Heads In Beds Show - How To Spend: $3k, $5k or $10k In Marketing Budget For Your Vacation Rental Company (Part 2)

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

In this episode Conrad and Paul finish in part two their chat on how to best spend budget if you have between $3k and $10k a month in marketing budget. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 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 of Med Show presented by Build Up Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacational 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. Hey guys, Conrad here. Last week, this ended up being a two-part episode.

So we're going to kind of enter the conversation midstream here. If you want to catch up on the first part of the episode, go back one in the feed and you'll see kind of part one. This is part two of the topic. We talked about building a marketing. budget with $3,000 per month, $5,000 per month, and $10,000 per month. So we're going to go ahead and roll the rest of this recording for part two. We thank you and we appreciate it.

Like what percent of small businesses in America? Like I was digging up these stats the one day I was trying to put it together a presentation for it. And this is like we don't have data on vacation rental companies. We just have data on like all small businesses. But it's like it's something like 4% of small businesses ever do a million dollars in revenue. And in our world in theory, that would be easier because like a lot of the revenue was not

even your revenue, right? you're getting a downowner, but I'd be shocked, right, if more than like maybe 5%, 6% of vacational companies ever do a million a year in gross booking revenue, you know, I think a lot of people start. They get a handful and they stall out long before that. If the typical property is doing about 50K a year in gross revenue, what are you going to need, right?

A million divided by 50, you're going to need 20 properties minimum to get to that million a year mark if each property is doing roughly 50K in gross revenue. So like, yeah, think about that. How many companies have we seen over the years that never made it to 20 or they just never get out of that mindset? And that's assuming they're average. Again, if you're small, you're probably not signing an average property, you might be signing a below average property from a revenue standpoint. So that's another kind of layer in the matrix there.

All right, we'll keep it going. Otherwise, we'll eat that into death too much. But, all right, $5,000 a month. So what's different about $5,000 versus $3,000 in terms of like what I would split it with? You know, I think at this point from a Google ads perspective on the guest side, I mean, it's honestly pretty straightforward here, right? You can actually just do more, you know? And I think your budgets, you kind of have figured out at this point, like I'm spending

$1,000, maybe $1,200 a month on, marketing. This campaign is working well, but I'm not showing as much as I could. Let me just spend a little bit more on that. So we have clients where, honestly, we'll do a build for a Google Ads budget that's 2000, and it might not be that different from 4,000 or 5,000. Like, sometimes it doesn't massively change the structure of it or how we've set it up. It's just, oh, great, I can put $200 day in this campaign versus $75 day. Like, that's awesome because I'm just going to get more bang for my buck, basically. So I think that's kind of one thing. You're probably just spending more on existing channels. I don't think you're adding a ton of new channels here, to be

honest with you. But I think at this level is when you can start to think about, you can definitely hire an agency at this point. You can definitely hire a part-time freelancer or like an individual contributor contractor at this point. And they're not going to blow your whole budget, right? The agency might be, you know, maybe 1,500 to 2,500 maybe of the budget, depending on exactly what you're hiring them for, depending, again, too, on like the consultant or something like that you're hiring. I think that's going to be, that's probably going to take up that portion of it. But then you still got several thousand dollars to play with for advertising, you know, expenses and marketing expenses. So I think you're scaling Google ads. I think you can definitely do like a little bit of top funnel

advertising on Facebook and Instagram here on meta. So it's not just retargeting, which is kind of probably what you're doing for the most part, if you even can at that lower level. But now it's like, oh, I can spend 500 to 750 a month of this budget. I'm just prospecting. I'm just trying to find new guests. I'm trying to find new potential customers out there. I know the same will apply for homeowners. We'll talk about that in a second. I think this is a stage where like one channel that I would be adding in here would be like creating actual content for your website. So you can definitely have the budget at this point to do a blog post every month, maybe even two, depending on how much you want to do there. And it's, you know, the best family-friendly hiking trails in destination,

top 10 restaurants in destination, best things to do, best attractions. It's that kind of content. And that's kind of going to start your SEO journey. I think at that lower level, it's really hard to like make meaningful progress in SEO unless you're in a very non-competitive market. But at this stage, I think you have the budget. You've got the firepower where you can do an actual legitimate SEO campaign, again, on your own, or with an agency, where you're doing content every month. You're putting out, you're getting links to your website every single month. And you're actually growing that needle, you know, a little bit at that stage. And that's kind of part of this $5,000 budget.

