Heads In Beds Show - How Much Should You Pay Attention To Your Vacation Rental Competition?

Episode Date: May 22, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about how much (or how little) you actually should be paying attention to your competition... including what techniques you can use to 'spy' into their overall marketing. 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 Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right, Paul Manzizi what's going on well you know it's a it's a wonderful day i i don't know we've we've been having a little bit of probably too much fun a little pre-recording and now we're gonna be a little shorter on time today but just it feels like a spring day today i i don't know what that feels like i don't know how i can better describe it but it's a minnesota spring day today i i don't know what that feels like i don't know how i can better describe it but it's a minnesota spring day today how are you doing sir well your family has like a farming

background right like is this do you go do like um starters at this point can you go like get all your little six-pack cells and start to get stuff in there or did you already do that what's your take on that that it is we will we'll get the garden going here probably in the next couple of weeks. We've had a lot of rain up here. This is usually the time of year, so my dad sold seed, and this was the time of year where the farmers really wanted the corn and the soybeans on their farms, in their sheds, ready to go. This was always a nervous time because it's in the hands of the weather gods at that point.

And yeah, it's I do. I remember some some different times. And after my season, my conception of seasonality has changed drastically from the planting season to harvest season to high season, the shoulder season and low season. Well, yeah, we all have seasons in our life. We all have these different things that we think about. So we thought we'd update a bit of a previous, I think we did a podcast before kind of on all the tools that we use, right? And it was, I think we listed a bunch of tools. Hey, use this, use this, use this. That was a while ago. We got some more listeners now. So we thought we'd take a little bit of a different direction. We'll mention maybe a handful of tools as we go along here,

but it was more about the idea of competition. So before we hit record, we were brainstorming podcast topic ideas as Paul and I tend to do. We saw a post from someone who was kind of alluding to the fact or hinting at the fact that because there is competition and in some markets, a ton of competition, it means that there's no more room for anybody else that, you know, nope. You know, Google might have a little sign at the bottom of the search results that says, sorry, it's full. And there's no action potentially meaningful, meaningfully improve your search results. Or there is, let's say, a Facebook page in your market, in your destination that has 100,000 followers. Therefore, nope, sorry, no more Facebook followers exist.

Of course, this is all tongue in cheek. tongue in cheek. And my belief is that that is a nonsense claim to imply that because there's competition, that there's not room for you to go in and do a great job, nor should that be your only decision criteria in deciding to make forward progress on doing direct bookings or on generating your own leads or whatever the case may be. So the topic today, if it makes any sense at all, is for us to talk a little bit about research, because we do research somewhat regularly on our side of things on the guest side. I'm sure you do in the owner side as well entertaining understanding the landscape understanding who's out there what are they doing what are they doing well what could they be doing better and kind of trying to give the

vacation manager listening hopefully a little bit of insight into understanding how competitive their market is and not hopefully getting letting them get too down on themselves if they are in fact in a competitive market we can mention some specific examples as we go along here but instead give them some tools to say, my journey here to the top might be a little bit longer, but what are some little checkpoints along the way maybe that I could find myself in on the guest marketing side and on the homeowner marketing side that I know my business is growing in a healthy way? So we don't have a super detailed outline, so we're going to be winging it a little bit here, Paul, but I think it'll be fun. What's kind of your idea? What's

kind of like your general philosophy on competition? Are you someone who tends to worry more about competition when you enter a market or do you see opportunity and you don't worry as much about competition? Yeah, I think having been in so many different markets, I don't think there's something like it probably scares me when I see a brand that I know. I mean, I've had the opportunity to work with a lot of different brands and to see and to compete with a lot of different brands. And when there's someone where you've competed consistently over time with, yeah, that's probably not something I'd love to see. But I also like that challenge of, okay, let's go. Let's beat one of the best in the space here. So yeah, competition is, I think, maybe having a long memory is a little

