Heads In Beds Show - Events Are Huge Vacation Rental Marketing Opportunities - Do You Take Advantage?

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

In this episode Conrad and Paul break down building marketing opportunities with events. The duo specifically focuses on how to leverage landing pages, search volume trends, and other signals in your local community to take advantage of people traveling for these events. Drive more bookings with these tips.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 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 of Med Show presented by Build Up Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacational properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host, Paul. You know, Paul was expecting a tan after you were in Florida for a while, but not really much of a tan.

What's going on? What's happening? There's a burn. I'll tell you. There's a burn. You don't get to see your shirt off right now. Right? I was going to say, that's after, we just talked about heads and bets.

after hours. That is a whole different after hours, I would say. But yeah, no, we, we spent a lot, a lot, a lot of time in the pool. So that was, uh, the six, seven, um, really enjoyed. That was dumb. Is that still going on? It was the, and it is, it's dying down. I, we still just get it because that's just, the ages until I need May 21st, 6,8. We're there. I can't want me. But it was really cool to see, you know, we don't get to swim a whole lot in Minnesota in the winter unless you got lessons.

And we haven't done, we didn't do lessons this winter. So it was really cool to see them just kind of fish their way through the pool and have a good time. But it was overall, just a nice relaxing week. You heard about my gulp that really didn't happen. It was severely.

by the Florida weather. So, no, it was a good time. And now, as a result, you know, we got some ideas. We percolated a little bit when I was sitting by the pool and getting splashed relentlessly by my children who I love so very dearly. But how are you doing, sir? Pretty good, man. It was a boring week up here.

So I feel like I'm glad you had a good time down there in Florida. I get to hear. And a good reason for someone to always travel and go explore vacation rentals because, of course, they can experience new places and get out of the cold, you know, terrible, you know, Midwest, North Midwest, is that a thing? Weather. Yeah, that you deal with and deal with more fun stuff. So it's good to hear.

But yeah, I got a trip coming up next week. So that's my, that's what I'm looking forward to down to Kiowa, like we talked about a few weeks ago. So it should be fun. I'll get there. Well, sweet man, yeah, you know, it's funny. We often travel for just leisure. We often travel for events. Sometimes we'd go for specific reasons.

So this was your idea. So take it away. What's this idea that we have today about national events, local events, you know, reasons people come to your destination that's not just purely we're going for a beach week we're going for a cabin getaway with your thoughts here yeah so one of the things that we got to enjoy um while we were down in florida is that we were actually on the other side we were on the golf side but we did we got to see the little contrail and we my dad's got video of the one of the boosters kind of falling off a little red spark so that was pretty cool and uh we both work with people

in the space coast so that was something that i did i did a little as i was a little as i was was getting ready for for the launch. We add some keywords and we had a little fun with that. But but that is. I mean, these events are always happening. It's not always a space launch. It's not always the first lunar space launch in 50 years. That was a big deal. But there are, there are always local events. There are, we have a World Cup coming up in the United States. We have, you know, other sporting events. You know, the final four is in Indianapolis this weekend. These are things that I think, you know, if you're not taking advantage of these in some way, you don't have to be doing heavy marketing, but I think there's something that maybe we fundamentally

miss, and maybe it's because traditionally events go to hotel, the attendees go to hotels, and they kind of package things up and do things like that. So that was. It was, that's the culmination of that, ooh, watching the rocket go into space and saying, Huh. But we could turn this into a podcast episode. So that's, uh, that's kind of what we're doing here. I will say maybe I'm just, this isn't my, I'm not like anti-spaced by any starts the imagination. I just wasn't paying attention to this kind of stuff. So I saw the memes on, I think it was like on the first, like two days ago. We're recording this on the third for reference. Just so I didn't

listen to it later, but we're recording this April 3rd. But I just wasn't aware of this. And I thought these were all jokes. Like I thought people were making an April Fool's joke. And I was like, oh, no, there was like an actual launch. And this thing went out there. So it shows you I was paying attention, I guess, as it were. Yeah, it seems like a pretty cool thing. I won't lie to you. I had the old lady at the pool in the morning that told my, I said, oh, hey, kids, there's going to be a little rock launch night.

