Heads In Beds Show - Building A Marketing Calendar For Your Vacation Rental Business (Updated for 2025)

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

In this episode Paul and Conrad refresh the annual marketing plan with some new tips and tricks along with bonuses (see show notes links below). Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101Bonuses: Annual ads budget spreadsheetAnnual ads spending / calculator spreadsheet🔗 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 Head to Med Show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right host Paul. All right, Paul, good morning. How's it going?

You know, we are in the holiday timeframe. Now we've talked, I guess we were leading up to it the last few weeks. Now we're recording on Thanksgiving week. So oh, plenty of busyness going on in both our personal world, personal lives and personal worlds and the greater hospitality, travel, tourism world, I think this is always that time of year where, well, if nothing else, Google likes to really spruce up their ad revenue. This, I think we've talked about many times

that this is the time of year where Google says, ah, 25% premium sounds like what we can do, what we can get away with. I'm just kind of bracing myself for that extreme hike in the cost per click on Google side of things. But how are you doing, Sarnia? Let's get to the fun side of things, not talk about the exorbitant costs

we're going to be paying for the next few months or three weeks here, I suppose. Yeah, well, it's funny. You talk about planning, we talk about marketing today's topic really is about building a marketing plan. And I feel like some of our clients, we love them, we love many of them. But they haven't done a lot of planning. And now they're sort of last minute coming up with ideas for Black

Friday or doing some Black Friday stuff, which if you're listening, this will come out much, I think a few weeks after so you'll, you'll know how your Black Friday sale went. But um, I think there's, there's always some juice there. You know, one thing at a client was like, Hey, can I even cut through the noise? Should I be doing this, that sort of thing? And I said, look, here's my take on it. People are generally speaking in a buying mood during this time. Yeah, it's very hard for you to cut through the noise. I agree with that statement. But the same token if someone's in a buying mood and you're not in front of them or you don't

have something visible for them to look at, maybe they move on to someone else. So I'm like the downside risk of like running some kind of Black Friday promotion, even if you don't run a lot of advertising for it, even if it's just like your own list or your own website traffic for a few days or something like that, it's pretty low, like the again, there's minimal risk there of like things not going well. The worst thing that happens is like not many people take you up on your offer. Right? The best thing is a lot of people take you up on your

offer. And hopefully you price that in a way where you still make a lot of revenue from those bookings. But not doing it would mean that like someone in the buying mood comes to your website and doesn't book which feels like a missed opportunity. So I've talked maybe more clients into doing these kind of Black Friday, Cyber Monday type of specials and deals and promotions. Some clients are really into it. Some clients are not. The one thing though that I'm learning is like, start this process. I'm going to start this process next year on Halloween. Not like, you know, I did or before that even maybe it's like, I don't know when the you

know, when the kids go back to school, like, all right, let's have Black Friday meeting, you know, Black Friday meeting, not like a few weeks before where we're trying to get things buttoned in and dialed in the last minute, particularly things that are a little more complicated, like promo codes that take off three nights, but those free nights are variable depending on the rates and things like this. So I think PMS is still have a way to go with how we want to customize and tweak offers. I think a lot of offers, you know, look clunky in a checkout, look clunky in certain areas. So I think we had a lot of work to go there, but that's just a broader note. And it brings us to today's topic,

which is basically making a marketing calendar. So just for the listener, we did do this episode previously, kind of a version of it. So I'll put a link in the show notes to the archival version of kind of what we did last year. So if you want to hear some slightly different thoughts, we'll go there. We may recap a little bit of what we talked about last time because some of the fundamentals of doing planning are the same. But I don't know, Paul, like I've gotten a little older, maybe a little wiser since we did this one, kind of towards the tail end of last year.

I've got some new ideas or new ways to think about describing how to actually build one of these calendars and how detailed to make them or maybe in some cases, as we'll talk about today, how not detailed them. So yeah, what's some what's your perspective on this? I mean, you've done marketing for a long time. Are you like a very calendar driven person? I want to plan far in advance. Are you more like, hey, let's just, you know, see where it goes every day. Or are you somewhere in the middle? Where do you kind of land on the spectrum? I would like to say I'm calendar in advance. And I would say I am calendar in advance in building it, but following through with it is more of a day-to-day kind of seeing how the waves will,

the waves of water will take our ship here. But I do, I think that if you don't have the plan in place, you're missing out. You don't have anything to actually go work from, or you don't have the plan from which to work. And I think that that's really important. You might not follow through with this whole plan, but to at least put it out there. And the self-fulfilling prophecy doesn't happen unless you put the prophecy out there to begin with. And I think that that's something that

it does seem like a lot sometimes to set the time aside, to put four hours aside and put a plan together or put a day or take take two days and and really dive in. But I think when you actually do it with your team, do it with your agency, do it with whoever you're working with there, and you get that collaboration, the insights you get from everybody being, you know, working together collaboratively, I think are great. But the output, the plan that you actually put together, whether or not you do every little detail of it, it does just feel a little more comprehensive that way when you've got the whole team.

