Heads In Beds Show - Running A Marketing Audit For Your Vacation Rental Business To Get More Bookings

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

In this episode Conrad goes solo on this audio-only version of a LIVE training on "Running A Marketing Audit For Your Vacation Rental Business To Get More Bookings". Want to get the video too? Tap the link below.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellRecording: Running A Marketing Audit For Your Vacation Rental Business To Get More BookingsConrad'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.

Hey guys, Conrad here. A bit of a solo episode today. This was actually a recording that I did a little while ago for a webinar called How to Run a Marketing Audit on Your 2024 Results, so you can set up a success for 2025. So this was a fun live training that we did a little while ago. I thought it would be good if perhaps you missed it or didn't watch the initial webinar for you to catch the results here or catch the audio here on the podcast feed. So I'm going to go ahead and roll that right now. And yeah, let me know what you think if you enjoy it. If you have any feedback, I would certainly appreciate that some of the things that we do mention in the recording here were

actually slides on a screen. So what I'll do is also put a link in the show notes here or kind of beneath this episode to the video recording. I'll just put a link to our website where you can check out the video recording if you wanted to look at it that way. Otherwise, please enjoy. Thanks much. We'll dive into it. Be respectful of everybody's time. And like I said, got a lot to go over. So I'm excited to kind of share a little bit about what we've been putting together on this particular presentation. All right. So today's presentation title of it is running a marketing audit on your 2024 results. And of course, setting yourself up for success in 2025. So the premise of today is, you know, odd it's not a word that maybe everybody loves,

but I think it's appropriate sometimes when you're trying to review what you're working on and then ultimately make a plan of how you can potentially get better results next year. So these are, in my opinion, and what we're gonna talk about today, this is an assortment of some of the most valuable plastic on the planet.

So there's lots of plastic on our planet, unfortunately, I guess in a way, but this plastic is some of the most valuable plastic on the planet. So there's lots of plastic on our planet, unfortunately, I guess in a way, but this plastic is some of the most valuable because it is made by Lego. So if you have kids, I have kids, and my oldest is out there right now. Most kids love Lego blocks. Even some adults love Lego blocks and that's fine too. I, for one, I'm actually really tired of Lego blocks

penetrating my feet as I walk upstairs in my house or walk through my kids' room. You know, I can easily find those Lego blocks just with my the ball of my feet whenever I want to. So that's kind of unfortunate. But it turns out that Lego in two thousand and twenty three did ten billion dollars in sales. I knew they were a big company. I'll be honest, I didn't know how big Lego actually was. So to kind of do some research for this presentation, thinking about different companies and how they become successful, I kind of found the story of Lego and I did some research into how large they

are and it's kind of melts my brain a little bit to realize that they sold $10 million in Legos the last year that they have data available. So in 2004 though, that was not the case. In fact, in 2004, Lego lost $320 million. I had to convert it from, I think it's like Swedish currency over to US currency. But in 2004, Lego lost $320 million. I had to convert it from I think it's like Swedish, you know currency over to US currency But in 2004 Lego lost $320 million and they were in the red and kind of on the way to bankruptcy kind of on the way to Irrelevance and this was long after Lego had become successful. They had a lot of customers They had a lot of clients people love Lego and yet in 2004 things were going pretty horribly for them

They in their annual report They talked about it and they said, competition from abroad and the computerization of children's playtime is the reason why they felt like they were losing market share, where they were spending a lot of money and they weren't really getting good outcomes in their business. In fact, like I said, Lego was actually on the brink of bankruptcy. Our turnaround obviously was needed. Lego Group actually hired a consulting firm,

BCG or Boston Consulting Group, to come in and evaluate what Lego was doing, give them some advice, give them some feedback, and see if they can turn around what was obviously desperately needed to take Lego from where they were, losing $300-plus million per year back in 2004, to, of course, now we see them today

as this huge success story, and they've been able to recover from their perceived weaknesses or what they thought was the problem at the time. So some of the details don't matter too much, but we're going to go over some of the things that just kind of understand the mindset here. I think that's an important piece to understand as we get going. But by 2005, they had actually changed everything

in their entire organization, and they redid and redesigned all of the actual LEGO sets they were putting out. So from 2003 to 2005, everything was basically put in the trash, they started over. They're doing fun stuff like this. We've got Star Wars stuff. This is one I remember as a kid, or maybe as like a teen growing up and looking at this kind of stuff.

And of course we see 2003 was bad, 2004 was okay. They eked out a small, tiny profit in 2005. And then since then, 2006, all the way up here to when the last data was available in 2003, 2023, excuse me, they've generated, you know, billions upon billions of dollars and Lego has been super successful. But if you go look at their reports today, they will actually talk about this period as the moment where they had to sit down,

reflect, audit, review, see what was going on, understand what the interchange inside their business. And now of course we see Lego as a huge success, but you wouldn't have felt that way back in 2003. So Lego saved their business with an audit. And I would say this is very important as well by taking action. So they reviewed everything, they understood what the problem set was, but then they took action and they revamped and redid everything. And I certainly hope that if you're here with me today, if you're listening later on, you're

not losing $320 million a year, that would be very less than ideal. But perhaps you're coming down a bit, perhaps your bookings are down a little bit, perhaps your demand is down a bit, perhaps your lead flow is down a little bit. And so you've got to figure out paths to get there and perhaps an audit is the way to get there. And that's kind of the bulk of what we're going to talk about today. So for some people here I'm seeing in the, in the room and things like that live, and maybe if you're watching later on, we haven't chatted before, we haven't met before.

So I just wanted to do a minute or two about myself, our company, kind of what we do. And you know, I know there's some new people here that we have not connected with before. So first of all, thank you for attending. If you're here live, if you're watching later on, we super appreciate that as well. I know your time is super valuable. So I try to make it as valuable as I can on my side of things, giving you the information that you need to make your audit and your business more successful next year. So my name is Conrad O'Connell. I'm the founder of Buildup Bookings. Last year, I read a book called Mastering Vacation and Marketing. That book has now become an Amazon bestseller. So if you're going out to Amazon, you can check that out and learn more about it. I've really spent the last nine or almost close

to 10 years at this point working with vacation rental managers. And our campaigns, if I collectively look at them, have driven over $50 million in direct bookings. So we've seen some good things. We've seen some ways that maybe things could be executed upon better. And of course, the goal today is to share some of that insight, share some of that knowledge with you. So just a note kind of on some of the clients that we've worked with over the years, I did a poll at the very top of the kind of webinar here as you're jumping in asking folks to tell me a little bit about themselves. It looks like most people today have kind of selected that property manager button. I see 83% of the respondents so far have said property manager. So that'll be kind of where I'll try to bias

maybe some of my advice here or some of my feedback. But I see we've got some other folks that have clicked the single property host button. So I'll try to give them some useful feedback as well. I think the good news about this is that the fundamentals of marketing, which is the last webinar we did and the audit of those fundamentals,

which is kind of what we're talking about today, are broadly similar. Like the way that you might execute upon them is a little bit different if you're a single property host versus a property manager, but it's kind of like, you've got to get to the outcome the same way, right? Like you're going to drive on the same roads, whether you're driving a Ferrari or a Honda Civic,

and you still got to follow all the traffic laws, right? One of those is going to be a lot more fun experience than the other, but I think the good news is that what we're talking about today really applies to a lot of different folks. And I just wanted to share again, a little bit about, you know, the clients that we've worked with, you know, they're generating a lot of revenue from bookings and, you know, we use this tagline in a lot of different folks. And I just wanted to share again a little bit about, you know, the clients that we've worked with, you know, they're generating a lot of revenue from bookings. And, you know, we use this tagline in a lot of our marketing.

