Heads In Beds Show - How & Why To Build Guest & Owner Personas For Your Vacation Rental Marketing

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

In this episode Conrad and Paul dive into building a persona before diving into marketing. Why do personas matter? How does messaging/copy tie into your persona + a lot more.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing🔗 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. Hey there, Paul. How's it going? Another wonderful day here. I'd say it's in the middle of November

or beginning of November here now. I don't know. Weather's changing a little bit on us. I feel like we just got over conference season. There's that lull between before we start to hit holidays and doing stuff like that, but I know people are already planning. How are you doing? It's that weird gray area time of year, I would say. Yeah yeah we've got a vacation next week actually planned so that's on my radar thanksgiving we did it last year at a beach and we're going to the beach again this year so that'll be exciting looking forward to that be the fun and things going on but i thought you'd be in a better mood given the all that sort of stuff it is it's fun to have a backup quarterback come into the game and then get replaced by another backup quarterback that was just signed to your roster on Tuesday of that week.

But it's the, yes, the NFL gods smiled upon the Vikings this week with at least an enjoyable game to watch. I'm sure Fox was happy that they got to put that on with like their fourth crew, which I don't know. If anybody here listens to Mark Flaherty, he's not my favorite. He just, he doesn't have a lot of great observations, I don't think. So we'll take it with that, but win's a win, as they say. Yeah, I got to be happy with that. And who knows, might be a playoff season for us ahead yet,

or it could be a fantastic rebuilding process that we're about to begin. So yeah, we were doing some sports slash vacation rental comparisons, which is something I do quite a bit on the shows that I do host the two that I do host. And I don't know if the listener actually likes it or not. I feel like there's some listeners who listen to sports slash vacation rental comparison. And they're like, you guys, I don't even understand what you're saying, nor does it make any sense. So I worry about that. But until you email me and tell me,

I guess I won't really know. But it's a good example. In my mind, we were joking before we hit record about this idea that if someone comes in and does a good job right away, like you can usually tell that they're going to be a good fit. And if it's a cleaner who like goes above and beyond this, oh, I noticed that this was all wrong, and I went and fixed it. Or if it's a quarterback who has two days of practice, a day of practice doesn't even know anybody's name and goes in and wins, like probably good signs. You never know what you're going to get sometimes. And that's why it's entertaining to watch. That is often the case. But one thing that's also entertaining to watch is having success with marketing. I don't know if you feel the same way.

I do. I generally, I do. Okay, good. I was a little worried. You didn't immediately say yes. So I spent some time, we've been talking about the book. So I'm not going to talk about the book over and over again. But one of the first things that we say in the book, Mastering Vacational Marketing, you can buy it on amazon.com. I'll put a link in the show notes, is on page 24, we talk about guest personas. And I thought it'd be interesting today to do a guest persona conversation. We can go through that. But then you have a lot of insight on the owner persona, which I don't really touch on in here at all. We need a master vacation rental owner marketing book from Paul Manzi,

just a little nugget of an idea. Manzi 2024, we could come back and play with that. I joke a little bit, but it's actually something that we put in our outline as an idea a little while ago. And I think it's a good topic because ultimately guest personas does describe how you do a lot of marketing, how you might target certain ads online,

the type of content that you might want to create, a type of property that you might want to create, which kind of photography, videography, et cetera, that you put with the property. So what's your overall perspective if someone was like, I don't really understand what a guest persona is, how would you explain it to them so they could wrap their marketing right around it? I think it is. It's describing what that, not what an individual traveler is, but the idea of collectively who is coming, who is engaging with your business there. So it is, it's maybe there where they're

located. It may be some of the psychographic information that they're, that they exhibit online or elsewhere. It could be the size of their family, the type of their family. There's a lot that goes into it. And I think more often than not, we got get pigeonholed into those areas of it's demographics, it, its numbers, its statistics. That's fine. You can build in some of the statistics into a persona, but I think it's more than that. It's really being able to tell a story, tell a, as we talk about it on a product site, the user story. How is someone going to use your website?

