Heads In Beds Show - Building Your Vacation Rental Marketing Fundamentals

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

In this episode Conrad goes solo on this audio-only version of a LIVE training on "Building Your Vacation Rental Marketing Fundamentals".Want to get the video too? Tap the link below.Enjoy!��️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellRecording: Building Your Vacation Rental Marketing FundamentalsConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 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.

Hey guys, Conrad here, another solo episode this week. I thought you guys might enjoy this one. This is all about building your vacation rental marketing fundamentals. This was a webinar, kind of a live training that I did a few weeks back, but perhaps those listening to the podcast may not have caught the webinar when we did a live. So I'll put a link in the show notes down to the video recording. There's a blog post on our website where you can see the video recording. There are a few things I mentioned during the audio that made sense a little bit more

as slides. So that may be something that would help you out a little bit there. But otherwise, I think this was a pretty good chat. We kind of went into a lot of different details and information all about kind of the what those kind of core things are with respect to marketing fundamentals, not trying to get all fancy and doing a thousand things. But let's go back to the basics. What does that look like? So please enjoy this recording of the live training. If you have any questions, let me know. Thanks for listening. Yeah. Today's presentation, today's webinar,

live event is building your vacation rental marketing fundamentals, lessons learned for millions of indirect bookings. So really excited to kind of talk today about everything fundamentals and everything marketing because I think we're going to learn a lot from it. So I love watching sports. And one thing always kind of sticks out to me as someone that enjoys watching sports and always kind of paying attention to the finer details of things, which is that all great athletes return to and really practice the fundamentals on pretty much a daily basis or at least as often as they reasonably can. And in fact, if you listen to interviews or media or podcasts or books or whatever the case may be

from famous athletes, they often refer to their work as mastering the basics and mastering the fundamentals. So you may think that your favorite player of whatever sport maybe that you're a fan of knows all these advanced techniques and tactics. And there might be some truth to that. They might know some more advanced things. But in many cases, they're actually just mastering and getting really comfortable with the basics

and with the fundamentals. So that was kind of the seed of the idea of today's webinar was kind of going through a little bit of what those fundamentals actually are for our world, for the vacation rental world, and what it actually means to execute on these fundamentals at a high level.

So you can actually get your marketing in better shape, get better results, all these kinds of things. So I've got a story to kind of get us started here. This is Adam Scott. If you're not a fan of professional golf, you probably don't know who he is, but he turned pro a long time ago actually. Adam Scott turned pro in the year 2000.

So he's been a professional golfer for a little bit over 24 years at this point. And in fact, on the golf course, Adam Scott has won over $60 million. He's also made a lot of money outside the golf course as well, sponsorship, steals, all that kind of stuff. So needless to say, he's had a very, very long career, a successful career, Brian, he stretched,

and he's done pretty well for himself. And for those 24 years that he's been a professional, he's pretty much never been outside of the top, let's say 50 or 75 players on the planet, right? So there's thousands of professional golfers all attempting to be as good as Adam Scott. Maybe he wasn't necessarily the best player in any given year, but he was often one of the best players. And that's been the case for almost 25 years at this point, which is pretty impressive. So someone that if you watch professional golf, you may have heard of before, seen him winning tournaments, and again, making over $60 million,

not a bad gig if you can get it, right? So here's Adam Scott on the range, and Adam Scott's probably hit, who knows, right? 10,000, 100,000, 500,000 range balls in his life over that 25 year period, maybe more, who knows? But when he gets the range, what does he do? He lays down these alignment sticks, you see kind of near his feet here on the right side

and in front of his club to line up where he's hitting. So it's interesting, right? The guy gets the range and lays down alignment sticks. Did a professional golfer forget how to actually line up? I don't think so. I think he knows how to line up, but it's interesting. If he doesn't lay down the alignment sticks, what he's talked about before is that he gets off track.

He gets off kilter. He actually, it can cause him other issues. So by, if he's lining up wrong and he doesn't lay down these sticks and he starts aiming things a little bit too far right, he's over-correcting, he's having problems, he's having issues, and it causes all these fundamental problems in his game

that then end up impacting everything else he's doing on the other side of things. So a professional golfer didn't forget how to line up. But again, every single time he goes to the range, he actually returns to the basics. Scottie Scheffler, if again you follow golf, is another example. He gets the range, puts down linemen sticks and actually has a grip trainer. This is something that, you know, a beginning golfer might use to understand how to hold the club. And he uses this grip trainer regularly to actually teach himself how to hold the club, and he uses the script trainer regularly to actually teach himself how to hold the club.

This is a guy who this year won eight or nine tournaments, over $60 million this year, one of the most successful players of our modern era, and he returns the basics. So I could go through a lot of examples, but I think you get the point, pick your sport of choice, and you can find examples of that, the best athletes in the world

returning back to those basics, and doing them repeatedly, consistently, over and over again to kind of see what they need to be focusing on. All right, so a lot there about, you know, sports and that kind of stuff. What does that have to do with vacation rentals, right? So I think that refining the fundamentals allow

for you to focus on the basics before layering in too much. And it's interesting, as I was putting together this presentation, I thought kind of two things. One is that we see groups of people that reach out to us here at Buildup Bookings, and they want to do everything all at once. So they want to master, or they want to get really good at social media marketing.

They want to get really good at email marketing. They want to do conversion rate optimization. They want to do, you know, SEO. They want to, you know, be running Google ads. They want to do everything all at once. And they really complicate their approach because they're actually trying to do too many things, but they're not making to do too many things,

but they're not making a lot of progress on any one given activity. So that's kind of one bucket of people I see is sort of running around maybe a little chaotically at times trying to make the progress they're trying to make, but actually, unfortunately, ending up not making the progress that they want to be making, which can be a little bit frustrating at times.

So the second set of people, they're struggling at times, right, with the actual decision-making process of what they need to be working on, that they do nothing. So instead of taking action and doing too many things, they actually have the opposite problem. They're not doing anything. And as a result, they find themselves in a bit of a tricky spot there.

So that's the funny part, right? Is that there's two kind of audiences kind of happening here or different examples happening here. And the funny part is they end up in the same spot when it's all said and done. Whether you're doing too much or you're not taking action and working on what you need to be working on, you actually needed the sort of, the piece that you need to work on

is kind of the same in my mind, which is get back to the basics, working on those core marketing blocks in your vacation from business, and then executing on those. So for those of you kind of attending here live or watching later on, perhaps we haven't met before, so if that's the case, I wanted to introduce myself as we get going here. My name is Conrad. I'm the founder of an agency built up bookings. We've been doing vacation rental marketing in some form or fashion since 2016.

Last year I wrote a book called Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing. We'll have more on that at the end, so stick around for that. And I've spent really the last nine years working directly with the vacation rental managers, helping them with their vacation rental marketing. Search social email has kind of been our focus and we've got other things that we can talk about today as well. Over the last nine, 10 years at this point, I can really attribute over $50 million of direct bookings driven through our marketing campaigns that myself and people in my agency have put together. So we've kind of been able to see what's worked well

and all these different pieces that we can improve upon as we get going. So different folks listening in today I realize. So just wanted to go through some examples here or like a note on the different clients that we have worked with, because as you know, not every single person in this space comes in with the same business model.

