Heads In Beds Show - Here's How To Level Up Your Marketing With JUST 4 Hours Per Week

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

In this episode Conrad goes solo on this audio-only version of a LIVE training on "The 4 Hour Vacation Rental Marketing Workweek".Want to get the video too? Tap the link below.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellRecording Video: YouTubeConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Hey, everybody, Conrad here. I thought I would do a fun kind of rerun here of a webinar recording that I did a few weeks back. And the title of this webinar series, or this webinar specifically was the four-hour vacation rental marketing work week. The premise was that we talked about, myself and Adam talked a little bit about how to get more direct bookings, how to get more results, if you could only spend four hours per week on your marketing.

So had some fun kind of putting this together. I thought this may be a fun thing to actually reshare in the podcast feed. I'll put a link in the show notes of the YouTube video so that if you want to go watch the, there's some visuals and some slides and things like that that may potentially give you some extra punch over on the YouTube channel. But honestly, the audio itself was pretty indicative of what we talked about on the webinar. So I think you'll get a lot of value out of it. So we'll go ahead and roll that clip. And at the end, if you like this kind of thing, go ahead and subscribe to that YouTube channel. The title is Conrad at Buildup Bookings. That's

the title of the YouTube channel. Looking to get more videos out here in 2026 on that channel, think you'll like some of those. And let me know if you like these webinars. We've got some new ones that we might do in the future. It's kind of a way for me to be more specific and people can ask questions. We go through things live, that sort of thing. So enjoy. We appreciate it. And we'll catch you on the next episode. Have an awesome day. Diled in. But if you don't mind, Adam, what's going on in your world? We got a minute or two to kill. Maybe some people dialing it for the first time aren't aware of you. Would you mind a little intro or background? Maybe that's not the worst idea. Yeah, happy to. So I work with Conrad on a couple different things. Co-host at the Art of

hospitality. So Conrad and I've got a podcast that we do on a weekly basis. And then I also work with Conrad on the marketing side or the sales side, I guess I should say, for build-up bookings. I've been in the industry since 2008. I live on the Outer Banks, but have had a variety of different roles in the industry from the management side and the vendor side, primarily focused on sales and marketing throughout my career, but a variety of different roles from Director of Marketing at a vacation rental company here in the Outer Banks to Director of Sales and Marketing at Point Central at Breezeway, VP of Sales at Inhabit. Now I get an opportunity to work with a couple different vendors, build up bookings being one, and then Riva, which is a review management

tool being the other. Yeah. It's great, Adam, to have you here kind of, you know, depth of experience. I guess I'm wondering before we get started. Any Tim Ferriss four-hour workweek stuff? People very cleverly kind of figured out my title from Tim Ferriss and stuff. You're familiar with his work? I loved Tim. I was listening to him a lot when he first started the podcast. I have I haven't listened to him in a number of years. It felt like I was hearing a lot of the same things when I was listening to the podcast. But I love his perspective on things. I think he's got a really interesting way to think about the world.

Yeah, like you, it's not something where I consume it all the time, but I think it was an interesting concept title. So actually, I'll spill the secret sauce now. Hopefully this doesn't get me in any trouble with the VRMA folks because we love them over at VRMA. But this was actually one of the sessions that they rejected for VRMA this year. So I got a different session, not complaining. But to be clear, this was one that we had pitched for them that they didn't end up

proceeding with. So, all good. All right. Well, I'm seeing many, many of our participants, probably over half at this point, are here live. We gave it three minutes. We'll go ahead and get started. So welcome, everybody. Hello, my name is Conrad O'Connell. Welcome to the four-hour vacation rental marketing work week. We're going to stop being pretty busy today, and we're going to start being productive. So excited to get things going, and I've got a lot of content to share. Adam's going to be kind of putting in some extra flavor to some of my questions and ideas here as well as we get going. But I want to start with this. So how many hours did you actually spend on marketing. I find that there's often this bifurcation of the different companies that we work with

where some of them are larger, bigger property managers, and they have scaled up a team, and then they have multiple people working on it, and it's their primary job role. So they're spending 20, 30, 40, 50 hours a week maybe on marketing collectively. And then sometimes it's like a barbell. You have the other side of the barbell, and it's people spending no time at all. They're not actually doing any sort of ongoing marketing efforts or ongoing marketing activities. I wonder if we could kind of with the premise of today's webinar or the premise of today's talk, what if we could just spend four hours a week on marketing? I think it's very tangible because I think as we get going here in the webinar, what you'll learn is that it doesn't mean that only four hours of marketing

work is occurring on a annual base or a weekly basis, excuse me. It just means that you're directing four hours of work every single week. And then a team or someone that you're collaborating with is assisting, you know, with some of those marketing elements and some of those different techniques or strategies that you're hoping to leverage. So it's not in my mind the belief that more time automatically means a better outcome when it comes to doing better marketing or more marketing. Sometimes, in fact, you can find yourself distractor, you can find yourself going down the path of working on things that are not working. So that is kind of the challenge that I have today, which is, can I convince you that four hours a week is enough of your time that you can

invest into your marketing and that it's ultimately going to help you grow your business, whether your goals are to get more bookings for the rest of this year. Maybe your goals are to get significantly more traffic or visibility next year for your business. Whatever the case may be, the goal is today to talk about some of these ideas and kind of go through though. So we'd love to hear, again, any comments or thoughts in the chat that people might have about how much money they actually, or how much time and money, maybe, to some degree, they might actually spend on marketing on a weekly basis. And to be honest, I think this is part of the problem right here on the screen right now. The marketing channel mix, and this was just a graphic that I grabbed off of Google, there's so many things that you can be doing, right? There's these different bubbles, kind of, if you will, representing different channels.

You could be doing SEO. You could be doing paid, you know, Google ads. You could be doing, quote, unquote, social media, but social media is a very broad, diverse set of platforms at this point. Obviously, Facebook, Instagram, kind of our big ones. There's other social platforms out there, like, you know, TikTok comes to mind. Obviously, there's another one that some of our clients have explored. Twitter, you know, now called X.

That's another platform. There's a lot of daily users on platforms like Snapchat. Pinterest still gets a lot of users. We have clients who's actually, who've actually successfully gotten a lot of traffic from Pinterest. So it's very easy, I think, if you're not in the marketing mindset and the marketing mode, to say, gosh, there's 10,000 things that I can do. how do I narrow things down into focusing on what, you know, I should be doing? And I think that that problem is probably where I think a lot of people do get stuck

because they don't know what they actually need to work on. But, Adam, I mean, you started on the industry, you know, some time ago and maybe the number of channels that you started with back when you were, you know, working in-house at a vacational company was a lot smaller. But what's kind of your reaction to this idea as far as, like, the quantity of things that we're encountered with? And that's some of the battle that we're fighting here a little bit. Yeah, I think you want to make it as simple as possible,

especially if we're going to try to really, I won't say limit, but I'd say use your time as wisely as you can. So if we are thinking about that four hour per week, then you really want to make your marketing approach as simple as you can. And even way back in 2008 when I was starting, the number of channels were growing a lot. And I was testing them out and wasting my time in a lot of different directions. And what I ended up landing back on was the ones that I felt were the core

to driving the message and driving the content that I was creating, whether that's a blog post, video, Instagram was just coming on. So pictures were we coming in. exceptionally important. But I think it's the consistency. It's the simple approach and then consistently consistently going after that approach on a regular basis. So it's not falling off. It's not getting too many different options. So you're only touching one every once in a while. It's really getting a core group of channels or approaches that you want to think about in marketing and then sticking with those. Now, to your point, at some point, maybe you realize that that's not working or it's not

driving what you want or you're not enjoying it. And then you can make that switch. But I think you've got to commit mentally for at least a, you know, a little bit of time to see if it works and then switch another channel if you feel like you need to. Yeah. I want to go to the poll results here just for a moment before we kind of proceed with that line of thinking, Adam, because I think I'm pretty aligned with what you're, you know, explaining here too. And I want to talk about some of it. So just for reference, about 70% of you here live on the call have submitted the survey so far. So I'm going to read off some stats here. I think you can't see it as a participant, but I can see it as the one running the webinar here. So about 13% of you

are single property host. You just have one property. About 20% of you are multi-property host. That leads roughly, I'm getting another response right now. So it's changing the numbers a little bit, but that leaves roughly 70% of people in the room that are property managers. The second question was, how many direct booking channels do you focus on? So kind of relevant to the graphic on the screen right now, 20% of people said none. We're not focusing on any direct booking marketing channels right now. 27% said they're focusing on one or two channels. 33% so they're focusing on three or more. And then the 20% of people said we're on it all.