better there. You do, you kind of get to see the trends over time and remember how some of the churches have changed over time to see who's gone here, who's gone here, who is under Vacasa, who is no longer in an area. I think kind of having that, that background and knowledge is good and it helps. Initially, I rely on a lot of tribal knowledge of, of who we, who I've worked with previously, who's in an area that, you know, we, we, I know specific PMSs are in an area or specific agencies are in an area and kind of strengths and weakness, weaknesses there. So I, yeah, I think that's, that's maybe just experience over time there, but I, when you, I know you, you primarily have the exclusivity in a specific

market, you know, how do you attack that maybe differently than maybe having multiple people who are advertising in similar markets there? Well, I'll go back to these three buckets that we've talked about before. There's a search bucket, which has organic and paid. There's a social bucket that has organic and paid. And then there's email marketing. And I think that search in particular, certainly organic is an example where there is a zero sum game of traffic. rentals. I just did a search actually for a client that we worked with for some time, who's in a large major city, but not really one where there's lots of vacation rental searches. And I was trying to see like, hey, where do they end up, you know, all things told, because they started from like zero from an SEO perspective. And they currently rank number one when you do a search for like area name plus vacation rentals, even though they actually haven't been doing SEO for a few months now at this point, which does prove that SEO does have

this long lasting effect. Sometimes Even if you stop the efforts, you may actually still stick there for a while. It's not like, you know, your rankings go away overnight if you stop working with an agency, by the way. I've never said that. There's some agencies that do that really bother me, by the way.

But my general take on it is that some of these things are zero-sum games. So if we rank number one in Google for a given keyword, no one else can rank number one, including Airbnb, including VRBO, and including local competition. So the whole exclusivity piece that we've always had, I think kind of folded into that process was important because I don't see how you can ethically or logically try to rank website number one and website number two without at some point

making the decision of who do I put more effort into or who deserves to rank number one or number two in this environment. Now we have some areas that we work on where we have multiple clients, but only with full knowledge of like, hey, here's where you're at, here's where they're at. There may be a little overlap, but everyone's on the same page as far as we have those clients in the same market.

And there's typically a lot of traffic out there. We may kind of occasionally bump into each other, but hopefully we're not colliding or it wouldn't make sense for us to work in that market. So that's kind of, excuse me, my read on that, which is that, yeah, it's hard on the SEO side, PPC is a little bit more nuanced of a conversation because in theory, having two clients that are going after the same keyword might actually be slightly beneficial. We could like, if we wanted to, not that we're price fixing, um, you know,

Mr. Antitrust person is listening, but in theory, like we get set similar bids. Um, there's typically almost always, I can really count on very few examples myself personally, where we're exhausting our budget, uh, or sorry, we exhausted the clicks every day before we exhaust our budget. So on the guest side of things, it's very rare that like we have a hundred dollar a day budget on a campaign and we're not spending up into that limit, you know, every day. And there's more clicks out there on the paid search side of things. So that's a little bit more of a nuanced question.

I could see easily how if there's 50 different advertisers bidding on, you know, destinedin in Florida vacation rentals, if you're managing two of them, I don't think that's some egregious, you know, misstep from like an ethical or like marketing performance standpoint. In fact, you'll probably learn something from one account that you can apply to the other that'll probably make your performance for both accounts better in some degree. So I'm a little more, you know, it depends on that, which I know is like a terrible answer, but that's kind of my take on it. With social, again, some benefits there. You're typically marketing mostly to your own audience or interest-based audiences who might see the same ads from lots of other people.

