Heads In Beds Show - Running A Marketing Audit To Build YOUR 2024 Marketing Plan

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad talk through the new BuildUp Bookings "Growth Activation Audit" checklist and how to best review brand, search, social, email, homeowner and overall website strategy progress in your vacation rental business. Want a copy of the growth activation audit for yourself? Email [e-mail] with "Audit" in the subject line! Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'Connell🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. Hey there, Paul. How's it going? Well, another week here. We're a full week into school now, and I can fully say that I've made more mistakes than I thought I would in the year of school as far as on the parent side of things.

So we drop off issues and every other thing in between, but I think we got him to school. He's still happy. He wants to keep going back. So how are you doing? Again, you're much further into the school year and much further into just fall now but how are you doing one thing they do here the first like week or so at school there's there's like traffic monitoring and there's actual police officers like sitting at the like place where you turn into the school and stuff like that and then everyone's wearing their safety vest then a week later all that's gone so i did notice that i did call it like theater to my wife and she disagreed with me and i'm like that's theater that's just we're just pretending and then she's no people new to the area may not know that this is where the school is and what time.

So they're there for the week. She was trying to like talk against it. And I was like, no, that's just theater. We were just disagreeing on it. I'm like, you should drive carefully around the school all the time because you never know when a child's going to be around there. So that was my takeaway on it. But I would have to agree.

It's all for optics and that's fine. But yeah, I definitely noticed a lessened presence of really anybody official outside. So we're right on cue there. Yeah. Apparently that is a regional or a, it's a national thing that happens everywhere perhaps. Yeah. But man, those cops getting overtime for that, for that week. Not bad. Hanging out there at 6am eating Chick-fil-A in their cop car. Not that's what happens here, but that's how it goes no all good you and i both suffered a loss yesterday both emotionally and physically does the nfl season is back maybe there's an advertising angle brand there that we can i think we did super bowl last year when we were starting the podcast we'll come back to our little nfl updates people like the misery and fun of being an nfl fan right no yeah we we may not after the week one but but 16 weeks left, 17 weeks. That's right. Just got to think about that. It's going to be our year yet.

Oh, we'll see. Yeah, I don't think so. I could see some more wins for sure on both sides, but not in the sense that it's our year. That may be too far of a bridge for me to cross, most likely. It could be. But you know what? People definitely have to figure out this year before they get into next year what their marketing plan is going to be so we've got a pretty interesting episode today this is based on something that we've not been doing for a really long period of time this is a newer thing

so i'm interested to share it and also get some feedback even too from people that listen the data indicates to us that lots of you listen and i don't get a lot of emails so i'm asking for emails this time for sure you will be able to follow along fully if you get the actual audit document that we're talking about but let me set the table a little bit, the stage about what we're doing here. And then Paul, I shared this document with you very recently, so you didn't have a ton of time to look at it, but I'd love to get your sense of it. And we're going to take a peek at this. A few weeks back, we came up with this framework that we're calling the growth activation audit, which is a fancy sounding name. But the gist of it is that we're trying to do a better job on our

side when we're working with a new client, fully understand where they stand, where they are, what they're actually working on today, so that we can better, to be honest with you, better scope the actual work that we might be able to do for them and actually be able to pitch them to some degree to potentially work with us. So you could argue it's a bit of a selfish thing that we're trying to do here to actually figure out what's going on. But now that we've gone through roughly a dozen of them, I don't think it's actually selfish at all. I think actually what it really does is help the client define a little bit of what they're doing well and what they're not doing well. So I hear the word audit sometimes and I recoil a little bit. I think, oh no, my taxes

or something like that. That's not really what it is. This is just a, there's no IRS involved. This is just like a self-reported audit to some degree. And we have actually structured it in a way where there's exactly a hundred items that we check. Now we're not going to run through all a hundred items here on the podcast today. We'd be here for several hours, but we are going to run through the major sections. So we ask strategy questions first, which is like, what are you thinking about? What's the thing that you're actually working towards? What pieces and measurements and tools do you have in place to actually measure the strategy? And most importantly, execute upon the strategy. Then we have branded website, which is what are

you actually presenting to the world from a direct booking perspective? What are you showing the actual potential guest in terms of what PMS platform do they use? What's the website look like? What's the branding of the company? How much thought have they put into the branding? Is it just a logo they made in paint? Is it like they've thought of thought a lot of different things there? Do they have a lot of brand assets that are unique to them? Do they have not much? So we'll cover brand and website. Next section that we go through in the audit is search marketing. This encompasses both SEO and paid search, but it's basically like, how are people finding you mostly through search? I say search as a general term, but let's be honest, it means Google. Then we cover content marketing. So what's the actual information that

you produce that's, again, unique to your company, both on the guidebook and property description side, more of the nuts and bolts of the actual property marketing itself. And also what's on your website from like a photography, videography, blog content aspect as well. Then we get into social media and email marketing. So both of those are separate sections where we go through the specifics of what they may be doing on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, et cetera,

or what they may be doing with an email marketing platform, MailChimp, Drip, Revo, whatever the case may be. There's a lot of different platforms, but we ask about what they're doing there. What's their activity level? And then finally, we get to homeowner marketing last, but certainly not least as well. We get to homeowner marketing,

where of course, if they are in fact a property manager, and some people taking this audit, by the way, are not property managers, they just own their properties. So that section we just laid off. But anyways, most people we talk to are homeowners. And we ask, what are they doing? Do they have a dedicated CRM? Are they using inventory? What's their approach to mailers?

