Heads In Beds Show - Expanding Into NEW Vacation Rental Marketing Channels In 2026? Here's How To Make It Work...

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about when and how to consider expanding your marketing and advertising into new channels you may not have used before like TikTok, Pinterest, native, Digital TV ads and more...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 Buildup 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. All right, Paul, good afternoon. What's going on? What's happening?

Well, you know, I've lost some interest in football because I don't get to enjoy the playoffs like you do. I think we look back to like months ago that. that we kind of predicted this. I didn't predict this. I didn't predict this. Not for my team. I predicted that you were going to end up in better shape than I was. We're going to, we'll start with that because the signs were early on that this was going to happen. But I'm really excited to cheer for their quarterback and your team and your coach and all the other good stuff.

And a few former Vikings on there. So, yeah, I would be remissed if I didn't mention how frustrating it is to end up with a 9-and-8, record on a team that whatever. How are you doing, sir? How are things going for you? So this will, of course, come out after the Chargers game, right? Because I think we got one more after that. So we don't know the outcome as of this recording. So if I nail it then, I deserve a lot of credit as it were. But I mean, I think to me, it's a coin flip game. I think Patriots Chargers, that's a coin flip game for me. I could really see it truly it going either way. You got to feel like if you're at home, you have a slight tiny little edge maybe, you know, but there's a lot

of injuries or a lot of other reasons. I really think the running game could be it. It's kind of like the 2018 team. That's 2018 Patriots. team just ran the ball with Sony Michelle and that whole team. It wasn't really Brady that that whole playoff run. So I think they could win one. I think it'll be really hard for them to win two. So we'll see how it all shakes out. But I think there's a good chance that could be the Chargers.

I don't know if they have a really amazing chance to be anyone after that, particularly if they had to go against the bills or the Broncos or something like that. But we'll see how it all shakes out. Chip, a chair and the chance. You got the chip and the chair and the chance. Yeah. In a way, we're ahead of schedule. So like if you're a Patriots fan, you can't be upset about the situation that we're in,

because it's like, again, if we had won eight or nine games this year, I think that would have been a good thing too. you know, they ended up winning a lot more than that. But yeah, we schedule all that. I understand some of those complaints. So it's kind of like choosing the right things to work on with the football team. It's kind of like choosing what marketing channels to work on for a vacational business. So this is kind of a novel idea. I think we've had an interesting idea here. I listen to a lot of other podcasts, by the way, and we try, we try not to ever rip off another podcast. Or if we do, we give credit. Like, I'm pretty sure this is a new idea that I'm not seen anyone else do. But the premise of today's episode is you have the channels that we've talked about,

perhaps ad nauseum now for closing in on 150 episodes together, something like that, more than that. And those are kind of the ones that we always talk about. We always talk about the OTAs. We always talk about search. We always talk about social. We always talk about email. Paul talks a lot in the home on the marketing side about things like cold email, things like direct mail, et cetera. So you've heard us talk about all those things. But every once in a while, it's not really not even every once in a while. I would say regularly a client comes to us and goes, why aren't we doing X? And X is some other channel. So it could be something like TikTok. It could be something like YouTube. It could be something like doing a podcast. It could be having a Reddit account. It could be a list of things that we'll talk

about today's episode. And the question is, should we be doing these things? You know, if we aren't doing these things, why not? Like, these seem like places where people hang out online that we could be advertising and marketing to. Is there a reason why we should do them? And if so, what's kind of like the pros, what are the cons, maybe exploring some of these new channels? So we'll trade off here, touch maybe on like the guest and homeowner ideas to some degree. But, you know, we'll both kind of cover both topics to some degree of, you know the channels that really work well, again, to recap. OTAs are going to work really well. You're getting a lot of bookings from them. Your search ads on Google. Search on Google in general is going to give you a lot of results.

Advertising on meta platforms, Facebook and Instagram, Instagram in particular being really got strong, email, SMS. And then having like the last thing on our bullet point list here was like those local chamber style relationships. Those are all like pretty hard to fail with. Like almost every client we work with has success there. But it's really about those new channels. So what's kind of your experience here? I'm sure you've had these conversations in the past for our client. And again, client comes to you and goes, why aren't we doing X, XYZ? And then you have to answer why we're not doing xyz. Yeah.

That easy answer usually is just, well, how much would you like to spend? And that's where, you know, it does. I think we get into the area of, I wish we, I think this is timing. It times well for us because we just, we just recorded the, what would you do with the $3,000, $5,000 and $10,000 budget? And I do. I think the budget plays a huge role in the channels that people do choose and the people, the channels that people decide to hold off on.