So if you're searching for a vacation rental on Facebook, you probably are getting put into some of these interest groups that we are targeting anyways. And then we're trying to maybe limit it by geography or target based on other interests you might have. So, you know, you're only going to book one. I think that's one of those equations where the booking is only going to go in one direction, but using some of the audience information in theory from multiple areas may be a little bit helpful. And I think email is probably the most independent thing that you could do from a marketing standpoint when researching either competition or when

thinking about like, how should I approach email? Because your list is your list, right? And you're not going to share that list with another business, nor should you, even if that person agreed, because they're just going to opt out. If they're used to getting emails from Paul's cool chalets, and then they get an email from Conrad's cool cabin company, they're probably just going to unsubscribe anyways, and not really be interested in the offer anyways. So I think email is one of those things where you could have multiple people doing the same email-ish design and email copy and marketing out to a list, and you're probably in perfectly good shape. So I stand somewhere in the middle, going back to the competition question. It's nice to kind of know what arena you're walking into with respect to how competitive it is. But I also

don't assume that just because a website ranks well, that they're doing SEO perfectly. I think I've talked about this before when we've done some of our technical SEO conversations, where if you go put any top ranking site into Google, you're going to find little things that aren't perfect. So the goal isn't perfection. Otherwise every site that's perfect would rank number one, which is obviously impossible because only one site ranks number one. It's more about making progress on like the big boulders of SEO, which are content and links, and then trying to optimize the on-page SEO to kind of take advantage of that. Just to give a very specific example, then I'll kick it back your way. We started working with a client that was very small several years ago, you know,

10 listings, maybe the biggest client in their market or the biggest person in that market, excuse me, had maybe 300 listings. And you could tell though, they were like chipping away. Like they were every week, they were like getting one more, getting one more, getting one more, that sort of thing. And now they're actually bigger than the old company because they've grown so much in the old company. I shrunk and they ranked number one in Google ahead of this other legacy competitor, let's say. And the joke that I made with my client is they at one point listed a marketing role, meaning the competitor. And I sent a screenshot to my client and I said, hey, now they're going to take marketing seriously after they've already lost maybe 50, 60 homes from their program into your program, which they've done a good job and they've kept those owners really happy.

So I think from a competition standpoint on paper, it would have been foolish. Why would I go in and I have 10 units, this guy has 330. It wouldn't make a lot of sense for me to go in here and try to compete with them until you realize that they're kind of resting on their laurels. They're not doing much. They weren't doing any content creation. They weren't really active on social, maybe every once in a while. They weren't sending emails consistently to their list. And so on paper, you go in there and do those things. You actually get to the top pretty quickly from an SEO perspective or from an overall marketing awareness perspective, because you've got someone who's kind of on cruise control and the speedometer is at 20, you know? So I don't know. I don't know what your perspective is on this and the homeowner side. I know there's definitely challenges to

getting those initial contracts and that's maybe where the competition can be really stiff on the homeowner side, but on the guest side, it's like there's progress that can be made. And it's I think it's silly to over index on competition. I mean, I think you just thinking about the surf page just because someone is at number one, you don't know exactly. I mean, you can you can look at the technical. You can look at anything behind the scenes, run it through every report in the world. But it is you don't know the work that actually is going to take to move the needle. I mean, it might not take, it might be more low hanging fruit than, than you would anticipate or expect there. I continue to think that as we see more of that

generative search experience that we've talked about, like there's going to be an aspect of that where reviews are going to be really important to local SEO and we is already, but I think that's going to be one of those things where, again, that's something technically we can do outside of here. Let's send out a review for you and hopefully you'll give us five stars. And if you don't, well, now Google's going to say, you know, you're, you're not that great a business. What is that secret sauce? We don't know that secret sauce. If we did again, everybody be ranking number one, but I would say if you're on the second or third page of Google or Bing, even for that matter, don't think that it takes a lot of work to move up to the number one position.

