Heads In Beds Show - Local Is Your Vacation Rental Marketing Advantage - Are You Using It?

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

In this episode Conrad and Paul break apart how "being local" actually looks in a marketing strategy across search, social, email and digital marketing channels. 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. Blink, Blink, the red recording light has begun. Paul, what is going on?

Good afternoon. What's up? Well, right now, you are far closer to my wife than I am. Oh, yeah? Where's she out? She will be touching down in your... lovely airport there in probably 10, 15 minutes.

Again, for better or worse, she's got to go to strip this. Oh, gotcha. As a boys weekend, I like boys' weekends. It'll be interesting to see, you know, what the reception is down in Myrtle Beach. And they're going to know about you. Nice. Well, if you lose contact with her, you know,

give me her last location. You know, I can put my best people on it, as it were. That's what I mean, it is. I figured it can't get in that much trouble. But yeah, that's what's, that's the new stuff in my to the woods this week. How are you doing, sir? Yeah, pretty good. Everyone's at home that I'm aware of, well, I mean, they're at school right now, but you know what I mean? They'll be back home shortly, as it were. So that's all good on my side of things. And yeah, hoping for,

hoping for a good week coming up here. I feel like we're in like that make it or break it mode a little bit, maybe with some of the demand for summer. You know, that's, that's the feeling that I've getting. And then at some point, we'll cross over and make it or break it will no longer matter. And it'll just be whether you made it or not. So that's kind of what we're going to be figuring out as it were as we go along here. I think that's just our little note for our on-air production meeting of that may be something to revisit like a real-time recap here next week and talking about a little bit about what's happening macro in the vacation rental hospitality space.

But today we're going to switch things up a little bit. We go get something else on the platter for today. We do. Yeah. I think it's a good idea. So I think this was your memory service. Maybe this was an idea or a headline that you came up with. then I think it's a good one, which is local is your advantage or are you using it.

And I think the premise being, we're going to talk today about social, but in theory, this could span not just social. This could span organic blog content. This could span, you know, X number of other things. But yeah, I think this idea of everyone says that, hey, we're local, we're local, we're local. But what does that actually mean? And what parts of your company are local? And with the increase that we have now with offshoring and AI, or in some cases, both those things,

what actually is, yeah, what actually is like your defined local characteristics? What does that mean? and how do you get that fleshed out into your marketing? So, yeah, the thought process today is talking a little bit about if local is your advantage and everyone's talking about all these different things that you can be doing, how are you doing them? What are things that make sense for you to be focused on locally? And then how do you make that more performance?

Like, how do you get more people to pay attention to you because if you have these threads that you can pull on from your local background? And I would suffice to say many vacational managers are not doing this that well. So this would be a good checkpoint to maybe see how you can blend some of these things of like trying to be efficient with AI and offshoring, but also leading into what you have locally to do a great job and get more eyeballs on your business. I mean, local was one of those things that on the owner side,

local was what you wanted to be. Local is what you wanted to have. I mean, that was one of those buzzwords that was on almost everything. But I think what you brought up there is really good in the fact that what makes you local. And for a lot of companies, sometimes it's the address alone. that's something that sometimes you can fake local and I think it's become a lot easier to feel like you can fake being local more effectively again AI some other resources there some image generation and all this stuff but I think that's where it really I think that that's where socials where and images are where it's always kind of come back to and this goes back all the way to resorts and lodges days, which doesn't exist. I just figured that as a sidebar.

You do that search for resorts and lodge.com. You don't. That was a little shocking. I hadn't looked, I guess, since February. But truly, that's something that we talked about back in those times, those days a decade ago, how important imagery was and how important it was to have a local person be able to go and see and do some of that stuff. And that did.

that really carried over to conversations on the social side as we've kind of progressed into the agency side of things and making sure that you had someone who was on site who really knew what was happening. And I think that that's something that to run a social media account effectively, I think you have to be able to engage with your audience, your digital audience, but it's more than that. It's really connecting it back to more of a local angle and being able to take video and being able to showcase what's really happening, and not just what really happening,

what's really happening in real time. Because sometimes there are. There are events that are taking place this next weekend. Over the course of the summer, there are tons of events happening in all these little destinations. And some of them are going to bring in tons of people. Some of them aren't going to do anything like that, but they're important to the community.

