Heads In Beds Show - How To Build The Right Strategic Approach To Your Vacation Rental Marketing

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about how you can use the right building blocks in your vacation rental strategy to maximize the growth of your business. They debate tactics vs strategy and why there's a time and place for both. 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. Paul, how's it going today? Just another fantastic day. It's in the heat of summer and we are, the timestamp is never really good on these because it's always a little ahead of us now.

We got ahead. This is awesome for us recording wise, but happy Father's Day early to you here because we got that coming up here in US Open weekend here. So it's kind of a golf happy weekend as we just spent a little bit of our preview time going over golf scores. So how are you doing sir? Yeah, I think whoops is the technical term on that, but that's always our problem. Yeah, I'm doing pretty good. Yeah, happy Father's Day to you as well. As you said, people will be listening to this a little bit later on for sure.

But hopefully if you're a father out there or if you have a father in your life that you, you know, got some nice things for Father's Day for they appreciate that. Yeah, I thought we had a pretty I thought we had a pretty interesting topic today, though, to dive right into it. Which is this idea of there's a strategic component. I feel like a lot of our conversations to go back for a second, are very tactical, like here's exactly how to do thing a thing B thing C, whether it's auto marketing, guest marketing,

etc. And, you know, I was talking to someone recently, and they said said like, you know, let's stop, let's zoom back and let's think strategically, which I guess just my brain tends to go towards the tactical, maybe that's one of the things that just has been drilled into me, maybe because I started, you know, in doing digital marketing was very tactically driven, it was like, hey, you're, you're doing SEO, but like, you have to learn how to do this one thing and like, do it really well and do it over and over again. That was kind of how I got started, which I think has maybe led my brain down that path of let's do things. But I do think there's a valid discussion to be had and some viable improvements that we can make, I would argue, to any vacational business with thinking strategically about what are we trying to achieve and why, and then we can decide what are the exact best steps to get there. And it would be foolish, I think, for us to just always try to fit, you know, so called a square peg in a square hole, meaning like this is our framework, this is our strategy, it must go into this exact company in the same way. So I like this kind of idea that things was your idea, and then we kind of built, you know, some some build points and some talking points off of it, because it's about building a strategic approach, which I think it combines, yes, you have to know tactically what's possible. So I think it's one thing that I will say is that I think it's really, really hard to build a strategy when you don't know what the tactical components look like. And that's one thing that I kind of dislike what I see maybe on the industry is people might say something to the effect of like, we're going to build

direct bookings in this way, but then they say things that aren't really realistic or feasible or possible or their knowledge is a little dated. And then they kind of suggest things that just don't make sense. Like they're suggesting, you know, let's do targeting this way on Facebook, but we can't do targeting that way on Facebook, for example. So anyways, we're going to put the tactics to the side for today. And we're just going to talk about more of that strategic approach of like, building a plan building like a thought process of what should be done and how it should be done. And then we can certainly resume some of the tactical discussions down the road. So when you hear a strategy, what's what do you think? What's your typical venture? Are you more tactical? Are you

more strategic? How do you kind of balance those things in your head? I tend to think more of the tactical side of things. I like to say that it's all strategic, high level. And that's the mindset I take. But I do I get down to nitty gritty. That's something that, again, I think we both kind of play that same role where we've had to be the tactician, we've had to be the actual doers behind the scenes. And I do I think we both kind of played that same role where we've had to be the tactician. We've had to be the actual doers behind the scenes.

And I do, I think that when you get into the creation of a campaign and the launch of a campaign and review the performance of the campaign, that does, you maybe get a little siloed, a little segmented into just thinking about that where we really do have to build it into that broader strategy. So I think that that's something that over time we've had to adapt to. I've had to get better at that. And I do, I hope that now when I do think

about individual campaigns, it's within a structure of a higher, more of a hierarchy as I'm kind of looking to assess that. I think when, how we kind of came into this conversation with kind of the rant for lack of a better word, that I went down was really talking about, kind of jumping into the timing side of things. In our space, seasonality is a critical thing to understand.

It's the difference between, we don't just serve, not every market across the United States has the same busy period, the same high season, same low season, the same shoulder season. And whether you're selling on the B2B side or the B2C side of things, that's something to consider is when you need to sell a campaign to launch a campaign in order to have the maximum effectiveness. So I think starting off with square one there, timing is so critical, you know, what, how do you how do you really make sure you're building that into the strategy when you're looking at that time?