And again, we'll talk about how far in advance you should be doing this and all of those important things of really making sure that you can put together a plan that, that you can follow through with. But while I love having the plan in place, once you get into the trenches, can you actually follow through and make sure that you are, you're, you're keeping on with that content schedule. You are making sure that any of the projects that you're taking on within that plan are, you know, you have the right timelines you're taking on within that plan are, you know, you have the right timelines and you have things like that in place.

So I think it's critically important. And I think the more that people do it, the more effective their marketing is in the long run there. Yeah, I guess I think of this a little bit almost like when you're using something like Google Maps, it's like at first when you hit preview of a long trip, like a long road trip, it gives you like a general sense of where you're going, how long it's gonna take, you know, hey, there's tolls here, there's this kind of thing, gives you some high level detail.

But then as you get closer to whatever the road is you need to get on or the turn you need to make, it gives you more and more feedback as you get closer to it. That's kind of my, if that analogy makes any sense, that's how I think about it. So I like to be very detailed as far as like, how much money am I spending this month? And how am I breaking down between homeowner

and how am I breaking down between guests. So like, I don't mind going a little bit more month to month type of approach or even like a quarter to quarter type approach doesn't bother me. But I will say going back to my Black Friday comment from a few minutes ago in the intro, I also don't mind getting some preview of where we intend to go this year. Because that can be a really helpful exercise. So it's like, hey, just to give you let's make it round number to make it simple. We're ending 2024 with 100 properties, we want to manage 125 properties by the end of 2025, we want to raise our direct booking percentage from 10%, or 15% to 25%. And we plan to spend $50,000 in our marketing to get there. Okay, that's useful. Like that's that's

some high level goals of like our 25 properties, we've got to get, you know, whatever, let's say 200 more direct bookings, we've got $50,000 to spend. Now I can start to kind of put together. I did LinkedIn post the other day about a horror mozi podcast I'll listen to listen to and he defined strategy in an interesting way. Because like, you and I have kind of picked apart some of the you know, people who say they make strategic decisions, or they build strategy in their company. And I was like, like, okay, like, I kind of know what that means. But I've seen some of these documents before. And this is what you and I picked out before, where it's like a long list of things that you could do, you know, hey, you could do a million things in your marketing. And

it's like, all right, like, that's true. Like, yes, these are all reasonable ideas. But I've always known in my core, like, what it comes down to, in my mind is always like, how do we figure out what to do not what works, but what works the best is always like the way that I thought about it. So hormones, you defined it like this, how do you deploy the resources that you have for maximum effect? And I think that's kind of my, you know, framework on that is like, the budget is both human, like people, whether it's a freelancer, a consultant, an agency, or whether it's someone on your team, like that's, that's, there's a people running, you know, the budget.

And then there's also advertising costs or marketing costs in general. Right. And if you put those things together, it's how do I have resources available to me? I want to get maximum effect. Hopefully you tie it back to those broader goals. Like I just shared a second ago, we want to sign 25 homes or we want to sign 50 homes or we want to sign 10 homes. Hopefully that number is rooted in something real. We could go on that in a second about how to actually make realistic goals. And then you say, here's my goal. Here's my outcome. I have this much resources available to me, people and budget like dollars, how do I get there?

That's what strategic decision is not really about, not a list of 50 things you could do. It's here's the seven things I'm going to choose to do. But also back to my general approach is let's take this probably 90 days at a time. Let's not sit here and take this, try to plan out a whole year of like, here's exactly the subject line of a brand to send for the email next September. Like I think that's a waste of time to be honest with you, because so many things could change between now and then, or you might just change your mind. And so then you're, you know, planning on stuff that doesn't actually end up coming to fruition. So I'm with you, annual planning matters. I think you have to set it in the context of one realistic goals. Maybe

you could go on down that for a second. And then I think you have to apply those goals against a realistic budget against a realistic, what resources do I have available to me? And then build around that. But go down the goal thing, because I think that's where the when people, you know, I know, when you did this kind of work before, for the last company we're working with, you they would people come to you and say, I've got five homes, I want to have 100 homes. And they would just expect that they could snap their fingers and make that a reality on the management side. But walk through that, what do you think, like, is a realistic target that people could set with their growth goals?

Yeah, I think, really, that's, that's what the plan comes down to is that there has to be goals around it. Without goals, I don't think you can set a really good plan. That's that you have to be working towards something. And I think those goals are the end goal. And now I also remember that last year when we were doing this goals, you know, I stumbled on smart goals. So I definitely pulled it up before just to make sure. But it is we'll run through this those the smart goals specific,

measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. And I think all those are really important in what we're doing, especially on the growth side of things. Because it is it's, it's not easy to achieve those goals that are not achievable. Because it is, it's, it's not easy to achieve those goals that are not achievable. And it's demotivating. It's very demotivating. I've worked with enough I've worked with enough property managers who said that exact same thing. I have five, I want 50. Okay, that sounds fantastic. When you're thinking about any of that, you know, the measurable nature of that.