So those are kind of some of the new things that I'd see on my side of things. But what would you kind of see from your side there? Both anything you want to add into Gast and then any homeowner. Yeah, yeah. Adding more fuel to the fire on the Google ads side of things, that's, we always want to play with more budget because it is. There's just the reality of, you know, I think anybody who's done marketing of any kind of Google ads is run into their account at some point.

And they've had the notification of, oh, your ads were paused at the most, your busiest days or something like that because of, you know, budgeting issues or whatever. More money you have, the less you have to worry about those budgeting issues. So I do. I think that that's, there's a lot to be said there. And it's why on the owner's side of things, as, you know, what I would say is this is where you introduce some Google Ads. And I always ask for as much budget as I can get because where Google Ads is fantastic on the traveler side. It's just wonderful.

you can get these cheap clicks. You can show a good ROI. Everything's really great there. Our cost per click on the owner's side is just nowhere near the cost per click that it is on the guest side in almost every market. I mean, I even... It could be 10x difference. You should say that. Well, like, it could be a dollar for the guest click and $10 or more for the home on our click.

It could be that extreme. Absolutely. And again, and just thinking about that, when you think about the $10 a click and let's say, what we've got down is $400 a month. I'm hoping for five, but 400, three, whatever it is, there's got to be a number there. But just do the simple math. $400 divided by that $10. You're only getting 40 clicks on that.

So again, 40 people going to your landing page in a given month, and maybe you have a 5% conversion rate, 10% conversion rate. If you're really, really good job. If you got one or two leads, you've done a good job. Exactly. I mean, the basis for, you know, a conversion rate on a form fill, that's something. like that, one and two percent, maybe three percent on most times. If you're getting 100 visitors, you're going to get one or two leads, maybe. If you're only getting 40 visitors, again, we've got to play the scale game a little bit more on the owner's side when we're thinking about that.

So yes, I think this is definitely where you're starting to do Airbnb management in your market, vacation rental management in your market, property management in your market. You even have to be a little bit careful there if you're in a major metropolitan market because those people looking for property management are usually looking for the long-term side of things and tenant services and where do I pay my bills and stuff like that. So again, this is where the owner's side of things does bring in some complexity that we're just not used to, some friction that we're not used to on the guest side. But what we also, I mean, these leads are expensive, but high intent. If you get someone who is searching for the case rental management in your market or Airbnb management in your market or short-term

rental management in your market and go down the lines. I've got a whole list of them. That's gold. That is, I mean, that is, there is nobody who is more intentful in looking at a specific, that's what they're looking for. They're looking for management companies in your area. So you should be showing up for those companies. Now, are you going to get that deal closed? That's a whole other discussion, as we've said, but you want to be in front of those people. Because otherwise, there aren't a lot of great ways to do it proactively. I mean, again, you can take that additional money scale your direct mail the other digital channel you can kind of start to go down is i would say certainly because you're already doing the guest marketing side of things you

have the pixel on the website so making sure you have a dedicated retargeting audience for people who are just hitting that property management page is going to be important as well now you may not have an audience that's large enough to serve up ads to that side of things for a while i think that's kind of the other difficult part about doing owner marketing on social, on Facebook, on meta, is that we do. We deal with smaller list sizes. So again, you take that list of 1,000 homeowners and you put it into Facebook and maybe 600 people have Facebook accounts and maybe they're able to match that much.

But then we get into, well, it's interruption marketing and how many of those people are actually interested and how many people are actually, you know, the right fit. And we can kind of go down that route there. So, yeah, I think you can scale direct mail here, but I do. This is where I would start to if you do have a larger enough list. And you are, I would say, a little more aggressive and willing to take on all as opposed to specific properties. This is where you can start to fold in the social media side of things. And again, getting that brand, a little bit of brand awareness out there.

You really are, we've got the brand focus here. We're moving from reputation to recognition. Yes, people, you know, people need to know about you, but now they need to keep knowing about you. They need to continue to see your brand. And not just on the guest side, on the owner's side as well, because that is a path that I think, I'm trying to think someone did a LinkedIn post the other day

about they had a homeowner who was secret chopping. I mean, that was essentially going through. Oh, yeah, I think I saw that. Yeah, JJ. That's who it was, JJ. Yeah, I think it was talking about he didn't fill out a, he didn't do a, I was a little confused by the post, to be honest with you, because he talked about someone who made a dark booking, but their payment didn't go through.

So I was confused how that even went through. But that's, yeah, maybe something like that. The story there. But it is. Yeah, but how about that? That's pretty rare, but that's interesting. I mean, very, like, it's something that, we did Venturi's secret shopped people to see how they're doing it, but it was more as a sales tactic.

