Heads In Beds Show - Announcing My BOOK: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing [Behind The Scenes]

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

In this episode, Conrad and Paul chat about Conrad's new book launching for VRMA: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing and share early-access to get on the list to get it first when the book is launched. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellBuy The Book Now (Amazon)🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. Hey there, Paul. How's it going? Just fantastic. We're recording this. It's October.

So we are well into the fall swing now. Unfortunately, we had to suffer through some sporting mishaps, we'll say in some cases. The Ryder Cup was not good. We as golfers, it was not a great time to be a big USA fan on the Ryder Cup side of things. That was tough and that I was up early in the morning, three hours in the morning watching it. So I regret that decision now a little bit three days later. But in the moment, I guess it was okay. Yeah, just feels like fall now, even though we had a record high for October 1st,

91 degrees in Minnesota. So I think we might have exceeded your attempts. I'm not sure. I didn't check any weather reports, but yeah, it's a little off, but we're going to be at 37 by Saturday. So welcome to Minnesota. So I think we might have exceeded your attempts. I'm not checking any weather reports, but yeah, it's a little off, but we're going to be at 37 by Saturday. So welcome to Minnesota. Yeah, I like the background. How are you doing, sir? Yeah, I too watch some of these things on tape delay because I'm not a weirdo.

And it seems like a lesson, a lesson to be learned here for people who are like, what's the Ryder Cup? They don't care, is that excellence requires preparation. If you want to win at something, you want to be the best at something you've got to prepare if you take a month and a half off from your chosen skill or field or whatever you're good at and then you try to dive into something and say oh yeah i'm gonna be excellent i'm gonna beat the best in the the other world at this particular thing if you're gonna be the best people in the world at a specific thing you better be working hard and preparing for it so i guess i find it i don't find the excuses credible to be honest with you this idea that oh we're away and this and i think it's ultimately it's like they were playing most of their team was playing at least somewhat competitively for about six weeks the other guys weren't the good guys so to speak weren't yeah and

they started very slow look on sunday and they played a lot better because they then played for a few days and stuff like that and then just lots of excuses about illnesses and things like that. It doesn't matter. You got to perform when your number is calling, if you're supposed to be the best in the world at something. So correct. Correct. That's the takeaway there. No doubt about it. Yeah. Yeah, I, it is. I think that was a great point is the guys who played recently, they played well, so leave it at that, leave it, what it will be there. But, and sometimes you can practice and you can prepare and you're just not good enough. See Mac Jones on. TV. Sometimes you can try. And the unfortunate part is that trying isn't, you don't really get rewarded for trying. It's really about the outcome and there's some bad outcomes there.

So another lesson to be learned, I think. Another lesson to be learned. Yes. Because we'll try to transition into the proper topic of the podcast now. I think a lot of people think that. And so what we're announcing today, what we're talking about today is the release of my book or the announcement of my book. It's coming up very shortly. I'll have a pre-order page

and stuff like that in the show notes or at least a place where you can put your email where I can send you an email when it's all done. And we spent about six, seven months working on this book. And I've tried to think about every possible iteration of property manager or host that might pick up this book and read it.

And I was thinking back to a lot of conversations that I've had with different people over the years. And a lot of them have said things like that, like, I've tried or like, I've attempted to do this before, I've tried to get direct bookings, and I haven't been successful. And then I look at the output that they put out there. And it's not very good. We'll dive into that as we go along here. But the title of the book is called mastering vacation marketing lessons learned from $50 million in direct booking. And you learn in chapter one that $50 million is actually not a real number. So we call it teaser in the business. So you'll actually get to see that. But no, it's been really fun to work on the book. I'm glad to finally

publicly announce it. I know, Paul, you saw an early copy. I've been working on it with an editor and with kind of a writer who's been helping me craft a lot of the pieces and my thoughts and put it into a book. And writing a book is hard. This has been like eight months or so from initial idea to like outlining to now getting ready to announce it publicly. It's been a ton of work. I was inspired by other people in the industry who have done it, like Brooke and others that we know together. And it's harder than you think. I think we ended at 168 pages on the document that we worked on. So it's not even particularly long, all things considered. There's people who write books twice, three times, four times as long as this, but it was actually a lot of fun to put together. And we want to talk today about what's inside of it. If it might be interesting for you

to those listeners to actually pick up a copy and go through it. But what was your early reaction when I sent you the pre-release Google doc version of it and what your thoughts were on mastering vacation rental marketing? It was, it was fun to see a lot of the stuff that we talk about here just play itself. Obviously, none of this stuff is off the top of your head. None of this stuff that this is years of experience. This is strategies on top of strategies, campaigns of top of campaigns. But just seeing everything be put in black and white, it's one of those things that I think it's an incredibly helpful tool. And it's just how people want to use it.