Not every person in this space comes in with the same business model. Not every person in the space comes in with the same approach. Some are managers, some are hosts, some own the property that they're marketing and trying to get more bookings on. Some just manage that property for others. They only get a small commission. But the good news is, in my mind, is that despite these different business models, a lot of the marketing fundamentals are the same. Now, how much you can pay for a booking and what your sort of cost basis is may be a little

bit different, but it doesn't change the core or fundamental activities of what you actually need to be focused on. So the good news is that even if you're kind of coming at it from a different angle today, again, host manager, small, large, the fundamentals kind of remain the same in my mind. So let's share a little bit about the results that we've seen, just so you can kind of understand what we have seen in our agency, you know, working with all these clients over the last nine or 10 years at this point, and what we can learn from that. So it's so funny, we use this tagline on a lot of our marketing material. Of course,

we'll talk today really about the vacation rental marketing side of things. But of course, we're always trying to market our own agency. And I like this tagline because it actually doesn't talk about us. It talks about our clients a little bit. And the clients are the ones that actually do the work, right? Like, I don't think we deserve the credit for, you know, the results that a lot of our campaigns have driven, because our clients are the star of the show.

We're just a supporting role. We're just helping a little bit along the way, you know, get people in the right place, be aware of these properties, show them, you know, what they're interested in, and then much of the hard pieces that we'll talk about today are actually getting on their property,

understanding the audience targeting, a lot of things that we didn't have any, you know, say so or involvement in, but we can help enhance it when we actually get to work with a client. So a few slides ago, for example, I said I can track $50 million in direct bookings from search, social, and email campaigns that we've worked on.

But again, our clients deserve the overwhelming majority of credit for that because it's not really about us, it's about the things that we can do for our clients and the results that they get. So again, in very different markets, all the fundamentals we talk about today still apply. Doesn't really matter if it's a beach market

or a mountain market, cabin market. If people are searching for vacation rentals in a given area, if they're looking for that type of experience, I feel confident that everything we're gonna talk about today will apply. So let's go through some examples. This is a client that we've worked with now

for a few years. They're in a single market, they've got about 125 units, mostly condo inventory. That's kind of the most common unit type that they have, but they have some homes as well. Over the last 12 months or so, this is based on data that I pulled when prepping and building out these slides, you know, about a week ago. So I went to September 1st.

They've done just a little over $1 million in direct revenue on their website. This is another client that we're working with, two markets actually, sort of in the same state, but different regions of that state. They've got about 195 units, more of a cabin type market, as I would say. And this is a company that's done a little under $3 million

in direct bookings over the last 12 months. Here's another client, single market, 300 plus units, very seasonal demand, actually a season that's kind of open during a certain period of the year. And then during the beginning part of the year, kind of the fall period, it actually kind of shuts down and there's very little demand. Actually season that's kind of open during a certain period of the year. And then during the beginning part of the year, kind of fall period, it actually kind of shuts down and there's very little demand. They're in a single market. They've got about 300 units, mostly whole homes, single family homes is kind of the most common inventory type they've had. And they've done over five, just a little bit under $5 million in direct reservations

over the last 12 months. And then finally, just to give like some different types of examples here, here's a plant they're working with. It's more of a resort property in a typical beach market. They're in a single market, so they've got 500 rooms at this resort, and they've done a little over $6 million in direct bookings. Last example here, sorry, one more, three markets. This client's actually in a few different places in one of the most popular cabin markets in the US. They've got 600 units, and they've done a little bit over $13 million in direct bookings over the past 12 months or so. So I could have been going but I think you get the point. The point is that these fundamentals that we're going to talk about today, despite the fact that they're in different markets, some are beach markets, some are mountain markets, some are

new. One of those clients started in 2021 for example, others have been around for a long time. One of the other clients that I shared there actually opened their business. They took their first booking back in 1986. In fact, that client loves to sort of joke and remind me that he's been doing this longer than I've been alive. And I'm certainly not a spring chicken at this point. So it's always funny to kind of hear those kinds of things. But despite all their differences, age of company, market, number of units, obviously some have more bookings coming in than others,

but they all do these fundamentals that we're gonna talk about today the same way. So let's dive in, the marketing fundamentals. What are we focused on? What are we talking about? So in today's webinar, we're gonna go into detail on each of these six different points. We've got strategy, branding, website, search marketing, social media, and email.

So the way that I'm kind of thinking about how we're gonna talk through everything today and go through everything today, these top three pillars are kind of things that you set up to get to the bottom three pillars. So the strategy, we're gonna cover it in detail in a moment here, but basically that's kind of like who we're targeting, why we're targeting,

why our properties are right for those people. The branding is how we present our actual listings in our company to people that are actually interested in staying with us. The website is what we're actually sending them to. Again, we'll talk about all these in more detail here in a minute, but those are kind of things that we set up. The bottom three pillars here, the search, social, and email marketing components are things that we can do to get more people aware of our properties. So if we have a specific guest avatar in mind, we've got to let

them know about it. Certainly OTAs are one successful way of doing that. And today's webinar, we're going to touch on OTAs. We're going to talk about OTAs. And OTAs are great. I suggest you use them and leverage them to the best of your ability. But there's also other things that you can do to drive more demand. And we're going to talk about these bottom pieces, search, social and email, as really being some of the most impactful things you can do to actually get more reservations, get more people interested in your company, get more people interested in booking with you. And those are those pieces. So kind of think of this as like the top layer and then a bottom layer, but these six fundamentals are really going to be work we're going to

dive into deeply. All right, so there's people here live. So stay to the end, we've got a bonus downloadable guide on building the right fundamentals. Everything we talked about today is a lot of information, obviously, again, it's recorded. So if you miss something, no big deal, I'll send you the recording when it's all done. But for those that are live, I've got something kind of extra extra for you because you took time out of your day to come here live. I appreciate that. Obviously some people register and then don't actually show up. So I'm actually going to stop the recording before we actually finish everything out today. And I'm going to give away a few extra things for people

that are actually here live with me today. So thank you for that. But stay to the end. And we've got some bonus things that we're going to cover. All right. So pillar number one, or fundamental number one, maybe I should say strategy. So I've got a quote that I'll share here, a Seneca quote, if those of you that are into maybe Stoic philosophy might have heard this one before, but I think it's okay if you've not heard that before or if you're not familiar with this because we're going to go into what it actually means and why I think this is one of the most fundamental problems that most of our clients face or potential clients might face when they're getting going. So I love this quote, if one does not know to which one port is sailing,

no wind is favorable, Seneca quote, probably two thousands of years old at this point, but it actually still makes sense to what a lot of people struggle with today. Because I think figuratively or in some cases, almost literally people are sailing in the wrong direction. So they're trying to accomplish something when it comes to marketing, they're trying to accomplish something when it comes to, you know, building up their traffic, whatever problem we're trying to solve as it relates to today's topic, but they're trying to accomplish something when it comes to marketing, they're trying to accomplish something when it comes to building up their traffic, whatever problem we're trying to solve as it relates to today's topic, but they're actually quite literally

going in the wrong direction. They're spending a lot of time, effort, energy, marketing to an audience that doesn't care. Maybe they're trying to promote a property that no one really wants. Like there's a lot of these fundamental things that I think come into play, where if you don't have the right strategy

kind of built out initially, if you don't know which port you're sailing to, then there's no wind or there's no direction that's actually going to make it successful. So there's a reason, too, that I kind of started with this one, the strategy one, because I think that if this is wrong, everything after is either not going to work well or not work at all.

