Heads In Beds Show - The 2023 Guest Marketing Master Class To Get More Bookings

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellSMART goalsEOS model🔗 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 & Pets 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. All right, good day, Paul. How is it going today? Another wonderful week here as we're hitting the end of the year. It seems timely to be talking about next year

because we wasn't already thinking about 2023. So how about you? How's your end of the year going? Everything's going pretty good. I think my wife spent an ungodly amount of money on Target. She's gone to Target to get toys this year. I think there's been like availability issues over at Amazon. So yeah, that's going to be exciting.

We're now hiding, as we moved in the new house, we're hiding toys in new places and the kids don't know where any of this stuff is. In their old house, they could find it because it was so small. Like it was easy for them to find where we're hiding toys. They don't even know about the linen closet. That's like in our bathroom, like behind it, there's like a little area and then we put a towel in front so they can't find anything. But I'm not looking forward to getting the credit card bill with Target charges on it, but they're gonna have a great time. I'm looking forward to it. That's, I was going to say, Target and Best Buy up in Minnesota. It's like in Starbucks in

Washington, you can throw in and hit one of those stores. Oh, we've had plenty of charges from both of those in the last couple of weeks here. So I can only imagine our balances probably look pretty similar right now. Is it Target though or Target?? Some people call it Tarjay. I'm feeling fancy. I have heard Tarjay in some of the more, we'll say prominent suburbs up here. So maybe I'm just out of it in wherever the little podunk suburb I live in. All right. One day we'll have to do a breakdown of wealthy, affluent Minnesotans. What do they spend their money on? That would be a fascinating conversation. I like it. I like it. But today we have another fascinating conversation that we're talking about. And to your point, it is something very interesting.

So we're going to skip the marketing minute today. And I know we normally do that, but we have way too much stuff to get to because we today are doing a 2023 guest marketing plan extravaganza, bonanza. I don't know what you want to call it. But really what we're going to talk about is this week, we're going to talk about how you can plan an amazing 2023 guest marketing plan. And then we're going to talk about how you can plan an amazing 2023 guest marketing plan. And then we're going to talk about how you can plan an amazing 2023 homeowner marketing episode. So you might see me maybe dominating the talk time a little bit more on this episode, although Paul has hundreds of ideas that have been made.

And on the flip side, I'll obviously talk a lot more next week. But I think these two are intertwined. I know I've said this before. I don't know if I've said it a lot on this particular format before, but I believe good guest marketing is good owner marketing because you're able to attract and create visibility. And that naturally is going to be shown to owners who are in the community, who are in your area, and they're going to see you. And then they're therefore going to be drawn to working with you. But I also believe in a way the opposite can be true, which is that you have to attract good homeowners in order to get the guests that you're after, right? If you're managing

the lowest quality inventory for the pickiest, hardest to please homeowners, then your guest marketing really difficult, right? You're not gonna be able to get the results that you want to do. As with all things we talked about on the show, these two are unbelievably linked and intertwined. But today, we're going to talk a little bit more on the guest side. And then of course, we'll touch more next week on the owner side. So I'll dive right in. My number one objective or the number one thing that I think people should start with as they get going in planning their 2023 guest marketing, it sounds simple, but I see it all the time, which is actually defining the goals and objectives that they have with their business next year.

So this is something that you and I have talked about quite a bit where people either haven't defined these very well, or they've created unbelievably unreasonable expectations of where they can be when next year starts. So I'll give some examples of what I think an objective might become. We could maybe even touch on EOS. We could maybe even touch on the rock concept a little bit. And I think where I want to start is actually just a simpler concept, which doesn't even involve EOS and rocks and stuff like that, which is the idea of a smart goal. So a smart goal is something that's specific, measurable, actionable, reasonable, and time-bound. So if you make a

smart goal for 2023, it might be something like our direct booking percentage is currently 13%. I want that to be 20% by the end of the calendar year 2023. So then it's very specific. You're trying to raise your direct booking marketing rate from 13% to 20%. It's reasonable, right? You're increasing it by a good clip. It's going to take some work to get that, but you're not saying you're trying to go from 13% to 90% in one year. That would be unbelievably difficult to accomplish when that date is that's going to occur. By the end of the calendar year, I want to sum up our numbers and see that we've had 20% direct bookings versus 13% today. And it's actionable, you can take action that'll actually you can take steps that are actually going to get you to that. So that's my number

one thing, which is that I don't know if you've seen this in the past, but people say, Oh, I want more booking, I want to improve things, but they're kind of squishy goals. There's not really like a way that I can write it down and look at it. And I know in the past that we've collaborated on projects before, like Brooke, for example, Hilo, someone else should be able to look at that goal and tell you if you reach it or not. So if it just says increased bookings, does that just mean 1%? Or does that mean like 20% or 100%? So I don't know if you've encountered this before, but what's your kind of thoughts of not just defining goals and objectives, but how to do it so that it actually is actionable for someone who's working on that side of it?