But I know that there are homeowners out there that do something very similar, is that they will reach out to X, Y, and Z property managers in an area. and they will check on the responsiveness and check on like how professional the communication is. And I think in his case, they had the, they weren't buckling. They had the process in place. They had the operations in place that they stood true. And that's what the homeowner was looking for. So I do.

I think that as much as anything. I mean, I think it's less about money on the homeowner marketing side of things. It really is. I mean, you want to have budget. I'm not going to say. I mean, if I can do more with the $2,000 homeowner marketing budget, than I can with a $500 homeowner marketing budget. But so much more of it comes to, I think,

the ability to close and the ability to really show your value where, not saying that doesn't happen on the traveler side, because certainly you have to, you know, you have to have, I think it's, you have to have to have the inventory to get people through the door. Whereas in this case, you have to set yourself up as, be all the end all and the people that are going to, that people are willing to put the trust in. It's a million dollar assets of two million dollar asset we've talked about. Yeah, well, I think the one thing I would add to add into what you're saying is that this is why

the distribution of leads is so unequal. Because when, if you go in your website and then you go on the best property manager in your market, who's got 10x their reviews and maybe they're even better, right? Like who has much more properties in their website, who has a better looking website, they've got a better looking brand, they have more presence, they have more experience. Like, again, you have to really think about it objectively. Why would a homeowner choose the fifth biggest, the seventh biggest, the 10th biggest property manager when they can choose the person that's the biggest. If that person has a good reputation, which to be fair, not all the

big, quote unquote, big guys in a given market do have a good reputation. But if they do have a good reputation and they seem to be doing a good job, the homeowners are going to be very biased towards that. They're going to be like, why would I, you know, try to go with this guy who's still figuring it out or this gal who's still figuring it out and is early on in their, you know, journey versus over here. It doesn't mean that you don't, you're not going to get a shot. But Again, our biggest clients that we work with some of these big markets, they'll get 40 to 50 homeowner leads a week, you know, and they're not even doing necessarily the volume of marketing and advertising that Paul's reverend to here on the homeowner side. So it's, it is quote

unquote, unfair. You can say that, right? I think the same thing happens on dating sites. I think we did this analogy one time where it's like the best looking people on dating sites get, especially men, get like 10 or 20 or 30 X the number of responses that a so-called average looking guy is, which is not fair. You know, as an average looking guy, I'm lucky enough to do that. You know, it's like, that's how it goes, right? Like, the distribution of leads is very uneven. distribution of interest is very uneven. We could say the same thing about a lot of things in life. You know, social media accounts. If there's a thousand social media accounts in your given feed at a moment, certain accounts get shown a lot more. Certain content gets shown a lot more lately

on these feeds and on these platforms. Like that's, it almost is like a little bit of a winner winner seizes all or winner seizes a lot type of scenario. And I think that applies both to the guest marketing side and the homeowner side. So it's almost like if you're at this mid-range level, you know, five, seven thousand dollars a month of advertising, it's like you've made some amazing progress, but it's like, you're not really where you need to be. Like, our biggest clients that we work with will spend $50,000 a month on Google ads. Like, we have a client in the, you know, one of the major markets in the, in the Southeast that spends $50,000 a month of Google ads because they are the biggest in their market or they're more of the top right, too,

let's say, depending on the week, it's like one property manager will have a little bit more than the other. But as a result, you know, they have their own problems. Don't get me wrong, but they get their, they get a higher volume of throughput everywhere. Like their ads can be better for guests. They get more homeowner leads as a result. They have a problem of scale, which is another thing that if you go look at the key data dashboard slides from Durham, they talked about, which is that the bigger you get, unfortunately, what can happen is the quality slips a little bit. It's hard to keep 500 homes and as good as shape it as it is to keep 100 homes in good shape, but you have all this extra revenue coming in. You have all this extra

dollars coming in. You can do a lot more with it. So I guess with that will kind of come to this last idea, which is like the $10,000 budget. Again, you know, some people listening may think that that's a lot. Some people may listening may think that's not a lot. I will say it's pretty common. You know, if you're the biggest, you know, company in a market, this is kind of probably a floor if you're in a reasonably sized market. And again, the ceiling that I've seen is much closer to like 50 or $60,000 a month in total advertising spend, if not more. And that's even, I'm just talking advertising spent. The client that I'm referring to actually has, they're paying us the fee. They have an in-house marketing team. They have several people on working as well.

