Heads In Beds Show - Marketing Ideas You Can Do NOW To Get More Direct Bookings & Get More Homeowners

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about the things you can do now to get more bookings and more homeowners now without waiting for future. What are tactics you can do now to get more results? Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads in Bed 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. Good afternoon, Paul. How's it going? It's a wonderful day, beautiful day in the neighborhood, right? We're going to do a little Mister Rogers on the bit. I'm excited. This is something where we've kind of been revving

up to get some of these good episodes out, some of these fun conversations out. And we got another good one today. We got some stuff that people can hopefully, actionably do in their day-to- day operations to make things better. But how are you before we hop into that? How are you doing, sir? How are things going on your neck? Yeah, it's so funny. I might put a LinkedIn post on Friday to this effect. People are listening to this a few weeks later. So maybe they'll have already seen this, which is that

people are often accused about talking about how awesome things are going how things are going great, how there's excellent, you know, they're doing awesome, the company's doing awesome, what is like that can't possibly be true. We're not all doing awesome. I'll say it, the universe dealt me a bad hand this week. And I took a lot more L's than I did W's this week. And I'm feeling okay about it, right? Like we're never gonna always have perfect success, linear success. I think that's actually a fallacy that we believe in sports, which is that a player goes from a second year to a third year, he's gonna get better right before a fan of you know As you and I talked about sports and things like that

We make that mistake all the time The mistake we make is that people who are performing at this level are gonna continue to perform at this level or better Over time I've learned this week that that's not the case. I've learned that people can unfortunately go down and performance significantly Maybe it's within their control. Maybe it's not that's a point for discussion But um, you you've got to push back against it The I posted the entropy article from James Clear on my LinkedIn feed before if not, I can maybe toss that in the show notes. And it's basically over time, everything becomes disorderly. Over time, things don't get more structured and better performing, they actually

get worse, you know, like chaos is introduced into the system. And that's kind of like excited in today's topic a little bit, but it's kind of how I'm feeling today as well, which is like chaos get introduced in the system. And it's our job to like push against it and align things. We've got to put things back in order, right? No one's going to do it for us. We've got to do it for ourselves. That's my take on it. So I think, you know, that's that never ending improvement there. That's, that's, that's the, oh, that's what we, we end up with there. So I like it. Yeah. And the moment you take your eye off something is the moment when it tends to actually begin that descent into chaos. We just don't know it at first, because it maybe it's on the right track for a little bit longer, you know, you take your eye off something, and you think like, Okay, I've got that plate spinning over there. Let me go look at these plates over here. And then you go back and look and you're like, Oh, God, the plate fell on the floor. And it's cracked. And there's stuff everywhere. What happens, you know, and it's like, yeah, that plate was spinning only because the inertia was holding up. And then as soon as that fell, it all fell apart. So yeah, I'm not doing great, one would argue,

if you looked at the objective facts over the past, you know, a few weeks for me at least, but I'm feeling fine. So just a dose of reality, perhaps. Like, as I said, people don't often give a dose of reality on things like this. It's always everything's awesome, everything's great, that sort of thing. Sometimes it is for me, but this week it wasn't.

So that's okay, we'll dive in. All right, so marketing ideas you can do now to get more direct bookings. This is a good one, because I think you and I have heard the feeling I probably heard a little more than you on the guest side. Obviously, maybe you've got some feedback through the owner side too. What can I do now? Like I'm down. I'm my bookings aren't where I want them to be. Maybe summer was okay. If you're listening to this, it's kind of the end issue of the summer or close to it somewhere in that range. Shoulder season is upon us. We've done a shoulder season episode before. But what are those

things you can do today? It's it's, I think at times we talk about SEO, for example, it's like, well, I know it's long term, I know I'm going to be creating content, creating links, and there's going to be some pot of gold, you know, is the analogy I've done at the end of the rainbow. But that doesn't help me today. Like I have vacancies this weekend, I have vacancies next weekend, what can I do today? So we've got a list of eight ish or so things that kind of span, I think a little bit of both, what can I do today to get more bookings or get more inventory so we kind of have a little bit more guest here than owner here, but all of that kind of ties into your business.