And I like it, obviously, for reasons, because I think it talks about the effect that our clients have. And I think that's ultimately what you should be looking for when you're thinking of how to improve your marketing or what you're looking for when you should be thinking about, it's really about the client. In your case, your client is probably the homeowner. How do I get them the best results?

How do I make my company better so that they get better results? I think that's kind of what these audits could do on the backend of them. You can learn a lot from them. And yeah, all the fundamentals or the audits that we're gonna talk about from the fundamentals last time still apply today.

So here's just a smattering of examples. We don't have to spend a ton of time on this, but here's a client that we're working with, single market, they've got 125 units. They've done a million dollars in direct bookings in the last 12 months. There's another client, two markets, about 200 units or so, two different beach markets actually based in Florida,

which as we record this right now, they're in a different spot for sure now than they've been in the past. And we certainly hope the hurricane passes without too much long-term damage. But this is a property manager that's over the last year or so generated a little under $3 million in direct bookings. Another client that we work with that's going to do just about

$5 million this year, if we look at it in terms of total direct bookings, this is a resort we work with that's going to do a little over 6 million this year in direct bookings here locally to me in South Carolina. And we've seen a lot of different data come from these. So I could have kept going and get more examples, but you get the point, which is that all these vacationer managers and hosts audit what they're doing, they review what they're doing, and they figure out ways to make that better. So let's dive in, shall we? Running a marketing audit, what does that look like for your business? How can you see the results from that once you actually get started with everything? So I kind of wanted to break everything into these different categories, and I could have really, there was really no limit to the number of things I could have put

into the audit, right? We've done some website conversion audits with folks before, where it's, you know, 20, 50, 100, 200 items in there. But I guess what I wanted to do and what I'm hoping to accomplish today is to really break it down and be a lot more specific and a lot more tactical into each of these six areas. By no means do I think this comprehensive and covers every single thing that you could be doing in your vacational business. But I think if you're trying to get more reservations,

if you're trying to get more bookings direct, these things feel like the safest bets to me based on all the data that I've looked at and all the clients that we've worked with over the past few years of buildup booking. So, and audit is great. Like in theory, we could, like I was saying a minute ago, uncover every single stone in the river

and make sure that we look for every little nook and cranny to figure out what's gonna work best. And my sort of belief system, by the way, is that any form of marketing can work, right? With enough volume, anything that I skipped over, I didn't put on this list today could work. So I'm not saying that if it's not on this list, it's not a marketing activity worth doing, it very well may be. But what I've noticed, again, looking at all the clients that we've had the opportunity to work with over the past few years, these are where we get the best results from. So if I could only pick six and I've got an hour of time

as I've got with you today, these are the six that in my mind make the most sense to be focused on if you're gonna review, audit and look at what you're doing to figure out how you can make it perform better. So people talk about like the 80-20 principle or like where does the majority of my results come from? In my mind, it's these and that's kind of where

I think we're gonna focus on today. So top left to bottom right, website performance kind of being number one. Search marketing number two, we'll talk both on the paid side of search marketing or what we some people might call PPC or ICM. And then we're also going to talk about the organic side of search marketing. So most people might say SEO, organic search. We're going to talk about that same kind of concept with social.

There's kind of an organic component to social and there's a paid component to social. There's also a few channels within social Facebook and Instagram will kind of be the focus of today's talk and audit and things like that. But of course, there's other social channels that you could focus on too. TikTok will be a good example. So we could talk about that as well as we get going. Content marketing, I kind of separated this on purpose. We'll get to that obviously here in a few minutes, but content in my mind is certainly what you put on your website from like a blog post perspective, resource pages, that kind of thing. But content is everything you produce, right? The emails you send to your guests when you're actually getting them ready to arrive at your properties, right? Content is also the guidebook

that you send them when they're there and you're giving them recommendations on where to go, what to do, all those kinds of things. Then we'll head over to email marketing, and then finally, fees and budgets. So at the end of the day, the dollars and cents of everything is how we can make all these marketing engines go. So we'll kind of wrap up on fees and budgets. All right. So stay to the end. Again, if you're here live, I've got sort of a downloadable version of the checklist that we're going to go over. So again, if you're watching the recording, you're seeing the recording, you don't need to like take notes or anything like that. You've got it. But again, if you're here with me live, stay to the end and I can send you sort of a checklist or a downloadable

version of what we're going to talk about today, just to make, you know, going through this in your own business and your own company a little bit easier. So just stick to the end. I'll give that bonus out at the very end. It's just a Google Sheet that'll make, I think, everything we're going to talk about today a little bit more tactical and a little bit more relevant.

Also, we'd love questions. We've got a good amount of material today. But if you guys have any questions that you want answered, I'll try to carve out a few minutes at the very end here and try to get through any of those questions that might come in as they come through. So there's a chat function here.

If you're here live, feel free to use that chat function so we can see what's going on there. All right, so always love to start with a quote when we go through each of these sections. So this is one from Will Durant. I like this one quite a bit. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not just an act but a habit.

And I liked this quote quite a bit when I was thinking of what to put in on this section because I think a lot of people think that marketing is like this viral activity or this one-time thing that's going to occur in their business and they're going to go from not being good at marketing to then all of a sudden a viral event is going to happen or something positive is going to happen and then the marketing is done or the marketing is complete for some period of time. And I'm not saying that virality does not exist in marketing. Of course it does. We can point to a lot of examples of where a viral ad or a viral brand has come from seemingly nowhere and seen a lot of success.

I just don't think it's very repeatable, and I don't think it's very planable. So it's not like we can hope for one thing to occur, and that's what's actually going to drive the results in our business. We've got to think, what are things that we can do every day, or weekly, or monthly, or something on a reasonable cadence, a reasonable schedule, that's going to lead to an outcome that we

want. And we can always sort of try to increase our surface area for viral, you know, videos to occur. If you're posting more on, let's say, Instagram, your chance of getting a viral reel for your property goes a lot higher than if you're not posting. One would get to the conclusion there, obviously. But I think it's a bad idea or a bad kind of concept to just try to force or assume that virality is going to be the thing that's actually going to lead you to where you want to go. Most of the best clients we work with, all the top property managers that we've seen kind of under the hood on over the past, you know, for me, nine years at this point, don't really have this one

thing that happened. They might have a few stories or examples of like, oh, we put up a Facebook post one time and it went viral and we got a million views. But it's really just like the day in day out consistency of these things that really leads to I think that great outcome that they have. And it's really just like, how do I build a brand awareness over an extended period of time? So I guess what I'm hoping for, and we'll talk about this a little bit later at the end too, is that you don't go through a checklist, do everything frenetically or rapidly one time, and then put it back on the shelf and never look at it again. I think a better structure for us to think about is how can I consistently do these things over all of next year,

like starting this year and then all of 2025? What things are sustainable? What things can I actually do consistently? And that's where I think excellence or just great brand awareness or great marketing comes from is really just these little things that we do over an extended period of time. So this audit, I certainly don't hope anything

we're gonna talk about today will make you feel bad. I mean, maybe that might occur if you feel like, oh, no, I'm not doing this, I'm not doing that. You might feel like your checklist is a little bit there. But, you know, in my mind, if you're successful and you're here and you're, you know, spanking time out of your day to sort of attend this and figure out how you can get your marketing in better shape, to me, you're probably already ahead of 90% of property managers out there that are doing nothing or not taking action they need to. But if my past experience have taught me anything, it's that when people are confronted with a very long list of things to do or they're not doing,

they can maybe feel bad or get demotivated. So I don't want you to be demotivated, because I think if you were to go audit any single VRM, Vacational Manager Company, in the US, it would be so easy to find little mistakes or little things that weren't done perfectly. We've had the opportunity to work with these large property managers that are doing millions of dollars a year,

$5, $10, $15, $20,, 30, 40 million dollars a year in gross booking revenue. And they've got a team of people, like five full-time team members that are just doing marketing inside their business. And I can always go in and pick at something, right? And I can find something that's not done perfectly. So again, the goal today is not to find a thousand things that you need to do. The goal is to find two or three things that you can commit to and work on and those sorts of pieces.

