Heads In Beds Show - Brand Building 101: How To Make Your Vacation Rental Brand Noteworthy

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'Connell🔗 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. Hello there, Paul. How are you doing tonight? Great, Conrad. How are you doing today?

Pretty good. Pretty good. It's our first post-Christmas episode. We're sneaking in one more recording, I believe, before the new year. So you mentioned before we started hitting record that the little ones were sick. It wasn't good for this Christmas for you, unfortunately, but you had fun overall? I did. It was, yeah, we had two sick kiddos, so not exactly what we were looking for, but Santa still made a visit.

We still got to watch a little bit of the Santa Tracker on Hulu. So while they were awake, we did watch a little bit of the santa tracker on hulu so while they were awake we did enjoy a little bit of the holiday there so that was good what about you did you do you enjoy some time with the family there yeah it was good uh luckily no sick kids this time so we got to enjoy it and they were all enthusiastic and our first christmas in the new house so that was pretty good as well i had the childhood experience or i gave sorry my children the childhood experience that i got as a kid which is that you wait at the top of the stairs until you're ready to come down. And then once you're ready to come down, then you're like, you're summoned and it's released the Kraken

sort of vibes like you just let the door open and you just let you know, them run in. And of course, the baby gets knocked over by the middle. But yeah, I got to recreate that, which obviously we didn't have in the old house. So there was a it was like a tinge of nostalgia as I saw them coming down. And then we covered all their presents with blankets. And then you like take the blankets off. It's very like, what was that TV show where they like reveal the house at the end? I'm blanking on it. Someone's going to email us.

Exactly. Clearly we haven't been watching enough TV than the last year. Yeah. Yeah. I watched the heck out of some Paw Patrol, but yeah. True. We're up to date there. And the junior show is Disney junior show.

But it was that kind of vibe. You really lifted up the blanket and there was all these presents Santa Cain ask questions which is good because we don't have a fireplace so one would wonder how that's what is you can watch the Santa Claus movie there there is a solution there that's the maybe a radiator or you can a window or I mean, breaking and entering. It's good during Christmas. That's exactly what we have to overcome that idea of. So yeah. Yeah. Santa's great. You know what else is great?

Reputation management. So today we're talking about the brand side of vacation rentals. And I think this is actually going to be an interesting episode because this is, I think, one of the core tenants that I have with regards to people who choose a specific vacation rental company over another one, whether it be an owner or a guest. And obviously, we're going to dive into both kind of areas of it today. And my sort of like assessment or sentiment is that this is actually the most valuable thing that you can do as a vacation rental manager over the long term. Now, in the short term, like building a brand when you have not enough revenue coming in to pay your bills is obviously a waste of time and energy. But once I think you reach a certain level, I don't know exactly what that level is. Maybe we can try to define that a little bit

more bit further today. But once you reach a certain level, I think brand is really what you want to spend the most time working on, like establishing what your brand actually stands for what your brand identity is. And when I see people that are struggling, I think it's usually because they don't stand for one thing, like they're too kind of scattered, they don't exactly know what type of property they're actually trying to go after. They don't really know what type of guests they're really looking to serve. And that's where I want to get started today is basically like, how do you define brand? And then what are the benefits of a brand? I have kind of two thoughts on those. So what are your thoughts on that? What's the, what is a brand? What does that mean to you in the context

of vacation rental? And then how do you benefit from having a brand, brand awareness? Right. I think the brand awareness or having that brand is something that it is. It's defining who you are. You are truly taking the steps to put your, establish yourself. And I think establishment is going to be my, I think it's going to be my buzzword today just because it is. It's it, I think what you're talking about as far as the being able to build it and being able to establish it, it's so critical. And that time frame of when does it happen?