Well, it might be, I think it's more acute for you with respect to like success on the owner side, right? Like, you're probably not gonna have any success, right? As we record this, of course, we're alluding to the fact that it's June, you're probably not gonna have a ton of success homeowner marketing right now in general, it doesn't mean that you won't find like the odds and ends or the random bits and pieces of like, hey, an owner just happened to be buying or selling on this date. So therefore, you can get that contract. But it's probably not super repeatable. It's probably like, more luck than anything, like, you know, whereas you've referred to that term before signing season. So timing your marketing campaigns to say, it doesn't mean that you don't do any marketing in the summer to be clear, we're not saying like zero marketing. Exactly. But should you put like all of your chips on the table right now from like an ad spend perspective or from a postcard perspective?

Probably not. You should probably do that if you could in most beach markets in August, September, that time frame likely makes more sense. In fact, I knew a client told me a while ago, hey, my chance, my only chance to get homeowners from this particular company is actually right at the beginning of July. How they did it is they sent out their contract renewals at the very end of July beginning of August. And it was for the following year. And it was right after you got a fat check. So

your July occupancy was likely 100% barring some disaster. You would probably let's say you have a condo even you got a four or $5,000 check you're like, Holy smokes, that's amazing. Oh, by the way, you know, Mr. Manzi, go ahead and sign this one year contract extension. And you just got a $5,000 check for a condo you're like feeling, by the way, you know, Mr. Manzi, go ahead and sign this one year contract extension. And you just got a $5,000 check for a condo, you're like feeling great, right? So you sign that check. And then the rest of the year, of course, is pretty much zero as far as fees, you know,

and low bookings and low ADRs and stuff like that. And some to be clear, some of that's not the property manager's fault. So if you know, there's there's some psychology in the game that they're playing, but it's kind of like, send the contract renewal when they're the vibes are highest in the speech market happens to be the end of July. So there's clever components to that. But it's also if you're sitting on the other side of that coin back to this idea of like, when to time a campaign, and you know that about

competition, well, then you might want to, you know, adjust your strategy backwards a little bit, hey, they're going to try to lock you in in July, let's just have a conversation before then, and kind of let's look at the whole year, not just this one hottest month, you know, so to speak, both literally, I guess, and figuratively, as far as revenue goes, right, and let's have a conversation about what's possible for you to get. So that could be tailoring your media

tailing your marketing, tailoring your tailoring your message. And most importantly, we're talking about right here, tailoring your timing, your strategy to be around one specific month or one specific timeframe. And there's kind of a little tactic there that you know, some people have leveraged in the past. So I think that's that's an important piece of it now for guest marketing, obviously, right there, we're gonna have the high season, we're gonna have right there, we're gonna have the high season,

we're gonna have low season, we're gonna have shoulder, and a lot of our ad spend, et cetera, is gonna be tailored around, hey, let's try to maximize our traffic, maximize our visibility, et cetera, during these kind of higher booking periods. For a lot of our clients, it actually still is, even though the booking windows have gone back,

for a lot of our beach market clients, we still do a lot of bookings from that January to March timeframe. Then there seems to be that little spring slowdown is what I always used to call it, the spring slowdown. And then it's like everything picks back up again for last minute what's left, you know, I'm planning a little bit more later. And obviously, that second wave has gotten bigger over the past few years, it used to be for the most part that, you know, when I started doing this kind of work back in 2014, kind of 14,

15, 16, that era, I mean, you it would feel like if you if January and February didn't go well, your season was kind of shot, like there there really was not a lot you could do. Now it feels like that shifted where there's like these kind of two waves for a lot of clients and beach markets. And again, ski markets are maybe different time windows and things like that that you have to think about, lake markets, et cetera. But I think the timing of it relates on our side mostly to ad spend and deploying that ad spend.