So let's start with the website. I think starting with the website is perfect because sadly it's unfortunate sorts of pieces. So let's start with website. I think starting with website is perfect because sadly it's unfortunate. Even great marketing can fail with the wrong website. So I kind of do feel like it's the thing to start with because a lot of the other pieces that we're gonna talk about layering in from here on the audit of search marketing, social email,

these other pieces don't work well in my experience if you don't have the website tuned in properly. And we've had a lot of examples recently where we're working with clients and they sort of shed the old, you know, dated website and they get a new one in place that has all the right tracking in place. We're gonna talk about that.

It has a better aesthetic, a better brand, a better look and feel. And then all of a sudden the same marketing we were doing before starts working a lot better. I think this is a common one where, you know, sometimes if you're thinking or you feel confident that maybe the website is the problem, some marketing people will try to maybe talk you out of that. Oh, no, you need more traffic. Maybe.

But in my experience, like the website is often the problem if you're not getting the results that you want. And we got to start here with the website, but talking about traffic, though, you know, let's look first at the audit of the traffic. I think the questions to ask yourself when you're doing this, this kind of audit and review is where people coming from, what traffic sources drive the highest volume, and then what traffic sources drive the highest conversions. I think those are the simple questions to ask as you're getting going with this review of your website itself is that we all have subjective opinions about how the website looks and how it feels. Those are all things that we just feel, it doesn't really map into it. I think data is going to be your friend here. So I think having

very clear, very obvious understanding of here's all the bookings that are coming in, here's where they're actually coming from, and then where am I getting the most traffic are just the fundamental questions to ask. Because what you may discover, a lot of our clients have discovered this over the past few years,

you may have a traffic source that drives a high volume of traffic, but a very low level of bookings. Now it doesn't mean that that traffic source is not helping you or benefiting you in some way. Social often falls into that bucket for a lot of clients that we work with in the vacational space. They get a lot of maybe clicks from social, particularly if they're running ads on Facebook or ads on Instagram, and they don't get a lot of bookings. And some clients

might get discouraged by that. And then we later go in and dig in further and realize the fact that many guests who are booking are finding the properties through social media and then later going to the website directly to actually make a reservation. And when I say directly, I don't just mean a direct booking, I just mean like they're going later to the website in their browser or something like that by typing in the URL, hitting enter, and going to that website.

So understanding these kinds of pieces is probably the first piece of the audit to really get a good handle on where people are coming from. And to this conversion piece really quickly, I think that's the second pillar here that we have in the audit. You'd be shocked at like the lack of tracking that I think a lot of folks have when they're doing sort of marketing activity.

And I think that's probably one of the weak spots that a lot of folks have to deal with, which is that if you're getting traffic to the website, it's so critically important that if we can, and I realize not every PMS supports this, not every website supports this, which maybe that's fodder for changing your website if you need to. But if you have the tracking in place, then we can actually understand exactly where things are occurring. Without it, we are at best guessing, and that's being generous with that sort of phrasing of we're guessing what's going to work versus seeing what actually is working.

And when we get clients that actually add in this tracking and we understand the percent of people that are coming in and converting, how effective our different ad campaigns are. You know, we have two campaigns both spending the same budget per day. One may be converting 5x, 10x, 20x better than the other one. Once you have an understanding of that, then the audit is so much more useful because you're actually understanding, okay, I spent this and I got that. I spent this and I got that. I want to do more of this and less of less of that, right? Like just just simple conclusions are so much easier when you've got the right data in front of you. I think it's going to be really, really challenging, or I would argue, pretty much impossible to do an audit if you

don't have a good sense of where people are coming from and how they're actually converting on your website from a booking perspective. So I think these two pieces of where people coming from and how are they converting are probably the most important pieces to get in place before you really do the audit in earnest on each of the other channels or rather talk about coming up here,

like search, social email, all those other things. So the last kind of tile here that I want to talk about for a few minutes is user experience. So it's not just does your website work. It's how does your website work. And I think that that's something where it's easy to have a sort of black and white view or a binary view of how these things are working.

So we could make a checklist to say, like, I put in dates into the home page of this vacation website. And then I get to the search results page, and it returns properties. But if it takes five seconds for that to happen, or if the map doesn't load properly, or if the dates don't carry over properly,

there's so many little things that can occur where one thing doesn't kill your conversion rate, in my experience. It's usually this collection. It's usually this almost like snowball rolling down the hill in a bad way of little problems at a website that pop up in her conversion rate so drastically. I sort of had this theory that 50% of your success with like this marketing and advertising game in general

comes down to like how you set up the ads, who you're targeting, what you're showing them, the ad creative itself, the copy, the graphics, the landing page, all that kind of stuff, right? And then the other half comes down to the website where you're targeting, what you're showing them, the ad creative itself, the copy, the graphics, the landing page, all that kind of stuff, right? And then the other half comes down to the website where you're actually sending them. And I've actually seen many situations recently where I would argue someone set up the ads really strongly.

Like they set up ads perfectly, you know, using the best practices, if you will, that Google or Facebook or Meta would have in place. And then they send them to a page that's not set up well for success and then their ads fail. And then I've kind of seen the other thing at times where, you know, we've got the chance to look at audit or do an audit of someone's Google ads account

one time where they were really setting things up poorly. But because their website was like their properties were so desirable, it was kind of working even though the ads weren't really weren't really set up that well. Of course, the optimal outcomes that we get both working in tandem. But I think it's it's very it's unfortunate that kind of in this competitive environment, you've got to be able to nail both those things. You've got to set up things properly on the advertising and marketing side, and you've got to have the user experience on your website, be tuned in, and at least be a reasonable on par experience compared to working with an OTA platform. A guest is going to compare you, whether unfairly or fairly,

to an OTA platform in terms of website experience. And if your website loads a lot slower, if your website doesn't have the same ease of use where I'm clicking on dates and I'm getting back quickly the price quote, what I expect to pay for the reservation, all those things, then they're going to consider going somewhere else to another local competitor, or they're certainly, of course, going to consider going to an AOTA. So is your website ever going to be as good as Airbnb? Probably not, of course, right? Your website's not going to be as good as VRBO, but you don't have the same outcome as them. You're not really trying to market for millions of different listings, hundreds of different destinations. You're focused on one market. So your problem set is a lot smaller, but the truth is the

website UI UX piece cannot be skipped over because you've got to have both in place for things to be successful. Just to give you some metrics or numbers, once you've got to have both in place for things to really be successful. So just to give you some metrics or numbers, once you've got the conversion rate tracking tuned in, I consider targeted traffic should convert at least 1% for us to feel like we're doing the right thing from a user experience and kind of overall conversion rate perspective. So just to give you some examples of what I consider targeted traffic, if we're sending in paid search traffic on a very specific keyword to a website and it's not converting at at least 1%, I feel like there's usually something wrong on that website layer, right?