It may take a lot of upfront work, but over time, you may see you be on the first page in a month or two months or three months. For some some of these maybe lower competition keywords rest the goal on top one top three even though that's important certainly drives the most engagement drives the most traffic and as google takes up more of the serp themselves might be the only place we actually see on the first page with the air quotes there so um but again if you don't put the work if you don't take the first steps of putting that work in, if you just relegate yourself to, oh, I'm going to just be here, I'll pay for the traffic or I'll use social or I'll use these other great channels. But I would invest a little, that little bit upfront or that large amount upfront just to start to build what you, I think your example on LinkedIn is still one of the best visuals of,

hey, it takes time. And it's not a day over day. It's not a week over week evaluation. It's a quarter over quarter, year over year. Yeah, I like posting that. By the way, it didn't look great. It was just literally a screenshot from like an internal tracking thing

that Kat on my team uses. So it didn't look cool, but I was like, this is too cool not to share because she's been tracking for that long. And for what Paul's referencing, I can put a link at the show notes maybe for people to check out. But if you go to my LinkedIn, scroll back, there's a screenshot basically of us tracking blog content traffic for a client. And they basically start at 12 clicks a quarter. So it's like nothing. And it's like one click every three days or something like that. It's horrible. But that's where they started. They started with basically no traffic, no content on the blog, you know, or maybe one or two blog posts, nothing meaningful. And now they're going to do,

I assume they'll do maybe 40,000 clicks this quarter, somewhere in that range. And that's how we're measuring it. But yeah, what took us? So here'd be an interesting framing to that conversation. What if instead of saying, okay, you're here, you're at zero, maybe or near zero from a traffic perspective, you want to be at 10,000 visits a month. What if I told you that you were 25 blog posts and 50 links away from that, from an SEO perspective? So I didn't use the metric of time or I didn't use the metric of cost or of effort or anything like that. I just said, you're 25 good links and 25 good blog posts or something like that away from

getting 10,000 visits a month. Well, then you might think about that differently because you may say, okay, well, if I do one a month, it might take me 25 months. If I do two a month, it might take me 12 months or 13 months or something like that to get that outcome. If I did three a month, maybe I could do it in six months. And I'm not saying that's gonna perfectly follow that logic, but it just gets your brain thinking, I think.

And I think that's what people don't do in competition is they look at a company that's at 500 units and they're at five and they go, well, how am I ever going to get there? Well, like when did they start? You know, like we have a client that has 500 units. They started in 2007. You know, we have someone else that we work with, with a hundred plus units who started in 1986 and he's turned and, you know, he's grown and honestly he's smaller than he used

to be, but it's like, you're comparing your new thing in many cases, I feel like is what a lot of people do in our space. Cause they're new to the industry. Like I entered the industry in 2020 2020 we talk about this on the art of hospitality show all the time i you know i figured it out i know the basics i'm sure you do know the basics i'm sure you do but there's a lot of work that could be done on the marketing side that you're just discounting because you've been doing this for like you've thought about this for a few months and then you're like why isn't this working where i feel like in most small businesses

i don't think anyone ever thinks that like i don't know much about plumbing marketing, but I can't imagine if my cousin came to me and is like, hey, I just got my plumbing license. I'm going to open a plumbing operation here in XYZ area. I'm like, it's probably going to take you years to get a book of business where you have enough revenue coming into your small business with regards to plumbing customers for you to be happy. So why would vacational management be any different? Why should you go from zero units

to 50 units under management in less than like two or three years? Like that doesn't really make a lot of sense to me necessarily, unless you're buying them and you have a ton of capital, but like to earn the trust of someone to keep them on your program, because if you're trying to grow net units and not just sign property after property

and watch them turn out the back door, cough, cough, vacasa, cough, vacasa, then certainly you would have a little bit of a different approach so i guess i guess that you know that we we did smart goals recently i think on a recent podcast where it's like realistic is one of those elements of making a smart goal and i think the idea that you can when you look at the competition you're looking at something that you know someone's been training for a marathon for 10 years and then you're looking at it going how'd they run a five hour or four hour marathon well they've been training 10

