Heads In Beds Show - How To Adapt When New Guest Marketing Channels Open: The Secret Triangle (Part 1)

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul break down "The Secret Triangle" of Dan Kennedy's book - The Ultimate Marketing Plan and explain how each of those three corners apply to the guest marketing side of any vacation rental business.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101The Ultimate Marketing Plan: Target Your Audience! Get Out Your Message! Build Your Brand!🔗 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 Meds show presented by BuildUp Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. I'm your co host Paul. All right, Paul, good afternoon. How's it going? It's a wonderful day in the Nancy household. Plenty of noises going on. We might get a little, we might have a barge in. I'm not ruling that out. And you know, as we're gonna, we're gonna have a long discussion today. And we're gonna talk about a lot of fun things. But

how are you doing, sir? How are things going in your world? Yeah, all good. If it's, um, if it's a funny cut in, you know, we may leave it, but if you hear like a random audio jump cut partway through this episode, it's because Paul's trying to juggle little ones at the same time of recording, which, um, you know what, for the listener, that's life, right? Like sometimes we just work from home thing has broke pros and cons. And sometimes the con is that you can't always sit there and focus on your work,

you know, perfectly when there's little ones running around. So it is what it is again, to the listener that has small children. They can very much empathy, empathize, I'm sure with us when that does happen to me, because that's happened to me before. Doing pretty good, a beautiful day here.

We've had, I feel like there's horrible weather the last two weeks or so. Rain, I mean, 15 inches of rain as we record this, it's sort of middle of August. I know we'll come out a little bit after that, but yeah, not awesome weather. So that always makes me kind of not like sour necessarily, but I don't love it. And today's good. So what the large white fluffy clouds. I remember when we was in elementary school, you would like go to the window and you'd like mark down what cloud type

it is. Yeah, I have to say, I don't remember any of those types off the top of my head. So it's the big fluffy ones, which always cumulus. So I think those are cumulus. So that's that's your favorite, maybe. Yeah, maybe. I don those are cumulus. So that's in your favor, maybe? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. Reader or listener, I should say, fact check us. Yeah, that's for sure. Please let us know the cloud takes.

If we're wrong, then please, we would love the hate mail or the fan mail. If you're passionate about clouds, we are too. Also love the bit about clouds where it's, there's this sticker and it's like, the cloud is just someone else's computer, which I think is actually a funny little technology comment on like that sort of things, but we can go in a different direction. So today's episode, speaking of things that were inspired by I've joked with you when we were putting together the outline for today's episode.

Some of these ideas are based loosely on a book by Dan Kennedy called The Ultimate Marketing Plan. And I read a lot of Dan Kennedy books, but this one I think is an oldie, but a bit of a classic. And I think a lot of, you know, great marketing books can be that way. Right. Like, I'm not so interested myself personally in reading, you know, 2024 is hot trend to tick tock marketing. Like, that doesn't feel to me as much. I just can't get through it. I'm a lot more intrigued by things like this. So the original version of this book, by the way, came out in 2000, 2000. Sorry, I was no, I'm sorry. Let me correct myself here. The original version came out in 1991. That happens to be the year I was born. So that's quite an OG book there. The revamped and revised

version came out in 2011. So the listener might be wondering how in the world is the book written originally in 1991, which is as old as I am, re released in 2011. I mean, there was, you know, a few iterations before that have anything in the world to do with what's going on today in 2024 marketing world. And the answer is that these books, most Dan Kennedy books, talk about concepts and classics or ideas, I should say, maybe that are timeless. They don't expire because they're based on fundamentals. And that's why I do like to read them. Because I think just like sports, we often start and we have to go back to the fundamentals, right? Like Tiger's drill, he gets on the putting green, what does he do? Put two T's in the ground, a quarter inch

outside his putter, and he hits the put putter face middle over and over again. Why would he need to do that? He's Tiger Woods, like he's won 15 majors because it's the fundamental because we get back to the beginning. So anyways, dear listener, hopefully you made it through that intro. You heard what I'm saying in this book. If you go to, I think it's page 30 ish or so it's pretty early on in the book. Dan talks about this idea of message market media, that there's these three things that actually work together in marketing to get your right message out there into the world. So if there's message market media, in my head,

I'm thinking, well, what's the vacation rental version of that? Because that's how my brain works. So Paul and I came up with some different concepts based on those three ideas, message market media. You can use that definition. We just tried to make the definition a little bit more maybe actionable for you, the listener, about guest messaging, which can kind of be more akin to

or compared to the property or the unit, guest media which could be a marketing channel and an OTA. We'll talk about OTAs a little bit today. And market is kind of like guest demand, guest desires. So we're gonna go through these ideas. So our version of this Dan's is message market media. Our version is property unit, marketing channel OTA and guest demand slash guest desires.

And then we'll kind of later on we'll do something about outers. And you may hear that in part two, so we can kind of keep this episode reasonably lengthwise. So that's a very, very long intro into like how we came up with this idea, but hopefully it all makes sense. Do you think that makes sense? I mean, you put it together with me. So hopefully we're on the same page here. I think you did a good job. I think that that gives the full background and it is these are timeless elements of marketing.

