The Boostly Guarantee is a confident one: a guaranteed return on client investment on any Boostly product in new direct bookings, or 100% money back. It’s not a claim many other agencies can make, but founder Mark Simpson has good reason for his conviction – his business model has been tested and proven.
With an ever-growing following and client portfolio, Boostly has built hundreds of websites for hospitality owners as of today and helped thousands market their businesses to increase their direct bookings and reduce OTA commission costs.
Let’s learn how this Cloudways Partner Agency has achieved success over time.
Boostly’s Unique Niche
Mark Simpson has a background in marketing, plus a family farm stay business in Yorkshire, England. It didn’t take much of a leap to merge the two, but the result was more than the sum of its parts: a new way for short term accommodation businesses to thrive from generating direct bookings. And so, Boostly was born.
Boostly’s sole niche is short stay accommodation owners like B&Bs, hotels, single property owners, serviced accommodation businesses and property managers. Working within this unique target audience, the agency has managed to secure a team with exceptional experience and knowledge in the industry. It is now one of the most highly recommended agencies to work within the UK and beyond.
Check out the other top marketing agencies in the UK
Boostly’s Biggest Achievement
“Building over 400 client websites.”
That’s no mean feat – Boostly was founded in October 2016, a mere four years prior to the time of writing this. And in addition to creating an average of a hundred websites per year, the company is also the largest online training platform for hospitality owners. It even managed to snag a Shortyz Award for Best Use of Social Media in 2020.
So how did Boostly manage to do it all?
The Boostly Recipe for Success
As Mark puts it, there’s a three-step process in place for success.
“1. Creating repeatable systems and processes to improve workflow.
2. Outsourcing and building a skilled team.
3. Showing up and giving value on social media every single day and creating a community around it.”
It’s easier said than done, of course, and Boostly has faced its fair share of challenges. The biggest obstacles, according to Mark, were: “Building reputation, trust and social proof from the beginning.” But overcoming those problems was only a matter of time. As word spread about Boostly’s immaculate results, the company gradually got to the point that it now “mostly gets work from referrals.”
What sets Boostly apart is its proactive approach to problem resolution. Take that time it ran into web hosting complications.
The Switch to a Reliable Managed Hosting Solution
“We were previously with Siteground,” relates Mark, “and ran into endless limitations. We moved to Bluehost and the performance was terrible and unreliable. We moved to Cloudways and haven’t stopped growing since. Why? Check comparison between Cloudways vs Bluehost.
The performance and speeds are by far the best, the support is by far the most helpful, and we scale so easily.”
It’s a key takeaway for agencies: don’t stop searching for solutions until you find that sweet Goldilocks spot.
Experience is a Teacher: Lessons from Boostly’s Most Challenging Project
Not every project slots neatly into a specified timeframe; in fact, you could probably count the ones that do on a single hand! And that’s the story behind Boostly’s most challenging project to date:
“It was creating a website template that was 95% ready to use, for over 50 new clients in under 24 hours. It had been requested by a community for a challenge they were running at short notice. The thing is, we had thought about creating such a product for some time.
We learned that sitting on ideas for months is a wasted opportunity. When you set a deadline and goal, you can achieve far more than you think in a much shorter time.”
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The Apps Boostly Can’t Do Without
The necessity of project management tools that align team members with agency goals, and increase productivity and efficiency are not lost on Mark. He credits three apps with providing the efficiency Boostly is known for:
“1. Elementor is the key to our business. It speeds up our process, makes it repeatable, and also easy for our clients to use themselves.
2. Trello for project management. With a team of now 10 people, everyone clearly knows what to be working on and what stage it is at.
3. Calendly, we have an efficient funnel and lead capture system paired with Calendly, so before we even get on a sales call our clients know 80% of what they need to know, which makes the ‘decision call’ as we call it much more efficient.”
Tips from Mark for New Agency Owners Finding their Niche
- “Know your industry inside out. Understand your clients’ pains and problems and how you can help solve them.
- A pretty website isn’t enough. Anyone can make a website these days. Businesses have much greater problems than how their website simply looks. Work out how you can help make their life easier.
- #neverstoplearning – What works well today will be obsolete tomorrow. Don’t get stale and stuck in your ways, because the world is changing fast. Keep up.”
