Heads In Beds Show - Foundational Marketing vs Ongoing Marketing Costs For Your Vacation Rentals Business

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul break down what the true foundational costs of marketing are vs the ongoing investments you're making to grow your vacation rental business. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Head to Med Show presented by Buildup Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation 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. Good afternoon, Mr. Manzi coming back from vacation. How's it going? What's going on? I am rested. I'm refreshed. I am much, much more robust. I had a

lot of ice cream. I've already told you the exploits of the family and our ice cream eating adventures. That's feels like half the reason we go to the resort in the first place. So there are some good times to be had elsewhere as well. But I think if you pull the family, that's probably the highlight. So how are you doing, sir? Nice. I'm doing pretty good. No vacation on this side of things, but that's okay. I already got my vacation in this year. So we are entitled to a little bit of time off and it was good. So when you and just so the people know the listener now, cause I know, but the listener doesn't know.

When you take these vacations, you basically get in your car, go in the middle of nowhere. And that's the vacation. That's the thing that appeals to you was like woods, lots of lakes, like walk me through the destination. A little bit. See, yes. Yeah. So we're, we're, we go up to Northern Minnesota.

And that's something I don't know. We used to growing up, we based our family vacations on hitting Major League Baseball stadiums. So I've also hit, you know, 1520 baseball stadiums as well. That was a little more exciting. Maybe we'll do that at some point when as the kids get older. But, but yeah, that's that's what we do now. There's a there's a lot of and I've maybe talked about this before, but a lot of cabin resorts up in Northern Minnesota

that I still think it's a ripe market down the road for short-term rental, vacation rentals. We'll talk about that in the future. But it is a really cool spot with a lot of lakes. And I think there was a Timberwolves pack, not the Minnesota Timberwolves, but real Timberwolves pack in the area. That was something that we were

informed of. So we needed to be a little more. Got to stay strapped. Got to have the nine millimeter tucked in the waistband. You know, you got to be thinking about things. So yeah, it was, that's, that's where we were. There's a little, we'll say an executive golf course that's, that's free to play. They've got a basketball courts and play sets and a little mini golf course. And it's, it's, it's just a really fun time. And we're, we've been there a couple of years. Do you've got families there that, um, they do organize bingo at the end of the weekend. People go up and say, how many times you've been here? 25, 35, 45 years.

I mean, people just generationally come back and it's, it's impressive to see that. I mean, just, just, just, you. I mean, just like I said, we're early on in this process. So we talk about some of the principles of hospitality and what brings people back. Well, you create experiences like that. There is something to that. How can you build some of that into what you do just in your short-term rental business? I think there's times where it's good to kind of borrow and maybe see what else is, what we don't, you're not always just competing

with other rental companies, it's what else are you competing with out there and to understand what that full service experience looks like for that all inclusive experience or those small add ons look like. It's just kind of fun to peek on the other side of that card there. So that was a, it was a fun time for me. Well, it seems like one of those to peek, peek on the other side of that card there. So that was a it was

a fun time for me. Well, it seems like one of those things to I've not been to a place like this. It almost sounds like a little bit to me like a Boy Scout camp for adults, you know, and then your kids are there too. And like, those were some of the things we had a Boy Scout camp, it wasn't quite as like unlimited. But I mean, yeah, those were like really fond memories when I was a kid. I think I went like four four years in a row, maybe

somewhere in that range, I eventually quit the Boy Scouts. I didn't finish all the way through. I probably, it's one of those things I should have kept doing. And then we moved and it just kind of got distracted. And I didn't end up finishing it. I got far up in the ranks, but not far enough to like have all these final things and stuff like that. And yeah, it was just like at this summer camp type thing. It's like just a good time. Like there, there's little moments that are kind of boring or whatever. But I think those are things that you remember for a long time. So to go and do it every year with your family and your boys, that's cool. I like that side of it.

And I think you're right. It is good to remind ourselves of like, why do people like this product? Why do people like the vacation product? It's like a lot of times it's they're making these memories. We've talked on the other podcast I do about, it's grandma's last vacation. It's the baby's first vacation.

Or the third one we came up with a little while ago is the only 72 hours this person is going to have off all year long. So they work all year long, and they're only going to get three days off, maybe a weekend after that, right? So four or five days off, that's only three, four or five days they're going to have off the whole year for many folks who are working and providing and that vacation home better be a good experience, or they're going to be like, man, that was

a bummer. I worked all year for that, you know, and it doesn't deliver. That's the kind of thing that I think we sometimes overlook, we everyone wants to talk about revenue. And, you know, this industry is going to get so big and all that kind of stuff. Cool. Like we're here for it, we all benefit from in some way. But you've got to deliver on just that, like, like you said, the feeling people have when they leave and the fact that they want to come back, you know,

that's, that's all the marketing you need right there, right? People wanting to come back, the rest of it's more just execution at that point. So I will admit, then, maybe in a few, hopefully in a few years when he listens to this, but my six year old was in tears as we were leaving just because it was that emotional. But that's no, I don't want to go. It was it's one of those that I could tell is going to happen because when we were finishing up in the lodge area, you say goodbye lodge goodbye loft, I'm like, Oh, this is going to be a painful. But uh, but yeah, I mean,

