Heads In Beds Show - The #1 Metric That Measures The Power Of Any Vacation Rental Brand

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

There's a single metric: branded search volume, that shows the strength of your micro-brand in the vacation rental world.ResourcesBuildUp BookingsGoogle Trends 

Hello there, welcome to another episode of the Heads and Beds show. I'm your host, Conrad O'Connell. Thanks so much for listening. So today's topic, we're going to be talking about brand and we're going to be talking about brand in the context of a vacation rental company. Now, brand is probably one of the hardest things to measure. So instead, what we're going to do in this episode is break down and talk about a single metric that I believe you can use to measure the impact of your brand in the vacation rental marketplace. So let's dive in. So we know the most successful vacation rental companies in your destination, in your market, have brand awareness. So if you have all the right information about your vacation

rental company, and people start to become aware of your brand, the most successful companies, they rely on their brand to do so. But building brand is very difficult, right? We can all think of big, well known, notable brands like Apple or Nike, but that doesn't really apply or that's not really useful information. If you're a small vacation rental manager in a single destination, you're not going to go run a Super Bowl ad, most likely. That would be your marketing budget for 10 years to get that sort of reach and impact, nor would it really even be a successful campaign for the most part. So we can't think of brand just as that level of broad awareness. We have

to think of it really for most vacation rental managers and owners and hosts as a micro brand. You might just be trying to influence people who are looking in your destination, maybe people who are driving within a two to four hour radius of your destination, if you're in a drive to destination, maybe the ones that are your focus. And we need to think about this micro brand influence specifically as a way that you can get repeat guests and that we can earn visibility from our other marketing efforts. So you're never going to get that big brand awareness. And that's fine. That's not really the goal here. Instead, we're trying to build that micro brand awareness. People that are interested in vacationing in your destination, they become well-known, you become well-known for that particular market. So companies that invest

heavily into their marketing, of course, tend to have higher brand awareness. But brand awareness is a very tough thing to measure. And one metric that I found that's been able to tie this into a specific kind of data point that we could look at and evaluate over an extended period of time, it's branded search volume, specifically branded search volume on Google. So people are going into Google and searching for the name of your vacation rental management company, and or the name of specific rental properties on your program or communities that you may manage. These are all forms of branded search volume that when I study the numbers across dozens

and dozens of vacation rental companies, indicate some level of success. Companies that have high branded search volume tend to also get high repeat booking rates, they tend to get better reviews, and they tend to actually need to spend less on marketing over time versus companies that have very low or no branded search volume. So some of this is just a function of popularity, right? If you have a lot of inventory in your market, and you're a property manager, then it's fair to say that you probably have some level of brand influence. But it doesn't always scale one to one. Some companies don't do a great job, for example, promoting their brand and making it well-known who that guest booked with

when they actually stayed in that property. But we'll talk about that more in a second. So the things that actually build a brand for a vacation rental company are some of the things you've, are obvious, right? Social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and even growing emerging channels like TikTok can help people find you

and search for your brand name on Google, even if they saw you somewhere else. So for example, we work with a client who has had several Facebook posts go viral. And what we see is that the Facebook post itself may not always drive all the traffic to that individual company. Instead, what sometimes occurs is that people see the property on Facebook, and they actually go to Google to search for the name of that property later on. And these trends are fairly easy to point out because we can look at a time and see when the post went viral and when the branded search volume peaked in Google, and they tend to correlate pretty well. So brand can be built on social channels, even though the actual mechanism

inside of analytics, for example, that you see them coming to your site in is Google organic, the actual brand building happened on a social channel like Facebook, Instagram, or again, even newer channels that are still growing like TikTok. But brand can also not just be built on social channels, brand can also be built on listing sites as well. So for example, let's say you have properties listed on Airbnb, you have properties listed on Vrbo, they can help build your brand over there if you do the right things. Guests will see the name of your property, They will see that you are the host or the manager of that property on these listing sites. And they may see additional information that you may have placed in that listing.