The best search marketing campaign in the world is not going to work particularly well if most people who are actually going to that website or that are interested in your properties get there and they're not interested in it. They look at it and they don't actually want to book it. So I think this is kind of the fundamental question to ask is, do we know where we're going? Do we know what port we're sailing to? Or in our analogy here, do we know what type of property and guests we're going after?

Am I the right person to host that person, that particular guest? And what properties do I have that meet their desires? So if we can get, you know, we could get really fancy and ask a lot of like analytics questions and data questions and things like that. And that's fine. Maybe there's time and a place for that. I'm not opposed to it. But I think this sentence here really does a much better job of explaining this core

strategy question. Who is my ideal guest? And why am I with the properties that I have the right person to host them? And I think this this could apply if you have one listing, this could apply if you have 10 listings, this could apply if you have 100 or 1,000 listings. The question is still the same, which is who is my ideal guest and why am I, meaning like the property manager or the host, with the properties that I have the right person to host them. So I think that first question is one of the most important things too to think about who is my ideal guest.

I think most people acquire inventory or maybe they get listings first and then they think about who the ideal guest is after, which feels a little backwards to me. Or maybe they have in mind what that guest might want, but then they don't do a lot of research or they don't have a lot of second order thinking maybe about what that property actually needs in order to feed that guest desire or demand. So if your property doesn't satisfy the need or desire of a guest who's looking to stay in that location, then everything else we talk about today really won't work very well or won't be very effective.

I think that's fair to say. Because if people are not interested in what you have to offer, no amount of promotion, no amount of advertising, no amount of social media campaigns is actually going to save you. So this, I think, is the foundational question to strategy. And we can really build this out by thinking

of our ideal guest in these three categories. So there's a lot of ways to describe your ideal guest. Some people will say something to the effect of like, well, a lot of people go to insert destination here. So a lot of people go to, based on the North Middle Beach area, for example, a lot of people come here, that's true. But I think you want to define the guests

a little bit more specifically than that. You might want to think about location, not only where they're traveling to, but also why they're traveling there. There's kind of two layers to that. If they're coming, for example, here in the Myrtle Beach area, many of our people who come here, people who travel here, come from a drive to Radius. So I can sort of draw a little circle, maybe two or three hours around the Myrtle Beach area, and we'll find a lot of our guests are coming from there. So that can be one way that we could identify an ideal guest, is where are they coming from, and where are they coming from?

And why are they coming to this particular destination? Why are they traveling? So again, sounds simple, but what is the actual desire that someone has when they get there? Are they traveling for work? They have to be there, and it's just kind of a place for them to sleep. I think that can be a challenging marketing problem to solve

because maybe people are more focused on budget and cost in that environment and that scenario. Maybe people are thinking, I, coming here with my family, it's going to be me and my kids and my grandparents or my parents are coming along with us. So it's multi-generational travel. They're reconnecting. That's going to change a little bit about how we're

going to do the marketing and advertising for sure. It could be people are coming for a bachelorette party. There's 1,000 reasons, as you guys know, that people may want to come to a specific destination. But we've got to think, why did my properties fit that desire? You know, I think that's the that's the foundational question to ask. Because when we find that when we find the the properties that are fitting what someone is really looking for, everything else that we're going to talk about later works a lot better. And the search ads convert better when people are looking for something

and then they see it and the conversion rate is 2%, not 1%. That sounds like a small difference, but it really makes a huge meaningful difference in how effective all the marketing and advertising is if we're basically advertising something people want or something that people don't want. So I refer to a lot of like Dan Kennedy books and media and things like that, and some of the marketing and advertising that I do. And he's got a great sort of like story that I think he's he'll ask people when they're getting started in their marketing journey. And he'll say, if we were to, you know, design the perfect environment for selling, and let's say we sold hot dogs

and we sold cold beer, what would be the best place for us to design the world where we would sell the most? And people give all these examples. Maybe it's a good idea to do it in this location, outside of a baseball game. Or maybe it's a good place to do it here, all these sorts of things. And he ignores, and most people ignore,

what the attribute is that would make selling cold beer and hot dogs the most successful, which is a starving crowd. So in our world, a starving crowd is a guest that desires the property that you have that you're actually listing on whatever means you happen to be pushing it out on. So if you've got that, you've got a lot of the ingredients in place to be successful. But I think some people actually stumble out of the gate and then it makes everything else a little bit harder. So why are they traveling and why are they traveling? Why do your properties fit that desire? And what is their budget? You know, I think that's one thing too that we often don't talk about. You know, sometimes guests that have more budget to spend on their vacation actually end up being a

much higher quality guest host and sometimes an easier guest to market to because although one property could rent for $500 a night and then their property could run for $500 a night and another property could run for $250 a night, it's usually not twice as expensive to acquire the guest that is a $500 guest per night than the $250 per guest night. But your marketing costs goes up incrementally, but your revenue can go up double. So it's like maybe we're bidding on Google Ads and our cost per click goes from $1 to $1.30.

That's an increase, but it's not 100% increase. That's a 30% increase. And the conversion rate may be actually pretty similar. So I think understanding playing in the right game from a budget standpoint, I think, is also a key part of the puzzle here. And certainly, if you're a property manager, and those on the call that I can see that are property managers,

can understand this even more acutely, because if you're taking 20%, let's say, commission on $100 per night property, you've got so little room to play with there, unless you're getting really, really long bookings to actually do a lot of marketing. If you're getting 20% commission on $1,000 per night property, we've got a lot more room to play with to actually do some of our own marketing, advertising, brand elements, the website design, all the things we're going to talk about today.

So I think budget and targeting the right sort of band of traveler, the right type of guests coming in is so critical too. And what means does that guest have to book? I think is a foundational question here to ask when you're thinking about where they're coming from, why they're coming, and what do they want to spend as we start to kind of put that triangle together, we can really define an ideal guest, you know, in my opinion, a lot better. And we can start to build a marketing plan that makes a lot more sense when we know that information. Okay, so let's go over to the second tile here that we've gotten kind of our top three tiles.

So we went through strategy there, more about the why and the how, like how am I gonna get people there? Branding I think is the next thing to focus on because even though we'll get to the, I would say more tactical marketing pieces here in a moment, I think it's worth spending some time to think deeply about branding and what it actually represents. I think a lot of people think that this is a logo.

This is just the, oh, this is the color of the font that we use on our website. And that's really not it at all. Branding is not just the logo or it's not even a fun tagline as much as I kind of was joking earlier about having fun taglines to advertise our own company or we come up with sometimes with fun copy for our clients.

That's all good stuff. It's a part of the process, but it's certainly not a fake promise. That's not what branding is either. I think it's beyond all those things. In my mind, branding is the promise I think it's beyond all those things. In my mind, branding is the promise that you're making to the guest.