that's, there's something to be said for and I think Tyon does a good job of like telling some of those stories, you know, on all the channels. But that is something that when I saw those tears rolling up in his eyes, I'm like, this was a good trip. You know, this is this is one of those things I think we get all right here. So hopefully it doesn't come to that every time. But hey, if it is, it is that's that's the reality. That's a really great experience. Yeah, no, that's funny. Like, yeah, like you said, it's sad for a moment, but it's actually kind of, you know, melancholy, maybe is a better word, not sad. It's like, oh, no, I'm gonna miss it,

you know, when it's gone. But I will say you can motivate the heck out of your son now. But we'll go back again, if you do x, y, z. If you get good grades in school, if you do this, if you do that, we'll go back again. Then they're like, he's like, oh yeah, like you can motivate a young man with that kind of stuff. So I like that one. Well, it sounds like you had an awesome time building some family memories, her foundational for your young, for your oldest, I should say there on that side of things. And that is actually today's topic.

So long intro, longer than we normally do, but fun stuff happening in Paul's world. Foundational versus ongoing marketing costs and strategies is kind of the working title that we have here. I may tweak that a little bit in the feed if you're listening right now. Maybe that's a little bit different, but we had to come up with something when we did the outline together before your vacation. So interesting one here, because this is a topic I kind of pitched your way. I think you liked it, but here's kind of the pitch that I had on it.

I've worked and we've started a lot of projects over the past few years. Some with clients that are brand new, they've literally never done this before, they're getting the business up and going. Sometimes they bought five properties, 10 properties themselves. Sometimes they bought a few themselves and starting to manage other people. And we will take on some of these smaller accounts. And then we've got, of course, people who've been around for a long time. And some of the reasons as they're different are obvious. Like some people will have a much larger email list if they've been around for a long time, they've been collecting email addresses,

they may have more fans on their Facebook page, they may have more followers on Instagram, and so on and so forth. There's all these things that are sort of obvious differences. The one non-obvious difference that I think I've noticed a lot over the years, the past few years, is that some things are these foundational

marketing principles that the sort of old guard has just kind of got in place. And I don't wanna say say takes for granted, but they just assume it's going to be there. And then you've got these ongoing marketing expenses that are really their focus. All right, we've already got a website, we've already got this, we've already got that. Now we just need to figure out how to run this engine as efficiently as possible. And then you've got newer folks, like newer vacation rental managers that are growing or getting started. And there's so much foundation that they haven't built yet, that they don't even know what they're missing. And so when we have a conversation with some of these people, sometimes they think like, that's a lot of money. That's a lot of budget. I'm

surprised by how much this is going to cost to accomplish what I'm trying to accomplish. And I go in my head, well, yeah, like you don't have anything built out that you need to have built out or that you should have built out. And therefore we have to lay the foundation of this house before we begin to talk about what the couch should look like in the living room, if that analogy makes any sense. So anyways, today's episode is a crack at trying to define what are those foundational pieces? And then what is the ongoing pieces? What does that look like to where you're pretty much never going to stop probably posting on social media. If social media exists as a marketing channel and there's guests on there, you basically kind of have to post on

Facebook from now until the time Facebook is no longer relevant. Same thing for Instagram, because the content sort of expires so quickly. So these are ongoing things, right, as a very clear example. But building a website is something you might do once initially, and then maybe every three or four years after that, which tweaks in between, you know, setting up that Facebook page is kind of a one time thing, you're probably not going to be setting up a lot of pages ongoing basis. So that's what I'm trying to do is kind of define those things. You helped me with some of the outline pieces here. So we can talk guest marketing, obviously, some of these things do dovetail nicely into homeowner marketing as well. But do you think I defined it well or is there pieces missing? No, I think that's it. I think again, you're just spot on with the, there are people that fall into

this or don't have all these baselines in place. And we as marketers do assume that some of this stuff is in place. And we just have to take that step back and say, well, this business came about in a slightly different way and really those table stakes for most are not table stakes for all. We're going down to some pretty simple definitions, but really important definitions of telling people this is what at a baseline you need to have in place to make sure that you're going to be successful. And I think in different capacities, we've, we've done this over time, but I think it is. It's just laying out, you know, in no uncertain terms, here are your fundamentals.

It dovetails nicely into some of the other work you're going to be doing here in the not so distant future as well. So, you know, just a little teaser for the end there maybe as well. But yeah, why don't you start us off on the search side of things and where do you see the most important fundamentals being in place there? Yeah, well, I think your table stakes analogy or that comment is perfect. Because to play the game, you've got to bring a certain amount of money to the table, right? Like if you want to go play poker, and the minimum buy in is x, it doesn't really matter if you want to make an ROI on y, if y is less than x, you're not getting on

the table, you're not sitting down. And I think that's kind of, you know, what people don't understand is that it takes a certain amount of money to even play the game. Nevermind play the game. Well, you know, that's that's a whole different discussion, which maybe we've talked about at length in the past. Yeah, let's go search first. So if I was building, you know, or if I was telling a vacational manager, what's the one marketing channel that you think I should get going on? What's that, you

know, initial base layer, I think maybe starting with the website is kind of like literally the foundation of a lot of the direct marketing efforts that you're going to do. So we've done some previous episodes on websites and kind of building a website that maybe is more simple and straightforward. Some PMSs honestly offer a pretty solid template website that's like maybe a good option for you to get going with.