When has your brand officially been established? I think it can be looked at a lot of different ways. And when I look at just brand and online reputation, I look at it from certainly a couple different perspectives there and look at it from how other people are seeing you. I think if you look online, typically people are looking at it through that owned media, earned media, paid media, shared media type of thing. So certainly as we see in the and I think we've seen it in the VR space much more frequently or I think there's been more growth of branding. I think Matt Landau plays a big role in that. He has a big personal brand and I think he's shared ways to really establish your brand across the space with individual property managers. That's something where really looking at social media and LinkedIn over the last year, you have, you've seen some people who have truly

and clearly taken the advice and heeded that input of this is how you should be establishing yourself and people really following a very similar playbook, I think, making sure they are owning that shared media and owning that earned media, certainly. And it is, I think, from the best practices perspective, really your, any of your owned media, as far as it is, I think from the best practices perspective, really your, any of your owned media, as far as your website, SEO, your areas there, I think you can look at that reputation in a lot of different ways. When I back on the agency side of things, we'll go back a couple of years here. So really reputation management was just unifying your brand across different places. That's the only way I saw it was okay. So Yahoo says the same thing as Bing, as Google, as anything like that. But I think

that was a very short sighted or a very small perspective of what it was, because it's not just everybody saying the same thing. Really owning that media and really owning everything in your reputation is more about the brand. And I think that in our discussions over the last year plus, certainly I think I've gotten a new perspective on that and thought about it completely through a different lens. And I'm going to throw that over to you. And a lot of that is, again, those discussions that we've had. But yeah, looking at it, how we're breaking it down, it is looking at that owned media. Own media, earned media.

I'm going to just jump right into it. And I think we'll go from there. But that owned media, making sure anything in your brand is unified, making sure your website, your blog, you have those third party websites, it is important to make sure that Yelp and Yahoo, Bing and all the other booking and booking sites that you can be on now, the distribution channels, meta search, anything like that. Anywhere where you could be, it has to be unified. I think at one time, the average placements or listings out there was 60 or 70 websites or placements that you could have online. And making sure that all those are saying the same thing, directing people back to the same information, have the same contact information, that is critical. Not quite to the brand part of it, but just being able to reach out and talk through those things. But as far as the brand,

that's a critical part of the branding. How do you feel about that owned media side of things? Where do you start where you're looking at that as a foundational item for you? In my perspective, a brand is basically what you stand for. What do you accept and what do you reject based on the values, your mission, and even to some degree, I think your personality. I have that in here as well, because I think that's an important company A in a market and company B in a market could both manage luxury homes and one could do it in a very different way than another in terms of how they approach it there. One may be more playful, one may be more serious, one may want to take on more of the investor type, one may want to take on just more of the second

homeowner type. So I think there's a lot to be said for that, which is that what are your mission, your values, what do you stand for? What's your personality? And then how do you reflect that visually? Having a logo and having like, right to your point, like a website, everything laid out all consistently, I think is part of that. But I think people over index on that typically at first, they're so worried about how it looks. And I'm like, well, it's not really like critical. That's something you can handle later on. You could V1 of your company, V2 of your company could have a Fiverr logo and you can get pretty far. I've seen it. Like you don't necessarily have to have a certain logo, even though we do sell design work from a logo perspective. That's just a visual

identity. It's not really what the brand is. Brand is something that you actually stand for. And then, you know, what I also put in here is that I think brand also means that you know what you can say yes to or what you should say yes to and what you should say no to. And I think that's also something that we sometimes come across people not really having a good grasp on is that to your point about the channels that you're going to get the message out there on their channels are very mixed. They don't really have one thing that they're saying because maybe they're a company that has four properties in four different markets. So they have 16 properties. And they're like, how am I going to market this product, this company, this brand, when people know me as X, because they stayed with X, but now I'm talking about Y on one social channel, not saying it can't be done. But it makes it very challenging. It makes it harder because you're having to almost establish like multiple brand identities simultaneously. And when you have multiple people

just get confused. So that's one thing. And then I think another thing is people will say what they think their brand stands for. But it's kind of like that thing about reputation right what does people what do people say in the room when you're not there that's what your brand is i think there's some logic in that because if you say we see this frequently when some of our collaborations in the past we see someone for example wanting to present their service or their property management as luxury when they themselves really don't have any luxury properties today and i get it it's like a ladder you have to like i started with small clients then over time i, I got bigger clients. So you might have to start with smaller, less premium or luxury feeling properties. And then over time,

you get leveled up. But you can't represent yourself as luxury when you're managing a very modest, plainly decorated one bedroom condos. That's not necessarily what anyone would define as luxury. So I think you have to lean into different things as you change. And I think your brand is going to change, change as you change, right? Like you need to change maybe your design, your look, your feel, your messaging, your copy, your going into your piece right here, your own media, maybe what the type of content that you post today might be very different than the type of content you post two years from now, when you have a very different set of inventory, when you have more past guests, things like that. And I think that's fine. So to your category