We probably did it in the same session? Did they not like market this well? We got to work on the PR for the rocket launches. I don't know what this is. It's definitely something that, you know, they could work on some things. But, you know, how many times last year, you know, I remember you were working with someone who was who was really going with the eclipse. You know, we had the eclipse travel.

I remember Jamie Lane did a whole piece on kind of that belt of where you could see the occupancies just go crazy and the site line there. So I do. I think that there are a lot of these opportunities. I mean, I think of like the little we had in little podunk Sherbourne, Minnesota, a town of a thousand. We had our little summer festival. That was something that people came to.

It probably tripled, almost tripled or quadrupled the size of the population of town when that was going on. But that's the type of thing where you have the blueberry festival, you have the sweet corn festival, you have the sporting events that are going on. These are things that even if you're not putting together a package, even if you're not putting together direct marketing, even if you're not doing PPC writing about these events, making sure that people, who are looking to learn more about the events are finding your website. It is. This is something that I've seen more blog posts about those little local festivals.

There's little things to do articles that mention all those things. Those lead to bookings. You know, we can follow that follow all the way through. People doing a search, look in Google Search Console. Look at some of those events that you have blogs for on your site. You're going to see some of those searches, impressions, clicks coming through. I bet you'll be able to track those down through some type of conversion on the website that ultimately happens maybe two or three touch points down the road.

But I think that's something we're understanding where you're going to find this information. So it is. I've used like local local area, local tourism boards and things like that or the city guides or, you know, their event calendars are usually built up for 12 months. But, you know, where have you? I know you've done those in blogs, but where have you done some of these event types of content and pieces like that? I think the chamber is often a really good starting point.

Like if you go on the most of those sites, here's kind of what I typically find when I work with clients on this kind of stuff, though, is that if we've gone to the chamber site, the example I always give is like there will be events in the chamber site and it'll be something like yoga with Susan in the park. And what I always tell clients is like, I'm sure Susan's great. I'm sure she's great at yoga.

But is someone going to drive 200 miles to come to yoga in the park with Susan? Well, if Susan's like a yoga influencer, by the way, it could happen. So there's a scenario where there where it does make sense. But I do think there's a lot of stuff on, you know, chamber sites in general that's like, okay, it's there. It's an event. It's on the local tourism board website. But it doesn't drive demand. It doesn't drive occupancy.

So I think that is that is local manager's job to be like, all right, I'm 100 miles away from you. I'm 500 miles away from you. I don't know your market as well as you do. This is your time local property manager to turn up your local knowledge and explain to me what actually drives demanding the market. And then we can build a strategy around the market. things that actually drive demand. So first of all, like, you may find things in the calendar that you didn't know about. I told you a story before you record about it was like movies in the park, you know, which is not going to drive demand to be fair, but it was like had been going on for like

five or six years before I ever attended it with my kids. And I was like, oh, that's embarrassing. I should know that. It's like two miles from my house. They like put this inflatable thing out, put a movie on the park and they do it like six or eight times throughout the summer. And I was like, whoops, didn't know about that. And that we're going to know me. I think it starts to get a May or something. It will go to that. It's a fun time with the kids. So yeah, do your research in your own market. Look at what actually drives demand. why do people come there? And it's funny, like, there'll be events that happen here that I kind of know

that they happen repeatedly. But like Mustang Week is a thing here. We have a sport bike week. We have a Harley Week here in the Myrtle Beach area, for those that don't know, I'm in the Myrtle Beach area. And these all drive significant demand. People will come because they have a Mustang, because they have a sport bike, because they have a Harley bike. And they come for these events and they drive to incredible demand, such that there's

actually, like, dedicated websites that are all just about, like, people coming for these events. So a world amateur handicap championship golf event is here. And like, I don't even know the number 30,000 is something like that. People come and play across all the number of things. and play across all the golf courses here in the Myrtle Beach area. So maybe I'm spoiled because I'm like, oh, these things are always going on here in my neck of the woods. So you got to research in your own market, figure out what drives demand.