Because I don't think anybody ever doesn't want to do every channel. But I think there is. It's a matter of choosing the effective channels and doing things like that. So that was typically the response of why we didn't do it. But I always wanted to make sure that I dug in and tried to figure out if people were doing it and tried to find examples of people who were doing it well. And more often trying to show examples of people not doing it so well to show people what the downside could potentially be. Not that I would ever assume that someone's going to do it poorly or do anything like that,

but especially on social channels, you know, considering a TikTok or a Snapchat or Pinterest or some of those other channels that very visually based can draw on certainly some of the target audiences that you're looking for, but require a little more work, a little more effort and maybe in today's AI, not as much more, but who knows? Everybody, everybody's doing things a little differently. So that's where I always wanted to provide examples, especially in our space, of people who have done it well, people who have done it poorly, and try to figure out where do you think you fit here? Do you think you could do this? It's something that I can help with, that the team can help with behind the scenes, certainly, depending on where I've been, but

what kind of outcome are we expecting? And I think with any channel you're looking to expand on, it is. What is the actual outcome we're looking to drive? Because If we're just doing it to do a channel, that's not a reason. It's just not something that you can be. I mean, that's a gut decision there at that point. That's the, ooh, I want to follow the crowd. I don't want to be a trend set or I want to be a trend follow or something like that. So I think that any question of expanding channels has to come with what is the

desired outcome we're looking to generate. And if we can't do that, is there another way to do it? I guess I would think about it like this. I would think about it like, am I stopping doing something else by doing this other thing? That's where my brain goes. So I think we end up with, we think about this differently, which is probably a good thing for the listener because they can hear two different perspectives. I like your idea, though, of like, what are we trying to achieve?

Instead of saying, oh, we should be active on Twitter, like as an example bluer, sorry, X, as it were. You know, it's like, okay, what are we trying to achieve? Website traffic. We're trying to achieve getting more inbound, of course, homeowner leads. We're trying to figure out how to get more guest visibility. And it's an unexplored channel. Not many people are actually marketing their vacation rentals on X, aka Twitter.

So as a result, we feel like there's greengrass in front of us that people are not optimizing for. And there's a lot of active users there, by the way. Like, I'm actually a very avid Twitter user. I don't use it to advertise for our clients, but like from a, like, do I use the app regularly? Absolutely. And I think you do as well. Now we have more of our personal interests in there. Maybe things like sports and hobbies and things like that that we follow in there.

But it doesn't mean that it's like people aren't paying attention. We know people are paying attention. It's not like, oh, let's go run a newspaper ad. And it's like, who's actually reading the newspaper nowadays, right? That's how we might talk about it. So, but the question in my mind, yeah, would become like, are we trading something off by doing it And sometimes the answer I would argue with social, organic social is kind of no. Like if you're using an organic social platform, like I use planable to schedule all

my social media content. It literally is like you connect Twitter and you just like click a button and like all your content will go out on both places. So like I would almost argue an organic standpoint, you're not really like changing your strategy that much. You could kind of make the case. Like if you have a big enough account, you're working on or it's already there and you have some awareness and reach already.

What's the harm really in cross posting? Probably not much to be honest with you. I think more so it comes down to like budget time when it's like, okay, we're going to have a Twitter strategy or an X strategy. We're going to sit down and write down exactly what it is to do these things. Okay, well, you're probably not doing, you know, when you're doing that, that means you're kind of putting the side the marketing that might do on Facebook, Instagram, you know, your Google ads campaigns, sending more emails out. But those things, again, because we can typically work a lot better or in my experience have worked a lot better. So I think

that's, that's one thing I would say is like, am I trading something off by doing this? That's one way to think about it. The other is that, like, why am I the person that figure this out when no one else has figured this out? Maybe that's kind of a cousin to the first idea. which is like, all right, no one's doing this. Why? Like, dig under the surface and say, like, certainly there's companies in our space that do $100 million plus a year of gross booking revenue. And if they're not really getting any results from, let's say, Twitter or X or Snapchat or Pinterest or something like that, what makes you think that you're the right one for it? And I can give you some examples of where I think that is the case. So YouTube,

if we go towards that direction as a channel expansion idea for guests, I would say that's more, there are some vacational companies that I see that actually regularly post and put out YouTube videos. Rarely, I would say, are they, like, YouTube optimized videos or they're made for clicks. They're made for attention. They're made for watch time retention. Oftentimes they're just like using YouTube as like a video hosting platform for like a property tour or something like that. But regardless, if someone's doing that, they say, oh, I'm very skilled in video production.