So what do you want to do? You want to take number one? You want me to take number one to dive in here? Yeah, I can hop right in. This is one where I posed it like I posed the question. When's the last time you took a look at the home page copy from your website? I think this is something that we we just overlook it a lot because it is it's just there whether we built our website a day ago, a week ago or five years

ago, the likelihood that we've changed content on that page is usually pretty low. So I think it's very valid to go through and just take a look and make sure as the vision the mission change, then maybe maybe you have a specific page for those, but does this still reflect, are you more of a luxury brand now? And maybe the copy feels a little more family driven, or are you looking for more large groups versus small groups or anything like that? I do. I think that that is such an important page in how people interact with your have that initial interaction with your business that it's important to actually take a look in and see is this content

still representing my business, my brand and the value proposition that I'm trying to present both to my homeowners and my guests. So yeah, I think when I go look at most clients analytics, you know, homepage is usually number one. I mean, sometimes it's not sometimes a blog post or some other interior page is high up on the list. But for the most part, most people are coming in through the front door, so to speak, right? They're coming in on the homepage of the website

and they're doing, you know, their date searches from there, that sort of thing. I think I've told this story in the podcast before. So if I'm repeating myself a little bit for a long time, listener, I apologize. But this was a little while ago, a client had, we sent live Facebook ad for our client and they screenshot it and sent it to me.

We're actually in their Slack instance. And they said, whoa, what's this copy? That doesn't, I don't like that copy at all. It doesn't reflect us. I'm like, Oh, wow. That's from your homepage. And I screenshot it, their homepage in a very friendly way and said, Hey, I took that bit of copy from your homepage and we published it. And then he had to hit me with the, Oh, you know, which I think to your point here, he hadn't looked at the homepage in some time. So yeah, very interesting. We, I think it's one of those things, right? We have this like blind spot, almost of like things we look at all the time. We just ignore yeah, very interesting. I think it's one of those things, right? We have this like blind spot almost

of like things we look at all the time, we just ignore, we just leave as they are. And then sometimes you don't notice like how maybe off track they can get. So I love this one quite a bit. I also love that we've talked about this before with like, I know a lot of people, you know, launching new websites in our space

and the homepage says something on the headline to the effect of like awesome vacation rentals or like search our cool vacation rentals. And it's like, where are you? Like, you know, going back and see the basics, right, of like page title heading, you know, that initial context, the video, that sort of thing. We're doing onboarding tomorrow with someone who's kind of like that.

Now, it's tricky because he's multi-market. He's in two very different markets. So it's kind of like that makes it hard. Right. How do we how do we decide how to do that? Maybe there's tiles on the home page or quick search links to go to the different market pages and so on and so forth. But yeah, I think it's an easy one to skip over because it just becomes kind of autopilot. And I think some people are afraid of harming their SEO when they change the homepage copy,

but they they're like changing things that don't really matter with SEO. So yeah, work with your agency or an SEO professional if you need to. But yeah, for the most part, I don't think there's any harm in taking a look at it. And there's probably some like opportunity that you could potentially improve on there for sure. All right, number two, are there any reviews that you can bring up for recent stays? So it's frequent, I feel like it's common that we see reviews featured somewhere on the homepage, featured somewhere on property detail pages, et cetera, and people kind of throw them up there.

Maybe when they finish the website, they get a bunch of reviews from past clients or past guests, that sort of thing. And then they leave them there. They don't ever modify them or change them. So I think this is a good one. Are there any reviews from recent stays? Because if you review the text of some of the reviews

that I see clients have coming in on a monthly basis, I mean, there's awesome things that guests are saying in many cases. Of course, we all focus and look at the negative reviews, right? But some of the exact words that people use in the positive reviews, I think are worth highlighting or worth discussing. And most people just don't refresh those lots. I think that's a little one, but it's just like constantly reminding people like what you're doing, the positives, the value that you are providing. I think reviews are a great way of doing that. So that's my second one, which is just adding that review text to the homepage a lot more regularly.