goals and objectives, but how to do it so that it actually is actionable for someone who's working on that side of it. Yeah, I think on the goal side of things, I think with SMART goals specifically, I think attainable and I think time bound are very important. Actionable and attainable, I think those are interchangeable in that A, but it is. I think it is important to set those realistic goals and make sure that you are... I always like having that, what I call the scorecard. I want the scoreboard. I want to see how I'm doing. I want to be measured by how I completed that goal. And if it's not measurable, if it's not attainable, if it's not time bound, then it is. I think you hit the nail on the head is how do you know, or how does someone else know whether or not you've hit and achieved that goal? I think you've got it spot on there. And I think that

the more people, stretch goals are one thing, but it really is. I've seen too many businesses put these aggressive goals out there, knowing that they're not going to hit them. And I think that's, that's fine, but it does, it sets the team up for, not say disappointment, but just never knowing, you want that sense of accomplishment. And you're taking that sense of accomplishment away by not giving people the ability to complete a goal. I'll wrap it up like that and say, I think that you've got a spot on there. Yeah, this is a small diversion. I'm not a big like Tony Robbins guy. I've never really been drawn to like his message or a lot of what he says. I think a lot of it's raw nonsense,

to be completely honest. Maybe you just offended a bunch of people. I don't know. But anyways, he had something where I saw this clip of him or something. I think it was on YouTube or something like that. And he was saying, why would someone who's a billionaire be unhappy? And he's someone who's actually whether you like him or don't like him. He's someone that has had a lot of contact with people that are millionaires and billionaires. And he says the problem is that someone like becomes a millionaire when they sell their company or a billionaire and they stop being CEO of their company or whatever the case may be. And the reason that they're unhappy is that someone like becomes a millionaire when they sell their company or a billionaire and they stop being CEO of their company or whatever the case may be. And the reason that they're unhappy is that they actually feel like they've stopped making progress and that

every human no matter where you are in like your journey as a business owner or working for someone or whatever, humans desire progress. Like even if we start here, we want to figure out how to get there. Even if it's from going to a low level to a minimum, medium level, we still desire that. And I think that's how I think about it is that if you make the goals so unrealistic, and unreasonable that people can't reach them, it actually doesn't, it doesn't inspire you to take action to make progress, because you don't actually think that it's attainable to get there. So that's, I've thought about that a lot since, which is that, how can you make progress so that people can, or how, sorry, how can you set up the goals in a way that people feel like, oh, I can make progress,

I can get there. It's, that's the best way best way I think to set up things like this, because then you have like going from 13% to 20% direct bookings or increasing traffic, 25% 30% year over year, or maybe you get people, okay, if we hit 30%, we'll do this. If we hit 50%, we'll do this, if we 100% we'll do this. I think that's kind of stuff can be fun, because then you feel like, all right, there's a small level that I should be able to hit without really pushing too hard. There's a medium level that should be like a little bit out of reach, but attainable. And maybe if it's like, if everything goes perfectly right, and I absolutely crush it, and we have an unbelievable effort on this, we get to this level, there's some unbelievable reward waiting for me over here. Like this level, you get a $5,000

bonus, this level, you get a $10,000 bonus. And this level, we get a $50,000 bonus, like something that would be high, then at least you feel like, all right, I've made progress, I didn't get all the way to where I wanted to go. And then you can figure out a way to to accomplish it so yeah a lot there on goals and objectives but i think it's that i think it's worth discussing because i have these conversations a lot with people where they aren't really exactly sure what they want to do like they know they want better results but they're not really sure exactly what those might be so i have to define those sometimes i'm like even like discovery calls and initial calls with clients where i'm like okay where you got today where you want to be and then usually I can squeeze out of them a little bit better

that they things that they haven't yet thought of themselves. So I think that's important. All right. So my second item moving on here is to actually sit down and identify your ideal guest profile. So again, something that I think not a lot of people have maybe done during the last COVID boom years, because do you really need to identify your ideal guest profile when you're booked all the time? and there's really no, there's unlimited demand for your property. My unlimited guest profile is someone that has an Amex and is willing to put it into my website. It's like, I've heard people say stuff like that before.

But now I think we're entering a different time because number one, demand is probably going to shift a little bit in your market. Some markets, maybe the shift is going to be very minor. Other markets, the shift might be more extreme. But you have to come back and figure out who the actual property is serving, and who you as the vocational manager want to serve, who's the actual ideal guest profile for each of your each of each of the properties that you have in your program. And you might have some properties that apply to many different profiles, you might have some properties that are really ideal for a specific type of person or a specific group of people, things like

that. So what I have here is like finding out their needs and their preferences, what do they need in the property for them to be drawn to it? Why would they choose that property over another one? We've talked about that in the past when we talked about what makes a property unique. It's that it has something that other properties don't have that are actually useful though. It's not just like some people put like the murals in the property and it looks cool. And I like that. I think that's actually really clever as like a marketing technique. But do they need the mural in the property? Like not really. It's just something nice to have, right? But if you define things that people might need in a property, like for example, oh, I would really wouldn't consider

booking if I didn't have King bed in every master suite. So that's something that someone might need that they would be drawn to even though and then you can use that in your marketing, because then they see, oh, I really want that. That's something that I value. Those are my needs and my preferences. Then you can create the marketing campaigns that are relevant and appealing to that ideal guest profile. So a lot of the messaging work that you're going to do, or a lot of the campaigns that you might run over the next 12 months, they're gonna be based on who is this email actually going to who's reading it on the other side. It's a mom, she lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, she's between 40 and 52 years old, she drives a Tahoe, she has two kids, seven years old, nine years old, she's coming to the beach,