It is. I think the really nice thing that you do about the book is very similarly to how you go through the process with your customers, clients, partners. It is really helping people understand where they're at in the process. And I think your boxing analogy, which we've talked about previously, is very solid. It just gives people really a better understanding of where they are and where they can get to in the steps that they're going to need to take, going to be required to take there. So I guess that's how I would just start it off, like talking about how did you come up with the outline, the system for how you were going to do this?

And that's, I guess, how you run your business, but how you were going to write the book there as well. I had to sit down and think about it because I think we've talked about this before a little bit too. I tend to be very tactic focused. That's if I tend to slip into something, it tends to be, let's do this, let's do this specific tactic. And, but when you put together a book, you can't really just put a list of things together that you could be doing. That's not really the right way of constructing the information, nor is it particularly useful. How do I know if that's the right tactic for me to use? I could be too small or too big or wrong, whatever the case may be for that particular, again, tactic. So I had to zoom out a little bit and I had to think a little bit less just in terms of number of tactics or the tactics

that we were using and be like, and think about stages. So that was the first swing at this was stages. Like, okay, if you're in stage one, you need to focus on these things. If you're in stage two, focus on these things and so on. And then we just came up with this idea together, the writer that I'm working with, on doing it as an analogy. And I forget what our original analogy was. It wasn't very good. And then someone else on our team came up with this idea of boxing. And I thought it was really clever because we all can relate to that. Even if we're not boxing fans, we get the idea that someone's a heavyweight, someone's a featherweight, someone's a super heavyweight or something like that. And that's ultimately how things are fair

too, by the way. You could have the best boxer in the world at 110 pounds, a mediocre 220 pound boxer is probably going to be able to beat them. Also something to think about when you think about measuring yourself against the competition, right? I should probably be measuring my progress against other featherweights or other middleweights, not against, yes, I'm not going to be able to market the same way that Vacasa can, but Vacasa has a billion dollars of gross bookings coming in every year. You probably don't if you're in that featherweight stage. You won't if you're in that featherweight stage, because we also bracket it a little bit based on revenue. But now that was where it came from, was this idea of assigning classifications to two tactics so that it was a way to organize

all the things that you should be doing and putting them roughly in order. And that's what the book does a little bit is there's a time and a place for you to be working on SEO, even when you have one property. It's just not trying to rank for vacation rentals in Florida, which is what most people go to. Oh, let me try to rank for that. No, your first assignment, this is like a little piece of the book on the featherweight, that initial section is coming up with a name for your company and coming up with a name for each property. And that's actually your first SEO win is ranking for the name of your company. We always give the example, I think it's in the book too, Conrad's Cool Cabin Rentals or something like that.

It's not a good example, but it just illustrates the point. And then the name of the property might be Paul's Beach Bungalow. And that's like the name, that's not a good name, but we tell you in the book how to come up with a good name. That's the first thing that you're trying to rank for. So when people are looking for your specific company or your specific listings, that's your first SEO win. It's not actually trying to rank for Florida So when people are looking for your specific company or your specific listings, that's your first SEL win. It's not actually trying to rank for Florida vacation rentals, which is something you might be able to do later on once you're

in heavyweight and stuff like that. So that's where that came from. Yeah. That's awesome. Okay. You've talked about tactics. Talk to me a little bit about the tactic versus strategy trap. That's something that stuck out to me right away when I was reading. And it is, I think so often we may either mislabel things or we don't really understand whether it's a long-term, short-term thing. What's the trap about? And I think I fall in this trap. That's why I'm able to write about it. I think pretty effectively is that I tend to do this a little bit at times. Or when you first start learning about any particular discipline that we cover in the book from like a digital marketing perspective,