So, you know, one thing I see more than I feel like I should see is, you know, someone will reach out to us here at BuildUp and they say that they're a luxury property manager, for example, and then you go look at the website and you might see a five-bedroom luxury home next to a two-bedroom or a one-bedroom condo, right? That's like, well, would a luxury property manager be managing a one-bedroom luxury home next to a two-bedroom or a one-bedroom condo, right? It's like, well, would a luxury property manager

be managing a one-bedroom condo? Not in most markets. That's certainly not something that kind of would be on the website of a luxury property manager. So people kind of make these brand promises a lot, I think, or they sort of say things aspirationally when it comes to branding. Well, I want to be the best property in this location, I want to have,

you know, the best views, or I want to offer the best service or whatever kind of they they may say, but if they if they don't actually deliver on that, then I think the brand can fall apart so quickly. All the brands that I think, you know, do the best in our space are ones that make a promise, and then deliver on that promise. So it's if it's a luxury property manager, but only takes luxury properties, that client is, or that brand in my mind is gonna be so much more successful

because they're connecting the brand, not just with the visual identity or like an idea, but they're connecting it with something that's actually very tangible. That's something that you can really sink your teeth into and understand. So I think the best thing in my mind when you think about branding is what do I stand for

and how do I make sure I deliver on what I stand for? And really in a perfect world, not only do I deliver for what I stand for, I over deliver a perfect world, not only do I deliver for what I stand for, I over-deliver, right? So not only do people get in and they expect good guest service, I give them great guest service. I give them the best hospitality that we possibly can.

I give them little bonuses or little extras that they didn't expect. So here's kind of an example just maybe to drive this point home. And I think a lot of people can relate to this one if you've traveled at all, which is you go to a, maybe for me it's going to one of these conferences, going to a VRMA VRMA conference or something

like that. And some destinations, you got to rent a car. And all these car rental companies kind of feel the same, you know, which is that you get there, you just got off maybe a four or five hour flight, you get to the check in desk for this car rental company, and you're waiting in a line of 35 to 55 people and there's one person up there helping everybody, right? So we've got to sit here and wait for an hour or two hours to get our car. This is like one of my pet peeves of traveling by the way. But usually, and sometimes I'll do this

if I'm not scrolling on my phone or I get bored doing that for an hour, you look to the right, you look to the left and you see something that might say something to the effect of, you know, we care about you and we strive to deliver excellent customer service. There'll be a little plaque on the wall or there'll be a little note there or something like that. But I don't believe you because otherwise you wouldn't have one employee

if there's 50 people trying to go off and rent a car right now. Right. So that's a good example, I think, in my mind of like the brand says one thing, we want to deliver you this excellent customer service when you go to rent a car from us. But the experience is not deliver that at all. And I think we can find lots of examples, too, in the vacation rental world, of people claiming something but not actually making that, fulfilling that promise. So what is the brand? In my mind, the brand is the promise that you're giving to guests. What am I going to deliver? How am I going to deliver that? And I think it can work at different layers

of the stack. It could be you have budget properties or maybe you're promising cleanliness and you're just promising comfort. Those are things that maybe don't require luxury. They don't require a 10 bedroombedroom oceanfront property. That's maybe a different type of segment. But you can make a promise to guests and deliver on that promise, even if you're renting a property that's $150 per night. So I think it's making a promise,

delivering on that promise is one of the most important things that I think people sometimes get wrong. The next thing, I think, is something memorable. Over the years, we've worked with a lot of clients and sometimes we'll come across a client who's like the name of the area plus vacation rentals or the name of the area plus properties

or something like that. And it's not that you can't be successful in that world, I think you can, but I think it makes it harder because no one really remembers area name vacation rental company nearly as well as a brand name that actually sticks in their mind. So I think even when it comes to thinking of the brand as like a name or an identity,

I think some people rush through the naming process of a company. And I've learned over the years that like, you might wanna sit down and really give some deep thought to how you're actually naming the company, how you're naming the properties, which is kind of a second piece that we'll talk about here in a minute,

because those are things that people are gonna look for and search for, and you wanna make sure that you're findable. So when people actually go to search for your brand, the worst thing in the world, and I see this pretty commonly, is that they actually go to look for your company and they can't find you. You know, maybe they did go on Airbnb, find one of your listings, find one of your properties, they were there looking and that

individual piece of the actual brand name is hard to find. They're like, oh no, I can't find it. Like I saw a question just come in. Like if someone was named just like something a generic term, like a beachside, you know, you know, brand name, could that be a good and original brand name? And if you own it, maybe it can work, right? But it's always going to be trickier if there's five or six other companies with that same name, because then you have to like add in geo modifiers, you've got to add in extra pieces, and that brand becomes less memorable. It's not that it can't ever work, but I think it just always becomes a little bit harder, a little bit more challenging when your brand name is not something memorable, people forget it after their stay, or even during their stay. Oh, who are we staying with? That sort of thing.

That's what you don't want to have. And then finally, I think your brand is mapped to your ideal guest. So we talked about this a minute ago, obviously, when it comes to strategy. But if your brand is mapped to your ideal guest, then you kind of want that brand to be maybe familiar to something that that guest may use in their other, you know, other areas of life. So, for example, if your guest is driving a BMW or Mercedes car, maybe you want to use fonts or colors or design elements from that that actually people are drawn to when they think of your brand name.

They want to actually see something that feels familiar to them. If you're a luxury property manager, your brand identity should line up with that. You probably shouldn't have a template site from an OTA if you're marketing a luxury asset. You might want to have something that's a little bit more unique, a little bit more, you know, tied into that amenity or tied into that specific brand name. Last note here that

I had, you know, I think we are so funny. We were just talking about this recently, this amenity war that's kind of going on. I'm putting this in air quotes, this amenity war going on means that I think your brand can stand for a lot of things, but you've got to figure out what people actually want. And I think that's one thing where if you're creating a long list of amenities, well, we've got ABC thing, we've got DEF thing, we've got all these things, but it's hard to actually figure out what your properties stand for. I think that can make marketing a challenge because you don't actually know who you're really going after, what the actual goal is of the property and what they're staying with.

And therefore people forget. They just forget the brand. They don't really know why they stayed there. They just happen to book. They don't really know why they stayed there. They just happen to book it because you were available. Maybe your reviews were OK. But it's going to be really challenging to build some of the other layers we're going to talk about here in a second on the website and some of the marketing channels

if you don't have some of those things in place. All right. So now we're into the website section. So at this point, let's say we've got a brand that's unique, memorable, and we've built the right property for the right guest. So we'll make a few assumptions as we get here to the website layer.

Again, a lot of people start on the website side without ever thinking about those first two pieces. So that's why I spent some time kind of going over those things because I think they're really important. So I think the website in my mind is kind of like the storefront that we put out into the world. And if we think about our own lives and the different stores that we may go to in person, which feels like maybe that's

not as common now as it was in the past, we buy so many things online. But when I go to may go to in person, which feels like maybe that's not as common now as it was in the past. We buy so many things online. But when I go to a storefront in person, many people, and I've met people, my dad has in his career met people to do this, they think heavily, they think a lot about how that store is actually designed. So for example, like in the grocery store world, like Publix, for example, maybe you have that in your area, maybe you don't. But you walk into that store and it's designed very intentionally.