years their first marathon attempt was probably eight hours you know and then you're looking at it going, how'd they run a five hour or four hour marathon? Well, they've been training 10 years. Their first marathon attempt was probably eight hours, you know, and now they're at four hours because they worked at it for that period of time. So I think that's just a much healthier way to think about it, which is like, how much time do I have available? What might I need to get there? And in a market like Destin or Myrtle Beach or something like that, you might need 500 links and 500 blog posts to rank on the first page of Google in a meaningful spot. Yeah. So that's fine. Like it may take you, if you do two a month, it may take you six years maybe to get to the top of Google. You know, that might not be an exaggeration if you're making that kind of like more slower, you know, investment, but you're never going to get there. I know that if you sit on the

sidelines and kind of like complain and say, oh, there's too much competition and this and that. And if you don't stick your flag in the ground and talk about what makes you unique, I think that's trouble in the owner side to kick it back to you, which is that they don't actually do anything unique. So how can you differentiate when nothing about your company is actually novel or unique? It's just the same thing as everybody else does. No, it's kind of fun. As we're recording this, this is the week we're releasing our most recent homeowner value proposition type of trying to convince people of a compelling offer. And that is, it's difficult to craft that,

but I think part of that is because we don't, we just don't understand what is that value? What's going to strike the value there? That's something that because it is so much more the homeowner side of it, there's limitations. Within each of these areas, I think that's where, maybe not email i won't say that but but certainly certainly on the social side certainly on the search side of things but we would just there's limitations that that's that's all there is to it um and i think that that's where you don't want to push all of the owner heavy centric content all the time because you do have to manage you have to manage that more of your

business is going to come from the guest side of things like in from the from the nuts and bolts of it maybe got caught mid-thought there a little no it's a good breakdown of like awareness is generated in one way and then the interest side of it is generated completely differently so the awareness is done through this kind of like broader idea of brand marketing like people who have heard of you before are much more likely to become a homeowner right but they're not going to hear about you until you've done a good job managing the first home the second home the third home the fifth home the tenth home and then you might have the chance to earn that 11th contract and the 12th contract and so on and so forth and like don't get me wrong it's a slog at first i actually don't know what the answer is at first it may depend on your situation it may

depend on what your competitors weaknesses are like i think going back to this example from a few minutes ago they kind of found out what their weaknesses were from their competitor um because they had like their first few that came over were like it was basically the story was they owned in the market they were just self-managing and then they found someone oh nearby hey do you want to manage my tune well maybe you know like you know let me let me try it basically i'll charge you a lower commission than whatever they're charging you and i'll see if i can do a better job and they kind of figured out that his kind of skill sauce was in like pricing and he was really good at like gapping like he was really good at filling in gaps and pricing to find those little you know whereas

the other company was probably like more of a traditional hey saturday to saturday type of company right so he was able to stick his slag in the ground i'm not just dynamic pricing but more like dynamic um calendar management filling in gap nights you know doing a lot of that kind of stuff and that was his secret sauce that got him you know his first let's say 50. you know it's just like hey i'm going to manage it better in this following way so you kind of have to find out what that is and to be fair if you're in a competitive market there's just obviously a greater probability that someone in that market is probably really good like if you're trying to bring it to the outer banks market there's already someone that market doing a good job um you know we work with someone in that market

and they have pretty low turn rates like i can count on one hand the number of turns that they've had like in the past year or so and it's usually like hey we sold it it's not going to be a vacation rental anymore you know or something it's usually a situation like that right it's not like oh i'm leaving and putting it with this other rental company so that's hard like i'm not going to dispute that but it's also like you're playing game, like you're entering the arena. So you have to know what playing field you're entering into. That's kind of back to that earlier commentary on both the homeowner and guest side of things. Well, when people see the growth of, and there's examples, you know, you get 70, bring 75 on in the first six months. Cool. Bring 30 on in the first three

months. There are some outstanding stories out there, but there's probably a little, the numbers below there are probably, you know, some came in on a group or something, you know, you got 10 over here and you got five, some multi-property deals, some stuff like that. Usually when you start to see the growth in big numbers,