And I do, I think that when you have someone who's local, they understand what moves the needle for some people. and what's not going to move the needle? And I think that that makes it a lot more authentic at the very least. And again, when you can grow that authenticity at a social level, it makes it a lot easier to bring that to your digital store from your website and things like that. So, I mean, we have. We've seen virality of specific companies and specific destinations in our space.

We've seen companies kind of grow through social media. And I would say the underlying value in all of those, they probably have a pretty solid social media manager who's really taking care of this and isn't just doing it remotely from X destination. They're boots on the ground and really doing it there. So I think that's where it starts. And where you take that locality from there is kind of where everybody has their own direction. Yeah.

Well, I think direction is a good word choice there. That wasn't their outline, I think. but that's a good one to build off of because ultimately, I think the optimal version of this, the maximum efficiency version of this, is that you figure out what you need to do locally, what's best on locally, and where can you get help chipping in around the corner from people all over the world? Because like the problem with this idea that we are referencing of doing your social media content locally is like hiring a full-time social media manager is not a reality for most companies. They're probably not able to dedicate, you know, let's say $50,000 to $70,000 a year

on just social media content, very few companies could make that, you know, RY positive investment. And then, you know, we've talked about this before, but they may say, oh, don't worry, we're going to make that person do the Google ads and the email and that's the SEO work and the content creation, all that. And then, you know, obviously we picked up the fore about the fact that that is possible, but you're looking for a unicorn. Unicorns are very rare. They probably don't live where you live and they probably don't accept a salary that's, you know, going to be less than multiple six figures if they truly are skilled and all those things, right? It's a very valuable skill set to have, excuse me. So I think in that,

scenario, what you end up with is we're going to train someone. We're going to cross train someone on reservations, on property inspection, on XYZ to do things that we can't do from afar easily. So, for example, like filming the interior of a vacation rental property on their phone is something that we could train someone how to do with X level of time, X amount of time. It's something that we've done with some of our clients regularly. In fact, I just had a conversation the other day about doing this. So that's very much a way to get there. And then that person is then dropping the content into a Google Drive folder, Dropbox, whatever you might call it, and then sending it off to an editor that can be literally anywhere in the world to edit that content and then get everything built out

into a social media calendar on meta, business planner, whatever the case that you might be using. So it's like that's kind of the optimal version of it when you have limited time, budget, effort, energy, money, and we all have limits of those things, no matter how larger company is. You can't, let's say you have one social media manager. You may say, well, I really want to because, you know, I have more ideas than I can do with, which is one person, right? You can always find new things to kind of focus on. But I think that what you probably, I would separate this idea of like content creation and filming videos and doing that kind of stuff with scheduling and posting.

I think those are two completely separate activities. But most people, myself included many times over the years, have sold that as one idea and the best companies that we see that do the best in social and just do a good job of like leading into what makes them local, figure out how to merge that blend in a way that's still effective and profitable for them. But it's hard to do, right? Like it's, you know, what I'm saying is like sounds easy on the surface. And then it's like, okay, find someone who's both good at reservations and good. at filming short room video content, that's not straightforward. There's no guarantee that a person just can be sitting there waiting for you to show up and hire them and build off.

So how, and this is, man, we're going to run through some stereotypes here. How often do you think people, companies in our space have hired someone age 18 through 25 as a 50 to 60 year? Again, we're crossing the generations here. simply based on that, simply based on the fact that they're younger and they think they know social media better. And they may say that, but it is. I think that's worthy. And we've talked about that between influencers and content creators and things like that.

But I think because there are so many people who are, you know, we have an experienced industry overall. We have pockets of people who are coming in and bringing that age down a little bit. but we still skew a little older, I would say. So I think it is. I think there are a lot of people who are taken in by that concept of the social media manager who is going to turn things around remotely and being able to do all these campaigns and do these things, but not knowing how to maybe hold account or be able to actually be able to drive and measure the effectiveness of what's happening here.

