Heads In Beds Show - Building Your Vacation Rental Business Beyond The Lightweight Stage ($200k~ In Bookings) With Digital Marketing

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about the growing point of every vacation rental business - $200k in gross revenue and bookings.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing🔗 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. All right, Paul, good afternoon afternoon how's it going you know it is uh twins and we're all recording this on twins opening day so y'all can figure out that's uh april 4th for any baseball fans out there um yeah it's this is this used to be for the early years of target field this was all right paul bundles up in maybe six layers of sweatshirts, hats, jackets, because 30 degrees at opening pitch. But I think the first three or four at Target Field I went to, and at some point we'll get the boys out to one of these, but not this year.

We'll just, we're going to let it be. But how are you doing, sir? Yeah, I've never been to an opening day game we went to an opening maybe like week-ish game not too long ago um my son and i when we went to uh boston last year and he got to go to a red sox game which for me was like this like seminal moment of like my sports fandom you know going to my first red sox game he didn't seem as into it so you know you can't you know you can't get these kids excited we went to a selfless game and a Red Sox game that visit, you know, this was last year and he definitely liked the basketball game a little bit more.

So we'll see. I don't know that he doesn't seem as into sports as I am. And I'm not going to force it on him. If he ends up enjoying sports, watching it down the road, then cool. If not, then, you know, I'm kind of like a liver, let live kind of parent in that respect. Like I'm not going to force my kids to be into what I'm into. Try to get him into golf on a few times too somewhat unsuccessfully and who knows he could pick it up two years and love it so you know i encourage but i don't force that's kind of my philosophy i think that's the perfect thing same thing i might like i i think it's great that we have a great backyard for playing any sport that the kids like this we have so many sports balls out there if they want to play with them they play with them if not they don't and they just run around and that's what

it's all about i i wish i could have that much you know wonder of the world and and be able to enjoy it at that level still so i'll you know let them do what they want to do exactly yeah it's um i think i think my kids definitely have a better life than i had so maybe they'll end up in different things i i fell into the runescape rabbit hole at one point when i was like a tween and i spent like i spent like two years just playing a video game you know what i mean and my parents it would have been easier for them to be like can you get out of like the room and like not play the video game but i don't regret it actually i feel it's so funny i've heard this from other people before too what we do is actually not too dissimilar from some kind of

video game i know a lot of people in like the seo space for example have been they're obsessed with like world of warcraft i never got into that you know but i like the grinding away like doing a repetitive task over and over again that's kind of like what some digital marketing tasks are honestly it's kind of grinding away and doing the same thing repetitively and just having like that mindset of like getting a little bit better getting a little bit more points getting you know getting my site ranking a little bit better these things are like they rhyme so ironically all the sports exploits were fun and i enjoyed all the you know competitive golf that i did for example but the thing that like helped me more for like my day-to-day is like sitting at a computer

for eight hours and playing runescape and now it's you know sitting at a computer for eight hours and trying to figure out how to get our plans more bookings so there you go you never you never know exactly how things are gonna you know out. So this is a follow-up episode, Paul. So we did a few episodes back, we did a featherweight breakdown. And the context of that episode is based loosely on the Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing book, where you can pick up on amazon.com, link in the show notes, the book that I wrote last year. So today we're going in a little bit of a, I guess, upward direction when it comes to revenue. So maybe I could set the table a little bit quickly, pretty quickly on kind of the context of what a lightweight might be.

That's kind of the terminology in the book. Maybe the idea of someone doing roughly 250 to maybe a little bit over 500K in gross booking revenue, we call them a lightweight in the book. And the premise of someone in that range is that almost always that's multi-property at this stage. I mean, it's not completely uncommon that you could have a property, one property that does over 200,000 a year in gross bookings, but it's pretty uncommon in my experience. So at this stage, if you're a property manager, for sure, and you're doing three, four or $500,000 a year in gross booking revenue, you might have four, five, six, seven, eight. I could see 10 if they were like smaller units.

That's not, you know, that's not uncommon in our experience. And you start to have some certain characteristics. You know, honestly, you start to have a little budget to play with when you're at the feather rate stage. Like we talked about a few weeks ago, you don't really have a lot of budget to play with. It's kind of like you have to kind of grind it out and get to that next, next, next tier in this case, lightweight.