Again, the fact that we can repurpose them into how we are talking about them, you know, going from the message to the property and being able to tie those in pretty directly. I don't think we agonize over getting to those areas either. I mean, this is, this should tell you that, yeah, these are these are things that probably transcend the vacation rental vertical But are certainly valid and something that it's gonna be a lot of fun to talk about Yeah, absolutely well I guess and if you're struggling with the marketing by the way

Like I think you're so much better off trying to learn the principles and kind of starting there Then trying to go and learn some little hack or trick or things like that and to be clear I like little hacks and tricks like I'm not opposed to these kind of things But I think you've got to know how to apply them Otherwise your knowledge is really just a collection of random hacks and tips and you know These little things that typically expire right like if there's a little loophole right and exploiting it You know those loopholes always expire and then you've got to come back come back to the beginning and be like what am I? Actually trying to accomplish here from a marketing perspective and that applies to both guests and owner

But today obviously initially we're gonna focus more on the guest side of things. So let's take a crack at it. So again, property unit. So this in my mind is the reason that it's a triangle, the reason that one of these three things matters so much, you know, in this kind of equation that we sort of co-opted here.

The property unit, the reason I wanna start there is that it's kind of the most important thing one would argue. You know what I mean? Like, again, I'm on the marketing side. I couldn't tell you how to design or decorate these properties. That's not my skill set. I'm not air DNA, right? I can't tell you what market to go into, hey, the metrics look good over here, they look worse over here.

I can tell you how to promote it once you get it. But I'm telling you, man, if we get a dog, if we get a bad property, or bad collection of properties, that no amount of promotion can save it. So I would actually argue if this was a triangle of you know, the idea is the property or you know, maybe sit at the bottom, you know, like that may be the most traditional one, don't have that right, the other two are just kind of kind of, you know, slide on the ground and fall over. So

property and unit, my mind is probably the most important piece of kind of building this, you know, secret triangle, if you will, of these marketing, you know, channels and kind of building a successful company. And I think a lot of people just don't maybe think about that. Or, you know, going back to the air DNA comment, I like all the folks that air DNA, by the way, and they do a phenomenal job, the data they collect the scraping, everything is unreal, right, what they're doing. But if you're following that data, you're a copycat, right? Let's be honest, right? If you're just, Oh, well,

the numbers look good over here, let me go get a property over here, right? You're not always necessarily tapping into guest demand desires. We'll come back to that in a minute with the property unit that you have. So maybe, you know, maybe we could start there again, policies in our area of expertise as it relates to like, we couldn't tell you exactly if this property is going to work better than that property. But we can, you know, because you and I have looked at so many units over the years, we know what a good one and bad one looks like, right? Like we can tell the difference between it. So maybe talk about this a little bit from your perspective. How do you, what defines or what are some characteristics that come to mind when like,

you're talking about the property unit itself? Why is that the most foundational piece of the marketing strategy? And we can bring this over to the owner's side for just a second and say, it's your selection and how you're getting these, bringing these homes into your inventory. It is, in initially a lot of cases, it's kind of a land grab. You're going to take whatever you can get and you're going to get to a point where you're going gonna make that money. But I think that's again, where if you're not,

if you don't have the foresight, you don't have the branding set up, the mission, the vision, kind of how you're going to establish your, let's say baseline for taking in a property, then it is, you've already compromised there a little bit. So how do you then communicate something that's not so good, but still, you know, it is. You've already compromised there a little bit. So how do you then communicate something that's not so good, but still, you know, it is you have to kind of maintain standards.

I think that's where people who have that growth strategy in place and have that idea in mind set up, this is, these are the properties I'm going to take on because these are the properties I can give life to. Like this is, I think that's something where going back to, yes, going back to your individual product, that is such a powerful resource that was underutilized for you there a little bit because people don't see the value there. I mean, it is so important to have incredible photography, you know, putting

video in, doing, you know, putting some design elements in there. Yeah, I can't do interior design worth a lick, but I've seen a good, I've seen a good interior image of a property versus a bad interior image. I've seen a good exterior image of a property versus a bad, and just the photography itself does that, but the work you put in behind the scenes, I think that is. And it's something that maybe we don't get to touch as much on the digital side. Like we're not, again, physically going in and helping you put that property and that unit together. We can consult and say, Ooh, this one's going to need some help here. You can kind of help to identify the stinkers from a digital perspective or a branding perspective or an aesthetic perspective just as we see it there.

I think that is if you haven't established that clarity of brand and what you are offering and you just have that mix and I know you've got specific examples of mixed portfolios, we'll say that it makes it hard for us to do our jobs because you don't really have the clear direction in your brand, in your business and what you're really doing there. So just kind of throwing it over to you. Where did I hit? Where did I miss? What did I get right?

