Heads In Beds Show - The Top Things That Happened in 2022 With A Look Ahead To 2023

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

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

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right. Hey there, Paul. How's it going today? Great.

Conrad, how are you doing today? Pretty good. Can't complain. I have things to complain about, but nothing noteworthy. We're here in the new year. We have lots of things to talk about. And I thought it would be interesting today to look back. We typically do like a marketing minute headlines, but this whole episode is basically going to be marketing the net line. So today we're going to recap of notable changes that occurred last year that impact the vacational space.

It's not meant to be a comprehensive news breakdown of everything that occurred, obviously, but I think we can do a good enough job of breaking down some of the important changes and things that we saw change last year. And then maybe we'll touch on maybe some predictions or thoughts that we might have of how that's going to evolve in the coming year. I think a lot of our conversations will be focused on the Google side of things. What was your most notable change last year? If you had to just pick one major change that you saw that you think made the biggest impact, what do you think that would be for you? For me, I think it is really about that helpful content update. I think because SEO plays such a fundamental role in organic presence, organic placement, content in general, plays such an important role on the digital side

of things, especially in the travel space, knowing that you want to get all that traffic that you can there. Really understanding what Google's looking for and allowing them to give us a playbook really for how to improve our sites. I think both the initial update and the subsequent update that we're still in the process of right now, I think that's had really the biggest effect, just in overall digital marketing. Now, maybe not so much in our space, and I'll touch on that a little bit when we talk about it more specifically. But what about you? What would you say is the top item that you thought has been the biggest effect in 2020? I think for me, the most notable change that I'm seeing is that conversion tracking and being able to get accurate analytics data is harder and harder. So I don't know if I can point to one specific change. I

think this all started, it was like the domino iOS 14.5 and people being able to opt out of tracking that knocked down one domino. And I think we're still like dealing with the impact of those today. But that's for me, what I would say is the constant and relentless limiting of data that's making a lot of our tracking efforts a lot more difficult. It's much more, it's much harder now to track like, here's how much we spent, here's how much bookings we got, like it was already hard before the device switching and long booking times and things like that. Now I think that dial has been turned up to 11. So that makes it very challenging. And I think that for this year, hopefully what we can try to figure out is more effective or efficient ways to do that tracking that most importantly is accurate. You don't have the right information in there. And I think

that's the frustrating part is that there's these billion dollar companies battling it out. And the one who suffers in many cases is the small business who isn't trying to violate someone in privacy, like they just want to know if their marketing is working. So yeah, that'd be my change. It's just the continued death of a lot of the analytics and specific targeting and a lot of the stuff that we used to be able to do a few years ago. Actually, I don't think I would have predicted that if you if I could hop in a time machine and interview 2017 me, and I would say, hey, all the stuff you use today, it's going to get worse, not better. I think I would be very surprised by that. I don't think I would have predicted that back then. And yet, for a myriad of reasons, here we are today

dealing with that situation. I would certainly agree with that. I think the opportunity was there in 17 and 18 and 19. If you actively managed your campaigns, you could actively make them better. I do. I think in a lot of this automation that Google has implemented, they've taken that away. They've taken away the ability to actively manage your campaigns, whether it's removing visibility of that reporting, whether it's a variety of things, whether changing up the ad format, different things they've done with matching match types and stuff like that. It is. It's not saying that you still don't want to go set it and

forget it, but Google's really pushing advertisers to let them be the optimizers. So we both know that's not the way to go. Recommendations and all that, optimizations, anything that we're talking about there, Google actually reaching out to some of these advertisers individually and saying, hey, we've got these great ideas for you. Are they really that great? I think we've seen that that's typically not the case. Yeah. My fear is that as all of these major entities push more towards automation, it does. Certainly, it's not just the advertisers. I think the people, the leads, the prospects are actually getting a worse experience as well because they're seeing the exact same things from everybody. And there's no differentiation because you can't differentiate nearly as much when Google's doing or Facebook's doing all the work behind the scenes there. So, yeah, I think we try to limit the get off my lawn motif here or theme here on the Heads and Beds show.