it's because you have, you've built up that brand equity. I mean, it is the people who do, you may only grow one to two units a month. You may only also be able to sustain growth of one to two units a month because then you have to market to those people and we have to put the operations in place behind the scenes. So you're maintaining it and you're keeping it safe and you're doing all these things. Maybe you're upgrading it so that it actually makes a little more money for you. I mean,

there are so many steps along the way that I think it is like growth to grow is great. And then getting 30 properties on 50 properties on is awesome. And again, if you can evaluate your competition and break it down and say, this is what it is. But I think the property managers we see who have that sustained growth, that consistent growth is they did. They only grew maybe one a quarter early on, and then it was one a month. And now they're selecting the leads that they want to take, and they don't want to take every lead. And I think that's a better position to be in, but not everybody's in that position. It takes a while to get into that position. But I think that's, again, understanding that competitive landscape goes a long way in understanding at what rate you can grow.

Because if you're thinking, it is, there may be a total addressable market of 2,500 cabin rentals in Pigeon Forge in the area you're looking for. However, what is that with the competition you're looking at? Like, can you grow? Yeah, you may think you can grow five a month. Realistically, you might be able to get one on every other month. We can talk about some of those tools and how we can evaluate, like, what is that competitive landscape look like? I mean, I think, you know, when we look at the Google side of things,

there's free tools, you know, use search trends. It's, I don't love search trends, but to get a high level look at how, you know, I mean, think about how people are going to do searches, you know, for on the, on the man, on the management side, it's the case rental management, short-term rental management, Airbnb management. Now trends isn't going to help you there, but you can also create a free ads account and try the keyword planning tool and do something like that where you can start to picture how people are going to actually get into your sales funnel, get into your marketing funnel. And I think that's when we talk about the search side, we've got those free tools. We like the paid tools certainly, but you know, what, what else

do you, I mean, how else are you doing some of that competitive research there? Yeah, I think the, the tools do certainly help cut down on the guesswork side of it. Like, so the numbers are numbers I was sharing earlier on SEO, your 25 blog posts and 50 links away from ranking better. Right. The best way I think to find that information is Ahrefs because you can kind of see pretty quickly where they're getting links from. You can kind of see even like their traffic now. I mean, Ahrefs has data now dating back to like 2018, 2017. So you can put a domain in there and see, again, like you might see two years of effort and then like they're only at 8,000 visitors, you know, a month after two years. And then you see like the most recent year,

they could have gone from 8,000 to 50,000 visitors because they've seen all this, you know, additional benefit coming in there. Right. So I think that's, um, that would be my tool of choice if I'm researching SEO and I was like brand new market, just got dropped in, didn't know anything about it. I would use Ahrefs to kind of get a lay of the land pretty quickly. I would specifically use the keyword tool and I would put in like area name plus vacation rentals or maybe like cabins. And I would see the top 10, see how authoritative the domains are, which is a pretty good measure of roughly how many links you might need to kind of crack into the top 10, see how authoritative the domains are, which is a pretty good measure of roughly how many links you might need to kind of crack into the top 10.

I would be a lot more, I would say, planning for a long journey if I saw DR numbers that were like in the 40s. You know, so like if the site that's on the bottom of page one of Google is a DR 45, then you're not getting in the top anytime soon unless you have a massive budget, right?

Again, it doesn't mean you can't going back to the whole premise of the episode. But if you put that in Myrtle Beach or you put that in Destin, Florida, or you put that in San Diego, for example, you're going to be in for a little bit more challenging of a time because there are two, three dozen, four dozen local companies that are going to go after those same keywords. So just be aware of that. Again, it doesn't mean that it's bad. You should be aware of what you're getting yourself into. You should be aware of what you're getting yourself into.