This is definitely your realm, the guest messaging side of things, the individual property itself. Take it from here. Let me tell them to educate me a little bit here. Yeah, no, I mean, I think you're on the right path. And I think ultimately, like, like you said, you've seen enough of them where even if it's not necessarily what you've been focused on day to day, or for the last little bit, again, you know, you know, you go look at a website right away. And it's almost like you

can tell if it's been intentionally put together. You know, I think the reason that the single property owner might struggle with marketing is not the reason that they think they think it's all comes Down the budget. I actually would argue that in some cases That's not always the case because we've been able to work with single property owners that have high-end property So that actually spend a good amount of budget marketing that property and sometimes the reason they just don't get great conversion rates Is that there's just not a lot to show in that property unit or the actual experience of being on the website isn't great, right. So it's even if the property itself is amazing, you could have one super high end luxury property, we work with clients in that realm. Because

again, the marketing and advertising can sum up to a decent amount there. And their sites don't convert that well, not because their property isn't good or interesting. But just because they're so, you know, it's such a it's a one offer, right? Like where the OTA does have the benefit, the most obvious thing we'll come to this in a second, is that they can show you 25 similar units, oh, you don't like this one, or this one's not available for the dates. Here's 25 other ones.

That's the piece that I think is hard. So I think you touched on it well, you know, photography, videography, we just did a whole design branding episodes, I'll go back, I think two in your feed, maybe at this point, or maybe one in your feed at this point, and you'll be able to see that kind of more expansive thoughts on branding and clarity. I think yeah, being clear about what you offer, who you stand for is so important, you know, and the property itself, and it all comes through, right? Like, if I see one unit that has a nice aesthetic design to it, it's going to be similar

to the, you know, and then you have 10 more that are like it, maybe different locations, different views, and so on and so forth. But if that all lines up logically, then like, I'm a lot more interested in, you know, going on that website and spending more time on it and stuff like that. So the property unit, I think, is kind of that bottom part of the triangle, if you will. And I think if you mess up there, boy, it is really, really, really hard to dig yourself out of that hole, right? If you've got a property that's not appealing, you know, that doesn't actually, I mean, we didn't even talk really about price, although I

think that kind of down, yeah, to like the value conversation, right? Like if you're maybe you're pricing a property, that's a B plus or B minus property. But if you're pricing like an A plus property, again, there's too many alternatives out there for people to be interested in. They'll just skip over it if you're in a market or a destination where there's lots of other alternatives, right? Like, you know, I've said this, I mean, clients these markets, so it's not like a, I don't mean this in a negative way. Overall, people may perceive it that way. But like, I personally would never buy property in Orlando,

Florida. I personally would never buy a property in Gallenburg, Tennessee. These are great markets from a demand perspective. And that's why I think we've been able to have success in those markets marketing it. But man, it is just so hard when you're one of quite literally 35 to 50,000 different units in both those markets that you're marketing and advertising. And you've got to really do something to stand out. Now, the good news is, and I think that if you are going to do it and you do it in that fashion, you can stand out right because there is 10,000 of those cabins in the Gatlinburg Smoky Mountain market area or because there's you know, 4000 condos in Orlando or Central Florida that all look the same.

When you do go and stand out, you know, it does really stand out and then there's all this demand that people sort of flock to you. So I think there's something to be said for that. And I think all these kind of really successful like Instagram properties, they put all their if they had points to distribute, they put most of their points into this side of it. They're like, if I just make a property, that's like, unbelievably visually interesting and entertaining, I will get additional lift on my marketing

channels. And, you know, my OTA performance will be better because I have something that no one else has. I start with that kind of foundational piece being so strong. And it bleeds over into marketing and marketing it is easier because of the fact that it's so interesting. Visually, there's great design, you know, obviously, you get to work on the, you know, presentation of that design. And that's kind of where marketing media, etc. can kind of play a role. But you know, I think starting with a

really unique property, obviously, it leads you to a better spot. I'm thinking to have a client that we had and we're working with one right now, who's in a dense market with a lot of competition, but they only do really, really large units. So it's like within the market itself, and the client I'm thinking of is in, I would argue not a massive market, a few thousand listings, but he has pretty much all of the like five, six, seven

bedroom larger units in that market. And there's a lot of two, threes that are, you know, kind of just in the, again, in the data set that are out there, but he's not interested in that. So again, go back and see our branding episode where we talked about like when people go to his website, the smallest one he's gonna have is five or six bedrooms, you know, and then every, you know, and then

he has ones up from there, all the way up to properties that can sleep 40, 50, 60 people. And then of course, they're assigned nicely, they've got all the right amenities in place, and so on and so forth. And it doesn't guarantee success, but like it starts you off a bit, I would argue from a better point, as you're kind of building this triangle of marketing success, property unit, you know, is something that, you know, I think you can't understate how important that is, or everything, the other two, you know, arms of the triangle kind of coming and flourishing together and make it a little bit challenging. So yeah, maybe nothing else there, we can dive into marketing channel OTA, but go ahead.

