Heads In Beds Show - Finding High Value Direct Booking Sources

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

In this episode, I will discuss how to find high-value direct booking sources. By implementing certain tools and tactics on your website and within your marketing strategy, you will be able to attract high-value bookings from multiple channels. 

Hello there and welcome to episode one of the Heads and Beds show. I'm your host Conrad O'Connell and today we're going to talk about how to find your highest value direct booking sources. So most managers listening to this show and property hosts are looking for more direct bookings. Today we're going to talk a little bit about where you can find those specific sources of direct bookings. We're going to talk about what we feel are the easiest paths to get direct bookings right away.

And then we're going to break down our most popular channels that we see analyzing hundreds, thousands of bookings across all of our clients. So let's get into it. So the most common question that I think we get from people who are interested in doing some marketing and advertising for their vacation rental property or businesses is when what's the easiest way, right? When someone's coming in and trying to build direct bookings, maybe they've had most of their bookings so far specifically coming from listing sites, their obvious question is, well, what's the one thing that I can do that's going to get a direct booking right away? So while today we're going to talk about kind of both sides of it, what are the quote unquote quick wins? And then also what are the pieces that we're going to build more for the long term, I think you should think about where you

personally can excel. So if you're a host or a manager that has the ability to drive results further or more from specific strategies on social media, maybe you can do better there, as opposed to a host that maybe is a great writer, so they can actually create content and build content for their vacation rental business or property from using that strategy. So one host may take one strategy very, very far, or a manager may take that strategy very, very far and have success with it, while another may struggle because it doesn't fit their level of expertise. Of course, other things may come into play, whether you're hiring out or actually finding other people who can do these services for you. But we're going to just talk about each channel, the pros, the cons, and explain a little bit about where we think the value is in investing time, effort, and energy to that

marketing channel. So the question, where can I find sources that we can get direct plugins right away? I want to talk a little bit about what the Airbnb execs refer to as off platform and what the Expedia slash Vrbo executives or leadership team refers to as leakage. So when a guest is searching for vacation rentals in your market or in your territory, wherever you happen to have your properties in. Many savvy guests will essentially go off and look for where can I find this property somewhere else. And most commonly, they use Google to do that. So if the name of your property is something unique, that the guests can just search the name of your property and then the name of your destination. So Conrad's Cool Beach Cottage in Myrtle Beach, and they can find your website easily. That's a great way to go

direct bookings just by simply ranking for your brand name in Google search organically, and then potentially considering running an ad using Google ads, a search ad for people searching for the brand name of your property. This is a phenomenal way to get people who are looking for your property, but maybe they want to contact you directly for whatever reason, you know, save on the service fee, they may feel like they'll get a better deal. Maybe they just want to contact you directly, and they're not comfortable or don't want to book on a listing site. So running branded paid search campaigns for two kind of keyword groups, I would say one would be the name of each property that you have in your program. Number one, number two would be the name of your company. If you're kind of branding yourself more as a property manager, as opposed to a host,

both these strategies combined can lead to not necessarily a significant amount of organic search traffic or paid search traffic coming from Google, but instead just hyper specific people who are searching for the names of your properties and then seeing value coming from that, or ultimately direct bookings. So we've had some campaigns that we've run in the past where we spend $100 a month on campaigns like this, and have gotten a dozen or more direct bookings just from this specific strategy on the Google Ads side of things.

So there are kind of some prerequisites for making a campaign like this successful. Obviously, you need to have somewhere to send them. So you would need your own website, ideally where guests could actually book directly on your website, that would be ideal. If not, there needs to be an easy way to contact you or have a messaging portal or something like that

built into it so they can get in touch with you. But we find that the best results come from that guest searching and then finding a website where they can book directly with you. So there's no extra steps needed or anything like that. The guests are, I don't want to say lazy, but the guests are, they want convenience, right? They want to be able to find what are the properties that I can search for, you know, dial right in, find the listing information, and then get a better rate by booking direct versus going from a listing site. So branded paid search and ranking organically in Google for that is a great way to tackle that. So beyond paid search and organic search, the next most common path that we find for getting direct bookings right away is by simply marketing

to people who have stayed with you before. So most listing sites will actually block the real email address of the guest staying with you. So it's not as simple as going into a dashboard and exporting all that information. That information is generally no longer available to you. Instead, you want to have a system built where you're gathering that email with permission, of course, from the guest. And then you can market to that person later on through a newsletter email marketing strategy that you would put together. So even if you're only hosting a few guests per property, if you're a small manager, large manager, and that list may be small, even when you start to gather it, there may only be 20, 30, 40 people on it. By the time

you start to send marketing messages to it, it can be very effective because you're marketing only to people who have stayed with you before. So you've built up, obviously, a significant amount of trust. Hopefully those guests had a phenomenal time. They left you a five-star review. And you can leverage that and make sure that you're getting that person to come back and stay again when they're considering visiting your destination a second time. So the most direct way to do that is by building an audience of people who have stayed with you before, uploading that into a tool.