Especially if you have people who are regular visitors, revisitors to your website, and they're seeing this, it is as good to freshen that content, see a different face if you are highlighting actual user pictures, user generated content. I think that's a great opportunity to just lighten things up a little bit and not be so SEO heavy and technical things like that. It's that light way to do that. So I love that. Real quick, you can go to the next one. Sorry. But we talked about Flip2 on the show before. Yes. What I think is interesting about that tool is that it kind of automatically refreshes for you

because it's like reaching out to your guests, getting real pictures. I think you have to go through and review them on the backend. Most of our clients are doing that directly. But it's like reaching out to your guests, getting real pictures. I think you have to go through and approve them on the back end. Most of our clients are doing that directly. But it's like, yeah, it's like creating like new information, new reviews. And it humanizes that, right? Like a review. Okay, Paul left a review and he said, this is the best place ever to stay in Minnesota. Okay, like that may or may not be true. But if I leave a review that's like a picture of you and your family, and that picture looks like my family, like I can resonate with that a lot stronger, right? Then seeing a smiley of kids at the beach in front of the beach vacation rental house hits a little bit better than like a text that says like me and my kids had a great

time at this vacation rental condo. So I think that you had to flip to side of it is a pretty valuable one. And what's nice about it is like, like you were saying a second ago, it is refreshing not automatically, but it's refreshing regularly because you're putting new stuff in there. So just some thought there as you go to the next one. Right. No, that's one of those vendors that the content user generated content, that's the best that I've seen on some partner websites, customer. It is always web two.

It is. There's I'm sure there are other people who are doing it well, but they just have a really nice I don't know embed tool, whatever that is, to bring that in in a nice and very user appealing, visually appealing way. So I, I really like that. Okay, hop number three here, reviewing your links in your email or on your website is and for most of these things here, we are trying to these are not heavy time consumers, heavy time eaters, most of these should be able to do, we can do them within 10 to 15 minutes, something like that there. So reviewing the links in your most recent newsletter or email copy, anything like that. Hopefully, if you're working with an agency to do your email marketing, they're doing that as well. But doesn't hurt to kind of look through, check those links,

there any broken links out there, if there are any 404s or, or 500, you know, server errors on the website. These are things you definitely want to catch because they are impacting probably a user's experience if they're hitting that page. But it's also the Google, you know, the the bots that are trying to crawl that page and figure out whether or not this is a good site. And that's a that's a signal to those bots that the SEO maybe isn't as strong here. So I do, I think that that's something that,

especially if you're doing a lot of email content, be a user, be a consumer, be an email subscriber for a second, look through that email, connect the dots. Does it make sense for you? Would you book from this email? Would you, on the owner side, would you sign up to learn more

about the homeowner services from this email? And again, take it five, 10 minutes, doesn't have to be the owner side, would you sign up to learn more about the homeowner services from this email? And again, take it five, 10 minutes. Doesn't have to be the whole day. It doesn't have to be anything like that. But I think it's certainly valuable to take that time and see if there are any technical issues or if there are any just user issues that it's not capturing the brand, capturing the voice,

capturing the USP that you want. Yeah, again, going back to like things that are automated, like you just don't look at the homepage much. Those automated emails, I mean, we build a lot of them for clients. A lot of people don't ever review those, right? So that the welcome email they're sending out to their guests has been the same one for some time. We have a client where we were featuring, this was kind of earlier, we've changed our process since then, where they were featuring, let's say three properties in the bottom of that newsletter. And they were static. One of the properties unfortunately left the rental program. So we were sending out a welcome

email, like, you know, five a day, 10 a day on a busy day. And then at the bottom of that was a broken link. I mean, we caught it before too long. It wasn't like it went that long before we caught it. But still, what a crappy experience for the user, right? They got a welcome email. Oh, that property looks interesting. Let me click on it.

Broken 404. It's like, oh, goodness. So yeah, those are, those are small wins for sure. And certainly we don't hope it's like a super valuable page in the process, but you'd be surprised. So every once in a while you find just things on your website, I don't know, just stuff changes, little things happen.

And if you don't have a process to go back and review it, sometimes things can get off track more than you think, more than you like, that sort of thing. Which actually brings us nicely to number four, review your website on your phone. So this is, I'm so guilty of this. So I'm saying this because I am part of the problem here on this one.