So you're not measuring just the growth of your portfolio. You're measuring the growth of the operations that has to take place as well. So yes, I wanna add 45 new rentals, okay? Is your market able to sustain 45 new rentals or is there 45 available rentals or permitting anything like that that's that's available is there you know what what is your budget to be able to market to these people to get new homeowners

what is your ability to actually maintain these homes once you have them in your portfolio what does that onboarding look like and once you ask two or three of these questions three three or four of these questions, it's bringing back to the realistic nature of what you're able to do. Can the average, we'll say hobby host, you know, going back to our episode with Mark Simpson, because the average hobby host doubled their inventory from five to 10, potentially over the course of a year. But the way I think about it, anytime you're looking at adding inventory on the owner's side,

you know, one a month is really, really good. So growth of 12 properties is a lot, because again, it's not just bringing them on. You gotta sell them, that's tricky. But then you have to onboard them, then you have to market to them, then all the other stuff that we're talking about after the fact needs to happen

in order for those homes to be successful. So it is so difficult to set yourself up for, I'm gonna add 30 homes this year. There are some of the best companies in the space that don't add 30 homes in a year. That's just the reality. And then they don't want to because they are thinking

about downstream what needs to happen as well. We have to market, we have to fill those homes, we have to reach the goals. Now we've given an ROI projection to these homeowners. Now we have to deliver on that as well. So overall, you're always trying to measure between, can I stay profitable? You know, where does that growth kind of end?

And there's that level of decreasing. And I'm struggling with the words today. Just like saturation, like at some point, your marketing advertising will continue to produce at the same level. So I think that that's one of those things that aggressive goals are good. Aggressive goals are fine.

And I think that if you continually reach and exceed your aggressive goals, you're awesome. You're a rock star. But don't, if you're setting those aggressive goals and you're continuously failing, yeah, you talked about the demotivating factor there. It's going to personally probably hurt you as an owner, general manager, whatever your role is there,

marketing manager, wherever your skin is in the game. But it's going to seep into other parts of your business. You know, this is somewhere along the lines in the support may not be as good because you're not hitting these other goals. And I think there's that backslide is pretty easy to find. So you can't have the plan without goals and if those aren't smart goals, if you don't have, you know, if you're not measuring your goals against the level of achievement, and if they're not achievable, if they're not relevant, you could be doing things that aren't even

moving the needle, but it's a goal. So if we accomplish that goal and it didn't move the needle, yeah, then it wasn't relevant. And again, time bound when we're looking at the cadence at which you're setting those plans, quarterly, monthly, weekly, whatever that looks like, having those that time factor in places is really important in making sure that that you're setting not only the first deadline, right, but any of the subsequent deadlines with goals as well.

Yeah. Well, two things come to mind. The first is that you and I kind of made this up on the spot. I remember on a call one time, we were talking with someone or talking about someone. And we said, All right, the company's been around, let's just say five years for the fictional example. And let's say they have 50 properties. So they average 10 properties a year. So that's like you said earlier, like that's not bad, like signing one per home, you know, and that's, and that is net, right? Because that would account for the fact that they might have had some churn for a reason, sometimes inside, sometimes outside their control. But I, to me, that was like a really easy way to identify like what someone, if someone is actually

building realistical, if their company's been around three years, and they've got 30 properties, it's like, oh, you're probably doing pretty good, honestly. Now, maybe their first year, they only did four homes on their second year, they did 15. So maybe they like, maybe their growth curve is accelerating. But if they said, I'm at 30, I want to be at 500, you know, it's like, okay, well, you've been signing, you've been doing well by signing one or two per month on average, to go from one to two per month to five or 10 per month, you know, on average is going to be, you know, to your point, it just may not be out there. That's one thing I think people don't often account for in the homeowner side. You and I have talked about this idea a lot, which is this idea of how much movement actually occurs, you know, from manager to manager or from RBO to manager, or like

how much inventory is actually coming online in most markets any given month. And sometimes though, they would say a number, you know, like to your point, that isn't even realistic, even if they signed 100% of the available inventory in that market that actually shipped that air change hands in a given month, it may not even be available for them to sign, right. So if the let's say 20 new homes are added on, you know, listing sites that month, and they say they want to sign 30, like obviously that's impossible. So I think, yeah, that smart side of it,

I think is super valuable. That was kind of my first reaction to it. I would say the second one is having some kind of like tracking system to go on like a piece by piece basis. So I'll go down scorecards and I'll kind of spend a few minutes on this idea of scorecards, which again is something that we talked about previously, kind of from like that EOS world, which a lot of people

are using that system, the EOS framework, if you will, popularized by the book Traction to understand exactly how to run their business. We use elements of it. I think we're trying to start to actually do more of it next year, something I'm talking about right now with someone on my team. So we're trying to get more into it. But scorecard is something that I've done for a long time. I like this idea a lot because I track it every week.