How it's actually laid out is been tested know, been tested, been put together. Should we put this product over here and that product over here and so on and so forth. So I think when you put your website out there, that's kind of like your storefront. You're trying to attract people to the front door, to your homepage of your website, or to the property page of one of your websites. And sometimes just the basic pieces there are really missed. And I think that first thing starts with like, not just direct booking functionality. That's what I put here on the slide, but easy to use, simple to understand direct book functionality

can be something that is skipped at times because people actually aren't going through the process themselves or they're sort of accepting a template site maybe from one of their PMS platforms of choice. And then they end up with something that really doesn't convert well. And a lot of the next pieces we'll talk about here in a moment end up not converting very well because they're sending traffic to a website that doesn't actually have the right pieces in place. So direct book functionality, I think,

is the base level thing of what we want. The truth is that we want good direct booking functionality, something that works well on a mobile device, something that works well when you put in calendar dates that the response is quick, you know, the people don't have to wait for 20 seconds or something like that to get a quote back. When guests are considering booking on your website directly and you've got hopefully

the right person looking at the right property, you would hate for something small to be the reason why they didn't book. You would hate for the page loading slowly to be a reason why they didn't book. You would hate for them not seeing a picture of you, your company, your brand be the reason that they don't book. You would hate for the website not being secure to be a reason that they don't book. So there's some of these basics that we've learned over the years that you've got to have in place. And sometimes it means making an investment into that storefront, making an investment into that website so you can put something out there

that people resonate with and respond with. For sure, you're never going to have the budget of Airbnb. You're never going to have the budget of VRBO to have an engineering team that's going to build you a custom website. That's not feasible. We know that to have the budget of VRBO to build, to have an engineering team that's going to build you a custom website. That's not feasible. We know that. But the goal is not necessarily to have something that is the best website in the world. The goal is, again, we'll go back to another Dan Kennedy

example here on the right side, GE is good enough. And I think that good enough doesn't mean bad. Good enough means good. And I think if you have a website that's good, that people can get through the process on, they can enter in dates, they can get quotes quickly, they can understand, you know, your pricing, that's very clear to them. They can go through the checkout process,

there's clarity in that process, what information you need, what's not required, all these smaller things. If you put that in place, you can absolutely have a lot of success with direct bookings. In fact, I was pulling some numbers the other day, didn't make its way into this presentation,

for a client who is using a template website from her particular PMS of choice. In this case, it's owner res is the PMS that she's using. Using the template site that comes with the owner res, there's a very small fee attached to it. I mean, maybe it's 10 or 20 dollars a month or something like that. And this client is driving anywhere from 50 to $60,000

a month in direct bookings off of the template website. Right, so it doesn't have to be maybe the most modern or the most fancy or unique website you've ever seen, but it's gotta be GE. It's gotta be good enough so that people can get through the process quickly and easily, and that there's some reason why they would wanna book direct in the first place, which again,

we'll come back to that in a moment. So the middle tile there, sorry, I just kinda skipped over that, is having that unique brand ID we just talked about a minute ago when it comes to branding is so key because I think the findability of that brand is so key. When people are going and searching for the name of your company, or again, we'll talk about this in a moment too, a little bit further, the name of an individual property. If you're a property manager, you might have 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 listings, right? If that's the case, then you got to figure out who's actually coming. Can they find what they're looking for? It sounds simple,

but you'd be shocked how often people skip over that and actually try to go on hard mode, so to speak. And they try to rank for very competitive keywords right away without making sure that people are first finding the brand ID that you are actually putting out into the world. So I think that that piece is so important. I think this website piece is something that you've got to get to a good spot. It doesn't have to be perfect or flawless or something like that. And I know this to be true that websites that aren't perfect can work well and can get a lot of results. Because if you go do a search in Google in a competitive market, and you look at the top three websites in that market, you can find little things that are not perfect. You can find little quibbles or little problems in there. Because I know over the years,

we've got the chance to work with sometimes a client who was already established was already top three in a given market. Maybe they have 500 properties, and I can go through the website and find little things that are not perfect, right? So the goal isn't, you know, to make it flawless again. The goal is to get it to good enough and have the guest experience through the website that people can understand, they're comfortable with. Maybe it mimics or is familiar with, you know, the way that VRBA works.

Maybe it's mimics or familiar with the layout of Airbnb, but it is your own unique thing that you have that you can actually put out into the world and get traffic to. Okay, so I'll do a little pause here maybe for a second. Adam, I'll go your direction just because we're going to go into the next three tiles and I just want to make sure we're on good footing. Anything you think I missed over those last few pieces as we're kind of roughly at the halfway point here at 1.33? No, I think that you covered them great Conrad. The next, I think, a few points,

I would underline that those are some fundamentals that you want to have in place prior to the next steps of taking action around marketing. So to your point, you want to think through these pieces of strategy and make sure that they're in place before you actually start taking some action on the marketing side. And by having these underlining foundational points in place, it's going to make your next steps that you'll cover in the next few minutes with us, the next fundamental around marketing that much more effective.

Awesome, I agree. I think that it's kind of, you know, obviously where the title is foundationals and fundamentals, these are the things we're talking about today. But I think it's always one of those things where people might nod their head, you know, and agree and say like, that's the way we should do it, but then no one ever really works to define it.

So there we go. That's kind of my take at defining what those fundamentals look like on the strategy side, on the branding side of things, and then finally on the website side of things. So thanks for that, Adam. We're going to forge ahead here with the next piece of everything. We're going to talk now about search marketing. So I'm going to use search to kind of describe what is both an organic and a paid model. Ultimately, yes, there is different techniques and tactics

and there's very different ways that we get success or we might get results with a client working with a paid search traffic versus doing SEO work or organic work there. But ultimately, the traffic is coming from the same place. Whether someone clicks on an ad on Google or whether they go to a website ranking organically in Google and click,

the outcome is the same, which is that someone's coming from a search engine. Obviously we all know when we say search engine, we mean Google. Of course there's other search engines that have, a minor, minor fractional portion or percentage of market share, but 95% of our clients that we look at

get 95% of their traffic specifically coming from Google. So when we think search, I think Google, of course, although there are other minor search engines that are kind of in the mix. But when we look at what source actually drives traffic to our clients' websites, then we look at hundreds of examples over the past few years. The number one traffic outside of people just coming directly

to the website is search traffic. So when people go to book, when guests go to book, they go to search. And the overwhelming majority of those guests that go to search specifically use Google. So I've actually been asked this a lot of times before by different clients or different people in the industry. And they always want to know, well, if you can only do one thing, what would be the one thing that you would do? And my answer would be,

even if I couldn't have a social media page, even if I couldn't have an email list, even if I couldn't have all these other marketing techniques or tactics available to me, if I could only do one thing for a company and I had to make it work, search would be the thing I would focus on. Now, I would hope that I could do both paid and organic search, just to cheat in that question a tiny bit. But if I could only get one traffic source that I feel like will deliver me the guests I'm looking for, can deliver me the type of traffic that I'm looking for, that can grow

