Heads In Beds Show - The Four Part Process To Build A Homeowner Marketing Plan

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

In this episode of The Heads In Beds Show, we share our four-part framework to get a homeowner marketing plan in place. We discuss: TargetingPositioningMessagingChannelsAnd how you can build a winning strategy in each area.⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagram🚀 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 of Med Show presented by Build Up Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation rental properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host, Paul. All right, Paul, a very long pre-show. So I think this will come out technically after VR. So hope you had a good VRMA, although we're recording before then, just in the magic of time zones and stuff like that.

But we need a two and a half minute for the listener, Rider Cup breakdown for reference to your listener, Paul was at the Rider Cup, which the U.S. lost, unfortunately, which is not Paul's fault by any stretch of the imagination. Give us the two and a half-minute version of what it's like to go to an event and hope for the best, but unfortunately kind of see not what you're looking to see. What's your thoughts there? Yeah, it was, I mean, New York is incredible. We got amazing weather. Like, let's talk about the positives. The weather was great. We got to go into Manhattan to go to the 9-11 Memorial one day.

There's a whole lot there. I got to spend great time with my dad. It's awesome. That is cool. That just can't beat. But yeah, you know, we got out for practice round on Wednesday, got out for the opening day on Friday. And I was texting you on Wednesday. I knew we were in some trouble.

The same things we didn't do on Wednesday. We didn't do on Friday and Saturday. So did you put it? Do you have the heart to put any money? Like go put 20 bucks? on Europe once you saw what you saw or you couldn't do it no no no no no no we still aren't going to play that game but but i mean it is it was going to a golf tournament of any kind i think it gives you kind of unparalleled access you're right there i mean i think that's that's one of

the best parts is that like i have pictures that i am feet away from scotty sheffler and jj spahn and rory mackereloy and all these guys and that's pretty cool um yeah obviously the roars are crazy at the Ryder Cup and I wish we'd have heard a few more um but but it was I mean just kind of the melting pot as we were walking around you'd hear kind of an Irish brook over here and then an English accent and then probably some Scandinavian uh language that I didn't even hear so my my German I will say I I got a little more testing on that than that I've had in the last two decades I would say um probably not the most practical language coming out of high school but whatever we're going to that's that is what it is but overall amazing experience um super excited

for it to come to hazeltine in four years um and and sunday sunday was a lot of fun i wish yeah i kind of wish we would have been there on sunday just to be able to be in here because like just hearing the roars that you just were you know 48 hours before it was it was pretty cool and i text you in sunday and i'm like we know it's not going to happen right and you were like yes but i was like also i'm not moving from my current spot and i'm not you know My legs are crossed a certain way, like, just in case, again, I feel very similar to about that. I was like Keegan Bradley did nail the comparison, 28 to 3 Super Bowl versus the Ryder Cup, because that's, and the 28 to 3 Super Bowl was like a one out of 1,000.

Every single play, it went up perfectly, and somehow it lined up perfectly. Honestly, one of a thousand is accurate. One out of 100,000 games, maybe would. Every single play had to go the Patriots way for them in that Super Bowl, and they obviously did. And that's kind of what had to happen for the U.S. to win, you know, on Sunday. It was like every single shot, every single 50-50, you know, put had to go their way. And honestly, 80, 90% of them did. It just, we need it, we needed 100%.

That's what it, that's quite a few of them made. We, I think we got 90, yeah, 99.9% but we missed like to. Yeah. And again, that's something that had we played better the first two days when I was, when I was watching it, it would have been great. So, so yeah, it was overall amazing experience. That is cool. For golf fans, highly recommend getting to, you know, something like that. Even if it's not like a major, like the U.S. Open at, uh, Beth Page.