point, owned, earned, shared and paid, my like most experience really is I would say on own and paid. That's like where we I think do the most. But I think there's something to be said for earned media in terms of being able to get attention. So I think some rental managers do a phenomenal job at getting attention, like in their local marketplace or through some form of media. And like, honestly, you could a quick litmus test, look at anyone that's been the RMA president over the past 10 years, they get a bunch of attention on their company. And they typically can speak from a position of authority because they're like, I was the president or vice president or on the executive leadership team on the manager side of VRMA. So then they can talk about what they're doing in other areas of their business. And people listen to them because that

reflects authority. And I've had the chance to work with some of those people who have had that position at various times or similar positions in there. And they do take their brand very seriously. Any company that we work with that's over $5 million a year in gross booking value, like they typically have significant investments that they're making both in terms of time or money or energy into building their brand identity, both locally, like in the community, and amongst the industry, in many cases, like amongst their peers and things like that. So yeah, there's lots to dive into. I guess maybe I was hoping to go maybe a little bit further

into one of your pieces there around owned media. So you were things that you control. How would someone know, break that down a little bit further. How would someone know the difference between owned media and earned media? Because I've got this mixed up in the past. So I'm curious if you want to.

I think I would define owned media as anything that you have, that you're primarily in control of. And SEO is going to be that gray area, but I do. I think SEO is still a critical part of owned media because you are. You're owning that search engine. You're earning it, whether you're doing it on the first page of the search results or whether you're doing it with your Google My Business listing. Those are going to be, I think, the primary areas. Those third-party websites, I think that's where it's a distribution question for me is what are the right third-party

and I think that gets into the branding side of things. What are the right third-party websites for me to be on? Should I be on every website that's out there that promotes travel and promotes vacation rentals? Not necessarily. I think that's something where, again, if you're defining your brand as luxury, if you're defining your brand as a family brand, as a large group brand, we've certainly run into some of those property managers where they want to be on the conference and convention center websites as opposed to some of the just the smaller family type of distribution sites. I think it is that's really being able to say that you are in control and that is really the difference between the owned and the earned. Press coverage on the earned media side of things, you can reach out to a newspaper or a newspaper could reach out to you certainly. You can collaborate on the content side of things with maybe a local blogger or a newspaper could reach out to you certainly. You can collaborate on the

content side of things with maybe a local blogger or a mom and pop blog. I think on the, when we get into the review side of things, certainly Google reviews, Yelp reviews, TripAdvisor, I think maybe not as much on the vacation rental side, but it certainly just general hospitality. That's an area you want to be looking at. It is, I think, for, in the case of Venturi for us, third-party sites, being able to point to a class store or a trust pilot or someone and see that there's trust not only with internal employees, but external vendors and people that we're working with as well.

So I think that is, it's really, there's a lot of different ways you can define that earned versus that owned media. I think it is, for me, it's the control. It feels like at some point with the earned media, you have to do something. There's a little quid pro quo there. Even if it's not like money or any true return on the value, if you're asking someone for a review after a stay or something like that, you may offer them something, but it's just you're asking them to do it.

There's someone else who has to do something there. Again, on those third-party sites, maybe you are, you're included on a top list for a travel and leisure or a resortsandlodges.com or somehow that list gets into a Reddit forum and who knows where we could go from there. It could get dicey in a hurry there. But that's also important to understand all those places where you could be, because I think the earned media is that area where you don't always know what's out there. SEMrush actually has a really great tool, and maybe Ahrefs does too, to really help you understand where you're picking up some of those articles, where you're picking up some of those forum mentions.