So, you know, I didn't know exactly how many to put into that poll to make it somewhat attainable, but they said we're on at all, which is interesting. I love this one. So I was very curious how people are trending. Obviously, we have our own data within buildup, but it's not exactly representative of every single vacation rental manager out there because some people are, you know, outside of our client list, they're doing different things. So my third question was, have your direct booking so far this calendar year gone up or down? So is your 2025 booking, and we could say revenue or a number of bookings, whatever metric you want to use is kind of okay with me. But have they gone up or have they gone down compared to your 2024 data?

So 8% of people said we're up. 67% of people, a huge chunk, said that we're flat, so no meaningful difference, nor we're not up or down. And then 25% of people said that we're down in direct booking. So that's not an amazing trend if we're being transparent and candid, right? That some people, you know, about quarter of the people that are listening are actually down. They're getting less direct bookings now than they were last year.

And then, yeah, last question, just kind of. come to a close here on that one. What were your goals in 2026? So 46% of people, I'm assuming mostly property managers, are hoping to get more homeowners. 31% of people are hoping to get more bookings overall, so no matter of the source. And then 23% of people are focused on getting more direct booking. So just people that are going to the website and booking directly. So that is an interesting one, Adam. I didn't put this in a poll. It's actually a poll that's coming out on LinkedIn, I think a week or so after this recording that we're doing here right now live. But I have a question for some folks, and I didn't put it in the polls here. But are you

currently, it seems like more people that we talk to are more booking constrained right now than they are inventory constrained, meaning that they're hoping to fill, they're hoping to get more reservations and more bookings for the inventory of the homes that they currently manage. And would they take a new home? Yes, but that's not the constraint in their business. They have more availability and more openings on their calendar than they do, you know, interested guests on that side of things. So I guess I'm curious Adam, where you're seeing the industry, do you think your typical average property manager needs more bookings right now overall? Or do they need more homeowners to meet the demand in their market? What do you think on your son?

Well, one quick note, Conrad mentioned a poll that's coming out in a week or so. So from a marketing perspective, the hidden tool behind that is he's actually leveraging a tool to be ahead of the marketing game. So he's leveraging his four hours per week by using some additional tools that can time things to go out when it's an appropriate time to do it. So just a side note, there's value in that. But I think the other side of that question around are you going after homeowners, are you going after guests? I think it's an interesting one, and my perspective is one that if you do great guest marketing, you're going to do great homeowner marketing because homeowners are looking at Google and social media in the same way that a lot of guests are. Insert market vacation rentals, vacation rental

management. They're following the same social media. If they see you as the property manager who is the frontrunner in that market that is sharing valuable content for guests, the homeowners are going to see that. It's probably valuable for them as well. but they're also going to see that you are driving significant attention from guests. And at the end of the day, homeowners want a management company that can fill their homes, not be great marketing for other homeowners. So I do believe that great guest marketing leads to great homeowner marketing. Now, I guess another way to think about that is if you're going after guests,

that means that you are trying to fill the homes that you have. If you are going after homeowners, to Conrad's question, does that mean that you actually have more demand than the homes or the supply that you have. My guess is that's probably not accurate. My guess is most of the people that are going after more homeowners see that as a revenue opportunity and say, hey, I want to drive more revenue. And if I get more homeowners, then I'll drive more revenue. And there is some accuracy behind that. But I think that another way to approach that is if we feel the homes that we have, then our homeowners are going to be happy. As a result, they're going to refer other homeowners to us or other homeowners are going to see the fact that

our calendars are full. In addition to that, if your homes are full, your rates are higher. So I think that this is a bit of a flywheel that if you can fill the homes what you have and start to drive guests, then the homeowners will sort of naturally come. I think the other side to that question is the cost associated with it. And there is a much larger market of guests looking for your homes than there are homeowners looking for your management. And the ROI on the marketing spend that you put towards homeowners is going to be much lower than the ROI on the spend that you put towards guests. So I think that if you're going to, especially if you're sort of just starting out or trying to drive new, new marketing ideas, I think guests is going to be the place that you see

faster and better success than if you're going after homeowners. Yeah, I agree. There was a comment in the chat here from Heather F. I don't know if you want me to share your last name, Heather, so hopefully that's okay. But, you know, she said there has to be balance of both. And I think Adam you nailed it too, right? Like, it's kind of, you know, the analogy I sometimes do is like a gym analogy. It's like if you go to the gym and you only lift with one arm, you're going to look really weird you know in a few months like why is that arm really strong the other arm's really weak right it's going to be very strange so i do think there's an element of we've got to do both to some degree but but to kind of the focus of today's um you know discussion and today's topic i think your

your big three your top three that we see and i've looked now at probably close to 500 different vacation rental managers google analytics profile so i go in there and i look at people um their traffic where it's coming from where they end up being a build-up bookings client or not and i say all right what are the number one you know number two number three traffic sources that we see over and over again. And this is almost always the case 98% of the time, let's say it that way, where people are finding them on search, people are finding them on social media, and then coming to the website that way, they're getting responses that are getting clicks to the website from emails that they're sending out. So these big three, and within search and social, we could have a quick debate

or a quick delineation, if you will, between organic and paid. So on the search side, obviously, there's kind of the SEO element to it. How well do I rank in mostly Google organically? We could almost open another Pandora's box, if you like, with respect to these new AI search platforms. I would argue that's still in a way search. We could call it a new flavor of search. But in my mind, you know, people using chat DBT or Gemini or a tool like that to kind to find, you know, different websites to click through and look for inventory. I feel like that's very similar to how we've done search marketing for a long time. Is there some new nuances or some new things that we're going to learn as we go along there? Absolutely. But in my mind,

I kind of put it into that search bucket for the time being. Currently, that's really more of an organic, you know, component one would say, like quote unquote, ranking well in chat gbt or being recommended by chat chvety isn't something today at this moment of time that you can influence with ads that will come by the way i almost guarantee that it's just matter of when not really a matter of if would be my take on that so down the road i could absolutely see a world where you're running your google ads maybe you're even running ads on a platform like bing and then shoot you might be running ads on platforms like you know chat chb t or you might be running ads in a search engine like perplexity or something like that and it's giving recommendations it's giving

sponsored links so again long di-tripe there but basically search as people using these different platforms to kind of find you that way. There's an organic and a paid component there. Social media, the same thing. Of course, we have Facebook and Instagram are kind of the, as we look to narrow things down a little bit here, as we get deeper in the presentation, I would say, those are where we see the majority of the results. Can you get traffic from, let's say a platform like Twitter? Can you get traffic from a platform like Pinterest? Absolutely. Is that where I ever see, you know, any significant booking trends or booking data indicating that you're getting success there? I haven't seen it. So I'm not saying it's not impossible, but I'm just saying that I don't see

very often. So within the social kind of world, we see Facebook and Instagram as kind of the big platforms there. And of course, within those platforms, there's a way to run advertising. And there's of course a way to run page content organically. But that's kind of number two. And then the last one is email. I could almost, and I've thought closely about kind of rebranding this a little bit to say not just email, but also let's call it outbound. So it could be email. It could be SMS. We have a lot of clients now that are doing both. I see some folks in the call that are current clients where they're saying, hey, you do more than just email for us. You do SMS for us as well. absolutely so I have thought about kind of renaming that rebranding that to call that like outbound