And I think that in my mind, too, can be like a much better use of your time to spend like 510 minutes every I do it every Wednesday, I do my scorecard and track these like seven or eight metrics. And I'm really looking at what's what's going on and how my activities mapping out to those outcomes that I'm looking for. And one thing to have done, I think I might have talked about this on previous episode, is I don't automate it actually could automate it if I want to. And I

choose not to automate it, because it forces me to log into all these different systems and look at these numbers and put them in my scorecard. That sounds like a small insight, but I think you've got to be careful with like marketing reporting. And I do this for clients,

so like I'm guilty of this at times where you can click a button, set it up to go out every Wednesday, a number gets fired off to you via email, or you get some spreadsheet or PDF document or something like that, but no one's actually really looking at it. No one's actually really reviewing that data. It sort of. It washes in, they look at it for a second,

and then it washes out of the system. It's not actually processed and understood. When you have to go pull a number manually and literally sit with your keyboard and type it into a spreadsheet, a Google sheet, there's something about that that tends to actually create a little bit more accountability or create a little bit more understanding of what that number actually is and what it means. Particularly if you then tie that into like a weekly review or some kind of weekly call where it's like, Hey, Paul, how many new leads that we get from Homer in the last seven days? And there may be a reason why you went over one week or there might be a reason why you went over for two weeks. But certainly if I'm looking

at a spreadsheet on a screen and I see Paul's generated single owner lead, which you would never do by the way, but you know, Paul's generating a single owner lead in a month. What the heck? Like when you're actually reading out loud, reviewing it out loud, there's something about that that creates like, your puts your brain on it, you know, when you see it in that format, or as if it just like is in a spreadsheet somewhere, and no one's really looking at it gets updated by some API automatically, I think it creates a lot of problems. So I

think as you're building your marketing plan for 2025, I think you might want to consider actually making it in a way like almost intentionally a little bit more low tech that might actually benefit you in some way to have things that are done manually where someone on your team marketing team has to go put a number in and then tie that I would say to some kind of, again, weekly call by weekly call something like that where you're reviewing that number and saying, all right, Paul, have you do you know, last two weeks since we last chatted or how we do last week since we chatted.

I think that's a really good way of you know, kind of going down that path. So I don't know if you have anything you want to add in there. If not, I'll go over the budgeting side of things. I think you've hit the nail on the head because the I have a couple spreadsheets or scorecards that I have in spreadsheets. And it's definitely more responsibility to those numbers. But what I find when I'm filling out that spreadsheet, as opposed to something that's being automatically pulled in and Google that or a data studio or a looker

studio or something like that, is that I do I dig in in Google or Data Studio or Looker Studio or something like that is that I do I dig in more to those numbers. So if there's a traffic number, if there's a cost per conversion number, I'll see that I'll put that in and then I'll spend 10-15 minutes just like oh going into Google Analytics a little further for each little number that I'm looking at and it gives you that pause every once in a while to say, oh, well, the copy paste, copy paste, copy paste mentality. It's easy to fall into. So I do, I think that any manual data you can add into that, it just gives your brain pause to say, let's, let's assess these numbers for five minutes.

And maybe, again, maybe for some people who won't do that. And that's, that's a whole nother issue. But I do think that that's one of those things that doing any type of manual scorecarding is very helpful. And that is something that, looking at some of the scorecards that you've had, I pulled from you as well,

trying to understand how can I make the data I'm presenting that much better for the end user, the client, the customer, anything like that. Yeah, right on. Well, I'm going to kick it over to budget. I'm actually going to kind of tie two things together that we made a talk to a little bit last time, but something that I've kind of involved my thinking on as we kind of build more of these 2025 plans.

So I just believe that the more data that I review, the longer we work with the client, the better we can deploy our budgets. That's kind of my insight, you know, working with a client. Now this year for the third year, I can now go back and look last two years and see, man, I really made some adjustments last year where I really underspent in January and February, and I kind of overspent in summer. So I took the budget I thought I adjusted properly based on seasonality, I did better than I

did the first year to be fair, like the results were better. But I looked at it and went, man, our pressure shares were like pretty low. And our ROAS was really good during January and February, I should have been pushing him harder on putting more budget into these months and then I look at the numbers in the summer and it's like yeah we're spending the profitability was there but the profitability was frankly a lot lower than it was the beginning of the year. I think two things are important here. Number one, have flexible budget based on seasonality and then number two, have what I call like room for improvisation is something that we have on like our about us page which is

that it kind of goes back to the open wibby open where we talked about like specifically what you do. Are you planner? Are you not a planner? Go see your pants? Like, I want to make plans a few months in advance, but I also want to look at a number within a month or within like a 30 day trend and be like in this clients that the clients name is Jeff. It's like, Hey, Jeff, like a row ass here was like over 40 to one. I don't think it's gonna be that good in June. Let's spend it now. Like, why are we waiting? If we have all vacancies available to steal properties we wanna book, let's go ahead and put more into it. And I'm okay borrowing from myself in June. Like, I'm not asking to change your overall budget,

but knock $2,000 off my June budget, give it to me now. And I think that'll be a better way for you to deploy that budget, as opposed to waiting till June. Hey, I'm holding this thing back. It's like a racehorse trying to run and I'm letting, I'm holding it back on my advertising and marketing. And then I'm hoping I'm going to fill in some last minute stuff

in June. I don't think that's the right way of going. So yeah, that's just my insight this year is like the longer and this is why honestly, like when we have a client for the first time, we're working with them. And I answer a lot of their questions now, like I don't know. And earlier in my career, I tried to give them some kind of answer. And now I'm realizing like, the proper answer in many situations is I don't know. But now I do a better job, in my opinion of explaining it. Well, I don't know. But now I do a better job, in my opinion, of explaining it.