So I do. I think that that's where that's where. that concept of being able to truly ask a few questions. And I think what we can do, like, what are those questions that people should be asking for someone as a social media manager? Like, if they're trying to hire someone to cross-train and cross-reference, like, okay, you know what they need to do on the reservation side of things. But what are some things that you would reckon for that person who is trying to find

that diamond in the rough or at least ask the right questions to be able to say, okay, this person, they're not going to be able to help, but this person over here, they may be able to assist us and they may have some opportunity. I think your best bet is always asking what projects they've worked on themselves. So I think if you're screening for someone who has already done this in another format, no, it's very unlikely that it's going to be for another vacational company, obviously. But just like I ran the social media for my school's fraternity and I did a good job at it and here's the proof of it.

Cool, I'll take that. Like obviously that may not be as applicable, that type of content that was done over there. to what you may do, but just that I think you look for fingerprints or signs of that. And then I think if we don't have that, I think the next best thing is show me what you think would work well. Give me specific examples of things that you would work well and then explain me how you would make them. So I really like this account on Instagram because they do a good job with video and here's how I would try to recreate the video that they're doing or like this account on Instagram or Facebook or whatever the case may be because they do a good job at this.

Or we've had a few clients lately that have really gotten dialed into Facebook groups. And I think that's like a pretty underutilized opportunity for most people doing Facebook groups, but it does require sort of this, like, just tedious nature of just, like, going into the Facebook group regularly and kind of looking for, like, those signal keywords or single topics or becoming well known for, like, oh, people in this group ask about vacation rentals, they know to tag Paul, because Paul has a vacation rental company, you know, in this location. And he just goes and adds value every day or every other day. So it's kind of this thing of like, you know, you do it when you're waiting in line

at the grocery store, you know, that kind of thing with social media management on a Facebook group. It's not really like, oh, we're going to sit down and make some massive content plan. It's more so just like providing value, constantly knowing what's going on. but then people you become well known for it on the Facebook group side of things. So I think that's how I would think about it. Yeah. Show me what you've done before.

Or show me what you think would work well and why. Explain why you think it would work well versus someone. Like I see this a little time. We've hired for social media managers before. And they'll just say like, I know Facebook. I know Instagram. I know this and I know that. And I'm like, okay, well, I would hope you would.

Right. Like these are the platforms that, you know, we're posting on. I assume you have a decent command or understanding of the back end systems there. But is that some like massive value ad to do that. To say that. Like, not really. Like the value ad is going to be for. you setting up a content strategy that works well. The rest I feel like is kind of like,

you know, just simple, simple like blocking and tackling, whatever you want to call it. Like, it's more straightforward to figure out who's going to schedule the content once the strategy is right. Like, I could go post the next 10 posts for Apple on their social media channels if they just gave me the right logins and told me what to post. And those posts would get millions of views, millions of interactions. If it was like announcing the launch of the new iPhone, right, that's going to get millions of reactions, is that due to some skill from the social media manager? Or is the fact that Apple's built right equity over the course of, you know, multiple decades and, you know, they're the most popular consumer product that anyone can purchase,

right? So it's like, I think that's the hard part sometimes in social media. Like social media is not going to save you or make your business more interesting. If your business is not interesting, your properties aren't interesting. If you don't have good photos and good videos to work from, no social media manager is really going to do much with that. They're going to, they can't turn it into a, they can't polish mediocrity into a golden, you know, shining profile. They can only work with what they're given. And then if they're given good stuff, then it's on them to make their strategy connect to, you know, with the type of content that you want to post and have it perform well. Yeah. I don't think social media is ever going to save your

professional business. That's, that's, that's, is through you, I mean, it's, if it could, if you're, if it's in diner straight. I was going to say, there are social first companies, right, and social for properties. But it's, I think what's interesting about that, to your point there, is they're designed that way from the beginning almost of like, this property will do well in social media. So maybe speak on that for a second. Yeah, I mean, that's, I think that there certainly has been because we have such a broad base of just commodity properties, I think people started to understand that really when you design for something specific, you can market it more specifically. You can draw higher ADR. Like there is a purpose behind those purpose billed vacation rentals. It's to make money.