How is someone going to use your rentals? How is someone going to use your business? Use your business feels a little odd or off-putting there. But yeah, how they're going to enjoy this day. So really allowing you to put a better overall experience together for these guests and owners as we look at that as well through all of your marketing efforts and on-site experiences that they're going to have, all of that. How do you feel? Did I miss any parts there? What, how do you feel about, or where do you draw your lines as you're trying to create those guests and owner personas? Yeah. It's so funny. Cause in the actual book,

when we talk about it, I give a persona example that has, I would say demographic and psychographics interleaved together, right? Which is like, you know, perhaps Hannah is a value conscious traveler in her mid forties who lives in Virginia and she loves to go to the beach in Florida. interleaved together, right? Which is like, you know, perhaps Hannah is a value conscious traveler in her mid forties who lives in Virginia and she loves to go to the beach in Florida. That's a mix of both demographics and psychographics. So the demographic information is lives in Richmond or lives in Norfolk and is 35 to 45 female,

makes between 55,000 and $85,000 a year. And she would enjoy a one week stay at my condo in Daytona Beach, Florida, or whatever the case may be, or Fort Lauderdale. Sorry, that's the example from the book. I want to get the example properly. That's a mix of both demographic and psychographic information. But a lot of psychographic information is what does she like to do? What are her preferences? What other media does she consume? I think you can learn a lot by people by like, how much would you know about a person if you could see all their just like their web history, like just what their news, what they're into, what they're reading, just stuff like that, not even anything

bad. I feel like you can learn a lot from just poking around and understanding the behaviors of what someone values and what they spend time consuming. And that's ultimately my mind what a lot of good guest persona marketing looks like is just understanding what they care about and what they're after when they're going on a stay. And to be fair, the same person can fit into multiple guest personas in my mind because my wife and I are planning a trip potentially next year that's just her and I.

Really, we don't do that quite often. So our criteria that we're going to have for that trip that might come in the spring of next year is completely different than the one we're taking in seven or eight days from now, which is going to be, okay, we're going to kids. We have to value a pack and play and certain different things that we're going to value. So my credit card is going to be used in both transactions, but you'd be inappropriate to

use that as the only measurement for the trip because there's different experiences. Or at VRMA, we got a chance to stay with a client, Matt Deal from Element Vacation Homes, which was great. But the property that we ended up staying at was more of a family-friendly property, I would argue. But it served the purpose perfectly for our trip, which is like a lot of individual space. Everyone got their own room, big house, and we actually saved a lot of money doing it that way versus booking individual hotel rooms, which at the mouse are pretty expensive from a cost perspective. So things shift and change. Did you say one person is one persona is not really the way to think about it. It's more like a way of traveling and the experience that they have while you travel. I think you said it well there, that you can build an actual marketing idea behind.

And I find that the clients that we have that have success with us pretty early on have thought about that a little bit more. Whereas some clients we get on the phone early on when we're considering working with them, and it's a little bit more like, oh yeah, pretty much anybody, they don't have a really well thought out process. Whereas the clients that we have that are a little more successful in my mind will say, yeah, 80% of our clients come from these four markets or these four states they're driving in or 20% of them fly. They have most of their groups are between three and six people. It's typically family, sometimes mixed couples, mixed groups, et cetera. And these are the things they look for. They value this, they value that. We tried this, they don't value that. And that's

what you can do. Because once you understand what the guest persona is, you can figure out what they value and don't value ultimately. Yeah. I think it's not the same on the owner side of things, but it is still very similar. I think you do get into more of people who are looking, I think maybe it's a little more straightforward. There aren't as many personas and you can create as many or as few personas as you really want to there. But it is when we're trying to identify those owner personas, I think it is if you see it as an investment property and kind of falling under that, we'll say that the leg of that, we're going to do a triangle here or the tripod here. They're going to be some type of investors where they're really looking to make money.