If we're bidding on a very specific term or even more specific example, if people are searching for like the name of a company, the name of a brand, the name of a listing, the name of a vacation rental home, they get to that page and they're not converting at least 1%, then usually something's off on the website side of things.

You know, on the flip side, if you're converting at over 2%, whatever marketing channel that happens to be that converts that more than 2%. So if you send it 100 visitors from whatever the marketing traffic happens to be, and then you get at least two bookings from that, and you can repeat that over a long period of time, you got to figure out what you can do to get more of that traffic, right? And pretty almost any paid advertising or any sort of campaign that converts at 2% is worth doing as much of it as you possibly can hold, doing as much of it as you possibly can hold or as much of it as you possibly can as you get going

to really figure out how you can get more of those reservations. I had a call with a client recently and we were talking about the fact that their best converting email campaign is a very simple plain text one. And it's two guests that are staying in the units currently asking them if they want a book

for the following calendar year. And they convert like something ridiculous. I mean, like 15% of people who are staying with them will say, Oh, yeah, I'll take the same weeks next year. And I'm like, well, how do we make sure we get that message in as many places as possible? Because like, when I'm on vacation, I don't check my email, right? So like, I'm not you can send me the prettiest link in the world to your

website. And when I'm on vacation, and I'm disconnected, I don't want to look at it. I don't want to engage with it. So we added in text, the other can add in text marketing to kind of this approach. And now we've got something and marketing thing that's converting a 12% going out via text and going out via email. Sounds like a simple enough insight, but like this audit of like uncovering our highest traffic converting sources was what led us to this outcome of how we can figure out where the actual bookings are coming from and where they're converting the best. So again, the website is so critical, the website is so valuable. And without that being in good

shape, and most importantly, understanding where traffic is coming from and how it's converting, we're gonna find everything else here a little bit harder. So that's website. Let's go along a little bit here to the search marketing journey and just cover a little bit more of that side of it. So the first marketing channel that I put up here,

obviously on the audit checklist today is search marketing. And the reason for that, and this is a question I get asked all the time, right? If you could only do one thing, what would you do? You know, it's like, it's like the default question that a lot of people seem to have for me when I'm, when we're going through all these different marketing ideas. And my answer is always search. And the reason that I say that is that if I can only have one channel that I could leverage search, I know can drive the highest volume of traffic compared to doing social media marketing or doing email marketing or these other things.

I can get the highest volume of clicks for people coming from search. And when I say search, let's be honest, I mean Google. Of course, there's other search engines, but 95% of our traffic is gonna come from Google. And I know that the quality of the traffic coming from search is often very high as well, right? When people go into Google

and they're searching for very specific things, terms, you know, keywords for content or keywords for individual vacation rental properties, those sorts of things, they convert at a much higher percentage into bookings or into leads directly than other channels do by a pretty wide margin when I look at it. So if you're going to audit one thing,

if you're going to do one thing next year better than maybe you're doing it today, Search feels like a really safe bet to me based on all the data and analytics that I review on a regular basis. So again, I kind of mentioned this a few minutes ago at the top. We talked about search kind of has both this paid and organic component. I think some people dividing these two things is kind of silly, to be honest with you, because both channels drive what essentially amounts to the same traffic, right?

When you go into Google and you do a search and you click on the second ad, for example, in the ad block versus clicking on the second organic result, the traffic intent is the same, right? Now we're paying for one and we're not paying for the other. I would argue we kind of are paying for the SEO piece of the puzzle, right? With respect to we're paying with time, we're paying with energy, we're paying with other things that are not given Google our credit card. It's a little bit different in that respect, but they both amount to again, what does it affect the same traffic? So if you're very hesitant to invest into

ads or you're maybe investing in ads right now, and you're not sure if you should be investing more, I would say the first thing is let's understand the tracking. So we can go back two slides and look at the tracking. What are we spending versus what are we getting out of it? We'll talk about that more a little bit here in a few minutes as well when we talk about fees and we talk about structure of payments and ROAS and things like that. But if you're putting money into ads and you're not getting the results that you want, let's first try to figure out is like, are we sending in the right intent traffic?

So I think understanding I'm paying money on the ad side of things to Google. What's my ROAS? What do I consider an acceptable ROAS? So ROAS meaning return on ad spend. And how do I know if I'm getting all the growth opportunities in front of me that I should be getting? I think it starts with just understanding those three metrics. So if I'm looking at a Google ads account for the first time, I want to understand a few simple numbers. What are we spending? Let's just pick a number. Let's say we're spending a thousand dollars a month. What are we getting out of that from a ROAS perspective? So again, some of our clients may spend a thousand dollars. They would expect to get at least $5,000. Let's say of gross booking revenue from that thousand

dollars of ad spend. So our ROAS in that situation would be five to one. How many impressions am I actually gathering? So impression chair tells us if if there's 100 searches occurring in a given day or week or month, how many of those searches am I showing up for? Let's go back to my previous comment about if you have something that's converting at 2%, what is much of your budget into that as possible, right? If you're converting at that, because you need to understand, that's probably a home run hitter,

and you should ride that thing as long as you can. Impression Share will tell you that, because if you have a campaign converting a 2%, but you're only showing half the time, we should go in and maximize our budget, maximize our ad spend into those things that are working best. And it may mean that we turn off a different campaign

and save that budget and put it more into the one that's working best. I think that's kind of what these audits can uncover for us a lot of times is we have audits where we don't change the budget for a client at all. We just allocate it very differently. We shift it around very differently and we get a much better outcome there. And then, you know, that was this last idea on the paid side of things. Where are my growth

opportunities? You know, where am I not investing enough or where am I? What keywords am I bidding on that are not working well? And how do I find new ones that can work better? My sort of thesis here is that it's kind of like, there's kind of like layers of how specific a search is in Google. And you want to be as much as possible. You want to be at the bottom of that wherever you can at first. And then over time, you actually get a little bit more broad and you get a little bit more generalized into what keywords are going after. So to give like a specific example, the fictional example I do in the podcast all the time is not a real company called Conrad School Cabin Rentals. Well, the first like paid search layer I may want to go through is like people looking for the names of

my company, this fictional company, Conrad School Cabin Rentals, and also the name of any listings I have in that company. So I have one, it's called Julian's Getaway. That's my son's name. So just picking simple things here. I want to make sure that when people search for the name of that property or the name of my company, I'm coming up and those growth opportunities are fully captured. No one else can run on my terms, both on the property level and on the brand level other than me, where I'm showing up there as much as I can. And in this situation, I wanna show on both the paid side,

I want an ad to be running, and I wanna show up on the organic side. So it may mean that I need to do work kind of in two different areas. At first, I need to make sure my page is optimized properly from an on-page SEO perspective, you know, title, content on the page, and so on and so forth for that keyword. And then I also need to make sure that I'm running an ad when people are searching for those things. You'd be shocked how often people go into these very broad and generalized

keyword examples. Let's say they want to rank for a term like Myrtle Beach Vacation Rentals. That's where I'm based here in the Myrtle Beach area. And they want to rank for that before they've got the basics down. So I think it's getting that basics down first, then going into these next pieces after that on the basics down. So I think it's getting that basics down first, then going into these next pieces after that on the paid side. So yeah, next up SEO. So we could have done a lot on SEO. I probably could do an hour, to be honest with you, on just doing a technical SEO audit, but in the spirit of trying to keep to today's outline and today's goal, I won't do that. We'll talk just kind of about a high level of like, if I could only audit or review one area or one portion of a SEO campaign, what would I look at?