Other PMSs don't offer a great website. I know I just did a chat up with Terry White recently, and he was talking about the fact that he would not recommend that someone, you know, take the PMS website, always have your own website, and then plug the PMS in the back end. That way, it's more configurable and customizable. I see a pro there. But I also realized that that may increase the cost significantly. So it does depend to you know, on what kind of game you're trying to play going back to

the stable table stakes comment, there's a $5 table, there's a $50 table, and there's a thousand dollar table, right? Like, and depending on what market you're going into, and you're buying into a $1,000 table market, meaning a very competitive market, and you're brand new, if you've got a pretty plain Jane standard template site, it might be hard to capture the attention that you're after, particularly if your competitors in the market are very well funded and do have awesome websites. So that website to me is kind of like, that's where you're going to be sending a lot of your marketing to whether it's search, social email, we're going to talk about other things within that platform.

But I think having a website that's, that's good, like it's got to be at least good, ideally great. But the closer you can get to that, the more success you're going to have. And I think people will skip out on that and then try to build a lot of marketing on top of kind of a shaky website. And they wonder why their ads don't convert well for guestbooking. They wonder why they don't get any homeowner leads when they run postcards for that kind of stuff. And I think a lot of it actually starts in that website side. So maybe you could speak to that because you've looked

at a lot of websites over the last few years on the homeowner side too. This I think this is the the homeowner side of things is where you see that more because there is less of a focus there. I think necessarily in a lot of cases because the revenue that shakes out down the road a little bit for you, what helps you operate is obviously that booking revenue coming in. So people do, the table stakes on the homeowner side are very, very different and varying in certainly a lot of degrees there.

But if you don't have a spot, it goes down to the point of I've seen, I know you've seen it as well, but I've seen a paragraph of content, no call to action, no click to a link, no click to email, no doing it. There's no way to contact if you're interested to begin with. So that has always been something that, and I think again, that's where Bintore came in. That's where a lot of these other systems came in and proved a clear landing spot for owner traffic.

And that's something that, yes, it had been built into some of the templates that we've talked about there, but it hadn't really been a focus. We put a heavy focus on really making that experience more like a guestbooking experience because it just wasn't up to this point. I don't think most companies did a good job of differentiating themselves. It was just, I've got to get them to contact me. You've got to give them something compelling to actually help them contact you there. So yeah, that baseline of the direct booking website, the landing page itself, you have to have some place to that foundationally, people can land and expand their experience,

land and expand, land and expand their experience with you because hopefully it's not just that one time encounter where they are just bouncing once they hit the homepage on either the guest side or the owner side of things, they're making their way down the funnel, the experience. They may not book this time, they may not fill out the form, but hopefully they're finding something that's informative that makes them want to come back down the road as they're actually making a decision there. So it's one of those things that you absolutely can't play without it, but you can improve the experience in a very substantial way by

making that investment. I think it's organic, yes, but also going to the paid side of things. Certainly that's something that's going to, I think once you've got that baseline in place, it's a non-negotiable in getting more people to the top of the funnel because it is going to be, I think we both agree here that it is going to be the best way to get that high intent top of funnel traffic in that can then experience your website, experience your business, go through that desired experience that you're trying to create with that website. But I kind of circled our way around to the paid side of things.

What are your thoughts on just improving that overall experience there, or just the experiences he owner versus guest? Yeah, I have two things that I wanted to go down. The first is I was listening to an Hormozi podcast the other day and he was talking about, you're gonna pay, it's just a matter of if you pay with time or pay with money, and you're always gonna pay

with some level of both, right? But like, I think that's such a good way to describe what the problem set is, because if you launch a bad landing page, we'll just make it simple and say, bad, it doesn't have the right call to actions, right, it doesn't look appealing, and so on and so forth. And you're trying to attract homeowners, you're going to kind of pay with a lot of money and time because you're

going to be spending money to market that page. And then that page is not going to be appealing, it's not going to drive any leads. So whether your budget is $10 a day, $1,000 a day, $50,000 a month for homeowner marketing, if you're not driving leads, then you're paying with money too, right? So it's like, you're probably better off if you can, shortcutting as much time as possible, talking to a company or looking at a company that's doing a good job on that side of things, whether it's guests or homeowner or both. And then, you know, mimicking or looking at what

they're doing and saying, how can I get as close to that as possible within the confines of my budget, within the confines of what I have? So I love that as a way to measure it. Am I paying in time? Am I paying in money? I'm always paying in both. But how much am I trading? Am I trading money for a lot of time right now? If I build this awesome page, am I not going to have to go redo it in a little while? Is my stuff going to convert better from now until, you know, two or three years from now?