you get very, I would say, drawn to where you get hooked on this idea of there's one little trick that you can do that's going to help you get better results, right? And that's what a lot of SEO discourse tends to be a lot of publishing around SEO tends to be stuff like that. Certainly, like the black hat gray hat world, which is a whole nother topic for a different day. Oh, I found if you use this exact anchor text and this exact ratio, you can pop to the top of the search results, which is what we're after to some degree. But again, if you zoom back a little bit and you think, why am I trying to do this in the first place? That's more so I think what a strategic discussion looks like, which is that I could be doing lots of different things. There's a

different, a million different ways that I could be deploying my time or my effort or my energy or my capital, like my money when it comes to marketing. So what's right for me and my business. And the truth is it's can be a little bit different from business to business, even in the same market. We've been talking to people who have different approaches, different strategies, even though they might manage somewhat similar inventory in adjacent markets or nearby markets, they have different unique advantages. So just to give an example, and this isn't inside the book, but the story of this is inside the book. We work with a property manager who's been around since the 90s in a market, in a West Coast beach market. And so their email list is a huge advantage because they

have so many past guests that they've collected the email and the contact information from. So their ability to send out an email and get results from it is about 50 times better, no exaggeration, 50 times better than a new property manager that we're working with. That's about three hours away, different market, three hours away. They're both very insulated to their markets because they have a new list. They're both very insulated to their markets because they have a new list. They've been around for 18 months or something at this point,

maybe 12 months at this point. And they've got a few hundred people on an email list. The other company has tens of thousands, almost 100,000 people on an email list. And that's after we've cleaned it up and removed a lot of the dead and inactive emails. So they get sent out an email, even though they're a relatively modest size company

under a hundred listings. And they can typically get 15 bookings or so from an email. The other person is happy when they get one booking from an email, even though they're a relatively modest size company under 100 listings, and they can typically get 15 bookings or so from an email, the other person is happy when they get one booking from an email. So that's an example where strategically, one per one company can leverage their email list and get far better results because they have this kind of unique unfair advantage almost to some degree, if you will. The other company is like still getting some results from email, it's not a waste of time, to be fair. And we talked about like time investment in the book a little bit too. But it's the lever they're pulling, the impact they get from email is relatively small to the other company. So I think strategically is understanding what your,

what market you're in, what are your unique advantages? What do you have going for you? Something that we've talked a lot about on the owner side too. And how do you actually leverage that and, and use your kind of unique advantages that you have and get better results? I think if you're pining and pinning all your hopes on an agency to do everything for you, you're in the wrong game. We're trying to find clients now. And obviously, yes, the book is somewhat something for us so we can show off our expertise and we hope people will reach out after reading the book. But my goal is for someone reading this book and going through these things is that whether they end up working with us or having conversation with us or not, they can take everything inside this book and

think about the right activities that they should be doing the right strategy to build. And then they might need some tactical help down the road. Obviously, we hope that might be the case, they might reach out to us. But regardless, they're going to be putting together a plan that's going to work for them. So that's where those pieces come from strategy versus tactics. That's, that's just one spot on there. Wonderful there. What about it is that the next part that I did when I was taking notes, just going through things, but we cater to everyone because everybody has heard that once or twice in the marketing side of things. Talk about why that ideal, that guest persona is so important and how you build on it throughout

the book, not just talking about it at that featherweight stage, but really where it goes everywhere there. Yeah, but it's in the featherweight stage for a reason, which is that you can have multiple guest personas, by the way, you could have different types of people that might come and experience your properties. But I think one thing that I see in companies that aren't making much progress on direct, or they're not making a ton of, they're not really successful in their direct marketing efforts, is that they don't have enough overlap between the traffic that they're getting, depending on the property, based on the properties they have. For example, they have two oceanfront condos in Myrtle Beach,

and then they have five properties in Texas, and then they have two properties in Minnesota, they have four properties over here. And the overlap of traffic is basically non-existent. It's just that if it was like a dough laid out on a table and the dough was the different traffic places that we get, we're taking a little segment over here, a little segment over here, a little segment over here, and we're not building any momentum towards an actual brand that people become known for. How can you become known for something when you're in five different markets or you're doing five different things?