So yeah, today is really a breakdown of what to do if you're in that bucket, maybe that two to 500 K and whatever you can add a little bit, you know, go a little bit under, go a little bit over. These are kind of more like guidelines, not exactual hard rules with respect to these revenue bands. But this is just kind of some characteristics that I see if you're in this band of revenue and kind of what you need to be focused on. So yeah, any questions? What's kind of your take on the lightweight person from the homeowner side of things? And of course, you have a lot of guest knowledge as well. What are they struggling with? What are they working

on at that stage in the business? It is. I think it's that consistent messaging. Consistency is really going to be the key here where you're starting to develop some level of consistency, whether that's email marketing, that that's something that a lot of people have some ideas of where they want to go with it. But I think, and we've talked about this in previous episodes as well, is that this is where the plans really start to come into play. Hopefully, you're planning at the featherweight level too. But I think this is where you can develop a plan that consistently, I mean, you can carry out for an entire period of time, an entire season, an entire six months, or even going into that one-year plan. And I know that that's something just on your list there.

But I think this is where it goes from ad hoc to, okay, this is where I'm – these are my goals. These are, this is what's attainable. This is what's not attainable. This is where I start to really put together a roadmap for success. So, you know, hopefully you're, you're doing that in a variety of ways, but I think that, again, we're talking about leveling up, you know, and putting, putting yourselves in those different levels. I think the plan is where you get to this lightweight level. Yes, it's the bookings, it's the revenue and everything else. But you're really doing this on the basis of I'm running month to month, I'm running year over year, I'm running a lot more to help understand how effectively, how efficiently my business is running as well. Yeah. Well, I think you bring up a good point on the consistency of marketing,

because the truth is you will have some budget, but you will also probably try things that will deplete your budget relatively quickly with respect to marketing. So on the homeowner side, I was actually talking about this earlier before we hit record. We were talking about an inventory partner that you guys had worked with who was doing some of the postcard marketing, but they'd never done any postcard marketing before. So they were releasing some budget to do that postcard marketing. But if that was their annual budget for postcards was these three cents or four cents that they could do, you know, it's not a huge quantity, let's be honest, right? And these things take time, it may not have produced a significant amount of leads the first time they sent one, but they saw X thousands of

dollars run out the door, right? And we've talked about that before too, with respect to saying that could happen in PPC. Certainly the same thing happens in SEO, right? Where you're paying money to produce content, you're paying money to produce links, whether it's on your own team or whether it's hiring an agency, like that's what activity is occurring basically. And yeah, like there's a period, time period where your money is going out the door and really not a lot of money is coming back in the door directly tied to those efforts. And that's hard when you're at the stage because, you know, let's say you're running on 20% margins or something like that.

I mean, you don't have a significant amount of volume to necessarily play with. Even if you can't hire a contractor, you're giving them a beer budget, not a champagne budget, so to speak, with regards to marketing. So you still have to be pretty diligent. It's nice to be able to not have to do everything yourself, which is very much what that feather right stage is. You can start to outsource little bits and pieces and free up a little bit more of your time. But again, this is a stage that you probably don't want to be

in forever if you're trying to build a really independent business. Because as you allude to, you have budget, but you don't have an unlimited budget, needless to say. Not that any client we've ever worked with, I always joke about this, has an unlimited budget. But in this case, it can be particularly acute. So these are some other things that I wrote down. I think you bring up a lot of good points there. So I think at this point, usually I start to see some direct coming into play. Most people at that featherweight stage don't really have much direct bookings coming in, but as they get into lightweight, we start to see it maybe 10%, 30% I think is like pretty typical, you know, of direct at this stage. And usually it's like past guests who have just found your website directly. You probably still

have a template website from a PMS provider. Most commonly, every once in a while, I'll see someone here who does invest in like building a more custom website. But 90% of the time, someone in this revenue range probably still using the website from their PMS tool of choice typically. Hopefully you have some consistency. I think you alluded to this already, Paul. So not to beat up on your comment there too much, but you're sending emails, but it's