is equally impressive or you know kind of getting to one of those big tournaments that's it's something different so definitely well maybe i'll visit you in what four years at this point right yeah 2029 you know you've got an easy easy access to uh to hazel team yeah that'd be cool that'd be a fun experience you know it's so funny the the wins the losses are on such fine margins as we discussed marketing can be the same way like knowing what you actually need to do to get the you know the pieces in place to get marketing to work well is so important so we'll pivot into today's topic the simple four-part process towards building a homeowner marketing plan we'll probably to come back in the future and do a guest market it will, but this is specific on the

homeowner side of things where Paul has deep knowledge in. And despite the fact, he's running a little sleep and he's a little emotionally torn up, we're going to go his way anyways as we get started here. So let me set the table and then we'll go into these four items as time allows here. So I thought about this a little bit recently, if just trying to get people on the podcast here, a simpler framework to kind of understand what we're talking about, just so they have a better, easier way to grasp what needs to get done. I think a lot of people when they start to get into this marketing world, they get overwhelmed very easily. Oh, there's so many things I have to do or I heard somebody feedback from,

hey, direct mail works or PPC works or, you know, realtor relationship works. And it's like, it's so hard to like just zoom back for a second and say, what am I trying to actually achieve here with my homeowner marketing? And so I thought we, you know, we did some brainstorm and put some notes together and what we think a pretty good framework is for it. So here's kind of my four-part process. We'll lay these out one by one.

Targeting, which is who are my ideal homeowners. Positioning. How do I want owners to perceive us and what value do we actually offer to those owners? Messaging. How do I want to say that? how do I want to communicate that to my owners? And then for channels, how am I going to communicate with those owners? So I think just like I did many years ago when Matt Landau challenged me, come up with an

SEO, you know, Wade Displaying XCO, and I came up with TLCK, technical link building, content creation keyword research. This is a little bit more in order, by the way. That's not in order. This is a little bit more in order. But I think if you think about it this way, again, I'll repeat them one more time. Targeting, who are we going after? Positioning, how do we want them to perceive us?

What are we offering, et cetera? Messaging. How are we saying it? How are we communicating it? And then four, where are we communicating it? you can then take everything you're doing in the homeowner marketing and put it into those buckets and have a little bit more of a clear path as we go along here. So, Paul, take it away here, your reaction to kind of those four ideas as we get going.

I think it's a really concise and really effective way of looking at it, specifically on the owner's side, because there is. There's a lot of extraneous stuff that feels like it's important sometimes, but it, I mean, if you're nailing all of these four things, you're going, your marketing is going to be as effective as possible. Now, I think with the homeowner side of things, there it is always comes down to a sales element as well. But that's something that we'll just drive, dive right into targeting. I mean, I think that's something that it's really difficult to find the data that you're looking for sometimes. And there's data brokers out there. There's your local municipality,

your county, everything like that. But I think the people you're looking, you know, those absentee owners. Anybody who's who's done this before has probably heard that term, absentee owners, absentee investors. It's people who aren't actually living in your area, but have that home there. And I think that that's something that does that guarantee that they're going to want some type of property management that they're going to want to rent their houses a home? No, it doesn't. But that's kind of the best that we can do there. So I think when we start with that big list, you know, everybody said, get a market to 1,000 people, market to 500 people, market to all these people. That's kind of the list where everybody starts. The absence.

see, the people who own in the area but don't live there. And then it is. It's, you know, then you can find a whole bunch of other options. You know, on our list, we've got legacy homes, lifestyle owners, short-term rental, you know, newbies, people who actually are interested in going to the investment side of things. But I do. I think that that's, it's really difficult then to understand when you're looking at all those different types of audiences, even within those segments, it's what are their pain points?

And everybody's got a different pain point. I think, you know, ROI is, is that one resounding thing that we all want to hear to some certain extent. That's the drum that consistently beats. But, I mean, how often have you been in a conversation with a homeowner where my home just wasn't taken care of? Or I didn't think we got as much money as we could have because all of our bookings came in through Airbnb or vice versa. Or, you know, it doesn't feel like you're giving my time. my rental as much time as this other rental does because you are. You're a professional company. You're trying to give everybody kind of a uniform experience there. So really making

sure you're targeting the right homeowners and that's difficult because when we kind of look at marketing from the owner's side versus from the traveler side, it's very different scales of people. It's dozens, hundreds, maybe in the right market, you might be marketing to a thousand homeowners, but that would be a huge market and really quite an undertaking because I said it on LinkedIn a month ago now, but what if you did get all those leads to come in? Now you're never going to get 100% lead conversion rate coming from your marketing efforts. But what if you got 20 of those in? What if you got 30 of those in?