I spent all day on this laptop I'm looking at right now, I'm recording on right now, right? I'm looking at this 13 inch or 14 inch, whatever size screen it is. And then I've got a big 24 or five inch whatever external monitor over here to my right. And it's killing me, right? Like it's not good because the truth is that 80%

of our guests, 70, 80% of our guests in many cases are looking and are browsing and potentially, making the whole process on their phone. And I spend very little time looking at my phone with our clients' websites and many vacational websites. So I'm admitting it. I'm walking in. Hi, I am an overly self-centered desktop user who doesn't think about the phone experience

as much as I should. Certainly being responsive is a check mark. Either responsive or not. It's mobile friendly or not. You can do those kind of tests quickly. And I remember way back when Google had these tools that they introduced, that was the question, Oh, can you pass this mobile friendly test? But that's not what I'm encouraging. I would actually encourage someone to open the website on their phone and go through

if you can, all the way through the whole way through the booking process. I mean, even if it means refunding yourself for that stay or something like that, the date search box, it may open on mobile, but we had this pop up a few times recently, you click the date box and it opens the keyboard. So you're trying to type in or you're trying to put in like the dates and it's opening this little jQuery calendar and then your keyboard is overlapping it. So it's like, ah, that's just a horrible user experience, right? Like, but you wouldn't caught it if you were just doing a mobile test because it passes the mobile test. It's not like it's broken per se. It works, but it's clunky. It's a bad user experience. It

doesn't work well. Same as you go through the checkout process or we had a situation where on a property detail page, you're scrolling, you're scrolling, you're scrolling. The gallery was covering up the rates. So people couldn't see the rates of when they put a, you know, a dates in there, right? Again, you didn't know it until you use the website like a user would. You didn't catch it on just a typical review

of the property detail page. When it loaded, it was perfectly fine. It was when you added in dates that things started to go a little bit sideways. So yeah, no doubt, obviously all the way through last idea on the checkout process. Again, what fields are filling automatically? You can name the fields properly in the actual HTML, the source code of the page. And it'll suggest, for example, like iPhones, I think Androids work the same way to auto-fill.

So I tap a button and it auto-fills my name, you know, maybe my address. If you would need that information, my phone number, et cetera. Again, a little bit of a quality of life thing as opposed to someone having to type in C-O-N-R-A-D, you know, oh, I got to find the apostrophe. It takes a second, right? If you can just have a button that's, you know, because it's labeled correctly, the browser understands, auto fail, click, boom, it fills up the whole thing.

A little bit of friction you just got rid of that's going to make someone who is ready to book that much easier for them to book. And then, of course, all the way to the payment, you know, how does the payment work? Can I enter it in properly? When I tap in the credit card field, I've given a lot of keyboard examples today. When you tap in the credit card field, I've given a lot of keyboard examples today. We tap in the credit card field, show numbers.

Don't show the keyboard that has letters on it. There's no letters in credit card numbers. So show numbers on my field. So in typing in my credit card number, it's a little bit smoother process there. So we could go on and on. We have a whole audit list that I could send people if they're interested, if they really want to go through that in a very, very detailed way. But use it on your phone.

Use every page on your phone, homepage, search results, property detail page, check out, go through that whole process. And I bet you'll find something that's like, man, if I could just make that a little bit better, particularly if you're a high traffic website, you're probably going to see a nice little clip increase in the number of books that you're getting. I same way. I, you know, I think maybe as marketers, that's our that's the foil

we have to deal with is that we do sit on screens for so long that it's just not we don't think about that mobile device in and I can read Google Analytics and have it tell me yes, it's 60%. I mean, on average, you look globally, it is 6040. That's the breakdown of mobile desktop. And yet we still really focus there. That's something that using clarity, Microsoft Clarity, hot char using one of those screen requirements, that definitely helps just give you that that different visual because it's not even your device like my mobile device, my

Samsung is different from your iPhone from your from from someone else's this from someone else's that. So the ability to kind of see different devices and how they are rendering and know you don't have to optimize for the edge cases, but yeah, if on that mobile experience, your bottom menu is taking up a third of the page and your top menu is taking up a third of the page and people can't scroll in between the middle there,

there's gonna be some problems. So whether you're using, whether you're doing your own review or whether you're using some type of software, just have visual into the mobile experience because it is the predominant experience that people are going to have with your business. So understand how people are using it. Otherwise, you know, we're going to be where we're going to be there. Right

on. Um, keep moving down. Let's see here. What vendors have referred you stays before? What can you remind them? What can you do to remind them of that? This is something that anytime you don't have to go into the advertising space that you can kind of strengthen those local bonds. You know who the people who are, whether that's a local restaurant, whether that's a local activities guide, whether there are those things where you want that to be, you want to strengthen those partnerships. Vendors play a big role in how the, usually the whole market, the whole destination works.