not like we send one first Thursday of every month you know we don't miss like we see that in the next year up we'll talk about that in a future episode but it's usually like yeah i sent an email to our guests we had some openings for spring break and then we had some openings for fourth of july and then they kind of you know disappear for a while and then they come back into play certainly the same thing happens i i find in this level on social media hey i was posting for a little bit while on social then i got distracted i got busy and again they're not maybe outsourcing that so when they get busy the social media stuff kind of dries up a little bit um you know they have uh maybe a team in place or they're starting to have a team in place to help them operationally

um so it could be marketing related could not be but there could be some marketing pieces that they now have in place that people could potentially assist them with. It could be most commonly at this stage too, you kind of have that jack of all trades or Jill of all trades, so to speak, who's lower in the organization, maybe working directly under you. You have a budget to actually pay someone full time. So that's a plus, but you probably don't have the budget to hire a specialist for each role. As the company grows, you have the chance to hire someone who only does reservations and nothing else. But I see at this stage, excuse me, somewhat regularly, someone will have a reservations person who also does the marketing and who may also assist them with this. And that person could even be part-time. That's pretty common that we encounter someone at

this range where they have, maybe it's someone who has flexible work schedule. Maybe they've got personal commitments. They can only work every day from nine to two, but hey, that helps to have someone there to assist you with some of your goals that is not the case there. So these are just some characteristics, not saying everybody in this revenue band has that same situation or same stack of problems or same stack of challenges that they're overcoming. But those are kind of some typical things that I see.

Well, let's go back to your comment then on a one-year plan. So if you were helping someone at this stage develop that one-year plan, and that could span both homeowner marketing and guest marketing, what are some things that maybe you would suggest they put into that plan that would help them get into that next level as far as revenue and growing the business? I think a lot of it is defining those SMART goals. What's a SMART goal for the listener? See, I always get it wrong. So I'm going to defer to you on the S-M-A-R-T. I know that

time sensitive is in there. know that there's it is uh specific measurable achievable relevant and time bound yeah so yeah so like specific would be like um you know the one-year plan shouldn't say grow bookings or grow inventory it should say we're at 35 units or we're at seven units or 10 or whatever you know we want to be at 25 by the end of the year we want to be at 25 by the end of the year, we want to be at 20 by the end of the year, whatever measurable would be just that how do I measure this outcome? In that case, it'd be very, you know, obvious, like how many units that we say achievable, maybe you could go on that for a second, because we do see people I think at this

stage, they've got big dreams, which is awesome. But did they always pick something achievable, relevant, you know, naturally makes sense. You know, let's not say I want 100% direct bookings. You know, when you're small, like you probably don't have the budget to do that. So relevant in my mind is also like a realistic, I say relevant and realistic or think kind of, you know, tied together as well. And the last thing on SMART goals is time bound, right? So the idea of I want to have 25 units. Well, if you don't finish that sentence by the end of the year, by the end of the quarter, you know, whatever, that sort of thing that I think people can get off track. So sorry, beat that up a little bit. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. Yeah. I think achievable and time, achievable and time bound are the things that

we need to focus the most on at this stage, just because you do want to make sure that you're setting goals that you can achieve. If you're setting goals, first of all, again, you're building a business. If you're not hitting the goals, whether that's revenue goals, whether that's personnel, internal operational goals, at certain periods of time, it means that the business is not getting to a point that it needs to get to or you want it to get to. So I think that it is. I mean, even if you have to take what feel like baby steps, accomplishing those goals, it does, it benefits the overall, you know, the atmosphere of your company, hopefully.

And it just, it is, we're human beings. There's the human nature of there. We want to hit our goals. You know, if you want to run a business like this, you're probably a top performer. You've probably been measured on a scorecard previously. And you want those goals. You want to be able to hit those goals. Time bound it is.

You want to make sure, hey, this is a monthly goal. This is a quarterly goal. This is a yearly goal. This is an annual goal. This is an annual goal, but setting those up, you know, obviously we're running through EOS and setting different rocks and boulders and things like that to understand what we're driving to. But I think that can, you know, that doesn't have to be an EOS thing. That's a, just make sure that you're setting goals, that there's stretch goals. That's one thing, but you want to hit your goals. You know, it's not, it's not bad to hit a hundred percent. It's not bad to hit 100%. It's not bad to hit 70%. It's not bad to hit 60%. It's just a matter of how you're measuring completion or I think all of those things, you know, I think you want to have the quantitative numbers and it's easy to measure that quantitative, but how do you measure that qualitative as well? How do you measure that satisfaction of that homeowner?