I have 10 years of experience doing video production or I shot videos, you know, for the last business that I was involved with that I'm very skilled at it. Cool. That's something that you have that most vacational managers, I would say 99% of them don't have. And as a result, you're like, yeah, I know how to script and write a eight-minute YouTube video that's going to get thousands of views. that could be a really potentially really engaging marketing channel for you if that's your particular skill set. So that's an example of my mind of like, oh, I'm going to do well at this because I know

how to do this format or this medium or this marketing channel because I have previous experience or I have an idea that no one else is done. And I feel like I've got reached from it. So that's how I think about it. But again, maybe you see things that touch differently on your side. Everybody's going to evaluate everything differently. I think that's the other side. And I think it is refreshing that we don't always quite. Maybe part of it is that you've been running your own business, I've kind of had to follow in with other people's business plans, other people's, you know, sales, goals, sales, things like that. So that's probably changed the way, and it is. It's a lot of times it was not about, it was about not adding cost. I think that that

was so often that has been so ingrained into my mind that I even, to this day, when people say, should I expand channels, I have a hard time saying, yes, you should add this channel. Even if I know that it's going to be an effective channel and we'll probably be able to drive some more return on ads, Ben, and do all these things, I still get scared because there is. There's the, I mean, you never want to be wrong. I think it is, you know, we can fail fast. We can do all those things, but you don't want to be wrong in making a suggestion of doing something like that. So I think from, you know, from our standpoint, it's we want to make the best recommendation to, again, help it reach your business goals and do things like. that we don't want to recommend something that won't be effective that isn't a good fit for your

business but maybe a good fit for you know three other businesses that that you work with that's it's that weird break-even point of how do you know how do you expand effectively how do you find the right channels how do you how do you how do you reach the right audience ultimately whether it's homeowners or whether it's guests and i do i think that on the homeowner side you do have to be a little more unique ingenuitive something like that with how you're trying to go after that audience because it is a lot harder than just having you know finding people who are in a specific location finding people who are interested in traveling to the beach find finding people you know it's more interest based well on the

homeowner side it's you got to have the asset if you don't have the asset you have to be interested in buying the asset if you're not interested in buying the asset oh boy yeah let's try to find how people, how we can kind of accumulate those groups, how we can aggregate those groups, how we can put that data, that audience, that list together there. So my biggest hesitation has always been, I don't want to add cost. I don't want to recommend something that's not going to be effective, or I want to make sure I have all the metrics in place, all the measurables in place to tell you, yes, this is effective or no, this isn't effective, and this is why we're cut it.

And I think every marketer, whether you're working for yourself almost, you have your own business, you're a leader, marketing leader in a company, like a CMO or a marketing director or something, or whether you're like an agency external person that's been hired. You sort of have that come to Jesus moment at one point in time with leadership, where they look at you and they say, okay, this is your job. Marketing is your job. Justify everything that you're doing. Justify why we're doing this over this. And my general feeling most of the time is that I'd rather tell someone I'm focusing on a few things and we're trying to do them to the best of our ability. We're trying to really become experts at sending emails in a way that we're going to get better results from and kind of

tweaking something and really refining it and getting it to a really distilled point where it works well over, yeah, we went and posted a video on Snapchat and YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and all these different platforms and then go to them and say, yep, how many people saw that? Oh, like 72 people saw it, you know, versus if you just focus on Instagram, you know, you get one video that gets 7,000 views versus 70 views split across 10 different platforms. So it's, I think sometimes it's, I was going to say it's earlier, I didn't want to interrupt you. This is often the Nard marketers idea of what markets. is, which is let me just do a higher volume of stuff across a higher volume of channels.