messaging because in my mind that outbound messaging could be done through email it could be done through SMS like text marketing but it's kind of the same general idea which is like I'm pushing out a message to a list of subscribers whether they happen to be on WhatsApp or SMS or email is somewhat immaterial to the points that I'm going to make you know through the rest of the presentation today it's really just this idea of people looking for you people engaging on platforms where you can post content and then my ability to reach out to people in a one-to-one or to many type fashion. So I think when you're going through this idea that Adam just said very well a few minutes ago of focusing and narrowing in, you got to kind of zoom out for a second,

though, I think, and really understand like, what am I trying to achieve what I'm doing, quote, unquote, doing SEO, or what I'm quote unquote doing PPC? Like, what is my objective? What am I trying to get to? And if you understand that at a high level, then the actual actions that you take, the crystallized nature of what you need to focus on after that is so much clear because you're like, I'm doing this. I'm creating content on my website to get more search traffic, people coming in and looking at my website so that more people can be aware of my brand, see my property, see what I have to offer, then they will come back and make a booking. So when we know what we're trying to achieve, it's so much easier to kind of get from point A to point B versus people that want

to write very long strategy documents that are 80 pages, but it's like, okay, what do I do from there? How actionable is that? How tactical is that where I need to kind of focus on things? So my suggestion, right, for a lot of people listening and, you know, to some of the poll results that we've seen so far on the webinar today is that you're so much better off going a mile deep and an inch wide in a given channel, then being a mile wide and an inch deep in a channel, right? So, like, the best thing I think for you to do is if you're focused on SEO, focus on just SEO for a few months at a time. So if you only have these four hours per week that you can work on it,

again, maybe it's you're working a few hours per week, then you're delegating down to other people on a team or in some other fashion. We'll cover that in a minute when it comes to working with a freelancer, working with a specialist, maybe working with an agency. These are all the different, you know, avenues available to you. Maybe it's an in-house team member. I think your best bet in what I see that works the best, over time is being that mile deep in an inch wide, taking one channel and trying to get really

good at it and not worrying so much about, oh, we're ignoring Instagram right now. That's okay. You can ignore Instagram right now. I have a client that we work with. That's a 70% plus direct booking, you know, property manager that we work with, actually here in the South Carolina area that I'm based in. And he doesn't even have an Instagram page. Genuinely, there's not an Instagram page for this company at all, does not exist, and he gets 70% of his bookings. His sort of mile deep in his world has been SEO and paid search. So that's kind of where he's put his effort, his energy, his focus into, he's got a lot of direct bookings coming in mostly off those channels. He does have a Facebook page, but he does not have an Instagram page. And the

Facebook page does provide some traffic. So, and we've seen these kind of so-called viral Airbnbs, you know, that will pop up from time to time. We've spoken, you know, Adam, to many of them on the podcast and things like that. And many of them double, triple quadruple down on Instagram. Did they cross post some of their content to Facebook or maybe YouTube or something like that? Yeah. But like if they look at the 80-20 or shoot, even the 90-10, it's not even really 80-20 sometimes. The majority of the results often come from doing one channel and doing doing it really well versus spreading yourself so thin across seven or eight different channels. So like in your marketing lexicon, in your operational lexicon here, as you get further on the

process here, be completely comfortable or be completely fine. We're just saying, no, I'm not focused on that right now. It doesn't mean that it's not a good idea. It doesn't mean that we can't get bookings from Instagram. Doesn't mean that we can't get bookings from SEO. Let's say that's the channel that you're ignoring right now. Just know that I'm trying to go a mile deep. And I can't do that if I'm spreading myself too thin. So Adam is the, um, Hopefully this kind of hits the mark with what you're saying there a little bit, but any reaction to kind of these before I go to the next thought process. Well, yeah, so quick reaction, but I would also love for you to explain when we talk about SEO,

what does that really mean to us? But I agree with that. And the one thing I would say is that after you go a mile deep, the next thing you can do is start to layer on additional channels once you get really good at that. And I would suggest that you repurpose things that you do. So, for instance, if, and I'll let you answer the SEO side of it, but if my focus is SEO, I might be writing a lot of great value-added blog posts that I'm sharing. Well, when I do that, I might also take pictures. Maybe I'll take a video. And those are the type of things that I could then

repurpose into YouTube and into Instagram and into Facebook or into my monthly newsletter. So a holistic approach, I think, is ultimately where you want to get to. But if you're starting from zero, you want to take one step first and then think about how you can layer in some additional channels as you go. Yeah. It's a good point when it comes to each channel, like, what are the discrete actions that make up that channel. So SEO will do that one to your question there, Adam. So when I think of SEO, I've come up with this a while ago. Actually, Matt Landau made me come up with this because he's like,

this stuff's too complicated. People get confused and that sort of thing. You know, so TLCK was kind of the framework that I ended up coming up with. So technical, which is like, is my website in good enough is the word I use now. I added that in later on because I think some people get overly fixated on technical SEO. I'm going to spend, you know, 10,000 hours auditing my website and trying to get a perfect score on one of these crawling tools, not actually as valuable as you. think. What you want to do is make sure you don't have any major gaps, major issues. But it's

almost like if you go to the doctor and ask for a full body scan, they'll find something on you. Like they'll find a little skin tag or something. They'll find a, you know, a knee crack that didn't heal properly or something like that. So, you know, when it comes to these SEO audits, I think what you want to do is do a technical SEO audit. Get it good enough. Make sure you don't have like obvious problems. Like make sure you don't have an open wound on your arm, as it were. Like you don't want those types of things. And then you're focusing a lot of effort into keyword research. What are the terms that I actually want to show up for. So if I'm in the Outer Banks, I probably want to rank well for Outer Banks condo rentals. But I also probably want to rank well when someone searches

for the best pet-friendly Outer Banks vacation rentals and so on and so forth. So that's kind of the keyword research element. What are the terms I want to rank for? Then there's content creation and link building. And those are the things, essentially you can do in perpetuity, by the way. So you can do, you can put new blog posts out on the website on a pretty much continual basis for a decade, like we have clients who worked with for a long time. We're still updating the website with new content. And link building is kind of one of those, again, limitless games where in theory you could play, you know, forever and really never max out or, you know, get more links probably than your competition. So now over time, is there some

case to be made for diminishing returns? Absolutely. Like, we have a clients that we've worked with that rank number one in their core market for a given SEO term. So let's say, you know, insert area name vacation rentals. So if it was outer banks vacation rentals and you rank number one, you could sort of make the argument that doing a lot more SEO work may not give you a lot of incremental gains in terms of your organic search revenue. I can sort of, I can agree with that sort of premise for that thesis if someone were to suggest that to me. Now, I do think there's something to be said for, how great is my lead? So my one point up right now in a basketball game, it is the opponent have the ball in they're

about to score, as the Celtics let me down last night aggressively at them, sidebar that we won't get into right now. Or do I have a 20-point lead, and I don't need to worry about it. That's more of a nuanced situation depending on where you're at. But I do think it's okay to go back to that idea from a second ago, let's say with a channel like SEO, is say, I've posted 50 blog posts at this point. I've built 100 links to my website. I rank number one or number two when you search area and vacation rentals,

let me then go double down and focus on another channel. I think that's perfectly healthy. I think that's okay, especially given the context of what we're saying with I've a limited amount of time every week. I've got to decide what kind of needs my attention. What's my new thing that I can work on? And then go from there. So definitely can agree with that.