So it's a company doing, you know, many tens of millions dollars in gross booking revenue. Why wouldn't their marketing budget, you know, be at least $50,000 a month, if not closer to $100,000 a month depending on the season and stuff like that? So anyways, the ceiling can go a higher from here. But at this point, it's like you can do everything for the most part. It's just a question of how much can you do. I'd say on the guest marketing side. So you can obviously spend a lot more on guest marketing advertising. You know, you can do multiple targeting campaigns on social media just for prospecting. So you could have, you could hire at this stage of video agency to go and go shoot video content for you and use those as ads. You could have a probably a full-time

person on your team who's at least spending a lot of time on marketing and maybe even have an agency fee on top of that and still money left over advertising. At that point, it's getting a little bit tighter, but it's feasible, right, at this level, I think, to do that. So yeah, you're doing a lot more of new things. Again, are you doing anything different from like a channel perspective? In my mind, no, you're still focused on search social email, but it's just you can do paid and organic on each of those channels to get, you know, significantly better results. And I think at that point, you have more budget for things like creative, you're more budget for things like, you know, just testing different things and kind of figuring it out. Like, you can peel 500 or $1,000 off every month,

just the test. And if it doesn't work, like, your marketing engine isn't failing. You know, you can't do that at the smaller level. You can't afford to test much. Like what you're testing is your main budget. You're not testing like a side budget. So those are kind of some things that come to mind is like at this point you're doing pretty much everything. And you have the ability to do testing. And you're still focused though on search social email, but you're doing those things

probably at a higher level of quality, I would say to some degree. And more consistency. Like your email is going out every other week. Like on schedule, on time. You've got a dedicated person or an agency that's doing your email. You know, you don't stress so much about like, oh, I got to do the email and I got to do social media and I got to do this and I got to do that. Like your life does get a little bit easier at this stage because you can

higher experts or specialists in that given area. And as a result, the results can get, you know, a lot more predictable at this stage because at this point, you probably have enough data on what hasn't worked and what has worked and you double down on what's working. So those are kind of some of my thoughts that I've seen at this level. And really, you know, is a lot higher than that when I see some companies that fit into that pocket. Yeah. I think a lot of it's the same way here. And now I would say you probably have the opportunity to add more channels on the owner's side of things as we look at, you know, this time around adding 1,500. So we're up to about 2,500 on the owner side of things. But I do. I think,

you know, again, this is how, depending on how you're defining what sales versus marketing is, but this is probably where you're looking at like putting a nice spiff for a bonus out there for some of the offline owner marketing. So you go to those realtor events and you're saying, okay, well, I'm dedicating $5,000 a month, $2,500 a month to lead. So maybe $500,000. per lead that comes through or something like that or closed lead, something like that. I can see that being effective. LinkedIn is one of those spots where I would try it, certainly. It is.

This is certainly where you're going to hit, this is the social media channel where you're going to hit the high net worth individuals or the specific professions, whether it is investors, whether it is realtors, in your specific feeder markets there. So I do think that's something that we've tried. it. You know, it is. It's one of those things where if you need to get in front of new people and you can't think of ways to other ways to do that, LinkedIn's a great way to do it. I still think that this is also where investing some of that money into your data itself, you know, that we don't have that on the list here, actually, but I do think that that that's

something that if you have a list of 500 people, 300 people, 100 people, whatever that is, find out ways that you can enrich that information because you may be missing out on some data that is going to help you close that deal down the road based on some of their psychographic information or some other items there. So I do think that one of the areas that everybody can get better in on the owner's side is data. Like that that is. You want to have the best, most accurate, most up-to-date data because ultimately, you know, which is more important, the marketing campaigns or the list you're marketing too, it's the list. I mean, we can put together of the most beautiful campaigns in the world or, you know, the flashiest, whatever it has to be.

But if we're serving it up to the wrong people, then ultimately that's kind of that scary part there. And I think, you know, once we do get into this scale budget area, the one thing that is, the one thing that is the easiest to do with the bigger budget is waste money. So, that's a good way to end. Awesome to have a big budget. But there's almost a guarantee that you will waste more money than you started with some of those lower budget stays. And that's that's testing. That's that's that's marketing. I mean, that's, that's what we do.

That's, you're, you're going to throw some stuff at the wall that doesn't stick. You're, you're, this is just the reality. But having that additional budget does give you room to play, gives your room to test, give you your room to experiment. And I think it's, if you can think about it as experimentation, as opposed to, I just threw away a couple thousand dollars. That's the key. But again, you can't be silly with it.