What's their approach to having a team member dedicated to homeowners and so on? So I thought we'd run through these core different ideas today, again, not meaning to cover every single piece of this audit, but rather just sharing the things that we find are relevant questions to ask when you're thinking about strategy, brand, website, search, content, social, email, and homeowner marketing, all these different layers. And then just go back and forth, share a few things that we've learned so far, and then happy to go through the homeowner piece with you and see if you think I did a good job or not, because you can see this was great. Sounds good. All right. So strategy. I thought this was an interesting one to start with because

my initial reaction was not to start with this and start with, ah, what are you doing with the website? Like that's getting there first. But I think we actually need to take a step back before we get to what you're putting out there. I think we need to stop for a second and say, where are you trying to go? What's your actual, what are you trying to achieve? And I've done a poor job with this in the past. I've been like overly tactical focused or overly focused on just what are the pieces that you have in place? And I've never done a great job in the past again of stopping and thinking, what's the strategy that you're actually trying to pursue? And you and I've talked about this quite a bit where most people's when you press them on that, I find this has happened a lot in the homeowner side. They

manage two bedroom condos, but they want to manage 10 bedroom luxury estates, right? Fantastic. That's a great aspirational goal to have. I can currently lift 200 pounds. I would love if I could lift 500 pounds. Awesome. But you're not going to get from 200 to 500 without first going from 200 to 215 to 230 to 245, right? And I think that's what I'm trying to figure out here a little bit is where you're trying

to go. Number one, clearly understood by everybody, both internally on your team. And can you explain it clearly to quote unquote an outsider? That's one piece of the puzzle. The other piece is, okay, there's a lot of steps that have to be taken. If you have this big lofty goal, which a lot of people do, which is fantastic to go from where you are now, potentially to this big lofty goal, how are you going to get there and how have you thought it out? So based on what you in the strategy question, some of the questions that we ask are like, do they know who the ideal guest persona target is? Some people have really thought about this. Some people haven't. Do they have a

one-year plan? Some of this is taken loosely from traction and EOS and kind of that framework, but it's not one for one copy. But I find some of these things are useful. Is there like a vision and mission statement written down? Can I read it? Can I look at it? Can I understand what it means? Do you have goals that each team member is working on? So in the EOS system, this is called ROCS, but whatever, it could be anything. It doesn't have to be that system. But do you have something where it's like, okay, by the end of this year, I want our review rate to be 94.95 on Airbnb. Okay, that's a goal that's written down that people are working towards. Fantastic. I can understand that. Do you have a three-year goal? So like a little bit of future planning. Okay,

I'm here today. I want to get over here. What are all the steps I need to take together? And so on. So it goes through all these different questions. And again, we're partially looking at this to understand if they actually know where they want to go and if we can help them get there. Because if we can't articulate the point, how are we going to get there? But it's also, we found it helps the client as well. So I'll pause there for a second. I guess I'm curious your thoughts on the strategy section and how we go through this

process and the audit side. This is, I truly, seeing the first one and the first bullet point being having a clearly defined guest persona type of guest target, I think that's something that a lot of people overlook and that clear one-year plan. I think the top two things that you're evaluating are really critical. And I think for a lot of people who are just establishing their business, they haven't thought about that. They've heard of the Airbnb, vacation rental, short-term rental market being the place to be to make money. But how are you going to make that money? And if you aren't looking at this in a, and I love the intervals, the big hairy audacious

goal, the BHAG, the 10-year target, the three-year target, like really putting this in perspective, like you're not just going to start a rental company and be successful if you don't have some of these really baseline bedrock type of items in place, or at least you're thinking about them. You have to have the clear mission and visions written down. I think it's a good thing to do because it is, it's that goal, but that's something that you can at least step into. I think what's reassuring is that hopefully you're going through this with these property managers, with these business owners, and they are, if they don't have this in place, hopefully they are using it as a, okay, this is a checklist. I've out of my 10 to 15 items on the strategy side of things, I have two. Maybe I'm not as ready within the business overall, generally, as I think I am, or it is. Maybe these are just evaluation points that I don't think they're unique, where I hope that if someone is starting a business,

these are not unique to hospitality. So it's not like this isn't something you should have in place just to begin with when you're starting a business, but it is maybe for people who are transitioning from vertical to vertical or something like that. This is something to make them think of, okay, this is how you built your car brand. This is how you built your real estate brand, your financial brand, whatever that was. Hospitality is going to be a little different and company processes, hiring processes. I think those are also so important as well. Just thinking about within the framework of a one-year, three-year, 10-year plan, when are you going to have to add X person on the BD side? When are you going to have to add a housekeeper? When are you going to have to add

maintenance, stuff like that? How long can you run it as a one-person crew or where are those scaling points? So running through this on the strategy side of things, I hope this is just on that part alone, I think this is worth its weight in gold. So I think you've hit, you've nailed all the key things that when we look at successful businesses, six months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months down the road, most of these things should be checked off or at least be working towards those items. Yeah.