And actually, it's funny that SEO was the next slide because that wasn't that wasn't pre-planned Adam, your question, as it were. But the truth is that doing a tiny bit of, let's say, SEO work. And this applies to a lot of things. I just use SEO as the example. It's kind of the same as doing zero. see a work. So like if I do my gym analogy again, going to the gym and lifting a dumbbell that's 50 pounds one time doesn't build a muscle, doesn't get you much stronger. It's lifting that 50 pound

dumbbell seven or eight or ten times across four reps and then doing that every single, you know, multiple times per week for two years and then your arm is huge, right? Like those are the things that happen over time. So I think that what some people often fall into or they make that mistake that I see regularly is what we sent one email. You know, we send an email out to our email newsletter list you know, four months ago and we didn't get any bookings off it. So therefore, you know, email marketing doesn't work. You know, I think with any level of rational thought or sort of, you know, questioning, again, that sort of statement, we all know that that sounds a little silly when we say it all loud. But I think it can happen to the best of us where we try something for a very

small sample size or a very small little bit of effort. It doesn't work. And then we just kind of retreat. And we say, well, we're not going to focus on that anymore because it didn't work. So that's, you know, again, to kind of hammer my point home here. That's why we want to go a mile deep because we need to do, you know, not one blog post. We need to do 100 blog posts. We need to build one link. We need to build 50 links, you know, to kind of see the results there. And yes, it's frustrating. There's moments where you feel like you are spending some time and not seeing the results right away. But one thing I believe with email, with SEO, with paid search, with social media, is that you should see progress along the way. So maybe you're going

to have moments where it's like, this is a little bit frustrating. I'm not seeing the results that I want to. I'm not getting a massive increase in my direct bookings. But there's little flags that you can look for that will show you success. So if you're in that early part of your journey and you're looking at, for example, let's say in the SEO side, Google Search Console impressions would be a really good example, I think, of what that might look like. So if you verify your website in Google search console, it's brand new, you've done no SEO work, what's it going to show for? Like maybe your brand name, maybe a few other keywords, but you're going to have like 50 or 100 impressions in Google search console, right? But then as you go along, it's like maybe

you only are getting, you know, 10 visits a month. And then two months later, you're only getting 30. You're like, that's not really a lot of visitors. I've been focused on this now for two months, but your impressions likely will go from maybe a few hundred to a few thousand. Or, you know, maybe a few months after that, you're up to 10,000 impressions in search console. So I believe almost every marketing channel out there will kind of leave you a little breadcrumbs of success, even if the results aren't massively different, you can start to see that progress or those improvements over time. On the email list, I would make the argument that looking at the number of subscribers is a relatively healthy, you know, thing to measure your success or your progress

on that. On the social media side, obviously followers is a decent proxy. Maybe just number of people reach might be even a better proxy for some level of success that you're seeing with social media. So if you're posting on Instagram three times a week, and you start by getting 30 people to see your content, and then five months later, you're getting 3,000 people to see your content. Again, you may not be getting a lot of bookings when you're getting going, you know, because 3,000 people isn't often enough to get, you know, a new booking every single week or every single day or anything like that, but you see progress along the way. So just kind of think about it that way that doing a tiny bit of something is kind of the same as doing nothing.

But when you're focused on it and you're putting effort into it over time, you want to make sure that you're giving it enough time. You're pushing through this plateau so you can actually get to that next stage, that next step. So a lot of ways to describe this, right? Shiny Object Syndrome sees like the most, how would I say this? The most. widely used one of these. There's a, the woman in the red dress is the one that Hermosi uses all the time, but, you know, insert your, you know, uh, distraction element of choice here. It could be anything, you know, but we all know what this feels like. And I'm guilty of this as well, by the way. So I'm not sitting here from some high horse and saying, oh, I never fall victim

to this because I fall in victim to this pretty much just as much as anybody, you know, else out there can do, which is we have a no idea. We put some level of effort into it. We stop doing it. It falls off completely. We get no level of, you know, success from it. And then we kind of lose interest and move on. Then we find a new thing. We do that for a little while. fall off and then, you know, repeat the cycle over and over again, as much as you, you know, as much as you might feel like that hits the hits it for you. But over time, you know, what I typically see with, let's say, SEO link building or SEO content creation is this sort of thing. Like there's moments where we're doing a lot of work and we're not getting a significant

improvement of result. And then we get up a little bit. And then we start to rank a little bit better in Google. We start to get more emails on the email list. We start to get more followers on social media. We start to see those direct bookings coming in and then things level off a little bit. So going back to the poll results that we had a few minutes ago, a lot of you weren't seeing a massive growth in direct bookings year every year. I just like, depending on where you actually are in your stage, that could be somewhat normal. It could be that you have to double or triple or quadruple your output in order to see the same results as you did before.

And that can be frustrating again at times. Like I think back to, you know, the SEO work that we've done for clients before ranking their blog content highly. Now that blog content has been chewed away a lot by these AI overviews on Google. I don't feel bad about the work we did. Like the work we did led to a lot of organic search traffic. It's a good thing overall that we did that work. But now Google is putting this AI overview in the search results and we've lost a lot

of our traffic. That's a bummer. There's also nothing we can do about it. We can't control Google. We can't control what they're doing with their algorithm and their search results page, but it lets us know that that's a plateau. Heck, that might even be a decline for a moment, and we still got to be creating that content so we can get to that next step. So I think the problem that most people have is that they're in this tactics trap, right? It's like, okay, well, yeah, Airbnb is changing. Let me go worry about the new 15.5% Airbnb fee that's working on right now. Or, you know, we did one email, and then we took a six-month break and then didn't do another email. Or we did one blog post, took a year break, and then didn't do

another one. That's what I think. So I think the key is that we want to be productive. We want to focus on something for a long period of time. We want to see the progress along the way, and we don't just want to be busy. I think it's often, you know, overused trope that people are just busy all the time. It's really where you're prioritizing. And is there things that you can stop doing, like focusing on, instead of focusing on four channels, focus on one, but then make that a lot deeper and not be on that hamster wheel. So I don't think it's about being lazy at all. I think it very much is about leverage. So the idea is that, you know, really what we often find is that a small percentage, of course, over and over again, we hear this, you know, this phraseology.

And it turns out to be true over and over again. And we have to learn the hard way, you know, again, time and time again, how this goes. But the minority of your efforts typically do lead to the most direct booking. So if I go back to my channel mix from earlier, it's these three channels are going to lead to the majority of the results for most of our clients when we look at them, not the fact that there's 85 different things that we can do. but maybe five or six channels in total that typically get the best results. So again, not about being lazy, it's about finding that leverage.

What are the things that I can do over the next, you know, three months, six months, nine months, year that are going to help me improve my results significantly? And what is the actual breakdown of the things that I'm doing on a regular basis,

those four hours per week that'll actually get me there? So, you know, the joke that we typically make on the heads and beds podcast feed is how many minutes did we get into the podcast before we mentioned AI? So today, 29 minutes,

we made it before I. I don't think we mentioned AI before that. And at least it wasn't in my slides intentionally. Maybe I did it one of my little, you know, rants there. But I think that, yes, AI is a unlock. It is a powerful productivity multiplier for things like content, things like building, you know, pages on your website, things like helping you brains from a strategy.

So I am all for and all, you know, open to the idea of how AI can help us. Now, is AI just the perfect solution where we just click a button, you know, and everything that's just kind of done for us and everything works perfectly? That I'm not, I'm not taking it that far yet. Like, I think there's still, we still need to supervise these AI, you know, tools and platforms and machines and requests that we're doing. Because without that, I think what you get is this term AI slop has gotten very popular. And I think you see that a lot with people that are just very clearly using, you know, AI tools and not really thinking about the way that they actually get presented to the person on the back end of that. So the email itself, you know, not having that exact design or style that matches your brain.

It's just a quick AI, you know, slop version of it. So I think the AI tools are great, but I think that they are the analogy that I'm doing now. nowadays for AI, it's like the board game shoots and ladders. In the board game shoots and ladders, you have these little moments where you come to a certain friction point or a stopping point, you hit the ladder, and then you go up a level. So AI can do something like that. It can do analysis for you. It can write a blog post outline for you. It can get you going, and it's like a little shortcut. It's like a little cheat code to get, you know, one level ahead of where you are today, using that four hours, but being able to outline 10 or 12 blog posts at a high

level of effectiveness and not one or two. So that's amazing. And I think we should embrace and use AI for tools like that. Now, does it give you the final, in shoots and ladders game, when you go up one ladder, it doesn't mean that you're going to win the game because you can certainly find shoots, which is, yeah, you get to a certain pace on the board and you go down a path and then you end up getting kicked back a level or two. So if you use really crappy AI content and then someone unsubscribes from your email newsletter list, that's a shoot. It's like, ah, we got this email out quicker. I'm glad we got it out. That's a good thing. But if the, if the content is not good, then we have a shoot moment happen where we actually get

negative results, negative progress from AI. So that's where I think all the, the the promises of AI don't always match the reality. I feel like a lot of people feel that way. And the way that I'm thinking about using AI in our business and with our clients is how do we find more ladders and try not to fall into any of these shoots or slides as we go along here. So I'm going to do a block here on freelancers as agencies, but Adam, I'll take a, I'll take a breath there because I feel like you have some thoughts on AI as well that are quite valuable.