because she values these four things. If we give her beach gear, if we give her an easy way to split up her payments into multiple sets, and if we give her fast and responsive service via phone or text, we're going to keep that guest super happy. So once you actually sit down to define exactly what those parameters are, I think it's a lot easier to actually come up with ways that you can approach that person and market to them because you understand them a little bit better. And even though I like, I think that's one thing in marketing that some people who are like new, like I've talked to people in the past who are like either a company owners were like, oh, marketing isn't my forte or like new younger people who are getting into the space. And they're like, what do I need to know? I'm like, part of

what you need to know, I think to do this job well is you have to be empathetic. You have to be able to take yourself out of your shoes, pop yourself in the shoes of someone that you're not that maybe you've never even met the person that you're in the shoes of, but think about what do they care about? What do they value? How would they, why would they book this property over another one? And then once you sit down and figure out those parameters, then I think you can come up with like a lot better messaging, a lot better copy in your actual offers and things like that. And I think the success rate of your marketing is so much better once you know who specifically you're marketing to. So I don't know if you have some

stories in the past of what you've done, like creating those ideal guest profiles, but it's something I think that's very important. I do. I think, I mean, it's incredibly important. I think those who have done some marketing previously, if they've done digital, especially you, you usually can peel out those insights and figure out who that ideal guest profile, or at least who has been kind of interacting with their digital up to this point with Google ads, with Facebook, there's a lot of audience information in there. And I think that's really helpful in understanding whether you are hitting that target profile or whether you're not.

Because it's whether you've gone through and developed it yet or are looking to develop it. I think just leveraging the reporting that's already in Google or Facebook on the digital side of things is a huge help. But also, if you've got your CRM in place, you've got all that guest data, you've got all that information, and hopefully your reservation staff or anything like that has been filling in and been very comprehensive when people are checking in, when they're enjoying a stay with you, and then you can really customize that experience, but also customize that profile down the road too. Yeah, I think that's well said.

All right, so moving along to number three for me, number three for me was develop a guest content marketing strategy. So I don't think you can do this to, you know, who you're actually marketing to. But once you know that, I think you can create a lot of content that actually maps to what those guests care about. So we talked about this before, refer back to a previous episode where we talked about like ideas and how to actually come up with them. That might be valuable. I'll put that in the show notes. But basically, once you have the who you're actually going after, then you can map ideas to those ideal guest profile targets. So the example that we gave in that episode, just to repeat it to talk about it is you probably don't want a page about the weather, you probably don't want a page about campgrounds,

even though these are high value topics, you want pages on the site that actually appeal to your guest marketing audience. For example, we have a client locally here in my area in Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, where we've done a guide to the dancing events that happen down here. There's all these shag dance events and stuff like that happen that we're trying to draw in people who are coming to these events. Now, the people coming to these events are 65 to 85, right? These are people who are definitely like older. They're actually in some cases very affluent.

They live in North Carolina, Virginia. They live in Ohio in some cases. They love the beach. They love coming down here for these dancing events, and they will pay whatever rates my client is willing to charge on those condo rentals to come and stay during these events. So when we put out a piece of content, that's here's all the shag dancing events that are happening in North Myrtle Beach here during the summer and fall. And we promote that to our audience through email who care about those events. This is unbelievably valuable content for us. Now for someone else, like my family who comes

down with their two kids, they don't care about this type of thing at all, but to create different content for them, best restaurants, best things to do for free, best beach places to go, best parking, plus way to find parking if you're not staying at one of the resorts. There's a million things that you can do that people actually care about. And that's the type of content that you should be creating. Yes, it has to map back in some cases, in my view to like search volume and keyword, what are people actually looking for in the keyword level inside of Google? Because otherwise you're shouting into the void.

If you make a bunch of content that people are not actually searching for and looking for, but once you find a little bit of that overlap, this is who my guest is. This is what they care about. And these are the actual keywords that map to this. And they have search volume. I think you want to go all in. We have clients where their guest content marketing strategy might, we talked a little bit about blog posts, but it also can include things like social media posts that you actually make from that blog post. It does not always have to be a link to that blog post too, by the way. That's one thing I think sometimes people get tripped up about is I say you have to

be careful about posting links nowadays on social media, Facebook in particular, because they kill the reach of any link post. And then they go, you're telling me I shouldn't post my blog at a conversation with a client like this recently. Maybe like it depends on what we're trying to accomplish with it, but I'm not opposed to taking the blog content and basically repurposing it into a Facebook post without a link, you could always put a link in the comments of that Facebook post. And that itself could be a piece of content that you publish on social media. Or we've now do this

in like reels format, we take an article, we basically convert it to like vertical video format, we take the images from the article, and we say five awesome restaurants that you want to check out one and then video the restaurant to then video the restaurant and so on content in my mind, this is like what information are you giving to the broader, like past guest list or your guest list out there that people are drawn to that they see value in that they're entertained by they're informed by they're educated by that's the type of thing that you can actually create a content marketing strategy around. It's not just we're going to write these nine blog posts, or we're going to do these four social media posts and things like that. It's more so who's

the audience that I'm speaking to, who do I actually want to market to, and then you can create content that maps to all those things. And that's where I think you have the best outcome, not just a list of deliverables, but actually a list of who you're actually promoting to. So I think you have experience here. What's been your approach in the past with creating that strategy to actually promote the content? Yeah. I think it's leveraging what content they already have in some cases. Certainly we want to put a full strategy in place, but if they have some good content that's gotten them somewhere, I think it's really repurposing in some cases.