MailChimp is one of our favorites that we've used extensively. And then sending marketing messages to that audience monthly, maybe every other week where that's appropriate during the high booking season. And you can typically generate a lot of bookings from there. Again, we talk about channels here. The two tactics we've talked about so far

are relatively low cost. Setting up MailChimp, for example, might cost you $10 or $20 per month, but can provide a ton of direct booking interest from those people once you've built up a small list. Obviously, as you scale, those systems can potentially work a lot better, but you may also end up with a lot of people on your list who are more interested as leads as opposed to past guests. So by segmenting that out, you can be a little bit more personal with people who have stayed with you before. You could even customize your email messages. If you're a property manager, you can customize your email marketing messages

to include information like the property they stayed in, specials, promotions, etc. and so on. So when we talk about finding your highest value direct booking sources, Google paid search or essentially branded search can be your number one platform for doing that right away, while email marketing can be your number two source of people coming in and wanting to find that information and then booking with you directly. But there's lots of other paths that you can find to measure these high value direct booking sources. So once you're more established, you've built your own site, we highly recommend installing Google Analytics on your website, your vacation rental website as soon as you possibly can. That way you're gathering and collecting information for the long haul, you're going to see a lot of benefit in that as

you see your traffic grow and change and morph over time. So Google Analytics is a phenomenal way to measure specifically when people are visiting your website where they're coming from. We find that most of our clients, whether they are property managers with five, ten, a hundred or a thousand properties, Google is often number one or number two in their referral traffic sources. Whether that's paid or organic, of course, depends on where they're investing their time, their effort, their energy and their money into. Google is king when it comes to direct booking, or I should say, high traffic sources coming to your vacation rental website.

And ultimately, the impact that Google has is often where people go when they want to make that book. There's lots of investments that you can make into social that can bring you a lot of visibility, but it may not necessarily be the channel that brings you that direct booking right away. So the analogy that I like to draw is pretending we had, instead of our vacation rental businesses, pretending that we had a retail store. Social media and Facebook is kind of like someone's walking outside our retail store. We kind of, you know, wave our hand at them, grab them by the arm, try to get them to come in our retail store and buy whatever products we happen to be selling. So it's kind of interruption marketing and advertising. And obviously it can be valuable because they may say, oh, I didn't

realize that this was here. I didn't realize this was available. And they may create some awareness for your properties or for your vacation rental business that wasn't there with that audience before. So we love social as a means to build your brand as a means to potentially drive interest and like that kind of initial awareness of your brand for that guest that's considering staying with you. But when it comes to actually that channel where they want to take action, we find that guests go to Google more than anything, because that's the path that they're going to take when they're ready to actually do that booking to perform that conversion. So the analogy of our retail store a moment ago, of social media kind of being like tapping people on the arm, asking them if they'd like to check out your products, we see Google is kind of the opposite. We're just sitting in our store,

or in our little virtual vacation rental, you know, storefronts, if you will, whether that's a listing site page that you've got out there somewhere, or it's your own website. Google is people actively coming into your retail store or your little vacation rental world and saying, I'm interested in a pet friendly condo, you know, in this destination. I want to stay in this type of property. Do you have what I'm looking for? And if you can match what they're looking for with what you have to offer, then there's a great match there. And the conversion rate of traffic coming from Google is someone that's specifically looking for, for example, you know, pet friendly condo rental in Miami Beach.

for example, you know, pet-friendly condo rental in Miami Beach. So a search like that is naturally going to have a much higher conversion rate than targeting people who, you know, live in North Carolina and have an affinity towards Miami Beach. They might be interested, but they also just, you know, the timing may be wrong for whatever reason. Someone that's going into Google and searching specifically for vacation rentals, condo rentals, whatever the case may be in your market, that's someone who's putting their hand out, raising their hand and saying, I want what you have to offer. If you can get them to your website, naturally, that's going to help your conversion rates dramatically. So we've talked a little bit so far about branded paid search.

That's kind of your very low hanging fruit, very high conversion, but also limited ceiling channel. We've talked a little bit about email marketing. So gathering the email address as a past guess and going ahead and driving it that way. Of course, you're limited there by how many emails you can collect is sort of predicated upon how many bookings you're doing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis for your properties. And then we talked more about SEO. And over the long term, SEO and paid search can be those channels where Google is sending

you all that traffic and you're benefiting from that significantly because of the fact that it's an action channel. Naturally, SEO traffic can also scale very well. You can get a lot of organic search traffic over time as you build things up, as you build more content, as you have more money to invest in paid search, you can continually drive your traffic up. And over the long term, we find that our clients see in their analytics that Google ends up being their number one direct booking source. People specifically coming from Google are the top converting source for them. So as you consider your marketing mix and the strategy that you're going to put together for your vacation rental business, think about all these channels. Think about how to collect emails. Think about what

people are searching for that's specific to my company. So branded paid search or the name of your individual properties. Think about what's my long-term play. How am I going to continually build this email list? How am I going to continually build traffic from Google so that I can have awareness and I can have guests finding me? And we find that when you put all these pieces together, you can get more direct bookings once you have a comprehensive plan. So that's our show for today. Thanks so much for listening. We appreciate any subscriptions of the show or feedback that you have. Feel free to email me, Conrad, at buildupbookings.com. And we're looking forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks so much.