Same argument I would argue if you're even in a single market, but you have $100 a night condos and you have $5,000 a night luxury properties. Some people can pull that off, but it's the minority. I actually think that's really challenging to do. And the best bet is to have as much overlapping inventory as possible, because then each person that you attract to the business, even if property ABC isn't available, as long as property DEF is available, they're going to be drawn towards that. Oh, this one was booked, but this one's pretty similar. It's down the road. Oh, this one has a pool. This one doesn't. There could be some characteristics that don't overlap necessarily. But I find that's a common issue still is that people oh, this one was booked, but this one's pretty similar. It's down the road. Oh, this one has a pool. This one doesn't. There could be some characteristics that don't overlap necessarily.

But I find that's a common issue still is that people think I'm going to diversify my revenue or diversify my efforts. I'm going to have different types of properties or maybe different locations or different types of guests that we're going after. I think that's really challenging. I think that's the hardest path to do because then you're basically doing mediocre marketing to three different audiences instead of hopefully good to great marketing or ideally really good marketing into one audience that actually builds upon itself. And then they stay and they go, Oh, next time you go check out this place, they have exactly what you're at, what you're after. And they do a great job. We have a client that we work with and working with for

some time. Again, their case studies in the book, but not by name, they weren't able to share their name publicly. And I don't blame them because we give very exact numbers and things like that. But anyways, they're in an island market, I'll say that. And not only are they focused on this one island, they're focused on this one quarter, I would argue, of the island. There's this road that cuts across the island. And they're like, we only take stuff that's south of that area. And there's one or two that kind of snuck in north of it, but 99% of their inventory is south of it. So not only do they know what market they're focused on from a guest perspective, owner marketing, they can tell you what streets are focused on.

Yeah, these streets are actually the ones that we really want to go after. So they're so hyper specific and they've done such a great job of building their company so that the marketing that we're helping them do works so much better. It's not that we do better marketing for this company versus another company that we might work with that has the other characteristics that I'm describing, but it just works so much damn better when you have that single focus and you have such a single binary type of guest that you're going after. It just makes it more straightforward. So back to the persona thing, the reason we put it so early on, I think it's foundational because if you don't have a specific type of person that you're marketing to, then it feels like you're

never making any progress. That's the feeling that I've gotten as I reflected a lot and as I was writing the book is that and to be fair even clients we work with today i feel like some of them in this bucket is we're not making as much progress because we're almost like going back and resetting and it's okay to take off this hat of this type of marketing that we're doing and then put on this hat and then market to this audience and it's really challenging so i find that very hard yeah that's that i think the thing that i like about just the process of the book is that you're not just talking about the marketing side of things. You're talking about property management

systems. You're talking about Airbnb, which talking about direct bookings and figuring all that out as well. But what outside of the market, what do you think people are going to find the most value in not looking at just the strategies, tactics, stuff like that, but where else do you think they're going to find value in the book? I hope that we can give people like the right strategic decisions to base their company off of because I think you can't out market. I think I say this line or something similar to it in a certain section. I think it's the middleweight section of memory serves, where you like you can't out market a bad company, basically. And I feel like that used to be a little bit more possible. I feel like you could just brute force your way to enough traffic and

you get the right outcome. But now our industry is blown up during COVID and a lot of stuff has changed. The fundamentals didn't change in my opinion, but now it's every Jim, Bob and Mary for a few years there was buying their own property and putting it out there in the marketplace. So if you thought you had an advantage, it might've disappeared quite a bit during the COVID boom. Now we're in a different time, obviously, where things have maybe fallen back a little bit and maybe Jim, Bob and Mary that bought their Airbnb listing, and they're making 50k a year off of it might not be doing so hot right now. Maybe they're selling it and stuff like that. So we'll see long term what the ramifications are from that. I don't know, to be honest with you. And anyone who says they know,