I think one thing I would love to do is take some of the clients that we've been working with for a long time that have gone from 10 units. We have one that's gone from like 17 when we started to I think they're at 150 today, something like that. It's been about three years. So it hasn't, it didn't happen overnight.

It took a long period of time, but it would be fascinating to see how much of these processes and things that they've actually checked off the strategy side because especially maintaining high reviews that one client i'm thinking of actually recently showed up on one of those air dna the air dna like top property managers across the whole country they average like 4.9 something on however many reviews they have 2 000 plus reviews and that's hard to do like it's good it's easy to get a lot of reviews if you have one or two listings that book a lot you can usually get pretty high ratings

if you're able to managing it. But to get consistently high reviews across a hundred properties, across thousands of different stays, that's really challenging to do when they do that. And a lot of these pieces, even though we don't talk about them day to day, we're more in the marketing mindset.

I do think it helps a lot. Like you were saying earlier, orient a little bit of here's where they're at. Here's what they're working towards. And are we all able to communicate it clearly? Because even though it doesn't really matter to me exactly too much, if you know exactly what the 90 day goal is for your housekeeper, that doesn't really mean too much. I like that you have it because it tells me a lot about you as a company that you've sat down and thought heavily about each aspect of the company maintenance or

housekeeping or these types of things. Because I've said this before, like operational excellence leads to great marketing outcomes. Because when there's operational excellence and homes are always clean, there's never any issues there. It's going to give us better reviews. It's going to give us happier guests. And they're going to want to come back and stay again. And that's the best kind of marketing that you can have, right? It's either word of mouth or you can have guests that just come back and keep spending

money with you. Hopefully we acquired them one time initially. And then they just fall into this pattern of coming back and staying again and again. So yeah, I ask strategy questions, not because it always directly maps to, okay, this is, we're going to change our SEO approach because of your strategy sometimes, but like usually not based on the ones that we've gone through so far, but it's really helpful for, do you know what you're doing? And then does, therefore, is my proposal going to be seen as something that's like a temporary expense that you're just going to have to endure and you're going to pin all

your hopes on me, which is not what I'm after. I'm not on any agency, by the way, but rather what's this partnership? I know Vintoria likes to use that terminology. It's not part, it's not language that I use, but I like the sentiment of it, even though it's not the words that I use. How's this partnership or how's this current client relationship going to go so that we're going to be both successful together? It's going to make sense for you and it's going to make sense for me. I use the terminology like win-win, but that's the same idea, I think, behind both those things. No, it has to make sense on both sides. All right. So once we get through the strategy piece, which like you said, can take some time, we get into brand new website, which is typically where I would have started before, right? Brand new website

being what direct booking website did they have? And that's one checkmark question. Do they have direct booking website? Yes or no? The real question is how good is that direct booking website in terms of functionality, usability, traffic, right? What's coming into it. So we dive into those pieces in the audit as well. What's our PMS platform? We're not super specific, or I don't care if someone uses PMS platform A, B, or C for the most part. We have certain partnerships with certain PMS companies. I think there's great ones out there. If you want a list, or if you're considering switching, email me because I don't really have any specific allegiances or alliances towards any of them. I think a lot of them do a great job. And we have clients that are super successful and

ownerized. We have clients that have made millions of dollars on Guesty. Some of our biggest clients are on track. And a lot of them seem to make a ton of money doing all different things on the PMS side. So I don't really have one where I'm like, oh no, you have to be on this PMS for this. I know there's obviously agency service type companies that are attached to a PMS company and that's fine too. There's nothing wrong with that, but we're pretty agnostic in that respect from a PMS perspective. But I do want to know what you're using, because it might help me understand a little bit about what we might have from a template standpoint, from a website standpoint, and so on. Right. The next few pieces are all about what work have you put into the

brand. And some people see the brand as just this throwaway thing. Oh, yeah, we just came up with this name. And they didn't really put much thought into it. Other people put a ton of thought into it. Oh, it means that this is how we talk about the brand. This is what language we use. This is what copy we use. And of course, everything in between. But we ask questions about, do you have a recognizable and unique? That sounds simple brand name, but we've kind of backfired a bit recently where it's area name plus vacation rentals.