But yeah, I think that's like step one. Maybe step two is, okay, I know what events are coming. What's the booking window for these things? Because with some of the stuff like you talked about, like the rocket launch example or some of these world golf type tournaments that we have here, you kind of know, like months and months in advance this is happening, what it's happening and why. This World Cup stuff that people keep bringing up, I think it's a little bit different. And I'm not like super savvy about the World Cup. I'm going to talk out of my tail here.

and I'm not as sad about it. It isn't that we don't exactly know what the arrangements are going to be as far as who's going to play who until a little bit later on. I know we know like what countries are going to be here, but you may not know exactly like what day your team is playing. There's like a series of days. So it's complicated, right? It's not like we know what this exact moment right now is we record in April,

these two teams and this exact day and time are going to play in this exact event. So that's trickier, right? Because it's like someone may not want to stay for longer than they need to. And I think that's why the World Cup stuff has been a little bit more challenging. But regardless, we could do a whole bit on World Cup if I want to. But no, what events are coming. knowing the booking window. And then ultimately knowing if you actually have pricing power or not.

Like I think some events are just like good to market, but you may not actually really have much pricing power. Like people are going to come for this event and they may not drive a lot more demand. It's normal demand. But at least I'm getting in front of them. I think that's some events. Some events are going to drive enough demand where it's like, you know, the Super Bowl a few years ago we had a client in the Arizona market.

And it was like there was so much demand for that Super Bowl as far as stays go that that she sold out. And she was like, I was charging a lot and I could have charged more. I think she had 50 homes and she sold out all 50 for the Super Bowl. and she could have easily charged maybe 20, 30% more. So she just misjudged it. And I guess that's going to happen to you too in some situations. But again, the truth is some events are worth marketing.

Some are not. Some are just good little marketing anchors to kind of attach your brand to, attach your company to. And some are actually going to drive, like, rate, demand that you can actually get more results from. And some are just like, if I put my properties in front of people looking for this, I'll get the booking instead of someone else, but it's not going to be like a massive improvement rate. So I think you just have to know what game you're playing when it comes to events as you start.

Yeah. I mean, I think it is. We were talking about Super Bowl. I mean, I think that that was a culmination of events where Scott still had the Super Bowl and the WM open the same week in Ways Management Open. I mean, just an insane culmination of what was happening there. But it is. I mean, I think that's the thing. I mean, some of these larger events, yeah, you know, final four we've got.

We're in a unique time right now. Final four. I mean, even Masters week, there's people who, it's a different crowd as well. But that's something that I was a good example. Yeah. Yeah, if I was looking in, if I was in those areas, I'd probably be doing, knowing that it go, it's a whole, again, that is one of one right there when we're talking about specific events. That is such a niche.

And it is, it's such a limited ticket. And that audience, that crowd is different. So, yeah, I think. Well, also, can I add one more thing in there? Yeah, please, please. Some of these events you don't know until very short, where the demand is going to come from? So imagine the Super Bowl example.

We don't know until two weeks before the event who's actually playing the Super Bowl, right? It depends on the outcome of the AFC and NFC championship games. So that's tricky because you could have two teams in that game and it could be coming from this destination or this destination. Obviously, the most recent Super Bowl, the Patriots were in it, but they were playing the Broncos. So your demand could have come from Denver or it could have come from New England.

You know, it's like you don't really know until that game concludes, right? So that's a good example of like, you know, for those sorts of things you don't know. whereas the World Cup stuff was announced months in advance, we know like what countries are playing once it. And it is taking that the World Cup, they know the first round. So they knew, no, yeah, Kansas City will have these four teams.