I think they're, I don't know, I've listened to 20 their predictions, they might be right once or twice. But a lot of people like that aren't actually right that often. But I do feel this way, which is that if you have a lot of competition in your market, and you have a lot of different people going after the same inventory, it, it is a blessing and a curse. That's one thing I felt too, writing the book and looking at different markets and really seeing what's unique about this market. If you have one of these markets where everything's very restricted and you have a permit and no one else does and stuff like that, I think it's great. We don't have any clients in the market at the moment, but I learned about Key West during the writing of this book, when we talked about the different sections of like inventory control and stuff like that. And Key West has a fixed number of basically short-term rental units available in their

specific market. And it's been the same for 20 something years. So if you want a short-term rental license, it's not that hard to get one, but you just have to acquire from someone else, or it has to be with a property when you buy it. So what a wonderful market to be in, right? When there's this cap number, as long as people want to keep coming there, which I think everyone wants to go to Key West, seems very tropical. I've never been, but what a fantastic market to be in with high demand, limited supply, and this fixed number that's not going to grow over time versus, and this happened to us during the writing of this book. We had a client leave us who was in one of these markets that went from 2000 listings pre-COVID to 8,000 listings post-COVID or 2023

timeframe. And their revenue dropped, not because the property manager was doing a bad job. I think the property manager was actually doing a pretty great job. Excellent reviews, homeowners happy, guests happy, doing a lot of things right. Just like a lot of supply. It's just such a brutal thing to fight against in our industry. Going from 20 homes on a street to 50 homes on a street, all doing the same thing. It pushes price down no matter what you do.

And I think that's the hardest game to play for sure so what i'm hoping people get out of it is that we are marketing agency that's what we do but we try to be selective and give advice and be thoughtful about the business how have you set up the business because if you've set up the business correctly then everything you do with marketing is going to be like these rowing teams where like you pull your shoulders and everyone's going at the same pace the same speed and you're just flying through the water and every once in a while we talk to someone who's just everything inside their company is broken or not broken but it's just everything is suboptimal like each step of the journey they did something that really wasn't correct or really wasn't optimal and now they're like hey can marketing fix this and the

answer is no and we have to have like awkward conversations almost a little bit sometimes where we're like i don't think that this is going to be a winning engagement because of these specific reasons. So hopefully we can help people make better decisions. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Piggybacking off. No, piggybacking off that. I don't want to step on your touchdown dance there, but that is, I think what I love the visual, the company goal scorecard is that, is that something that, I mean, I certainly it's something that people can customize to their needs, what they need to track, what they need to value. But I see the visual right now. I think it's in the lightweight section, but talk to me, is that something that you are doing with your customers, with your clients, with your partners? Is that something that you recommend

doing? It certainly would help or just figure out where or supplement that information of this is what I don't know. This is what I do know. Talk a little bit about that scorecard. Yeah. So the scorecard is something that we've actually been doing for some time. I started a different version of it last year, and I've been very regimented and very specific to doing it this year. So it's not often something that we do directly for clients where we're filling out that info because it has some pretty detailed information. But I love when clients tell me they have some form of it. So we have a mutual client, one of ours in Texas, you may know who it is, does something similar on their company health. And we just have to fill out one number inside

that dashboard. There's a marketing direct booking number that we fill out in that dashboard. But I love seeing that whole dashboard put together because it's great to basically, I feel like you need that like cockpit style view of the business, right? You need to be able to sit in, look at five, six numbers and really get the health of the business. And we've talked about a little bit in the book about traction and EOS and that kind of system. It's loosely based on that idea, which is the scorecard system. And you have these six, seven numbers that you're keeping track of. And then you can look at those numbers and measure the measure, the success of things. But I think the scorecard system is really helpful by manually pulling those numbers because it removes the emotion a lot from what this tends to be. And I

find a lot of company owners that we've worked with over the years are very emotional. Like they have a good booking week and they're happy and then they have a bad booking week and they're mad and they want to cancel. And these are just like normal ebbs and flows in this business, right? It just, it tends to go different ways depending on how people are focused on. Obviously it's very seasonal as well. So there's another layer in there about seasonality and how people think about it and measure it. I'm really bullish on removing automation from that process. Actually, I'm all for automation. There's a lot of contexts where automation is great. It makes a lot of sense. But in this context, I think it's great to actually just sit down, write down your numbers

each week, look at them, measure them, and then be able to flag something if it's not going correctly and letting the things that are working well, continue to work well inside your business. Like you built maybe an efficient machine and that's churning out the right occupancy numbers, the right rate numbers, whatever the case may be, and then have things in context for the next week as you begin to work through it. So yeah, I'm really bullish on companies that we work with having some kind of measurement system because I find again, back to my earlier conversation, companies that don't have a measure measurement system, they don't also seem to like actually be able to value progress because they