Well, it is. I mean, that's the one thing that I would say is that the people who do who who are the Airbnb super hosts who have one or two that they have, they purchase, they've they've made their own. When they try to make the transition in this, I would say they don't have the foundations because at that point, they don't, I mean, they maybe aren't as discerning. They want to get those numbers to get up to that certain point. And I do, I think that's something that putting that foundation, they should understand that the foundation is there and maybe more so than some of the professional property managers who have who probably brought them on in droves or they've

acquired something like that. So I think that that's, I hope it hammers home the point that that is that that's something that specifically those smaller managers who are out there who are listening to this, make sure you're keeping that in mind when you're looking at that acquisition strategy. Yeah, well, let's go into the second leg of the triangle here. So marketing channel, or OTA, is what we put in our outline. Again, maybe from the original inspiration

that we got here from Mr. Kennedy himself, media is the comparison. So media is like, where? Let's say we've actually checked off the first box relatively sufficiently, Paul, just for the sake of this episode, and kind of the conversation, we've got an amazing property that people want to stay in. We'll talk about desire in a second, but let's just we'll go to the market. So now how do I get my word out about that property, right? And this is where I think people are too way too tribalistic, or, you know, I guess, like

focused in on well, I can go to Airbnb and I can Yes, absolutely. Please do like list on Airbnb list on VRBO or verbal listed everywhere you can. That's phenomenal. Please do. Obviously, we're sort of promoters or we advocate direct marketing because why not? Why wouldn't you have that be part of your marketing channel slash OTA mix, right? Like it's visibility. So my first point here, I think on this is that if your goal is to build something long standing for a long period of time, whether that's the brand, you're a property manager, and that's kind of here's what I'm, you know, here's what I'm putting out as the world. I want people to come and stay in these types of properties, these types of stays here. So I'm looking for then that brand is going to compound over time.

I think the mistake that you and I have highlighted or talked about maybe a link before is the fact that people expect this like instant ROI or this instant results from their marketing channel OTA spend. And to be fair, they are and have been over the past few years, maybe a little bit unfairly spoiled by Airbnb, right? Like Airbnb has no basically no essential startup costs, right? Once I get my property set to go, I take the pictures that sure, there's a cost of incurring there. But then once I get going at Airbnb, I'm not paying anything for listener and putting this in air quotes, I'm not paying

anything. And I think that's a blessing and a curse if we're being honest, right? The truth is that the acquisition cost is mostly funded in many situations by the guest. And so because you don't see it, you think it didn't happen, right? Well, that's Airbnb's, you know, fee or whatever that the guest is charging. Now some of our clients now, and I think many of their PMS connected have to pay that fee on their side, right? There's no button or choice or that sort of thing. But I don't know how strictly that's enforced. Maybe we could talk to like an actual Airbnb, like employee or professional about exactly how that works.

But then you can start to see the acquisition cost a little bit more clearly, right? And then you realize, man, between the card to card fee and the so-called service fee, it's almost 20% or darn near, you know, close to it, maybe 15% range a little bit more in other markets that we've talked with property managers in that they're getting paid to be the OTA of the marketing channel, right? So in that scenario, if you could imagine a scenario where you would get more bookings

cheaper than that, it may be more effective to get bookings cheaper than that. Or you could see a scenario where this is kind of my take on this too. The guest is completely willing, able, and one would argue looking at Airbnb's revenue has been perfectly happy paying that service fee to Airbnb. That could be your fee, right? That could be the amount of money that you're charging to make a booking, to make a reservation. I would argue you should charge a little bit less than Airbnb should. That's my take on it. But the point is that the guest has an overall budget, you know, and part of their budget is going to Airbnb to facilitate that transaction. We could sit here

and debate the semantics of it as far as like they paid it versus you didn't pay it, or there was, you know, some additional upside that was left on the table there. But the point is that like these OTAs are very expensive. I think that's one thing that people don't want to admit because of the way that business model works. And again, kudos to Verbo and Airbnb for kind of coming up with this model. It certainly was not the original VRVO model. And I'm saying VRVO on purpose in that scenario, because it was, you know, listing fee based. And of course, that was abused, and they weren't making enough money off of it, but a different discussion for a different day. But I guess that's kind of the one thing

that I wish people understood a little bit better is that if someone's doing 60% of their bookings at Airbnb, and that let's just say that's, you know, 1000 reservations a year, it's a it's a middle sized property manager, and the average, you know, acquisition cost of each of those things 1000, and then they're paying, let's say $165 in fees, basically, either they were robbed of $165,000 of revenue that could have occurred, right? And service fees or something like that. Or they paid, they basically paid,

you know, $165,000 to Airbnb, in order to get those 1000 reservations, I'm just making up numbers for the sake of the demo. But you're you're I think you're crazy if you think that you couldn't build a marketing plan around $165,000 per year. Now, again, I'm not suggesting or advocating that you like, stop your OTA spend and go all in a direct, you probably can't do that. But you could peel off a portion of it right and kind of over time, you know, build this brand and build this part portion of the kind of the triangle out which is, you know, having other avenues