They're going to own that home and it's going to be historic and they're going to want to stay in that home and use it as a vacation rental themselves. Or that third kind of gray area, that mix between the two of, it is, I want to make money, but it's also my property that I want to be able to use when I can. And again, there's far more, you can go into a lot more granularity and that only helps you make that messaging match their needs as they're looking at it on the owner side there. So it is, I think it's in any way you're looking at it. I think that's the thing is that you can create as many personas as you want to, and you can create as many campaign strategies, whatever you want to offer those personas. But really,

a lot of it has to do with how you're reaching them, how you're getting that messaging across to them in a way that it resonates. I think that's really what it's all about is communicating and messaging to them in a way that resonates back to their needs, what they want to find, whether it's a home, a property manager, or an ultimate vacation or destination there. That I would make at a strategy level between an owner marketing persona and a guest marketing persona is that the guest is probably only accomplishing one or two things for the most part, right? And the level of trust that a guest needs to book with you in a way isn't very high.

Like a guest will take a little bit of a chance if they're like, hey, this property looks nice. They've got some good reviews and they'll inherit a little bit of risk, I think, in some respect to get the property that they're after. An owner is looking to eliminate risk when they're choosing a property. And they're very scared about making the wrong decision. And that's why the decision making process can be quite a bit longer, right? We've talked about this in the past where an owner might get a postcard from a property

manager through Venturi or some other means, and they might spend eight months holding onto that postcard and then they make a call. That doesn't really happening on the guest marketing side. It's sure you could argue, yeah, we've always wanted to stay here. We just, it didn't work last year. It's going to work next year. But when they go do that search again, they probably will do an open search. They'll search on Google, they'll search on Airbnb, they'll search on VRBO, and then we'll maybe work their way back to you if you really have what they're after. Also an interesting discussion to be had here about like scarcity of inventory where you control very rare inventory, then it's go ahead and look for another four bedroom legal property in Napa Valley, right? They don't exist. There's five of them. And I have two of them. So therefore, you're probably gonna book with me versus I have a one bedroom condo in Myrtle Beach. It's congratulations, you and there's that whole layer to discuss, but we'll pull that apart for pull it to the side for a second.

whole layer to discuss, but we'll pull that apart for pull it to the side for a second. But yeah, I guess the way that I think about it is the owner is going to have so much more consideration before they make that move. Whereas the guest, like I said, is just willing to inherit a little bit more risk. Like they're, they don't want to have their vacation ruined, but it feels like, Hey, if you're offering me something that this property manager wants $2,000 for, and I get it for 1200 bucks over here, I'll do it barring some kind of major red flag. So yeah, idea. Some people perpetuate this idea online, for example, on LinkedIn do it barring some kind of major red flag. So yeah, idea. Some people perpetuate this idea online, for example, on LinkedIn, that you have to do lots of things to build trust to get a guest booking. I don't think you have to do that many things. I think

you better do three or four things well, and just prove that you're good. And you'll get at least some momentum from it. But with owners, you have to do it's actually a lot harder. It is. Yeah, it's I think I think it when it comes down to it these homes are quarter million dollar homes half million dollar homes million multi-million homes you can't find anything and you'd have to be in a pretty pretty obscure location there but yeah maybe it's probably some people out there in some lake markets in that that are in that area. But you are trusting someone with your asset. It's probably not your primary residence. It's a secondary home in a lot of cases. And it is, you're trusting these people, the property managers, to find the right travelers. And it is, it's that dual effect

of, do I trust you to find the right travelers to not break my home? I think there's a lot more to it than that, certainly. But if I'm a vacation rental, or excuse me, if I'm a second homeowner and I'm vetting someone, that's probably going to be pretty much front and center in my concerns, at least initially, is how are you going to take care of my home? How am I going to make sure that if and when I come, everything still works? How am I going to make sure that all these repairs and everything like that are not something I have to worry about or concern myself about? So it is building the trust. I think it's why it does take multiple touch points.