over time, that we can get a lot of wins on, search would be my answer. So I think if you could only focus on a handful of things, this I think you would have to rank towards the top of your list so you're getting more traffic into your website that's going to hopefully convert and do a good job for you. So our SEO framework that we come up with a little while ago was actually challenged years ago by Matt Landau to be like, I tell people about SEO, I try to educate people about SEO, for example, but they find it so complicated. They start to read maybe something like the Moz Starter Guide, and they just get so confused by reading that framework because it is very complicated. It's almost like learning a new language, it feels like. All the terms and

terminology that a lot of people use in the SEO world feels like it's not English. Even if English is your first language, it can be a little bit tricky. So I came up with this idea of TLCK. a little bit tricky. So I came up with this idea of a TLCK. T is technical SEO, L is for link building, C is for constant creation, and K is for keyword research. So we'll go through each of those pretty quickly here so you kind of understand what that means. So the technical side of things is how basically Google

or any search engine looks at your website and evaluates your website from a crawling perspective. So what Google is doing every day throughout the entire internet is they're trying to index and find every single page that's out there online. And they're trying to make sure that they can process that page, understand that page, and put that page in their actual cache, in their index.

So when people search, they can try to find the most relevant page for that given query, for that given keyword that people are searching for. So the technical side of it can be a complex well when you think about all the different nuances of how technical SEO works. But what I find is that most people, going back to that good enough concept from a few minutes ago, most people who will share an audit with you or say, hey, your website has a bunch of technical problems, are picking at things that don't really matter. I think when you're thinking about the fundamentals of search marketing,

the technical side of your SEO needs to be good enough. We need to make sure there's no horrible missteps. We certainly don't want broken links. We certainly don't want a website that loads in 25 seconds. We certainly don't want some of these things that are going to harm us from actually getting more conversion. But there's really significant, in my experience, diminishing returns on trying to, quote unquote, perfect the technical SEO on your website. Usually it's fixing the basics, doing a good job, putting some monitoring in place. We use a tool, for example, called Ahrefs

to crawl all of our client sites on a monthly or even biweekly basis and look for anything new that's popped up. Obviously things can change on the website in any given moment in time. So we want to keep an eye on it. But for the most part, when you're thinking of technical SEO, you're fixing any problems

that were there originally. Maybe there's some trigger, you know, trigger points for you. If you're swapping CMSs, you're going from one website provider to another website provider that may require a more detailed technical review. But these are things generally you do one time, you keep an eye on them, and you don't need to spend a lot of your effort or energy or budget on like optimizing or perfecting the technical SEO of a website. So that's more of a one and done and then keep keep an eye on it to put a piece of the puzzle in my experience. The next three we'll go through here, link building, concentration, keyword research, are a little bit more ongoing, right? Particularly link building. I think this is one of those things

where if you're a single property host, if you don't have a lot of listings or you're a newer company, and maybe you're a property manager, but if you're a newer company, this is where a lot of folks might struggle a little bit on the link building side of things because no one knows about your occasional business, right? No one's mentioned you before, no one's linked to you before. And that's where you're just at a severe disadvantage when you're competing against the OTAs or against either other more established, maybe local property managers who might've been around for five, 10, 15 years and have the benefit of time to like get people to talk

about them, mention their website. They've done different activities or marketing, over the years to get more links. And that's probably a weakness, I would say, link building is for a lot of smaller or newer property managers or hosts out there that we begin to work with or talk about. So link building is that piece of the puzzle where if you don't have it in place, doing everything else well will really limit your upside. Whereas getting more links, getting more mentions of your brand and website will benefit you tremendously in my experience because you're starting to compete more so on the Google side of things

with people looking for your company because it's been mentioned in a lot of different places. As with all things link building, there's a white hat or a more Google safe approach to doing it and more black hat approaches. Maybe it's outside of the scope of today's fundamentals discussion to talk about all those different pieces. But I think this is a useful way to think about link building. The harder it is to get that link,

the more valuable it tends to be. I think that's a good way to think about it. So if you're mentioned in the New York Times Travel section, that's a very, very, very hard link to get. That's probably going to be a lot more valuable than a blog comment link that's on someone's travel blog. That's very easy to get. Pretty much anyone could do it

by just leaving a comment on a blog. So again, we can come back to that maybe down the road if people are interested in learning more about like the link building side of things, but just know that your search marketing, particularly your SEO to be clear, will not be successful if you have a site that has no links pointing to it and you don't consistently work on getting more links to it

and getting more potential growth on that side of things. Okay. So two last pieces here on TLCK. So content creation and keyword research. I put these kind of together because the truth is K kind of goes before C if we're being honest but TLKC just doesn't look as good so I kind of do it in this way. So keyword research. Think back to a few tiles ago, a few slides ago when we were talking at length about our specific approach that we have to knowing the guest audience, knowing who actually

wants to book our property. This is where keyword research can really come into play. Because if you've got the best pet-friendly properties in a given market, if you've got the best pet-friendly cabins in Blue Ridge, Georgia, you can easily think of keywords that that guest, that ideal guest type might be searching. And then you can create content, back to the sea example, that would map to that ideal guest that you're going after. So they might search for what are the best dog parks in the area, they might look for the best restaurants that allow dogs, those are things that we could do. And these are all keyword research ideas that you can start to look into and see if they could be good content ideas. Our experience with this sort of content approach is that you want to find keywords that

ideally at first are lower competition. Certainly this is kind of that next tile here, grabbing the low hanging fruit. You want to find people who are, you know, you probably don't want to go after things to do in Blue Ridge right away. That's going to be a more difficult keyword to rank for. But doing a keyword like the best dog parks in Blue Ridge, Georgia, might be a little bit more attainable. That might be something you want to focus on at first. And then build the content that comprehensively covers that topic. I think the one thing that sometimes people fall on is they actually get the right idea in place, but they don't actually execute on that content at a high level. And then they don't see any results, you know, because they've got a article that's 100

words that doesn't go into a lot of detail, doesn't have photos, doesn't have videos, doesn't have a map on it, doesn't have kind of like more interactive interactivity to it. And they just don't see success. So those that kind of content layer is something where I'm much more bullish and I'm much more, I guess, like inclined to help people on the content side produce less quantity of posts, but a higher quality of post. And I think that's where grabbing low hanging fruit is a lot easier. If there hasn't been 50, 100, 200 other people that have done a blog post on the best restaurants, and you're finding stuff that's less competitive, but you can actually do a great

job on, make a comprehensive resource and make that work well. So we talked about this earlier, but just to kind of push this concept through a little bit further on the SEO side of things, the way I think about it is being a seed in the ground, right? I think the common expression goes, the best time to plant a seed is 10 years ago, the next best time is today. But a seed in the ground, right? Every, I think the common expression goes, the best time to plant a seed is 10 years ago, the next best time is today. But a seed, particularly depending on the plant, needs a lot of, I would say water, or it needs a lot of things for that seed to grow

and be the best plant it could be, right? So you can't just chuck your website out there and go, okay, I've got the website done, now people are gonna find me. You've gotta water it, right, in this case, right? You've gotta build new content on the website consistently. Ideally one, two, three, four blog posts a month, depending on your budget and what you can do.