So having those strong ties with the key and critical vendors that you're going to deal with on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly basis, I think that's super important. But that's probably probably a little more on the stay side of things. Where do you come in on the vendor side there? Yeah, well, I think it's so funny.

I think I've told the paperclip story before, which I don't even know where I heard this from originally, but I think it might apply to the owner side of things? Where do you come in on the vendor side there? Yeah, well, I think it's so funny. I think I've told the paperclip story before, which I don't even know where I heard this from originally. But I think it might apply to the owner side as well, which is long story short, you know, young brokers coming in to replace the old broker who's been at it for 50 years, super successful, you know, has made millions of dollars in his career. And he's like, what's the secret? He's like, there's no real secret. Here's all it is. He has a cup with 100 paperclips in it. And then he's got an empty cup. And every day he takes the club with 100 paper clips, puts it on the left side of his desk. He makes a phone call to all of his contacts.

Anyone that can refer him business, anyone that could send a business makes a phone call. And maybe it's not even about business. Maybe it's about, Hey, how are the Celtics doing? You know, Hey, what's going on here? Hey, how's your daughter's play go? That sort of thing. Takes the paper clip, takes it out of the empty cup, drops them the other cup. He said, I just did that for 30 years. That's it. I did a hundred phone calls. And who's doing a hundred phone calls every day to past every day to past homeowners that filled out a form and never converted? Who's doing 100 phone calls a day to people that have some of the business before

groups or larger organizations that have stayed with them before that haven't stayed recently? Who's doing that? The answer is nobody really, from my experience. You're too operationally tied in. You don't have time for it. And maybe 100 is too much. But it's an illustrating example, which is that if you're doing something small to reach out to people every day, maybe it's realtors that could refer you new listings. Hey, do you have any listings at the moment that you need quotes for from a revenue perspective?

Oh yeah, actually, I just got one yesterday. I haven't even posted on the MLS yet. Your timing's perfect, Paul. Oh, here's the property, here's the address, and you can go from there, right? So you don't know what opportunities will come up, but I think it's one of those situations where Dan Kennedy has this idea of like,

today bank, future bank, we always have to do things for today's bank. What are we doing today? What have we already committed to? What are we promising to do for our client XYZ? The guests are staying with us right now. We got to take care of them, of course. But we also got to do one thing every day for future bank. We got to do something, sending that one postcard off to an owner that maybe will list with us, sending that email out to a past guest who's departed, you know, 25 days ago, Hey, do you want to book again next year, I can offer you a rate. If we can do something every day, that's going to put money to Future

Bank, then we're usually going to end up in a good spot. I think it's an easy thing to just skip, not put on your list, not worry about, and then you kind of end up in a position where people forget about you. Let's be honest, right? We're bombarded with marketing, media, advertising messages all day, every day, people forget about your business so quickly. I hate that it's true. You know, believe you would make our advertising easier if we just had to pay for it once and

not have to pay for it again. But it doesn't work that way. There's too much, you know, attention that's being sapped away by other sources. So we have to remind people what we do, what we offer, how awesome our properties are, or on the owner side, how awesome our service are, is you know, that we provide to property owners. And then we can, you know, continue to make success. But I think it's an easy thing to skip. And I think it's something that if you did not just today, but you did every day, something for future bank, something for future booking, something for future inventory acquisition, I think a year from now you're going to be in a way better spot for sure.

Most definitely. You want to slide over to number six then? Yeah. Yeah. So this is something that I've been saying this going back to, I remember giving, I don't know, some type of how to optimize your resorts and lodges.com listing, take pictures. It is. And at that point, it was just taking pictures. Everybody's got a phone that has as high a power camera as what you used to be able to buy for $500 at a camera store.

So I do. I think that now it is. It's more video. What we've seen is that unproduced, kind of not so highly polished, highly edited video really performs better because more often than not, you're using those videos in some type of social media, some type of social setting where that up down is a more of an interruption. It causes people to stop and everybody's seen the nicely produced with the palm trees waving

and the waves and everything like that. Everybody sees, you'd probably see a dozen of those videos when you're going into your Instagram feed or your Facebook feed or TikTok or whatever that looks like. However, it's those authentic, hey, look at my face for a second. And then let's go over to the actual property or do the property overview, the property walkthrough.