Yeah, well, I agree with everything you said. I think that AI is definitely an unlock. And I think from my perspective on the marketing side of things, it's an unlock from content creation. And if I think about all of the pieces that we're talking about, search social email, I think they all feed together. Now, to Conrad's point, I think choose one of those paths and go into it and get good at it and make sure that you can build some traction in it and then start to think about the other ones. But if we start at the top and we think about SEO and content building, that feeds the rest of that flywheel. So AI gives you that ability. If you have an idea,

then you can go into AI and to Conrad's point, create an outline, have it write it for you. I you should be the one that finalized that and put your voice into it and make sure that you're sharing your perspective, but AI is going to give you that shortcut, whereas we were having to sit down and write all of this prior to this, this now gives you that speed that you can then start to put out content faster. And what I would suggest is if you, well, I'll take a step back, and I say this quite a bit, but I truly believe it. I think the superpower that we have as hosts and managers is we have local knowledge that guests and homeowners crave. The OTAs can never touch that. The problem is that we're not spending the time to share

that local knowledge. So I think that AI gives us the ability to take that information that's in our head and start to get it out. And the way you get it out is through content building. So it's the blog post that you're talking about the local events, the partners, where to see the best sunset, what is the best hiking trail? All of those things are people are things that our guests and our homeowners crave and we need to share with them. And when we share it with them, all of a sudden we have all of this information that we can then leverage across the other channels. So to Conrad's point, it's not necessarily all about SEO and driving traffic and driving reservations. Some of this is really more about creating a media company, thinking of ourselves as sort of this holistic media company that creates this content and then continues to distribute it in multiple ways.

So that great blog post that you shared about the right place to watch the right sunset, you can have a video, you can have a picture, you can then share that in social, which is very, value ad. You can then share that in your newsletter, which is value ad. So this is a flywheel that really starts to get going. I think that at the beginning, you need to start slow and be manageable because you don't want to overdo yourself so that you back out. But the other part of that is I think you want to have the right expectations from the beginning. I talk with managers quite a bit and they want to get direct bookings. But to Conrad's point, they put time into email or social or content building and they didn't see the results as fast as they want. So they backed out and now they're, again, dependent on the OTAs.

I think you've got to have this expectation that it's going to take some time and effort to build that process. But AI is a tool that will help unlock all of that and help you move faster and generate more content over time. And I'll say something controversial here, too, right, as the agency owner, which is that the agency is another unlock, and we have that in the third tile here as our freelancers or hiring independent people, but they're not, an agency alone will not make your company successful. You know, to be very clear, like, I don't care who's on the call if they've hired us

or they're considering hiring us, like, we alone by ourselves are not going to make your company successful. You are going to make your company successful or your leadership team will, and then you are using an agency or a freelancer to help augment to enhance to find certain expertise, to find certain skills that maybe you don't have on your team or that you don't want to hire a full-time person for, right? And I can give the best advice possible. I can give all the right ideas or things that I've seen hundreds of times now over the last 10 years, but if you're not going in there and executing upon it, if we have an idea for something, but then you don't go do it, it kind of doesn't matter, right? Like an idea on the shelf or, again,

a little bit of SEO is the same as doing no SEO. So I kind of feel that way a lot of times, too, which is like if you're the owner of the company or if you're the, you know, whatever title you might have, founder you might have, founder, COO, CO, whatever the case may be, it is your responsibility. It's your job to really understand marketing at a high level. This business, the best companies, get really good, get really savvy of marketing. Now, as the leader of these companies, always a marketing-led person, absolutely not. I see that regularly where that's not the case. But the companies that we work with that do the best over time, they invest in marketing. Even if it's not their core competency, even if it's not what they love doing, they know that

it's something that is actually going to drive the results thereafter, and they will invest time, effort, energy, money into at least learning marketing, understanding it, bringing people on their team, whether it be full-time team members, again, whether it's using these other options of outsourcing to freelancing, outsourcing to agencies, et cetera, and they invest into that marketing. And then they have some reasonable expectations and metrics on the back end to measure how well it's going. So I think what doesn't work well is like, well, the agency has got it or this freelancer has got it. I hired one person or I hired a team of people. I'm just going to leave them alone and not engage with them or not chat with them and hopefully they figured out that will

not work. I'll tell you right now that the only path that actually has success is the path where you're intimately involved in this. And again, it doesn't have to be a lot of time. It can be one hour. If you do one hour per week of focused marketing work working with a freelancer, working with an agency, you are ahead of 90% of other vacational companies out there. I promise you. It is not like that much time effort energy to be, you know, in that top 5%, that top 10%, that's for sure. Now the top 1% of a market, that can be hard, right? Because they might have been out for decades. that can be a bit of a challenge. But if you're doing that, you're ahead of a lot of other people who are too down in the weeds, too focus on other things, too distracted to kind of work on their

marketing. And you can tell. And the results they get, you know, are indicative of them. So I think a really good, you know, kind of phraseology as you've got going here is like, where am I on all these different channels? Where am I on SEO? Where am I on paid advertising if I'm doing it? Where am I on my email list? Where am I on my social media, et cetera, et cetera? And kind of just knowing your starting point, I think, is the way to kind of get going. So I have some different, you know, ideas or concepts in here. And these are direct booking revenue numbers, let's say, just as an example. But if you're level zero, I'm going to call you the spectator. You're just watching. You're not really doing anything. You're not taking action. You're just literally, you know,

looking through a computer screen, looking through binoculars, looking through glasses like I have. And you're just seeing, you know, people, other people essentially, you know, maybe work on their brand, work on their company. And you're just being a spectator. By the way, you know, you and I, you and I have talked about this a lot. I don't necessarily think that that's inherently the wrong thing if you know that's the game you're playing. where I often have a lot of challenge and struggle with people is people who are kind of at this level zero, level one type mindset, but they think they're doing a lot of things. They think this is a key part of their business, but they're not actually putting in the effort that they

sort of believe they are or that they tell themselves they're doing. And as a result, they feel like they're level two, level three, but they're really level zero or level one when it comes to understanding their marketing and what they're doing on a direct booking perspective. So I think it's okay to be 100% reliant on OTAs, as long as you fully accept that that is the path that you are going to sort of live and die by. That's the sword that you're going to fall on, or that's a sword that's going to, you know, bring you to success. So you can probably make your business a lot simpler. You can probably make your business a lot more straightforward to manage if you're very OTA heavy and you just sort of accept the cards you get dealt from the OTA

platforms. Now, to me, that sounds miserable. And I would certainly not recommend that to a friend or friendly member. So I have a hard time recommending to anyone listening in. But I think that is something that you see a lot, which is people that are spectators, but sort of have this idea that they're doing other things. Now, I think that level one is where you see a lot of these smaller managers get to, which is like, let's call them a contender. You know, this kind of bring you some themes in from the book, and we'll talk about the book here in a few minutes.

But let's say you've got a few hundred thousand dollars a year of direct revenue coming in, direct booking revenue coming in. So maybe you've got a website set up. Maybe you've got the ability to book on that website. So maybe it's using one of your PMS platform template sites. Maybe you invest it in like a smaller or custom website, that sort of thing. You know, you've got some level of consistency there. Maybe you're doing one channel some of the times.