You've gotta build links to that website. You've gotta let people know about it. You've gotta go out there proactively and do these things. Because I can promise you one thing, which is that certainly in a competitive market, your competitors are doing that. And if you do nothing, it's not gonna work nearly as well

as if you put that seed in the ground and put a lot of attention into it. And that's what's going to actually see the results that you want to see specifically with SEO is by doing that. Now, a lot of these pieces kind of apply in my mind to the paid search side of things. So paid search, obviously it's a bit of a different game that we're playing with paid search. The good news is that we don't have to be as patient. We don't have to feel quite as rushed on being a seat in the ground like we do with SEO because we can, in theory, open a Google Ads account tomorrow and be getting traffic by that next day. So that's the benefit of doing Google search ads specifically, is that

we can get approved quickly, we can drive traffic quickly. The downside is that, of course, we're paying per click and that cost per click is generally speaking only going to trend up over time in our experience. It's probably not going to go down. So for running paid search ads, that's awesome. It can be a great way to get traffic right away. It can invalidate some of our ideas, some of our, you know, theses that we have about what guests are searching for. We have a client that we're working with, for example, right now,

that found that a lot of people are searching for wellness retreats in this particular destination. So we were able to actually run a Google Ads ad group focusing on this area plus wellness retreats or wellness villas, those kind of keywords. And we found that that was actually getting almost as much search volume as that area plus luxury vacation rentals or luxury villas. So that was an insight that we got from specifically running PPC ads. And we can now build a whole campaign around that and get some better results from that. So that's kind of one idea of you

can find an idea, test it with Google ads quickly, and then start to get some data that you can then build a strategy around. So that is kind of covering everything, all things search. Let's go over to the social media side of things and kind of talk about that. I think this is an interesting one, social is, because in my mind, people feel like they can do social the best right away. Maybe they're like a user of social media and they go,

ah, I know, I use social media myself. I'm a habitual or I'm a frequent user of Facebook. Certainly I could run my own Facebook page. And I think some people can actually understand the medium very well. And we have clients that do phenomenally well running their own pages. But some struggle with it. And I think that it's because like most things we talked about earlier, they're trying to do too much all at once.

They're saying, oh, I'm going to have a TikTok page. I'm going to have a Pinterest account. I'm going to have Instagram. I'm going to have Facebook. And I'm going to be doing content across all these channels simultaneously. I find that really challenging unless you have a really, really high budget or you get a really, really high attention to detail on doing all those different social channels well.

I think you're better off focusing on one channel at a time, getting strong or at least getting competent in that one channel before you consider expanding into other ones. So for a lot of our clients, Instagram feels like the safest bet, particularly when it comes to properties that are visually very interesting. So like the more luxury, the more high-end, the more design the property, the better it tends to do on Instagram, I think, broadly speaking, from a marketing point of view, because guests on there are inspired by visual design, by visual appeal. So if you have the opportunity to take video assets being kind of the thing that dominates on Instagram nowadays,

and you can do a lot of video on one channel, you can do a lot of video on Instagram, you can see a lot of success with those pieces because of the fact that you're using that medium what is intended in that channel, and you're getting a lot of success and a lot of results from that. So I think that's a good way to think about it. If you can only do one thing, pick one channel,

execute on at a high level, and then you're going to get better results from social media, as opposed to trying to do five or six different things all at once, and then maybe struggling to see the same type of reach or the same type of results from it. So the other thing about social is that at first, it's like no one really knows about your property, no one really knows about your company. So we've got to go grow through both creative and advertising. So if I could give someone advice on social and what we've seen work the best from a fundamental standpoint, it's could be grow through advertising. So can we get people to follow our page by promoting our page on Facebook? We can do that through different advertising options within Facebook to get more page likes.

On Instagram, we can do getting people, we can pay for people who have been on our website, for example, to see our page and we can get them to follow it in that way. And then we can grow by having creative on the page. Like one thing that we've not seen work well is promoting a page that has no content on it. And one thing that we've seen not work well is have a page with a lot of content, but no one who's actually looking at it. So I think the key with social is finding the balance or the kind of that knowing when to accelerate on the content production side of things, particularly when it comes to video. And also knowing when's the time that I need to be more focused on using advertising to grow my audience so that I'm showing my property, showing my company, showing my listings to new people so that they can figure out if they're interested

in what I have to offer. If we think way back to our strategy tile from probably 30, 40 minutes ago at this point, right, advertising on Facebook and Instagram gets a lot easier when you know who you're going after. Instead of having to target everybody in the United States, for example, if we target only people who are based in Charlotte to come to Myrtle Beach, it's going to make our social media advertising a lot more effective because we're only going to have to spend a fraction of the budget to reach the people that really matter to us. And we're not going to advertise people in Montana who never come to Myrtle Beach, just to give like a specific example of that. So that's one kind of pro I would say that social media offers you that search

marketing does not. Right? Search marketing is us reacting to what people are already looking for in Google and then saying, hey, come look at my website, come look at my resource, come look at my properties because you searched for this. I have that. Maybe you're interested in it. That's what search can do for us. Social can do something very different or we can actually show something to someone who we think would be a good fit for our properties based on the fact that we know who they are, maybe not the fact that they were looking for us. So I think despite the fact that social media traffic

doesn't quote unquote convert as well into bookings that search traffic does, and that's why I made that comment a few minutes ago about if I could only do one channel, here's why I would focus on search. The benefit of social or I'd say the upside of social media is that you can introduce your brand to new people and you can build interest basically from scratch or you can build interest from

nothing. Whereas in search we're always reacting to what people are already looking for. So I think there's a lot of upside in there if you think about it from a marketing perspective, because you could do something fun, unique, novel, you could entertain people, you could have stunning photography, stunning videography of a property and that can gap their attention and that can convert into real interest if you do social the right way. All right, so let's go over to email marketing. And I want to be respectful of everybody's time. I know we've got about 10 minutes left, and we've got a few more things at the end to

go through with regards to the bonuses. So I'll get through this last piece, and then we've got some Q&A, actually, that I've seen come on the screen here. So let's go through email marketing, and then we'll be able to dive into those other specifics. And thank you, by the way, again. Thank you for listening. I really appreciate everybody that's here and sticking with us.

It means a lot because it's the first one that we've done and it's good to see people showing up here and engaging with us. All right, so email marketing. Maybe not the most exciting, maybe not the most sexy form of marketing that we're going to do here, but I think the email marketing is something that pretty much anybody can do.

I would say if there's one of the most universal channels that someone could do with regards to marketing has to be email, because it doesn't matter if you have one property or if you have 100 or 1000, maybe your list size will be bigger, the bigger you get, but email marketing works well for all those different company sizes. No matter what your business model is,

whether you're a single property host, property manager, rental arbitrage, whatever it is, however you're doing your business, I promise you that email marketing can be an effective channel. So the first thing in my mind is like, let's assume the basics are in place, right? Like we recommend Mailchimp as the ESP

or the email service provider, but there's a lot of different ones out there. You can do your research and find out what works best for you. Our sort of opinion is that at this point, there's a lot of parity between the different email marketing, email marketing softwares. Like we have clients that use HubSpot, for example.