And that feels like I'm doing more marketing. But the truth of the matter is like, you're really just taking, you know, I don't drink. I don't really know exactly what this. If my analogy is going to work well here, but it's like taking the best scotch or the best bourbon or something like that and then putting a ton of water into it and then being like, oh yeah, this is the product I'm giving you. And I imagine that would taste very bad or wine or whatever example you want to give there. If you dilute down your efforts and your time and you split across 15, 20 different things,

Generally speaking, most of the time, it tends to not work very well, unfortunately. I mean, that is. That law of diminishing returns is certainly something that we've seen play out. I do. I remember having those conversations with the property managers and them saying, yeah, we're on all these channels and this is why we should put this on the landing page. So, okay, so what if someone asked you what you were doing on all those channels? What would you say? Deer in the headlights look that you got on that person's face was just like,

like, oh, well, we're on there and we post. I was like, okay. But we're talking about advertising. We're talking about doing all these things. I just think it's very, you should be very explicit with what you're doing, what people, what people are understanding. Because, again, that savvy homeowner, a savvy perspective owner that you're going to add your inventory is going to ask those questions. It is going to dive down to that next level. And again, maybe you don't need to hold it yourself to that account.

But I think that that's something that you cannot do everything very well. We've said that many times before. It's impossible. Whether you're lacking in resources, whether you're lacking in budget, whether you're lacking in something else, you know, enough following, enough, you know, being in the right market. Let's take into consideration all these things that could be potentially impacting. When you start to try to do it all, you're really the master of none.

So, let's, again, that's why I love the concept of search, email, social. you can still expand within those and certainly you should be testing, you should be trying, you should be iterating. I mean, that's if we've said one thing, if we've demonstrated one thing is that marketing is not just a set and forget. It's not a wash or its repeat because you're going to get those same results. And if you're not happy with those results, again, you can kind of tie it all back to that. So I think that I love when people are interested in trying to expand.

I love when people want to try to do some of these things. I love it when people want to take a different approach. We're going to target this group as opposed to this group. On the homeowner side, we're going to target realtors as opposed to the homeowners themselves. Boy, let's go get that bang for the buck. That type of thing. It's awesome to want to innovate and do those things. Again, I think it's also important to be able to measure and understand, is that getting that desired outcome?

because if you're not measuring the right thing and measuring, what we talked about before, measuring what matters. If you're not measuring what matters, if you're measuring the following and not the engagement, is that really a key indicator of how well that channel is performing or, you know, what the ultimate outcome is that you were looking for there.

Measure those things that are actually going to impact your business, not those vanity metrics. Well, well, you bring a good point there, which is like, unfortunately, if you reach out to the wrong marketing person or you have the wrong, I guess, ethical approach to marketing. Like you can make a channel seem like it has more value than it really does. Right. So, you know, a very broad scale display

advertising with fit into this bucket for me. And you and I have been, had many conversations over the years, both recorded or not recorded about sort of my distaste for what I call mystery meet display advertising, which is like, oh yeah, go use this ad network over here that is not Google is not one of these main ones. You know, there's lots of ones that we've seen out there. Some are vendors some are just like general advertising networks that you go out there. They will spend a lot of money on getting all these views and then they'll take credit for a lot of things that are coming from those views. But like here would be my view of it. If you were to turn off a marketing channel, you should notice it. You know, like if you turned off your Google ads and then you looked a month later and you're like,

what, that world happened, you know, then you know that like Google ads are really additive to your business. If you know my next to website and Google and then all of a sudden you're like, wait, our phone's not ringing. We're not getting any direct bookings. Like you would know that very quickly, right. You send an email and like every email bounce like your email sending domain authentication was wrong. So none of the emails went out. You're like, oh, we sent an email up, but we didn't get a single booking from it. You know, like those are things you see you would figure out relatively quickly one would assume if you have someone's paying attention. So that's kind of something that I think is a good example of it. Whereas like if we stopped all of our posting on Reddit, let's say we had a Reddit account. We were trying to focus on Reddit. Would anyone notice? Would there be any change in reduction? I'll give you an example actually.

I had a client who was doing a lot of Pinterest marketing and was getting a lot of traffic from it. So if you had a dashboard up somewhere on the screen, this person, Could have looked you right in the eye and said, we're getting 40, 50,000 visitors every month from Pinterest. What we learned, though, is that people collecting from Pinterest were clicking on, like, cabin inspiration images and, like, boards and things like that. So they're like, I want to build a cabin one day, perhaps, or I'm interested in cabs. They were literally just looking at the picture of the cabin, what it looked like aesthetically, and be like, oh, that looks cool. And then closing the tab. So their time on site was like 20, 30 seconds, maybe somewhere in that range. I think over those, it was like, there was one month where I looked where we had like 55,000 visitors and like one booking from 55,000 visitors on Pinterest.