That's a big part of it. But part of that is high marketability. And that is visually stunning properties with all the amenities to the nines and everything else in between, highly photographable, photographical. So they can go on social. So they can go on all of these specific channels and really shine. That is where you can. You can build a strategy, but you have to build the whole business strategy around that as well.

And I think that there are a few people in the space who have done that really well. But I don't think you're going to just take something from off the ground right now. And do that, I think it's hard. It's hard to differentiate yourself. You really have to have something that is stunningly different. And then finds an audience that also finds that stunningly different as well. And now, I mean, to kind of, you know, segue here a little bit. Like the ability to distinguish yourself from images is not as easy to do because AI is now

really able to manipulate a lot, generate. something maybe more desirable, maybe cooler, maybe this. Now, I do think that they didn't reference, they referenced images kind of specifically. I'm interested to hear what Google says on the 20th here on Google Marketing Live. That's one 2026 version is coming around. So we got that coming up next week. We'll have maybe that'll be recap of that.

And we'll talk about what's happening in hospitality. We get the show notes ready. We're good to go. Come on, Google. But they did it. At the Toronto Summit, they were talking about that commodity versus non-commodity content. And part of that non-commodity content is not using AI images. And, you know, being able to, here's the thing, all these LLMs, they can all track what is AI generated, what is not.

We know. This is something that's certifiable right now. So even the best AI image is going to be tagged somewhere as AI. But your ability to, again, create your own images and have your own images, that is going to be important. I mean, I think from an SEO perspective, content that features your images as opposed to AI images is going to have some advantages. Is it going to perform better all the time? No, not necessarily. But when we do talk about commodity versus non-commodity content, and that's going to be a thing that you're going to hear a lot moving forward, images is part of that.

And I think that where right now it feels like we're kind of losing to AI, losing the image battle to AI because we don't have that control right now. I think moving forward, those who do have the stunning assets to start and are kind of being copied, those will be the ones that will shine truer moving forward. But again, that kind of remains to be seen as well in how Google, the LLM's Bing and C-AlSol, everything in between, how they, reading and understanding our websites, our listings, all of that information there. I've seen some blowback recently a little bit on this.

And I think I shared with you with there was a popular social media account that I saw that was using AI to generate a lot of their video content. And I was pretty surprised by that because I think you're playing with fire by doing that, by doing AI generated videos, even if yes, it's sourced or it's trained from where it's fine-tuned or whatever on real photos and real videos of an actual vacation on property. I think the moment you kind of bring your eye into it, you put in fake people, you put in fake cars, you put in fake fireplaces, you put in fake sunset views, all that kind of stuff. It does get pretty messy pretty quickly.

I think my line that I've drawn in the sand has been like, the analogy I'm doing is when a fashion brand does a photo shoot and there's a model and they take picture the model and the model has a little cut on her chin or something like that or his chin, whatever. They go in Photoshop and they clean that up, right? Like that to me is like, hey, we're going to make the lighting and the colors and all that a little bit better on a real photo. I'm kind of in that camp of like that's probably fine. I think the camp you've got to be super careful of.

Again, going back to the episode topic of being local is like we hit the API for Gemini and we made a completely, you know, bogus image that's not actually of any particular location or property or actually have any landmarks here in this location. And we're passing that off as if it's an image, you know, of this particular spot that I have a hard time with. I don't give an example. Like all the NFL schedule stuff is coming out right now or like leaks a bit are coming out.

And people are doing graphics where it's like a picture of like the stadium. And then on the top of it, they're using a. AI to add the graphics of like the Patriots, you're playing the Seahawks, the Wednesday of the first season. It's like, okay, that's fine. That's just saving you time of like what you do in Canva in five minutes. I don't have any problem with that. But I think you have to be super careful. Yeah, about like, here's a video or here's an image that's completely AI generated. And I gave it two pictures of this place. And then I just had it make up the rest. We've done a little bit of that these platforms like Home Real was one and then they kind of renamed it. But it was taking,

it was really just doing like animation. It was like Ken Byrne style quote unquote video. I'm putting the snare quotes that the list for you can't see. Kenburn style video is kind of how they were doing that. And that seemed to be something that people may respond to pretty positively, but we're not misleading anybody. I think with AI, it's so easy to mislead someone and to think it's something different than it is, which in my mind inevitably is only going to lead to one thing, which is a really unhappy guest or a bad review of like, this place online looked like this, and then I got there and it was that. And that gap of, you know, disappointment that you can create is quite large, unfortunately. That's a good, that's a good example to kind of characterize it.