But every once in a while we have to lean every once in a while i mean we gotta get it all right let's dive into it the first one for you is helpful content update maybe let's talk broadly about search updates google search updates specifically because let's be honest that's really what matters is the google search side of things although maybe this happened maybe towards the end of 2022 coming into 2023 but did you see the bing is actually going to be integrating the chat GPT features into their search engine? I tweeted the other day that Bing should rebrand.

I think this is a great opportunity actually for them to be like Bing is a brand that no one has any positive sentiment or associations for. Bing makes $6.5 billion a year in revenue. This is not a tiny business like that you can just ignore

if you're Microsoft, like it's a significant amount of money. If any startup built a $6 billion annual business, we'd be fawning over how amazing it was. So it just shows you how profitable search is. But Bing is no one was like, let's Bing it. I mean, it's just it's ridiculous. So now is the perfect opportunity. Bing is old and dead and gone.

Chat GPT is new and fresh. And the next thing for them to completely rename it, I don't know if they just name it off chat GPT or GPT or AI or something like that. But if Bing wants to reach out and we can come up with some names, I'm happy to charge the agency's fee for doing that. But I think that was the perfect opportunity for them to rebrand because that's the, it's like new Bing. Like that's the thing that actually is going to fundamentally change how the search engine works. And it actually makes them in some ways, perhaps more compelling to use than Google. So that's one little side thing. I want to stuff in there. It wasn't in our outline, but I thought about it while we were recapping. But one thing I wanted to talk about is that you mentioned the helpful

content update. I went on the about us, like how search works page again. And they updated recently to say that there's over 5,500 changes that occur every year in search. So when Google talks about update a or update B or update C, and sometimes they make obviously literally thousands of updates that they never say anything about. I think that's useful context for the listener to understand when we talk about updates is that some of these big ones, they might impact five, 10% of the queries occurring on Google every day, which is a massive number because of how popular obviously Google searches, but lots of changes occur and never, they never say anything about it and you don't see anything about it. And it may have impacted you. I find that all the time is that an update will will occur. And our client sites see no change, neither positive or benefit. It's just kind of keep on

keeping on whatever path they were on before they're still on. And then all of a sudden, two months later, they randomly we randomly see a spike or we randomly see traffic falling or whatever, we have to go diagnose it and figure it out. So that's one thing I wanted to share too, which is that Google is updating all the time. And just because you see a spike or a falling traffic signal during a specific time, it may have been an update that they just didn't talk about publicly. And I do. I think that Google's done a really good job of communicating those core updates. And I do think that in previous years, those core updates really were more impactful. Looking at, there's still some volatility. If you look at, I think February, March,

there was some volatility. September, not quite as much. And it felt like the main core updates were following other changes that were happening. So I do, I think it is, it's more about that. Google's tweaking it every day. That used to be one of those things where, yeah, you'd look for the core updates,

but you know that there's impact in the search results with every change that gets made, whether they're talking about spam brain, whether they're talking about BERT, whether they're talking about the newest, the newest helpful content items. So I, I think that that's something that certainly they're going to keep announcing core updates and things that are fundamentally shifting more than just a single industry or more than just a single vertical, stuff like that. I think that's when they're going to make them notable. But it is, when I look at the updates that I think had the most actual impact, I think it is the healthful content update had more of a shift or at least cause people to think more and strategically plan more than most of the

core updates did this year now i think a lot of that in looking at one of the articles that i found kind of end of year as well as we were preparing for this was an article from search engine journal that actually feels like they unearth the research paper behind what they think is the helpful content update and read through and see really how that's contributing and what's going to contribute moving forward. Making sure that that's high quality content is one thing. But one thing that's referenced many times in this research paper is the fact that it's supposed to be human written content. And we've seen some references towards electronic watermarks for some of this chat GBT content. So bringing it full circle with what we just talked about with Bing there as well, I'm

interested to see how that rolls into place there. And as chat GBT or all these other AI content creators are being leveraged more frequently, what's the responsibility of the publisher, the content creator? But what's the responsibility and how does that actually look as we're trying to figure out where that content is going to rank and how helpful Google is really going to find it there? It is. I think there's a lot that goes in there. Now, at the same time, I think when websites that were built by great web services providers like BuildUp or some of the other people in our industry, I don't think that maybe our industry was affected as much as some other industries because we do.