So if we have a budget of $12,000 just to make it simple, I don't want to spend $1,000 a month, right? I might have a month where I want to spend $2,500 and then a month where I spend $500 and then we've got to work with the client to kind of figure out what's most optimal there. So I think that is, you know, it's important to have that strategic kind of thought process to both the homeowner side and the guest side, because ultimately, it's going to let you make better decisions. That's the way I see it. Do you see it the same way? Or do you

have some other flair on the timing and budget kind of breakdown pieces? No, I think that's the key. I mean, I think certainly on the owner side, it is. You identified that signing season. It is still about the consistency. So you hit the nail on the head with, you don't want to stop. You may want to slow down. You may want to turn the juice down, turn the faucet down a little bit there on what's going out. But you definitely want to still understand that there's going to be those fluctuations and understanding where those fluctuations are is just important to making sure that your sales funnel or your booking funnel or whatever that is, is actually representative and that scalability part. You don't want the one-offs. That's something that you can't ever scale on

the one-offs. So make sure that you've got that system in place and timing plays a big role in that system. Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's go over to the next idea then. So timing is one piece, which is kind of like, when do you want to launch the campaign? How long is the ramp up? What is needed to get the job done? What's the budget? Those are kind of some strategic questions. The next one was was my idea, which is this idea, we've talked about this a lot internally recently, build up, which is the idea of we've used the term

infrastructure, we use the term prerequisites, that's which is the idea of we've used the term infrastructure, we use the term prerequisites, that's kind of the term that we've used, I guess, I'm going back to like college, and I'm thinking, you can't take the marketing 301 class until you took the one on one and the 202 class or whatever the case may be, right. And I think a lot of our clients don't really grasp that or some of our newer clients don't grasp that in some situations, we're setting, we have to set up a lot of work

before we can get to the meat of the problem in some situations. And I think that's something that I need to do myself a better job, like being self critical of communicating again, from a strategic standpoint is, here's the example that I'll give. If you're hiring, no matter if it's an agency, an individual, whatever for email marketing campaigns, what am I giving them on day one to get started? Let's go through that example. So like one thing that we've gone through recently is, well, number one, we need the list, the list needs to be in an ESP platform, MailChimp, constant contact, campaign monitor, whatever, pick your poison. Like it needs to be in that platform. We need to have the email now verified with all the proper DNS records added.

We need to have the design of a template. We need to have new emails flowing in, let's say from an offline source like Stafi or a guidebook, like hostily or something like that. And we also need something or I prefer something, I guess I should say, on site email collection. So pop up is our typical playbook, but you could do other things there. So there's kind of like six, seven pieces there that are just kind of like, all right, to get our first newsletter kind of out, this is kind of what I expect. So someone comes to us and has zero of those things done, then like, that's great. Like we can all agree strategically that like email marketing is

the right tool and the tool belt that we could use to potentially get more traffic income or bookings, we could kind of all nod our heads to that. That's fine. But there's a lot of like prerequisites that someone may have to do if they have zero of those things set up, which is not uncommon, you know, for us to deal with clients that are in that bucket. And we're happy to help, by the way, it's not that we're unhappy to do those pieces. But it does mean like, potentially a few weeks or a month or whatever of setup to kind of get from point A to like the starting line more so than like the actual firing the gun and we're actually getting going. So I think that some clients just underestimate that. And I think, again, strategically making a plan of like, all right, evaluating and reviewing what infrastructure or again, we're

calling it prerequisites, what prerequisites have they already done? And then making a plan of like, okay, here's how we get from where you are. And maybe they have three of those things done. Okay, great. So we're going to set up these four things in month one, and then we'll go ahead and start the campaigns on week six or week eight or whatever the case may be. So I think that some clients don't understand that part of it. And I think it's ultimately a valuable piece of the puzzle for someone listening, you know, on the other side, the manager, the host, etc. to think about what have I set up? And are those things revenue generating?

You know, the other piece that I had in here in the outline was the idea that setting up the email marketing campaign doesn't really drive any revenue, right? Like getting the MailChimp set up, getting the template design, getting Stafi hooked up in the units, those things actually cost you money candidly. And you don't really make any from that initial steps process.

You make money after, right? Once we start sending the emails, we're getting clicks, we're getting bookings, then we can start talking about the return on ad spend. But I think that that's one critical piece that I see people kind of misunderstanding on the guest side. And from what our conversations, correct me if I'm wrong, I feel like it's worse on your side of things, the homeowner side, because people sometimes have less set

up than they really need to be successful. So maybe you can go down that thread. That's always I was I was chomping at the bit for this one a little bit. Yeah, go for it. Part of the difference that we you and I are dealing with is that you do you you have certain thresholds where you're not gonna take somebody who's a little earlier on, they, you want, so you might be interested in taking someone on that's a little more established, where we're taking people from zero to five, you know,