I mean, you can do that in some business. You can. You can do it in general, not retail, I wouldn't say, but more general businesses, you can market more broadly there where you are painting an experience. If you are generating an experience that doesn't exist for someone, that's really bad. Prior to AI, we already had people who would come on all of the review sites

and say, ah, this didn't, this is. Fake photography. It's still real photography. It's just staged in a way to make it look a little different. But that's the thing. Like, anytime you're, I think, like, I mean, and that's not even just the properties, like proximity to the beach, proximity to these things,

trying to create more closeness out of the experience than it really is. Yeah, the only thing that's going to happen there is you're going to get negative reviews. Nobody's going to say, oh, I really love that image. That was such a cool image. on your website. I remember that. I'm going to come back and stay with you and leave you another one star with you because, no, this is like anybody who's considering doing that and putting some of

those images in, I can see at some point along the lines, we're going to have business. That's going to be another AI verification or Airbnb verification point that you're going to have to make sure that people aren't creating these ghost properties out of thin air literally with AI. But yeah, this is, that's something that if you're considering doing something like that. And I've heard just a little here and there, people say, well, what would you do? Can you do? No, no, no.

I'm not going to do it most certainly. But I wouldn't recommend you do it either because our business is a different kind of business where it is so experiential. You can't fudge that experience there or you're getting in trouble. Yeah, yeah. I think that's part of your decision-making process, right?

when you're building, I mean, really a marketing strategy, but ultimately, like, kind of what we're talking about here, how local are you? I think it spends, I think that goes into how you present our company online. I've said this before. Maybe it's worth repeating again in this context. This is an acquisition business. Like, if you don't like acquiring new customers, acquiring new guests all the time, acquiring new homeowners, if you're a property manager, I just don't think this is a business for you. Like, I think you can be in another business and do great, but this is not the business for you. So the people that I run into that are like very, I'll say anti-marketing, but they seem like perturbed by this part of the business.

I worry about them a little bit long term. I don't think they're going to build a large company. Because I think if you don't like marketing, and that's very obvious with the way that you operate or the fact that you keep all the stuff at an arm's distance, okay, sure, dive into operations, dive into property maintenance, property care. Maybe you like dealing with the people side of it.

So you like dealing with the guests once they're in the property, or you like dealing with a homeowner on a day-d-day basis. But if you don't have someone in your company that's like really dialed into acquisition, that lives and breathes of how do we get more bookings that are cheaper costs, how do we sign more homeowners, and do our marketing effectively.

Like your business won't get very, very big. Like, or you're going to grow very, very slowly. I guess I should say, I found a few of these people who have done well over the years, but it's because they've been like chipping away at adding two or three homes a year for a decade. You know, and then they end up with a decent-sized business. But this business is an acquisition's business. Everything we do marketing-wise, like feeds the core engine of what we need to do. Like this is not, maybe you should be doing long-term property management, right?

Where it's like a new tenant comes in once every other year, you know, and it's like, okay, we have to market the property only when it's empty and it's only empty every once in a while. Maybe you'd like that better. but if you don't like running and optimizing on Airbnb and optimizing in Verbo and optimizing your direct booking strategy stack or there's not someone in your company that really lives and breeze that every day. And like, that's what this business is. It's you need someone new every two to four days from now until the business is dead.

