The problem with digital marketing for small business is that more often than not, it sounds too good to be true. Getting orders in your sleep?! Making 7 figures without having 21 employees?! Growing your business without hiring a full-time marketing team?! Are you sure this is legal?!
And I hear you, and I agree: what we marketers talk about sounds like witchcraft 50% of the times and borderline criminal activity the other 50%.
Today I want to share more about digital marketing for horse stables and specifically, describe how Salty Cowboy – a rescue horse stable in Bali is taking advantage of the possibilities of digital marketing to grow their top and bottom line and ultimately: save more horses!
The story of Salty Cowboy
Salty Cowboy is a horse rescue center in Kedungu beach, Tabanan. At any given time, they home between 16-18 horses and ponies. Horses aren’t rescued from the slaughter parking lot (eating horse meat is not a thing in Indonesia), rather, they are bought from owners who are not taking great care of them.
Most horses come in malnourished, anxious and with abrasions that never had time or care to heal.
Simone, an ambitious Dutch entrepreneur and former professional rider, set out to change this in 2019. Salty Cowboy is a one-of-a-kind place in Indonesia.
This social enterprise has a smart model. She buys the horses from the owners, then homes and re-trains them so they can be suitable for fun beach & rice field rides. After 12-18 months, the horses are in great health and ready to find a new forever family – which Simone vets and trains personally to ensure their welfare.
Salty Cowboy is a leisurely 8 minute walk from a black sand beach where the horses can play and it’s surrounded by quiet rice fields! Each horse has its own stable with a fan and receives regular vet care as well as nutritious food.
The marketing & IT situation
As Simone keeps telling me: animals aren’t machines. You can’t predict when Lumpia is going to have a bad day or the weather at 5pm two Tuesdays from now.
So, everything was done manually. That includes:
- Customer communication (approx 3-5h of Whatsapp back-and-forth every day)
- Scheduling (1-2h every day)
- Social media posting (1h)
- Payments and accounting (1-2h every day)
- Legalities (1h every day)
When I say manually, I mean it. The “calendar” is an old-style paper agenda with lots of scribbles that only Simone herself can read. Payments go directly to a bank account and then everyone needs to double check, find the payment, confirm, scribble in the notebook.
Even with COVID-19 and travel restrictions, by the summer of 2021 Salty Cowboy actually had a full schedule between training horses, kids’ lessons and fun beach & rice field rides and to say that Simone was stretched thin is an understatement.
She loves giving all her energy to horses & people alike so the obvious idea of “ah, just hire someone to man the phones” is not an option. Knowing which horse can do which activity is actually a complex operation that can’t be outsourced to a software or a receptionist.
But, coordinating this was costing 3-6 hours every day – ON TOP of Simone’s main job of chief horse trainer.
What witchcraft I used to fix this
The first issue: messy scheduling
The first step was to appeal to Simone’s creative side (she used to run a design company in her previous life, afterall!) and implementing a color coded Google Calendar.
Yes.
A simple, free, easy Google Calendar.
Brown = this activity takes place in the arena
Green = this is in the rice fields
Yellow = this is at the beach
Red = admin meetings
Blue = raincheck (literally)
Each event contains: Human name, Activity, Payment Status, Horse + any notes. For example, if I booked a beach rice it might look like this
And this is the first, big sigh of relief for Simone. Now, to gauge how the business is doing, she can simply look at the calendar and see how many slots are taken each day. Since capacity is constrained by both horses and staff, she knows exactly when slots are available and for which activity.
Secondly, this provides a very valuable history of how much each horse is working. Salty Cowboy practices responsible and sustainable horse riding, so each horse works for (MAX!) 2 non consecutive hours each day. This also affects a horse diet, so it’s a really valuable addition to the “system”.
Scheduling was definitely the biggest issue I wanted to solve, and this Google Calendar solution ticks a lot of boxes. Are there more complicated systems out there? I’m sure. But at this point, they’re not worth the extra stress or cost.
The second issue: too much time on Whatsapp!!
I’ll forever be amazed at people who don’t read websites and instead prefer asking the same questions to a live person. FOREVER. Why would you want to wait for someone to look at their phone and reply when all you want to know is readily available on a website? I have no idea, but let’s leave my introversion out of this.
Since scheduling isn’t automated, it has to be done manually, which means Simone talks to EVERY person who comes to Salty Cowboy.
Which is awesome. It’s rare to find business owners so dedicated to their work these days.