You have to be, you know, planning. You have to be, you know, dedicated to, okay, we're going to add this channel these, these months and you're going to do this. And you're going to see the results. You need it's trust, but verify and verify and see what's happening. Because if the vanity metrics say, oh, we're getting so much more traffic, but the underlying KPIs say nothing much is changing. Let's reevaluate, readjust and try some new things.

So that is, that's the tricky. It is the tricky. about. I think that's one thing that when people are, you know, again, almost going back to what you brought up at the very beginning, which I think is so important in this whole conversation around what is someone's mindset and are they willing to at least kind of lean into this? Maybe it's not their favorite thing in the world to do. Gosh knows, there's things in my business that I don't love doing. But it's like, we've got to dedicate X amount of time or X amount of hours to these things and at least get good at them. Now, are you, if marketing is the thing you hate the most of doing in

your business, are you ever going to love it the most? Probably not. Although I will say, like, you will benefit from getting better at this. And maybe that's what you need to see. Maybe you haven't liked marketing before because you've tried a few things. You put almost no money behind it and the results weren't there. So you think, ah, this felt like a waste of time. You know, let me retreat back into my revenue management cave where I change things and I get quick results and it feels a lot more, you know, sustainable or it feels like

a lot more tangible, like the changes I'm making or lead into a better outcome. But I will say this. Like if you're the owner of the small business, right? and the success of your small business mostly comes down to the awareness of people have about your company, how many people sign up for you, all those things. And it's like really hard to give up on those things and say,

oh, I'm just going to delegate it to somebody else or I'm just going to give it to somebody else. Like you have to be willing to say, I'm going to at least get good at this. Maybe it will never be my favorite thing and that's okay. It doesn't have to be your favorite thing. I know there's a lot of clients who work with that have really successful businesses and marketing is not their favorite thing.

But it's really hard to shun it completely or put people in a box over here and say, yeah, you guys kind of figured out because an external person, myself included, and I will admit that freely, is never going to be as dialed into your company into its success as you are. If you're the owner of the small business, like essentially you are the captain of the ship, you know, deciding where things are going to go. And if you're not the one who's putting the most effort in overall, then like it's really hard to see how other people are going to work harder than you in your own business. So you've got to figure out how to, you know, get those things dialed in. And when you do, like the results are there. But, you know, one thing I do believe,

like this is my analogy when it comes to like SEO, for example, you mentioned like, trying things and seeing if you're getting results from them. Yes, things like SEO do take time, but I've always believed you see progress along the way. So like at least we should see more impressions coming in. Maybe the clicks aren't there yet, but like we see more impressions coming in. Or hey, we tried all this new direct mail. We should see like, this sounds silly, but almost like more bouncebacks coming through. You know, because it's like, all right, like that at least proves that they're being sent out, you know, or obviously we need to see a higher volume of leads coming through to justify additional, you know, marketing expenses and things like that.

And again, all those lights can be perfect or all those leads going to convert? No, we know that's not the case. And like generally speaking, if you get a much higher volume of leads, the quality might go down a little bit. But like there are indicators that you can track that tells you or that indicates to you if you're making progress or not. And like if you're doing a lot of marketing activity and literally nothing is coming back in, then like, yes, you're probably on the wrong track and you need to adjust course and pivot out of there. But if you're seeing like progress along the way of like, yeah, we got four more leads. They didn't close yet. But like I know I'm headed in the right direction because I got four more leads than I got the week prior. That's super

valuable. So those will kind of be some of my, you know, closing thoughts here. We can put a on this one, Paul. It was a bit of a longer one, but I think we had a lot to get through here. So yeah, I mean, you know, these are different ideas. Three, five thousand, you know, three, thousand, five thousand, ten thousand. Again, you could easily pick six, ten and twenty if you want to. It doesn't really matter. The point being, like, these are some ideas that I've seen kind of shift and change over time. I think you want to get your foundation, get your kind of fundamentals in place first. Like, we've got to, like, have the wheels on the car tuned in properly before we kind of try to start to run a race. We've got to figure out, like, what's high intent?

Like, I just need to get my first few wins on that smaller budget level. And then, And once I find some results, I've got to just keep doubling down, doubling down, you know, figure out what's working well, do a lot more of it. And that's where a lot of the results come from. So any other parting thoughts or should we put a, put a about one. I think we wore this one out pretty good. Hopefully, hopefully you're budgeting something. If you're falling in one of these buckets, awesome.

If not, you know, hopefully you've got someone to help you guide the ship and, you know, find that right destination for us. Exactly. Well, I think they've got to guide themselves to something else, Paul, before they depart for today. And that is a podcast review. So go to your iTunes or Spotify download player. Again, the data would indicate to us that that's where the most listens come from.

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