They will play three matches against each other. This will happen. But that next round, that is. You're going to have a week, two weeks. Now, again, it's built in demand because the people that are either there from that country or they're going to try to make it there or they're going to try to fly in, quick, but, like, that is, after this first week of game matches, we'll do it the right way,

because otherwise Mark Simpson, if he is listening, is going to yell. We're not saying pitch and matches. No, it's funny. No, Mark says soccer. We had him on Art of Hospitality on Toulengo, and he says soccer because he, like, trained people in the U.S. for a while. So, like, come on, Mark. All right.

Well, then we're going to just, you know, okay, soccer pitch matches. I was like, what are you doing? All right. where, same thing with the final four. Same thing with, I mean, I think you look at basketball's a little different. It goes market to market. That's things like that. But some of these more, I think golf is a very good example because they are in the same,

close to the same locations year after year after year, if those contracts are renewing if they're not. We know it advanced. We know the dates that are advanced and we know the rough list of players, you know, except for like Tiger flipping his car and not going like he was planning to. Well, again, this is not a new show. But yeah, I mean, I think that that's something with some of those bigger events, they're worthy of doing keyword research, you know, using AHRFs or using Semrash or doing some of those things, because it isn't going to be a lot.

It's probably going to be 20 or 30 searches a month, 50 searches a month. And during that period, maybe you get 150, you know, this. The problem is neither of those systems is really good at determining. when those spikes are going to happen. That's just not what they're built for. They're built for the higher volume keywords. They're going to be able to evaluate and show you different placements. This is.

This is very niche, very situational, very timely. These things are happening. So basing your decision on whether or whether or not to write this content or try to create something like this should not be determined by a or one of these SES or SEMRash because that's not what they're built to do. They're built to tell you maybe if they're something. something there, but I think you just have to know that people are going to be doing those searches. And you can do it. You can look at Google search trends, but I would also do the

searches around those events and see if your competitors already have content built out. Because if they do, then that is, that's an opportunity that they are getting in front of those people and you're not. So if you're not doing your keyword research through a software, I think that's a good, I mean, it's always a good way to just do the search for the event, see what's popping up. If it's a Facebook event, if it's an vent-brite URL, I mean, there's a lot of different things for some of these smaller and even mid-sized events that it's kind of surprising what holds up. And a really solid domain website for a vacation rental company that, you know, has a little bit of equity built in there. It's going to rank pretty quick for some of these longer tail keyword event specific types of keywords. Yeah.

And by the way, let the record show. We went 15 minutes without saying AI, I believe. But this, to me, would be a really good AI use case, right? Of, like, I want to build in a page or content about this event. Obviously, you've got to get the right context, of course, as always with AI. But, like, it would be far easier for you to give Gemini, chat, BT, Claude, et cetera, a little briefing on, like, I want to write a page about this particular event. Here's some information about it dates, time, starting times, et cetera.

And then you could feed it into one of these systems, come back, you know, 20, 30 minutes later. And it would go build you, like, some text about each of those things. Whereas before, it's like, all right. I got to make this event. I got to click page by page by page by page. You know, like it's just tedious. So I do think there's something to be said for it. It's easier now to kind of go from point A to point B very quickly on building a page for it,

especially if your website supports it. I wish more and more websites did this, but we can make a search results page with a few of our sites that we work on that is pre-selected dates. Yeah. So when it opens the page could be something like domain.com, you know, Conrad School Cabin Rentals.com slash events slash for, I mean, 4th of July would be like a very obvious example. But let's say we did like the World Cup example.

It could be World Cup, you know, Charlotte, North Carolina, which don't think they're coming here, but whatever. Then you would basically, with that, when they go to that page, the dates would be preloaded as whatever the dates were for that event. So then they see by default what those are. That's a really cool function. It's on a few of the sites we work on because then we can send people that landing page. We know they're kind of looking at the right thing.