How do you measure the satisfaction of your guests? And we'll get into that kind of with the five-star reviews and stuff like that. But there are definitely some things there that you can get a good sentiment score of your business by defining the right goals at this level, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I think you bring up a good point too, which is like the psychology of those goals. I think the goal setting does matter quite a bit when you're small. And I don't know, this is just my own personal take on it. Other people may see it differently. When you make that unrealistic goal, okay, I'm at 10 units. This is something that's come up. I know we've had this conversation many times, but for the benefit of the listener, if someone's at, let's say you've been in business for two

years or three years. So you've been in business for two or three years, and then your goal is you have 10 units. So you've averaged, obviously we could go back and look if you kept track, but you've averaged adding two or three units a year. So maybe you went from two to five or six and then to eight or nine or 10 or something like that. So your rate of growth is maybe 50%. It might be reasonable to assume that you can go from 10 to 15 the next year. That might be a reasonable assumption, assuming all things are equal. But it also depends on where you got those units from. So a lot of times, this is the case with clients that we work with and clients on the inventory side, I imagine the first few inventory pieces they got were easier because it was a referral or it was someone who specifically, you know, like it was your own units in some

cases. Well, like you didn't have to convince that homeowner to give you a chance. You were the homeowner, right? So, but, but anyways, going back to what I was saying a second ago, if you're at 10 units and then you say, I want to be 50 by the end of the year, even if you make a smart, you know, a smart goal, well, what makes you think that you're going to be able to have the output to go from 10 to 50? You know, like, and, and I don't know, to me, it's just, I think it's demotivating, unfortunately, to like have that thing come up, um, you know, where it's like, you know, you, you, then, because then let's say you go from 10 to 25. And then for some reason you were actually upset or you're not happy with the you know setup of things because you even though you actually accomplished a lot going from

10 to 25 is an amazing accomplish um accomplishment i should say you know you feel like maybe you didn't accomplish stuff because you set this very unrealistic goal so i do like the idea of like two goals like a normal goal and stretch goal or something like that but i do think it helps you know to have uh you know pieces in place because then it's more, you know, clear on like exactly how things are set up. Yeah, I'm all for the goal setting. I think having it be under the SMART criteria, specifically too realistic does make sense.

And maybe it's, okay, I would be really upset if we didn't get from 10 to 15. Like that's like a floor goal for us, but I really want to be to 20. So my, like at 15 is kind of my like, if I don't hit this, I'll be unhappy. At 20 is like my, I would celebrate if that happened. And then, you know, if you end up with 18, like you should still be celebrating if you

went from 10 to 18. Or if you went from 25 to 40, like that's an amazing accomplishment. Going from 25 to 100 is like really hard. Like not many people are able to do that in a one year, you know, timeframe, for example. So, you know, and part of it too, like sometimes some of the conversations that, you know, we've had before has been just giving them examples, you know? So like maybe asking that, asking that person or thinking internally, okay, let's go look at my market or let's go look at a market nearby or one that I know, or one that I'm familiar with, you know, this person went from

X to X, like go look at what they did, what techniques or tactics did they employ to get from wherever they were to their higher level of inventory growth. And you may find in some cases they added, added a lot of inventory because they bought a company. Well, that's kind of a cheat code, so to speak, that's not really available to everybody to be able to have a spare $500,000 or a million dollars to go buy another company and then merge your companies together. Great for inventory acquisition. Not always feasible, though, at this stage of the plan, unless you've got a lot of financing

or debt or something like that to play with. Right, Right. And that is, that is, that's, that's one of those things that although it does seem like it happens quite a bit in our space, it's not the, I would say that's not the norm. Like that, that, that's still, we, we all, everybody sees the posts and everything, but he sees the press releases that come out when, when those acquisitions happen. But you know, that yeah, cheat code,