Maybe when I can kind of rip this down and revamp it and make it better? I believe so. Like the data would kind of bear that out when I've looked at a lot of inventory pages or I've just looked at any professionally designed landing page for homeowners, it converts so much better. So I think that's like an angle that's often, you know, well, I got it done cheap. Well, yeah, like maybe it was cheap for a reason. You know, there's always something to that. And it's so funny, because our clients would say the same thing in many cases. Well, how much do you charge for your, you know, commission for your rental management services? Well, I charge 22%. And that's a fair rate. Look at what I do many cases. Well, how much do you charge for your, you know, commission for your rental management services? Well, I charge 22%. That's a fair rate. Look at

what I do for it. Oh, awesome. Okay. So what do you think of the guy down the street that charges 10%? Well, he's a hack, you know, or she's a hack. She doesn't know what she's doing. He doesn't know what she's doing. And I'm like, cool. Like, so then why did you want to spend $200 on a website? Right? Like, wouldn't a hack be putting that together? Like, yes, the answer is. So I think that people don't understand the investment that they're making is costing them a lot of time because they're sort of penny wise, pound foolish. And I think there's unfortunately a lot to that. The second thing I'll say, and you were touching on at the end there is that I do believe talking about this foundational concept that roughly half the success of any

like paid advertising campaign in general, any paid media in general comes down to how you're targeting it, what the creative looks like. So if I'm targeting the right people and I'm showing them a creative that is appealing to them, I've actually only got halfway there. The other half is once I click, once they click on that link or they click on that ad or whatever, they indicate interest, how well am I mastering that experience that they're sending to? So the page itself, the offer itself, all those kind of second pieces when they get there. And I think that honestly, and I've been a part of many campaigns where I think we're doing our half pretty solidly, and then the other half is not really up to snuff and the results aren't good. And honestly, it reflects've been a part of many campaigns where I think we're doing our half pretty solidly. And then the other half is not really up to snuff. And like the results aren't good. And

like, honestly, it reflects back on us poorly, which is why we, you know, tend to be somewhat selective or tend to be somewhat picky, like, hey, here's kind of what we like to see. Here's the type of website that we think will convert well on the guest marketing side of things. I'm sure you've had a lot of experience, obviously, on the other side of it. But you know, you know, that looks like you know, what a good page is, that's gonna have the right pieces in place. And, and honestly, I've seen the opposite, I've seen like, very badly run campaigns. But if they're actually running to like a pretty solid landing page, they'll be somewhat successful. I mean, they won't be perfectly efficient. But like, I've seen campaigns where I'm like, this ad

account is actually set up horribly, but they're still doing like a seven, eight to one ROAS. Like, that's not bad, all things considered, you know, I mean, if we go tighten this thing up, like, I think we'll get it to 14, 15, 16 ROAS, right on the guest marketing side of things. So I think it's roughly 5050. I don't know what your reaction is to that. But I think there's some it to 14, 15, 16 ROAS, right? On the guest marketing side of things. So I think it's roughly 50-50. I don't know what your reaction is to that, but I think there's some truth to that in my experience. I think, I mean, just look at what Google puts together for the three qualifiers for the quality score for search ads.

I mean, it is, it's ad content. Okay, we can control that completely. That's on us as marketers. But expected click through and landing page experience, that should be telling you that's something that Google is trying to measure once expected click through and landing page experience, that should be telling you that's something that Google is trying to measure once they get to the landing page. So yeah, half of it is the front side of it,

but half of it is absolutely that experience on the landing page. I think that is 100% spot on and it does. It was something that as people were getting their landing pages built out of Venturi, that was an offer I would make if people had a decent, if they had a BISCOR website, if they had an Atlas website, something like that, where they had a decent owner landing page, I'd say, okay, I can send traffic to that site. In the meantime,

while we're building our little more robust site for you, the microsite, the landing page, everything like that, I can do that. There are some partners I just would not do that for because I can't justify spending money driving traffic to a site that cannot convert much less, you know, it's just the baddest experience for everybody. So yeah, it's it's without it. I just you can't be successful. Yeah, well, it's it's you know, like we're saying here, it's ultimately, it's an effectiveness conversation, right? It's how effective are you going to be? It's not an efficiency conversation, necessarily at this point, like, you don't know how to be efficient, because you don't have any

leads coming in on the guest side, you don't have any bookings coming in on the guest side, I should say. And you have no leads coming into the homeowner side. So let's quit worrying about like the conversion rate, like, let's get it to where it has a chance of success. And then we can market more off the backside of it. So that's kind of the paid side of it. Let's flip the page slightly, if you will, at least to the other side of the. Let's flip the page slightly, if you will, at least to the other side of the page for organic. And I mean, in my mind here, as we think about the fundamental pieces of SEO,

and we talked about this at length in the book. So if you want to pick up the book, link in the show notes, people can pick up a copy of the book. But to give you the quick summary, the way I see it is that there's kind of these foundational pieces of brand, like people need to ultimately,

you've got to have a name that people look for And that you can find you know based on that as we record this today I have a client that just rebranded literally yesterday. Actually, it's a Venturi client as well So I think it's someone that you know of and they had an old name. They want to expand the name was too specific We talked about this in our naming and branding episode So they had to expand it a little bit So it covers more of a region and not this one town because they don't just want to be in this one town anymore So they're very legitimate reason for doing

the rebranding. But I'm like, hey, expect some choppiness. Like there's going to be some legit loss, you know, in the short term in terms of organic results, potentially, we're doing a new domain name or 301 again, like there's always a little bit of loss in that scenario, unfortunately, in my experience before. But I'm like, we actually have to go back to the basics. So we're, you know, this company that's doing, I assume, 10 to $12 million a year, roughly in direct bookings, maybe a little bit more. I'm not sure to be honest with you, but it's somewhere in that, somewhere in that general ballpark.