Well, I don't know because what I would like to review with you, Mr. Client, is the last two years of data on Google Ads and where you spent and where you returned poorly, and then where you spent and where you returned well. And then I'll do something very simple. I'm just going to put more money into the months that are performing better and I'm going to take money out of the months that don't perform as well. But because we don't have that data, we're just going to have to figure it out together. So I don't really answer your question about exactly how much money should I deploy, you know,

you can use obviously, like your OTA booking data to see when people are booking, we could make some good educated guesses, let's just not throw our hands up and you know, not try anything at all. But it's gonna be hard to like get this perfect until we've gone through a little bit of time together. And we see how well things are working. So I think that's part of the budget, or excuse me, part of the plan needs to be a budget, where there's maybe more of an annual number. but I love clients that give me ROAS markets where it's

like, hey, I'm comfortable spending money if our ROAS is 10 or 11 to one. So not in that vein, I want to go I'm going back to them now and saying, all right, if it's 11 to one, I'm not going to limit it. So like you put 4000 spreadsheet, I spent 8000 but it's 11 to one. You're cool, right? Yeah, I'm cool. Okay, awesome. So we can have that conversation. See, in my mind, this is kind of the way that I think about it from a guest marketing perspective. I imagine the homeowner thing is more probably

about the cost for lead and then most importantly, how many of those leads convert. But maybe you could touch on anything guest related and then if you wanna go to the homeowner side, feel free. Yeah, I mean, I think everything you're painting there and it's another note on the outline here, it's the client-centric approach. I mean, there are going to be times that it is better

between, I mean, understanding are going to be times that it is better between, I mean, understanding what we know about campaigns, the audience behavior, all those things. Sometimes it's better to delay a campaign. Sometimes it's better to not run something immediately. Sometimes it is making the strategic decision is not running something. I think on the guest side and the owner side, sometimes, you know, our example here is the proper tracking is, isn't set up or in place. That's, that's a good reason not to run things until because it is, we're, we're missing out on some of those insights.

It should be very straightforward, but you as the client, you as the customer, you, it is your money. It's your decision. We're just trying to put a plan around it. We're trying to put the budget around it. That's going to be super helpful there. Or again, get the most for your money. It's your decision. We're just trying to put a plan around it. We're trying to put the budget around it. That's going to be super helpful there. Or again, get the most for your money. It's an investment.

You're investing in people and you're investing in the strategies to help grow your business. So everything you're talking about, they're just being very client centric with things and slowing down the speed up in some cases. I think that that's really important because there are,

there are gonna be those people that are gonna do the rah rah and I wanna spend, I wanna do this, I wanna that that's really important because there are, there are going to be those people that are going to do the rah-rah, and I want to spend, I want to do this, I want to do that. But they don't have everything that they need in place. And we as marketers can just jump in and say, hey, let's spend that budget and get it going, and we'll kind of fix things as we go. No, putting the needs of that client first is always going to be super important.

That's on the guest side or the owner side. On the owner side, when we side. On the owner side, when we're talking about the budget specifically, we can put that big number out there. I mean, I've said it before, some of the first calls that I used to get on with partners looking to grow that ownership side of things, and they had goals of,

we're gonna grow 30 or 40 properties. The number of budget that we were putting out there is 125,000, 130,000. You're gonna do some postcards, you're gonna do some email marketing, do some Google ads, do this of budget that we were putting out there is 125,000, 130,000. You're going to do some postcards, you're going to do some email marketing, do some Google ads, do this, do that. There's a lot of sticker shock there. But I also think that there's just general sticker shock when we're talking about owner marketing that you're probably not going to get a whole lot of bookings or a whole lot of leads coming in at a dollar a click, two dollars a click, things like that.

And so you do, you have to kind of do that reverse engineering of that math and say, okay, of the leads that have come in over the last 12 months, I've closed 15% of those leads. Okay, so then I'm going to have to generate enough leads to ensure that I am hitting those growth goals. Well, every lead that comes in is $100 a lead, $150 a lead, $200 a lead.

So again, when we're thinking about that math, so five leads cost some, a 200 bucks lead costs us a thousand bucks. Well, I might close 15% of that, so I might close one of those leads, half of those leads. It's more math than maybe someone might like to do. It's more about math than I like to do. But in kind of reverse engineering that

we're presenting a better true budget opportunity of, yeah, in order to grow 20 additional units, you're probably going to have to invest 40 to $50,000. And you look at that gross booking revenue long term, you know, all those churn numbers and everything like that, hopefully your margins are going to be right there. But it's, I would say it's because it's not just money in, bookings out, there's just more complexity that you're going to want to add in. Heck, if you need a BD person to help close some of those deals, you might not, as the owner or the general manager, you might not have, be the person who can close those deals

or that's a struggle area. That's a struggle area for a lot of people. And it's, we'll add one more point here. It's difficult to budget in when a lot of the leads that you've gotten up to this point are referrals or realtor referrals or homeowner referrals, things like that where you didn't have to spend any money to get those leads to come in.

Your marketing budget was zero. That's not gonna be that way moving forward if you're gonna do it proactively. So the budgeting, take some of those things into consideration. What is your close percentage on the owner's side to get those owners through the door? How much does it cost to get those leads?