At Ventura, we see it. It is that direct mail piece. It is the email, consistent email. It's keeping that top of mind. And I think additionally on the owner side of things with when you're building out that persona, it's taking timing into consideration too. There's really no, there's seasonality obviously in anything that we do, but travelers, you can travel pretty much all year long. Yes, you can sign up to have your property managed all year long, but there are certainly times of the year and times just within a cycle. Think about the real estate market. Think about the housing market. Think about all these other things. Think about regulation. There's a lot that go in there. So I think there's more that needs to be incorporated into that owner persona in thinking

about all the things they're considering when they are deciding which property or whether they're going to manage it themselves or whether they're going to find someone to manage it for them, whether they're going to choose a vacasa or an evolve to semi-manage it for them or co-host it with them. Yeah, it's the greater the complexity of the decision-making process. I think the more detailed you have to be in creating those personas, because you do have to uncover some of those, some of what's under the rock there as far as, okay, so they know all of these things, but this is the unknown and this is the unknown universally across all property managers. So how do I take it into that differentiation phase and

make sure that people are knowing me from any of the half dozen other property managers in my area? And I think that's, in my mind, that just reinforces the need to have these personas mapped out a little bit more clearly. Because the problem that I see with what you've described in the owner side is that you build a persona and you say okay i'm looking for paul and his wife and they own a second home on this lake in wisconsin and it's beautiful and for someone to get all those things lined up characteristically i would say this too in order for someone to get a second home a vacation home they're financially successful most likely whatever they're doing barring their parents or sleep with them or something like that but for someone to go out there and make enough money to be like yeah yeah, we're going to go have $100,000 that we're

going to put in cash wise on this deal, and we're going to buy this home. It takes a lot of success to have that. So even if they don't know anything about the vocational industry, most people in that situation are not stupid. And I think sometimes the average typical like, owner marketing that I see, I'm not saying that it assumes that they're stupid, but it assumes that they're not going to carefully question everything that they say. So they believe that they claim something that will be true to the target persona to go back to the topic of what we started on. So if I say to the investor that I'm going to deliver excellent returns, then that is a credible statement.

But I think what they fail to realize is that is not a credible statement to that person on the other side, because you haven't proven it. So you can put on, and we talked about this on the copywriting side, you can put a bullet point that says excellent cash flow, great returns, great yield, great property care, all those things. That's great. Those are nice messaging points that, and I would argue they're probably the correct messaging points, but if they don't believe you, then it's all for naught. It's all for nothing. And the same thing applies on the guest side. If you say on a website, we deliver a, people say this all the time, a five-star experience. We have excellent

hospitality. We have concierge, we have all this stuff, but it doesn't feel and look like that's something that actually is evident in the reviews or evident in the actual property itself. Or if the photography is sloppy or if the property description has typos or these types of things, the guest almost performs this like unconscious like bias, I feel like a little bit and same on the homeowner side, right? If you're the best property manager in Texas, then wouldn't you have a thousand units? So when you go to the website and there's two units, like that just doesn't seem plausible. Like it's not a believable claim. So sometimes I wonder if the messaging isn't wrong, Paul, but it's like the forcing that

people try to do sometimes with trying to make a claim that they can't actually back up is where people get into a lot of trouble. Both more on the homeowner side, that's kind of where I started, but also it can happen on the guest side too. I think you're right. We can, and I've, I'm a big offender. I was a big offender where top rated in X area, top rated in X area. Not everybody's top rated and that's how there is to it. I think we use that more general copy as you're talking about there, because it's what we know that, or we think that the guest or the owner wants to see. But I think if we pulled that back a little further and said,

okay, actually what they want to see is they want to see reality. They want to see some type of truth there. And when you have those personas built out extensively, what trust items are important to them. Maybe it is a matter of, I need to make the last thing going back to your pack and play or anything like a crib. The last thing you want to do is say, we have a pack and play on site or we have a crib on site, and then you don't have it. It's those small details, but for your family, that's not a small detail anymore. That's a, oh my goodness, now we don't know what we're going to do for the next five, six, seven days. I think just saying you have every amenity without defining that amenity, in a bathroom somewhere. That's not exactly, I think we have to make sure that we understand really what that guest is looking for. And in a lot of cases, it's an honest assessment of what you're going to do. Same thing with the owner. They don't want to hear that

