's about reviews. That's going to be happening and we'd be glad to see you once again on that. Or if you weren't able to make it this time on the live, you'll have a chance next time. It's pretty exciting and I think that's going to wrap up our time together today. I appreciate those that were able to jump on with us.
If there's any questions from this or anything else related to just your online presence, I'd be glad to have a conversation. We do have the final slide, so we can keep the conversation going because we would love to chat with you. You can go to https://book.restrelaxroi.com and book a time for us to talk about whatever you want. Actually, we have no limitations on the subject matter.
If you want to talk about shirt that my kids got me for Father's Day, I can tell you about that, but I don't know if that's a big drawing item or not. All right, everybody, thank you very much for your time. We're so glad that you could jump on with us today or you watched it later. Super glad that you're looking at us, chatting in the comments. All right, everyone, until next time, happy trails!