On the flip side, it's common, and I did another post on LinkedIn recently about this, where you might only need a DR10 to be on the first page of Google. If you go do a search for Seattle vacation rentals, you'll see a website ranking in the very top of Google. Hopefully that's still the case when you're listening to this, that has a DR of 11 or something like that. And they are outranking currently, I'm doing the search right now, Vrbo, Vacasa, Home2Go, Kayak, Evolve, Booking, and Airbnb. Oh, and Expedia. So there's your nine other links on the first page of Google behind a local company that has a DR of nine. But it has a ton of content and other things on it.

So, you know, Ahrefs is a good way to do that. Looking at the SERP, I call it reading the SERP, is a good way of doing that. To be honest with you, I've not found a tool that I think is good on the paid search side of things. I put domain after domain into these tools in the past where it's supposed to estimate the amount of monthly spend. We have a client that spends $15,000 a month on Google ads. If you put their domain name into one of these PPC estimation budget tools, it says like 2000. So I think those

numbers are horribly off. I don't know of a good way to figure that out. I just think you have to do the searches. If you can maybe like try the VPN trick. Like if you're in, let's say Blue Ridge, for example, pretend you're in Atlanta and like do that same search because they're probably excluding you know you based on your location so clients get this wrong all the time you know they my ads not running it's like yeah because i exclude you like i exclude you very intentionally that's why you can't see your ad um but anyways yeah i think seo wise it's a lot easier to do competitive research with tools like atrefs on the ppc side i don't think there is a great tool to be honest with you. I don't know if you see it differently, but the only way you can do it, I think you have to be in the auction. Like then you can get some

of the auction insights, but that's, that's still only giving you search impression share, not, you know, right. It is, it's not giving you any really projected budget. You have some idea of what everybody's paying probably. Um, but not necessarily because that a lot of that comes from the quality score and how those are ranking. You're expected to click through, landing page experience. I mean, it's more about that than it really is about the keywords themselves because everybody's going after the same thing at that level. The only caveat i throw i throw in there i think we've did this one before is that with ads to be honest with you especially when you're small

your goal like airbnb can outspend me well yeah like i know that that's you know the goal is not to outspend airbnb remember on paid search ads the goal is to be profitable so whether you're spending five dollars a day fifty five hundred five thousand you know whatever your budget is the goal is to make the ads profitable or to like benefit your business in some tangible way. The goal is not to outspend Airbnb. That's not the goal. That's the, you're thinking of the completely wrong objective, right? With respect to how the ads are going to work. So yeah, that's, that's just my comment on that. You know, the goal is to be profitable with the ads. Who cares what you're spending? If they're profitable, then my, my opinion is you should keep edging it up maybe until you're not profitable or you're finding some maximum,

but you can be profitable $5 a day. We do it all the time. To be fair, I think Google pushes a lot of people in that direction is you focus on these other metrics, these revenue metrics. So that's what they are. Like there are times when it is important to understand what your impression share is, what your cost per click is, what is that? But I think it is, it's ultimately,'s ultimately it's, it's an investment. What is that return on that investment? What is the cost per, you know, cost per conversion, cost per booking, cost per whatever that is. And let's maximize that. But when you get some of the other, when you get some of the other, Ooh, well, what is my competitor doing? Not as important. They're

there. We know it. Let's focus on what we're doing. It is. It's where I like having the competitive metrics to give you that feeling of, hey, I'm doing better than them. But then when you focus more on that than the actual performance metrics,

okay, now we have to segue back into what's actually going to move the needle for us on the performance of the things. Yeah, 100%. So yeah, that's kind of the search side of things to go to social really quickly. Honestly, I don't think there's tools. I think there's, for the most part,

it's you following the accounts on social media, you know, and looking at what they're doing. And I think you can learn a lot just by following, you know, Instagram and Facebook accounts. And I would actually argue this is a good thing that you can borrow from other areas. So if you're in San Diego,

go look at the most popular Instagram accounts that maybe are in Ocean City, Maryland, right? And see what they're doing. Maybe you can learn a bit from like their template formatting. I will give Acosta some love. We were kind of crapping on them earlier. I've seen some really clever stuff on their Instagram with like stories and format stuff that they've done that I've sent to my team.