So you could see a scenario where you could launch an event page like what we're describing here in 10 minutes, 15 minutes, put it on the top navigation, put it somewhere else. Obviously, you could do an ad to that page in Google. You could do an ad on meta. et cetera, for that visibility, know very quickly, like, oh, people are coming and looking at this page. And if you did 20 of those or 30 of those over the course of a year, you know, let's say one or two every month, which should only take you a little bit of time, then you'll find, okay, these 10 or 12 events,

like I was saying earlier, actually drive search interest and volume and occupancy. People will come and look at these event pages. These 20 maybe don't move the needle as much against, you know, yoga in the park with Susan. So I'm not going to keep working on those. I'll just get rid of them or 3.01 on the back to the main events page. And I'll work on these that drive a lot of demand. And I think that that's the way that over time, you build a little bit more of a strategy around your website, around marketing, around occupancy for specific date periods. And you're not doing something where it's just like, like, I think sometimes vacation later to struggle with like what to say.

Like, especially during these shoulder seasons where it's like, all right, I said this someone earlier this week. It's funny. I was thinking about a conversation you and I had recently. And I was like, why would someone come to this destination, more of a mountain destination during April? Because it's like kind of mud season, this destination, skis it over like an hour in April. And it's kind of like, he's like, hiking trails open up. I'm like, okay, well, we can try something with that. Like, there's a reason there.

And he found a few other things. The golf course is opening at the very tail end of April and this mountain destination. So I'm like, all right, those are things we can play with versus just like, okay, again, the revenue manager will say, knock a $10 off the rate, knock $20 off the rate. And I'm like, I'm not saying that doesn't work. I'm just saying there's nothing marketing about that. That's just like a hit and hope kind of strategy or a cut in hope kind of strategy. Like I think if you're actually trying to build a marketing strategy, it's golfers.

This destination, our golf course opens up on April 21st, be the first one to experience of this season. Here's the link. Here's more information about it. Here's what it is. You can put that out on social media. And like, am I guaranteeing that's going to give you 20 bookings? No, but I think it's just like that constant, like, having somebody valuable to say versus just like repeating these simple discounts or changing things from there. So that would be kind of the way that I would structure it or think about it. And those are the ways that I think you can drive better demand or potentially drive better results from that. The way you laid that out, I think that's, that's definitely something that, you know, AI is more than capable of putting together those landing pages

and just making sure that, like, it is. That's more scalable thing. Like, you don't have to just wait for the one-off big ones. You can do it and feel like it can drive some value without having to take all of your time in putting something like that together. But, yeah, I think that going back to fundamentally, like where those guests are coming from, in a lot of times, you know, we talked pre-show about the, you know,

some of the repeat guests from the resort that I go to. And it is it's year after year after, year. I think some of these events have that calling. You know, you're going to have some events that have been going on for 25, 35, 45, 45 years locally and the same people come back year after year. If you're taking a look at your booking patterns and taking a look at some of your past guests and seeing when they stayed and when that overlap is for this event, maybe it doesn't happen every year at the same time, but maybe it's a similar period or you take a look at what is happening. I mean, you can take a look at some of your booking patterns without taking a look at that calendar and start to understand where there are specific events that were driving some more travel and kind of reverse engineer that a little bit.

That's more of a nice to do as opposed to a need to do. But I think it is. It's something that really understanding when and why and then you have that better understanding what that booking window is as well. And is it 30 days out? Is it 60 days out? Is it at their booking the same time at the end of the summer of the previous year? I mean, that's something that it's going to help and make your marketing of these events a lot better. And I do.

I think that that's something that, you know, you can also do a little outbound here. If you've got past guests and we talked about it, that's probably one of the underutilized options in our space. I think because people are so focused on their direct booking. websites and we're big proponents of that. But there's that other understanding that that's not the only way people are booking your properties and really making sure that not only you're taking those calls, but you're doing a little bit about outbound work. I mean, I think that that's something that if they stayed with you previously and they haven't booked with you yet, you should wonder why. I mean, they ask the question why. I mean, it's worth reaching out to be able to say, hey, we noticed

that you hadn't booked your, the same room, the same rental, we haven't booked for this event yet. You know, is there anything we can do to help make that process easier for you? And maybe it is. Maybe you start to learn. We're not coming this year. We're not doing this this year. Or we are and we just haven't made a decision yet. Well, let's make that decision right now.