And the answer for me is always going to be Google Search Console. So when I look in Search Console, I can see clicks that are occurring. I can see impressions where my website's actually showing up for. And then I can see how people are clicking on the website and finding me. So the one thing I think that it's important to understand is that in a perfect world, we rank for every term, every keyword that we want to in Google, number one, all the time, right? That's the perfect world. In the real world, we've got to understand what are the keywords that actually move the needle for us. And if there's a keyword that we feel like is really valuable, it might even be worth going by the way and running that

keyword into paid ads and seeing how well it converts. You'd be again, surprised by how often a client might give us a mandate or an idea or an example of, hey, we want to rank for this particular keyword. And then we actually tried in the paid ads side of things in Google and the keyword doesn't convert. So it's actually a good thing. I would be honest, a really good thing that we did not go ahead and try to rank for that keyword organically and put a bunch of effort into it. Because if we had, maybe we would have got to the end of the rainbow there, so to speak,

and realize that that keyword wasn't going to convert anyways. So paid ads and some of these things can be a great way to like get more data, get more research in front of you so that you understand what's going to work well from an SEO perspective. And some of the best wins we've had, I would argue, on the SEO side or when you're auditing, your SEO results could be, what are my best, you know, converting traffic on the paid side? How can I make sure that I rank the best possible on the organic side so you can learn more from that?

The last note I had in here on SEO is we can look at clicks, we can look at impressions in Search Console. That's ideal. But I think that links build is probably the next thing that you want to look at. My sort of, again, belief in work that I've done over the past few years has indicated to me that most of the time SEO comes down to a few things. It's TLCK, right? It's technical, link building, keyword research, constant creation. That's what really SEO is. So at the end of the day, if you're going and trying to rank your website better in search and I'm sort of here advocating that you do that because this is where some of the best quality traffic comes from for most of our clients that we work with.

Once you've got the technical side of your website in what I call good enough shape, you don't need to always focus on that on a regular ongoing basis. It's in good shape. You can then kind of transition your efforts into other things. That point is really just, can I build more relevant pages on my website? And can I build links to my website? Can I get more people to reference my website out there on the internet so that people know who I am? They'll find me, Google will find those links and then I'll get a benefit from it. So I think it's easy to overcomplicate

it because certainly when you get into the nuance of SEO, there's a lot of different kind of ways to approach link building, or there's a lot of different ways to approach doing a technical audit and those kind of things. But I think if I had to just look at an audit and say, all right, just walk me through how many links were built, how many new pages were added, and then what was the effect of that in Search Console, I think you're going to get really close to the answer that you need of what your weakness is or what you're not doing

that you can then do better and improve on for 2025. So yeah, I could probably do, again, like I said, an hour on just technical SEO, but I wanted to give a quick example as it relates to, you know, like trying to figure out how many links you might need to go from wherever you are to the top of Google. So I did this research a few weeks ago. This market I picked was just kind of at random,

but just to give you an example, I picked a market where we have no clients, Amelia Island, Florida. This is a market in Florida that seems to have good search volume, good demand. It's not a new market that no one has ever found before. People have been around there for a long time. The top ranking local site on Amelia Island has 62 links pointing to it. So 62 different websites have linked to the top ranking local site in Amelia Island. So if you were building two links per month,

it would take you two years basically to get just as many links as that company has that, from what I could tell, has been around for five or 10 years at this point. If you were building three or four links per month, you might only need one year to actually get just as many links on that website as you had from other places. To me, that's wild, right? Because it makes you realize that there's not that much difference or there's not that much in the way of you actually ranking well in Google and when you're competing with local sites. And most people aren't spending a lot of time, effort and energy on this. So if you can do that piece, if you can understand where your top local competitor is and then compare where you are, you may realize that you're

not as far away as you think you are. Again, I think a lot of folks will compare their marketing efforts or how many links they have to Airbnb. And that's silly. You're not competing with Airbnb. You're competing. Most people are listening are competing in their local market. They're trying to compete with the one, two, four, five, six property managers in their market. You're racing against a handful of folks. You're not racing against Airbnb and a billion dollar budget. That's a totally different game to play. The last thing I'll say is that one of the best things I think to understand, and we've talked about this on previous, I've talked about this in previous media and podcasts

and stuff that I've done, is understanding how many people are searching for your brand name every single month. So going into Google search console, looking at the data that's coming in and realizing how many people are searching for, again, this fictional example of Conrad school cabinet rentals every month. I love that data. I love that information because to me it's validation that all the marketing you're doing is working. When people are going to Google and looking for your specific company, they've actually

at that point narrowed out or they've eliminated, if you will, most of the other competition out there. They're not considering other property managers. They're not considering even OTAs at that point. That's the best quality traffic that I could get is people searching for my brand name. But I think if you're auditing your SEO results, you don't want to overly rely on that because that may be where a good chunk of your conversions and a good chunk of your actual results are coming from is people searching for your brand name. You want to see if you can look at non-brand traffic that's

coming through. And non-brand traffic will probably tell you a lot because non-brand traffic is ultimately that person finding you for the first time and they've never seen you before. And then when they see you, now we're building new interests, we're building new things that come into the fold, which is gonna help you ultimately get better results from search. So you can go into your analytics,

look at rankings and revenue from non-brand or organic traffic, you're gonna get a lot of benefit from that as well. All right, social media. So social, let's kind of head in this direction. Again, trying to simplify things today or we're doing an audit. I would say if we can sum up social into two things, it would be social as an activity game and social as a creative game. So social is one of these channels, unlike search, where I can't build an asset like a blog post, and then let that get a

lot of visibility and a lot of traffic for the next, you know, 10 months or two years or three years or something like that. We have clients where we've written blog posts, and it ranks for a really long time in Google. Unfortunately, that is not social media. Social media is an activity game where most of the time, a piece of content that we post into Facebook or into Instagram is going to last anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours. Every once in a while, we'll see something last a little bit longer,

but that's usually not the case in social. Social is this game that we've got to keep playing over and over again, we've got to keep posting over and over again for us to see results. Now, it doesn't mean that I don't think you should do it or that you shouldn't be having this as part of your marketing plan. Of course, there's a lot of benefits to be leveraging social and getting some wins from it, but that's the game, right? We've got to realize that we're committing to doing something for an extended period of time, which is also why I believe that in social, looking at page growth and engagement across what your active channels are is the key. So it's not, you know, I've seen a lot

of reports before in the past where it's like, I have 10,000 Facebook followers. Okay, cool. That's awesome. But like, are any of those followers actually engaging with the content? Because I'll take a page that has 1000 followers, but gets 10% of people who actually follow the page to like comment, share, do something with it over a page with 10,000 followers, but only, you know, one, 100 of those people actually engage in the content. And you'd be surprised at how often that's kind of the metric that folks are optimizing for. They're optimizing for number of followers, not number of people actually engaging with you. It would be like if I was doing this, you know, presentation right now,

and there was a thousand people in the room, but none of them were paying attention and they were distracted versus having 50 people in the room, but they're intently listening to everything I'm saying. I think that's the one thing that people just don't understand. And reach on social is one of these things that can be gained easily, you know, if you focus on the right kind of content and the creative that people want to focus on or they want to see on their feeds, right? So I think a high level of activity, posting as much as you can

while keeping the content quality high is kind of the battle here, right? So I've got to figure out what channels can I do well, how much content can I actually push out, and how to make sure that I keep my quality high. Even if it means you slow down your quantity a little bit, I think that's the play as we look at where social trends are going. You're better off posting once a day, twice a day,

or, excuse me, once a week, twice a week, but posting something that's interesting that people really are looking to consume or watch. So on Instagram, that might be doing more video, for example, versus doing a post every single day, but it's getting very low engagement. In fact, we've seen a lot of clients where they slow down their posting

and they actually get way more reach because the post actually gets some momentum and gets some legs, people start to see it, and then it gets shown to more people and so on and so forth. There's kind of some beneficial loops that come from there. So high posting frequency, but low kind of care about the content is kind of the wrong formula, in my opinion.