don't even really know when progress is occurring because they're just very like in the moment of what happened that week, or they had a bad guest this week, therefore bad. They had a, they seem to have a few good reviews this week, therefore good. And the truth is a little bit more nuanced than just emotional,

you know, reactions to numbers and stuff. Absolutely. I think the best part about the book is that it's not just, people at that featherweight level are not going to be the only ones who get value out of this. It's all the way up to heavyweight. And that's something where how did you really drive that value at each of those levels? Or what were you focusing on to really drive values for each of the property managers? Because it is, obviously, there's a lot more you can do a lot more, you can give a lot of advice or strategies, tactics you can give to those featherweights. But how did you really

develop it all the way up? Yeah, so as you get later in the book, you get in, like you were saying to the heavyweight sections and the super heavyweight sections. And in those phases, I think middleweight is where a lot of the heavy work is done around like building the assets and really having everything you need, all the tools that you need, I think, to be really successful. So when you're at heavyweight, like things are going pretty well, like you're probably doing several million dollars a year in direct bookings or just bookings in general. But certainly, you know, I think in the book, we mentioned that probably less than half of 1% or half of 1% of vocational managers reach this stage in my view. But we've the good

news is we've been lucky enough to work with some of these types of companies. And I find at that stage, you're seeing like the outcome of where they are today. And you're not seeing all the work that they did to get there. So I think that's one thing that I mentioned too early in that chapter is this idea that like, they've been owner like to the owner side of things. I know we talk about that sometimes they might have been done doing owner marketing for 10 years. And you're seeing it now and you're going, Oh oh yeah, it's good for them. They have 500 properties and they're dominating the market. That's not fair. I don't have the budget. Yeah, but you didn't see the years one and year three and year seven and year nine even,

right, where they might not have had 500 properties and they had to literally go scratch and claw and close each contract one by one and retain those properties, by the way, different discussions, maybe for a different day, but having some kind of zone in it. So one thing I think that's happens a little bit with companies at that stage is that they have these huge inventories, they've got a lot of revenue coming in, they've loved direct bookings, etc. But then they lose focus a little bit. I do see that sometimes where they've gotten so not corporate, but they've just gotten big enough where like the person who was responsible for driving a lot of those results early on is now in some CEO chair off putting and then when we meet about marketing, they're nowhere to be found. They're busy. They

are dealing with this problem or that problem. And I think they can lose a little bit of that effectiveness. I think they get a little, I don't want to say fat and happy, but they get a little bit sluggish with some of their results and they just don't want to push things forward. So if anything, I find the heavyweight and the featherweight have a little bit more in common than you might think with regards to what they're struggling with. The featherweight doesn't know what to do and they're all over the place. They want to try a million things. They don't actually know what to focus on.

The heavyweight knows what to work on in theory, but gets away from it because they just, things are going on. They're not really disciplined enough to keep on that same track when they're working on what they're working on. They don't seem to stay on that right track. So heavyweight, we talk a little bit about like setting a big goal. Okay, we want to get to 1000 properties, how are we going to get there and then making a plan being better with communication. I think at that heavyweight

stage, it's whether it's fortunate or unfortunate, it's just the reality, you're so big that you need to be writing down a lot more communication and putting it out. So everybody's on the same page. Again, we've had situations with these heavyweight style clients where they're large, and they don't know like the right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing. Like the CRM system was changed for guest marketing and no one told the marketing team. It was like a reservations decision. And then our emails are all going to the wrong system for two weeks. And yes, that, yes, that did happen to us. And yeah, these leads aren't converting at all. It's yeah, no one's actually working in leads. So yeah, things like that can be really challenging. And the heavyweight section

talks about some of those challenges that we've seen, but also gives ideas about like, how can you take the brand that you're building and make it bigger and make it better and make it more notable and more well-known? How can you do brand partnerships that actually make sense and not just give an influencer a free stay just because they have an Instagram account? So we talked about some of those problems that we see at this stage as well. And I think that's instructive too. Yeah.

And that's, I mean, it is, it's, that's really what to see, to see the, just how you've broken everything down, I think is just, it's, I think everybody's going to be able to figure out where they are and where they want to go to. It is, maybe not everybody wants to get to that heavyweight stage. Maybe people want to just stay in that middleweight stage or something like that. They want to get their, get to their level of revenue. They get to their level of properties, get to their, whatever that comfort point is.