you've got it perfectly there. That's not the way that I would do it. Exactly. Yeah. And so maybe you could go down more of the direction of the marketing side of things. So if someone was making a marketing plan and it could span both owner and guest, maybe you can dive more into the owner stuff, give some guest ideas. And I'll do the same on the flip side, guest with a handful of owner ideas. What are some tactics and techniques maybe that someone could be employing at this stage on the homeowner side to make a one-year marketing plan? What channels could they be leveraging, whether it's direct mail, digital advertising, cold

outreach, and so on and so forth? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think absolutely we're wanting to set up that 12-month plan because you want that consistency. In fact, when our partners are going through a strategy session, that's what you're doing. You're really setting up that 12-month plan of, okay, we're going to run cold email the entire time, trying to make sure that we're reaching out to those people that we know are absentee owners in your area and really making sure that we're trying to get in front of them, trying to connect the dots for who are these verified owners that we have in the database and how can we reach them with compelling messaging that's going to set you apart. Certainly, we do. We found that postcards work.

As the digital marketing guy, it's kind of painful, but that is something that I know is effective, but that is something that I know is effective, but it is. And, you know, we, fortunately, with a lot of the direct mail pieces that you do now, we can take some of that offline and put some of that tracking online. Like we can, we can tell when someone is hitting a QR code or a personal URL scan or something like that to make sure that, you know, we can really connect the dots of how effective that marketing is. But that's something that, yeah, certainly you might want to dabble into some digital, maybe doing some spends.

I would say at a minimum, you're going to want to, anybody who's going to that owner page or landing page or doing something like that, hopefully you have that. If not, that's something you want to consider at this point too. I think this is probably where you're starting to think about that. If you've got the full website, one of those pages on there should probably be your list your property or learning more about your management side of things. So having somewhere to land that traffic, I think is important. And then retarget from people, anybody who's hitting that page, you want to be able to stay in front of them because it is going to be a limited number of

people. So you want to make sure that you're getting in front of them as consistently as you can. But yeah, I think that that's something that you want to be doing that, well, whether you're doing the direct mail pieces monthly or quarterly or every other month. You know, think of, we have to think about the seasonality of when people are interested in changing a lot more at this time of things. I think that's where anything you're doing here, doing the one year plan is important. Lay it out over 12 months,

take your seasonality into consideration, whether that's on the owner side or the booking side. Hey, if I'm going to get most of my bookings from January to April for the months of May till September, what's the likelihood that people are going, you know, when do I have to plan those with those owner campaigns and vice versa? When do I need to really spend on the guest side to make sure I'm taking most advantage of that booking window there? So I think so much of it goes back to, this is the time where you're creating that annual plan, that annual marketing plan that, you know, starting to lay out, you know,

what type of social media posts am I going to do alongside these different campaigns, these different paid campaigns I'm going to run. So yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, bringing it back to the guest side of things, where, how do you see that breakdown? Is it on that one year plan? Or is it more on a smaller scale even? I think having some understanding of what direction you're going in is super helpful. So I do you take that plus maybe you can start to maybe explore depending on kind of your level of competition, your budget, what you're willing to dedicate to it, and so on and so forth. But maybe you could start to introduce the idea of a campaign for long tail keywords. I have, of my 10 units I have, five are pet friendly. So pet friendly vacation rentals in destination could be a campaign you start to play with, even if it's $5 a day.

Like you don't necessarily need to go in there and put in $5,000 a day to be successful with these initial paid search campaigns. So I think giving yourself the chance to, you know, start with those campaigns and get something live on the paid search side would make some sense and wouldn't require, you know, a significant upfront investment, something you could budget on a monthly basis, or maybe you run those ads during high season, turn them off or lower their budget during low season. On the SEO side, you know, I think there's some infrastructure you can put in place here that's going to help you get some wins down the road. I'll be honest, you probably don't have the budget to really hire

like an SEO agency to do everything for you. So, you know, if you hire an agency that's going to do all your link building for you, all your content creation for you, do a technical SEO audit and clean up all the problems that might be on your site,

that could be a few thousand dollar affair or a few thousand dollar per month affair if it was ongoing work. And you may not have that necessarily at this stage, but could you go do the basics? I think so. Like, I think you could start to do