What if you got 50 of those in? Would you be able to take those all in? Would you want to take all of those in? Or should you be a little more, I would say, targeted even with your targeting to ensure, that you're not just, you know, not just taking everybody, but you're taking the right people here. So there's a lot. You know, mix that apart. Go ahead, jump in and start shooting some holes in there, I'd say. No, I think we're mostly in alignment here. Maybe initial context that I would layer in for the listener is that only a small portion of that group that Paul

talked about a second ago is ready to sign right now. I think that's an underrated piece of this whole puzzle, which is that you may have this list of X number, whatever number happens to be, 250 people that are like perfect, they check all the boxes, right location, right property, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Only maybe a fraction of those people, literally a handful, might actually be in the buying mode for your services right now. So that's where I think, again, this idea of like direct response can be really challenging in homeowner marketing because I want a direct response campaign to work.

I want to be able to send out one single newsletter, one single direct mail piece, and get the results back. And we'll talk about targeting here, obviously, at the end, but, or we'll talk about kind of those channels in the end, but the truth is that if only four or five people are going a switch in a given month. And by the way, they're comparing you against 10 or 12 other options. You can see how the numbers actually at a month and month basis, day-to-day basis get really, really small really, really quickly on who's actually in the market to buy. So my belief is that define who your ideal homeowners are, and we'll talk about in a second, but it's your goal to

become well known to those people. Whether you succeed or fail will kind of long term, I think depends on that. Not one clever campaign, not one direct mail campaign is never going to do the job. And we've hammered this point over and over again. We don't need to necessarily beat the dead horse completely to a pulp here. But I think what's people seem to think, you know, Paul from my previous conversations is that, okay, I've got this list of 250. Let me just start marketing out, messaging out to these people. And then some percentage of them are going to respond. Some percentages of them will respond eventually. But if you measure it off one single touch point, you're going to be sorely disappointed when you go that narrow. Now, if you're one

of these people like an Evolve type company and you're targeting everybody who has a vacation home in the United States of America, you probably have very different targets and goals and things like that. But if you're in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, or if you're in whatever, insert, whatever market here that you want to insert, and there's only a few dozen that are shifting on a regular basis, you have to be well known to get in front of those people. Again, I feel like the most apt example that we can all think of in our own lives if we ever bought or sold a home is a realtor. How do you choose a realtor? Most people choose a realtor based on their previous experience with that real estate professional before, like buying or selling a home with them

previously, a referral from a friend or family member, and then only the third, the fourth, the fifth bits are people who are like going online, searching, looking for a realtor, they don't know anyone, they couldn't get a recommendation, et cetera. So those people that get those referrals from real estate, and I know of some real estate agents that I work with, and some of our clients do both real estate and rentals, they're getting those referrals off of a decade of brand experience or a decade being in the market and so on and so forth. This isn't that dissimilar, would be my take on it. So you have to be well known to those people in doing that's a bit of a challenge. But that'd be one thing I'd add in, but I agree with everything

else you're saying there for sure i mean we just recently talked about it i mean it is a lot of the targeting you can target all that you want but really it's in a lot of cases it's the owner targeting you like that's i mean obviously that's that's that's something that's that's something that's that's something that we have to put ourselves out in front and we have to put ourselves out in front with marketing and do things like that but i definitely think more so you know it's it's it is about those right homeowners than re-engaging with you and and you're right it's it's a percent game, it's a very small percentage game at best for us. This is a very high trust transaction.

Maybe that's a good way to describe it, right, Paul? Like this is something where imagine you have a million dollar home, which is not uncommon now in this world of vacation rentals, a million dollar home. It's your second home. It's your investment. You might have three to four to five hundred thousand dollars of cash put into this home. Are you going to get one postcard from someone and be like, yeah, looks good. Yeah, go ahead.

Take a million dollar investment and run with it, my dude. I'm hoping, I'm rooting for you. Heck no. Right. You're going to have so much consideration, so much thought that goes into that. And the moment that you think it's this one transaction, this one shot, you know, type of success is I think the moment that you get really disappointed by. It should be what's my homeowner strategy for the next decade, not what's my homeowner strategy for the next 10 days because that's not going to get you anywhere. It might get you know, again, if I do my analogy, there's a few fish that are biting.

You might get lucky to throw a hook out one time without bait on it and snag that one fish. But that you're not building a winning strategy off that. You're not building a company off that. So there's so many things to it. But yeah, if you want to fold us into positioning, unless you want to react to anything. I was going to say, I mean, I think you just, you did it. did a really good job. They're just kind of like, I mean, those who are positioning themselves for the short term,

there is no. Like, then you're going to keep moving the goalposts, for lack of a better phrase for us. Like, that's how you're positioning your brand for the future truly does paint a picture. Like, you know what? Once someone stays with, once that traveler stays with you, they're probably not as concerned. Hopefully you're remarketing or no. That's the whole other.