Like that's just what you require. So I don't think there's a pill you can take or a solution for not having that be a core part of what you're doing. And that's where again, you find that blend between local and and also like we haven't said this yet, but like revenue management, I don't really think that revenue management is something that needs to be done that locally. I think local context is super valuable and important, but I really don't think, and there's some amazing revenue managers I met over the years that have never set foot in the destination, and they do a great job at it. We have a client, I was just talking to him

today who has their property or their revenue management companies in Europe, and he's in Florida. You know, they do a great job, and they've been growing, you know, their OTA bookings using their particular revenue management services. So they've not even been in the state before, I don't think, and they do a good job at it. But now, would it be, you know, if you're working in a new destination, if you're revenue manager and you're turning your ears off and saying, I'm not going to learn anything from local. That's also foolish, right? You should sit down and go, well, tell me, like, walk me through last year's calendar and walk me through kind of some of these high peaks. What's this event? What's this event? What's that? Why was that? Why did that do? Why did that do so well? Why did this pop up at this time? Like, I think that's that inquisitive nature of, like, I think that's that inquisitive nature, a little bit, because you can miss the forest through the trees, maybe you're like, oh, no, you sold us way too. I'm not really. I'm not really some big events coming up that happens every other year.

And then they sell it right away. The revenue manager might be like, oh, I did a good job. I got these properties sold out. And then maybe you're like, oh, no, you sold us way too early, you know, for blah blah, blah, fast. And it only happens every other year. And, you know, people pay a thousand bucks tonight and you sold it for 300. Like, what a foolish mistake.

So that's just that. But I think the same conversation can come into social as well, where you don't know what you know until you know it. I think that's something where when social is just kind of being done to be done. done. It's it, or or when it's being done, again, when you have five posts a week and they're being done from wherever and they are about topics, maybe you're hitting hashtags, maybe you're doing this, maybe you have a theme, maybe you've that. But it might perform very well. It might, you know, you might get followers. You might have a great audience. But I still think that if you took that down to the local level and had someone, you know, doing it that was more engaged. And it, you know, know, it is. It's hard to take that jump or to kind of incorporate that in or make it feel like that. But I do think it would have that same type of impact where that revenue manager is going to go in and ask and get some specific areas. They are. They're going to ultimately figure it out. But that's where social is different, where if you are seeing those results and you start putting those local pictures and some are creating contests where people locally in your area, you know, if you aren't just cultivating, I think,

on the social side of things, more so than any other area, you're cultivating locally geographically as well as a digital follower. I think that's the one area really where you can try to engage with your community at a deeper level and try to mix in with different businesses and try to incorporate things like that because you have the ability to connect with your entire town population, the county population, you know, whatever is there in addition to the tens of thousands of people that you're hoping to attract nationally just as travelers or as people who are interested in your destination or the things that you post about or things like that. So here's the real reality is that we do see a lot of companies that are, say they're local,

but they're not local in the space, but they do a good job. They're effective. You know, they can claim different parts are local and things like that. But I truly do think that this, you know, this is that opportunity to at least take the step and tiptoe into some true locality. And it is trying to incorporate that more local aspect into your social media or into other, some of your other marketing efforts. I mean, I do. I think that that's something that I will be, I've got now granted, very niche, but, but someone on Hawaii who sends one newsletter out to the travel audience and one to the locals.

I mean, they have a local newsletter specifically and they get a lot of really good, a lot of engagement from that, a lot of people coming to the website from that, and a few bookings that come through the local side of things as well. It's kind of crazy to see. But when you're nurturing that long-term relationship with these people, and I think that's what locality allows you to do, it makes everything a little more effective in what you're doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's ultimately what it is, right? Which is like, effective is the key. What's going to be most effective when you take all these factors into account? And you frankly might have to go through a few different iterations or variations of what that's going to look like, you know, ultimately

with your business, because you may find, well, I tried it this way and that didn't work. So I then went back and tried it this way and that worked better. And again, I'll refer to this example because I referred to it on previous topics and things that we've covered on the show, this idea of hiring the all in one person, we even talked about earlier on this episode. And I see that a lot. Oh, an hour in one person, they're going to do everything. And it's just really, really hard to do that.