And I think you want to audit what posts have done best. So if you go into, for example, like meta business insights, you can go look at like the last 12 months of content you posted on social and be like, let's look at my top 10 real quick. Maybe you posted something twice a week. So you posted 100 pieces of content. Let's go look at the top 10 and see what I can learn from that. Probably their video and probably there's something that, you know, tapped into a trend or tapped into an interest that had an interesting aesthetic to it. And you can probably find a lot more from that. So the next piece here that I want to talk about on the paid side of things is just like, just like we talked about with a second eagle in search, there's an organic component and a paid component.

The same thing applies, of course, to social, you know, and when I say social, again, I mostly mean Facebook and Instagram. And a lot of people try to, again, make Facebook ads really complicated. I've kind of started to say this WWW framework, which is what are we actually trying to get people to achieve with the ad? So most of the time that's make a booking or fill out a lead form or, you know, give us some information so we can follow up with that guest. That's kind of the first thing. Who do we want to show that ad to? And then what do we actually want to show them? So if we're thinking of social and we're thinking of ads, I think a lot of people get very focused on that last piece

of like, here's what the video or image should actually look like. And they kind of skip over those first two pieces a little bit too much, which is what am I trying to actually achieve? So again, most of the time that's getting a direct booking or getting someone to follow the page or getting someone to fill out a contact form,

getting someone to download our local area guide. There's a lot of different objectives, depending on the budget and the campaign and stuff like that. Who do I wanna show the ad to? And then the last step in my mind is what do I actually wanna show them? And that's where I think looking at, again,

video creative versus static creative. With all of our clients now, we're really pushing hard to try to make sure we can get video creative wherever possible. That's obviously where social is going, particularly on Instagram. It's kinda hard to keep going down the Instagram path without doing much in the way of video creative, because that's where a lot of the consumption has gone on

that platform. And that's different. A year ago, that was not the case, or it was the case, but it wasn't as strong as it is today. So understanding what the format is that people actually are looking for, what they care about, what they're consuming can make you a lot more successful when you're actually going to run those campaigns because you're getting it in front of the right people. So page growth in terms of just getting more people to follow you, getting more people to consume your ad is easy, right? I can get likes for a penny if I target folks in Bangladesh.

But if you're listening and you're in the US, you probably aren't gonna get many people coming from Bangladesh to actually book a vacation rental with you. So it might cost us 10 times more to show an ad to someone based in Washington, DC, versus someone based in Bangladesh or India, but that person is a hundred times or,000 times more likely to actually convert. So I think that's kind of where, again, the numbers can sort of get confusing

or get challenging in time to review and look at, because you're looking at stuff that's more of any metric than actual real business impact. And I think that's ultimately what needs to be focused on here. We talked about this a second ago, but yeah, what are we trying to do? Who am I showing my ads to? And what am I showing them? So I think that the best thing to do in my mind here is to review the creative the most I think the what you're actually showing them needs to be the most focus of like if I'm changing my ads Why am I changing my ads? What am I doing differently in those campaigns? Maybe it's trying new music in the ads

Maybe it's trying a different edit. Maybe it's making the ads a little bit quicker edits versus the slower edits Maybe it's doing the opposite. Those are all things that you could test and audit and review. Then the next layer up is like, who am I showing the ads to? Those may not change significantly. Your core demographics, who you're actually marketing to on a regular basis, who come and stay in your properties the most, probably doesn't shift a ton year over year.

I mean, of course, over time, you'll see trends of perhaps different age groups attending or people. Maybe you get new properties, larger properties, and you can now host multi-generational families where you couldn't before if you had smaller properties. So over time, things may shift, but usually month to month, year to year, the actual audience of who you're showing the ads to probably doesn't change a lot. So let's see why I want you to be doing a lot of creative, right? So you can show them different

stuff. And the, and the what the, that top layer objective really rarely changes at all, right? Like this campaign is trying to get bookings. This campaign is trying to get brand awareness. This campaign is trying to get more people to follow my page. So that changes the least, the what, the who changes a slower amount, and then what we're actually showing them, that last layer, is what changes the most. That's where we're actually making a lot of modifications.

So just some other tips here that I wanna talk about. One thing I love to do when we're running ads for clients is actually keep people in a retargeting audience even after they've booked. We've had clients in the past who have given us lists of people and said, Hey, this person or this group of people actually already reserved. I want to go ahead and exclude them from the ads. I used to be like, okay, no problem. We'll take that list and we'll exclude her from the ads. I now no longer like to do that. And if anything, I want to make sure that people who have booked are seeing our ads

over and over again, because there's nothing I love more to see on a Facebook ads campaign than to see comments from real people who have left a comment on that ad itself and have said something to the effect of, oh, I just booked with Conrad school cabins or I just got back from my stay. It was awesome. We had a great time. The property was amazing. It was clean. It was everything I expected. All those kinds of things. That's the sort of social proof that you can't fake. And that's the sort of social proof that really can convince someone to be like, I'm seeing this out for the first time. I'm seeing this company for the first time. how do I know

I can trust them seeing a dozen comments underneath an ad of these guys are awesome. They took care of me and they took care of my family is so valuable. And I think we as like marketing professionals have gotten too into the data at times where it's like, oh, let's let's make sure that our, you know, 1.1% of our budget doesn't go to the wrong people. And we don't realize the positive or the benefits that you get from actually showing that ad to someone who's already booked. If you're doing a great job as a host or as a property manager, they see that, they leave

a comment, and there's so many pros there. So I just wanted to kind of put that in there. I don't know exactly where it's stated in the presentation, but I wanted to put it in that middle spot there. All right, so the last kind of tile here, tracking from social activity, and then what are the levels of views that we're book and bookings that we're getting from that social activity? So I talked about this the very kind of first section where we talked about website and tracking most of the clients that we look at, most of the audits that we do when we're book and bookings that we're getting from that social activity. So I talked about this the very kind of first section where we talked about website and

tracking most of the clients that we look at most of the audits that we do when we're reviewing analytics data indicates to us that a lot of people come from social ads over to the website and then do not book in that same browsing session. So a lot of clients may at times I would say kind of falsely or misunderstood the misunderstanding the fact that people coming from social are not in the booking mindset in that exact moment for the most part. Right. So if someone clicks on a Facebook ad and they look at a property detail page, for example, on your website, the chance of them converting

are pretty low in that same browsing session, particularly if it's cold targeting, meaning they haven't seen you before. They haven't stayed with you before. This is the first time they've ever seen this property and they clicked on it. So the thing to measure inside of analytics is not who clicks over and converts in that same browsing session. The thing to measure is on the ad side of things. Let's say you're running ads, for example, on Facebook is you want to look at your metal pixel data and understand how many people are coming, looking, and then converting later on once they saw that ad for the first time, again,