And I'm like, we're going back to like basic, like what we in the book call feather, right? Section. Let's go to search console, set up the domain, the new domain. Let's make sure the redirect is right. Let's make sure that when people search our brand, they're finding it. Let's go rename the Google My Business profile. Like we had to go all the way back to the beginning and get the fundamentals in

place for the new brand. Cause it essentially was like we were starting over in a way. I mean, we certainly aren't starting over. Hopefully long term, you know, we're gonna get, excuse me, all the traffic back and things like that. But it's going to be a little bit of a, you know, curve there. And we actually at the moment are actually running branded paid ads on both the old name and the new name simultaneously. So because people are going to still be searching the old name, probably for the next, you know, few years, I would imagine there's still gonna be people searching for that old name. You know, think

of a company in our space on the marketing tool side of things. There's some people that still say SEO Moz, even though Moz is, you know, as was its own thing for, you know, probably a decade at this point, there's people who might just say, Oh, SEO Moz, right? It was the old name of what that was. So yeah, I think with organic search, it's that brand name people can find that when they go into Google, they can find you easily again, sounds simple, sounds sounds basic enough, but you'd be surprised when people kind of pick a bad name.

And then they're kind of stuck in this loop for a long time of like getting people to actually understand the name of that company. Then I think it's being indexed in Google search. Once that website is actually built out, going in and setting up the basics analytics search console. All right, we've got people searching for us. They can find us and so on and so forth. And then if possible, Google My Business listing. Those are kind of those foundational pieces in my mind, where again, can't even play the game of SEO

until we've at least got those pieces in place. Past that, as I go a little bit up the tier list a little bit or up the foundational list of things that make sense, content I think is that next layer in link building. So again, this is sort of a recipe, and if these ingredients cost money, meaning a lot of content and a lot of links

probably isn't on the table, but some content and if you these ingredients cost money, meaning a lot of content and a lot of links probably isn't on the table. But some content and some links are certainly better than no content and no links. If I can have the option or the optionality to choose between doing those two things. And sometimes that can be done internally, you know, with your own team and things like that. But not having like a things to do page not having a restaurants near our vacation rentals page, not having these kind of pages is kind of asking for people to

ignore you right in search. Why Why would Google ever show a site that has, you know, X number of rentals on it and a contact us page? Why would they ever show a site like that over the local site that has built out over two or three years, you know, 50 articles, 100 articles on things to do area information, parking, all this kind of stuff. The answer is that Google pretty much never does that unless there's some very valid reason why they would be doing that. And I've not really found many cases where that that seems to be the case. So yeah, I think it's once your index, once the site exists in Google, you've got a brand name, people can find you, they can find the names of your properties, you're kind of off

to that foundational pieces. But then from there, it's links and content for a long time. So going back into like the ongoing pieces for a second, that's what it is, right? Over a long period of time, the sites that rank well in Google that are local sites, not talking Airbnb and Verbo, those sites, I'm talking, go do a search in your market. What do you think that top ranking site is doing a lot of? They probably built a lot of content over the years.

They probably built a lot of links over the years, whether directly or indirectly. And that's why Google's showing them up top. It's not really a secret, right? In my mind, it's very, very hard, if not impossible, to find a site that's winning in search that is not investing into content and investing into link building on an ongoing basis. And I think the one thing, just the one

extra little touching point is just the structure, just making sure that it is a structure that does make sense. That I think we get into, and I think maybe in the vacation rental space more so, because we want to get really granular with how we're breaking things down and Being very you know, it is making SEO friendly pages and stuff like that. But I still think we have to think about how How the search engines gonna see things and how someone's actually going to use the site? so like breaking down in and structuring the site in a way that's going to make sense for people to Use it and engage with it. Because I do, I think sometimes we either get

overly complex and it's just giving people a worse experience and not allowing them to find what a little more streamlined experience might give them. Or it is we don't put enough thought into it or just bucket everything together and we hope that we're gonna, that people are gonna find what they wanna find once they get into that big bucket there. So but you're right, it's as far as getting people there, getting

the content in place. That's the key. And then making sure you organize it, you know, organize it in a way that people are going to be able to get down that funnel, get to that booking path and ultimately drive that home with you. Yeah. We want to take a swing in social. So social, paid and organic. Again, same kind of logic. There's paid components for social. There's an organic component social. What are the fundamentals? What do people actually need to get going on social? I think you at a very minimum got to have the business page claimed.

Making sure that you have that social handle. On the Facebook and Met meta side of things, I think that's a non-negotiable that you have to have the meta set up in place. We'll talk about that in a little more detail here. But again, having the Instagram, having Facebook, having, if you would like to do that, having TikTok. It is. I think you want to consider the channels, you don't have to be on every channel, you don't have to do everything, but be where you think it's actually going to be effective. If you think Pinterest is still viable, you know, create a Pinterest board or something like that, that's not going to hurt you. I think the key is only add the channels or only create the channels that

you're actually going to be able to maintain. You may be keeping all your other social channels up to date. This one's out of date. That's what someone sees you on. You're not gonna give anything else a chance there. So I think just make sure that with those social channels, you're only choosing the ones that you're going to maintain that you want to post on, that you want to engage on there.