We've talked about a lot of different video options that you can do, but taking the time to do that. Actually, taking five minutes out of your day and you don't have to write up a script if you feel comfortable, but maybe write up a couple lines that you wanna say and give yourself a minute to just kind of show people an experience, show people the walk to the beach,

show people the gourmet kitchen that just came on with your newest property, do something to highlight some specific items and give people your insights. That's going to help sell people on that experience. And I, as much as we can, we have to focus on that experiential moving forward because that's what people are looking for. It's if we were learning anything about millennials, Gen Z, Gen X, everybody after our age group really wants that experience. And ours does too. And the boomers are, boomers still want that experience too. People are looking for an experience. They just don't want to sit in four walls. If they

did that, they'd be going to a hotel. They'd be going to a big box hotel. They'd be paying $90, $100, $150 a night and just be satisfied with that. They want an experience and you can provide that and you can show them that experience through a video that does not have to cost you $2,000 to be edited and fully published and polished and everything like that. So I mean, I know you've had some some good experience with the video side of things. What where do you kind of take that? Yeah, I think you nailed it well, which is going to dovetail nicely into the next one that I had, which is that you'd be surprised that the highly polished, perfect marketing sort of asset doesn't always work as well as you might think, right? I'm not saying put typos in there and put mistakes in your emails and things like that. Although I do recall a very long time ago, I had thought about this. This wasn't in our outline. I

don't suspect that anyone from our old ICD social team is listening. But if they were, I remember there was a little hack for a while where we were putting typos and social posts on purpose. And the number of corrections would just boost the post to the moon as far as the algorithm. This would have been back in like 2014, that timeframe. But basically you would go in there and you would say like, you'd say like, have a great beach day and you'd spell beach wrong. And then it would just like boost the engagement. So funny little tricks that eventually kind of wore out,

wore out their welcome very quickly, but it did work for a little while. But yeah, going back to this idea of like, you know, a video walkthrough property can be you know, like the one thing I've learned is like, we have clients where they've filmed videos on their iPhone that have done very, very well from an organic reach perspective. The only thing that seems to matter audio quality still needs to be okay. So maybe having clean no background noise that that does matter quite a bit.

And having the phone be smooth or stable. But like an iPhone, I'm sitting here with an iPhone 15, the camera in this thing is just as good as the DSLR probably was four, five, six, seven years ago. It's not that different, at least when it comes to filming a video. So yeah, I think walking through that with a stabilizer on your iPhone is going to produce like that is a peak plus quality video. Sure, the professional videographer can come in there

and do things that you can't do. That's 100% true. But like to your point, think about the output of quantity of videos over time. If you can hire the videographer once per month to do one awesome walkthrough listing, that's cool. You could probably have done 15 or 20 walkthroughs of your listings and post them on Facebook

in that same timeframe, but posting a story every day. Hey, check out this listing, it's new. Check out this listing, it just got cleaned. Hey, check out this listing, we're working with the client right now. New things get added to his property for regularly. It's a high end luxury property. He just took out the grass put in turf grass, he just oven got replaced or new stuff was put on there. He's so it's the same property, but

he's tweaking it, he's modifying it, he's making it better. And I think we, you know, understate maybe that the guest would care about that kind of stuff. If we, like you were saying, explain how it's going to improve the guest experience. Well, when you come out of the back deck, deck now you guys don't have to worry about the dirt getting in your toes I just put all artificial turf out here it's perfectly leveled super comfortable you know come can't wait to host you guys back here it's gonna be phenomenal stay that sort of thing so yeah I'm only on that one and I think people maybe panic because they feel like things need to be perfect or maybe they see like a pixel perfect image from Airbnb you know the corporate account and they think I got I have to do that I have to do that. I don't think so. Like if you can, don't get me wrong, if you can increase the quality over time, that's probably better. But don't be afraid to like put stuff out there. Like you've got to do these things every day, going back to like the premise of the episode, they're going to give you attention. Like you lack attention. If you're not getting bookings, then you don't have enough attention or your rates are way off, right? That's

the only kind of possible scenario there. So you've got to do things that you get attention, even if it's B plus, I would take B plus every day, over A+, done once a month or twice a quarter or something like that. So yeah, anyways, number seven, I'll go to mine here. We have a client that tested this pretty extensively. I think he actually listens to, so he's actually kind of changed my opinion a little bit. Plain text emails, outperforming, highly designed, sort of highly graphic, intense emails. I've been really surprised by it, but the data is clear. Like he's done a bunch of testing. We're talking a 10,000 person list, maybe somewhere in that range. Maybe it's 8,000. And he's done 50, 50 split tests, some plain text emailed people, send the highly graphic designed email to someone, and the plain text stuff does better. So