particularly for cold audiences. So if I show an ad to someone for the first time on social media, let's just say Instagram, for example, they click over to my website, they look at, let's say a handful of photos, they put in the dates and then they leave. That was not necessarily an unsuccessful ad. It could be that I planted a seed that I could harvest later on, which I can understand once I get the tracking in place from these pixel pieces. So the very first, again, section here, we talked about website tracking for analytics. This is a little bit harder. Again, you might need some custom

work done on your website or whether you're a developer, but you really want that meta pixel tracking in place too, if you're going to be running ads from social platforms like Facebook and Instagram because you can see views through conversions, which is really valuable to understand, again, particularly on cold traffic for people who visit the website one time and then later return and make a reservation from that initial visit. So that kind of covers social. Let's head over to content. I did split up content for a reason separate from SEO, although obviously content is a

portion and a chunk of what we're doing on the search and specifically on the SEO side of things. But content, I think, is one of these pieces that needs its own review or needs its own audit because it takes many different forms. One thing that COVID taught us taught me a lot of things. But one thing it taught me, unfortunately, is that restaurants were closing left and right during COVID. So all these restaurant guides that we spent hours working on with our writing team, with our content team, for our clients, here's the 10 best restaurants in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, became irrelevant pretty quickly as restaurants were closing left and right throughout 2020 and 2021.

So we had to go and update some of our clients. We had to update like five times, six times. We had to go and update these blog posts to make sure that they were still accurate. So it's one of those things where content decays, unfortunately, at a very fast rate, particularly online, where you are competing in the search results with people who have maybe more time and effort to update that content. Maybe you're competing with people in the search results that are, that is their business. So their business is not vacation rentals, and they're writing content to support that side of their business to kind of get more awareness or attention. But you're competing with sites where their job is basically to make the most comprehensive updated list of restaurants in a location like Myrtle Beach. So the content decay,

I think, is something where auditing and reviewing what's actually going out from like a blog post perspective or what's going on into things like guidebooks, for example, what's going out as like your recommendations for when guests are coming and staying. These are things that need to be, again, reviewed and audited quite a bit because things change quite a bit. And you want to be on top of that. I think there's nothing worse than breaking the trust of a guest by saying, hey, go to Cooper's. Cooper's is the best seafood restaurant here in the area.

And then Cooper's closed two months ago, and you're still recommending that in your guidebook or something like that. So yeah, if I was going and doing the content audit, what am I looking for? Content written and pieces published. Again, I think something I see somewhat commonly when we're doing reviews or lists of, you know, project work for clients is we see a list of ideas, but we don't see the actual published, you know,

content from those ideas. So I think that having a list of what you want to work on is great. What's better is not just having a list of what you want to work on, but actually understanding what's been published, what are we actually getting out there on the site, and how well are those pieces performing. So new content, we can actually getting out there on the site, and how well are those pieces performing. So new content, we can look at Search Console, for example, and maybe we're not looking at traffic at first, we're looking at impressions. We're putting out a new blog post, how many people just saw it in the first, let's say, 35 days after I published it?

That could be a good measure if Google's taking to that post, if we're getting some benefit from it, excuse me, and if we're getting a lot of reach from that content. It might be a red flag for you if you're publishing 5, 10, 15, 20 articles per calendar year and you're seeing each post get no more than, let's say, 500 impressions. That could be a pretty red flag signal of like, what I'm publishing is not connecting or it's not landing with people at all. I know there's search volume here and I'm not capturing it. So I want to figure out how I can improve that and how I can get that better.

Content is not just written though. I've talked about written content there for a few minutes, but video's published. How many views am I getting per video? Are people searching for my brand? So one thing that I've seen going back to this earlier commentary about viral videos, one thing I've definitely seen from that

when clients have those is that people actually see the video go viral on let's say Instagram, and then they're going and searching for the name of that property or searching for the name of that property manager on Google. So you see these kind of like multi-channel or kind of cross-channel effects quite commonly in our industry, in our space.

When things do well in one channel, they tend to kind of bleed over or start to impact another channel pretty quickly. So a video goes viral on social media showing a vacation on property. And then 24 hours later or less, we're starting to see clicks come in from Google of people looking for that company

or looking for that property name. So again, if your content is never landing and over the course of a calendar year, you never have a example or situation where you're seeing that occur, these are things that you might want to audit and review and say, how can I make my creative work better? How can I go get inspiration from other accounts? Maybe I need to look at local competitors. Maybe I just need to find a similar market somewhere else. So if you're in a beach market in Florida, go look at beach markets in California and see what they're doing over there. And you can probably figure out a lot of paths to kind of creating better stuff there. Just a note here,

too. I think too much content is self-serving. I think when you're writing a blog post, when you're making a video, it's not about what your business is about and what you do. I think it's, you want to actually go to that next piece and understand what people are actually viewing, what they're actually consuming, what do they care about, what's the pieces there. Then one last note here, I love this Alex Hormozi framing, more and better, doing both at the same time. So in a perfect world, we're doing more content, but going back to my earlier commentary on social,

we've got to be careful if we're doing more content, that we're also doing better content. So those are just the yin and yang you've got to balance and those other pieces that you've got to have in place here. All right, let's head over to email, because I've got email to go through, and then I've got fees to go through. So I just want to make sure we get through each

of these pieces here on the email side of things. So email, perhaps not the channel that most people start with, but it's also, I think, one of the most successful channels for a lot of our clients. So kind of like with SEO a few minutes ago, we talked about, really, there's all these complicated ways that people will try to make it seem challenging to do.

But there's really just two or three things that really matter in email. There's I want to make my list bigger. I want my email list to grow with relevant guests or relevant potential guests. I want to send to my list enough where they recall us, they remember us, they have kind of, you know, they have brand awareness of us in their inbox. And I want to send them things that they open and that they care about. So those are kind of like my high level objectives with email marketing.

So if you're tracking or if you're auditing email marketing, like your email marketing results, I would think you wanna first consider how many people are seeing the content that I'm publishing? How many people are on my list? How many gains or like, let's say net gains are occurring on the email list? So if we're growing the email list by 500 people a month,

but then we're losing 700 people a month out the back door through unsubscribes and hard bounces, then we're losing 200 people, you know, net every single month, that's a cause for concern. Of course, your list should be growing over time. Most people aren't tracking like on a monthly or even quarterly basis how big their list is. I think that's a mistake that's easily correctable. I want to know how many total sends went out there. So if I have a list of 10,000 and I email them once a month and that list stayed the same for all of this year, I would send out roughly 120,000 emails,

which is a lot when you think about it. But over time, you're probably going to have, for example, resends, you're going to have some people open the email more than once, you're going to have people, the list is going to grow, you're going to get your list, maybe that starts this year, 10,000 to 12,000 or 15,000 by the end of the year. So these are all things that you can help, you know, work on to potentially grow and get more results from them. So the ways to grow your list, a pop up on the website, we've talked about this, you know, before, I think it's one of the safest and kind of best ways to get more people on your list.

It's just ask for the email more directly. Some people put like a little newsletter sign up, stuff to the bottom of the footer of the website. Those things don't work really well. There's not really much incentive there. The pop-ups that work the best for us are pop-ups that have a fixed dollar incentive to them. So sign up and save X on your next vacation.