That's our brand name. Understandable, but it makes it pretty challenging from like an awareness perspective. Sometimes when they're not really known for that, they're just naming themselves as Orlando vacation homes.com. Make it a little bit more challenging versus being known as a specific brand that actually stands for something. So we spend a little bit of time on that, depending on the client. Some people come in and they have everything well thought out. Other people need a lot of work in that department, that's for sure. One thing that gets skipped quite a bit, line 22 in the

audit. And again, if you're wondering what we're reading off of, email me and I can send you a link to this audit. It doesn't come through well in audio form, obviously, but if you email this to me, I'm happy to send this over to you. A trademark registered. We've gotten in, we've had one situation that really has been problematic where a client had not secured the trademark. Someone came back at them from a different hospitality brand, a hotel brand. I'll say that. I don't want to say which one, but a hotel brand. And it was like, yeah, we own this trademark as it relates to lodging accommodation services. Like you can't use this. And they had to go through a very painful and extremely challenging and costly rebranding

process and change a bunch of stuff. And they were this close to being sued and having to go to court. I'm sure the lawyers from this very large multi-billion dollar hotel corporation crushed whoever the small property manager was going to put in front of them. So you gotta be careful on the trademark stuff. It's one of those things where if you're in the right, then it's great. And if you're ever in the wrong, it can be a six figure mistake potentially from a trademark perspective. Also be really careful on stay names and B&B names specifically. We've seen some clients come to us recently that B&B

in the name. My understanding is that Airbnb is not tolerating that. If you're using B&B in your name, if you get a certain size, they can potentially come after you. I think you and I have a mutual partner that has happened to change their name because they have B&B in their brand name. So that's also a little flag. It's not in here specifically, but it is as a subtext line 20 of that unique brand name better not include B&B because Eric could potentially say you're confusing our trademark by using whatever Minnesota B&B or something like that, which I don't agree with that logic, but again, they have more money than you and they're probably going to win. Then the rest of the piece here that we go through a brand website,

we mush them together because I think there's a lot of overlapping pieces there, obviously. What's the style guide? What assets do you have inside the property? We talk about this quite a bit with clients, more so on the description side, but I think it matters quite a bit. If someone's books are an OTA and they get to the property, how do they know that they're staying with Paul's Cabin Rentals in Minnesota? Where's the in-property signage and physical items that remind them of that? Again, it sounds like a simple thing, but some people I've stayed in properties like this, where you go and stay in the property and you have no idea who's managing the property. You know, it does a great job of this too, is Wander. Wander has these signs literally

affixed to the outside of the property that they like screw into the actual outside of the property. I love that. I think that's such a fantastic, simple thing to be doing. And a lot of property managers have done that for a long time. That's not that unique of an idea. There's just look a lot nicer and it's like literally fixed. I just love that. I think that's such a fantastic, simple thing to be doing. And a lot of property managers have done that for a long time. That's not that unique of an idea. Theirs just look a lot nicer and it's like literally fixed. I just love that. I think that's such a fantastic in-property reminder of where you're staying at. Look up, look down. You see that brand, you see that logo reinforcing itself.

I think there's a lot to be said for that. So people remember you. And that's ultimately what a good chunk of brand is about. And then we talk over some other pieces from a website perspective, but I'll pause there again. This is like my audits. I'm going too long. But yeah, your thoughts on branded website and how it relates to the overall position that someone's putting into the marketplace. I think, and we've talked about it on other episodes, but where you do have a lot of businesses have brick and mortar

businesses, buildings that you can drive by and that's how you're marketing to. This is your brick and mortar. This is your online brick and mortar. And it's actually more powerful than just having a standalone building because it is, it can be accessed by anybody doing searches or by any of our marketing efforts. It is, you're not relying on someone to drive by. So I think the focus on that direct booking website is critical because ultimately, how are you generating revenue? It's going to be through those bookings, making sure that experience is optimized. Anything that you can do there is critical. Talking about even bringing the offline or the online offline and having those signs

up, I think in some markets, it's actually required that you have to have that signage in place. Now, I don't know why you wouldn't want to have it in place to make sure that you have that brand awareness and brand exposure out there. But yeah, I think in some markets I've talked to, it feels like North Carolina would have that type of regulation or something with everything else that they have. But I think it is, it's a requirement that you have to have your brand out there but it is i think when we take it back online it really is about making sure that you have everything in place we do work with a lot of people who are early enough on in their business creation that they do they slap together

when you hear when you say slap together a logo that's exactly what they're doing they're putting a couple words in canva or photoshop or indesign or something like that putting a little color over top of it and saying okay there's my brand and it is it's that's a bandage that's a quick it gets you off the ground but i it i think that's where this full audit idea just allows you to really understand what's going to get you to, and we talk about your boxing levels from flyweight to heavy, middleweight, heavyweight, all those areas getting up to a heavyweight level. If you don't have these small steps in place, you are, you're going to suffer. Do you need to have all 100 points here?

No, that is part of growing your business. But to know that these are important aspects. And I think you're hitting all these spot on really making sure that if people aren't thinking about them from this perspective, just making sure they understand that this is how other people are going to see it, whether that's the guests, whether that's potential homeowners, anybody that could be working with your business down the road. It could be vendors. You could be those housekeepers and maintenance people that are really going to create that five-star stay that hopefully those guests are going to come back through and give you those reviews when you come back through. And they're going to keep staying with you and are going to continue that whole booking process, the whole customer experience for you. Yeah. I think if you have revenue issues, I feel like a lot of times we can easily point back to

a direct booking website. Now that might not be the case in every case, but in a lot of cases, if you've got a good product, if you're in the right market, it's going to sell itself. So you have to have a website where people can go through, give you that payment information, browse the rentals that you have, find that right stay, that right experience that they want, and then go from there. So having that website, it's critical. You can't not have it. And if it's not working properly, you're going to know about it. Yeah. And ultimately, it's the classic leaky bucket analogy, right? If you're pouring a bunch of traffic into something that's not actually converting, then you're not really going to get the right outcome either from a performance standpoint. So again, having a website is a checkbox that you can say yes or no to. Having a good website takes a little bit more nuance,