like we are taking people from a, let's talk about the garden, it's a fresh plot of land there. So really it is, it's sometimes it's not a matter of, you know, we can talk about those those key elements of do you have your USP's? Do you have kind of the the you don't as a zero to five, you usually don't have the owner references or some some trust built up or that equity built up. You don't always have that social proof of

anything like that going on. But we also run into it where you don't have your markets defined yet. So I think there are there there there are really some things on the owner side where if you don't know exactly and I know everybody thinks and and I heard Marcus Rader talking on Alex and Annie this week sometime, the clip that they had whatever it was talking about, you know, focusing on managing a certain number of properties or managing a certain number of markets, people get kind of fixated on being everywhere as opposed to just delivering that service and driving that home there. And I think that's a strategic thing of not really focusing on growing to grow. I think there's a growing and a scalability and an operational foundation that you have to put into place there.

So that is, it's maybe I think some of those prereqs on the owner side also include having that baseline of growth goals. Okay, I want to be at five properties at the end of six months. And that may seem small, but again, if you're building from zero, you're building the brand and building your own marketing campaigns as well there. So establishing your markets, making sure that, hey, if I'm jumping into Pan,

PCB and 30A and Fort Walton Beach and some of those panhandle destinations, I'm going to a crazy town. And yes, there's a lot of opportunity there, but oh my goodness, are you going to have more competition. And yes, there's a lot of opportunity there, but oh my goodness, are you going to have more competition than you'd ever thought you can deal with? Some of those prerequisites to have in place and that infrastructure, it is so critical because you are, you're selling an experience on the guest side, but on the ownership side of things, you're selling

the trust that they are putting their, we've talked about it over and over, half million, million dollar, multi-million dollar home in your hands. And you cannot come across as someone that's not going to be a professional manager in that case. So there's a lot more foundational stuff that we need to have on the homeowner side of things to be successful. But when people do have it, you see those immediate successes or those quick success stories of it may seem a little fluky or it may seem like, oh, they just sent this out and magically they got

half a dozen leads to come in. No, that brand equity was built up behind the scenes and a lot of that work now seems like luck or being in the right place at the right time. But there's a lot more work that's gone in behind the scenes and I think that is so critical in however you're planning out a new campaign or strategies. 100% I mean, the piece that I had on that idea is that is what am I taking something that I'm already doing and getting it to work better? So for example, like we're running Google ads or running postcard campaigns, and we're getting X number of leads out of in this system consistently. So like we've have a baseline of data that we can give you, again, whether it's an individual you're giving it to, or an agency or a service, inventory build up, whatever the case may be, like you're giving

something to someone and you're like, here's kind of what we're doing. What do you think about it? You know, am I, am I good? Am I bad? Are my results, you know, kind of somewhere in the middle? What do you think? What's your perspective on it? That's a totally different conversation, though. And I think what you just talked about strategically, where it's like, I'm new to this market, I have two listings, there's 75 other property managers in Destin, Florida. It's like, that's really hard. It's not saying you can't do

it. I'm not saying that at all. But it's like, that's completely different. You have to have something that's going to make you stand out from the crowd, right? Ultimately, because people are going to trust you. In fact, their first, like, I think that's one thing that we miss sometimes in this world is the context, the context of the person on the other side. And what they think in their head, and what they know in their head to be true is like, how could you be the best property manager in Dustin if you have more properties like that just doesn't that doesn't mesh in their head that doesn't line up that doesn't make sense. Think about that. If you if you said a

car brand x y z is the fastest car brand in the world, but you never heard of it before. You'd be like, I don't think you make faster cars than like Ferrari or like McLaren. So like that, you know, like you would just reject the idea because you're like, surely I've heard of if you're like a car enthusiast, I would have heard of your car brand before. It's the context, right? Of like, I don't trust you because that doesn't make any sense. Like people, again, these people are smart in many cases who own these properties. So yeah, strategically, it's kind of like, what am I going to do differently?