And I kind of talk to the client, and I'm like, here's the problem that I see with this. Here's the reason that I think the audience coming from Pinterest is not matching up with what you're offering. And I probably don't think this is worth it. Like if we're having a team member spend 20 hours of her time or something on a monthly basis doing this, like, I just don't see enough value here. Have her go do a lot more video content, you know, about the cabins and post that on social. Like, I think we'll get better. Richard Bang on her buck there. That was absolutely the case, you know?

So I think that there's a lot of situations where it's like you do have to sometimes look at the metrics and think about them honestly. and think about them in a way that may not always be a good feeling because you maybe look someone in the eye and say like, hey, I told you wanted traffic, you got me traffic, but it's still not, it wasn't delivering bookings. We're going to kill this and do something else. I think it takes a certain bravery almost to look someone in the eye and say like, you're wasting your time doing this. I need to do something else. And then be okay with like cutting off instead of what I think, again, back to one more thing that I see like non-marketers due to marketers or just leaders or just leaders or just, yeah, I want you to do more video content. That's on top of everything else you're doing on Facebook, on Instagram, et cetera, et cetera.

So that's like a common thing I see in leadership is let me pile one thing more on your plate that you're carrying and then things can fall over or the quality of everything just goes down as well. That's I do. I mean, I think that from the other, looking at like the other side of that example, we did get a handful of times where we had we made the recommendation or we, a couple of times we made the recommendation of we're just not seeing any bookings coming through social media, Facebook ads doing all that stuff. Yeah. And then when we turn those off, and then all of a sudden you see a drop in the bookings, oh boy, now we're starting to see a little changes. Again, it's the fun part about marketing. It's that full attribution path.

And so few people actually go from point A to point B of research, click, book, whatever. There's dreaming. We've gone over it. Look back on some of the episodes there of how the traveler plans the trip. It's hard to make any of these decisions about it. So that's the thing. If you don't have the data to make these decisions, maybe that's kind of the absolute table stakes here of if you were going to,

here we'll throw it back to you, if you were going to choose one of these channels to expand it, or you're going to do something like that on the guest side, whether it's social, whether it's out of home, whether it says, what would you be looking at in Google Analytics? Or what metrics would you be looking at in search consular or in clarity? Maybe not clarity for you, but what would you be looking for to see the effectiveness of that market?

So one of the bullet points we had in our list here, and maybe we should read this off to you, by the way, because we made this list, I don't know, we've actually hit it half a dozen times so far. We have actually read it out. So one layer on top of social media that I think is kind of a secondary activity. You don't have to do social to do this well. Is influencer marketing?

And that's a hot topic, I think, amongst many people over the last few years, which is, hey, how do I get more influencers today in my properties? How do I deal with them? Honestly, we're getting into this now, and we've been in this now for the last few months, it is hard. It is hard to line up the stays. It's really hard to line up the cost. It's really hard to justify sometimes the blocks that we have to put in these

calendars to host these influencers. And unfortunately, working with different influencers, it can be very hit or miss. Like, it's not a very predictable outcome. So when the influencer thing works, it works unbelievably well. There's lots of stories out there about people that have partnered with influencers and they've had a lot of success. But unfortunately, it can be like a, well, I just chased my tail. I blocked four days at my three days of my premium high end home, you know, that I lost

revenue on potentially. I paid a cleaning fee. I paid this influencer a few grand, and I got nothing out of it. Like, that's very common to you, unfortunately, in that world. But that is something that I think, if I can point to something that has a better chance of success, I would kind of point at that. But I'm going to read off the rest of the list, just so we have it kind of written or spoken into the record, as it were. So this is one that I wish it was easier to do. The quick answer that I've seen here is like, this doesn't seem very straightforward to solve, but the idea of like making your guests affiliates. I'm kind of bullish on this idea or just having like an affiliate program in general, where it's like, hey, you stayed with me.

I will want you to come back and stay again. And if you share your code, it's Paul 729 through for you want and four with the person that's willing to book and come and stay in this particular cabin, I'll give you $100 off your next day and I'll give them $100 off the next day too. Maybe you have to do a minimum in there three nights or something like that. But the affiliate space is very, very well documented and strategized in e-commerce, selling physical products and Amazon being probably the one of the largest affiliates in the world. And affiliate is actually pretty well established.