Like, again, it just sounds great in the surface. And then underneath the hood, like, you just realize how challenging that is. So yeah, couldn't agree more that that's like a key part of understanding things. Let me go a little bit deeper here kind of on the helpline and kind of talk about some other things. Some accounts that I think do a good job or some people that I think do a good job at this that are, you know, maybe somewhat of a hybrid of like remote and local. These roll-up companies that are kind of finding their footing a little bit, I find pretty interesting to follow. So they're doing this version where I see a lot of companies doing this now that are in these roll-ups where they have a social media account for that brand.

and they're posting from that brand, you know, as that brand. But then it all rolls up to this larger entity, you know, from afar. Is that better, right? In theory, then we have one account called whatever vacations, you know, and then we're trying to market these 12 different areas, you know, all with one account. Like, I think the better way of going about it is to have that one Instagram account for that one specific location because people follow it because they care about,

insert choice, you know, Park City, Utah, or they care about it because they care about going to Hilton, South Carolina, or Destin, Florida, or whatever the case may be. And then if they see then every third post is about Cape Cod or it's about, you know, northern Wisconsin or whatever the case may be, they're just like, yeah, I just don't care about this. Like, it's not what I'm interested in. And so I think that concept of having your irons of the right fire and then working on the content that's local and relevant to those people. I think it's just this trap that a lot of people follow into on social media, which is like I have one account that has 100,000 followers. And it's just random followers that have no sort of like interest than what I'm actually posting on a regular basis. I just got lucky and had a few, a few so-called post and that led to some level of reach. And then you have the account that has 5,000 followers, but it's like everyone that follows this account chose to follow because they want information about Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

That follower, that account will crush the other one. And it'll grow a lot better over the next, you know, six months, 12 months in terms of reach than the other one will. But you don't know that until like you've seen a lot of it. You know, I think maybe it's just some property managers think like more followers equals a guarantee that I'm going to get more reach and then it's going to work well. And it's kind of not always that way.

So I think that's another lesson that I've had to kind of like learn and see up close, you know, many times over my career as well. I mean, we haven't said vanity metrics in a while, the followers are such a vanity metric. It's, I think that that's something that people, I don't think people tout it that much anymore. Or if you do, you probably have cultivated it over an extended period of time. You didn't buy those followers. You didn't do things like that. So you put together a strategy to do that.

If you're, if you're hyping it up, I think. Yeah. But it does. I mean, it's certainly, I think I can remember being in a, or listening to to a proposal where that was part of the conversation is here's your local competitors, here's what their followers, and that was something that this particular person put a lot of weight in. I probably wouldn't put as much weight on that. But it is. I don't think maybe travelers are using it as much as some other third-party validation tools, but followers may be something that if you're going into, it may be, you know, a high-level distinction to be able to say,

I get mad. That may be more of a female thing than a male thing. I'm not going to Facebook to check their followers. But who knows? That may be something that as the true decision maker, they may be paying a little closer attention to the follower count for X versus Y. And if that's one thing that can weigh things in your direction to the positive or the negative, I guess it's something to at least acknowledge.

But yeah, that's, is. that's not something I would put a lot of time and focus into. Here's the one, I'm going to ask you this one. If you had a $500 to invest, there are a little hot day question here in local content right now. What would you spend it on? I probably would make sure, well, maybe a prerequisite, I'd make sure I had the right equipment to actually collect that local content.

So I think that would actually be a decent starting point. I want a newer model iPhone. So I guess I can sneak that in my budget by doing monthly payments, right? Like now I'm cheating on this question. I'd have a gimbal. and then if I'm having anyone on camera, I'd have a little clip on microphone. And those things you can certainly buy the gimbal and the clip on microphone for under 500 for sure. So I think, yeah, I would invest a little bit more into like a decent setup as far as collecting that video content.

A gimbal goes a long way. There are 100 bucks, you know, a clip on microphone, you know, is quite solid there as well. You know, if you're doing any kind of presentation or talking through any property, I think that's critical. So that's probably how it's been that. And then I would have someone in my team, you know, work on do their reps, you know, start to, you know, do a property video walkthrough or start to do those kind of things. So that is something that I would actually, you know, lean into first. And then once I had that stuff settled, if I had a little bit more budget, I would also be very encourage if I could fit that in the budget of giving my initial content a little bit of a boost.