How can I show that? And what do I have to kind of say or do or act or how do I build up this business brick by brick on the homeowner side, which then gives me the opportunity to do more guest marketing. I think that people skip over that and they just think, well, like you were saying a second ago, because it worked for a large company, I can just copy and paste that same playbook and run it for a small company. It doesn't, unfortunately, work that way. And that makes it really hard. So the piece that I kind of wanted to get across was that is what I'm doing working well, let's just say some level of success from it. So my plugging a hole, I kind of have a system, I have a process, I need someone to come run that system or run

that process. Maybe they know better than me do maybe maybe I hire a good agency that's done it before, you know, and they can improve on a process. Again, we took over an ad account, I think we talked about this one in a previous episode from an agency that was kind of like savvy about Google Ads candidly, but didn't know vacation rental. So there was like, it was good, it was profitable. It wasn't like a disaster. But I went in and went like, well, I kind of preferred

to do it this way. We make tweaks, tweaks, tweaks, tweaks. Now we're getting a better return on adspent number, not to toot our own horn. But it's like we didn't massively change the account. It was more so just like four or five little adjustments to landing pages to copy to keywords that kind of put it from a 10 to one to a 12 or 13 to one ROAS. So like our fee is well justified in that scenario. That's a totally different conversation than like, Hi, Conrad. Hi, Paul. I've never run ads before. I'm small. I need to figure this out along the way. And you're paying you know, candidly on the on the management side, sometimes the same fee for us to like figure it out for you. Versus you know, you having done it yourself for or that sort of

thing. And being the other thing I had here is like standard to the market or you forging a new path. So if you're offering 25% commissions, I'm going to take care of your home and revenue, I'm going to manage your properties revenue, I'm going to try to get the most I can, you know, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. That's awesome, but that's not really forging a new path. And it doesn't mean, again, it doesn't mean you can't be successful. Some people in some markets I think are successful by just doing what they say they're going to do, like being good communicators, cleaning the homes properly, really caring. I think there's a lot to that.

We talked to someone recently on the Art of Hospitality podcast I do down in Hilton at Mark, and he was like, yeah, my owners do word of mouth advertising for me, basically. I haven't had to do a lot of owner marketing because do down in Hilton Ed Mark. And he was like, Yeah, my owners do word of mouth like advertising for me basically, like I haven't had to do a lot of owner marketing, because they just listen like, like people in Facebook groups and things like that will be like, Oh, what's a good rental manager I can trust. And they

say Mark, because Mark's company does a great job of managing rentals in that market, according to all those owners. So like, what's a better way to kind of build up the map like you really can't think of many that say, Hey, I gave him my condo, he does a great job, I like working with them, etc. That's hard to duplicate. But it's just providing good service right there. I don't I would argue and I don't know if Mark would agree with this just based on what I saw from his company. He's not doing anything different. He's necessarily massively I mean, there's little things he

talked about fresh flowers in the unit and so on and so forth. But it's kind of like just being better, like just being that better option. And over time, I think you will win, but it's going to take time like there's going to be a lot of a lot of pieces along the way there. So I'll go to a different direction here, which is about budget and what budget is needed for these marketing campaigns and what are my expectations for that cost or investment of budget. Again, if you're new, this is where I think people get in trouble on both the homeowner side and the guest side. They have nothing to refer to. They have no reference. They have no data points. So they say, I've never spent $5,000 in marketing, advertising for my business.

What can I expect out of it? I mean, I try to give an answer sometimes of like, hey, here's what our typical expectations would be. Maybe at first a three or four one ROAS might be okay. We could talk about some general numbers there, but it's very plausible your first $5,000 will get you nothing. That's plausible because you're building it from scratch. You're almost doing, again, the prerequisites in some mind of some of those initial pieces. So strategically, going back to the thesis of the episode, your strategy at first is like to build out what the infrastructure you need to be successful. And there is, in many cases, no return on ad spend there at all, or no return on investment there at all, initially, until you get

some of these pieces in place. So if you're building out a spreadsheet, and you're just candidly guessing, like you're just saying, all right, let me go ahead and put $10,000 of ad spend in for 2025, let's say if you were doing that, and you're building saying, All right, let me go ahead and put $10,000 of ad spend in for 2025. Let's say if you were doing that, and you're building a plan for next year. Awesome. But like if we can't go refer back to like, how did the ads go in 2022? How'd they go in 2023? How it's just guessing like we can make we can put a spreadsheet if it makes you feel better. But like we don't know until we actually run it. And we