I would argue on the OTA side, with the exception of Airbnb, who does have a small affiliate program. But for the most part, companies like booking.com, Verbo, Expedia, et cetera, all have affiliate programs for, you know, essentially what ends up being, and we have a one client who's kind of in this bucket. They end up being professional traffic drivers,

you know, to those websites, and they get a lot of visibility there. Affiliates, I think, is super powerful, but most vacational managers don't have any access to affiliates or to get the word out or how do I access affiliates. So that's one I'm kind of bullish on. I mentioned this already, but just kind of hitting these a little bit quicker.

YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, linear TV or like traditional, I guess like this kind of new version of like digital based like TV advertising, doing like a podcast, Twitter, you know, now, now known as X, a loyalty program. So like join this membership or join this club, you know, within our program and join us there. Reddit and then maybe like traditional PR would kind of be something. I think that would kind of fit into that bucket. So of all those, yeah, I think the influencer one would be the one that I'd be bullish on. Again, I'd be really bullish on YouTube if you had the on your team to create high quality YouTube style content. When I say YouTube style content, I mean content that's meant to be consumed on YouTube. That's these four to nine minute or four

to 15 minute videos that are essentially storytelling about like what it is that you do, your properties, the experience you provide, et cetera, et cetera. And there are some examples of companies that have leaned into that and done well or built like an audience on YouTube and they've turned that into, you know, real bookings, real demand, real business on that side of things. So those are kind of some things that come to mind for me. What about what about you on your son? Yeah, I mean, I think on the homeowner side specifically, it is, it's those channels that you can use with your homeowner list. So in some cases, that's going to be, you're going to be limited in what you can really do there with the dad that they're looking for you. Again, you can use some of these digital out of home.

You can use magazine ads. That's something that I've seen be suggested. Effectiveness is tough. But if you're matching that the right audience there, I probably wouldn't be advertising and Sports Illustrated by the Forbes or something like that, some leisure and travel maybe even looking for some opportunities like that. Kind of nice. Bon Appetit. Maybe a little higher upscale, something like that. Connected TV, I think, is a good option as well.

I do think that that's something that there are a lot of opportunities to push into some of those markets. And I think it gives you, I don't know outside of, like I've seen guesty commercials. I've seen TV commercials. I'm not exactly sure whether those are CTV commercials really targeting me or whether it's just more general in my market. Because we're in a suburb, there's probably some people who would be looking to buy some vacation rentals here as well. So I've seen that. I've seen Bacasa. But outside of that, I haven't seen a whole lot of people do this.

And I do think it gives you more of a national brand feel if you see it, even if you're watching Hulu or you're watching something like that, if your image shows up for those homeowners that you're trying to target, boy, or your 30 second commercial, whatever that is, if you can put something like that together, I think it's more than valuable because it does make you feel like a bigger brand and it does make you feel a little more professional. Now, you may not be going for that type of branding, that type of vision. and you got to match what you're actually going for there. But ultimately, that is one that I've been bullish on for a while. It's very hard to get people to convince to do something like that because very few have that 30-second B-roll ready to go

and you'd have to put together some video production behind it. But the more customized you can make that marketing, obviously, you know, hitting a large area, great. Hitting a small area with the right people that you're targeting within that. small area, it just opens up a whole new door for you there. So I do hope that 2026 is a year where people are a little more interested in putting the assets together to be able to purpose, you know, for a TV commercial, to be able to purpose for more YouTube, more TikTok content, all of that. We've talked about how video is a very important channel no matter where

you're accessing it from. So I do think that, yeah, it is. It's on the homeowner side, it is. It's a boring. Like what what works is is more of the old-fashioned what we talked about like the product placement marketing of make my brand out there be be present be relevant handshakes behind the scenes kiss babies do all that stuff. That's what works on the homeowner side and that's what works on the B2B side versus the BDC side too we got to have to acknowledge that but it's also pretty easy to see if you're investing a thousand dollars, two thousand dollars, three thousand dollars and mail or some of these other items and you're getting a number of leads back. I mean, I think that metric that a lot of property managers use on the homeowner side is cost per leave or cost

per closed deal or something like that. And sure, it's harder to contribute more money in when you're not getting any more leads coming through there. So that $2,000 cost per closed deal feels a lot easier to stomach than $5,000 for cost deal just because you added in another channel or did something like that there. Right. Well, I think that's the thing, right? It's like there's a lot of creativity within these channels that you can do. So it doesn't just have to be, oh, I'm, if you have that creative itch and you want to try something new, it doesn't have to be, oh, I'm going to go get distracted over here,

trying some other channel. And we're going to try to build our TikTok account up to 10,000 followers like our Instagram account is. It's maybe just like, well, within the formats that I'm already doing on Instagram or on Facebook or like on email, for example, or like you mentioned realtors a few minutes ago, how can I just be more creative or provide more value in those spaces? Like I think it's very rare that I look at someone's marketing and I'm like, I look at like a homeowner newsletter, for example. And I'm like, wow, I don't see a single way that I can improve this.