available to you. So that's a long rant. I mean, it's it's, you know, it's tying together a few things that we've talked about at length before on the show, with respect to direct bookings, the math behind it, and OTAs and all that kind of stuff. But anything else to add in there before I go down my next bullet point? That's only two bullet points, by the way. Sorry. A lot more to go. That is I think that that is about the best description of that. And again, put putting the back of napkin math out there. That's, that's it. Like, just visualize that as

a marketing budget. And I think again, if you're if you're not looking at it that way, in some capacity, again, maybe 40,000, 50,000, whatever that is, that's a lot of money that you can put into channels that are going to drive not even more direct bookings, if you can create a better user experience and a guest experience, coming through a more customized hopefully experience than Airbnb and whether or not they want the more that you know, whether or not they've developed that brand loyalty,

whether or not they trust Airbnb, all those things, you can build that trust. So I think you nailed it. Yeah. And, you know, we haven't done a ton of stuff on Vecasa, you know, but I think the one thing that if you look back on it, that went so poorly for Vacaasa during all the acquisition growth that they did, and mostly like 22, I think is kind of when they were peaking there. I mean, they did a good chunk of it in 2122, maybe parts of 23. I don't

think they've really done much at all in 2024. As far as acquisitions go. The reason they stopped, though, I think is that what they probably realized they were doing is that they thought people were going to leave their local property manager. So they'd buy the local property manager, kill the brand, right. And then they'd say, No, it's no longer, you know, insert large company that's hold of a casa here. It's now a casa, whatever insert destination, it's now a casa,

Sandbridge Beach, it's now a casa, you know, Miami, Florida, whatever that case may be, right. And I think what they didn't understand is that the guest was loyal to that brand, in some respect. Now, it may be have a limited scope, right? Like the example that I've given before is that billboards may make a lot of sense if all of your travelers that come to Myrtle Beach come from Charlotte, like that marketing channel might make sense. Like, because you go well, yeah, half of our guests

come from the Charlotte metro area, I could actually run billboards, then it might make sense in that scenario. But if I'm in San Diego, like, and everyone comes from all over, like there may not be as much, you know, logical marketing channel mix that we could put into, you know, out of home advertising. So it's just an example, I really wouldn't necessarily advocate that unless you just have like brand awareness budget that you have to spend. But it's an example of

like, if you know your target guests closely, and you understand how you can how you can market to them, you can get a lot more creative, because you can think of so many different ideas or so many different paths or ways that you could actually get the word out about your company. And OTA should absolutely be part of the mix. But you know, as we record this again, mid August, a week and a half ago, or so Airbnb admitted, we are going to have a down quarter, this next quarter coming up is going

to be likely worse than it was last year from a revenue perspective, meaning Airbnb's revenue, which means, of course, that the listener is, you know, smart, they connect the dots that there's gonna be a lot less bookings to go around according to Airbnb's metrics. So if the top dog feels like they're not going to be able to deliver as much next quarter, my take on that has always been the same, which is that if Airbnb's not delivering, what do you do?

And I think the only logical solution that most people come to if they're Airbnb dependent is they've got to lower the price. Well, maybe if I lower the price, my value looks better. I'll kind of get maybe a boost in the algorithm. I can get more reservations or I can get more demand there. OK, great. Great, that's reasonable. You may have to lower the price on your website to write even if you have your own website, you're certainly immune to you know, having to offer the best value because your competition may be doing the same thing. But it feels so I guess powerless, right? Like I think the goal of any small business, you know, even whether it's a case for business or not, would be that you have some, I don't even know if independence is the right word because that word has been beat up a little bit but you just have options like what a what a

bad feeling I think in any small business again to feel like you have only one path there's only one road you can drive down and if that road is a little choppy or there's maintenance on the road or I mean you know god forbid this does happen they close the road and you can't go down that road anymore you could get banned from Airbnb right like that's not likely but it has happened there's some stories a while ago that I was reading about that. Then you're in a very bad spot. So let's go more into the specific stuff. That's before I beat up kind of on that too much.

I think one thing that's interesting is that channels have different guest profiles, different traffic, different pros and cons, right? So I gave kind of a, maybe I would argue, a bad example a few minutes ago with respect to doing a billboard advertising. Again, I don't really think that makes a lot of sense in most scenarios.

I could see a weird little niche scenario where it might make sense, but let's just go through this example. The audience on Instagram is different than the audience on Facebook, right? We can actually log into that platform and run ads on both, you know, kind of both channels, if you will, simultaneously.