have things firing exactly how well it's gonna work. So I think that that's something clients like to do in my experience as well when they're newer is build out the business model and a spreadsheet of how it should go or how it might work and not really adjust it once they actually get real data. So let's go through that for a second. Let's say you build that strategy plan out and you say, if we do this, we should expect this. Okay, that's fine. I like generally the idea of knowing where I'm going, having a bit of a roadmap or plan or schedule. Awesome. But let's sit back three months later and then look at it again and see where we actually ended up. If we do that, let's then look, set a reminder on month four and be like, let's go backfill all three months data. How much did we actually spend? How many homeowner leads did we actually get? Or guest clicks did we actually get? How many of those converted into new homeowners? Or how many of them converted into bookings? Some people might use like an EOS style scorecard for this or whatever, but just the spreadsheet could be fine. Let's do that. And then that gives us at least a little bit that we can build off of, and try to have the right expectations going forward. Because I think the classic small

business thing is, I want to spend as little as possible, of course, and I want as much as possible out of it, which I'm sympathetic to that. But it's also like, let's be realistic. Let's not set ourselves up for failure. And then we're all looking around kind of upset at each other for that reason. So those are some of my thoughts. But I went on for a while there. So tell me what you got. No, no, no, it's I mean, the budget item is probably one of the, I'm not going to say the worst

things, but one of the most difficult things for me to overcome if someone has had success on the guest side of things is they feel like they're printing money, is that I'm going to be able to put in an X amount of money, I'm going to be able to get a 6 to 1 or a 7 to 1 or a 10 to 1 or a 15 to 1, to one 20 to whatever that number is. It is not a clear cut on the owner side of things. And I think that the we have a lot of factors into that the fact that our cost per click is, you know, close to 10x higher than yours. In a lot of cases, there's, there's a lot of factors that that play with that as well as that, you're not going to get 100 clicks or 1000 clicks or 1500 clicks, We're going to say you might spend the same budget and get there in.

We have the cost per click difference, you know, a tenth of the clicks or a third of the clicks or something like that. And while it is easy to draw that clear cut line of, yep, that click right there, look, I can trace it all the way past through the attribution path. I can trace it down all the all the steps they took, and I can see that booking come through. Well, you're not doing that in the in the marketing side of things. Now that's going over to your sales team or your business development team or your owner, you know, whatever your owner team looks like.

There's there's just more more complexity to it there. And again, those those additional costs, it's, you know, installing state by, well, installing that BD person or putting some of these other things in the place to make sure that ultimately you can land something on that budget you're putting in. But I think we're really good in this space at doing the guest side of things.

And that does, that's, I don't know. It's a hurdle that we have to just, it's a psychological hurdle. It's that mind hurdle of, okay, boy, I don't know if getting 30 clicks a month is going to be enough or 50 clicks a month is going to be enough. You're probably right. So let's increase that budget. We have to take the same steps to ensure that we're not just spending more. I'm not just throwing more money at Google if there's no more search impressions there. Or if there's no more, you know, if the quality of the traffic isn't going to improve,

that's, it's a, it's not a volume game. It is a volume game, because we want as much as we can get, but we just don't have it out there. So yeah, that that budget piece, I'm not going to say you've shoved the dagger fully in my back, but it's you're tickling, you're tickling my spine a little bit. I think that's one of the hardest things, again. Like we're talking about thinking at a high level, which is, basically you're driving with your headlights off in the middle of the night. It's kind of a good analogy. I love my analogies. I think that's the analogy sometimes, is that you don't know what's in front of you, so it's hard to predict. That's why I think you need to have kind of like, I'll say no expectations because that's a ridiculous premise,

but you should have like, this is learning, I'm learning what's gonna work well, I need to build this out, like here's my steps. And then don't compare your year one to like someone else's year seven, like to that kind of logic, right? Which I see a lot. And you were alluding to that earlier.

If someone's in year seven, you can't copy and paste their strategy because they have built in advantages that you don't have. So that was the last thing in my outline actually, as we kind of round out here, which is that what part of this campaign, what part of your marketing gets better or cheaper or more effective over time. So for example, as you grow brand awareness, as more listings come into your

program, it's actually easier to get new listings. So it's it's kind of this unfair thing, or like the big get bigger, you know, the, the big guys get to bully the small guys in some markets. And we have a we have a client, for example, that we started working with, with about 20 units, I've talked about them before, I think they're around 100. Now they could be bigger, honestly, they just reject many units. Now at this point, they don't really want more. And it's this is a small market. This isn't some huge, this is not destined. This is a market