You're doing emails occasionally, every other month you're doing Facebook content occasionally maybe once or twice a week something like that but it's like hey I want to have time I'll do some marketing otherwise I'm just going to focus on other things again like does I get you out of the gates does I get you somewhere yes but like you probably want to be doing a lot more level two level three let's call these the champion and the expert I think the champion is that person who is getting solid results they know pretty predictably kind of where they're coming from so depending on the size of the company you could be anywhere from you know a few hundred thousand per year in direct bookings all the way up to one two three four five

million, it just really depends on exactly the size of your company, how many units you have. But let's say you're kind of in that 10 to 30 percent direct booking zone. That's where I think you have some level of consistency. Again, maybe you have a small team, could be in-house, could be freelancers, could be an agency that you've hired, any of those levels. But I think this is kind of where you see a lot of that, you know, 50 unit and up companies, generally speaking. And that's where you see a lot of these like one and a half to three and a half to four

and a half million dollar revenue companies, is they're able to kind of scrape by, get some direct bookings, do okay. But maybe they're not, you know, overly investing in it. they're kind of putting in the bare minimum, but it's enough to kind of get them some level of direct bookings coming in on that side of things. There was a key data dashboard report

that came on some time ago and it basically indicated that your typical property manager in their data set is getting about that 20%, 22, 23% direct booking number. What I find interesting about that is that when I go look at our own data,

when I see what's happening for most vacation rental managers on that side of things, I almost find again this like uneven distribution of how people get direct booking. So I think you've got a lot of people that are getting very few direct bookings, like far less than 5% are not doing much. They don't even have a website in some cases. And then you see these experts, these people that are getting

50, 60, 70% direct bookings. And then that averages out to be 25%. But there's often not a lot of people that are in that 25% bucket, as you might think. It's like the experts have to figure it figured out. They've got it scaled up. They know what they're doing. The beginners are down here. And it almost becomes a little bit of a haves and haves-nots type scenario. So I think if you're level two, you want to be there as little as possible and you want to figure out how I get to level three. How do I get to be an expert so that I'm very predictable with the direct bookings that I'm getting? Like marketing is a well-oiled machine that I'm having to, you know, do some maintenance on and change from time to time, but it's not something that I'm changing every single week or

every single month, that sort of thing. And ultimately, it's kind of like, how do I get to that top level of feeling very confident in my ability to get direct bookings? And I mean, the truth is that the task that get you from level zero to one are very different from the levels that get you from two to three. So obviously with a diverse, you know, group of people here on the call today, on the webinar today, you know, we're watching later. You're going to see different things that you might want to work on or focus on. So I think this level zero to one is kind of your foundational. So this is like, all right, at least let's make sure that we've got the right pieces in place. So going back to kind of our four hour, you know, concept here, if you have a

website, that is like the foundation of building a house is making sure that we've got the concrete there or however you build, I don't even know how to build houses, to be honest. The wrong person asked about that. But you've got that, at least when they built my house, they put down this concrete pad and then they built the house on top of it. I would imagine if they brought in the framing people before the concrete pad was built, they would just turn around and go home because they're like, well, we can't frame this house until the actual concrete pad is here, right? So I think this is where you think of your website, and this is where you think of your kind of, I just kind of refer to it as marketing infrastructure.

So it's like, we got to have the PMS, we've got to have the website, it's got to be online bookable, we've got to have some level of branding, we've got to have some level of a name, we've got to have a domain that is actually accessible. People can find us. We've got to have just the basic pages set up. I'm not even saying doing marketing on Instagram and Facebook and stuff like that at this stage. I'm saying that you better have your Facebook and Instagram page claimed at this point, that you own the page, you have access to it. At least there's a logo there in a picture.

Again, we don't even have to have the conversation yet of actually doing anything on those channels. But I just want to make sure you have your foundation in place. If you're kind of at this level zero, level one type stage, you've got to go through all those things and make sure they're solid. You'll be surprised, too, that foundations are not all or nothing. You know, what I do find sometimes we're quite regularly with certain clients that we begin to work with is that maybe their website's actually in pretty good shape. But it's like, oh, you've been no time on like your branding efforts at all. Like, we have no idea who our actual target guests are. We have no idea how our tracking is set up on the website.

It looks pretty. Like, it looks nice. But when it comes to kind of getting through these other elements of the foundation, we find some little cracks in the foundation that we can film. So if that's you, don't worry. Like, that's not uncommon. I mean, I had an audit that I did a little while ago for a property manager that was doing $5 million per year in total bookings.

I think about half of them were direct bookings. And they had no tracking in their Google ads. So complete head scratcher. You know, blew my mind that that was the case. But they were spending, you know, several thousand dollars per month on Google ads without any sort of sense or any sort of, you know, exact data set on the number of people that were coming in and making a booking direct from their Google ads. They just know, hey, we're spending money on Google ads, and then we're getting some level of people back in the door

there. So that's surprising, but that's not necessarily completely uncommon. So if there's things, something that you miss the foundation, don't feel bad, just fix it, and then move on the next thing. You know, in your four-hour workweek style, you know, marketing block that you have to work on, fix what you can fix, fix it. And then once you're on the next stage, you're on the next stage. So, yeah, again, this is kind of where I say, like, the website, this is your store. that if you were going to open a retail store and you want the customers to come in it, certainly you'd have the door unlocked, certainly you'd tell people when it's open, certainly you'd have the ability to take money from a customer if they were to walk in the store.

The direct booking site's no different. So I think that's kind of your base thing here. Your email list, I think email always becomes your single most valuable future asset, right? So it's like when your email list is small, I get it. You get nothing out of your email list when it's a few hundred people. Maybe you're lucky you get a booking or two or something like that. But I think if you start the email list now, it's kind of like that classic. You know, the best time with planted trees 10 years ago, the second best time is today.

That's email to a T. Because if you focus on growing your list early on, and then you're like, yeah, we've been doing this for a few years. I mean, sending out some emails. I don't get a lot of bookings from email, but these people are used to hearing from me. When you start to ramp up your efforts, it's going to work so much better if you just have some kind of base to come from. Instead of what we see, unfortunately a lot, is, oh, we're seven years into our company. We've never sent an email. We collected all these emails.

We did nothing with them. Gosh, don't do that if you can help it. Like, get started on the small, knowing full well that it's not going to be a massive growth driver, but you're going to have that leverage down the road because email is one of those things that scales incredibly efficiently. So as your email list gets bigger, it takes you no more time to send out the email.

We send an email out to one of our clients that has a list of 200,000 people on it. Candidly, it takes no more time for us to do that email than it does to a list of people that are past guests. But the leverage, the value that the property miniature gets that has 200,000 people in the email list is obviously, I can't even do that math in my head, what, 10,000 times, a thousand times more impactful to their business

because every time they send an email, out to that list of 200,000 people, they're getting 20, 30, 40, 50 direct bookings every single time. So it's like, we just know if we click a few buttons and they use MailChimp, click a few buttons in MailChimp, send out the right offer to their past guest list.

We're going to get 50 bookings just like that. Now, this is a large property manager. 50 bookings to them is kind of like a good morning, you know, that they're quite big, but the point remains of like those high leverage task on things like email grow and compound over time. SEO-wise, I think you want to make sure you're visible in Google. People can find you based on your brand name alone.