I think we all know that like, perfect. Yeah, exactly. Those creatives, that knowledge can be better. Just to give you a very simple example, we have a client who actually does, I think a pretty solid written version of the newsletter. But I told him, I was like, hey, if you just, and he was like, yeah, people don't really read it much. They don't engage with it a lot.

Like, I'm doing it. And I'm not going to stop doing it. But at the same token, he's like, I know well over half the people that I send it to, don't open it, don't click on it, don't read the homeowner newsletter that he sends. I'm like, what if you just did a video version too and just sent both over so they could choose to read it or to do a video version of it? And I guess I blew his mind with that idea or that suggestion because he's like, oh, I never thought about that.

But like, maybe that's why, you know, so that they're not doing it that they're not or text them the link too. Like maybe they're just not, they don't look at their email at ton or whatever. So take that same piece of content you're already doing and just like text it to them or put them on like an SMS distribution list and say, hey, here's a video link and then here's a written version of this. Here's my Q3, you know, 2026, let's say. upcoming homeowner newsletter. And he's like, oh, yeah, that's pretty tangible. So it wasn't really

reinventing the wheel. It was kind of just like, let me hit him in one more channel. Let me do different versions of this. So a video version of it and a written version of it. And I mean, we'll see. It's TBD. We're working on it now. You know, how much better that will improve his engagement. But I think it'll be pretty meaningful. I think he'll get more people engaging with that piece of content because of that. Or like, you mentioned realtors earlier. I got a quick story there. You know, we had a client who was like reaching out to realtors. Hey, you know, I can provide value. I can give you quotes. I can give you estimates, like a lot of things that that that person was doing to kind of warm with these realtors. And, you know, this, this is not a new idea,

but it was just like, why don't you do an event for the realtors? Why don't you do like a, you know, like a, here's our, you know, the short term rental meetup, you know, the short term real estate rental beat up or something like that, you know, for this particular town. And then rent a space out, you know, give these people, you know, something, maybe a bad evening drink or something like that, do a presentation, you know, and then maybe bring one or two other people in other realtors or other people to come in and do a presentation and pitch that as an idea. You know, it's not, you're not, you're reaching on the same audience, but you just have something kind of new to say to them. Like, I think that doesn't have to be a new marketing

channel. That can just be kind of a new idea layered on top of what you're already doing. So I'm really bullish on that. I think that's like where more marketing kind of needs to go is that direction of taking what you're doing that we know works well and being more creative with it, getting better results with it and not just copy and paste thing and, you know, try and did the same thing somewhere else, which is, again, not historically alleged to a lot of success unless you have some odd advantage. And I do. I think that AI has made that much easier to repurpose content and put it in different channels and expand upon and expound and do all that stuff. So I would agree with that.

The one piece, what we thought of is one piece of content five years ago can easily be turned into 20, 25 pieces of content for five to 10 different channels, depending on what you're looking at there. So I mean, how many times have we told people to repurpose old content again, update and do all those things? Now, my tendency to go back and just say, okay, but here, take it here. stick it in, plug it in over there, not change it, not do anything, not adapted. Again, that's not what we're talking about. But truly taking the time to, okay, update, improve, innovate, iterate, do a different version of it. But then taking that final product and then customizing it for YouTube, customizing it for TikTok, for Instagram, you know, whatever that is, taking non-video products and trying to bring them to the video channels and vice versa, if you can.

And I think that that's trying to cross up some of that content is something that, again, it's easier to do these things now. I think it's more fun and exciting to suggest it because with the right, you know, time. And the tools are there and pretty reasonably priced, I got to say right now. There's a lot of potential. So it's, I mean, I don't think anybody has to, but put it, you know, 2026 resolutions, we're to that point. Find one channel that you can add.

Coming out of this, I would say, just find one channel on the homeowner side and the guest side. You know, maybe make it a different channel for each side of the business just to see what you can do. Test it. Try it. Measure it. Understand what impact it has on your business and lose it if it didn't work or continue

to double down on it if it does work. Because I do think that there is a reason to go. Well, to try a new channel, to try a new channel on either side of business. Just find one that works for you. And listen to what we've got here. You got questions. We're here to help. We're here to answer and give you some additional insights.