Now, some clients are more in the luxury market. They don't wanna do that. That's understandable. Even a pop-up that offers a guide, come here and download our guide to vacationing in this destination. That can work better than not having a pop-up, which is what most people have. And so the next way to grow the list is in property or guest level collection. So like a huge, I'm a huge fan of Safi, for example, I think that's the most successful tool that you can put in place to get your email list to grow faster. Particularly if you're not getting many direct bookings of most people coming and staying or coming through Airbnb, those email addresses,

as you might know, are pretty much useless. I think the next best thing after a Stafi type solution is to have a guidebook gate. So it's like, hey, here's your door code, click here to get it from the guidebook. And by the way, put in your email address to access the guidebook. I think that's kind of second best. And then third best in my mind here would be for email list growth, contests or giveaways. So I want to target relevant people. I want to make sure that people who are seeing my email offers and stuff like that are relevant. So in the past, we've done contests and giveaways.

We've promoted them with Facebook ads in order to enter the contest or giveaway. Three free nights at one of Conrad's school cabin rentals, you go to enter in your email address and we're targeting people who are fitting our ideal profile in terms of location, demographic information, and that sort of thing with Facebook ads. So I think ideally you should be sending once per month. I think it's really hard to justify going under once per month from an email marketing perspective. Two per month to me is perfectly fine. I think it depends a little bit on like your targeting, what you're actually, you know, what your messaging is and things like that on that email itself. We have clients to send weekly. I think that can be too much.

You've got to look at your data and see what's kind of the rule of thumb I have is like one per thousand for spam. So if you have a list of 10,000 contacts, you better not be getting more than 10 spam complaints per email send. That's when you're definitely going to get in the hot water with the actual folks that are running the email platforms like Gmail and Outlook and these kinds of things. So one per thousand for spam. And then I kind of think about one per maybe 100 or one per 200 for an unsubscribe. So if you're sending emails to a list of 10,000 people and you're consistently

getting 25, 35, 45, 55 unsubscribes from that list, you're probably sending too much and or the content that they're seeing is not appealing to them. So it might be looking at the creative, looking at what we're putting in there and understanding how that, perform better. Our kind of target for the most part is 25 to 40% open rates tend to be ones that work well for us or that we see good results from there. And then I think the last thing here to think about is what can you automate? So all these things that we talked about is excellent. How can I automate, for example, getting more people to sign up on my list? I'm sending them an email, a sequence automatically. So I'm not having to go in and actually trigger anything. People are just getting that email once they sign up. All right, fees and budgets. And then

we got some time. I know one question came in. So I want to pop that one on the screen here and get to it and hope you're all having an awesome day. Thank you so much for attending. It really does mean a lot. All right, fees and budgets. So I think this is a struggle that pretty much everybody's fighting. I know we're fighting this on a daily basis. So by no means do I think we have this perfect. But I think in a perfect world, what it looks like is that your marketing efforts have a full understanding of what the ledger looks like of a booking.

So let's say, for example, that there's $1,000 booking that comes in. How much of that is rent? How much of that is fees? How much of that is taxes? And then most importantly, how much is the margin on all those different things? So in this scenario, just to make it simple,

$1,000 booking came in. $800 of that booking was rent. And then the property manager keeps 20% of that $800. So now we're starting to build a little bit of understanding of I'm running ads, I'm doing marketing, how much can I actually spend to acquire a booking? What's my actual cost? And then what's my actual return on that cost so I can better understand what I can invest more into and what I can invest less into if something's not working or it's not driving

the results we want. So again, this is something where I think it's really challenging to get this data in like a per booking lever. My sort of take on this is that if we can't do it per booking, maybe it's good to do it this monthly or quarterly. Hey, let's look at all the direct bookings that occurred. Let's look at our average commissions. Let's look at kind of what we actually make on each reservation. And let's kind of normalize that and understand what our costs are and what our revenue is. So we can understand what we can invest in marketing, right? Because I think we have clients that we've worked with over

the years that frankly over invest in marketing. They spend a lot and they're paying too much to acquire a guest. And then we have, I would say more commonly folks that are under investing in marketing. They're actually seeing good results, but they're not putting enough budget or they're not putting enough, you know, you know, dollars behind their ads to actually see results.

And then they're unhappy that they're not getting the results they want, cause they don't actually understand what their margins are. And they don't actually understand what their costs can be per booking. So I'm a big fan obviously of, um, you know, having some kind of reservation fee. I think this kind of five to 8% range is a sweet spot of having a guest reservation fee, service fee, whatever you want to call it.

Because most people that we work with on the property manager side, and I know that's most folks listening today from the poll we did at the top of the call are getting a 15 to 25% commission. Every once in a while, I'll hear a market where the commissions are higher than 25%, but it's not super common. And most of our clients can't absorb all the marketing costs into that 15 or 25% commission. So we've got to have some kind of fee, we've got to have some kind of structure built out to where we can fund marketing through additional fees and, and, you know, revenue coming in. So this five to 8% kind of range is something I've seen a lot of.

Some people do like static reservation fees. Again, you probably have to test and figure out what works best for you, but you've got to have the budget that you can put into marketing, whether you're doing it with us or someone else, it doesn't matter, right? Like marketing costs money. We have to spend money to sort of make money. The classic business idiom here is very much true. And I think understanding what those fees are and how you've structured them is so valuable to your marketing agency because you can tell them, hey, I'm okay spending X if you can deliver Y in terms of gross bookings. That is so valuable for someone in your organization

might be responsible for marketing. That's so valuable for an agency to understand, because then you can get really the true cost of what things need to be performing. So again, I don't know what the exact fee load looks like for you. I do know that most people have done a lot more fees over the last two or three years

than they have in years past. So maybe there's something to understand in that context have done a lot more fees over the last two or three years than they have in years past. So maybe there's something to, you know, understand in that context, people are doing more fees, and that seems to be working okay for a lot of clients that we're working with. Is there a place where maybe you take the fees too far? Of course, but I think you want to test this audit this understand where things are at. And probably, if you feel like you're under fee charging, you probably are. So maybe that's something to consider and adjust as you come into 2025. All right, let's recap for a few minutes. And then I got a few questions to go through.

So let's recap where we've been. We talked about website performance, search marketing, social media marketing, content, email, and then fees and budgets. These in my mind are the six pillars you can audit here to wrap up 2024 and get yourself in really, really good shape for next year. So those are the things to focus on. I saw a question came in. So the question from Michelle, I'll just read out loud for the benefit of listener. Will you be talking about how to or if you've had clients tracking offline bookings or online traffic as part of your OS? I love that question. That's a good question, Michelle. Offline bookings can be tracked in ads. What you have to do basically is pass through specific information from your ad account over to wherever that

booking happened to occur. Enhanced tracking or enhanced conversion tracking is what you need to opt into. Then what you're doing is uploading information from your PMS, like including the email address, when that person actually made that booking, that type of information. And then Google will actually match some of that stuff up for you. So if you say, Hey, I got 25 direct bookings that occurred in, let's say September, here was when they occurred. Here's the Google click ID, here's the email address, tell me if any of those people clicked on ads, particularly if they booked, quote unquote, as Michelle was saying here, offline,

which maybe means they did a phone call or they did a method that wasn't booking directly on the website. This takes a little bit of manual work. I don't know if a lot of folks are doing this, Michelle, but it's out there and there's frameworks for it. And maybe I could do a LinkedIn post on or something like that in the future.

All right, so let's see here. Now we've got a few more things to get through. So again, thank you for listening. Super appreciate everyone hopping around. Stick around if you're live. I'm gonna go ahead and stop the recording, so bear with me.