You could run Facebook ads and Instagram as the same way. We have a client where they get significantly better, you know, results and clicks, et cetera, from Instagram, than they do from Facebook. And then we have another client, another market where it's the complete opposite. So, you know, I think knowing to where your property stand for, again, your property going back to the first kind of portion of the triangle, what does it represent? Who is it actually meant for is going to dictate a little bit of what you should do from a marketing channel

or OTA perspective, right? Like you may want to actually put out different types of media or different types of messaging or different types of video creative. If you're targeting a 24 year old, you know, who's looking to do a getaway with his friends, who's based in Florida versus a family that is based in, let's say North Carolina, and they want to do a large beach navigation, right? Those may end up being very different marketing channel targeting platforms. So, you know, we've talked about this at length too, right? Like how you approach that channel, I think does determine your success a little bit, too. And I think you're better off doing a few things well,

typically, than doing 20 things. I think that's one thing that I see a lot of as well on LinkedIn and other media is, well, I've clicked a button and I've put my listings out on all these other channels. OK, awesome. The question may be, do those channels actually get any meaningful traffic? Am I going into a room and shouting,

I have properties available for your vacation and there's no one in the room. Like if that's the case, then we're doing the wrong thing. Right. That's not actually reaching, you know, and making a difference for the people that actually matter. But when you go out into Instagram and you say, I'm going to spend a thousand dollars a month, writing these properties with this specific targeting,

with this specific creative, I'll test it and see if I can figure out better creative, then you're kind of building more of a marketing channel strategy that makes sense because you have a little bit more conviction about what actually you should be doing. And I think that's kind of more what I would suggest people think about is like, let's zoom back for a minute. Let's not argue or do do semantics about Airbnb or VR or anything like that, or this channel or that channel. Let's just come back a little bit and say, if I want to get the word out there about my properties, what are all the things I have available to me? Where's the actual people that are interested in staying? Where do they kind of hang out? Let

me do some research and some thought on that. Then let me go forward with okay, I'm going to approach this in this way. And when I do my Airbnb listing, it's going to have awesome photography, it's going to have a phenomenal property description that's comprehensive, it's gonna, you know, we're gonna make sure we get a lot of reviews. So we're going to over deliver on that guest experience, all those things will make that channel work better than if you don't do

those things, right? Same with, again, we can go into our world for a second, same with SEO, if I'm going to do deliver on that guest experience, all those things will make that channel work better than if you don't do those things, right? Same with, again, we can go into our world for a second. Same with SEO. If I'm going to do SEO for my particular brand or website, I'm going to focus on making the site the best I can from a technical perspective. I mean, it may have some limitations with respect to your website design,

developer, that sort of thing. I'm going to put awesome, useful blog posts on there that are long form that have specific information on there. I'm going to tell a lot of people about my website and get them to link to it. And then I'm gonna make sure make sure I'm researching keywords that my guests might actually be searching for. If you do that and put all those things together, you'll have some level of success with SEO and you can

kind of see some gains there. So it's, I think the approach matters a lot. The choice of channel matters quite a lot. And I think people are again, going back to my original thought here, but people are way too tribalistic about it has to be this or it has to be that. No, it doesn't. Because those things are going to change over time. What makes sense today, we're recording this again, summer of 2024, five years from now, Airbnb could be down in the dump for all we know, or it

could be triple the size, we don't know, right? Like, like, we can't predict the future. So you've got to think you've got to not be too tied into like the way you get there. And you've got to think more about who I'm trying to get after. And then I think you can build a lot more logical kind of marketing channel strategy for your business. And they're the best example I have of that of we I got to when I was working outside of the vacate rental space more just generally with the lodging, it was we got to work with some fishing lodges in Alaska, who we had a salesperson who could

really sell those those fishing lodges in Alaska, and funds, I mean, really fun marketing to do it really was. But we had a guy who was just absolutely bent on getting making sure that his his ads were on Instagram, Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn. Those were the two channels he really wanted to have and I just this I admire I respect the heck out of that. And I said, just think about let's think let's think about your your typical angler. And Conrad, you know, you know that that profile very well. And think we'll think about the skew that we know takes place on Instagram being, oh, let's say 7030 female to male on its best days. So to say that we underperformed his expectations on the Instagram side of things would be it was just so funny how he thought that visually he did he had great ads,

but nobody on Instagram wanted to see his ads. That is just not what he did that very small subset. He had more luck going to some of the local fishing Facebook groups and just like posting in there and having you know, understanding where he where we actually could make a difference. And I think, yes, any channel, any channel you're considering, I love someone's willingness to go beyond to think beyond just the, hey, we can do this and this and this. Nope, we can do all of these other things if you have a willingness to spend or create some different assets, create some different media content, things like that.

I think that it is. It's so important in understanding how you're going to actually put that messaging together and how to make the marketing effective. We can put campaigns, we can put ads out there, we can put messaging out there that is boilerplate, nothing, yuck kind of stuff. That's not what's going to work.