Awesome, that works, that works well too. We have clients that use Constant Contact. Great, That works well, too. The software really doesn't make a huge difference, in my opinion. The key is growth, right? So no matter what platform we're using, we've got to grow that email list. We've got to collect emails. Collect emails, collect emails. So just like my last tile on social was about video, video, video, if email marketing could be three things, it would be grow, grow, grow, grow that list with relevant people. That's going to be the most impactful thing as long as you're sending to them consistently. So sort of one of the things that we encounter a lot in our, in our work here, build up bookings is that people have a large email list. So they've sort of done,

I would argue the hard part, which is getting a large email list, and they've done nothing to actually send to that list regularly. And people just forget about them. People actually forget completely about a company that they stayed with, you know with six months ago, stayed with a year ago, but then has never emailed them or messaged them since. Think about it. If you were thinking about maybe someplace you stayed two years ago, could you really articulate and tell me exactly the name of the host or the name of the property

manager if they haven't been consistently marketing to you? Probably not. As adults or if you live in the US, you're probably exposed to anywhere from 200 to 500 marketing messages every single day across social media, TV, media, advertising, billboards, right? Think of all the things that we get sort of assaulted with from a marketing and advertising standpoint. People are not going to remember you if you're not consistently being, you know, sending to them. Now, it doesn't mean you have to send an email every single week.

It doesn't mean you have to send an email every single day. We don't want to spam or annoy or bother people, right? That's not the key to success. But we certainly can't go six months, eight months, nine months a year, or people don't hear from us in their inbox, or they're just going to forget. And then when they do get that message, they're actually more likely just to unsubscribe because they're like, I don't remember this. And they're just going to unsubscribe and not actually engage with the email marketing further. So we've got to gauge interest and respond. And we've got to be, you know, depending on what people are clicking on, maybe we want to put more of that content in the next

newsletter. If people are not clicking on things or maybe certain subject lines get a high open rate, but a very high unsubscribe rate, those are things we might not want to do. And we've got to grow, grow, grow, you know, that first tile I think is so important. So on your website, it could be having a pop-up modal or something similar like that in place. So people can actually, you know, fill out, fill out a form. We often encourage or we recommend our clients do some kind of fixed dollar discount or some kind of bonus that people would get when they actually subscribe to that email list. So one of the most successful campaigns we've run for many years for a lot of our clients is sign up for our email list and get X dollars off of your next booking

and X may depend heavily on the property that you're managing and the quality or the percentage discount that that would represent. But for example, we found that offering a $50 discount for many properties works better than offering a 5 or 10% discount to get someone's email address, even when 5 or 10% will be a greater discount. It's a bit counterintuitive, but we find that like $50 off feels like a very tangible thing. The guests may understand that quickly. 5% or 10% off makes me, I got to do math. And once I got to do math, maybe you lose people there. The other thing I would say is I have a note in here about collecting emails offline. So what I mean by that is like when a guest is staying in your property, particularly if they booked through Airbnb, I think you've

got to do every sort of means imaginable to try to get the real email address of that guest. Right? So the most popular one is Stafi. So we've recommended and we've had a lot of our clients over the years use StafFi, which is an excellent system. You can use StayFi too when they actually go to sign into the wifi of your vacation home property, you can sort of say, hey, to access the wifi, give us your email address. That's, I think one of the best ways of doing it.

But you could also do it through a rental agreement. Those are verified and those are something that you can do through even Airbnb bookings. You can also do it through a guidebook, in order to access your door code or in order to access your guidebook, give us your email to validate your information and then get it that way.

So there's kind of different ways to skin the cat, if you will, but I think the outcome is always the same. We've got to collect emails every means possible, every way possible so that we can see success. All right, Adam, so I want to go back your way because I think a few questions came in here. Maybe we can go through those relatively quickly. Yeah, so I won't slow us down too much

to cover the questions, but just to recap a couple of points that you emphasized, Conrad. So I think that as managers, as marketers, we wanna focus on the areas that we personally, or our teams can be the most effective, and then potentially outsource some of those other areas that maybe we can't be effective with.

Now to Conrad's point, we shouldn't necessarily try everything at one time, but as you build proficiencies, you should continue to double down on the areas where you are seeing benefits and you can be effective and then outsource some of those other pieces. Now, the other points I would mention are consistency and focusing on the content side

of things so that you can build upon each other. So Conrad started by focusing on the content building and search. Now that's something that I think everyone can do. I think one of the greatest parts about the vacation rental industry is that we all live in markets where people want to vacation. So that means they are very interested in what happens in those markets. And there tends to be a lot of great things. So I live on the outer banks and I can focus on the activities that happen around here, whether that's beach, fishing, surfing, excuse me, some of the events that might be happening.

So the goal is to build content so that people want to come back and see what your content is, so that they can stay current on what's happening in the market that they're interested in. But then that consistency comes in. You need to consistently do this so that they know that you're a trusted source and that they can come back to you. Now what you do with the rest of that content is then build the other pieces that Conrad mentioned.

So that content is going to be used for your blog, your website, but then it's also used for social, start to build content on your social. And then when you lead into your email marketing, then you can leverage that same content into your email marketing, so you're giving value-added content in those monthly emails. So my takeaway would be that focus on the things

that you can be proficient in, build that consistency, and then use whatever you're building to leverage into multiple different areas of your marketing. Yeah, awesome. Well, so a few questions came in. The first one was, I think it's Jim here. How can I reduce my reliance on OTAs? I think it's about execution of those three different channels that we talked about. I think if you're executing on search marketing, social email, just to add what Adam was talking about over the last few minutes,

and you're doing that consistently, you will get more traffic. And if you have properties that people are interested in, that traffic will convert. So I think the way to reduce reliance on OTAs is by building your own independence, if you will, from a marketing standpoint, into those layers. The more people that are looking at your website, that are seeing what you have to offer, the better the results are that you're going to get. Next question was about link building. I did cover the other question, I think, a minute ago about the brand name piece. So I went through that. But the next one is about link building.

If my agency is not doing link building, am I missing out? Maybe, I mean, we certainly have worked with clients and brands over the years where they actually were already in good shape from a link building perspective. So maybe if this individual asking the question is working for a large established property manager that already has 10,000 links, you know, pointing to their website, five more may not make a difference

to be honest with you. I've been in that seat before, working with a client where I think link building was very diminishing returns or wasn't adding a lot more value to be honest with you. But if you're a newer brand or a newer company that people don't know about, I think link building is a really, really hard piece of the SEO puzzle to skip if you're trying to grow and if you're trying to get more results. So that would kind of be my take on that. All right. So a few more things here, a few more housekeeping things here. So thank you again, again, for listening and kind of making your way all the way through this presentation.

I've been a guest on webinars before, but I've never run my own. So this was a little bit new to me. Hopefully everything worked and there was solid information throughout. Stick around, live people. I'm going to end the recording right now, specifically for those that are watching the recording later on. Sorry, you're going to miss out on the bonuses. Next time, show up live.