I think for any new property managers or new businesses that just haven't done anything yet, haven't put these plans together. I think if they do have, that's something that I've found typically they do have, they have some blog posts or they have some social media. They've been doing that. They know to do it regularly. They know to do it consistently. So really to be able to build on the foundation or framework that you already have is that the overall content marketing strategy is critical because it's, it really does lay out how you're going to, I think it gives people the best, the many paths that they can take to get to your website. And I think not just looking at

content, content from a written content point of view, but looking at it from those social media posts, looking at from the video side of things and being able to leverage all those different types of media, whether it's the different channels or just different formats, I think it's critical to give people a lot of different content as opposed to just blog posts, social media posts, social media posts, email. Really being able to vary that content up is going to keep people more engaged. And that's what I've seen historically definitely is making sure that you are not you're not letting that content get stale yeah that makes sense that makes sense I think it's a good way to line it up how about you take the next one you know a little bit about this topic what's the next one after guest content marketing strategy do you want to talk about SEO

our favorite it's our favorite topic yeah so I think certainly SEO is something that you should be investing in. And I think that it's more than just creating a website. It's more than just creating a new website. It's making sure that website is really optimized and improving your visibility in the search engines. And I think so often it is. We worry too much about what something looks like, and we don't always think about the functionality.

So you've got this pretty site, but hey, it doesn't have page titles aligned. It doesn't have H1s aligned. It doesn't have very good content. We're not linking anywhere. That's not, I think we both know, and hopefully people who have listened now know that is not, that website is not going to perform well. So yes, it may seem like SEO is a long game that doesn't pay off. And I think we've all heard those, I mean, those sob stories. I

don't know how to say it lightly, but it is, oh, I haven't seen anything. Just SEO isn't working for me. I'm not improving anywhere. You are, it is. It's the consistency over time. And it is, it's having that technical SEO in place and the onssite SEO in place. And if you don't have all of that working together and then you're creating and following through with that content marketing strategy, ultimately the website isn't going to perform as well as you want it to. doesn't, the immediate investment, the immediate ROI may not pay off like a paid social or a paid search or another digital advertising channel. The long-term effects of investing in SEO certainly pay themselves off. But it is, if you're not ready for that, or if you don't know about that, it is, if you've got to find an expert. And certainly we've talked many times, and I consider you to be one of the foremost experts on SEO side of things, certainly in our space. But I do.

I think that's something that if you're not investing in SEO, ultimately you will suffer. Your website will suffer. Your overall business performance will suffer. I don't want to go all doomsday on it, but it is a critical part of any guest marketing plan, I think. Wow. Yeah. You can throw on whatever you want on top of that, but... The reason I think it's so critical is that every single client I look at, whether I've

worked with them or not, or I'm getting them later on, every one that's successful that's a large property manager, eventually they figure out, eventually you see them dominate in SEO. Eventually you see them dominating on the top few keywords in a given market. Eventually you see them in the top results. So I really don't, it's very hard for me to find any example of any client that I've ever worked with that has moderate to high direct booking percentages and isn't doing at least a good to great job with SEO because it's the most scalable channel. Once you've actually put in

the work and it's to your point, planting a seed in the ground or planting a seed in the ground, letting it grow a fitness, whatever analogy you want to draw, it doesn't matter. Eventually you get to the point where, wait, my brand is actually carrying me and people are looking for me and my customer acquisition cost is like zero. Like I'm not really paying any additional margin on top of my normal like expenses for hosting my website

and having my PMS and things like that. And people come to me and actually, you know, book with me automatically basically without any sort of direction or influence for me. Once you see that happening, and that's typically what like a good brand, a good SEO can actually do for you. Then you realize, oh, it's good.

This is the best thing for me long-term to get as many bookings as I possibly can from branded search and from people finding me on Google organically, or I'm not paying any marginal fees to get there. Like obviously you're gonna have to make an investment of time, money, energy, effort, all those things to get to in any competitive market

to get and win in organic search. That's obvious. But once you're there, then you realize, oh my goodness, the benefits of having this in place are tremendous. And it's not just the main keywords. Like we've talked about this before. I just, we actually just finished a new mini site for a client. I launched it on Friday and the mini site is targeting another condo rental keyword search concept, like the ones we've talked about before. This client does not rank number one or number two or number three in their market for area name plus vacation rentals. The problem is that they only offer condo rentals in a market that is very vacation home rental dominated. So the minority of inventory is condo inventory, and they happen to manage a lot of that inventory. So I would

argue we really have no chance. And I'm saying this as someone who is their SEO agency of record to rank for area name plus vacation rentals. Now we do well, very well in area name condo rentals, but that's a pretty low search volume concept compared to area name plus vacation rentals. Now we do well, very well in area name condo rentals, but that's a pretty low search volume concept compared to area name plus vacation rentals. So some people might say that and go, Oh, like you're just, you're fishing in a small pond and you've got what you got. I guess you've won SEO. And it's like, no, because now that we have the resort concept that we're going after too, we're trying to rank for the name of the resort plus rentals or the name of the resort plus condo rental or something like that. Now we have a whole nother surface area that we can build off of from an SEO perspective. So I just wanted to give a little

