Heads In Beds Show - The Future Of The Heads In Beds Show: Introducing Cohost Paul Manzey

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'Connell🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Hello there and welcome back to another episode of the Heads and Beds show. There's been a bit of a break between the last episode and this one, but for good reason. We've taken some time to think about the format and am introducing a co- and Beds show. There's been a bit of a break between the last episode and this one, but for good reason. We've taken some time to think about the format and am introducing a co-host into the show. So in a minute, you're gonna hear from our new co-host, Paul Manzi, and I think you're gonna be really excited to kind of see where I plan on taking this going forward. It's been, the solo show before that I was doing was fun.

I enjoyed it, but it was sometimes hard to, you know, keep talking about the topics just by myself. And I think that a lot can be learned from talking with other people out there in the industry. Paul and I connected some time ago, we have had the chance to collaborate on some projects, and I'm excited that he's agreed to join us here. So clip in a minute of our little intro episode here. So consider this kind of a new version of Heads in B bed show. And really looking forward to diving in and sharing everything that we know all things vacation rental marketing, digital marketing, guest marketing and owner marketing now with Paul's expertise. And I think this new

format is gonna be really, really exciting and a new way to share all the education, client work, etc, that Paul and I both have experience with. So thank you so much for continuing to subscribe. If you are seeing this episode, and you haven't seen an episode in your feed for a while, I think it's been a little while since I published, my apologies, but we're back on a regular schedule here. And I think we have great topics, great information, great educational stuff coming your way. So roll the clip here in a second of Paul and I kind of on our intro show. And then going forward, we'll have new episodes every week, publishing our first one that we've recorded that will drop next week after this one is all about SEO, but more specifically

about choosing contents, choosing topics, choosing blog posts, content creation ideas to actually grow organic search traffic and how that content actually maps to longer term results. So there's a business value in creating content, not just a traffic generation piece that occurs. So again, super happy to kind of have this new format here with Paul. We'll run the interview here in a second of us getting going. Consider this the intro episode and really looking forward to this new version of the Heads and Beds show. If you haven't had a chance to do so previously, make sure you are subscribed because we're going to be a lot more consistent going forward. Check us out on any of your podcast apps of choice. We should be easy to find. And if you get some value out of it and the show going forward, we'd always super

duper appreciate a review or just email me if you have any feedbacks or comments, things like that. Conrad, C-O-N-R-I-D at buildupbookings.com. Thanks so much. Welcome to the Heads in Bed 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. Paul, some people listening don't know you. Could you explain a little bit about your background in vacation rental marketing? Absolutely. So I've been in the vacation rental industry now for about a decade, both on the traveler side and on the owner's side. I spent the first years of my time in the vacation rental space with TravelNet Solutions. And now I am working with Vintori. So

it is, it's really being able to bring together both sides, both unique aspects of vacation rental marketing. But during that time, I've been able to do anything from conversion optimization, paid search, to retargeting, to custom audience marketing, IP retargeting. It's been pretty crazy. Really excited to be joining you and helping educate people on how they can earn more, get more homes and fill those rooms. Yeah. I like that. I like those lines of thinking because I think the best way for people to learn, I think, is for us to talk from our expertise, I guess, from our experience that we've had, right, that we've gone through. And there's a lot of folks out there that say a lot of things

about direct bookings or marketing or this and that. But they don't always have a lot of credentials to maybe back that up, or they don't have a lot of experience to back it up. So I think that word that you said earlier, we've talked about this word a little bit education or educational, I think is what we're trying to bring here. Maybe there'll be a future guest that may join us in the future. But if they do, it will be from that educational angle, it won't be from a it won't be from an angle of just there to promote their stuff, right? It's what can the person learn from it? Because I think that one thing hopefully the podcast can do is when you go to a conference, what's some of the best parts of the conference, right? You get to go talk to people and meet people and that's fun. The human connection element is obviously a fantastic part

of going to conferences like VRMA and Dharam and things like that. But I find that the things that I remember over the long term are what I learned from those conferences and events and things like that. And usually it's the one or two sessions that you have. And a lot of folks like I know you have in the past and I presented in the past, we spend hours and weeks and months putting together a 30 minute, 45 minute thing. We give it and then we don't really know what the impact is later on. So what I'm hoping to accomplish, I guess, a little bit too with this kind of revamp format is that we can educate people on an ongoing basis. They don't have to wait just for VRMA. Although certainly if you're at these conferences, do come up and say hello. But it's one of those things where you can come in, learn something, you get to value out of it as the listener. And then we can help you connect with educational components where either you go and hire someone and you can give them the right tools and techniques and tactics to make their sort of project a success. That's one option. Or you just learn better how to execute upon it