You know, so taking some content that I'm doing organically and promoting it simply to my warm audience. So my website visitors, my past guests, even if I had $20 left, I would still do that over not doing that. Because I think with content that you're posting on social, you just need to get it out there a little bit. Like you just need to see maybe it's psychological a little bit too, right? Like, it's just great to know that I posted a piece of content and I'm going to put a $10 promotional budget behind it with advertising. And if I can get a few more eyeballs, people leave me to 12 or 15 comments so that I then can like feel momentum. I want to make that new piece of content. I want to make that new piece of content.

So if budget allowed, I would definitely reserve a portion of it to retargeting my warm audience with some of the organic stuff I'm doing. How about you? How would you spend it? It would be to, I mean, I was thinking a camera and that type of thing as well. Because that is. I think that that does allow you to a high-quality camera. That's something that I invested in when I was like 21. I've never regretted it for a second because we have them here

and they are so effective and even more effective than the actual, the SLR cameras and then great digital cameras that we have. You can spend a lot of money on those and not really have that much a better experience than your phone now. So yeah, I think that is probably the direction I would go. And I would, I would, I would invest some of that in, like,

reaching out to local businesses and, like, trying to cultivate some partnerships and relationships that way. I think being able to kind of create some of the content between some local businesses, I think that's a way to, again, tiptoe it. Just get some initial conversation, some

communication, find some other businesses in your local community that do have big followings and that may be interested in doing a little partnership creating some content some dual content together and i think any anytime you're creating content like that again finding some way to make it not just that one piece of video content or one post or one this but something that can be repurposed and that you can have some evergreen life there so that's that's probably where i would go um you know trying to trying to keep a local there and trying to maybe again make an investment in the local community with some partnerships there and hope that that

breeds some more success organically there yeah yeah I could agree more um what are some other odds and ends what other pieces would you want to pick up here you know in our outline I know we're coming up against the time wise here or is that a pretty good uh stopping point for us maybe here is I think no here's the thing like so I have some strong feelings about what I think like again there's some fake looking social media accounts out there right now and I think there's some people who who maybe didn't try, like, I've seen some morphing of, it started with a little, you know, it's something that's an AI image here,

now it's all AI. So like, if you're seeing all AI content, clearly AI content coming up on social, what does that make, how does that make you feel now about, about an account? Well, I think it, yeah, to me, it makes me want to unfollow if it's meant to be featuring a real location, right? Like, that's why I think people maybe would take,

this out of context if we don't properly place in the right context, which, yeah, which is like, I think it's fine. Again, to use AI to make like a graphic of text on top of it or adding, you know, certain photo or whatever, that's fine. Like, do that. But yeah, this idea of, you know, hey, this is a real property. It's a real place that we're promoting. The goal is for me to get you to get your car, get an airplane, come and see me. And then I'm putting out, you know, completely kind of faux fake AI generated stuff. I think you're going to have really hard time with that. I think that's playing with fire. I personally would, I would personally probably unfollow a piece of content if that was something that it was focused on. So that'd be my personal

take on it. But, you know, there's the engagement from some of these comments or some of these accounts tell me that maybe I'm either a wrong or maybe I'm missing something through the trees or maybe maybe at my AI detector in my eye and my brain is just a little bit better than some people. And people are going to sniff out the AI stuff even better in the coming months of years. And they're going to be repelled by that. I think you could do well actually right now by being like, we don't use AI to edit it. If you have a great shot and like you don't use AI to edit it, you could be like, no AI, right? This is our real sunset for. from our back deck and our property.

And it looks amazing. And I think you're going to do well by promoting that. I like that a lot. Well, you know what takes no AI, really, Paul? It doesn't take any time. It's something you don't have to be local to us. You know, you have to be in Minnesota or Myrtle Beach to do. Leave us a podcast review.

So click five stars and you're listening out by choice. iTunes, Spotify, we get the most downloads there. Click five stars. We'll look back next week with another front episode. We appreciate it. And I'll be having an awesome rest of your day. Thank you, listener.