example there to pour water on the idea that like, oh, not big enough in this and that. No, you're not big enough probably maybe to rank for the name of your destination plus vacation rentals. I've had people say in the past, like, I have one property and I can't do that. And I'm like, yes, because if you could do that, then you should sell your property and you should open an agency and you should compete with me and everybody else like me. Because if you can get to the top of Google for area name plus vacation rentals, that skill is unbelievably valuable. That's a six figure annually per scale per market. And if you can do that across 20 markets, you're a multimillionaire, right? But anyways, the reason I say that is that SEO isn't just, that's just one, maybe that's like the most

competitive form of it. That is the Superbowl of SEO tactics is I want to rank for area name plus vacation rentals. There's a lot of other things that you can do underneath that. Branding the properties and actually marketing the properties. We've talked about that before. That's one layer that no one's going to compete with you on other than listing sites, other than your own listings. So if people aren't searching for, you know, Paul's cool cabin yet, then you have to make them search for it. You have to brand your properties in a way that people want to search for it. And then guess what? You've just won a little bit with SEO and all you had to do is outrank the Airbnb property detail page on your own website. That's actually not that hard, believe it or not. Even some of the one property can accomplish that successfully.

I know because I've helped people do it, then you could do the condo name concepts, you could do long tail concepts, pet friendly vacation rentals in area name, right? There's so many different layers to that, that I think people get tripped up sometimes on Oh, what person x has already started and person x has a head start and this and that I have it I have an old tweet. I'll see if I can dig it out and put it in the show notes. If not, it's because I couldn't find it. But it was a screenshot from I think it was like 2016 or 2017. First when I first started on my own, I got started doing build up. And it was I think it was I think it was Destin. I'm pretty sure that was the market. And it was like Destin, Florida condo

rentals or something like that. And it was like at the time it was home away ranking number one. Then at the time VRBO now VRBO. It was vacationrentals.com tripadvisor was in there flipkey was in there was one other like conglomerate kind of site in there from the umbrella of expedia slash tripadvisor and at the time i was it's going to be really challenging in this market to go and outrank these sites go do that search today and local people outranking those sites number one sites like home away have died and they've been merged into verbo so one slot was actually essentially given back to the local property. Like if you think about it, right, Airbnb is now more doing a better job with SEO, but I don't think they're as dominant as most people think they are. Do a lot of searches in a lot of leisure markets and you

won't see them typically in the top three or four across many markets. Obviously it depends on the market. Your market may be different. Flipkey has basically gone the way of the dodo bird. I don't really see them dominating at all anymore. I see them rarely showing up in organic search. So it's actually it's hilarious to think that we've had all this growth since 2016. And it's actually less competitive in some ways today than it was in 2022. From an SEO perspective, I swear, I swear, that's true. And that blows my mind. That is the case. They're like home to go has made some progress on the SEO side. They obviously didn't exist or weren't prominent in 2016. Again, Airbnb, I mentioned, but there's really only a few players nationally that are there. So in every location

that I've ever worked in, some local manager is ranking really well in Google and getting a ton of organic traffic. Why can't it be you? Or why can't you set up the building blocks now so that it can be in 2025, let's say, or 2024, where you're like, oh yeah, I can go and compete with this particular client. We have a mutual contact who previously worked in collaboration with us, who went and did a vacation rental company out in a market that's very competitive in Maryland. And they're already like top of page two, bottom of page one with 20 listings. And they're competing against two companies that have, I think, 500 listings each. And they're already like making progress. Are they number one? No. Are they going to dominate SEO anytime soon? No.

But like they know the value of it. And they know if we got started now and put all the work in the site today, X number of time down the future, we're going to be actually be able to rank better and have results there. So anyways, a lot there to say about SEO. Obviously we have a whole episodes where we do just about SEO, but I think it's one of those things where if you're sitting down in 2023 and there's not a line item for what's my future marketing investment going to look like, how am I going to build some of these initial things? And you're not thinking about that. I think to your point, you're, um, you're leaving a lot of traffic on the table potentially, and it doesn't have to just be the super high competitive keywords. There's a lot of things

for you to grab onto that are lower that you can tackle. So coming up next, my next item here was just focusing on social media. Again, this could probably be its own episode, but I think the broad trends that I'd like to share for 2023 is it's all vertical video, right? On mobile, let's be honest. We're now running their TikTok, we're now running their Instagram reels for them. And all the like image-based stuff, like we still have image posts that go out we still have link posts that go out because we have content and things like that that we've agreed to publish on a certain schedule for the client and we want to fulfill that obligation but like new plans that i'm writing for now going forward it's really going to be mostly that if we're doing social

media for a client now it's vertical video we need to go get shots of your actual destination of your property we now send shot lists to clients and we say, Hey, if you're going to, if you have a photographer or videographer that's going out and shooting one of your properties anyways, can you please have them go shoot this? And then I need it in a vertical phone format. I don't need it in the horizontal landscape format. That's doesn't help us anymore. And now we've clients obliging and giving that stuff back to us. And we have these vertical videos that are doing well, and they're getting lots of engagement. So I think this is the way that you can do a form of brand building in 2023. It's going to be something where social media is not your direct response platform, right? Like people don't come on Facebook or