Because it is, if you don't know that those are out there, all of a sudden there's a windfall, you've gone viral and you didn't even know what happened. I guess that's how I would define the difference between the owned and the earned. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think those are important distinctions. And to your point, I have seen some tools like that in the past that help you monitor brand mentions and things like that. I think those can be good ideas. To your point, there's an external component to that, right? Like reviews and things like that. You have some level of control over it. You can ask people to review you. You can certainly respond to reviews, even if they're positive or negative. And we've written many review responses over the years to negative

reviews. There's something too about like the idea of people who gang up and leave negative reviews. I think, okay, you had a bad experience. And in some cases, I've had some clients, I will admit that are super honest about it. And they're like messed up and then it's like all right how can we make it right and then other clients who will tilt everything in their favor like they meant they were supposed to be politicians because they're like it's not our fault blame this person blame this group blame this other people but you can learn so much from like people and how they respond to negative reviews and actually there's actually studies out there i'll try to if i can find one i'll link it in the show notes that actually say that if you have nothing but five

star reviews people are very skeptical so actually filtering in a few like negative or slightly less than negative reviews actually makes your brand more like authentic and real. So that's just the side bar and like reviews and just that whole concept of wanting to have the best reviews on online, which you should definitely optimize for. I think the volume matters probably much more so on the review side than just purely the star rating, right? Like we have clients who have worked really hard to get high review counts, so that when they do get negative reviews, it doesn't impact them at all. Like one of our clients has well over 1000 Google reviews at this point, we have another client that has well over 5000 Google reviews at this point, and 90% of them are four or five stars. So if they do go and get a one star review, like we're not

happy about it, we're going to respond to do what we need to do to try to make it right with the guests that had negative experience. But it doesn't't hurt them their average is still 4.67 4.75 which on google is a pretty good review rating on other platforms like airbnb that's actually a terrible review because they basically just get rich by the way there's another sidebar we're going down the sidebars a little bit today on the review side of things but i think this all feeds into brand airbnb and that what the brand that they want to contribute or that they put out there with regards to like their hosts they're, we have hosts and we have super hosts, right? So they want you to be maybe more likely to or want to book with a super host. Okay, that's fine. I don't disagree with that logic. But reviews on Airbnb are binary. That's the one thing that makes no sense to me. So basically, a five is passing and a four is failing. That's Airbnb. Yeah, you could distribute it down you could simplify it down to that level and the problem i have with that is that like very few properties i've ever stayed in have truly been a five-star experience and i've stayed in not a lot

but a handful of like actual five-star rated hotels and resorts and in some cases they're amazing but you can always find something like i stayed at last summer in boston with my uncle i didn't stay there he was staying there but we went on the four seasons and like you could go in the corner of the shower and find a crack. If you wanted to be, if you wanted to be a pain, you could be like, Oh, the quality of the shower is low. There's a crack in there. So was that a five-star experience? Like overall, I think it was, but anyone could pick at something and make something less than five stars. And I've stayed in short-term rentals, both my clients and just other ones as a family, just traveling. And I feel like very few of them

actually reach a five-star, but if I booked on a platform, which I don't do often, but I'm never going to leave less than a five star unless they just actively screwed me over, basically, because I know that anything less than a five is failing, which is not really how any like, real interaction in the real world works. But these platforms like Airbnb, and even outside of our space, like Uber and stuff, they've just distorted reality to basically saying an average interaction is supposed to be five stars. It actually makes it unfortunate, my opinion for people that are actually delivering above and beyond, because the sort of like unspoken rule about like brand reputation on a platform like Airbnb is that you leave five stars if it's what you expected. Basically, I got what I expected, what I paid for,

I got your sort of most guests who are savvy enough to understand the system will leave five stars. But if you actually do go above and beyond, you really don't get that six star credit that you probably deserve in many cases, like we have clients that leave behind gifts, we have a client who once a week, they can't do this for every guest just because of the size and scale of their operation. But once a week, they'll decorate a property based on what the person said they were coming for. So if they said birthday, they'll have the cleaner said they'll send a team in after the cleaner and they'll go put like a birthday cake in the fridge, they'll have candles, all this stuff, take a picture and send it to the guest and they're like, Oh, happy birthday, the guest walks in and sees that.