So that, I think that you've done a really good job of breaking down where you mean what you have to do, where you have to be in each of those locations. So what about what's the hidden gem? There's a couple little hidden gems that I see that I've picked out. What's the most under or maybe undervalued or landing page there? That was one of those that stuck out to me. But what are the hidden gems you think maybe per level or just maybe three hidden gems that you found that you want to make sure people find in the book, whether or not they're in a specific level or something like that? I wonder if I'm too close to it to give the hidden gems. The whole thing's

I joke. I think early on or even like early to middle as you're getting going, looking at brand awareness and looking at how many people are searching for your brand and looking for your brand is one of those things that is a great indicator of how healthy like the marketing is and how healthy the company is. Because a lot of marketing activity can occur outside of all these different channels, right? You have email, you've got Facebook,

you've got influencer, you've got Instagram, you've got this, you've got that. You might have even in-person offline marketing assigned in front of your properties or something like that. But people looking for your brand specifically early on, I think is such a great health signal for, okay, this person is gonna probably continue to do well

because that's the cheapest form of acquisition there is, is people going on to your website directly, like they're just typing in your vacationrentalcompany.com or they're going and searching on Google for your company name. And then that traffic that converts at a very high percentage is growing month over month or at least seasonally, it's growing and it's continuing to go up. So that's an early one that I could point out as a hidden gem, looking at that, measuring it, tracking it,

and doing what you can to influence that I think are all valid things that anybody can focus on, they're going to get some benefit of it. A little bit deeper on maybe if I go into middleweight section, we talk a lot about content. And I think at that lightweight to middleweight stage, you can start to focus on content and making your content comprehensive. That's the word that I use quite a bit because it's not about a word count. It's not about, okay, I'm going to do this restaurant guide and it's going to be a thousand words. Then I'm going to do a blog article about the best beaches and that's going to be a thousand words. No, it's about like, how can I make 10 or 15 assets maybe on my site? And it could take a whole year.

That's fine. Maybe you do one every two weeks and you don't have the budget to hire an agency yet or something. That's fine. But make the asset on your website excellent so that when you send it to people, they go, oh, wow, I didn't know that. Or, oh, that's great information. Or, oh, this looks great. Like having some kind of early content

wins on the site, I think is a bit of that hidden gem type of discussion where it's like, wow, they have this page on the website and it tells you all this information, all the free parking information of the beach. It shows you on the map

every lot that's free parking and every lot that's paid parking. And that's useful. Like having stuff that's just useful and valuable on the site that other people aren't replicating, or you're not just replicating or duplicating from someone else. I should say, excuse me. It's something that's novel and unique to you that people are searching for. So that's a, I would say middleweight hidden gem heavyweight. I would say hidden gem at that stage. I think it's like building the brand to have more power around it. So that's like the, we talk about like link building a little bit more in that section. Certainly, you should be doing it from the jump, like on the SEO side, if you can,

but then we really get into could you be doing press release style or PR style link building? And how do I actually get a lot of people to find out about my brand locally? And by casting a wide net, I'm going to end up with some people, the right people in my circle, because of the work that I'm doing. And some of the best companies that we work with do a lot of things like that. Sometimes unintentionally, sometimes it wasn't even, they weren't even doing it for the link or for this awareness, but then the byproduct of that was this awareness. And now people know about the company because of the work that they've done with a Facebook group or with press release style or with charitable donations or whatever the case may be, just producing things that people watch

and consume is such a valuable thing. I think at that heavy, super heavyweight level. What do you think about, so there's the, what do you think about mistakes? Can you talk a little briefly about mistakes that people are making? What's the biggest mistake that people can avoid with, with the help of the book? Cause obviously you're given tips and tactics all, all the way through, but what is it? What's that biggest mistake that this book is going to help solve or try to solve? Yeah, for sure. As I was wrapping up this book, I finished reading the $100 million leads book from Alex Hormozy. And he talks a lot in that book about volume. And we talked about this recently, you and I, that most people just aren't doing enough. And then they wonder why their results aren't excellent. So I talked a second ago, hey,