But also: it takes WAY too much time to leave any energy for running the business or, gasp!, taking an evening off work!
My *magic* solution included 2 parts:
- Make full use of Whatsapp Business
- Redirect all social media DM (there’s probably 10 every day) to Whatsapp or website
Whatsapp Business is an amazing tool. The features I was really excited about implementing for Simone are:
LABELS:
Guess what, now we can use color coded labels to tag conversations as “PENDING” “PAID” “BEACH RIDE” etc etc. Visual simplification saves time and makes everything more efficient.
Result: less stress and overwhelm, more control.
QUICK REPLIES:
Simone had some “standard replies” saved in her Notes app. So every time somebody asked “How much is X” she would open her notes app, find the right block, copy it, go back to Whatsapp, paste it, customise it and send. Which sounds easy – but it’s 30 seconds EXTRA every time you interact with a customer.
So I turned all those saved notes into quick replies which can be found by typing “/infobeachride” and never leaving the Whatsapp app.
BLISS.
Result: 2h less on Whatsapp every day. Less stress because you only need to check Whatsapp.
The third issue: payments
Most payments were received in cash or bank transfer, even though Salty Cowboy has an e-commerce ready Wix website.
It was pretty easy to connect Xendit to Wix, then QuickBooks to Wix so that money can flow in from the website and be correctly accounted for and deposited in the bank account at regular intervals.
Then, I created the different services as digital products in the Wix storefront. This is one example.
If you are following so far, you can imagine what my next step was: I created quick replies with the link to each products.
When a customer wants to book, they first agree on the time with Simone (manual), then make the payment through the website (digital), which is then reported in Quickbook (automated) and sent to Salty Cowboy’s bank account (automated).
An iPhone notification confirms the money’s in, and Simone can now manually update the calendar.
Result: 1h less on Whatsapp/accounting matters every day. Less stress, more control.
Other things we fixed along the way
- Google Analytics wasn’t tracking conversions because Ecommerce Reporting was turned off. Super easy fix.
- Website SEO for homepage and top 5 pages – this never hurts.
- Setting up Quickbooks.
- Setting up Xendit (48h lead time, but relatively painless).
- Whatsapp Business profile optimisation.
- Instagram Bio optimisation.
- Setting up Manychat with a nice welcome flow on Instagram and Facebook.
- Changed cancellation policy so it’s easier to manage with the new flow.
- YouTube channel creation, setup and optimisation.
- Social media strategy analysis & tips on how to improve conversion.
- Created redirects to her review page to collect more happy 5***** testimonials from customers.
- Setting up a recurring donation system for her international friends who want to support the horses.
How this helps rescue horses, which is ultimately the point
Simone thought she had to hire a full time admin person, which would’ve taken budget away from the horses’ welfare and time away from her schedule to train…
She doesn’t need to hire anymore, since her “manual” activities have been streamlined and semi-automated. It’s super fast for her to DIY, and down the line handing this off will be a lot more smooth vs transitioning from the manual system.
Simone also thought she couldn’t take on any more new clients….
Instead, now that she can visualise her calendar, she can accept 20% more bookings = which means she can rescue and train more horses too!
Simone was feeling self-conscious about her social media activities, since she has 7k followers and not 50k….
After looking at the data, we realised that she was doing just fine and no, she does not need to outsource her content creation efforts. I actually told her to post less, recycle all the videos and photos she already had, and focus on promoting those activities she still had capacity for! A few weeks later: it’s working. Her engagement is up and the number of enquiries and bookings is also growing.
What juicy services were involved?
We kicked things off with a 1-day-intensive session. 99% of the implementation mentioned above was done on the day of!
Before the 1-day-intensive session, I sat down with Simone over coffee and asked her about how things are going and where she’d like them to go instead.
On the day of, Simone was with me in between horse and human training while I was busy working on her calendar, Whatsapp and all the rest of the witchcraft.
At the end of the 1-day, once the stables were closed, we sat down and I showed her everything!!
In the following days, Simone emailed me with a few questions and clarifications. Signing up for an account on Quickbooks gave us a little stress, but nothing we couldn’t handle.
Now, Simone has SO MUCH extra time on her hands because of the automation she’s decided to join my digital marketing mastermind for business owners: The Pickling Club where she can keep learning new things from me and the other members.
What about the future? I can see more automation in Simone’s future! My dream is to implement Whatsapp API and maybe a dedicated stable management solution. But that’s a plan for 2022.