takes more time to go through. Hence why we dig in a little bit further on the audit. So let's move on to search marketing, just in the interest of time, even though we can spend a lot more time on that for sure. Search marketing. So again, we lump SEO and PPC together because at this moment, we're not necessarily trying to go through and figure out there's agencies out there. We've talked about this before. Actually, we did a whole episode before on automated SEO audits, right? And so there's agencies that put your website in SEMrush and they say, Hey, you're missing 27 meta titles and stuff like that, or meta descriptions. Sorry. There's these 85 images are missing stuff. There's a time and place for a technical audit. We do a technical audit for sure

when we sign a client. But in my mind at this stage, I don't really need to look at the site and see if there's technical issues or not. Number one, I can quickly see if you're getting traffic or not by just putting it into SEMrush or Ahrefs and looking. So I can see, all right, is there something here? And is what you're ranking for competitive or not competitive? Are you ranking for things that people are searching for? Like I can figure that out in 25 seconds or so. The real question of SEO is what have you done? What efforts have you done to get there?

That's more so what I'm trying to figure out in the audit. What are the steps that you've taken? Again, has an agency worked with you on that? Have you done some of your own content? What's gone on there? And then really what we're trying to figure out in the proposal stage too is what's the opportunity? So if you're thinking about your marketing plan for 2024, the question is not, should I or should I not do SEO or PPC? The

answer is maybe. It's the right question to ask, but the right outcome, in my opinion, to try to figure out is what can I expect from a click-through rate perspective? How many people might go to my website? What percentage of those people might book? Those are the right questions to ask. And then we can back into the right approach to SEO once we figure that out. Because spoiler alert, it's not really that complicated. It's like picking the right keywords that you actually want to focus on that have search volume that match your properties. It's building content about not only those pages, but build content about the area, become an expert in your area in the eyes of Google, and then build high quality links to the website. It's not really

that complicated of a process and try to limit as many technical mistakes as you can along the way. Sure, in a perfect world, we would have sites with no technical mistakes, but I always challenge people to do this. Go look at any site that ranks on the top of Google for a competitive search term in the vacation rental industry, and you'll find the top ranking sites have little minor technical issues. So it's not that this idea of you can perfect the technical components of a vacation rental website and that therefore you're going to rock it to the top of the search results. That doesn't happen in reality. And if someone can find an example of it, please send it to me and I'll have it.

We'll back that statement. But that's not really how it works. We want a good enough technical site with great content and great links pointing to it that offers the person on the other end what they're looking for. That's what's going to rank. That's what's going to work well in Google. So that's the core of what we ask on the search marketing side of things. Again, some are PPC related.

Excuse me, some are SEO related, but it all maps back to that for me. Those kind of big questions. Your thoughts on search marketing side of things. Again, some are PPC related, excuse me, some are SEO related, but it all maps back to that for me. Those kinds of big questions. Your thoughts on search marketing? Google is trying to answer questions. That's what they're trying to do. Like it's not Ask Jeeves, it's just people writing in long tail keywords or short tail keywords, but they're going to find the right answer because there are thousands of searches or hundreds of searches or dozens of searches, but whatever it is, they know when people are sticking around the site. They know when users are having a good experience. You got to give people a good experience. That's what it comes down to. So if you make the answers easily findable by not only the traveler or the homeowner, but for the search engines as well, you got to kind of balance that. It's not

just writing for search engines. We say that on the content marketing side of things, but it's true. You can't just write for the bots. Like you do have to give an answer. And if that means writing a paragraph as opposed to a sentence or whatever that is, that's fine. Then make sure that's what you're putting on there. And we'll talk about that more in the content marketing side of things. But it is, especially on the travel side, when so many people do start their searches on Google, specifically, yeah, Bing too, but mostly on Google because of what they've implemented with Google Flights and Google Vacation Rentals and all these other things. Google's made themselves into a pretty cool travel hub in direct competition to the Expedias and the booking.coms and all these other things.

So it is. I think that knowing that is where, whether it's 80%, whether it's 60%, whether it's 90%, a bulk of people are starting their search for travel on a search engine. So making sure you're optimized there from an SEO perspective or from a paid perspective, I think is definitely important and well worth being a part of the audit there. So yeah, for sure. Awesome. Let's go a little bit quicker here. So we get to homeowner because I want to let I want to let you eat. So the content marketing section, we talk about there's lots of layers of content, actually, the base model of content for I think every property manager or host out there is what's your property description, which is what do you actually put on the listing that gets put out to OTAs. A lot of people

overlook that. We have a whole actually service oriented specifically towards property description. So if you want any help with that thing, let us know, but we call it a comprehensive property description. So that's what we look for. Yes, there are certain arguments you can make about the style, the tone. Again, we're talking earlier about brand, but I think ultimately having that property description is actually the first most important piece of content. The second is actually the guidebook. What do you send a guest? They book with you, they've given you $2,000. What do you actually send them as far as the information? And again, having the guidebook is a yes or no check mark. Having a good guidebook is a bit more into a conversation, just like the website thing from earlier. But we've seen some