the good news is some of these marketing ideas you can do by yourself. If you can use a keyboard and write, you can send out a plain text email to all your past guests. Hey, Paul, are you planning on coming again to the Myrtle Beach this fall? If so, let me know. I'd love to send you a few places. That's a plain text email that anyone could send from the Mailchimp account needs no marketing experience needs nothing. The subject line could be Hey, there, Paul, a question that could be the subject line. And an email like that might get a 40 50% open rate better than

you know, August 2024 newsletter for insert company name here, right? Like that kind of that kind of stuff, which we do see regularly. And to be clear, we do a lot of these designed emails. So it's kind of been surprising testing these plain text ones, because it seems like in many cases, they do better. So these six and seven kind of tie together to me, a video off your phone might actually do better than a highly produced video, a plain text email might do better. Certainly, they're not saying an email at all, which is the alternative that a lot of people fall into. Yeah. And a plain text email, believe it or not, might actually perform a little bit better in some cases, than a highly designed graphic, you know, design heavy email, now

you're not gonna be able to get nearly as many marketing messages across. Certainly, it's hard to feature a bunch of listings like we do, you don't talk about news and stuff like that. So the truth is, maybe that there's a time and place for both the general email newsletter that's designed and the plain text email that you could send out to people. But yeah, maybe don't feel like you need to, I guess, like obsess over the polish of what you're doing from a marketing perspective. If your goal is more occupancy, more attention,

be willing to try things like plain text emails and you might actually see a pretty interesting lift from it. Well, this I mean, plain text is gonna dovetail nicely into my last option, just is just kind of reviewing the overall homeowner stack. But what we have seen be most effective for cold email outreach is certainly that plain text. It does make it feel more personal. Like, like it's not just this form email that is still probably more or less the case that it's it's quick statements. It's asking a question.

It's not asking you to click on anything. It's asking you to personalize and actually continue the conversation. So I think that that's, I'm not surprised that it works on the, on the traveler side as well, depending on the business, if it is, if it's a kind of a smaller, more personal kind of that family feel, that's exactly what someone's looking for. Now maybe it's something that's a little larger, more of the scale, more of a metro area. Maybe that's not the right feel, but like with anything here, yeah, you just have to match the feel for what people match the persona, make the messaging match what you're trying to be as a brand and think about that strategically

there. But as far as just kind of outside of the cold emails that happen on the homeowner side, it's important to take a look at the landing page. Take a look at what are you doing for marketing? Are you doing postcards? Okay. does what I'm saying in the postcard match what I'm saying in my Facebook ad, match what I'm saying in my Google ad, match what I'm saying on my landing page? Doesn't have to be one-to-one, but you don't want one specific area to be saying,

talking about the ROI and one specific area to only be talking about how well you take care of the home. Anytime we're talking about doing omni-ch, omnichannel is really making all those communication channels communicate together in the using the you know, using the same messaging using the same unifying actions of call to action of, okay, I want a book, I want you to sign up your home, something like that. Otherwise, you're, you're, you can do multi channel marketing, and you can just do marketing into these different channels. I do think that that Otherwise, you can do multi channel marketing, and you can just do marketing into these different channels. I do think that that's, there's a very

big difference between people who talk about the omnichannel, as opposed to people who are just advertising in all these different areas. So, and taking it back to where that looks specifically on the homeowner side, yeah, typically, we are looking at a lot of these different channels. So, focusing on, you know on what are those specific areas for the testimonial side of things, probably a slightly different testimonial

than your guest side of things. So what are the results that people have seen and trying to push for, if you have a results testimonial, what about some objections that homeowners have had or that you had with a different property manager, that an owner has had with a different property manager. How can you kind of highlight those things as well? Anything you can do to kind of increase your credibility is certainly going to be helpful there. You know, kind of those key items that you're wanting to hit on your value proposition, your risk reversals,

your guarantees. Think about some of those items. Have you had the success that you've wanted to have in bringing some homeowners on? What have been some of those major objections that you've had as you've had conversations with people? Hopefully you are having conversations, you're emailing with them, you're talking with them on the phone, doing all these things.