where there's only a few hundred plus things in total, and they manage, I would argue some of the best ones. And I look at it, and I go, they just get homeowner leads kind of by default now, you know, and they get they get, you know, 1000 1000 brand searches every single month, that convert at a pretty good rate when people search the name of the company, click on Google, click on that particular website and go there. So what do we attribute that to? Like we attribute it to all the marketing and branding and advertising work that's been gone going on for five or six years now at this point. But it's it's actually you know, his his budget actually stretches a lot further now, his results go a lot further now with any sort of homeowner marketing campaign, any sort of guest marketing campaign, because they go offer into that company, I've stayed there

before, oh, my friends stayed there before, there's all these pieces that you know, you kind of understand are like, more efficient, more efficient, more effective, better over time. So PPC converts better as you get more properties, the same budget gets a better return on ad spend, you get homeowner leads, let's say you do a great job back to Mark's example from earlier word of mouth, was you get more homeowners, if you keep doing a great job, more people are out there talking about you positively, you're going to get more homeowners, which if any you do a great job back to Mark's example from earlier word of mouth was you get more homeowners, if you keep doing a great job, more people are out there talking about you positively, you're going to get more homeowners, which if any you do a great job, you're going to get more homeowners, right? Like you see the kind of potential effects that can occur and from what I can tell what Mark has seen with his own business, right? And that I'm just using that

as an example, because we talked to them, but I'm sure there's many companies that fit into that same, you know, bucket out there. So that's what makes the strategy piece, I think, so challenging for some, you know, clients is that they want to defer down, like, and hire a fractional consultant, or one of these part time people to come in and tell me what to do. And typically, I don't have a problem with most of those people. I don't disagree with a lot of what they say. I think a lot of what they say is accurate. Problem that I have with that is that, like, how would they know what to do if they haven't done enough of it themselves? That they're not, like, coming from the same spot that you were at, if they weren't doing the same things that you're trying to do, it makes it really challenging to get that

perspective. And then if they're not doing the actual tactical work, I think that makes it even harder to like actually tell you what to do. So they're telling you, let's say they tell you to do SEO. But if they've not like been like, like our company and actually do SEO every single day and talk about how do we get links? How do we build content? What's the process for getting the content published on the website? How do we make sure it's optimized for SEO? What things are a good way to spend time like for us, ClearScope reports and what things turn out to be kind of a waste of time like keyword density, like it just doesn't matter. You don't know that until you've done it. So that's kind of my parting thoughts here. I know we're up against it time wise, which is that take strategic advice maybe

from someone that has done it before, or it's like copying, you're copying their playbook a little bit from like where they were to where you want to go. And I would be very cautious or careful about taking strategic advice from people that don't really haven't really done it themselves, or can't really point to like, I've worked with 1215 1820 different companies, and I've seen them go from step A to step, you know, z, and I can kind of show you or talk about so this was a different process this year. And then I guess my final final thought is that the strategic decisions are still yours to

make, like you can get advice from people like myself, people like Paul, people inside of our companies, you know, Venturi buildup, etc. That's great. But it's kind of still up to you to like forge your own path. Copy and pasting someone else's entire playbook is not the way to success either. Like you've got to kind of find out what you're responsible for, which is ultimately you're responsible for the success of the company or you're responsible for the success of the marketing, maybe even if you're a marketing manager in that company. And if you're not like taking that part of it seriously, if you're not responding the success of the marketing, maybe even if you're marketing manager in that company. And if you're not like taking that part of it seriously, if you're not responding to the homeowner leads,

if you don't take care of the guests and you know, make sure cleaning is tightened up, then a lot of the work that we do in the marketing and advertising side just kind of falls flat. So it's great devise strategy, but you got to be a hell of an executor to get the job done. No one's saying that that's easy. I know how hard it is because I've seen it up close now for a long time, but that's the key. Like it, without that, you know,

it's really challenging to get the steps you need. So yeah, anything else that in that I think it is the you tied the bow on it perfectly. It is it's it's complex. It's not just ABC. It's there's a lot of steps along the way. So making sure you're covering all as many of those steps as possible. That's the key. Awesome. Well, awesome ball. I know we had 30 today. So I think we put a tight little bow as you alluded to on this one. So one thing that isn't very strategic, but is kind of tactical, is leaving us a review on your podcast app of choice. So if you're an iTunes listener,

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but those two are where we get the most downloads. So that's kind of where we appreciate the reviews from the most. Click five stars, leave us a comment about your strategic versus tactical conversations. We're all ears on that. We appreciate it. And we'll catch everybody on the next episode of the Hats and Beds show. Have a fantastic day.