bad guidebooks that people are sending out lately. I saw one the other day and I was like, I think you're better off not sending a guidebook. I said it in a friendlier way, but I'm like, the guidebook is so bad and it looks so unprofessional that I'd rather you just not send anything and just be like, go to this local website and send them to somewhere else because what you're sending out is so bad. Obviously, we put that in the trash and we're working on giving them a much better one that they can actually send out with pride to their guests. But yeah, it was painful. So I think the proper description of the guidebook is the basic that everybody should have no matter what. Then you get into, okay, I have the website. We have this core set of informational

pages that we typically focus on. Things to do, restaurants, attractions, leisure information. So that could be if you're a ski mountain, information about the ski resort nearby. Things to do is universally applicable. Restaurant's pretty universally applicable. We want to eat. We want to do things when we're at a vacation rental for the most part, with very few exceptions. So we find those are good pages to have on the website. Then we ask more content questions, excuse me, in the content section about having custom videography, having custom photography, having link assets, having content that you put on the site that's specifically meant to attract people into it from a traffic perspective and also from a linking perspective, that kind of

gets a little bit more higher up. And then even getting multimedia, doing video content, not a lot of people can do it. It's certainly a higher level of execution to do like a YouTube show or a high quality YouTube video about a restaurant in your area or a thing to do in your area. But we have some clients that are doing it and they certainly do get a lot of reach. So that's the content marketing section in a nutshell.

I'll move on to social just so we can get through and spend more time on homeowner for sure because I think there's a lot of value there. Social, again, there's a lot of different questions that we ask within social. The first is, do you have all your brand pages set up and at least your brand names claimed? My belief is that you shouldn't try to be everywhere

all at once doing social and all channels at all times. So like that there's a time and a place for that. I think you're better off picking one channel and doing it well. Instagram is actually the way that we've been pushing people more so lately. If you can do really well on Instagram or do really well on Facebook,

those two kind of make the most sense depending on your customer, excuse me, your guest persona. Go head back to question number one for that piece there. But once you know where your target audience spends the most time, spending the most money and the time on Facebook or spending the most money and time on Instagram typically is the right way to approach it. Getting these pages to a thousand followers is like a pretty nice momentum feeler that you're on the right track.

Are you active and ongoing with the content promotion of that channel? Are you retargeting people who visit the website and getting them to follow you on those social media channels? That can be a good way to think about it. And then from there, how do you actually scale into other channels? How do you produce high quality content, not just across Facebook and Instagram, but also in TikTok and doing videos along with static assets and things like that. So that's what our social audit asks is all those different questions. There's also a note in there about influencers. We do ask people about influencers lately because we found that a lot of clients are working with influencers in the sense of like they're giving away free stays. Sometimes there's great value being

exchanged and they're getting a lot of visibility for that. Other times there's basically no value getting exchanged and they're wasting a lot of money. So we always ask that because it is sometimes a point to circle back around to, so to speak, when we actually talk with them and go through that and say, yes, working with influencers is a bit of a yes, no type of thing. You are, or you are not. Some people are just waiting for the person to reach out to them. Generally speaking, when someone's reaching out to you, the content and the quality of what they're doing and the reach they have is typically less because the best influencers don't need to reach out to the business. They just get reached out to by other businesses to do promotions. So that's

one layer that you should consider. But for the most part, we like to know that. So going in so we can figure out, okay, is what they're doing adding value or not adding value. We're talking to someone right now who's working with influencers and they're adding a ton of value because they're picking the right ones. They have a very specific audience, even geo specifically located that makes the most sense for them. And they're producing really high quality stuff, videos, photo assets that are really useful. So there's a time and a place where it makes a lot of sense. There's a time and a place where you're just giving white freeze days to people that have Instagram.

That's not really the best thing to be doing. Then we go into email marketing. So email, again, the basics are like, do you have an email marketing campaign set up? You'd be shocked at how large some of these clients reach out to us that don't even have a MailChimp account or anything set up.

And I go, okay, you've been in business five years. You have no emails to speak for. I know you're mostly OTA, but like no emails to speak for. And we basically have start from ground one. Other people come to us. We had someone come to us not too long ago with 2000 people on the list and they have four properties and they've just been really diligent that we do this for a long time. And they really had a ton of contact information that we could work with. So the size of the company doesn't necessarily correlate that well in our

experience going through these audits now with the size of the list. Like you think it's correlation there, but it feels like it's like Pandora's box when we ask that question. We don't know what we're going to get when we crack that thing open. Sometimes we find gold. Sometimes we find you've been doing what exactly for how long? So that's always challenging, but obviously email, that's a channel you own. It's one of the few channels that we've talked about today that you actually own. You own the list. You can continually market to those people over time. Obviously, once you have their consent from an email marketing perspective, and there's a lot of layers that you can explore there from an email perspective to get more results out of

your emails. And that's what the audit covers a little bit. Are you doing at first, it's you have a welcome series and you have a monthly newsletter. If I can only fire two bullets in the email marketing question audit, it would be those two. Are you at least like when people sign up? Are you sending them information for a short period of time after they sign up? Number one. And then number two, do you actually just send out at least to everybody once a month, hey, we exist. Here's what we have to offer. Here's our properties.