Like this really taking a tactical look at it. With ChatGPT, easier than ever to generate even the worst ads you've seen, right? Like, right? Oh, my goodness, it is, it's something. Um, but I do, I think that's, that's the thing anybody can, anybody can do this, you can have everybody can do this. But you can't do it well, unless you are going down to that next level. And you get you've got that foundation that you can work with that property unit you can work with and you build up there. So swing it absolutely. No, that makes sense. I mean, I think so here's here's the the questions I think that make a lot more sense to ask not should I do channel x, y, z, but rather like, or when you do a new marketing activity, are you doing it alongside other marketing activities? Or are you maybe replacing some of your effort or time or budget with I'm going to stop doing X because X

has proven not to be effective like a sessions X now because that is actually a social platform. I'm going to stop doing channel whatever you know and then I'm going to do channel blah blah blah. Okay, great. If you're stopping doing something then maybe there's some data that you've collected that indicates that I'm putting message you know my media out there I'm putting this marketing channel to work and it's not delivering for me great make, make that decision.

And then you can confidently try something new. So this may be an interesting question asked you what can go right and what can go wrong? You know, like, how are the ways that I might see success with this channel? Can I copy or could I, you know, maybe get inspired by someone in another area, another market doing this channel? Well, maybe there's something to learn from that. Um, I follow a ton of Instagram accounts, right? For other, you know, um, you know,

I guess like hosts or property managers and other places. And I kind of look accounts right from other, you know, you know, I guess like hosts or property managers and other places and I kind of look and say, Hey, that's, it's interesting. That's an interesting idea. Maybe we could take some of that and bring that to some of the clients that we work with that on or, you know, I looked through Facebook ad library frequently, hey, what are they doing from an advertising perspective? Can I learn something from that? I saw a really interesting one yesterday

where someone's doing like construction on a property, but they're selling, in essence, like pre reservations. So it's like, if you pay like $50, you're gonna get like $250 of guest credit when they actually open the property. So it's kind of like, you're buying the future, right? Of what it will look like, but it's not done yet. Really clever, really clever.

I've not seen anyone do that. And I was like, that's an interesting approach. Now they're doing that marketing channel, through Instagram, that's how I saw it was an Instagram ad. But when I saw that, I was like, that's a clever approach. Maybe I can learn something from that. When you have a new property, you want to get bookings right away. Could we let the first few bookings be cheaper by sort of pre-promoting it? It's an interesting idea.

Again, maybe it'll work well in some channels and not in other channels. What does that cost? So again, cost could just be budget and it could also be time. Am I going to have to stop doing something else again to do this? Certainly if you're getting 60% of your bookings from Airbnb, it probably doesn't make sense to lay your Airbnb listings rot and not spend time on them if it means that you're going and doing,

let's say running a Facebook page that's not getting success. And then again, what are some KPIs or metrics? Is there data, is there proof that I could look at that will actually show success? I think these are valid things to actually look at as well. And if you can show data or you can have proof of like, here's what it looks like to be successful, I think you're valid things to actually look at as well. And if you can show data, or you can have proof of, here's what it looks like to be successful, I think you're going to have a lot better outcome, for sure.

So those are some of my high level views of the marketing channel OTA. So to recap where we've been so far, property unit is the bottom of this triangle. Marketing channel OTA, it can be left or right. I don't know. It doesn't matter. Let's just say it's left for the sake of the argument.

Now, the right side of this triangle, in my mind, is guest demand, guest desires. Now, in my mind, this does tie back to the original piece that we were talking about, which is the property itself, because I'll say something, right? If you build the right property in sort of the wrong location or the wrong market, or people just don't like it, then I think you're really not going to do well, right? So now I would say this is the hardest thing to gauge because most people will judge guest demand or guest desire solely off of what they already see working well. So again, going back to the air DNA comment,

well, I see other five bedrooms doing well here. If I build a five bedroom, I may do well here too. Cool, I think that's a very reasonable sort of conclusion to come from. But I think a lot of people that I see that get like really quick success or they really figure out exactly what the right sort of outcome is,

or they figure out what property is gonna really do well and they beat the curve, they're ahead of the curve, is they actually understand the guest's desire to be better than anybody else has before. So I think the classic, what's the forward quote, I think is something to the effect of if I ask people what they wanted, they want faster cars, right? I think the same kind of logic could be applied in our space. If I asked guests what they wanted, they would say like, maybe a little bit better view or they you know, they'd want some, you know, some of these things.

And it's valuable, maybe sometimes to learn from, you know, what the guest is saying, or they'd want some of these things. And it's valuable maybe sometimes to learn from what the guest is saying or the feedback that they're giving. But sometimes I think it's like, this is where the tastemakers and almost like the artists in our space, I think, really shine, is when you can put together a property or you can do some form of property design or something like that that actually speaks to a guest demand or desire that hasn't actually been voiced or searched for or looked on. So it may not be what they're searching on Google.

Now, that could be a decent starting point, right? But it's not a guarantee that if they're searching for it on Google, you know, it's automatically a great idea, but it does kind of help. So anyway, some of your thoughts on these about like guest demand, guest desire, and how that builds back to the original base of this, which is the property itself.