That's the second part of this conversation. but it is in order to have that that value proposition really stand out that you are going to have less hassle, that you are going to have expert care, that you are going to have a strongest experience. Like those are things you have to stand on. You can't just say, well, I'm going to make you more revenue and then a week later, well, then we're going to do this too. That's it's wishy-washy. I mean, an owner is going to know that that seems a little wishy-washy. If you're just giving people something that they say, you're just giving people what they want to hear,

obviously that's that doesn't strengthen your position as you know kind of underlying your USPs there so I do think having a strong position setting up those USPs making sure that you are professional and confident and trustworthy in every communication you have with them because it won't just be that email it won't just be that um in a direct mail piece it won't just be maybe a Facebook ad that you throw out there or something like that there are You have to keep that consistency, I think, more so with the homeowners because, again, it is a, it's the whining and dining of this individual. You are not just saying, okay, look at this pretty home. Does it work for you?

Look at these pretty amenities. Look at the things that are drawing you into the individual rentals. No, this is not just one small piece of it. This is your entire business. This is your entire brand. And I think, you know, talking about just overall brand positioning, if you don't have that strong brand positioning, you don't have that strong foundation of a brand story and your, you know, your core mission, core values, those items, it is.

This is going to be a much harder marketing and sales process because those are what people are really valuing here. Yeah, again, you put numbers out there, they'll check on them. You have put your other homeowners out there and they will ask about them, but they're not going to ask about the numbers. They're going to ask about how the experience is done with you. So I do. I think that however you can position that in a way that hits all of your targets there, and it's going to be difficult.

It's not going to just be a one marketing piece that's going to solve everything. You do. It's where all of the communication really comes together. And the concept of an omni-channel marketing strategy, I use those air quotes, but it's real. It's not just you're not just marketing on all channels. You're making all the channels tell a cohesive brand story there. super important. I agree.

I think the positioning angle comes down to like a lot of people feel, I feel like they're repeating what an owner wants to hear and they're not actually acting or behaving in a way that is true to what they're positioning actually is. So for example, you know, you and I beat this one again to death here a little bit, but this idea of everyone says the same thing. I'm going to drive you a lot of revenue. I'm going to make a lot of revenue for your home.

I don't think those messages are that compelling. Otherwise, this direct mail stuff that I've seen sent out a lot would work better. I do think it's something you should mention. Absolutely. You should talk about your revenue approach. But the analogy I've done recently is, saying that you drive a lot of revenue in a direct mail piece or a homeowner marketing piece, it's kind of like Toyota saying that we've got a transmission in the car, we've got keyless locks.

It's like, okay, dude, so does everybody else. That's not a compelling reason to buy Toyota versus buying a Honda or a Ford or a Chevy or whatever the case may be, right? Like, that's not a good enough reason to do that. I think the positioning thing is absolutely a long-term thing. But I think another angle that I would kind of explore here on the positioning side will come to this in a second on messaging is you've got to show and you've got to have proof, not just promise something. So I'm big on that. I think that's a Hormosey thing, too, where he talks about, like, you know, don't just show proof of what you're saying.

Don't just promise that you're going to deliver something. And when you have those people who are advocating for you, that's so much stronger of a tool in your tool belt. So it's like instead of saying, don't position yourself as we're the luxury property manager. You actually have to be the luxury property manager for that message to land with anybody meaningful. Again, are you going to trick someone here and there to get to sign on with you? Sure. But like, the only path, I think, to actually deliver this amazing positioning, you know,

through your messaging that we'll talk about here in second is to actually be that thing. So this is the hard part of the business, I will admit, like, and I think about my own marketing now. And what I had to do to get those initial few clients back in 2016 is very different than what I'm doing now. And the way my business run is very different from now because now I have a lot of results and a lot of proof. And I can, I want to say charge whatever I want. I wish that was the case. But I can command a little bit more stronger over price premium for my services today than I could in 2016 where I'll just sign, oh, you're willing to give me money and I can do SEO for you. Sounds amazing.