yourself. And one thing I think that we've both encountered over the years is that if you don't really know how to evaluate the people that are doing the work for you, you can make bad decisions. So even if you are not an expert in SEO, or you're not an expert in paid search, it's hard to be an expert in those things and also run your vacation rental business. The best thing to do is probably at least have a good understanding of what those things are so that as you proceed, as you go along in your business, you have a reference point to go back on and say, my understanding is that it works in this way. Can you explain that to me?

And then you can tell from results, right? I think we're both pretty results oriented people. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it's going to be interesting. So the owner side, the guest side of things, we're going to dive into both ends of it because really, as we got connected through Venturi, I've changed my perspective and my opinion on owner marketing a lot. What's been your perspective on the owner side versus the guest side? Is one more important

than the other? Should we have a battle here in the future? Or what's your thoughts on this too, just to get a little perspective? I think at the bare minimum, owner marketing is a little more difficult than traveler marketing. I think just a scale of what we're doing, of who we're going after. I think if you're not doing both, you're missing an opportunity. You have to be doing extensive marketing for both of those areas. No, not necessarily. But I do think that there's some digital plays that are certainly applicable on the owner side that don't cost as much as maybe your traditional play. Everybody gets the postcards. We've all seen the postcards.

Everybody loves the postcards. I get it. But that's not exactly what we're here to talk about. It is. I think certainly one of the things that as we look at Airbnb playing such a big role in distribution, I think that's why on the traveler side, you absolutely have to have a marketing strategy. That's not just Airbnb. That's not just a third party bookings. It's trying to drive more direct bookings to your website. Now, is it going to be a hundred percent? No, it's that healthy mix that we've talked about so many times before, but it is, I really do think that it's a different type of funnel. It's looking at a full funnel of how do

I get the inventory in so that people can rent it. And then you're looking at another funnel for the guest side of things as well. So it's, you have to have those units to book them. So let's take it all the way through that full scope. Yeah, that's a good way to think about it, which is that it's Alex Ramosi has talked about this before, like a ladder. So there's, there's one side of the ladder, which is like the right side of it. There's the left side of it. And then there's all these rungs in the middle and any great company needs all three like components. So maybe it's like finance, marketing and operations or something like that. So for a vacation rental company, it might be this side of the ladder is owner. This side of

the ladder is guest. And then the middle rung is like your ability to attract both sides of it. So if you have too many owners and I've seen this happen before, although not very common, there's markets where it does occur. You have a good amount of inventory and you're not really good at guest marketing and you just do a bad job and your occupancy is low. You don't really fill up the properties in an effective way. And the owners kind of lose trust in you and you can start this downward spiral of inventory loss. And then on the flip side, if you're really good at guest marketing, but you just don't have enough value coming in, then it's really hard to grow your company. You're just very capped out. You're booked out constantly. You don't really have enough revenue potential to really grow the business and expand and scale it. So that can become a challenge as well. I've worked but they're not going as fast as they want to go. So they maybe have 30 homes that are management. They'd love to have 50 and they have 30 okay homes. They'd love to have 50 amazing homes, their best homes. And then on the guest side,

it's like, maybe they get a little bit of 5% direct bookings from this thing and 10% from this thing and 50% Airbnb. They don't really have that stability. And I was actually thinking the other day, this is a hypothetical question maybe we can try to answer as we go along. When people who rely just on listing sites, when they're not getting the demand they want, I'm always curious what they do. So if you get all your bookings from Airbnb and you're not getting the bookings you want, you just kind of shrug your shoulders. And I guess your only tool that I can perceive from here is that you lower your rates. That would be my assumption. I don't really see another way around it. So again, what I hope to cover, what I think we can cover here in the coming shows and episodes that we're going to talk about is

not necessarily you have to do direct booking or have to do this, but just think what kind of company do you want to build? Do you want to build a company that's like a dead fish floating in the ocean that just Airbnb is the ocean and you're just a fish going with it? Yeah, you're just like in the tide or do you actually want to like swim and go the direction you're trying to go? And I think there's, I've said this in the past, I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with the people that are completely relying on Airbnb, as long as they're aware of the risks. Where I think I've seen the problems come in before is that people are completely relying on Airbnb. And they pretend like it's not a problem where they don't want to admit that that's that there's a inherent risk in