I think that that's something that ultimately, that is, I've seen these, we both seen these campaigns be a, when people are willing to just pick up the phone and reach out to some of these guests. It's not just a passive income stream that comes in with these direct bookings. And sometimes you've got to do a little work. And again, it's fruitful when it happens. Talk about some of the experience you've seen with people who have been successful. Well, I mean, I was talking about just large clients that I've worked with over the years. And many of them have sometimes quite large teams that are doing some level of outbound or

guest reservations. And it is interesting. Just, you know, if you look back on the trends of where we've been in the past and where we are now, and there's been this huge reduction in the reservations team in general. It used to be that it was necessary to have a large team due to reservations. And now it's like that reservation cost has been mostly shifted to huge OTA fees like Airbnb taking a big fee or booking.com or Vibbo taking a big fee or your website itself being like, hey, it's on the website, man, like just book on the website, right? Which again, like you and I say, we're obviously proponents of that. But, you know, 100%. I mean, I think that if people are coming for an event, and certainly if they do so habitually, if they come every year,

and then we're here, and it's April 3rd, and they didn't book for an event that's happening at the end of May or the beginning of June, and you have the opportunity to go and tap their shoulder and do an outbound. We have probably, really, if I count on smaller managers on, like, one hand, maybe the number of people that actually do somewhat consistent outbound. If you're a client that I have is like a really strong performer. And sometimes the basic stuff, by the way. Like, we have one client that does it through SMS and phone, and it's, they're in the Outer Banks, and it's basically a simple outbound. And it says, I think it's around March 1 is when they do it.

And it's that they didn't book in January, February, but they stayed the prior year. And say, Paul, I'm just curious if you're doing outer bank strip this year. And then it'd be like dash Conrad at company name, you know. So that's the outbound message. It's not some super salesy, whatever. And they get like, they get like 10 to 20% of people to respond to that. People that were dead cold, like in the CRM hadn't done any activity, no opens, no clicks on any of the marketing messages that we're sending. You know, and then that one text outbound and the one outbound call of, hey, Paul, are you planning on coming back to the outer banks again this year will generate a ton of amount interest.

And sometimes the answer is like, oh, we had to have. health battle and we're not coming this year. And like that, that's actually a moment almost for like hospitality or, oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. And I certainly hope things get better. We obviously would love to welcome you back when you're able to do so. It could just be that. And it's not an opportunity. And that's good. And it could be, oh, yeah, we've just been lazy. We didn't get around to booking it. Oh, what do you have? You know, like, it's such a great opportunity. So yeah, I believe, speaking of like everyone wants to build an AI agent. Everyone wants to do all this automation. Put an AI agent on automating, you know, with

personalization, right? Hey, you came for the Harley Bike Week last year and you have not booked again yet for this year. You come down again, you're sell your bike? You know, what's going on? What's happening? I think there's a lot of, you know, fruitful efforts involved in that. And there's some companies I see kind of scratching the surface on that. We have a client that's using an AI platform. And they do, based on the intake form, they personalize the outbound message that's like 90 days later of like, oh, I saw you came last time and you did this. And it's based on what they said in the intake form. You know, are you planning understay for this? And they get like pretty good open rates and response rates on that. So I think like that's kind of there. You have to cobble some things together

right now. You have to be willing to be a little experimental. But I feel like for events, like it's a great use case for like if people are coming back for the same thing every year. You could absolutely outbound it for sure. I mean, we've said it before, but I think this does reinforce that like your property management system is one of your best marketing tools. If you're using it effectively, I mean, if your team is using it effectively, if you're tagging people, really understanding why they're traveling the way they're traveling, this is. These are things that you can. If you know when the dates, again, these pre-planned events, If they're happening nine months in advance, you can start that cadence out and have these