And they will frequently get amazing reviews, like amazing brand building activity occurs from these sort of acts of kindness, whatever you want to call it, from the guest side of things. But even if everything about the property is fantastic, they'll get five stars. They really, in that scenario, should get like six or seven stars. That's not really how the system works. Yeah. A lot of this online, I think it's really challenging to truly differentiate a good versus a great company. And that's why volume I think sometimes differentiates it because pretty much anybody could figure out a way to get 25 star reviews. It is really hard to figure out a way to fake 1000. Like that is very challenging to do. So even if you see two companies, and this thing,

this bears it out in the data that I see when people click through, for example, Google My Business, company A has 50 five star reviews, company B has, I got 2000 five star reviews, I do think the guest is drawn to that they're drawn to the idea of excellence over time, not just a few months or a few weeks of of good performance. And I think the people who are new to the space, they don't see that they see a company founded in 2017, with 1000s of five star reviews, and they think they can go compete with that company right away. And I'm like, you don't realize how much time and effort and energy they've taken to build that reputation and build that brand. You were saying earlier, like, how do we actually know if people have like affinity or identity towards a brand? One simple way that I've talked about in the past, I don't

know if you've talked about it on this show is the idea of just looking at branded search volume for the name of the company. So if you have a company, a vocational management company, and 50 people a month are starting to search for that brand name, that's pretty significant. If you fill a room with 50 people that were looking for you every month, you'd be surprised by that if you went and saw it in person. Online, it's just it's on a spreadsheet. You can't really see the impact of that. But any company that we work with that starts to see that uptick initially, who's a smaller company, they start to have people looking for the name of their company inside of Google on a branded search. I always noticed that those are the ones that typically tend to pick up properties. Those are the ones that tend to get good five star reviews, those are the ones that tend to

have more Google or online bookings and things like that direct bookings. And I think it all comes back to that it all comes back to people specifically seeking out your brand. And I didn't say this earlier, but I think it's in this kind of sentiment, what I how I see it is that people who like the real value of a brand is that people will pay more money for a commodity. No one wants our vacation or properties that we market to be commodities. But let's be honest, in many cases, especially now with the inventory boom, there's a lot of alternatives for a three bedroom, four bedroom house inside of pick your destination here, right? That is the case. So my sentiment is that the brands that are the companies that actually have real brand power

are the companies that can take the same three bedroom, four bedroom property, price it on their website better than their competitors, because people prefer to stay with them. They're like, when I book with company X, I know I'm going to get a good experience. So I'm not really willing to risk it, even if it's $300 over here, if I book with this random host on Airbnb, maybe it's $500 cheaper if I go to this other manager, but they have some sketchy reviews online, etc. So if you want to talk about what actually makes a brand valuable, and using these different channels that we talked about, owned or media, all what does this all sum together towards, in my opinion, what it sums together towards that you can offer a commodity property or a nearly

commodity property, and you can command a higher rate for it, because people have an affinity for your brand and actually want to choose want to book with you. So that's my way that I would define those different elements. But you did a good job, I think, of breaking down the differences between those different platforms, maybe go down the paid media one for a second, because I think that you can build a brand, at least partially, with paid media. What's your perspective on how advertising and awareness can be built through paid? It is. I think certainly for those companies who... I think that's one of the fun parts about working with Venturi is we get to work with a lot of people who are trying to establish that brand. And I think that you can

do it. And I've seen people do it effectively through those digital channels. I think social media ads and social media, we've talked about it many times. It's great for brand exposure, not exactly great for the e-commerce direct conversions coming through. So being able to really establish yourself, I think you have to, again, I'm gonna keep buzzwording it, but establish that brand, make sure you know what you are right now and then let everybody else know where it is.

Whether you're using Facebook, whether you're using Google, LinkedIn's a great way to do it. It is, certainly you can use other channels that are outside of just the traditionals that we use. I've seen a lot of different people using, I think the display side is a really great way to visualize your brand. The paid search, you have to have, you have to have to find that brand. People have to know your brand in order to do it. So I think display is really the way where you start to get people

finding out about your brand. And it's not necessarily in those channels where, again, you traditionally be looking. You don't have to see the brand show up on a travel website. It doesn't have to be on Airbnb. It doesn't have to be on Vrbo. That's the wonderful part about social media ads, Google ads, or Google display ads. And I prefer Google over Bing because certainly the Google display network is a little more extensive than the Bing one is. But it is. Those are both opportunities to get that brand, get some visualization out there, get that new logo out there, get your value proposition out there, and just get people thinking about you. If they've searched with you before, if they've stayed with you before, that's great. Do that

little bit of retargeting. But in a lot of cases, you do. You want to be able to start setting up those drive-to destination areas and really start to get local people around you. Maybe it is, maybe you're just sticking within your county to start, or you're sticking within that 50 mile radius, 75 mile radius, just trying to grow your exposure out there. Then going to go into your Google Analytics, figure out where people are visiting your website, start targeting those areas and get more people in those areas that you're starting to identify as some target markets and target destinations. Get more of that brand exposure there. It is. It's one of those things where I think I certainly think that you can do a lot with paid media and especially on the display side for pretty cost effective ways.