Do some of that math together there and say, okay, maybe I need to invest, you know, a thousand bucks a month, 2,000 bucks a month, 3,000 bucks a month, where on the guest side, maybe I can get away with 500, 750, a thousand, and still see that same perceived ROI with the actual ROI coming in on the ad spend. Those leads just are a little more expensive, a little more valuable in the long term. And you really want to hold on to them. You want to make

sure your close rate is as high as possible there. Yeah. Well, you touched on a few things there. Let me go down the tracking piece, because I think you touched on it quickly, but I think it's worth, you know, going into a little bit more detail on because all the numbers that you're talking about are not possible to like answer for, you know, someone on your team or an agency or hiring or a consultant or whatever the case may be be if you don't have tracking in place. So I think that's something that's caught me a little bit this year, working with some clients on getting, trying to talk about what we should do for next year and just not having the right data still in analytics.

Or I've talked about this at length too on previous podcast episodes of trying to get not just the e-commerce data in there, but every fee broken down, every rent item broken down a little bit more accurately. So if we're really trying to get really in the weeds on exactly are we spent $1000, how many bookings came in or to your point of like cost per lead, you know, that's one thing as you know, that can be modified pretty easily, right, advertise on cheap display, add network inventory, and your cost per lead will go down. The trouble is those leads are not quality leads, you know, they're not actually people that are interested. So that's where you got to go into your CRM of choice, and actually grade the leads that you get and say how quality is what I'm getting, because that may make a

you know, there may be a traffic source where you pay $200 per lead, but the quality that you get is worth paying $200 per lead, you close a good percentage of them, right? There might be leads source where you get leads, quote unquote leads and put it in this air quotes for listener leads for $5 or $10. And then you go look and you go, yeah, but they're trash. Like they're terrible leads that don't convert that don't actually respond to my calls.

They're not actually interested in what I'm having to offer. It's basically a waste of time. So I think tracking is important, but I think you have to track through the process, right? It's not just like cost per lead. I think you're on the right track by doing that. But then you have to break it down per source. You probably have to break it down by close rate.

You have to probably break it down by. And these are things in my mind that do make sense to do more annually, and not month to month, because you're gonna have one good month or one bad month in a channel. And it is what it is, right? So don't don't make a decision off one month of data. There's not enough sample size there. But after a year, you should have a pretty good sense of like, all right, I'm running all these Google ads, display a network and search ad inventory, I get way less clicks from search ads, but they convert 5x 10x better into actual customers for me than someone coming from display, should I just cut off my

displays or providing some benefit there? That's more of a nuanced discussion you have to have with like your agency and like your exact approach. But I think that's kind of what those things that people tend to skip over is they they don't remember or they don't keep track of exactly where people come from you touched on it. Well, there's not going to go to with like the one customer you got that was a referral or a guest whether it's guest or a homeowner more often than not a homeowner referral.

And it's like, yeah, like that's not that that has a ceiling to it. You know, you can't scale a business just off referrals, like, you can, it can help your business scale, it can be a part of the puzzle. But I can't think of anyone that I work with that is a large, successful business. That's like, Oh, yeah, I don't do it. You do any marketing or advertising or anything. I just, you know, I'm good. I just get people that were everyone's while I get someone to refer a property over to me. And then I grow in solely off that. If you want to have a few properties and you're like running it more in that way, cool. But like for the rest of you know, most clients we work with, they're trying to scale and build a business that's more sustainable and not just the whims of someone having to recommend

you or for you. So I like referrals, don't get me wrong. I always think in my own business, by the way, referrals like a bonus, like I didn't, if I do well, then I get these things, but I never I would never bank on, hey, I'm gonna get 20 referrals this year, and I'm going to sign five or six of those clients, like, if it happens, awesome, but I'm never gonna bank on it, because I think it's a bad way to going about it. So that's kind of, you know, my approach there. I think I think we did a good job so far of, you know, kind of reviewing some of the

top pieces that we had in our outline and giving some new thoughts on there. I'm trying to look here and see what else we want to go into. We talked to length about goals. So just to kind of recap, maybe worry about so far, we talked at length about goals. We talked at length about setting a smart goal. Paul did a really good, I think, summary there, talking specifically about that framework of coming up with goals that are realistic, that sort of thing. I'll say one thing on goals maybe I didn't say earlier, or maybe I touched on it briefly. I just want to dive into this a little bit more. This idea of what are you focused on in the business,

not just the goals, but how do you want to spend to get there? So for example, some of our clients will tell us, you know, in their onboarding form now, we ask them a little bit about this. Hey, are you more conservative or are you more aggressive when it comes to like advertising spend? Are you willing to maybe hurt or reduce your profitability if it means that you're getting a lot more bookings or getting a lot more homeowners or getting more results? Or would you rather be very conservative, even if you realize that results will be slower? And it's interesting, people have answered that question.