Yeah, I think it's one of those things that you can't create demand for a specific, you know for a specific property. That is something that is... There's no magic potion, magic trick, magic thing that you can do just to make that happen. And I think it's painful because I have. I've seen those properties that seem like they're going to be just killer properties, but they're just in the wrong market, or they're just going after the wrong clientele. And I do, I think that that's sometimes that's, it is just the general lodging space, the general travel space. We can, you can get things booked. To do it isn't that difficult, but to drive the right guest demand, to drive the right guest desires and finding that right guest who is going to actually

book that home that is amazingly unique is the tree house and tree house in the stars and and can sleep 20 people only two people want to stay. There's those those sad examples and I do and I think that certainly it goes back to that property of if you're building it yourself, take that into consideration. I mean, it is, you can build whatever you want. I'm not gonna say that you can't build like a castle on the hill that is going to be the amazing thing,

the most amazing thing that everybody's ever seen and they're gonna desire it. They are gonna try to create that physical desire. However, you have to be careful because, and we can, you talk about those, you know, large group homes are great, unless you're in a market where that's not something that people do.

As those beach markets are great, those cabins in the Smokies are wonderful, lovely places. And they do, they fill up and people can generate that demand, but I think you also hit the nail on the head there just because you think it can happen in 38 market doesn't mean it can happen in the, well, it's the South Padre Island market or something like that, or just, you know,

these are, they're not universal truths across the board there. So I do, I think that the people who again, maybe maybe want to take things more national, I can do this, I do this great in, in the southwest Florida corridor, I can take this to I can take this to these big markets, I can take this to the North Georgia mountains, I can take this to Myrtle Beach, I can take this to, you know, a mountain market, I've got the system down. You may have a system down for your market.

You may think you understand, but I do. I think when that guest demand comes, how are you actually going to make sure that you can book, there it is. Get the prettiest homes out there, but to actually make sure that you are, you're filling them up in the end again, in the right way that you're not having to price down, you're not having to move

numbers just to get the bookings in. It's it's part of the conversation that if you have a three to five year plan, I'm sure you're having that conversation if you're bringing them on left and right and just trying to grow and grow. I don't know that that foundation is always there. So yeah, no, I agree. I think that we've talked about this before. But as you were saying that I kind of maybe crystallize something in my head there, which is that if you're what I've

said before is that if you go open a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth location, my kind of contention has always been to you, it might be your third, fourth, fifth priority to someone in that market. It might be your first priority. So they wake up every day and they're destined. I think I'm going to crush dust and dust in my only market. But if you have 85 in Phoenix, Arizona, Scottsdale, Arizona, whatever, and then you say I'm going to go get four in Destin, you know, like, are you going to be able to compete with that person just solely not even

based on budget or anything like that? I'm not even talking about that for a second. I'm just solely talking about the fact that like, are you going to wake up every day like hair on fire, like ready to attack that market and be like, I'm going to manage the best times I'm going to deliver the best experience. Like, it's very hard. I don't see how it's possible, you know, based on my insight or intellect. That being said, like, I'm not saying that a multi market, you know, plan won't work. I do think there's some pieces in place that would make you be able to deliver that guesstimate or

guest desires. Like, you know, I don't know exactly how Avon stays doing. I did talk, we did interview with Dustin a while ago in the other podcast that I do. That's probably out at this point, or should be out soon. And he was there. And it was like, interesting to hear about their inventory growth phase when they got a bunch of funding, and they were just like, taking everything. And now it seems like from afar, and again, I don't know anyone there, they've dialed back, and

they're like, we're only going to focus on like these large group homes. So they've kind of but they're multi location, right? They've got them all over the US, at least, I don't know if they're in other places. But they've got them in, you know, maybe a dozen US states or something like that at this point. So that's an interesting strategy. Again, could we learn from that?

These are the best family or group travel vacation homes, and we have all these different markets. Well, maybe because people are attracted to you and they say, I stayed with an awesome Avante State property in XYZ location. I wonder if there's one in ABC location. They think we did this example on a recent podcast. People search for Four Seasons properties in locations where they do not exist, because they hope there's a four seasons in, you know, Minnesota, they hope there's one, you know, what you know, different location, other may not be,

but they actually go into Google and they look for it, right. So it's a good example of like, you know, where a guest desire often comes from. So yeah, I think, you know, that that is kind of the way that we can maybe wrap up the guest side of things. We'll flip the page to owner in a second. But I think it's, you know, again, the original one was message media market. I think that kind of breaks down to property unit. What are you actually putting out there? Marketing channel OTA, how are you gonna get attention to that property?

Once you've got the property, how do I get attention to it? And then finally, am I even putting out there what people want? Is there any demand or is there any desire for what I'm actually offering, right? And I think when you get all those three things working together to be positive,

to kind of round out the guest side of things here, I think magic can happen. So yeah. Hey, Conrad here. We had a lot to share, and we ended up putting this into two parts. So that'll kind of wrap up episode one. If you made it all the way to the end, we super duper appreciate it.

Please do feel free to leave us a review in iTunes, Spotify, where we get the most downloads. Super appreciate that. We'll go ahead and roll episode two next week. So next week we're going to focus all on the homeowner side of this triangle. So this week was all about the guest side. Next week we'll do the homeowner side.

Appreciate you listening. Have an awesome day.