especially on the display side, for pretty cost-effective ways, especially when you're comparing that to the amount of time and the amount, certainly cost-cost effective, money cost effective, but time cost effective as well. To build that brand, to build a website, those projects take a long time. To build up that equity of certainly SEO, it takes a long time. To build up enough reviews on the earned media side of things. These are all very long-term projects. And I think paid media is a way to get that quick hit out there and start to get something that you can build on.

So what are your thoughts on the paid media side of things? One quick note on the idea of a brand taking a long time to build. I agree, obviously. And should take a long time. I said a brand taking a long time to build. I agree, obviously. And should take a long time. Yeah, I said this to someone a long time ago. And I think I put his brain into a pretzel just because he was like, I want to go quickly kind of guy. And I went, I was like, let's think about what you're trying to accomplish.

Basically, he wants all this market share, all the properties, all the direct bookings right away, which actually I like it. Like to be clear, like I dig that. Aggressive is much more fun than if we get to it eventually. Like that's not where great companies are built that way, whether they're small or large. So I like it like to be clear, like that I dig that aggressive is much more fun than if we get to it eventually, like that's not where great companies aren't built that way, whether they're small or large. So I like it a lot. But I was like, think about this a little bit. And we were actually making, in my opinion, good progress. He wasn't necessarily agreeing with me. So I'm like, okay, it's fine. We can have a difference of opinion. And I said, imagine you've been at this for basically 18 months, you've already got like 35 properties, you've already

got people looking, you already have 30% direct bookings, like you're doing really well. Believe me, there's companies much who've been doing this a lot longer who have made a lot less progress than you. That answer wasn't satisfactory to him. So I said, think about this. If it was if it took a year to get to 100% direct bookings and 200 of the best properties in the market, what's to stop someone from doing the same thing to you 12 months from now? What's the what's to stop someone from coming in the market into 2023? And saying, you know what, in 2023, I'm going to hit the gas pedal as hard as I can. And I'm going to be the best property manager in again, destination x, whatever destination x happens to be. And then I think he understood it a little bit better. Like it should be hard, it should

be challenging to build a brand, because then you actually have a little bit of a moat around your company. Once you have that brand brand built up, someone's gonna be like, I don't really know, like the Outer Banks is full of very established and very, I think, typically long standing vacation management brands. And I work with one of them. So I won't say which one if they don't want that out there. But it would be very challenging for someone to enter the Outer Banks market and say, I'm going to manage as many homes as a company. This is my client, but a company like Twitty, they have over 1000 homes, they're absolutely massive, it would be unbelievably challenging to even come close to their level of brand awareness

in that market. And I don't really care how much money they had. If it's if you were a new company, and you weren't buying another company out to get started, right, and you were going to try to compete with them in that in that, in that from that scale in that market, you'd have an incredibly hard time. So that's just one thing I wanted to say to you with this is that you're putting that work and it's like you're putting like future money in the bank. Like you're not really getting that money with all the stuff you're talking about leveraging paid, like people remembering your logo, remembering your brand messaging, like all this kind of stuff that goes on people following you on social media and engaging with your posts for 12 months or 16 months. None of that very little

that actually drives any value to you today. Very little of it does. But then over time, it's a wow, like we kept doing this over time. And then two years later, three years later, it's going back to my earlier point. Now a thousand people come to our website every month and 50 of them book, and I didn't have to do anything. That's what you're actually building for is this idea of like momentum or this idea of like awareness. Like people just walk in and automatically choose your particular product because they have an affinity towards it. So that's kind of the way that I see it now to the more direct question that we had started on with paid media. I think the awesome part about paid is that you can get right in front of your target customer right away