content on your website, even like a basic page of things to do, attractions, activities, uh, restaurants, like you could find six, seven, eight pages to kind of put in place where hopefully depending on your market, you might start to get some initial traction on those things from an SEO perspective. So those are things that come to mind on the search side of things that could be done certainly over a year. Even if you kind of chipped away at them slowly, you could get those things live. Um, you know, even if it was a part-time, you're a part-time marketing manager and still doing part-time other things in the business at this stage very similar to the featherweight stage on the email side of things

though i would argue um kind of flipping the page over there that is where you could do some better work here because collecting emails now isn't necessarily going to be very expensive you know we are a big fan of both online and offline email collection so online would be things in your website your you know your social media pages like Instagram and Facebook should have email signups and so on and so forth. Offline could also mean, you know, StayFi is kind of what we typically recommend for offline email collection. We had a client tell us the other day, hey, I can't do it because the way my Wi-Fi is

and my condo building, I'm toast. And we said, well, a guidebook still works perfectly fine. You know, a rental agreement still works perfectly fine. So, you know, I'm a StayFi stan. You know, I know it's not the only way to get the job done with regards to offline email collection. Again, guidebook and, you know, rental agreement could still work very well with regards to email collection. And by doing it now, by the way, doing it when you're at this smaller stage, so to speak, you're gathering a few hundred, a few thousand emails, hopefully over the coming year or two, then when you maybe have a,

you're going to just have a much larger list when you're doing more email marketing down the road. I will say that all the email collection you do today doesn't gonna feel like it's doing a lot because you're not getting a huge return when your list is 200 people. You're not gonna be like, oh yeah, every time I send an email, I get a booking,

but you're laying some really essential groundwork for, it's like the classic expression, right? The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The next best time is today. The best time to start email collection, both online and offline is as soon as possible and then being consistent with at least something once a month i think is kind of a good floor if you can't do that once a quarter you know certainly you can carve out four times a year being able to send an email out to your past guests i think that then they don't forget about

you which i think can happen at this stage is that you're busy you're running around you know with a thousand things on your list and the email may fall down the the priority list a little bit. And then you don't email someone for two years and they forget about you. Then when they open the email, they ignore it or they market a spam or they unsubscribe. So you want to, if you can avoid that, I think you want to make every step possible on your side to avoid that on the email marketing side, that would be more guest specific. And then, yeah, wrapping up with social. So in my mind, from a social perspective, this is where you're probably going to see, you know, where your time is not really well correlated either to the output that you're

getting. You might only have 100 page fans, right? So when you're posting content on Facebook or Instagram, only people have kind of found you or maybe they search for you specifically and like your page on Facebook or follow you on Instagram. It's not going to be a barn burner, right? With respect to content. So this is one where I feel like you could probably spend the least time on if I'm being

candid at this stage. It makes more sense, I think, to be. So this is one where I feel like you could probably spend the least time on if I'm being candid at this stage. It makes more sense, I think, to be investing in this. If we've talked about this before too, if you have the properties that are Instagram worthy, so to speak, we'll put that in air quotes. Maybe we should do like an Instagram worthy

definition episode at some point. Probably. But yeah, but if you're managing the same 10 bedroom or 10, sorry, 10, one bedroom condos, everybody else, Instagram is probably not your channel. It doesn't mean that you can't do it. We've talked to people before in the past that have done well with Facebook groups, for example.

What's going on? You know, Myrtle Beach, like that type of Facebook group could be a social channel that you do well in. So, you know, one thing I would also say here, I don't think we said this yet, is like, what are your skill sets? Like, what are you good at? If you're still doing a good chunk of the work and you're outsourcing little bits of it, it's a lot more, I feel like, healthy and a lot more logical to outsource things that you actually are somewhat knowledgeable about. If you yourself are knowledgeable about social media for whatever reason, maybe you've done it in a previous job or career or a different business that you were a part of, and you can grow that social following through your own skill set, and then you can assign down some of the tasks because you understand what good social media content looks like, then you might do better than someone who, you know, like myself that has a lot of knowledge about SEO. I could do some damage even with a low budget because I know how to do it, you know, and I could do it myself without a lot of training and technique. If you know nothing about SEO and the

idea of reading about SEO or even reading this book and implementing some of the things just terrifies you, then even though I think that's what's best for your business, like it may be something that you might want to wait a little bit on and maybe you can get better at one channel and execute it well. So I think that's, that's maybe another philosophical thing, excuse me, that I would share,

you know, today with you is like, you got to kind of focus on what you're good at and you're not going to be good at every single marketing channel right now. There are companies that are much larger than this stage that don't master every marketing channel. So that is not a prerequisite. I think you are better off doing one or two things well than doing 10 or 12 things very poorly, which I do see sometimes at this stage.