you're going to earn them 15 or 20% more if you're not going to do it. Like that's just dreams. That's just expectations that ultimately you're not going to be able to fulfill upon. So I think there's that just mutually agreed upon agreement of sorts of, this is the SLA of what I'm going to give you. And every persona has to match up to something like that. Yeah. again, when we're digging just this deep into it, it's one of those things you get to, you begin to understand just how important all this is because everything you're doing

with these personas should be going somewhere into your business, onto your website. It would be a silly exercise, I think, to just create guest personas and then not use them. And actually put together a marketing campaign or implement some of the things into your website, into your marketing materials, whether it's your guidebook, whether it's your next postcard for

your owners. That is the key is that you can have all the personas you want, but if you're not using them, leveraging them, they're useless. I think I mentioned the client that we had before where they have a lot of lodging on a golf course, but many of their guests don't care about golf at all. So when you sign up for the email list, you have three options, which I'm interested in staying and playing golf. So both together, I want to stay here

and I want to play here. I'm interested in lodging only or golf only because there are people who just come and play the course and they don't stay there. And those three personas, basically, we've all mapped out in the back end, get radically different marketing messaging once you check one of those three radial buttons and then hit submit on the pop-up. It's, of course, a fixed discount pop-up. Me and my fixed dollar discounts pop-up. That is what I like to do.

So it's a simple thing, but ultimately they check, I'm interested in a package, golf and lodging together, and they get sent down, here's our packages, here's what we're going to do. You're going to play here it's going to be fantastic here's all the benefits of doing that right boom that converts pretty good then we have the separate one that's golf only and then we don't talk at all about the bill is in the lodging and where to stay and we talk about the courses and oh by the way we can also book you these other courses and here's our tea time link and click here to book and that's that messaging and then of course there's one that's doesn't even really mention golf at all maybe briefly a little sentence here and there oh by the way we're on a

golf course and it's very nice and beautiful and all this kind of stuff but you're only 20 minutes away from the beach so you can get in the car and drive there you can park here you can do this you could do that and we're actually great value to stay here even if you don't choose to partake in the golf courses because to be honest the golf industry is like a little bit slowed down in this particular market especially during the off season and it's better to stay there and they'd rather have some occupancy even if people don't care about the course, then not have any occupancy, which is the other alternative. So I say that to just give a very practical example, which is some of these things don't have to be massively

complicated. It could be asking a simple question when they sign up. Do you typically travel with your pet? Yes or no? Do you typically are you coming as a group? Are you not coming as a group? Or you could just tell even by people looking at what properties that they're actually clicking on the website, you can make some reasonable assessments and judgments of what they're after, especially if you have a pretty wide variety of inventory, which I would argue actually makes marketing and sometimes the persona generation piece a little bit harder because if you have condos and homes and stuff that's way off the beach, that's more affordable and stuff that's right on the beach, it's really expensive, then

you actually end up with a 20 home company that has five different guest personas that you're trying to market to. Some of the clients that we work with that have some of the best click-through rates and success rates and all their marketing advertising are clients that do one thing and they really just have one type of home, almost just like copy and paste it over and over again with some small variations, right? Like this one's four bedrooms, this one's six bedrooms. But ultimately, we have a client that I think we talked about before, who's on this lake in North Carolina has a really high average booking value $7,000 to $8,000 average booking value. It's nothing but nice luxury homes on the lake. And they're all in different locations around the lake, they range in size,

some are a little more grand, some are a little more regular, so to speak. But as PPC converts to like the best of any of our clients, because it's you can pretty much book any home on the site. When you go to the site, anyone clicking through is a potential potential guest there's not a lot of massaging that we need to do on the messaging side of things it's we have the best homes on this lake in the entire region if you don't believe it click through and check it out and you'll see you'll we'll prove it to you very quickly so i guess that's part of it too is like everything in my mind from guest persona is not a theoretical document or spreadsheet that's sitting somewhere it's that's like really just a starting point that's why it's on page 24 of the book.