with paid media. That's one thing with these other channels that we're talking about. Try going out to a newspaper and saying, yeah, I have a new vacation rental company. I want to start managing properties in again, destination X. And they'd be like, okay, what have you done that's noteworthy or newsworthy? And the answer is probably nothing. But there's a lot of there's a lot of steps and hurdles you have to clear to get from A to Z on that kind of thing. Or to your point, SEO, it takes time. I agree with that sentiment. We have a website on SEO, we'll probably do more. But with paid, what I always tell clients when I'm on discovery calls and things like that is that we can have a campaign idea today and have ads and traffic coming in tomorrow. There's very few channels where you can do that outside of

these paid media platforms, right where we can and it's relevant traffic to it's not just like random people coming in. Whether that be on the owner side, or the guest side, we get relevant traffic coming in, and usually less than 28 or 48 hours. And that's a superpower, I think, to building a brand, because it does level the playing field quite a bit, I just spent a few minutes talking about a brand moat and things like that. But if you want to at least chip away, if you want to at least take an arrow and shoot it at the castle, and get one property, for example, from one of these other managers, you can do that with a targeted paid search campaign with a targeted retargeting campaign for people to visit that page with a targeted if you had a customer list or a guest list campaign, you can get them to book direct,

it's going to be brick by brick, you're going to have to go slowly to get that type of awareness. But I think the paid media can play a critical role in kind of this idea of reputation, the idea of brand building, because ultimately, you can get relevant traffic very quickly. And there's not any gatekeeper other than just following the rules of the platforms, which isn't that hard to do. And you can actually get the right the right person in front of you get the right person that you want to see your message, whether that be on the guest side of the owner side in front of them very quickly. So that's how I see the benefits of paid on the brand building side of things. Sure. Yeah, no, I agree with that. It is I think that's something where

if you could, if everything was a quick, certainly I think the easiest to implement is going to be the paid side of things. That's something that you have. Again, it's one of those things you control. It's not owned, but it is owned in the sense that the only difference is you're paying for the own, but it's still the control and how I'm defining it is that's how you're still owning that media there. So I do. I think that paid media is certainly something that over time, it has to be something. Once you've established that brand, you want to invest in the brand. And that is the way you do that. And certainly there are other organic ways to do it too. But I think we've both seen over time that paid media is certainly a way that you're going to take advantage of that. Absolutely.

What about on the customer feedback side of things? We've talked about reviews, but how have you managed the customer feedback loop? How have you gotten more out of it? What really have you done to improve that or use it to your advantage when as you're building those brands up? I think one thing we said earlier is the idea of a lot of platforms have essentially pass fail review systems, right? Airbnb. But what I've learned is that if you're collecting reviews and feedback directly, like on your website, or you're collecting it through some kind of post checkout form or something like that, you can usually be a lot more granular, you can get better feedback. So that's always helpful, in my opinion. But what I find is that people leave very

different levels of comments depending on their level of engagement with either property manager. So for example, again, if you deliver exactly what you say you're going to deliver, the property is clean, it's nice, they paid a good value Thursday, you're probably going to get a five star if you want any platform. However, what I've learned in my story from earlier about you go and do the birthday cake, you have your your team call and check in and say, Hey, we just want to make sure you and your family checked into the property properly is everything good in some cases this has actually always been funny to me but i find this is the case a lot of times customer guest feedback when a problem actually occurs you sometimes actually leave amazing feedback when a problem occurs because

it was addressed very quickly and like whether it's inside or outside of your control we had an example recently where a client ran out of firewood they went through their whatever four things of firewood that they're given and it it's all in the check in instructions, like they did exactly what they said they were going to do, right, they delivered the four four pieces of firewood to the cabin before arrival. And they went, Hey, we ran out. And they were like, actually, you know what, I'm headed out anyways, I'm just gonna go bring you eight extra ones just so you don't run out again. And that $25 act of kindness or whatever, even though it was a problem, not necessarily a negative thing, but left the customer Oh, so amazing. They came out and they brought us this and that.