Hey, you know, we're not on tech talk. We should be, let's do tech talk. And I'm like, okay, well, like, do we have the right infrastructure set up for tech talk? Do we have the budget? Are we going to be managing comments? Do we understand what works well in that platform? Or are we just doing it to check off a box? I think that's like an unhealthy thing that sometimes people find themselves in at this stage is they're doing something to check off a box to say they're doing X, Y, Z activity. They're not actually, you know, they're a mile wide and an inch deep as opposed to being, you know, an inch deep in a mile. You know what I'm trying to say there.

Sorry. That's sort of philosophy. I think you're probably better served at this stage focusing on a handful of channels on the owner side, like you've alluded to over the past few minutes. And what I was alluding to there is like search social email or where you're going to do some, some good work. There's a few things you can put in place that aren't going to take a ton of time or a ton of budget. It would make a lot of sense. Email collection being a good example, the rest focus on what's working, focus on what you're good at, recognize that you're not on every marketing channel and that's okay. That's perfectly

normal. And you will get to those other channels when you have more budget and time as you slide up the ladder, so to speak, revenue-wise. That's it. I think everybody wants to do everything at once because they think that doing everything at once is going to make them better or make it more effective. I think you can really focus in and hone in on specific channels and make sure that those channels are effective. I want you to use every channel that is effective for your business. But let's just face it that not every channel. We don't need to check every box. And it is once you get to that next stage, then maybe you're checking more boxes. And that's the it's one of those things where at some point marketing will have a lot of diminishing returns. You want to be able to just put money in and print money coming out on the back end of that. That is, and we hope that that is always going to be the case. That's just not the reality. So I think that's something where if the data ever tells you, whether you're at this level or whether you're at the super heavyweight level, that doesn't, like if the data tells you that something's not effective, then don't use it. Like you don't have to have every channel

running at every time, whether you're at whatever weight class your business is checking in at. So I think that that's something that, that we do. We get enamored by, oh, this person is doing this and this and that. Yes, they are. But really all they need to be doing is this email or this social campaign or this, you know, whatever your, whatever is most effective for them. Hey, if it's TikTok good for your business, might be at this lightweight stage. Might not be for everybody at this lightweight stage. So I think anything you're doing and evaluating, kind of building it back into that one-year plan, make sure that reporting is set up.

Make sure you have those goals set up so that you have something to measure the performance by. There's my soapbox moment there of jumping all over that one with just, that's something that I love people's willingness to say, hey, let's try LinkedIn. Hey, let's do this. Hey, let's do that. Those are great channels, but maybe not the best fit for us at this time. Let's see what works with some of these tried and true channels of more of the direct marketing, more of the search marketing, more of the things that we know are going to be effective. And let's track and let's adjust accordingly. Let's iterate. Let's make sure that we're doing the best practices of marketing, but with the channels that are going to be most.

I think that's a, I think that's a really good way to think about it. The other thing is I would kind of button up with, I did a LinkedIn post a little while ago and it did well from an engagement standpoint. I thought it was interesting. And you know, you know me, I'm all for the engagement. And the premise of the post was if you want to manage luxury homes, if you want to manage nice homes, be a home that deserves to be a company that deserves to manage luxury homes, if you want to manage nice homes, be a company that deserves to manage those homes. And I think that we understate the importance of that initial impression that someone

has on a company and how you do kind of have to sometimes work your way up from the bottom. Start at the bottom now. Where do you go from there? And I think when you're at this stage, you look at the work that you're doing. And this is kind of the classic example that a lot of people talk about in our industry. It's pretty much the same amount of work to manage the $50,000 a year gross booking revenue home as it is the 150. Yeah. One obviously makes it, you know, three X the revenue. So you're better off, you know, targeting the best quality home possible and the most revenue home possible. That makes a lot of sense that the trouble is that the 150,000, you know, per year homeowner doesn't always trust the brand new company that doesn't