that. And now you see all these stories all the time of, I got banned for a week, I got banned for a month, I got in theory, you could give someone could get banned completely because of what's happened. Yeah, I think it's one of those things where we have to be honest with people. I think we have to be truth tellers and let people know that Airbnb and these platforms like Airbnb are great. They're fantastic. Absolutely. You should use them in almost every case, but you need to keep them at an arm's distance

to some degree if you want to build a successful business. And you got to admit, do you want to be a shark? Or do you want to be a dead fish floating in the surf? Because there's a big difference between the two when we're about to head into what could potentially be a more economically challenging time next year for many people, you better have your ability to actually drive and generate your own stuff, whether it's owner marketing stuff or guest marketing stuff. Otherwise you're just really at the whimsy of what the market does to you, not how you actually go into the market and position yourself and position your company.

And that's, I think, I think that's something where specifically on Airbnb, when people who say my marketing is Airbnb, that's not marketing per se, that's distribution. So I certainly think that's, I certainly think that's something on the distribution side, but we do, we need to know, we need to consider that marketing is really about matching that message. All you're doing on Airbnb, all you're doing on Verbal, all you're doing on any of those distribution channels is you're putting your properties out there and getting them exposure. That's fantastic. That's not really marketing those properties per se. And you really want to go into greater depth, greater detail and make sure that it is. The other side of it is on Airbnb is that not only did I get banned, did I get this, but you also aren't at the control of cancellation. We've heard some horror stories, certainly of

people coming in and losing 10,000, 20,000, maybe a quarter of a million dollars in bookings just because Airbnb just took it away. That's a terrible position. As a business owner, you never want to put yourself in that type of liability, in that shape of everything coming through a single channel. So it is, I guess that's more maybe of a misconception of when people are saying, what are you doing to market your property? I use Airbnb, I use Vrbo. No, that's what you use to distribute your property, but how are you doing to market your property? I use Airbnb. I use Vrbo. No, that's what you use to distribute your property. But how are you marketing your business? How are you doing that? And maybe that's something that's context and really just how people are understanding what

marketing is. And hopefully this is that opportunity to say, that's distribution. This is marketing. This is revenue management. These are all of the key terms. And these are all the operations that you have to have sound in order to run a successful vacation rental business. Yeah. It reminds me back in college, I have a marketing degree. And at one point we had learned the P, which are like product, price, place, and promotion. So like product is your actual property that you're marketing, right? Price is the rate you're charging for the most part. Place is like a channel distribution strategy and promotion is how are you promoting the property? Again, I think it goes back to what you just said. If you're only promoting the property through a channel, through a listing,

then you have a very limited view of the way that you can actually market the listing. So yeah, ultimately I think that what we've both seen and the value that I think we can share with folks, how we can educate people is that we've seen great vacation rental companies. We've been inside of and had the opportunity to work alongside companies that are fantastic, that are leaders in the market. And it's always eye-opening for me. I go in and I try to provide the value that I can provide, of course.

I sometimes learn a lot from those companies as well, as far as how they approach things, what they choose to invest in, what they choose not to invest in or skip. And I think that if some of the smaller vacation rental managers saw what it's like inside of a 500-unit operation, as far as not just the fact that they make more top line, but how they choose to distribute some

of the money underneath in terms of marketing and promotion, owner relations, what they invest in paid search, things like that. I think they have a very different view of where they want to go and how they're trying to achieve whatever their particular goals are. And ultimately, if you're trying to achieve something great, it's going to be challenging, especially if you're in a competitive marketplace. It's hard to be it's going to be challenging, especially if you're in a competitive marketplace. It's hard to be the ninth biggest property manager in a given geo, right? We've talked about that before. It's really challenging to attract the owners and attract the guest.

There's not a lot of draw right in that scenario. So if we can do anything, I think we can give people some of the tips, the techniques, the tactics, the lessons, the learnings, whatever you want to call it, on how to actually take it and go from where you are today to a much grander scale, to a much greater impact, and ultimately be able to have much more stable and much more higher functioning business. So I think that's ultimately the way that we can help people out. Absolutely.