I think we do a good job as a vacation rental industry or hospitality industry of writing good content. But again, as we leverage more tools, what does that look like? Is that going to affect us positively, negatively? What are your thoughts on that there? So my take on using all these tools is that I am impressed by ChatDBT and all these AI text generation content tools. I'm impressed by them. I think that when you go and use them now, they've taken a big step from a year and a half ago or two years ago, I was trying copy.ai. And that was something where for headlines, little stuff, it could give you things back

and it was somewhat usable, but it missed more than it hit. I think that's the old kind of data that I saw today. I think it's very accurate. A chat GPT being something that I find a significant amount of, like, I would say affinity towards using it and the information get back. Here's my thing though. Ultimately, I think that this is like the analogy I've been drawing is like my uncle is a carpenter. When he goes to a job site, he does not bring a hammer. He brings a hammer, but he brings a pneumatic hammer. He brings something powered by a significant amount of energy, basically, so he can go and put a cabinet together in two hours, not in two days.

I'm sure he could do it with a hammer. He's skilled enough to do that, right? But damn, it's a hell of a lot faster if he uses the pneumatic hammer, right? So that's how I see this all shaking out. Meaning the chat GPT is only a tool, merely a tool for to not replace your copywriter, but to augment your copywriter, to be a pneumatic hammer instead of a manual hammer. And my take on it is that I'm probably thinking

about doing some stuff internally around this is that I think you can use this as a way to make yourself more productive, not as a way to replace anybody. I don't think I'm gonna be able to stop paying for content or stop paying for copy for any of our clients. And that's a significant investment that we make every month because it doesn't give you a polished finished product, right? It doesn't do that. And I don't know, maybe it'll get there. Maybe it won't. But the, I saw someone share on Twitter the other day that if chat GPT was writing news or was

writing any sort of information, it mimics the style of, for example, the Associated Press releases, or it mimics the style of NPR news, which is here's the facts, here's the situation, Joe Biden was elected president on this day at this time, he's from Delaware, that's the type of stuff that chat dbt is, but people don't follow the AP nearly as much as they follow Fox News and MSNBC, would that be the case? Because we want an opinion with our content. So I think maybe the next frontier for chat TPT is how do you get it to write in the style that you want it to write in? Or how do you get it to have an opinion? Or like, here's my opinion, express my opinion in writing or express my opinion in like, local information about whatever destination you're writing about. So bringing it back to the vacation industry, maybe that's the

way that you train in the future. But I'm skeptical, I don't see it there today. But I see it as a massive benefit if you know how to prompt it and how to get the right information out of it. So it's like anything, right? You have to use it in the most effective way for it to be useful. And if you just say, oh, I'm going to hire an intern, I'm going to have them, I'm just going to hire an intern. I'm going to have them prompting chat GBT all day. And I'm going to take that content, paste it in WordPress, hit publish, and I'm going to publish 50 blog posts in the time it took you guys to write five. I'm going gonna crush you, I'll take my chips that we can still be anybody using AI without any sort of context around how to put

the content together, how to grade it for SEO purposes, how to actually do the right keyword research, how to produce it, etc. But I also think that if you brought two carpenters to a job site, and one had a pneumatic hammer and is skilled, and one has a manual hammer and is skilled, one's going to get absolutely crushed in that scenario. So I think that's how I see it going forward, which is that all these AI text generation content tools could be super beneficial used properly for the average vacation rental manager. Maybe your reservations team can use it for emails. Oh, write me an email about this situation. And then it writes the email for you and copy and paste that and hit send. Or help me prompt my initial description or come up with new Airbnb headlines. But you have to give it something good for it to go off of.