So, yeah, what do you think? Yeah, I think that's a good way to think about it. Yeah, sort of take one bite of the apple at a time. I think that's a really good way to think about it. Look at your existing channels and do you really feel like you max it out? Have you actually max it out, right? I think that's kind of the first question to ask in most situations. Or am I going into this new thing?

And I will say this. We talked about this one time on a previous episode. If you're excited by a new idea, I think that's okay. I think you can sort of go into a new channel, knowing that it's not perfectly optimized or it's not the perfect thing for you to do. If you're kind of excited by it, you want to try something, I think that that's actually a decent enough reason to do something, even if you know it's not going to be the most effective maybe at the end of day.

Because I think that with marketing, we have to have that creative fun element to it or we do kind of just get bored by it or we just discard it. So I think there is an element to that of like, you know what? Maybe I'm not going to get the most reach in the world from doing YouTube, but I want to learn YouTube. I want to learn video. I want to be on camera. I want to talk about my business. I'm willing to fumble through it a little bit. You know, I'm willing to, you know, this podcast that we've done, we're willing to have some bad

episodes because we know there's going to be some great episodes in the backside of it. Like, it does take a little bit of a commitment to it. You have to like it. You know, I think the reason people don't, podcast don't last in general. I was thinking about this the other day because, you know, how well we've done at sticking with it is that people don't enjoy doing them. So if you don't enjoy doing them, no amount of like me telling you that podcasting is a good marketing channel for you, potentially in your business is going to make you want to do it. Like if we have clients like this, they hate being on camera. If I told them, hey, I want you to do 20 property tours

and the next six months or whatever, walk through a property, voiceover, you know, get on camera, talk about it. I have clients that would rather genuinely, like, jump off a bridge than do that. They'd be like, please don't make me get on camera. Like, please don't make me do that of my business. Other clients we have are like,

I could not be more excited. Like, we're shooting in a week or two, and I'm pumped to do this walk through, showing everything in my home and how I make an amazing experience for guests, right? So it's like two people, very different outcomes from a mindset perspective. And I think it's okay to acknowledge that

and say, let me kind of focus on what I enjoy doing. to some degree, as long as there is some justification in the backside of performance and that sort of thing. So I think it's a good way to think about it. A bit of an off-topic one, or a bit of a new topic today, but hopefully one that wasn't too far off-topic for listeners. Any other odds and ends you want to clean up, Paul, or should we put a bow on this one and put it on the list? I think we're good. Did we chew this one up pretty good here? I think we're in good shape. Excellent. Well, dear listener, if you made it all the way to the end, I think the score was that. So this is my prediction. Reporting this on January 8th reference.

This is key. 31, 24 Patriots win. We'll see what happens after that. But I think it's going to be good offense, good running game. Chargers are going to score on us. It's not going to, you know, defense is going to bottle them up. I mean, it's Justin Herbert. They got some good players.

But I think they, I think they get it done by a score up there in Foxborough. I kind of like that score. I think 50, I think 50, 55 is a 52. I don't know what the overrunner is, but I would say plus 50 is definitely the way to be, if whatever that number ends up. Yeah, I think it'll be a little bit harsh. And the Charger are going to score early. The Patriots defense early in games hasn't been great.

So like if we're down 7-0-0-0-0, I'm not going to overly panic. I'm not going to overly panic because we've had some situations. We've put ourselves in some holes that we've dug out of. And I think that they could do it if they get the running game going. And if we get Drake May playing well in primetime. Prime time, too. I think that a lot of respect on the Patriots name by putting them in prime time. They could have chosen a lot of other teams for that.

And they chose to put the Patriots there. So we'll see. We'll see if I'm right or not. You're listening later. You know, you will know. or I mean, shoot, worst case scenario, the Patriots just get killed, right? It's like 42 nothing. And then people are listening to this.

Like, you idiot, you know, like everybody's going to know that because I'll immediately go on LinkedIn the next day and tell it. Yeah, clip it right out. Yeah, Paul clip it if I'm way off here. So now it's all good. We appreciate it. Have an awesome rest of your day. Leave us a review.

Go to your podcast, happy choice. Click five stars. No matter the outcome of the game, click five stars. And, you know, if you're a loyalist here on the show, we always appreciate the reviews. We see more and more coming in regularly. So we appreciate that because it gets more people listening. Thank you. Have an awesome day.