automations and triggers running based on these event things. And I do that. I think that that's, we just use it to run the business and we use marketing to market. And sometimes we do have to just, I think there's some convergence there that needs to happen that, hey, it is. I don't think the marketing managers or directors or whoever that role is, wants to be in the property management system or vice versa i don't think the people who are in charge of that side of things the operations really want to hop into the marketing side but i think there is there's

something especially be said for event marketing where if you understand why they're traveling being able to put that in as a tag and and then again reference back to that in an email follow up in a future call all you up on call all these are opportunities to really strengthen that long you know long term value of that customer it is they may not book this time but next year if that event comes around maybe they will maybe there's another event that maybe they are more event based travelers that certainly is more of a trend with younger generations being more focused on the experiential side of things so being able to note that somewhere and use it in future marketing efforts no-brainer, I think.

To me, the marketer, that's a no-brainer, right? I don't know. Maybe just like a fun thought exercise. Should it be easy to get a booking? Like, I feel like we've been conditioned over the past few years during the COVID boom that it should be easy to get a booking. But again, if you go study like history or if I go talk to companies that have been around for 20 plus years,

they're like, yeah, there's a lot of time when it was really hard to get a booking. And there was a lot of processing work involved, manual time and effort and energy to get a booking. And so I think if you're down in bookings right now, you can't be willing to like put your nose up at any idea. say, oh, yeah, well, you guys, okay, you guys make it seem so easy, but like, this is a lot of work. And I'm like, yeah, like, I'm not saying that it's going to be like as easy as clicking a button. There's no magic pill here that you can take that will guarantee above average performance.

Like, most people aren't very good. So if you want to get significantly above average performance, you have to put in significantly above average effort in order to get significantly above average performance. And I think a lot of property managers don't where they want to put in the bare minimum in marketing. You know, it's been kind of a recurring theme that I've noticed at least a little bit this year is like, so people want to come in in, they want to sprinkle a touch marketing on it. And like, if you're down, if you're below average, you need to be doing three X what you. were doing before 5x because demands down in most markets. So if demands down, you have to work maybe twice as hard, three times a hard to get the same bookings that you were getting before. In a perfect world, that's not the case. Like that sucks almost to say that out loud, but like at

the same token, you can either do that or you can accept subpar performance, I feel. So that's kind of part of. But one more thing here to kind of come to a close would be as you're putting together these things, you have tools in your tool belt that you're probably not utilizing very well either. So it could be a promo code. It could be a special. Could be a package, right? Of like, here's all the things that we could do in these situations. And I think that those are the pieces that you could put together where it's like, we just did one for a client call today that we're going to launch at some point during April, maybe during May. And it's, we're going to target a few their worst weeks from prior years, worst weekends from prior years. They're actually

going to hire a local guide company, fly fishing guide company to come in for that weekend. So it'll be like a Friday, Saturday type deal. And then for people to book during that weekend, we're going to do up to four person. There's two guides that are going to come. There are going to be four people that can go and do a kind of a guided fishing, fly fishing tour with these guides at no additional charge. So we're going to pick weekends that we typically were unbooked anyways. We're going to say, hey, we have eight slots available, guide number one, guide number two, four slots with each guide. You can come and do kind of a fishing weekend, fly fishing weekend at this destination. And we're going to make a big deal about it.

And it's actually not a promotion or special in the sense of like, say, $10 off your stay or anything like that. It's more of a value ad promotion or special. Or if you book and you put your name on this list and you are one of the first eight that make this reservation during this time frame, you were going to get essentially a sort of a small group fly fishing guide tour for free. And I'm like, I was super pumped about this idea. I'm like, this makes a lot of sense to me because for the right person, this is going to be a very appealing offer for them instead of, again, save $10 or save $20 off their nightly rate.