Sometimes not what I expected them to answer that question as. Like I've had people where I was spending somewhat conservatively, you know, we're getting good results, they're happy, but they're like, oh yeah, I totally would spend more if I knew it was gonna produce the same level of results. And I'm like, really? Cause like I've said that before and you've never, you know,

had indicated that was something you're interested in. Well, you know, I didn't understand what you're asking. So I think it's on the marketing person or the agency sometimes to be communicating regularly with your clients and like things may change, you know, we had a client who acquired a company, so you had to put a lot of his money into that deal. Once the deal started doing well, he was very happy and he brought his budgets back up. But for three

months there, he's like, Yeah, I just spent all my all my shackles, if you will, on this, you know, buying this company buying this other property management company in my market. So long term, it's gonna be awesome. But the short term, like I'm very cash trap right now, basically. So those kind of conversations need to keep going. You know, who knows, I have a client who bought a company last year, not intentionally, like he wasn't trying to buy the company. And

then all of a sudden, it fell in his lap. And, you know, he had like 30 days to make the decision yesterday. And then he ended up doing it by the company and opening it in a new market that he wasn't in before. So, you know, because it was a too good of a deal to turn down. So that's kind of part of I think our broader points to that we've talked about so far today is like, great to make a plan, great to make a budget, great to have an idea of where you want to go. But like my Google Apps, you know,

analogy from earlier, you don't want to do like step by step when directions when you're too far, you know, we don't talk about that for what we're going to do in July of next year, we might want to have a general sense of it, but we're not going to be able to go through that. We talked about strategy a little bit, I'm going to just want to like, you know, rehash that point, if you will, or maybe go over it a little bit more. How do I deploy the resources that I have available to me for maximum effect? And maximum effect depends on what your goal is.

So I think these things tie together so nicely. Here's my goal. So for me, that's my maximum effect will be achieving my goals. My goal is realistic, that's important. It's relevant to what I'm trying to accomplish. Now the strategy is just how do I, with what I have in front of me,

how do I get closest to that goal? We talked a little bit about timing. I would say the one thing we probably didn't talk about so far, Paul, was the tech stack and tools. Do you want to go through some of those tools that you're using today? I have a little list here as well as a way to accomplish those pieces. Yeah. I think on the SEO side of things, we've talked AHRF, SEMrush.

Those are just for the monitoring, for the visibility, for understanding, you know, how overall your website is performing and then Google search console as well. Those are, if you're not using those, you're missing out. I did a LinkedIn post about that last week where you can't grow your SEO unless you have some type of tool like this, I think, you know, just having the visibility and understanding is so important. You need to have some type of monitoring solution in place. Search Console being that free option,

but Ahrefs and SEMrush really being able to let you drive to a deeper, deeper level with some of these insights. And again, identify some areas where there's keyword opportunities, really doing all, and I know ClearScope really jumps into that too. So maybe you can talk about ClearScope and how you use that to really define a better keyword strategy. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think I was trying to think about this when we were putting our outline together too, about this idea of like, what's changed for me from a tools perspective.

And honestly, I don't think I picked up a lot of new tools, like the tools I have last year, pretty much the tools I have this year. I would say the only I could go down SEO. So like Paul said a second ago, Ahrefs, SCM, Marsh, ClearScope, those are kind of like the three horsemen. I'm more of like an Ahrefs person. I know Paul's more of an SCM, Marsh person. I think they're both good options. You know, I have clients that have asked me before,

people that listen to podcasts before ask me, oh, I'm gonna sign up for one. Which one should I sign up for? And it's like, well, you know which one I'm gonna recommend, but if you end up choosing the other one, I still think you're making a good choice there. Optimizer is the paid search tool, management tool that I use. So that helps you with like budget pacing. It helps you look for negative keywords. It helps you find you're made a good choice there. Optimizer is the paid search tool management tool that I use.

So that helps you with budget pacing. It helps you look for negative keywords. It helps you find a lot of insights and tools there. So I'm a big fan still of Optimizer. Social media planning tools, excuse me, social media management tools, maybe I should say. I don't know if we talked about this one last time in the episode. I don't think we did.

I'm using a tool now called Planable, which I find to be pretty solid. I know Buffer is quite popular as well, but Planable for me has been a good solution, I think, for that social media scheduling kind of problem set. I use it for my own LinkedIn page, and then we probably have somewhere around a half dozen clients who are using Planable for their content.

I will say, if you're posting just to Facebook and Instagram, I think just using the default meta business sweet tools is probably fine. I think where tools like Planable are helpful is they can go to other platforms like LinkedIn, or they can go to, I think, Pinterest they have in there, they have a few other ones in there. But again, I know buffer is quite popular. These tools, I think can help you save some time if you one thing I've noticed about the social side of things, the social strategy side of things is that

if you sit down and like plan your social content, and then do it in a 123 hour block, you can get so much more done than going ad hoc. So I'm a big fan of that on the social media, you know, management side of things, email marketing platform. Again, MailChimp is kind of still our default recommendation. I will say my eye has wandered more this year than it has in most years past just because their pricing keeps going up with MailChimp. And they just don't really have the integrations that I think some of their platforms out there now have. I know there's kind of a growing thing in our space where people are connecting the PMS data layer to the email marketing platform layer. Some of the implementation implementations I've seen have been good. Some of them are just sharing email