if you're going to put out content, make sure it's comprehensive and unique. And if you can only put out 10, then put out 10. And I do agree with that. But if you can put out 20 or 30, then do that, right? Like the more that you can do, the better that you're going to be, I think, long term. And that applies to I think, the owner marketing side, and the guest marketing side. So if there's a mistake, I see it's that they do very little marketing, they do a small, they do a shot glass size of marketing. And then they go, this didn't work very much when they needed two gallons of marketing effort to actually get the results that they're after. Yeah, when I look at people that aren't successful, I feel like that's the common denominator

is that they haven't actually done enough volume and they haven't done enough quality. And to be fair, maybe they don't know what quality is. And that's understandable because they can't be an expert marketer and an expert everything else in this business. It is hard. I get that. But you don't know what's good or bad until you've done maybe 100 blog posts. Maybe your 101st blog post is the one that really hits. And you have to get through the first 100

bad ones to get to a good one. Or maybe your first 200 social posts only if you a dozen people see them. And then your 201st social post that's a real of a attraction, your market actually goes viral and you get a lot of followers. But you stopped at 10 social posts. So you never even got to be bad to mediocre to okay, before you finally got good. And then you got some benefit from it. So that comes to mind for sure, like a volume thing to some degree. And then actually having a unique advantage is probably my second one that I could point out there. So I think a lot of companies just have the same tech as everybody else. They do the same thing as everybody else. They take care of the guest a little bit. They take care

of the owner. They send the checks on time for the most part, but they're just a B plus operation, but they expect a plus result. If you're a B plus operation and you're fine with B plus results, then cool. I think we have clients that kind of fit that bucket, to be honest with you. They're happy at a certain stage or at a certain size. They don't want to grow and have all this problems and headaches from growth. And I'm all for that. I think that's a very logical approach, by the way. But you can't have those things be in non-compliance. You can't put in mediocre efforts or have a mediocre service and then expect to be the top manager in the market.

I think the top manager in the market is doing a lot more than most managers are doing. And you have to map that to the actual people, resources, personnel, dollar investments, et cetera, that you're used to. And the ones that do that kind of investment tends to be the one that grows the most in my experience. I would agree. I would certainly agree there. Not that this whole episode hasn't been a bit of an elevator pitch, but I mean, it is. If you can pitch it to lightweights and heavyweights right now, why do they need to get

this book? What's the real value they're going to take away from mastering vacation rental marketing? Yeah. My hope with the book is that you know what to focus on. There's a lot of things out there about here's things that you could do and that's fine. And I give advice like that on LinkedIn and other platforms at times too. But the book I think does a great job of telling you what to focus on at the stage that you're at. So I think it's a great crystallizer instead of feeling a little scattered or I could do all these things. I think I've tried to do a good job and spend a lot of time putting together an effort of here's what I need to be focused on at this stage. Let me get that done and then I can move to the next stage, right? I can work up a ladder,

so to speak. And that's the whole boxing analogy a little bit too. How can I go from a featherweight to a lightweight? You got to work out a lot, right? You got to put muscle on, you got to go to that next stage. And the book tries to do the vacation rental business version of that, which is letting people walk up that ladder and not letting them get distracted into something that takes a lot of time and effort and energy, but lets them focus on the thing that's like getting them to the next spot and getting them to the next spot and going from there. I think it is. I hope that between that elevator and everything you've been talking about here, certainly there's value in this book. And I'm

happy that I got a peek behind the scenes to see it before anybody else did here. And I can tell you, having looked through it in pretty great detail here, there are nuggets galore to help you grow your business, to make things just that 1% better. So congratulations, Conrad. I don't know quite when it's going to timing, when it's going to come out, but this is a fantastic resource and everybody needs to find this book, buy this book. It's just, it's an awesome opportunity for you to learn more about what we talk about on a daily basis or a weekly basis here and really take it to that, take your business to that next level. No, I appreciate it, Paul. I'll put a link in the show notes to like the interest page. It's not fully up yet, but we are announcing

it because it'll be out for VRMA. So definitely appreciate that. And yeah, if you can check it out once it's out and people can pick it up, that would mean a lot. And we put a lot of effort into it. So appreciate it. We'll be back next week with a more marketing focused episode, but hey, we spent a lot of time on it. So we thought. We'll be back next week with a more marketing focused episode. But hey, we spent a lot of time on it. So we thought it'd be fun to do a little deep dive into the book itself. That's coming out here soon. Mastering Vacational Marketing. So appreciate you.