So for example, if you have the name of a property where your properties are branded a certain way, they may see that information inside of the description. They could also see it in the headline if you've chosen to make the headline the name of the property. One kind of small tip here that a client of mine has done for some time, they actually put the logo of their vacation rental company on the TV of every photo inside of the rental. So you go from the living room, you see the logo of the company. You go to the bedroom, you TV in there, they put the logo in there as well. And the listing sites leave these things up because it's just a part of the photo. It's not a watermark or anything like that. It's

an actual logo that's on the TV in a screensaver mode. So all these things, all these different kind of branded touch points, if you will, on a listing site will lead many guests to exit or go off platform, if you will, of a listing site and search for you directly on Google. So when you start to list your properties with Airbnb, you may start to see an increase in branded search volume for people looking for your specific company or specific rentals that you have on your program. And they're trying to actually find a way to book directly. And these are all ways that branded search volume on Google is influenced by other marketing activities that you're undergoing, in this case on listing sites. So another touch point that we've seen people have success with is consistently sending email

newsletters out to people that have stayed with them before or all their past leads. The data tells us that a good email may get anywhere from a 20 to 50% open rate. So that means even if very successful email, half of your list may not open it. But it doesn't mean that email is a failure. A lot of times just having that brand be in their inbox, they can see your name, they can see that you're consistently reaching out to them sometimes trigger a memory and brand recall down the road to where they're doing a search for the name of your vacation rental company, just based on the fact that you've been consistently sending them emails. So all these things are digital touch points, if you will, to some degree, social media, listing sites, and email marketing. But there's also, as we talked about at the start of the show,

there's the in-property experience. So the in-property experience could be having a sign in the property of who the actual manager is. It could be when they go to get the Wi-Fi password. What's the name of the network? Is it the name of the house? Is it the name of the property manager? It could be all these little individual pieces inside of the rental itself, your welcome guidebook, information like that, that also let the guests remember who they stayed with. It's very common, actually, that a guest will stay in a vacation rental property and then not recall who they stayed with even 30 or 60 days after. So you have to remind them, just like the big brands that we were talking about earlier. I still see Coca-Cola ads. Apple still wants me to buy an iPhone. I bought nothing but iPhones for nine years now. I see Toyota ads constantly, Ford ads constantly.

These are the biggest well-known brands of the world, and they're continually investing in all of these forms of reach and advertising because they don't want you to forget about them. We should be treating our vacation rental guests that have stayed with us the same way. We can be reaching out to them and advertising to them on social media. We can be sending them email newsletters so that they're aware of it. And then when that moment happens later on where they go, yes, I do want to go back to San Diego. Yes, I do want to go back to Destin, Florida. Yes, I do want to go back to North Myrtle Beach. They recall that brand, they search that brand, and you get true value from that. When you're earning a branded search at the end of the day, you're getting the cheapest form of marketing and advertising that can exist.

You're essentially getting a referral in a way of someone recalling and specifically thinking of your brand, and then coming back and making sure that they want to stay with you again in the future. Branded search volume is always going to be the highest, probably one of the highest converting channels out there in the world of kind of marketing and advertising your properties because there's no friction. They're specifically seeking you out, going in and saying, I want to stay with this company. So branded search volume is a massive indicator of long-term success in my experience. And if you're not sure of this, or you don't go into your destination, go to Google Trends and put in the name of some of the biggest markets, the biggest

companies, I should say, in the markets that you're focused on. And what you'll typically find is that the companies that have the best reviews, the best ratings, a lot of times the most inventory have high branded search volume. People have stayed with them. If they're doing a good job of marketing and promoting, they're kind of getting people to what I say their digital doorstep, right? Their website. They may be getting hundreds or thousands of people coming in every single week, and you'll find that these companies map well with the ones that are performing the best. So to recap, branded search volume and influencing people looking for your company on Google can be done through a lot of different channels like social, listing sites,

email, and even the in-property experience experience. But this indicator looking at how many people each month are searching for your brand name in Google is a phenomenal indicator of success. And it's a good indicator of how well your brand is becoming well known. If you start to track this metric, you can just look into Google Search Console and look at impressions for people searching for your brand name in Google, both at the property management level and at the specific property name level, if you want to get that specific. These indicators will show you over time if you're investing and people are starting to recall and remember your brand. We started working with a new company that had essentially no brand whatsoever, no past guests. And a few years later, they now have over 2000 people a month searching for their brand name in a small beach town that they're starting to get some real solid traction on. So these things

do take time, but they don't take a ton of time. And over time, you'll see the compounding benefits of focusing on your brand and people starting to search for it that will reflect itself in your direct bookings. So that's all I have for today. Thanks so much for listening. We appreciate any reviews that you may have. Feel free to leave a review in your favorite podcast app of choice or on iTunes. That would be awesome. If you have any questions, email me conrad at buildupbookings.com. We'd love to hear what you have to think about the episode or how you're tracking brand for your vacation rental company. We appreciate it. And thank you so much. We look forward to you listening to the next episode.