have the track record or the history or the branding or the marketing or the, you know, go on and on to get there. So I think that anything you can do at this stage to, you know, make yourself look, I guess, like bigger than you are, nicer than you are, I think is kind of a valid thing to be exploring or having an approach that actually is novel and unique. You know, we've kind of beat this up before on the show, so we don't need to go too far on this, but like every landing page kind of says the same thing at times, you know, every landing page says we manage your home for revenue. We, you know, we keep track of the guests. We do a good job. We clean it, you know, between stays, like a lot of those things are really similar. You've got to find something that maybe makes you stand out from the crowd. And sometimes

it's a personality thing. Sometimes just doing a good job, but just realizing that it's going to take time to like build up referrals and build up quality homes. And you're going to have to reach out to it. You're going to have to have maybe 25 conversations with homes that are above your current level of quality until you get one to say yes. And then once you get that one to say yes, you blow his or her socks off, do such a great job that you're kind of getting to that next stage. So I think this is very much like the butterfly is like, you know, in the caterpillar right now at this stage of the business. And you're trying to figure out how to like make it this beautiful butterfly that you want your company to be.

And I think that a lot of these pieces that you have in place are about kind of building trust, you know, so like having an about us page, you touched on this earlier, having a property management page, you touched on that earlier, making them awesome, making them look nice, making them look professionally designed, you know, having some actual legitimate unique selling points. But we do this. Most people in our industry do that, you know, or, you know, we have the, the proof is in the pudding, often in reviews. We have that in our notes here. And that's something that we talk about in the

book. If, um, I've, I thought about this recently. I don't know. This is a bit of a tangent, but a four is failing on Airbnb and a five is not failing on Airbnb. So really when you see someone that has a 4.27 or 4.7, whatever the number is, just chop off the four. The four doesn't matter. And then look at the point, whatever, as their actual grade. So if you're grading someone at school and they had a 4.74, that's like a C. They're getting 74 out of 100 because, again, zero is failing and four means you're off

Airbnb. Five means you're on Airbnb. So really, if you look at reviews, what you actually want is someone who's like 4.85, 4.9, if they have enough volume, and certainly a property manager should have enough volume, you know, even if they only have 10 stays, and they've been at it for a little while, they should have a few hundred reviews, where you should start to have an average, how many four stars, three stars, two stars, one star are you getting? And just know that like any luxury, savvy vacation rental, you know, homeowner investor, if they see a 4.12, or 4.22, or something like that, they're not going to be as happy, you know,

with that outcome. So yeah, I think, I think those are the things to kind of put in place and understand and realize that, yeah, it's going to take a lot of work to get where you want to go. And ultimately, you know, these are the things that, that don't make sense that you want to focus on and build off of. So, yeah, I would agree with that. That's, I mean, it is, I think, you know, this is another exciting time for the business to, to kind of move up to that next level. Um, yeah, I think you've kind of covered everything or, you know, all those things you want to focus on as much as you can maybe stay away from the noise of outside. And this is where you really focus in, make your plan, follow your plan, hit your goals and, and kind of move up to that next level.

Yeah, exactly. Awesome. Well, we can wrap. Otherwise, we'll spend all day, you know, talking about this sort of thing. So if the listener has got some value out of this episode, we're going to keep going. We're going to keep doing this episode type. We started with featherweight. We did lightweight just now.

We're going to kind of go up the ring, so to speak. All this is broken down in the book, Mastering Vacational Marketing. You can pick that up on Amazon.com or search that, you search that online and you can probably find a copy of it pretty easily. It'll be shipped to your door through the magic of Amazon for around $15. That would benefit a lot. Appreciate you listening. If you got some value out of what we've talked about and what we are discussing here today, we always appreciate reviews. So hopefully you can leave a review on your podcast app of choice and more people can listen to the show. And otherwise we'll be back next week on a different topic. And then we'll kind of come back to this series here down the road.

So yeah, if you have any other questions, let us know. You can email me conrad at buildupbookings.com. Appreciate it. And we'll catch you on the next episode. Thanks so much.