You can take that as you will. I would say for me, the non-negotiables would be Facebook, Instagram, probably TikTok. I still consider Google Business to be a social channel. It is. That serves that function. Obviously, it serves the organic function as well, but something that you have to have claimed there. Those definitely at a minimum. And then kind of taking

it over to the overall overarching business side of things, you have to create a meta business account. That may be an episode in and of itself just because it is so important. Facebook has made this a non-negotiable for your business, but they didn't tell anybody about that. They didn't tell anybody why it's important. They didn't tell anybody how to use it really. You're just kind of forced in at some point when you have to give access to one of us, find agency people behind the scenes. I don't know who's got access to this. Some intern made this for me like six years ago. So I do. I think that is maybe for the social side of things, maybe the foundational thing is knowing who has access, knowing who owns those social accounts, and making sure

that you have a change management log in place to understand who then has access moving forward. Because yeah, that's the other side of it is that someone who creates it three, four years ago may not be with the company or may have moved into a different role or may have a different, see also all the things that could happen. Again, social is a little more, it's straightforward in just claiming the listings. I think the more complex things you want to do with social, the know, the greater the long term the ongoing costs are going to be. I think the foundational is just claim the listings, claim the business manager, fingers crossed hope for

the best a little bit. But what are your thoughts on the social side of things? Yeah, some some triggering commentary there with respect to access to these things. I didn't know this was going to be an assault on my mental health. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, goodness. It is a mess over there as you know. Yeah, I mean, what's really problematic about the access side of things, actually, you now that you bring it up, it is actually something to really consider, you know, like, I have clients that don't know where their domain is registered at. They don't know where their DNS is pointed to. They don't know where who owns their Facebook page to your comment from a second ago. They don't know, you know, how

to access their admin to their email. Like these are things that are, you know, it's not again, is a marketing focus. I mean, not really. It's almost more like company security, you know, health best practices kind of stuff that kind of flows into it. But I think there's a lot of truth kind of in what you're saying, where it's like, yeah, knowing the foundation is also knowing, you know, who has keys to my house, who could walk into my house at any given time. And I think usually speaking, generally speaking, there's mostly good actors in our industry. There's a few folks that maybe if we hit pause on

stopper recording one day, I could tell you are very challenging to deal with, with respect to account access, there's some folks in our space who will run ads for you. And it's in their contract. So like read the contract, I think would be the lesson here. But as they run ads for you, and they stop, you know, you're stop your marketing campaign with some of these agencies in our space, they will turn off, you know, delete the ads, turn them off, and then we'll give you any

historical data, they won't give you any access to your previous account. And essentially, they own your account, you're renting it, you're leasing it more so from them than the other way around. Don't do that, by the way, we don't do that. I think it's a very, very sort of horrible and really bad way to do business, in my opinion. But that does exist. And I think as we talked about foundational pieces, one thing, you know, and we help on calls with clients, somewhat regularly on this side, particularly with new clients who are like new to this space is we're like, Hey, I'm making go

through all this, I can make an account for you, like in Facebook, I could do it, but I don't want to do it. Because then I own your ad account. And I actually don't want to own your ad account. It's actually just gonna be a headache for both of us. So let's open, share your screen, log in. Oh, we got to get two-step turned on. This happened the other day. All right, let's get the app download. Let's turn two-step on. Like we're going all the way back to basics, right?

That's kind of the story here today a little bit. But let's get your ad account built out. You own it. It's owned by you, not by me. And then I'm going to link to it. And then you approve that request. Sound good? Sounds good. Let's go. And I think that's the right way of doing things. And yeah, I mean, as we think about foundational pieces, access is a very valid thing to bring up, Paul, for sure.

So I think that's actually a good call out. The only thing you didn't mention that I would slide into the commentary there is a pixel. So it's similar to the, you know, once you have the ad account built out, we just want to get a pixel on the site. And typically you can install that, you know, yourself, if you have access to your website,

there's like a script section, section you can install it in. Or that's often a reason to ask in my mind for your developer to help you who built your website to say, hey, here's my pixel, can you install it on these pages? And you might want to do some additional tracking with respect to revenue and things like that. But maybe we can come back to that down the road when we talk about ongoing effort. But yeah, foundational analytics, pixel, and those are kind of things that do matter quite a bit and help you make things a little bit easier as you're going along. All right, you did social.

I think that's a good spot there. Email. I'll go down the email path really quickly. I think I can sum this one up pretty quickly. I think you want to have an email marketing platform of choice. MailChimp is an often common one that we recommend. There's a lot of platforms out there. A lot of them are great, honestly.

The parity on email marketing is pretty similar. Like HubSpot does it this way, ActiveCampaign does it this way, MailChimp does it that way. Is there really some massive difference in how you use these tools day to day? Not really, if we're being honest. I mean, like there's a lot of similar functionality there. So, use what makes sense for you.