Instagram or TikTok to book your property today. That's not how it is. That's not how it works. We've talked about that before on like attribution episode previously. But they do come on social media to be entertained or informed or engaged with like we talked about before. So if you're constantly putting stuff out there, that's like, how about this amazing property? How about this amazing cabin? Look what's going on here. Look at this event. Look at this thing. If you do that and you push that content out consistently, frequently, you're going to get a great outcome on social where you're going to have a lot of followers. And most importantly, you're going to have attention. And when you have attention, then you can monetize it because then people remember you when they think, oh yeah, I'm going

to go back to area X. I'm going to go back to destination Y. I already know who I'm going to book with, or I know who at least I'm going to check out first. I'm going to go check out the company that I follow on social media. So that's my way of thinking about social is that it's a brand promotion activity. It's not direct response.

Don't try to make, if you're trying to make social direct response or only think of it as direct response, I think you're pigeonholing yourself and you're causing yourself pain and unrealistic expectations. But what's your thoughts on that? I know it's not something that maybe you've focused on a ton in the past, but you've done a lot

of social, been around a lot of social work and you've probably seen good outcomes and bad outcomes from it. Yeah, I think that certainly, I think it's another one of those non-negotiables. It certainly has to be on this list. And I do, I think it's about leveraging the right channels and finding that video. That video is something that certainly, even on the owner's side, I have pushed hard, hard, hard on people to implement. And it doesn't have to be that fully produced five minute, four minute, three minute video. It's 30 seconds with the vertical video. I've seen those engage probably three or four X better than that overly produced video. Video,

I think is definitely the medium that people are digesting the most right now on social because you've got actual channels that are devoted just to videos. But I do. I think that any one of the one of the big keys for me, I'd say is consistency. Just make sure you're consistently putting that content out there and keep the keep the sales to a minimum and just engage with your art with your target audience there because it is. It's more of a personal experience. That's that personalized conversation. A lot of the advertising you're doing is advertising, but social media is more of a, it should be a personalized conversation and really engaging with users that are engaging with your business,

whether that's Facebook, whether that's Twitter, whether that's TikTok, whether that's LinkedIn, whether that's really anywhere So certainly, I think that on the guest side, the more traditional channels are going to be maybe TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, maybe Twitter, something like that, but really leveraging every channel and make sure you're on there consistently. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense, which is that if you tie it to if you map it to the outcome that you're hoping for with social, I think you're gonna you can think of it as that activity, you're gonna have the best outcome. Trying to make it something it's not is where I think people fall short. And they go on Facebook all day. That's not really what we're trying to do there. Let's dive into something that is very direct response,

or at least has a better outcome. And I think you and I have worked on this in the past somewhat extensively on both sides. So email marketing, people always I don't I dislike a little bit when people preface something with Oh, this isn't the sexiest topic. It's like, I don't, I dislike a little bit when people preface something with, oh, this isn't the sexiest topic. It's like, well, I don't really, I don't care what topic is sexy or not. I care what channel gets results. And like, you know, maybe it's not the sexiest topic, but it gets results, right? Like the clients that we have that leverage email marketing, they get phenomenal results. I don't see any sort of slowdown in open rates.

I don't see a slowdown in click rates. I don't see a slowdown in any of that stuff. The numbers that I see on my side indicate to me that email is probably the second best or third best channel for most of our clients in terms of being able to generate direct bookings. And we actually have a lot of our clients where they don't email, they might email once a month. We have some clients that are a little more aggressive than that.

I find the more aggressive you are, you actually harm your performance over time. In the short term, you get a little boost. And then over time, you actually harm your performance. We find that keeping a more reasonable cadence is the way to go with email. And it's exactly what you think. It's not really, I would say the playbook here to run email is probably the simplest of anything that we've talked about so far. It's collecting.

It's getting all the email addresses you can. Stay fi, like I'll stand for stay fi till it stops working because it's working amazingly well for all the clients that we have. You get stay fi in all the properties. You're collecting email addresses from every guest that's staying and their counterparts now and their friends that are coming their family members etc you grow your list we have clients that have 100,000 lists we have one of our clients that has a 200,000 list but it doesn't matter like we have clients that have a 200 person list and they get bookings from it when they send out we have clients that have a 2,000 person list and they get bookings

from it when they send it out so it's one of those things um this is the easiest so if you're looking if you've got this far in the episode and you you're like, what's the easy thing that I could do now that you guys talked about SEO, and it's gonna take a while and listen that this is it, this is what you're looking for. If you're looking for the simple thing to do, that's not super time intensive, it's not going to take you a significant amount of cost or money to accomplish, but you want to get results, it's make sure you're collecting as many email addresses as you possibly can, number one, and then number two, make sure you're doing everything you can to consistently message to them. Again, monthly cadence is completely reasonable. You can