You know, you're going to give me 500 bucks a month. I'll do it. Right. So like, you know, to give that comparison of like, if you're the small fish in the big pond, you've got to have some. something that you're positioning yourself against the big guys. And I think you were saying this a minute ago, I just don't want to interrupt you. I think one of the main things on that value proposition of what you're offering people. If it's that local service, I think it's doubling down on that. And I think during the sales process, they're going to see how you treat them during

the sales process. And they're going to want that to continue once they get going. I've seen people leave Vacasa or I've seen contact forms fill out from Vacasa, like owners that are leaving the old Vacasa. I'm not talking about the current Vacasa because that's kind of different, but the old Vakasa. And they're just basically saying like the performance, even it wasn't that bad. they weren't that unhappy with the revenue. They weren't that unhappy with anything. They hated the fact that their marketing or their point of contact for their home

in a relation was not local to their market. There were at various points. They were in Portland, Oregon or something like that. And they hated the fact that they would change a lot. Even if they were local, they hated the fact that, oh, there's so much turnover.

You know, one month I'm talking to Paul. The next month I'm talking to John. The next month I'm talking to Mary. The next month I'm talking to this person. And they hated that because it was like building a new relationship from scratch. So that wasn't a, that wasn't a numbers thing. That wasn't a how much revenue comes in,

although that seemed to be, you know, sometimes the reason that someone might might be unhappy, but it wasn't every time. A lot of it was just like, who knows what's going on in this property, right? Whereas if you're that consistent voice and you're saying, I'm a small company, I'm going to be very involved in your property. I only have 50 homes. I only have 25 homes. I'm going to take care of each one, you know, with a higher level of standard.

They're actually going to accept less revenue to choose that. They may be like, oh, cool, like I'm dealing with you directly or you have one plus one other teammate that I'm dealing with. You know, it's the Paul and Conrad show. I like that. I don't know if I like this, you know, bigger model. So you're going to find people that meet your, you know, that you connect with when you get the messaging here in a second. But you've got to be willing to lean into that. What I think

you should not do in your positioning is not say what you think they want. You need to say what you could actually deliver upon and then show the proof that you can do that. So maybe that folds us nicely, Paul, then into messaging. So when you actually decide what that is and we agree, how do you actually say it? What are some things that you would actually say to, you know, someone to deliver that messaging in the right way? So copy advertising, etc. I found, you know, a lot of different effective ways to use the messaging here. I think that whenever you can, you know, you want to tell a story because I do think that that's something that even on a small postcard being able to put some visuals in there

that are telling a story of a before and after, that's huge. And like you said, that's something that people are looking for. You have to be able to prove it. They don't want the projections because they've gotten the projections. If they're looking again or in there with a professional management company, they've gotten the projections, probably didn't. hit those projections or probably didn't hit something else on the expectation side of things anytime i mean case studies are are the be all end all owner testimonials my goodness

this is something that i think if we've done multiple multiple episodes on what type of content you can produce in a hurry or you know that will make an impact in your marketing now owner testimonials are that i think that that's something that having someone say having the ability to give someone the phone number that's awesome but having a 90 second video a two minute video a three minute video whatever that is telling them just you know saying all the things that you want to say but having it out of the mouth of a homeowner my goodness that's it's gold your that's the willingness for someone to do that is if they are willing that's something I would incentivize for it would pay somebody to do something like that that is because it will it will you know

you want to talk about ROI on on the marketing itself that one video, if you can use it to close 10 deals, I think you can extrapolate out that money on gross booking revenue and everything like that. I do. I think that they're depending on your market, some people are looking for a little more fun. Some people are looking for, again, this is defining your segments and really understanding who you're going after there. Some people are looking for that cheeky little message of, oh, did you make, did you do this?