Again, MailChimp is kind of our default recommendation. I will say their prices keep going up, so it has my eye wandering to other platforms. You know, it used to be really economical and really good, and now it's still good, but not as economical. So it has me has me thinking of other solutions. We have a client using MailerLite right now MailerLite is like about as bare bones plain Jane simple as you get. And it works perfectly fine. Like we've not had a single problem with that. So I'm not particularly, you know, loyal to any specific email marketing platform, but you need one and you need to be storing your emails in it. I would say the

foundational piece of email in my mind would be online and offline email collection and something to make sure that they remember your name. Like these are these are the three things that I would focus on if I can only do a few things for a new company or a company that was getting into email or doing it too late and they should have done it earlier. What's your online email collection strategy? So are you doing a contest somewhat regularly? Are you doing a giveaway? Are you doing a pop-up on your website? Are you doing lead ads on Facebook? These are all like sort of the online classic email collection growth techniques. Then I say offline, I guess it's not really offline in a way. But what are you doing to collect

email addresses of guests that are staying in the property? So Stafi disclosure and investor, I guess I always need to say that. But I'm love Stafi really, really solid platform. There's made more than one way to do that. I know there's some products out there like hostily, for example, has a guidebook product where you send the guy back to the guest and they have to put in their email to access the guidebook. Brilliant as well. It's not quite as good as Stafi in my mind from purely a volume side of things, because you're only going to get one email on the guestbook email, whereas you may get a lot of emails and Stafi. So I'm still bullish on Stafi for that reason. But you got to have something particularly for getting a lot of OTA bookings, you got to have some mechanism, some you may get a lot of emails on stay five, so I'm still bullish on stay five for that reason. But you got to have something, particularly if you're getting

a lot of OTA bookings, you got to have some mechanism, some way to get the real email address of the guest and not the fake cash one that Airbnb and the like give you because that has nothing you can do with that. Of course, get their consent. You know, if they want to unsubscribe, they can. But if you don't make an effort to give you that email, I'll tell you what, the guest is never going to volunteer to you. They're not going to be like, oh, I had such a great stay here. Give me, let me get my email. They're not going to do that. So you've got to do something on your side to actually, I guess, kind of force that email collection to happen.

And I think stay five is the is the quickest way to get from A to Z on that. So I'm very bullish on that. And then at the last piece, you can't just put them in a database and do nothing with them. That is like collecting a bunch of seeds and not putting them in the ground, right? That is useless. So even if you can't do, you know, maybe ongoing, the ongoing side of it is, I'm going to do reoccurring marketing over a long period of time.

I'm going to send out a monthly newsletter. Okay, great. But even if you can't do that, give me some automations. Give me some basic automations to where I sign up, you hit me with the tag, or you hit me with some kind of category inside of MailChimp or whatever email marketing platform you're using. And I get, you know, three months of emails, five months of emails, six months of emails. They could be spaced out, you know, six, eight weeks apart.

If you can't do a lot of them, I understand. But you got to have something that I sign up and I get something right away. And then you keep sending me things with some level of regularity. So I don't forget who you are. Because the one thing that we've seen over the years with clients is they get this email list, maybe they were actually doing a decent job or a good job on collection, but they don't ever email the list. And then the list is kind of useless because they don't know who it is. Why am I getting this email? Who is this company? Why are they messaging me? And they either unsubscribe or worst case scenario, they mark you a spam and then your toast. So

those are kind of my foundational pieces of the email side of things more on the guest side. But maybe you could tie in some any extra commentary on that. And then maybe some things that on our side as well. Yeah, I mean, I think you you hammered on guess that perfectly. That's that's that's exactly the things I would focus on there. You know, on the homeowner side of things, I think it's a matter of trying to,

just the same way, try to get those emails. Now, it's gonna be a little harder because the volume game just isn't there as far as getting those online sources. You can try to capture as many as you can on the homeowner side of things, but in reality, you don't want to necessarily, you don't want people who are guest-focused

to kind of seep into the homeowner email marketing side of things because that's not the messaging that they're looking for there. So you really are. I mean, you really only want to be sending maybe a dozen emails or a couple dozen emails or a hundred emails and obviously growing that list over time. You know, any way that you can do, you might have to be going and trying to find some of those absentee owners, or just looking for short-term permit holders, or vacation rental permit holders, or whatever ways you can use the public domain, that is how a lot of the companies in this space

are doing it, and that's how a lot of property managers did it before there were solutions like Ventoria around. So I think that that's something that any way you can get those email addresses to be able to email them. Yeah, you wanna put together kind of a, for any form fills, yeah, put together some type of workflow and work them through that. Sending a cold email flow to try to do some outreach

to these people, it is a low cost way of doing things if you already have an email system in place. Sending those additional emails, unless you're getting charged by the contact, probably isn't going to be a whole lot of additional costs there. But I think the other side of it on the homeowner side is that people do that email marketing top of funnel or more upstream, but they don't do as much of that communication downstream. So having that monthly or that quarterly email or newsletter that's going out to homeowners, sometimes the only time that these homeowners are being communicated

with our owner statements or something like that. So, okay, if the owner statement has a big red flag, we haven't really done any communication in the meantime to educate you on, oh, well, something might be, you know, the market conditions are shifting a little bit. Hey, things are going really well this quarter. They're not going so well this quarter. And really informing people. I think that that's something that to when you're thinking about the retention of those homeowners, you can't keep people on for year after year after year if you're not giving them that value. And money is something, certainly, but how are you communicating with them regularly in a way that it does it kind of puts their mind at ease that they're not missing out on them. If it is, if money is the

driver that they're not missing out on money or they are, you know, if it's the home, the taking care of your home or the maintenance or things like that, what are you doing to proactively? Are you putting in place these three, five, 10 step processes that are going to ensure all your inspections go perfectly? Cool. Let's talk about that. I do. I think that that's something that is underutilized, but something that will help you long term. I mean, it is keeping those homeowners on generates more revenue longterm. So anything you can do to,

I think email is a great way to kind of facilitate that communication longterm and just make sure that you're staying in front of these people, reminding these people, this is our brand, this is what we stand for, this is why you chose us, whenever you chose us to manage your home. You're still choosing us to make these decisions for you and to make sure that you and your home are staying

as happy and filled as possible on the occupancy side of things. Yeah, I saw a funny one the other day. It sounded so simple, but I saw a client who sends out their owner statement and on the kind of bottom of the email that goes out, it was like, are you confused about any of the numbers here? First of all, feel free to reach out to me.