And they were like, this cabin was amazing. We're going to come stay again. They left a lot of positive feedback. So that's how I always think about guest feedback when I'm reading it, like the marketing side, which is there are things here that I can take in turns into like marketing assets. Could there be quotes? Could there be specific screenshots of here's the people that had this feedback and stuff like that. And I think that's a good way to show what sort of path you're on from like a brand building perspective. Because and I'll admit it to we have clients who get a lot of feedback. And it's like, yep, property was nice, good stay overall, like like five stars and hit submit. Again, you deliver that person what you said you were going to deliver. I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily. But it's not the

same thing as, oh my god, this property was amazing. We had such a great time, we reconnected with family, we're going to come back and stay again, we're going to recommend this company to our friends. And all those things I think can occur when you actually really invest into the guest experience. And that's going to reflect in the feedback that you get from those guests. So that's how I see that from a brand building perspective is that I think there's different levels, right? There's like their minimum, there's like meeting expectations, there's exceeding expectations. And then there's those rare companies and rare hosts and managers that maybe not every time have the ability frequently to actually generate this like unbelievable goodwill that people will

remember for a long time and i think that if you care about the way that your company is presented from a brand perspective and from an online review perspective you have to leave yourself chances to build those opportunities otherwise one little mistake kills you like that's the i forget exactly where this came from but there's people out there who can leave this to be the case where basically you meet, you book the place and you have your neutral, like you, you're excited, you're looking forward to your neutral. And if you do things before the check-in that kind of builds some of that affinity, you actually, they check in the property and they already have a little bit better affinity for you. If you sent them a guidebook beforehand, if you messaged them beforehand, Hey, here's your door code. Hey, can I help with anything?

Hey, do you need any extra directions? Was the guidebook clearbook clear all that kind of stuff those are all goodwill building things then they check in and there's a little problem you can actually survive it because like they actually you actually built some goodwill before there was a problem on the flip side if like you let someone book the place and then you know they don't really talk to them you don't really send them any information you just kind of do the bare minimum here's your door code paul one two three four have fun you just kind of a lot of people that over automate their messaging i find tend to do stuff like this then you're neutral or you might even be a little bit negative oh they sent the door code in the day before that's rude and they have feelings like that at times i didn't hear from them i booked i didn't hear from them

for 90 days until i checked in and they thought did you even get my reservation do you even care about me all those things can occur and then one negative things happens and it's like then they start summing up everything that happened before in their head ah these guys sent guys sent the door code late, and they didn't check in with me, and they didn't even know if I and now the oven's broken, like, how dare they? And then, of course, that's reflected in negative customer feedback. So that's my assessment is that the more you do to provide that good experience, the more goodwill is reflected in your brand. And it's a snowball effect, the better brand awareness you have, the better brand reputation you have, the more people seek you out, the more people that seek you out,

the bigger you can grow. The more your marketing investments can carry you. And over time, the best companies that are single market companies that I've worked with all have this DNA running through them that is a heavy investment into the idea of brand that isn't always reflected in exactly the same way in how they do it, but brand is critical to them.

And I think that if you're trying to build a great company and you're trying to be one of the best managers in market and attract the best homes and have the best guests that take care of your places. You have to have a brand that people actually really love. Agreed. That's the perfect bow. Not on the bow there.

I think that sums it up just perfectly. Okay, cool. If you don't have anything else, we can put a bow on it to your point. I think we're up to 14 reviews now on Apple Podcasts. I've learned too that Apple Podcasts is the most popular podcast platform for people to listen to this podcast on.

That's a lot of mentions of the word podcast in one sentence. Anywho, if you are on Apple Podcasts or any podcast platform and you're listening this far, then you must like it. Otherwise, my goodness, why would you have stuck around for almost 40 minutes? You have to like it.

You have to like it at least a little bit or you just hate us and you're like writing down. This is how many people listen. You can rate us and that's fine. Yeah, that's good. But I don't think so. I think if they listen this far, they like it at least a little bit or you just hate us and you're like writing down this is how many yeah you can raise terrible that's fine yeah that's good but i don't think so i think if they listen this far they like it so in the new year it's about to be 2023 when this episode drops it may in fact be 2023 so if that's the case happy new year to you we have to get more reviews so we're pumping we're asking for more reviews and we certainly thank you for listening so if you know anything else paul we'll put a to your point we'll put a bow on it thanks everybody

for listening we hope you have a great day and we will catch you on the next episode