Don't worry about generic terms at this stage. And you at least want to have make sure that when people search your brand, you come up both organically and in paid search. So I think that's kind of your first thing. Own your name. Get some results here on level, kind of that level zero, level one type arrangement there. Level two building systems. This is where I think once you're getting to that, hey, we're getting a few hundred thousand dollars,

you know, on an annualized basis, maybe in terms of direct bookings. What's working well? Like, what's a system that I can build that will put out a blog post every single week, that will put out a new Instagram reel, you know, twice a week or once a week, depending on what your time and budget allows. In a way, I don't care that much about the output. Like, I want the output to be great. obviously. But if someone says, hey, only have time to do outlining blog posts once every other week,

I'm going to be able to do two and maybe two get published on a monthly basis. If they're awesome, you will make progress. Believe me, you will make some level of progress if you do that. Now, I think that your goal at this stage is that can I then start to bring in these other people? Can I start to come back here and go back a few steps here? Can I start to bring in freelancers and agencies maybe help automate some of my, you know, kind of like execution? I know what I want to do at this stage. I want to make sure that I'm getting to that next play. So that's something you want to consider, you know, as you get a little bit further along here. But I think that's what you're building. You're building a system. And then how you design the system

in terms of checks and balances, the people that you hire, the instruction, the feedback that you give them, that's your four hours, is working on those ideas. And then you're sort of turning the wheel over to them to actually run the car, right? It's your job to design the car and make sure it can get from point A to point B. It's your job to make sure that, hey, we have a system to get reels out on a weekly basis. It's your job to make sure, hey, we have a system to make sure that when homes are photographed, we get them into our Facebook ad set as soon as possible, but then you're not sitting there doing all those things. At this point, you can probably start to hire someone out, but you're building the system that people are going to run,

that people are actually going to execute upon. So there's your classic, you know, for our work week callback, you know, which is build it once and then it works for you. It says here forever. The truth is it's going to work for you until it breaks, and then you've got to go fix it. But that's marketing in general, right? Is that over time you're going to get better there. You know, so email automation, SEO, we mentioned that. I think it's, I'd rather go to this slide because this is more indicative of what I want to talk about. Once the website's kind of there, now you need to understand better, where's the traffic coming from? How is my tracking indicating what's going to work best, which channels are working best for me? You may find, going back to my earlier

slide, between search social and email, you may find you do much better on social media. And so you should be doubling down, tripling down on those types of advertisements, that type of content, if that works better for you. If you've found more success with SEO, if you found more success working on building on new landing pages for your market, because you have very unique inventory, double down on that. So this isn't always going to be the same playbook for every single manager out there. Obviously, there's a variety of people here on the call, you know, with all different markets and inventory counts and, you know, style of, you know, marketing that may be doing.

But I think once you have some tracking in place, you can start to look back once you've got 20, 30, 40, 50 direct bookings happening on a regular basis. And you could say, what are some commonalities between these things? What can I duplicate? What can I do more of and get more results there? I think with email or just outbound messaging in general, it's just once you get to this next stage, it's being consistent. So instead of that person who's sending the email and then it's a six-month delay,

then they send an email again. Again, that kind of gets you out of stage zero into stage one. But the person that's consistently saying, I'm going to send an email, every single, the first Tuesday of every month, and it's going to come out of 1 p.m. That person will get significantly better results over time because their guests actually becomes somewhat trained to seeing marketing messages from them. Same thing with things like retargeting. We have clients where we run retargeting ads for all the people that have been on their

website or their past guest list. And we have Facebook ad carousels where it says, new to the program. That's one of the ads that's that we run for this client. And it's so funny how every like month or so we're typically adding in new homes to this Facebook ads carousel and people will comment like, oh, I see this out all the time. And it's cool. You guys are always adding new homes. I click through and I look at them.

Now, is that someone that's going to book today or tomorrow? Probably not, to be honest with you. Like, someone who's just kind of casually looking at and seeing the ad is not always the person who's going to go and make that conversion right away. People who open emails are often not going and booking right away when they click on that email. They're often what they're doing is putting it in their knowledge bank,

putting it in their memory bank. And then when they think, who am I going to stay with when I go to this destination, they're thinking of you. And that's ultimately where you want to get to from a marketing perspective, right? The more directs someone's knowledge or someone's kind of thought processes between who do I book with, oh, I'm going to book with this company, the better off you are over time.

The trouble is that that is not measurable. Like, there's no metric that I could show you in a dashboard. There's no number I could put in a spreadsheet that would indicate that you are the first person that they think of when they go and do their, you know, their thought process of where I'm going to go stay in the Outer Banks this year if I was going to go visit Adam, right? That's the hard part is that it shows up in the actual results over time because you see significantly better email open rates. You see a lot of direct traffic.

When I say direct traffic, I don't just mean people going to your website in general. I mean them typing specifically your domain in and then hitting enter and going to your website. Branded traffic is another good to indicate. at this stage. People are not just looking for, you know, outer banks and having to find my properties or not looking for where I'm based in the North Myrtle Beach area and finding my properties. There's some level of, you know, marketing and one might argue chance to that, but they're searching specifically for, you know, the fictional company that I always do as an example as Conrad's School Cabin Rentals. That's the kind of search that converts so much better than any

other generic search because they want me specifically. And that's where these marketing things start to build on top of each other. So I mentioned this earlier on the SEO side. So we kind of already hit this, but build content, or create content, build links, and then track the most profitable non-brand ads and spend more. Like, that's kind of your SEO, PPC one-hour dashboard, is how can I make more blog content, how can I put more stuff out there about why we're experts, why we're local, what we do so well, what can I do in the link building side to make sure that more people reference my website, do I have budget at this point where I can go pay for links, or can I hire a link building

specialist to build more links to my website so people can find me. Also, there's a lot of data indicate that that's pretty valuable for these LOM search tools, by the way, if you're into that as well. And then, yeah, what are my most profitable non-brain campaigns and how can I spend more? So, Adam, I feel like this is where we see a lot of people, right? They're kind of in this level two. Maybe this is that 50, 40 unit company like we talked about earlier. They're getting some of that initial success. And in your thoughts here before I kind of go to that next tab on kind of these tactics or these ideas. Just one quick addition. And you've touched on a number of times, but I think this holistic approach is really what you want to get to eventually. Understood, you got to start somewhere. And maybe it's one channel. And then you can add additional. layers. But the reason there's value there, to Conrad's point, the people that you get in front of, the guests that are going to book your homes are not necessarily going to see one ad, one email, one blog post, and then go and click that link and go over to your website. You want to stay in front of them multiple different times and multiple different channels so that they can start to see you and start to recognize your brand and your message and your voice. That's how you

stick in your head so that when they're ready to book, that's when they seek you and find your website. As a way to think about exactly what Adam just described so well. there. It's like, how do I become well known to the people that are likely to book with me? Like, if you've got that, you've got to figure it out, right? Like, the channels are somewhat agnostic. In theory, you could do that well on Facebook or Instagram to some degree, depending on your audience, their demographics, their psychographics, both those can work well. And I think what people seem to always want when we chat with them for the first time is, what's the one thing I can do? And it's like, as much as I wish I could say that, it doesn't really work that way very

often. Like, what usually happens for most people is that it's a combination of things over time that they get really good at that lead to those kind of levels of success. So, you know, that's kind of the way I think about it. We touched on a homeowner earlier. I think when you're at this level two page, that's where you want to have a dedicated homeowner page. You want that to have be rich with information about what you offer. You want that to have case studies. You want that to have video testimonials. That's the one thing I see missed a lot nowadays is people have a homeowner page. And unfortunately, they just become very me too. Okay, well, we do revenue management. Well, so does everybody else in the market. They all say they do revenue management. That's not a new

concept. They say we're local. Okay, well, there's a half dozen local companies. Or depending on the market, there's two dozen local companies. So I think standing out on the homeowner side is really hard. So the best way is not you claiming that you're good. The best way in a homeowner page to stand out is get other people to say you're good. So Adam trusts his, you know, five-beder oceanfront house to me. He's going to let me rent his house out. I'm a property manager. I want Adam on video saying, man, I was really unsure if I was going to rent this cabin out or not, this property out or not. I then chose to work with Conrad's company. He's done a great job. It's amazing. We love working with him. He makes it stress-free. I love it. That will get so much

more effectiveness on the homeowner side than you saying over and over again, how great you are. because they see the same thing on every single piece of material they see, whether it's a landing page, whether it's a postcard, whether it's a big company or national company, whether it's a small local company. They all say the same thing. But no one else has your case studies. No one else has your story of your homeowner that you've worked with with with video or put in some kind of testimonial format and say, I worked with this company. I was worried. I was nervous. I wasn't sure I was going to go. And then they did a great. I kind of touched on this earlier. But again, I think this is that level two, level three, where you can expand beyond just the email. Email's great. Don't get me wrong. I love it. As a market. marketing tactic and channel. It fits very nicely into this kind of four-hour idea that we've hit on so far over the last 40 minutes or so. But outbound could be one-to-one messages. It could be outbound phone calls. It could be outbound SMS. But the idea is I've got this roster of past customers that have stayed with me before past guests. How can I reach out to them in diverse ways so that I get their attention? This was actually a topic of a recent offsite that I did a few weeks ago for a client in Denver. And they were talking about trying to