That's like, yo, this is awesome. Like the way they edited that image and showed that property across multiple tiles is cool. You know, you can learn a lot from other accounts. So I think you can get a ton of inspiration on instagram from other you know vacation rental managers out there and it's probably not following airbnb funny enough because like their instagram is basically just like house after house after house after house that's unbelievably unique you know and i think that's kind of what their their feed is which is fine like that's perfect for what airbnb is trying to achieve on instagram but i don't think it's super instructive for most vacation rental managers the only thing that we

put in our in our um in our notes before we got started was the idea of ad library. So within Facebook, you can go to ad library or just do a Google search for a Facebook ad library. It'll come right up. You can actually put in the names of your competitors' pages. It can see if they're running ads and you can see what the offer is, the copy, the landing page. And then it'll also tell you how long that ad has been running.

And the pro tip there is that if an ad has been running for a super long time, it's probably working. Assuming they have someone competent managing their ads, because most people don't let ads run for six months, you know, eight months a year, somewhere in that timeframe unless it's working well. Nor is it necessarily logical to turn off an ad that's performing well to switch it up and try to do something different. Speaking from personal experience, sometimes leaving an ad running that's doing well is

what I call not stepping on the butterfly and just letting things go if you're getting the ROAS goals that you have. Doesn't mean you're not trying to beat it with new creative but turning off an old ad is not always the uh the wisest play so those would be my social media considerations and i think that applies to both homeowner and guest um and then with email no no secret sauce there sign up for their email list you know the one little trick there to help organize it um in gmail you can do the plus trick so we have clients where you know we'll sign up for the email and we use like our shared inbox, which is hello at buildupbookings.com.

We'll do like hello plus client name. So it might be like hello plus Vacasa at BuildUp. And then you could simply click on that email in Gmail and you could see all the emails that they have sent. I will admit that's imperfect because you're probably not on their past guest list if you've not actually stayed with them. They might unsubscribe you

if you're not clicking and looking at those emails regularly. So it's imperfect. It's not the flawless system. But just signing up for the email list of your competition will reveal something to you about how they do things. Do they have a welcome series? What is their tone? What is their messaging? And for the most part, you're going to get a good sampling of what they're doing from a marketing perspective with respect to email newsletters. And again, it may inform your strategy, offers, things like that. I saw a good one the other day on the anniversary thing i think lauren talked about this where they had like the 30th anniversary of the company and so they did like a limited time one day 30 off sale that was all over their website all in email and i was like that is clever like we could do that for other clients you know

we have a client that market that competes with lauren but it's it's all good it's all love there we can probably find something else that would make sense there but yeah that's my take on it i know we're at time here paul but hopefully this was kind of a fun one for the listener and we can button this one up. Absolutely. I mean, side note that Facebook ads manager over the next like seven months is pretty hilarious to just kind of keep an eye on the political side

if you're interested in a laugh or two. They launch hundreds of them, don't they? I mean, those political campaigns. It gets really interesting. So again, that's just, that's a teaser for anybody who got to the end here and is about to leave us a review

because we're about to solicit that as well. Yes, yes. We are campaigning for more reviews. So if you made it this far, first of all, thank you for listening. This was a good episode to do. Kind of a fun one. Sharing more of our philosophy and ideas,

which we try to do sometimes on the show. We'll be back with something a little bit more educational, perhaps next week. But thanks for listening. If you made it all this way this far, Spotify, iTunes listeners, you are where we get the most downloads. So congratulations for being part of the majority. You're very attractive, good looking and we need one thing from you, which is a review. You go to

your podcast app of choice, Spotify, iTunes, you leave a review and more people can listen to the show. So we thank you and we'll catch everyone who's listening in on the next episode of the Hats and Beds show. Have an awesome day.