Did your home fall? Did your home burn down? Did your home fall apart? did you like these these highly satirical things but then bringing bringing it back to okay well this it didn't happen but this is what could have happened or this is what we will do i think that's that's the key again making sure you're on point with your branding and everything else if you're a high end upscale thing you probably don't want to go fun with it you don't want to go stand a bit with your marketing so i think anytime you're you're considering your messaging you do you want to think of what's going

be the highest value. So I do. I think any data you can put in there is going to be helpful. But then it is. It's matching that messaging, that intent of, okay, these are high-end homeowners. You're looking for a high-end professional experience, the white glove experience, and kind of demonstrating that as best you can with your words, with your visuals and doing things like that. I think images is one of those things that if you're doing postcard marketing if you're doing any type of direct response or digital for that matter i mean when you're looking at facebook the same way because that is a way to target people with a custom audience and do things like that so you do you have to make sure your visuals are represented of your brand the

clip art logo on your postcard probably something you want to stay away from we'll just we'll just go right And not just fitting it in a template. And there's a lot of templates out there for postcards. So like, don't just fit your messaging in a template, make your messaging something other than just falling in the template there. So I don't know. I think that's pretty straightforward for all marketing. But what did I miss there?

What do you got? No, no, I think you, you know, you nailed the most important pieces there. I think around design, it's about, you know, having, again, like we said earlier, having a point of view, explaining what your benefits are, you know, getting your message across. I think, yeah, people, you know, that what's the expression, right? Don't judge a book by its cover. Nonsense.

You know, people will say that, but that is not how people behave, right? People do judge a book by its cover. Every interaction they have with you, they're judging, you know, what they're seeing as far as the presentation, the professionalization, the copy, the content, the messaging. You know, it's things that I sometimes, you know, probably I overthink on my own business from time and time, or I overthink with client materials sometimes of like exactly how would someone perceive this word and sit there and kind of really mentally struggle with, like, I would hate for someone to think this, because that's, you know,

not really what we're trying to go for. I would really hope they would think this, you know, like the word luxury being a good example of something that's so overused, people use this word luxury all the time. So if you say our luxury property manager, first of all, what does that mean? Luxury property manager. But again, if I click on your website and I click your properties tab and I see an $85 per night condo, that's not luxury. Like we all know that. So then it just invalidates everything you're trying to do because you're not positioning yourself in messaging. I would say you're positioning very accurately because you're saying I'm a luxury property manager, but then you have an $85 per night condo.

That's not congruent. And I think, I think that's not compute. Yeah, does not compute, right? It's not congruent. I think congruency is a very important concept in marketing where these things kind of have to link together. If you're a luxury property manager, I might expect you to have an office. I might expect you to have wrapped you to have wrapped with me in a very clear way. This is, you know, fair or unfair. This might be something that I thought about recently. When I call you, I might expect someone in your local office to pick up, not a call center overseas. I that happened recently. I called a client called their office and I got a call center overseas, which I'm not opposed to that as like a revenue generating thing. We have team members

overseas. So I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it does that line up with, hey, we're local. What's like, are you though? Because you also have someone, you know, 100,000 miles away, you know, I'm exaggerating, but, you know, very far away answering your phone when I call. So it's like, that's a little bit of a tricky, you know, message to tie together. Maybe it's a small enough issue we can paper over it. I'm not sure. But it's an example of I think things that you have to think through. And you have to realize that every single piece that you're sending is a bit of a, you know, a judgment call. I'll give you another one. I have a client who is sending their homeowner proposals right now through like a word document, you know,

where it's like the person on the other side, the potential homeowner has to like go fill it out. They have to like print it out to get it to sign and stuff like that. And I showed him like, why don't you send this to like something like a docu sign or something that like allows for an online signature? That way if that person wanted to move forward, they could click a button,

click sign, get going. You've got a contract. Like you could build some momentum off that. Like it's an easier system for someone to say yes to. And he'd want to spend the 15 bucks a month or whatever for docus sign. And I'm like, okay, well,

there's a problem. Let's address that. Let's get the right tools in place here. Or whatever system you're using. I don't even care if it's docky sign. It could be something else. But again, this idea of let's not find friction in the process. Let's find everything to work smoothly all the way through, you know, this idea of like click

to close or this idea of like first touch point that I ever have with this company to, I take my first guest. Everything in that process has to be thought out. And the messaging on every single deliverable you have in that journey is going to be judged and it's going to be, you know, either it's matching what they're expecting and they want to proceed or they see a red flag and they go, you know what? Maybe it's safer to pick the big guy here. Or maybe it's safer to go this other direction.