That doesn't always give people that excited. It's like, okay, I mean, that's not what's stopping me from going. But going and have an experience while in there is very valuable to me. So anyways, you know, you could do a promo code where it's like, use promo code to World Cup and we'll give you a free gift card to this restaurant or we'll give you a, we'll pick you up at the airport, drop you off at the short term rental. I mean, there's so many things that you could do. The specials or packages could be pay a fixed fee or flat fee.

That's another idea we're testing with this client right now. So it'd be like, you know, during the slow week where we typically have very low occupancy anyways. It's pay $750 for the weekend. That's Friday, Saturday, check out Sunday. And you get this, this and this. And you get this additional thing on top of it. So it's like flat pricing, which will make our packaging very easy to put into like a meta ad.

Think of all these things, too, is like, what's my actual ad going to look like on Facebook or on Instagram or an email campaign or something that I put out in Google or when I put on a landing page is a very obvious of what people are signing up for. And then when you think about that and put that together, you're like, yeah, I could do that where I'm offering people these two nights or three nights for this event plus this fee. And that's where we have a client who's doing a World Cup campaign. And it's actually significantly higher rates than normal, but he's offering more value. It's you come in and you book these three nights or these four nights for the World Cup.

You get a stay. You get a transfer from the airport, a taxi from the airport, private car service, you know, and then to it from the stadium for whatever game you're going to, and then a gift card to a local restaurant. And it's pricey. It's $4,000 for this World Cup package. But everything's one price. It's easy to understand. and you could split it amongst two or three people

and it could be really good value, I think, for the money. So, yeah, so many things you could do here and kind of like just open your mind a little bit. I think sometimes people just, oh, well, this is how we've done it before. And I'm like, well, that doesn't mean, again, you don't want to probably make that and keep doing it that way if it's not working well. Yeah, I mean, I think that like,

even as you're talking about some of those things, like even at a lower value, hey, you want to make a T-shirt for some of these events that are happening. Like, I think those are things that people like that little kitsy stuff. They're not going to leave. it there most likely the t-shirt they might leave there i will say that but you know some plastic cups some some mugs it's something that's of value that they are going to it's going to help make that memory i don't i i think maybe the perceived value or the cost is is too much sometimes and i i think that

that's an investment that long term will more than pay itself off doing something cute making it more memorable, making something that is going to, I think I can remember was Lauren and Antebellum, you know, for some event she had done like specific little, like they had dog colors or something like that, or dog kerchiefs or something like that, but something that's memorable. It's small. Maybe it costs them a couple bucks. Maybe it cost them five bucks. But, you know, if you can justify that cost once and get a mass, you know, a big event like that or something cool that people can take home the number, think you're going to have some repeat bookings, but certainly some positive feedback, some

positive social feedback loop, whether that's on social media, whether that's reviews coming back in, you are going to feel the returns on that, even if it's not a monetary thing. Yeah, yeah, I agree. So all good. We appreciate you tuning in. Any other things, Paul, you'd want to put a bow on this one before we get it up on the shelf and click the publish button. Well, you're good. All good. Dear listener, you made it all the way to the end, even after the little fun breakdown there. Leave us a review. Go to your podcast, the app of choice. Again, there's tens of thousands of you now that have downloaded an episode that heads of Ben Show. But I promise you, there's not tens of thousands of reviews.

There's not even hundreds of reviews yet. So yeah, let's just keep getting the reviews there. We super duper appreciate it. More people listen in, the more reviews that get published. And we kind of get recommended, hopefully to the right people. We're such a niche topic, you know, in this world that we're doing. But we know people are listening in. And everyone's while I get a client. I did an onboard call the other day, Paul. And someone said, I've been listening to you for a year, a year. By the way, this client never left a review. He signed a contract with us. He's working with this now. So you might know he, um, this is your review. I went back to him to his review. I was like, hey, let me this review. So it was leave us to a review.

I appreciate that. I'm going to give me money, but don't give me a review. I'm like, okay, well, that's fine. We appreciate it. We'll catch you on the next show. Have an awesome