send out 12 emails next year, 12 emails, one per month, starting in January. And I believe that it'll probably be your number two or number three direct booking source by the end of the year, assuming you have some list that you started with, right? If you're starting from zero, it may take a little more time to get that list. But I bet that as soon as you get up over 200 people, you'll get a booking from every single email you send out because it's very rare that we don't see a client getting at least one booking from every email they send out, even when they're small. And then when they're big, the only question is how do I make sure that I send this in a way where I don't flood like my website. So we have clients who those bigger clients that I was

talking about a hundred thousand, 200,000 people list, they literally have to segment it. Like we're going to send this one on Tuesday, this one on Wednesday, this one on Thursday. So they actually don't have like website issues or traffic issues or people are calling or using live chat, things like that, that their reservation team is not overwhelmed. Good problem to have, right? First world problem to have from a marketing perspective. But that can actually absolutely be the case. And I think it shows you that when you send out an email, 30, 40, 50% open rates are still out there. We get them all the time. We had a client that had a newsletter last month that did like a 77% open rate on a small list, I admit, but it was very targeted. It was

sending to the exact people who had stayed during a similar timeframe, filling a holiday week. And I think there was like a booking that came in 15 minutes after it was sent to a few hundred person list. So if you send the right message out there, email is still super effective. Anything you want to add on email or should we just hammer people? Like this is the easiest thing. I think this is the one question I would throw it back over to you is, do you see more engagement with mobile versus desktop? That's something where, as we saw more proliferation of mobile devices, I know, going back to 15, 16, 17, that was something where we saw significantly more engagement. But it was really about, at that point, understanding the device and understanding renderings and understanding how to do this and things like that.

But would you say that you see more on the mobile side versus the desktop side? Or what does that look like in your report? Yeah, I think the click through rates are a little bit better on desktop than they are on mobile, just in terms of pure interest in people actually coming over to the website. That being said, though, I think that the majority of opens are on mobile. So I think you have to buy your activity and like to your point, your templates and things like that to that. So honestly, we have clients that send really long email newsletters. And I sometimes don't necessarily love that format, because some of the stuff that I see that works really well is actually pretty simple, right?

Think about your phone, you want buttons that are pretty big, the size of your thumb, easy to tap on, you want a few different options for people to click on, you probably don't necessarily want like absolutely everything in the kitchen sink in every single newsletter. We have some clients that do like events calendars, which I like, but then they put in 50 events. And I'm like, that's unnecessary. You don't need to put that in there. You could do here's two or three events that actually matter. And then a link to view all our events, click here. So those are those are some mobile versus desktop considerations that I feel like we talk about internally, where it's what's like the tap target of actually people

using it. Honestly, single column simplistic views actually work pretty well in mobile, you don't need to have a lot of like complex layouts or side columns or things like that don't even really work on mobile email, HTML is so archaic anyways, that you're limited by what you can do with things like web fonts and stuff like that. Yeah. And kiss supplies here, right? Keep it simple, keep it simple, stupid. And I think that's actually where you can get pretty good results. If the message is relevant, if anything, if you're gonna instead of trying to make the layout really complex, I would say you get more value out of making your segments a little bit more complex. In other words, sending a pet friendly newsletter out to people who stayed with a pet friendly property. And then the header image is not just

a cabin, but a cabin with a dog in front of it. Or there's a specific call to action button underneath all these cabins are pet friendly, click here, that kind of thing can work a lot better than worrying too much about design elements and things like that. Because people are going to read the whole email, they're going to skim, they're going to find what's relevant to them. And they're going to tap their thumb on what matters to them on mobile. So yeah, we should probably get some more updated data, we could do a whole episode two on email, right? It applies to everything we're talking about here. And I would love to bring some of that data to the fold, though. And we could talk about that a little bit more of like open rates, click rates and stuff like that. We could pull

some of that stuff together. Awesome. Okay, so I wanted to I know you had some notes on your side. But my last item here was like measuring and analyzing. So maybe we could go back to the EOS scorecard model that you were talking about on the very top. So if you're working with someone and they wanted to measure and analyze the results they were doing from their social investment, their SEO investment, their email marketing investment, all these things, how would you guide them into here's something simple that we can put together that everyone can look at that they get them look at on the scorecard basis. What's your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think, and for me, the gold standard is Google Analytics and not any other analytics that someone tries to be putting out there. That's

I think Google does a very good job, even as they're trying to as, as all of us as marketers are transitioning to G4. Yeah, it's a, it's one of those things that it's been a painful process, and I don't think it's going to be less painful after we actually make the full switch and we have to get used to using G4. But I do think that Google Analytics is that gold standard for really being able to identify and see how people are performing. Now, one of the things that I think has helped us on the Venturi side, and I think more, these are more providers of digital services should be at least considering it, is using Microsoft Clarity

or some type of screen recording. So that's something that, whether it's Hotjar, I think there's another product that I just heard that another partner just recommended to me that, again, there's some really great ways to not just measure the performance of your

marketing through the channels themselves, but then once those travelers or prospective travelers are getting to your website, then really understanding what they're doing there and understanding how they're interacting with your website. I think that's as much as the bounce rate by channel or the engagement by channel or events by channel, those are all important. It's really being able to visualize and understand how people are navigating your website so that you can understand, do I have this laid out? Do I have this aligned in a way that I'm leading people down or to the right pages on the website? I think we talked about it more on when you actually are creating that website is how are you laying that out? Great way to actually measure and understand whether you've laid it out appropriately for your users or your travelers in this case is using a hot jar, using a Microsoft Clarity, or using

something that's going to let you see what's your scroll depth? What is, how long are people staying on site? Where are the clicks happening? What are people hovering over? Are there dead clicks? Have you done something where people aren't exactly excited with your design and they're actually clicking to get out of the site or trying to figure out what they're doing? It is. In all cases, I would rather have way too much data to make those decisions than not having enough. And I think any analytics tool you can use, and it is, if you've got more comfort in a different channel, any analytics tool you can use. And it is, if you've got more comfort in a different channel, awesome. Use that channel. Just be able to create that scorecard and be able to show those results and demonstrate how you're growing or whether or not you are growing in some cases.