But I recorded a short video explaining to you how to read your owner statement or how to understand your owner statement. Basically, it was the gist of the video. And I was like, brilliant. Cause what's the worst thing? You get that owner statement, what is this charge? And then it just sees that little,

this is a Rob Holderness thing, as you know, in the absence of information, people assume the worst, that is brilliant. I don't know where he got that from. But that's an awesome one. Because in the absence of information, people are going to go, these guys are ripping me off. What's the $200 charge for? And then you realize like a guest, you know, tore a massive hole in your drywall, and they fix it for you already. And they charge you half the price that the drywall guy would charge you. And you're like, Oh, my God, these people are awesome. They fixed the drywall charge. I wasn't even aware of it, you know, or drywall damage, I wasn't even aware of it, right? So I mean, it's a fictional scenario,

but the point is context. I think that's what you hit on well there, Paul. Context can be communicated very well through email for homeowners. And one to many is a really good strategy for homeowners if you can pull it off, right? Like you as the property manager are, you know, Adam and I have been talking about this at length too

recently, you're probably overworked and spread too thin. So if you have the opportunity to spend 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, one time, and explain what you then don't need to explain 40 more times out to other folks, individual homeowners, and I always say this, if you have 20 properties, you may have 40 homeowners because it's often a husband-wife duo. I mean, there's some situations where it's like husband, wife, brother, sister, mom, uncle, cousin, all own the property in an LLC, and any one of them at any situations where it's like, husband, wife, brother, sister, mom, uncle, cousin, all own the property in an LLC. And any one of them at any given time could be like,

I have a question about this, right? So the more of that one to many communication that you can layer in helps a lot. And I think starting with foundational email is a great way of doing it. And yeah, I think you nailed it there, Paul. Retention is so key too. So if you can stop a churn,

if you can keep a current owner happy, even if the numbers are down, if you can still keep them happy or at least understanding like, here's what we're doing, here's the effort we're putting in, I think you're well down, if you can still keep them happier, at least understanding like, here's what we're doing, here's the effort we're putting in, I think you're well positioned because then you can still bring in new folks, add them to your roster of properties.

And this marketing is, you know, is it making you money in a way? No, but is it saving you a lot of lost revenue? Absolutely. And that can be just as additive as any sort of fancy marketing technique that we talk about in the guest or home owner marketing side, URL codes, all this kind of crazy stuff.

So yeah, that's it on the marketing side. I mean, I think, so there's always, the layers that I would say we could add into that is everything we talked about can be done both on the guest side and the homeowner side. There's current homeowner marketing that you could do. Paul talked about it while there. And then there's, of course, there's new homeowner marketing

and maybe we could talk about that in a future episode. But go back and look, I mean, we've done episodes on direct mail stuff. We've done episodes on list targeting. We've done episodes on a lot of stuff that Paul's really knowledgeable about. And I think that brings people out of context. So anything else we missed? Or you think we did a good job of covering some of those basics, some of those

foundational pieces that you need to grow and build an awesome marketing plan? What do you think, Paul? I think we hit it. I think that's stated in we do focus search, social and email, but those are they don't really breaking down to those foundations. And I think we gave people some usable digestible pieces here. And if not, we'll cover it on a different episode, or hopefully there's another one that has provided some value for you as well. But yeah, I think we did a good job here. Awesome. I think so too. But if you have any questions, we're all ears. You can

email us, reach out to us on LinkedIn is a good way of doing it. We've got our contact info and our LinkedIn stuff in the show notes. So that's all way of doing it. We've got our contact info and our LinkedIn stuff in the show notes. So that's all we got for today. If you made it all the way this far, 42 odd minutes in, almost 43 minutes in, you're a rock star. You're an awesome person. We love you. Thank you for listening.

It really is fun to record this podcast. Paul and I have fun doing it, but it's good that we see people listening. We see all the downloads and it's always one of those things where you see downloads and it's hard to connect it to people. And then I hear feedback or I get someone reaching out or they, Oh, I listened to this or a client, I listen to your podcast and I have a question about something you said about it.

And that actually does warm my heart because you never know where you are just hitting record. We talk all the time without the red light blinking. So we never know people are listening. So one way you can let us know that you're listening is to leave us a review, go to your podcast app of choice, iTunes, Spotify listeners, you are where we get the most downloads. Therefore, your review helps us the most, but we'll take a review anywhere. We're not that picky.

We just appreciate the people are listening. So if you made it this far, Review Super helps us. Otherwise, we'll be back next week with an awesome, fun new episode. We appreciate your time. Have an awesome day and thank you for listening.