Here's what's going on. I think if you're doing that, you're ahead of 90% of vacation managers out there. And then there's a lot in that last 10% that can be done better. A, B testing, different times of day, doing contests, growth lists, doing giveaways, retargeting people again on Facebook, doing a pop-up on the website. I did a LinkedIn post recently on pop-ups, super bullish on pop-ups still. They work really well from an email collection standpoint. So there's a lot there to dig into in that last 10%. But if you have a welcome series, you have a list

you're capturing in property with like Stay Fi, you're capturing on the website, and then you have a monthly newsletter, again, you're ahead of 90% of people. But that bar is hard to pass for a lot of folks. So that kind of covers a few of those channels really quickly. I went through it because I wanted to give you time on homeowner marketing. So homeowner's last piece in our audit, not because it's not the least important, most important. It just worked out that way. But yeah, your thoughts, I want to let you go through this. What do you think of my homeowner marketing growth activation audit section? Is it any good? Do you like it? What would you do differently? I think your number one is the key dedicated landing page for property management services. I think we've all been either on a

website that just doesn't have a dedicated landing page or they're using the contact us as a supplemental so it's list your property but it's that's like a call to action under that contact us page so they're not even a dedicated number in some cases it's just you're going to flow it right through that system so i just giving people that page where they can learn more about the service it is completely different service and offering than your travel site is. So you want to have that dedicated landing page inventory. We do. We've really taken that a little beyond anything.

I think even when I started, it was one landing page, a thank you page, and that was about it. You could give a lot of information on that landing page, and we're just sending them there. Now it's really giving people a lot more than that. It's the dedicated landing page. It's an ROI calculator to be able to actually let people, it's a little bit of interaction, a little interactivity to be able to say, okay, I have a two bedroom home, a three bedroom home. This is the difference between that two bedroom and that three bedroom. The difference between the view being really great or not so great, the location being really great, not so great. So I think the more you can engage with these people, the traveler side customer journey is, it's a lot of touches, but at a certain point, it's just, okay, which room's going to work best for us? Which accommodation? On the owner's side,

there's a lot more to it than that. And I think that's looking at that next point, the contracting the legal agreement for homeowners to sign. This is a big deal. You are, in some cases, these are half million, million dollar business assets. They're not just little, they're not little, they're not small decisions that you're making. So you're making a decision with a second home, maybe a third home, whatever it is. So you're making a decision with a second home, maybe a third home, whatever it is. So really, you want to make sure that you're contractually, legally being protected, as is the homeowner, to make sure that it is a beneficial partnership for both of you there. Yeah, it is.

When it comes down to the marketing itself, you want to make sure you're standing out. There are, depending on the market that you're in, you need to have a USP that's really going to clinch it for you. Just making more money than everybody else at a certain point doesn't work because everybody's going to say the same thing. And I think when we see a trend like this year, where we're coming back to reality of what revenues are and booking revenue looks like and the ROI and people's gross booking revenue of what they're seeing. They're a little less, they're probably money. The ROI on the management itself maybe isn't as much what you should be

focusing on. You should be focusing on how you're taking care of the home, giving people that peace of mind, how you're creating those five-star experiences when the guests finally come through. It is Venturi, we are still the only or one of the only CRMs dedicated specifically to the owner management side of things. And I think anytime you're doing that, anytime you're going through the sales process and the sales system, talking about creating those systems

or having that system in place, you want to make sure you're giving people the best sales experience possible there. So making sure you, in a CRM, you want to make sure you're giving people the best sales experience possible there. So making sure you in a CRM, you are tracking the notes. Oh, I just called this person. I just making sure that you are not dropping the ball during that process of selling them on your management services. So the ability to put automated communications out there to have that immediate response when someone fills out a form to have the automated calling going out there, to have that immediate response when someone fills out a form, to have the automated calling going out there, automated text messaging, and making sure you're really pushing people through that experience and getting them to sign on with your services.

I think that those are really baseline items for just the importance of having a fundamental system in place that you can use to scale your business. From there, doing the marketing, doing digital marketing. Obviously, I'm a big proponent of the digital marketing, but on the homeowner side of things, direct marketing works, direct mail works, postcards work, handwritten letters work. It might take two or three or five or six or nine or 10 of them. But over time, we hear anecdotally too often that people did. They saved the postcard. They saved the letter. They weren't ready at the beginning of the season, but at the end of the season, during signing season, during shoulder season, like we talked

about during the off season, they're reevaluating. And I think, yeah, now when people are seeing dramatically different booking revenues than they've seen in previous years, they're going to hold on to those marketing pieces even a little longer just to say, okay, maybe this is someone I want to reach out to. Maybe this is someone I want to really understand. And I want to understand what their offering is and if it's better than what I'm currently getting or better than self-managing. That's the other side of things is that sometimes it's not a matter of trying to convince someone you're better than the competition. It's you're trying to convince someone that you're better and it's less stressful than managing it yourself. And that can certainly be a difficult thing for people to do there. It is. I think all of those items are

really important. And then just like we're doing on the strategic side with the traveler, what is that persona? Who are those homeowners you're going after? In a lot of cases, there's public information out there that you can find who these owners of homes are if you want to go and scrape and find that data. It's out there. It's available. It takes hours of days, weeks of work sometimes, but it is available. But you don't necessarily need 1,000 people, 5,000 people, 10,000 people. It's understanding what types of homes you want to add. Like we talked about, you're managing all these two-bedroom condos and you want to add a 10-bedroom home. Okay.