addresses and not much else, which doesn't really move the needle for me. But some are giving like check-in dates, check-out dates, you know, notes, tags, references, stuff like that. So I'm excited to see that evolve. I don't know if we're going to be a Mailchimp shop forever, but right now we're happy with Mailchimp. I think it's like, it feels like a very safe choice, honestly, on the email marketing side of things. So when clients, you know, come to us, and they say, what email marketing system should I use, we often recommend MailChimp. And we really have never had any issues like deliverability reporting, I think the cost is still pretty reasonable. It's not the cheapest one out there

anymore. But it's also got a lot more functionality than some of the very cheap tools that are out there on the email marketing side of things. And then, you know, I think we did actually recently not too long ago, Paul, a whole episode on like project management tools, I did one, I did a presentation at the time of this recording last week for the RR summit all about like personal productivity tools. But I would say for us Basecamp is like our project management tools. So I think that's really helpful to have some kind of

like central place to keep all this stuff. I mean, it doesn't have to be that system. That's the one I prefer. But if you have like a Trello board, if you have some kind of system to manage all your marketing, whether it's internally or also with external teams, I think that's super valuable. And then we're more of like a Google services, suites, shops, so we use like Google Sheets, Google Docs, you know, those kind of things to help us along the way. So I think you use a lot of the same tools that I have. But maybe there's some

other ones, I don't know if you want to add any other ones in there across social, you know, email or other general like project management tools. Yeah, I mean, I think I think we've talked about during the email, one of our email episodes that I think that there's a little more parity on that side of things where it's just a little more established market where everybody has kind of leveled up to the point of, you know, Mailchimp was kind of the gold standard there for a while, but because they set it as such a good standard there, everybody else kind of followed in a way that was pretty effective.

But I would agree. There's, it feels like there's always some other solution that's worth at least exploring. As AI gets wrapped into all of this, I'm sure there's going to be some tools that'll send it for you while it's making some toast for you in the morning. I don't know. So they're really going to add to the tech stack here. But I think generally speaking, you covered pretty much everything there. And I think a willingness to explore other tools is important and in 2025, because there are, there's gonna be some more innovations

that some of these old tools maybe, I'm not gonna say they're left behind, but there may be some more enhancements with some of the new tools. So just keep your eyes open, not saying that you have to take anything out of your tech stack or put anything in immediately. But I would certainly take 2025 as a year to test some tools out and see what you know, what AI driven opportunities are available and to see if it helps helps

make your job more your campaigns more effective in your job more efficient. Yeah, yeah, couldn't agree more. So yeah, I mean, I think Paul, that kind of recaps what we talked about at length with this episode. So basically, you know, to kind of recap a little bit, I think this would be a good thing for us to do with an episode of this level, um, make an annual plan. You want more detail, the shorter, you know, timeframe you are, you want less detail further on, but you want to have some sense of annual plan, build a goal, use a weekly tool, like a scorecard to let you know know if you're on track to meet that goal or not hit that goal.

You know, set a realistic goals, you actually have a chance of achieving it and go through some of those information. Create your budgets, you know, here's how I plan to deploy the resources or, you know, dollars of people, et cetera, that I have in front of me. Building some kind of calendar or, hey, here's when I anticipate certain sales to occur,

here's when I anticipate certain campaigns to go out, that helps a lot, I think, in starting a month and going, all right, what's our main focus this month going through that side of it? Have tracking in place so you actually understand, all right, here's the results that I did have last year, but here's how I got there. Here was the specific dollars that I spent, here was leads that came in on the homeowner side, here was the dollars I spent, and here was the bookings that came in maybe on the guest side. Track that with as much detail as you can, particularly when you're building a plan of how do I not just cost per lead, for example,

but rather cost per quality lead or those kind of pieces. Leave some room for improvisation. So don't just have everything be super rigid. Oh, it has to be done exactly this way. If something's working well, you want to have the opportunity, I think, to go to your team or look internally and say, yeah, let's go ahead and double this budget this month. I know we anticipated spending 2000, let's spend 4000 because we're going to get a better return on it. You know, find the right balance between homeowner guest marketing, deploy your budget, use the right tools to get the job done. And then you're gonna have an awesome 2025. Anything else you want to add in there? Or is that a

pretty good summary of what we're talking about? I think if you put all that into in the place for your business in 2025, you're gonna have a good year. And if not, come call. We'll get you suited up. So awesome. Well, thanks for all this was this was a good episode. I think a good refresher on kind of this idea of like planning, you know, building the right processes

and things like that for 2025. So should be excited. It's hard to believe, you know, this year is kind of wrapping up if you're listening. It's well into December. I think at this point, you'll be listening to this one. So pretty much, you know, the rubber's meet the road and people got to figure out how they're gonna, you know,

get everything to work well in next year. So a lot of stuff's behind us now, as far as, you know, the demand, the election, all these things. So a lot of stuff's behind us now as far as the demand, the election, all these things. Now people just, let's get them on vacation. Let's bring them to these awesome destinations that so many of the listeners, so many of the clients we work with are representing.

So thank you so much. You've made it all the way to the end. We need one thing of you, shouldn't take but a minute, certainly less time. It's going to take you to build your 2025 marketing plan and it's to leave us a review. So go to your podcast app of choice, click follow or click subscribe

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