Yeah. You like that quite a bit. I think that ultimately there's a lot of, and analytics is the central hub, numbers you can take out of context or numbers that you can paint the data in a certain way. And I think their mother has done that in their career where it's, oh, the traffic's down, but let's look at these other things that don't really matter. But yeah, if you distill it down into sessions, conversions, conversion value, something to that effect, and maybe like goals or something like that, you can have even an executive or leader of a large company look at it and go, all right, how many people are coming? What are they doing once they're there? And how much money is coming in the bank at the end of the day? And that's where you should

map a lot of this stuff too. And we're talking about making an investment. We're talking about how to plan your marketing, but marketing has to map to revenue, right? There's only so much brand building activity that can go on. There's only so many things that you can sustain that are not bringing in cashflow. The type of client that we're working with, they're a small business. They can't sustain, they can't do a Superbowl ad, right? Oh, it's brand awareness, right? You're not Budweiser. You're not Coca-Cola, right? So you have to do things that are much closer to direct response, like marketing, than brand building activity in many cases. So I think that a lot of 80, 90% of your budget has to be mapped to things that are delivering

you revenue and will deliver you revenue in a short period of time. Not things that are hypothetical that might work down the road or cool brand things, unless you just have people margins where you can make that investment. And it's a reasonable one for you to make as the company grows, you can make some of those investments because you have this flywheel going. But depending on where you are in 2023, I think this pretty much applies to most of the clients that we talked to most of the clients that we're working with are thinking of their plans for next year. And a lot of them are using these ingredients of search, social and email. And those are the things that we talk about the most as like the three pillars. There's a

million other ways that you can go down the path, but these make a lot of sense to me. Yeah. Did you have any notes on your side? Did we miss anything important? I liked your note about website usability. I think that's important. Yeah, I think that's, we really covered it all.

I think you should use all the channels that are effective for you. Just because there are all these channels out there doesn't mean that you have to leverage all of them. You don't have to use Facebook and Instagram and TikTok if that's not where you want to be, or that's not where you're seeing the value coming back. It comes back to that return. So if you're spending on a channel and you're not seeing the return, evaluate it, make sure that you understand whether or not it's performing or whether you should be, whether you're doing it

wrong and you should be trying to improve it, or whether you should just be trying to ditch that channel and going somewhere else, whether that's an organic effort or a paid effort. I do. I think because we are working with these small to mid-sized businesses, and it is, there's cost attached to everything, whether it's a time cost or whether it's an actual monetary cost, really making sure that you are finding those correct channels or finding the most effective

results and really refining this strategy, taking a look at it from a holistic strategy standpoint, you are, you're going to come out at the end of 2023 with a much better, hopefully, much better results than if you just shot from the hip and said, okay, I'm going to turn everything on and see what works and hope for the best. So I think just the key is putting this plan together and helping people to realize those goals. Yeah, exactly. I think that's a good way to summarize it. So we'll put a bow on it for this week. I think this was our longest episode yet that we've done together, Paul, but a lot to cover. So hopefully the if the listeners have stuck around this far, thank you so much. I hope you have a happy holiday, Merry Christmas, whatever you celebrate. Seriously, all the best to you and your family.

We're still begging for reviews. We're going to beg for reviews till the day we die. I think. Yeah, we'll take more reviews, but I think, I think I saw the other day, December,

sorry, November was our most downloaded month and top double the people. I don't know if we're ready to share the numbers yet. Cause they're modest, but double the people in November checked out the podcast than they did the previous month. So I think it shows we're on the right path. People are checking it out.

The reviews definitely help. So thank you guys so much for anyone's left review. Thank you. We appreciate it. And next week, I think we have a good episode because I'm going to sit back

and just chill and Paul's going to do all the talking. I like meetings that I have with Paul where he can do all the talking and I just sit back and chill and maybe add a comment in here and there. And that's what next week is going to be.

So it's going to be fun. And it's all about the owner marketing side of things. So today was mostly guest marketing, although we might have touched on a handful of owner concepts here and there. Next week, next episode is going to be all about the owner

marketing side of things. 44 minutes, Paul could go for 44 hours on owner marketing and probably not cover everything. But we'll give it a we'll give it a crack. We'll we're excited to send that one out there. If you have any questions on any of these topics, do let us know you can email us or email to me Conrad, C-O-N-R-A-D at buildupbookings.com. And I'll make sure it gets to Paul if it's relevant there. And yeah, we thank you for your time and attention. And we will see you next show. Thank you. Bye.