It's like the starting point. Then all the messaging that you do after that maps back to those things from a guest marketing persona. And the same thing applies to owner, right? That's an idea. And then you have to test it. Like we joked about it and we're dancing around it. But if you just talk about revenue nonstop,

then part of it is you're only ever going to attract people that are only ever focused on revenue and nothing else. So you're giving yourself, and maybe you're okay with that. Maybe you're an investor too. And you go, that's what people really care about. But I would argue if I was looking at it from a property management standpoint, it might be end up being the worst owner to have in some respect, because they're only focused on revenue. So when you don't hit revenue numbers,

they're up your tail sideways, right? They're upset that you're not hitting the numbers that you claimed you were going to hit. Look at the environment we're in now. It's very different from the environment of 20 months ago. And you're putting yourself in a hard spot, right? Whereas a homeowner, that's just, I want you to keep it in good shape. I don't even mind if it's, oh, we don't rent to any guests on this day. We don't rent to any guests on July 4th. Actually, unfortunately, we've had property damage in the past. The investor would go, the hell you aren't, right? And he'd say, you booked that thing at 2000 bucks a night. That's my chance to make my hay. And the casual set person goes, oh, you know what? We want to go to the lake for 4th of July. Anyways, honey, let's go up there and stay in the property.

And they don't care that they're losing $3,000 in revenue. So it's a totally different mindset. And you have to talk about those people completely different in your marketing and advertising for sure. And it is. And just that example right there. One of the conversations I had last year at Burma with one of the partner's property managers at that point was, I'm just so sick of fielding

emails, fielding calls from people, from these owners who just aren't happy with how much they've made. I said, you know that your landing page, your direct mail, your email, everything says, I'm going to help you make 20% more. We are feeding the beast that you are not enjoying right now. And I just think that we get into that mindset of, oh, this is what people want to hear. Oh, this is what people want to hear. This is what this specific person wants to hear. This isn't what everybody wants to hear. So yeah, that was that, as you were saying that I can remember that conversation happening and he just, it was that eyes wide open moment for him of, oh yeah, you're right. We should probably change that. But it is going back. I want to double tap

on that email marketing thing too, because I think email is something that you can leverage so much more. Get the messaging out there. That's always important. But one of the things I think is under leveraged is how you use those emails to build personas. And I love the idea of doing that little survey, asking that question of, hey, how do you travel? Hey, what's most important to you? Hey, this and that. Because then you can tailor so much more and not just tailor the content moving forward, but you are.

Maybe you're understanding that there's a new guest or owner persona. And I just think that email is something that you've got them. They're a captive audience. They've given you, they've opted in to some extent there. Take advantage of that. Please make sure you're using that because all that's going to do is allow you to ensure that they can, they want to stick on your email marketing list long-term. And certainly that you have more personas and more communication styles that you can

develop over time and campaigns and strategies and all that fun stuff. Yeah. It's kind of like a picture, like it only has one pitch. Like that's what a lot of homeowner marketing can look like at times. And even some guest marketing, I would argue to some degree. And the best pitchers have five pitches that they can throw or four or something like that. And that would be my approach with the homeowner. And to your point, too, we have a client who's very adamant or likes to give discounts to

it's like firefighters, cops, nurses. He has these whole categories of people that he wants to give discounts to. Because you know what I've learned, though? They tend to be the best guests. So I don't even mind giving up a little bit of revenue. Because when I host a firefighter in my property and I say, hey, discounts for heroes, that kind of thing, they come in and say, oh, yeah, you don't have issues, that sort of thing. Because when I host a firefighter in my property and I say, hey, discounts for heroes, that kind of thing, they come and say, you don't have issues, that sort of thing. And that's his experience. I don't know if that's the case or not.

Somebody's telling me. And that's a good example in my mind too of the homeowner, maybe the homeowner that has that property that's not an investment property won't make the necessary investments to make the property great. So there's your struggle, right? It's the example that Scott and Adam and I have talked about before on the other show that I do. And it's they don't want to get rid of grandma's blanket that's sitting on the back of the couch. So like, that's grandma's blanket. It'll be really rude to not have that here when a guest comes to stays. And he's like, yeah, but it's ugly. So we're getting rid of it. We'll put somebody nice there. So the guest and really, I guess my rude in any way. So really, it's best that we put that in positive. And then they go, okay, you might be

right. It's a different tone of the conversation. Whereas an investor, if you could empirically prove, hey, if we put a hot tub in the conversation. Whereas an investor, if you could empirically prove, hey, if we put a hot tub in the back, it's going to cost you 20 grand, but we're going to make 50 grand in the next two years. They're like, all right, done. Here's your money. Like they'll make that decision a little bit more straightforward.