If there's a specific item that continues to come up, make sure that you're addressing that on your landing page, in your marketing efforts,, make sure that you're addressing that on your landing page in your marketing efforts and make sure that that's something that you're getting ahead of a little bit more because it will. I think it'll make those conversations with homeowners which let's say can be a little prickly, just a little more easy and a little more talking about what value you can offer them. It's not always about the money. It's not always about the home care. It's not always about the money. It's not always about, you know, the home care. It's not always

about the ease of use and doing things like that. But really making sure that as with everything we're kind of looking at on this list, making sure that your brand is represented in the right way. Don't don't become lackadaisical with it. Don't don't just kind of let things be and let things sit and let things simmer because at one point it's going to impact a homeowner's decision or it's going to impact a guest's decision to book with you and anything we can proactively do even taking five to 10 minutes a day to just kind of assess the business is a benefit. So again, you have to do all these

things in the next week. No, but, towards the end of the year, take one of these each week and try to focus on your homeowner side for one week, focus on the video side for one week, focus on the web, you know, the mobile experience for one. I think that's trying to give people a plan here for how they can attack some of these things because they will. If you're doing these things, they'll have a positive benefit on the business. Yeah, yeah. I think the way that I wrap it up is like kind of the progress you make is ultimately, like, what habits are you building from a marketing

perspective? What habits are you building from a company building perspective, and all the great companies that we've worked with are doing so many things all at once, right? They're doing all of the right things that deliver for the current guests are doing all the right things to reach out to new opportunities. And they're just relentless. Like, I mean, we always we always joke on the other podcasts I do about the passive income bros, you know, who are like, oh, this is passive income. And I'll add that word in a minute, by the way, there was certainly a year or two where I heard that word, that phrase constantly, you know, in every Instagram

and Facebook ad I saw was for these passive income guys. The truth is nothing about this is passive income, virtually nothing. But it is something you can do, I would say consistently to drive up the value of the income that you're making, like that's very feasible. Like we have clients that started at 10 properties are now at 50 properties or whatever. And there was no magic in that process. It was doing the same, you know, general things over and over again, stuff that's worked, delivering when something's broken back to

the top of my call, right sharing kind of were I found some broken things in my own business lately that I have to go back and correct. And like, it's not awesome feeling to do some of these things. But usually, you know, when I hear of people that are not getting more direct bookings, not getting a bookings in general, as I'm hearing right now, right, I can find a lot of holes in the process. And we can drive a lot more visibility, right? We can give Google money, and they'll send us traffic, we can

give Facebook money, and they'll send us traffic. That's awesome. But there's usually a lot of reasons why maybe the site's not converting well, why you have the occupancy you do in the first place, why you're getting so free, keep booking. There's usually a reason for that. So if you can tie everything together operationally and marketing wise, then I think you become one of the top companies in the industry, or certainly in your market, which is maybe what you're focused on.

And then your results can get better and better as you go along. So yeah, we're up against it, I think, a little bit time wise, Paul. But anything else that we should be fluttering in here before we let folks depart for the day? I think that's, again, that's the playbook. What people wanna do with it is up to them, but hopefully we've given people some direction on little things they can do

to make some big improvements, hopefully. I think so, I think so. So hopefully one thing that can improve not only your listening experience for the future, but just your general enjoyment of life is make my day. I've had a little bit of a rough week as I shared at the top of the call. I'm okay general, you know, enjoyment of life is make my day. I've had a little bit of a rough week as I shared at the top of the call. I'm okay. But one thing that would make me smile and put a smile on the

face is if I went into my email inbox, for example, let's say 24 to 48 hours after this episode was published, and I saw a review from you dear listener who made it all the way to the end 35 minutes in Thank you made all the way to the end. And you left a five star review Spotify iTunes you listeners are where we get the most downloads. I appreciate you guys most but anywhere you leave a review anywhere, we do appreciate it.

And then we can bring you more awesome episodes like this on the Heads and Beds show. So if you made it this far again, thank you again. You're an awesome person. Hope you have a wonderful day. We have a wonderful week. I hope you get more bookings and I hope you get more inventory.

And we look forward to sharing our thoughts on the next episode coming up here. So thank you and we'll talk to you next time.