Yes, yes, yes we know. It's a story we tell more than frequently at Yellow Tuxedo. But quite frankly we'll continue to talk about it until the cows come home because the time [ well times plural actually as we went to ITV studios 3 times] we were featured on This Morning with our old business Baylily Bell Tents is the perfect real life example of how working hard on your online presence really can open up the door to new opportunities that you may not have even realised were available to you.
So why are we blogging about it today? No...its not because the Mr Philip Scofield sacking scandal has blown up across the UK media, but our good old Facebook memories popped up this week with some incredible images and videos of our time at the ITV studios and it made us smile.
The funny thing was that when we first got the call from This Morning we weren't actually actively looking for a PR opportunity at that moment in time. Emily had literally 24hrs previously landed back on UK soil from Namibia, very tired and jet lagged from travel. We were also due to move house at the end of May so all of our worldly possessions were in boxes and scattered across Hampshire as we prepped to move. This included a lot of our business equipment that we'd put into temporary storage.
Needless to say that when the phone rang it didn't take very long for us to say yes and work out how the actual Jeff we were going to get to Central London for 05:30am the next day when we needed to pack the van and find child care for two babies..
Opportunities like This Morning don't land on your doorstep very often. And in the spirit of adventure we had to say yes.
It's very simple. It's what we teach our clients all the time. When someone Googles what you do you want to be showing up on page one. Not only do you want to show up on page one, you want to DOMINATE your page one with the most kick ass online presence that you can deliver.
And that is something that we worked incredibly hard to do for the ten years in which we grew Baylily Bell Tents. As a geographically based business we could have simply gone down the local marketing route of leaflets, local ads and wedding fairs and events. But we didn't want that. We saw the opportunity from growing an online presence that would give us the chance to not only become a well known local business but a national brand as well.
Not everyone has aspirations to be national or even global. We did. We had ambitions to grow our business with a franchise model that would be mean that we could deliver Baylily experiences all over the world [ something that we were very much going to do right up until the pandemic struck] and with those aspirations it meant that we really did have to do our best to stand out and be seen.
When the This Morning producer made that call on the chance that a glamping company could come and do a segment we were the obvious choice. We dominated our page one.
It's a perfect example of what we say about not knowing who is watching. You will NEVER know the name of the last person who googled you. It may not be ITV coming for you but the world is a huge place...you never know what that unforeseen opportunity is going to be.
The success of Baylily online was not an overnight one. In fact it took months and months of consistent effort to start making headway. It was by no means easy but nothing is. There are no magic wands. If you want something badly enough you have to put the work in.
For Baylily Bell Tents the game changer in our business really was our approach to video content and the growth of our YouTube channel. Working in seasonal events meant that we had a short window of time every year to ensure we were like content magpies collating as much video footage, photos and testimonials as possible to showcase the business properly.
In the winter we didn't down tools. We spent the off-season interviewing fellow suppliers, we did FB live Q&A sessions with couples getting married, we blogged about EVERYTHING.
And then we optimised.
And then we repurposed.
And then we rinsed and repeated.
Building an online presence doesn't have to be difficult. Its been three years since Baylily closed its doors permanently but we now spend all of our time supporting other small business owners to build a well rounded and successful online presence for themselves. We teach you the skills to be awesome online, we give you the toolkit that you can draw upon any time you have a business goal that you want to shout about and we stand on the sidelines with our virtual pom poms making sure that you feel confident enough to deliver.
We will forever be thankful for that initial phone call. It changed our world massively. It also helped shape Yellow Tuxedo to be what it is now and our approach to online visibility.