Because one thing, I think, to put a close in my thoughts on messaging that I would say is that this is not a this is not a relationship that we want to get married in most homeowners they don't treat it that way in other words they just dating you they're they're when they're reaching out they're probably reaching out to four or five companies and they're looking at every single company and seeing how they interact and they're going to certainly their perception of you is going to be painted on how the other companies treat them if the other companies are ignoring them and not you know responding to you know responding to their messages accurately and you are you're probably going to go to the top of the list even if you're a bit of a smaller fish right that's an advantage you can lean into

But if you're doing the bare minimum, you're responding, your online contract is a pain in the tail to sign. Like, those are all negatives, right? So it's like everything I think has to be thought through from a messaging. And messaging isn't just the words on the page, although that's part of it. Messaging is everything. I think with how that homeowner experiences it. So that was more rancy that I anticipated. But those are my thoughts there on the messaging side.

Well, I mean, how do you message? You message through the right channels. And I do. Like, I think that with the channels, and this is something, it's, it's not. not marketing, but I'm sorry a lot of these owner relationships. It's personal outreach. It's relationship building. It's direct calls. Yes, there's other stuff that we can do. And digital can play a role in what you're doing here. And it should. I mean, it has to because that's going to be do some of the top of funnel, some of the initial vetting, I would say, for some of our audience,

for a lot of things. But, but that is like the more personal you can make it, the better off you are because it's a different relationship, you know, you gave an example of the postcard that does feel a little more friendly. I mean, that's something that at Venturi, we had a handwriting machine that would handwrite these letters. That's something that, yeah, it's work. And I probably wouldn't personally handwrite 100 letters, 150 letters. That's up to you, you know, whatever you want to do. But that is that field that some people are looking for. You know, I think it is more of the, when you're looking at social channels, we've got LinkedIn here. I think that is a better spot to try to find owners because there's a little more of a B2B

experience there, the business side of things. It's more in maybe your investment driven. You've got things like that on your feed. Facebook, X, all these other things. That's probably not going to, it's not going to, you're not going to be engaged in some type of, ooh, I need to make more money for my rental experience or thought process. at that point. So I think, you know, being able to use LinkedIn to put thought leadership out there, to put some of those case studies out there, it's great. Is your audience going to find

it there? Hopefully. And if not, you know, take that same audience list that you're using to send emails, to send postcards and try to upload that to LinkedIn as well and see what you can do there, see as far as targeting goes. Webinars. We've seen webinars be effective. I think that's something, especially educating owners. That's something that you may not I think that's an opportunity not just to educate potential prospective owners, but your current homeowners as well because that's something that I think most people would admit that they could upgrade, do a little enhancement of their current owner communication. You know, it doesn't have to be a retention effort, but every communication point that you have

with an owner post-onboarding is a retention effort. So again, educating people on what you do, which is. you, what you do to make sure their homes are taking care of, to make sure their homes are maximizing revenue, to, you know, how we get away from the OTAs as much as possible. I think those are effective, you know, email marketing. Certainly that's something that we did a lot of cold email marketing, but that's not, that's not it. I think it really is, it's figuring out what else you can send because everybody can send those

dry, dry, dry, dry, dry, dry sales, those cold sales. emails and try to get a foot in the door. But really, it is. And because a lot of these are not one-call experiences, you should be really focusing on giving people more information, more, you know, whether it is a monthly newsletter, whether it's giving people an update of what's happening on site. These are small things that do make a big difference. And podcasts, you know, if you can get on podcasts, this is something that our industry has a lot. of them. So if you find that an effective way to get in front of your

homeowners, awesome. That's something, you can probably get on a local podcast or get on, maybe it's a local radio show or something like that. Something where you understand, again, going back up to the targeting, that your audience is paying attention, is listening, is that's where they are, being where

your audience is, and trying to give them the messaging that's going to help get them across the line there. I think some people listening to that last block from you would say, well, Well, that seems like a lot of work and, you know, but the funny part, what I would notice when I've had this conversation with people is that they're already having these conversations, they're just having them one-on-one with homeowners, you know, so it's like, you know, we use this tool now for a lot of our client calls called Granola. It's like an AI transcription tool in the back end of running on your meetings or whatever. And I think if you just recorded every homeowner call you were having and it was on something like Zoom or you can even record the call with their consent, of course, if you need to do that. You know, when you give them a call on the phone and you just basically take all those notes and put them into a tool like Granola, you could generate like a summary and generate, write really interesting insights from the things you're already saying or what I've said to clients as a starting point for channels for marketing is like a one to many message is so much