So there's pros and cons with all these different models when you understand what the persona is. And that's why you have to develop your persona. Sometimes over time, you might have to edit, adjust, modify, add in additional pieces about what you're looking for. I suspect your client who really wants to market and target or give discounts to firefighters didn't open his first property and go, yep, got to have firefighters in here. Like those are going to be great guests. He learned

that over time when he hosted some bad guests, hosted good guests and started to tie some threads together. So ultimately I think also the persona it's early in the process that I would recommend someone go through when they're building a marketing plan or looking at a marketing plan again, maybe even for 2024 for their business, but it shouldn't be something that I hope is static that never changes. I think you might want to update it perhaps every year, every other year, maybe it might even be a reasonably sufficient timeframe, just depending on what you're hoping to accomplish. And then you add an additional context and it informs a lot of what you're doing from a messaging perspective, which is,

I think really what we've picked out today. And also from an advertising perspective. So maybe we can go to that direction next. I know we don't have a ton of time left, but maybe we go towards advertising and talk a little bit about you can actually target a lot of your ads towards people who fit certain criteria, their location. This is where the demographics might come into play a little bit more straightforward, where they live, their ages, what they may have. So maybe talk about that for a second from like a digital advertising perspective. If you know who you're after, can you target ads to them online with those characteristics? Yeah, absolutely. And that's something that Google really put a big focus on using more of their audiences and not

just targeting to, but I think the one thing about that you begin to learn when you use the audiences and targeting, and we're going to do a specific episode on this topic, just making sure that you have those specific audiences, targeting those audiences through different channels, because there are so many different things that you can leverage. But one of the things that Google does is they start to aggregate people based on the search history, all of the things that they're doing online. And obviously Google's got a pretty good pulse on that. So you can use in-market and fit in these segments.

Like these people are avid investors. These people are interested in traveling to specific areas. These people just took out their homeowners. They just took out a home purchase loan. Just thinking these are actual audiences that Google has built into Google Ads in the back end of the platform. You don't have to target specifically those people, but the nice thing which you can do is put them on as an observation and see how they perform in contrast or comparison to other audiences that you've selected. So you really start to understand, okay, I think that avid investors are the right audience to be targeting with this. It's actually people who have owned a home or people who have considered purchasing a

home in the last six months or 12 months or something like that. And the nice thing is those lists are out there. It's not just Google who has them. There are display networks and there are other networks out there that are just constantly teaming with this type of information. out there that are just constantly teeming with this type of information. And I think that the more you understand what is out there, it helps inform your decision of, okay, what are the personas I'm actually looking for? Because that's the thing that I noticed and kind of my assumptions of, okay, we're going to put in these 26 audiences or affinity audience in market segments to observe and see. And yeah, as I've

said, investors, homeowners, these are things, oh yeah, these are absolutely going to perform higher than any of these other areas. Actually, it's commercial real estate. It performs people who are interested in commercial real estate or people who have traveled recently or people who are luxury owners or people who are interested in luxury shopping. You'll start to uncover some areas that maybe you didn't anticipate. And I think that's the other part of doing this process or this exercise is really maybe affirming some of the things that you, affirming some of your assumptions, but overcoming some of those assumptions as well and understanding, whoop, nope Nope, this is I assumed that this was happening, and it's not. And now I have a much better understanding of where the sticking point is