set up a really complex system for people that were coming for a specific event. I think it was like a triathlon or something to that effect. And how do we get them to book again for next year? So they're departing their stay in 2025. How do I get them to come and book again for 2026 in the same dates? And I was kind of like raising my hand there as the marketing guy in the room. And I'm like, can we just call them and ask them if they're coming in? And if they want to go ahead and reserve the stays, like, why are we overcomplicating this with a lot of, you know, fancy automation and trying to get the PMS that talk to the email system and stuff like that. I'm like, unless we have no ability to make, you know, let's say 12 or 15 phone calls,

that was kind of the amount of reservations that we're talking about here. Why not make that phone call the day before departure and say, hey, Adam, I know you're here for the triathlon up in, you know, wherever, up in Virginia. Just curious, you guys are going to do it again for next year. If so, they just gave us the dates for next year. I can go ahead and block those dates for you. You know, if you give me 10% down as a deposit, I'll collect the other 50% 90 days before. Whatever your policy is, right? I don't really care what your policy is. But that's the kind of thing that outbound level two, those are the companies who are saying, let me not even give Airbnb or Verbo a chance to get this guest again to book on their platform. Let me just get

them secured right now. Let me get them locked in right now. Let me make it easy on them. Let me provide a service, you know, that they actually care about, and then they got their date secured. Maybe even they want the same property. Oh, yeah, I can secure that same property for you. No problem. You know, like that's, that's not an issue for us. Oh, your friends coming next year? Well, I can give you this other property. It's, it has two more bedrooms. It's great, that sort of thing. That can happen a lot in outbound context. So the clients we work with, they do a lot of outbound just always are better, direct booking. It's just very simple. You know, like if they get inbound leads, they're responding better. They have a reservation team or something to that effect.

That's able to go out back to those people through phone, through one-to-one email, through a text, etc. And they just get better results. So I think this level two, level three is where outbound starts to make a lot of sense. I think SEO PPC-wise is where you're checking your rankings. Where are we growing? Where are we maybe to some degree hitting a wall? Like we rank number one when people are searching for this community building. Okay, we probably don't have to worry about that too much. Let's keep an eye on it. But we can then take that four hours a week and start to focus on another pages or focus in other areas. Whatever is working well, let's do more of it. If we've done 10 articles on the best things to do, we probably don't

need to keep doing that as much if those are not doing as well. Let's double down a restaurant content. Let's do that for a while. Let's repurpose that into reels and other types of content like Adam said a few minutes ago. And then, yeah, I think level three is the machine, right? That's not just a system or one particular thread from point into point B or one SOP or one marketing process. It's essentially you are the director. You know, and I think the clients that we work with that are getting, you know, millions of dollars of direct bookings on an annual basis. They're hiring us to work on one specific skill or one specific thing that we have developed in the buildup side of things. And then they are a director. They're telling us at a high level what's going on in the

company, what's changing, what's happening. And then obviously they're bringing that down to the tactical level of what we actually have to do. So this is where you're doing, you know, a high level goal strategy session. This is where you might be doing things like rocks, which is very common in the EOS system. That's quite popular. A lot of people might say, okay, this rock the one we're going to accomplish by this quarter is we want to have four new homeowner testimonials. So we need to be doing one every few weeks to make sure we have them. That's where you're not just doing basic SEO techniques and ranking for low volume keywords. We want to rank for you know the best travel blogs that cover our destination we want to get covered there and that's where we

want to really use you know all these fancy bidding strategies from google to be honest you're kind of using those a little bit early on but that's where you can do testing that's where you could spend a hundred dollars a day on one campaign strategy and then a hundred dollars a day on another campaign strategy and do some comparison to see how well those things are going so i think if our journey starts like this you're you identify where you're at you go between level zero and one you're getting the core assets the foundation built then you're building the systems that kind of start to work without you a little bit, and then you're eventually delegating strategizing and directing, you know, other people to kind of work with you. And that's how you get the success that you want. So I think

it's eliminate what's not working, focus on one channel at a time, just get rid of a lot of the distractions or things that you're trying to do. Know that you're putting something on the shelf, maybe not forever, but for right now. You're not focused on it. And then dedicate your time to getting that mile deep and not getting an inch deep with that particular channel. And I promise you could do that for next period of time. You'll see results. So I know we're coming up against the time wise. Here is my offer for today. So two things I can do for people. listening who are actually still here live. If you do this later on, I will not be able to give you the Amazon gift cards. This is only for the people that are here live right now.

Scan the QR code on the screen. Enter in your email address on the newsletter page that comes up when you scan this QR code on the screen. If you enter, I'm recording this, you know, basically we're wrapping up here 2 p.m. or so Wednesday, November 12th. So look at everyone who signs up between, let's say, 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. So of the next hour or so, I'll look at everyone that signs up, and I'm going to pick one random person that signs up on the newsletter, and I'm going to give them a $100 Amazon gift card. So look at your inbox. I'll sign that out tomorrow. But scan this QR code, get the list. And again, for the next hour or so, I'll look at all the signups that we get over the next hour or so. And then I'll reach back

out to one person and give them a $100 Amazon gift card. For those that don't win the gift card, obviously there's only one winner for the gift card, I would love to give you a copy of my book, mastering vocational marketing. So if you want that, sign up here and then reply to that email, you'll get like an auto responder, reply to that email and say, I would like a copy of the book. It'll come right back to my inbox, Conrad to buildup buckings.com. And if I can't give you the $100 gift card, I can give you the book. And that'll be applicable no matter what, whether you're looking at this, a day later, a month later, or six months later, whatever the case may be. So, Adam, I know we're close up against the timeways.

Any other parting thoughts before we put a bow on this one? I'll leave this up on the screen until we close. Just a couple of quick thoughts. So one, I think keep it simple and keep it consistent. So figure out what you can do on a regular basis and keep that simple. And then to Conrad's point about understanding what's working, focus on effective more than efficient. Find out what's working and then double down on that. Yeah, I love it.

So I'll leave this up here for just one more minute, you know, so people can go ahead and scan it. again, you have about the next hour, but I would do it right now, you know, because when I close this out, you're not going to be able to get to the QR code. But go ahead and enter. If you're new to the email list, even if you're new or if you've been on the email list before, don't worry, I'll get a little alert in my system. I'm going to pick one person tomorrow. I'm going to email that person, and I'm going to give them a $100 Amazon gift cards because you showed up live. And I think anyone showing up live is, thank you, first of all, for doing that, because you didn't have to. I'm sure you're super busy. I knew of a thousand things you need to do today, I'm

sure. So we appreciate you showing up live. I want to give you a small token of my gratitude, at least to one person. And yeah, I like that you took action. So that's fantastic. If you're watching the recording later on, don't worry. Still scan the QR code. Get in the list. You won't win the $100 gift card.

Sorry, lesson learned. Show up to our live webinars next time and you have a chance to win it. But if you want, I'm happy to give you copy of the book. Reply to the email that you get or just email me, Conrad at buildupbookings. Put like free book in there. And I could send you a physical copy of my book. If you're based in the U.S., if you're based elsewhere in the world, you're not in the U.S., I'll send you a PDF copy.

So at least you can get the same information. I just haven't figured out how to get a book in a reasonable cost from, you know, somewhere in my office over to wherever you might be in the world. So that's all I got. If you have any questions, at the end of this webinar, you will get a link to the getting started page. If you go to buildup bookings.com, click book a free call. You might be chatting with Adam. We might be chatting with Kathy and our team on the sales side, but you'll be able to chat with us and we could potentially help you with your marketing. But that's it.

We're at time. Thank you so much. We appreciate you for, you know, again, hopping on here and doing that kind of thing. If you have any questions, definitely let us know. And we look forward to seeing one other webinar in the future. Thanks so much. Have an awesome day. Thank you.