more effective than a one-to-one message. So that's what direct mail does, right? It's a one-to-many message. But it's very expensive. So you've got to be very thoughtful about how we how we deploy that. But if you had a video, if you had an article, we have a client who has like a white paper or like a resource about like, here's why you should buy a home in this area. Or if you're going to buy home in this area, here's 10 things to know before you do it. Stuff like that, you can produce one time. And then you can repeat it. You can run an ad to it. You can run certain outbound campaigns to it for a year or two years before maybe that information will materially change or be massively different. Couldn't agree more on this idea of like homeowner

newsletter, having content go on a regular basis. A monthly or quarterly, if you can't commit to monthly, that's understandable. I get it. But if you can commit to four updates a year, certainly you give people four updates a year on what's happening in your market, revenue trends, you know, amenities that are doing better than other ones, properties that are doing well. If things are down, by the way, it's good reason to explain why. We have a fine who's down right now. But he's like, hey, compared to the market, I'm actually crushing it, guys. I know you're not happy about your revenue being down 10% year every year, but you realize the market in this area is down like almost 30% year every year.

So, you know, just giving you some context, et cetera, et cetera. I know you got to work on the messaging to that. Like the way you say that is not defensive or awkward or whatever the case may be. But yeah, like all the, what I believe about marketing channels always and forever is that any marketing channel can work with enough volume. Your battle is figuring out over time and you're a specific market in your specific situation. Where can I kind of in a way, to be honest, put in the least effort, but get the most return out of?

And by least effort, I don't mean you half-heartedly do it and you don't put much effort into it. I just mean, yes, I realize that if you're listening, you are limited on time. You can't do everything. You can't do every single social platform. You can't do every single webinar, every single podcast, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So you got to figure out what is up those value add things. But think of a one to many messaging plan, build those little component pieces apart. And then your channel marketing, you know, becomes a little bit more straightforward. And I guarantee you, and Paul and I, you talked about this offline, because Michelle Marquis had asked for examples recently on LinkedIn. And we talked about that of if you do

something. If you do something consistently once a month, once every other month, once a quarter, and you put a few hours of effort into this, and you publish that stuff out there on the internet, you are ahead of 99% of other vacation rental managers. What is the average? The average is like, you know, seven or 10 properties that the average property manager manages. If you don't want to be average,

you have to put in, by that logic, an abnormal amount of effort. You have to put in double the effort, triple the effort. The good news is you're doubling almost no effort. So you're not, it's actually not that hard, to be honest with you, to like stand out from the crowd.

Like, if your goal was like, you know, lift a heavier weight than a bodybuilder, that's really hard, right? Because they spend all day in the gym. How am I ever going to lift more than that person? But if your goal is to lift more than a grandma who never works out, you have to go to the gym like two times and you can lift more than there. So anyways,

it's not going to be that challenging. I think if you put the right effort in and you realize, like to put a bone what we talked about earlier, you were building this over a long period of time. This is not one LinkedIn hit or one LinkedIn post or one podcast that I do or one webinar that's going to give me 50 homeowners. It's literally just like chipping away, getting that awareness and building this out.

So Paul, any other parting thoughts, if not we'll put a bow on this and we'll hit the framework one more time people to listen to you before they depart for today. Let's hit the framework. All right. The four step marketing strategy for homeowner marketing is number one, targeting. Who are your ideal homeowners?

Number two, positioning. Number three, messaging. And the number four channels, where are you going to communicate that out to them on? And then you're in business. Then you're cooking with gas as the kids would say. So one more thing, a fifth step for you, not related to anything we just talked about that we need from you though is a review. So go to your podcast app of choice iTunes, Spotify listeners.

You are statistically the most likely, most likely if the data tells us the truth, you're probably listening right now in one of those two platforms. So navigate to the respective podcast page, the Heads and Bed Show podcast page, click five stars, leave us a review. Otherwise, we can't do the episodes anymore. We don't see more reviews. We're just going to quit, and you're not going to want that because you're getting good value out of it. The downloads would tell us that to some degree.

So all good. We've got to keep Paul on the grind here. We've got to get more customers, more clients because he's got to buy this Rider Cup tickets four years from now when the U.S. will successfully triumph and take down the evil, vaunted Europeans. And we hope for the best there. So give us a point, five stars here, which will be the point that we need to win this match for this particular podcast.

We appreciate it. And we'll catch you on the next episode. have an awesome deck.