in some of my messaging and how I can improve that, I hope. Yeah, but what are your thoughts on how you move that into the advertising side of things? I think what helps you do a lot in my mind too, especially when you don't have a big budget at first, or you're trying to figure out how to get the most out of your budget is just narrow in. Cause by default, if you just let Facebook do whatever they want to do on targeting like that, then you're going to open a new ad set. You're going to target 280 million people in the U S and you're going to be like, well, that doesn't seem right. On the other side, there might be 500 people actually want to talk to you. Not 280. Now, it would be nice if we could just click a button that says, yeah, show me the second homeowners who

own this market. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. That would make things a lot easier. But you can narrow it down, right? And you can start to get a lot closer to what you're after. You can take a, I don't even know if shotgun's the right word. You can take a massive approach and narrow it down to be a little bit more like a sniper and be a little bit more specific. Same logic applies to guests. When we go and look at clients analytics, and we might say something to the effect of on the last 300 days, for example, you've got 100,000 website visitors and 78% of them have come from these four states. So it probably makes sense. Not saying that we're never going to get a booking from outside of these four states, but it probably makes sense to start here and then start to do, like you said, further

observation from there and figure out what's working best. Then in my mind too, it's always best to stack the cards in your favor when it comes to advertising and marketing and try to give yourself the easier ones first in theory. Certainly on the guest marketing side, you get a lot more guest bookings than you do owners signing up for most clients that we work with, obviously. So it's going to be a little bit easier to test over there. With owner, it's hard to test because there's just not as many different... There's not enough data that you're getting in on a consistent basis, unless you just have 50 owner leads coming in every month.

If so, email Paul. He'd like to know what's happening. That would be great. He'd like to get that one out a little bit better. No, that's the way that I see it, which is that the persona just helps guide you a lot better and you can make a lot better decisions from there. So that's the way I see it. And maybe that's a way to put a bow on this one, which is that the reason that it's so

important, the reason that we're talking about it today about building a persona is there really is foundational. That's why I do have it so early in the book is that it's that phase one thing, the tier one thing that we put together on our side of things to understand this is foundational. If you don't have, if you don't know like what the property is built for, and I would argue if you're building a property, if you're acquiring a property, who does that fit with your guest persona? Some clients that we have that are struggling a little bit, they have too much variety. They have different locations they're targeting.

We talked about this. Or they have a condo on their website sitting next to a $5 million beach home. It's great that you got the inventory. I'm happy. I'm not upset about that. But it's going to make it really challenging to market both things side by side. They're not the same person. So we can't drive in the same type of traffic and expect one person who might book the $1,000 a week condo to book the $10,000 a week home. It just doesn't happen. So it really helps you. I think the vocational manager sometimes needs to hear that, that they need to be a little

bit more focused. And you're probably better off having five of the same property in a market than 12 all over the place where you can't actually build any efficiencies or any movement. And the same thing in my mind applies to homeowner marketing. It's the same conversation. It's the other side of the coin around building and attracting the personas and audiences. So you've got to build the right guest personas. You've got to build the right owner personas. And the rest of marketing you do from there is actually a lot easier when you get the foundation in a little bit better setting. So yeah, I think that's all we got. Anything else before we tie a bow on this one? I think we're tied up there that was it is it's this is a

definitely fundamental and making sure that i think it's a good opportunity for people to read on read up a little more on those personas and check out your book there and maybe see if they can learn a little more about what you do with those personas moving forward too yeah no doubt that's awesome and we joke before we hit record too somehow paul's book arrived before mine as he he got a chip sent to him. The author didn't even get the book as soon as Paul did. But we do joke a little bit,

but we do appreciate it if you would be interested in checking it out. In the paperback version, it is page is 26, 27, 28, 30, like that kind of range is where we go through it. I'll put a link in the show notes so people can pick up a copy. I just saw I hit number one,

new releases in direct marketing yesterday. So we'll put a link in post about that. That's excellent. So we appreciate it. But more importantly, if you don't have time or if you already bought the book, thank you. If you have one more moment, what we'd also appreciate is it would be good of you,

Mr. Persona or Mrs. Persona that might be listening to us to go to your podcast app of choice at five stars. That way more people can see what we have to say, hear what we have to do. I don't know if that makes sense, but we appreciate any reviews. And we'll be back with you soon on the Heads and Beds show. Thanks so much.