Find your 10 bedrooms home. Customize a package or customize a value proposition that speaks to those people as opposed to the condo owners, because it's going to be a different messaging, different items, different things that are going to resonate more with those individuals. So I like your idea of having that dream 100 list of properties. It is sometimes the mass blanket marketing items aren't as effective as just really going after those dream 100 or the dream 50 or the dream 75 because with that higher touch it's a higher decision or a higher higher point decision making process you are going to need to really customize that targeting so instead of sending a thousand direct mail pieces to everybody, send 50 with a very specific message

to 50 people or send them a box of chocolates or send them a box of nuts or something like that. You really do have to take that marketing down to, I think, the lowest common denominator, whatever we're doing there. But you really have to take it down to a very customized level because it just doesn't work to just mass put a big message out there and say, okay, we're the best. This is why we're the best. Hopefully that's enough to sell you. So generally of the audit here, I think you've gone above and beyond as with everything.

Everything I've ever seen you do, Conrad, you've given this the more than the college try here. This is incredible. And just to see everything that the depth at which you're looking at the homeowner marketing side is fantastic. So kudos to you. It's good to hear that we're on the right track here. We spend a lot of time on it. In line 95, we asked people dedicated homeowner marketing CRM. And we mentioned Venturi and HubSpot. Those are two that we mentioned HubSpot being more mass market. Obviously, it's a great platform, but obviously Vintori is very specific

to the homeowner side. So we mentioned that and some people have come in and they're already using Vintori. We look at this audit, which is fantastic. And some people are like, what's that? And then we try to send them that way. So all good either way.

And what we try to put together here really is something useful. And then what I tell people too, when they book the session for us to review with this and talk about this, we say, look, you can keep this. Hopefully this makes sense for us and we decide the path to work together. But if not, that's okay. Keep this document because I truly believe this isn't just like fluff. Like this is stuff that we spent seven years. I spent seven, eight

years at this point, almost working towards thinking about, and these are the common threads that I see across all of it. It's a hundred items for a reason. Yes, that's a lot, but it's also lovely to give yourself a score at the end and be like, wow, I've only thought about 50 of these. I've only done 30 of them. And that's okay. If someone actually came in and filled this out 100%, I would just walk away and be like, okay, you're a great guy.

Yeah, you're good. Have a fantastic day. I'll send people your way if they're in your market. So I think 100 is a very unrealistic goal. Don't think of this as grading on a scale. Under 60 is a fail. 60 to 70 is a C. Like honestly, anything in the 20s or 30s

is probably pretty good on this audit. So if you would like a copy of the audit that we're referencing, obviously we've mentioned many items off of the audit in today's episode. And we think it's a great thing that you could potentially take with you and make a 2024 marketing plan out of.

Feel free to email me, conrad at buildupbookings.com. I'll send you a link to it. There's nothing proprietary in here. Someone on my team said, oh, weren't you afraid that the competition is going to look at it? And I go, let them look at it. Who cares? Because it's my IP. It doesn't matter if someone sees it. It doesn't matter to me if our competition sees it. I want the property manager to see it, get some value out of it, and then realize that if we work together, we're going to give you a

lot more value. This is just a taste of the things that we want to look at before we actually potentially work together. So that's not a pitch. That's just a chance to email me. And if you want to fill this out and then have a call with us, we would obviously be happy to do so. That's all I got. I don't think with anything else, or do you want to put a bow on this one, Mr. Paul Hanson? I think we're ready to bow this one up here. Okay. That's pretty good. I think our timing was pretty good today. Obviously it's a lot to go through. So I went through some sections quickly, but I think the outcome was pretty good. So if you made it this far, hopefully you've got some value. So two things I want you to do. Number

one, email me and I'll send you a link to the audit, obviously. Number two, you've got to go to your podcast app of choice. You've got to click five stars, which is going to take you very little time. And we will check in the audit to see if you actually left. If not, that'll be the 101st item in the audit is if you actually left the Heads and Beds show five stars on either Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. So that's the last ask. I joke always each week, but I do appreciate it because we are getting more reviews and the numbers on the last ask. I joke always each week, but I do appreciate it because we are getting more reviews and the numbers on the download

appear to be climbing. Last week, we mentioned we don't share exact numbers, but Paul and I looked at the downloads last week and it was one of our most downloaded episodes of the past few months. So maybe we struck a nerve with that topic

and we're trying to get more actionable and practical advice for the vocational manager out there based on our experience. So we thank you again. Thanks for listening this deep. Have a great rest of your week and we'll talk to you soon.