You can't just have it write generic stuff and expect that's going to be the case. So that was a long time there in chat GBC. But I think it's an important development that happened in 2022, leading into 2023. I think it's going to continue to get better. And let's keep an eye on it. And let's use it as a tool not not, not push it away and be like, no, there's no way we can use this because it's AI content. I don't see it that way. But also not just be like, oh, everything is changed. And we're just gonna be able to copy and paste this from here to here and WordPress and click publish. That's a farce, I think, as well. So the truth is, as with most things somewhere in the middle, and that's my opinion on it as well.

Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. Yeah, let's move on that. We talked a little bit about search updates, helpful content, AI content, there's a lot there that search updates, helpful content, AI content. There's a lot there that we can continue to unpack in future episodes. But what about the PPC side? I touched on it earlier. My main trend in 2022 that concerned me

was the lack of having data, having tracking data. What's your take on that? First-party data is more useful. Google's kind of automating things. We have less control. How would you sum that up in terms of Google Ads changes that occurred in 2022? It's, I think the first-party data was something that I actually got really excited when the Google

Marketing Live event was going on, doing all the videos, having everybody talk. I nerd out over that stuff. I don't know if you watched it too, but that's just one of those things that I was happy that they got back to doing that because it does truly understand that roadmap for what they're doing and how they're rolling stuff out. and they put a big push on that first party data now again the strategy or the dreams versus the reality in taking a look at how we've been able to leverage the first party data and with custom audience and audience segments and stuff like that behind the scenes in google it's okay i think it's better than it was. And they still are obviously continuing to refine that. I think what you get right now on the first party data side, when you do have those custom audience

lists or you're doing more of that, is you are getting a few more insights as to what the makeup of that audience is. I think it is. I think it's a better use right now to see it as how you're building your target audience or really trying to understand that, kind of what we talked about a few weeks ago there. I still don't see, I mean, as a targeting option, I still think Google lacks in its ability to target some of these specific audiences.

I think the affinity audiences are still great. Those custom segments, when they're able to identify, I think it's certainly valuable to leverage those. But I still think that Google is not quite where even Facebook, I think audiences are still an area where Facebook kind of dominates Google. I think the more applicable changes that have been made that people probably seen in real time, the performance changes and updates and hopefully improvements is as Google kind of phased out expanded text ads, the old maybe three headlines, two headlines, three headlines, two descriptions. That's it. For most advertisers, I hope that they've been using responsive ads because it is, it's a really great way to do that multivariate testing and understand what keywords, what headlines, what descriptions

Google's serving up most frequently and aligning your ad content with that, really understanding what's driving the clicks, what's driving the engagement going from there. So again, I hope people were using responsive search ads before, but now they have to be because those expanded text ads are out. So I think that's something that we've seen those advertisers who were using expanded before and now have transitioned to responsive and they're seeing so much better performance. And it's just, yeah, that's something you should have been doing back in 2020 or something like that. Same thing with display ads. I think that I really never understood why Google had created smart campaigns

versus smart display campaigns versus standard display campaigns. The really only difference appeared to be targeting. So the fact that they've now just allowed you to say, expand your targeting to be able to do some additional expansion on the display side. Yeah. I think if you're doing brand awareness and brand exposure, the newest version of display ads on the Google side of things can be effective, whether it's smart, whether it's standard display ads. I think that's probably where people have gone in and made some updates, maybe seen some changes in their performance. I think those are the main pushes. But yeah, certainly the audience side of things, I would love to have more of an

impact moving forward in 2023, leveraging more of that specific custom audience data or custom segments when we're creating specific segments. There's a lot of really cool things that you can do. You can create audiences based on what they're searching and what sites they're visiting and what apps they're using. But when you actually put that into practice and try to use it to target someone, I just haven't found that to be effective yet. So that's a lot to touch on there. But any thoughts on ads or the audiences from you there? Well, I guess the reason that I still think that a lot of the social ads are much more high performant in terms of click through rate and targeting and stuff like that is that typically the social networks can gather more information about people, right? Knowing what their websites,

things like that. I think it's harder for Google to do. It's not that they can't do it to your point, like people who have browsed the Airbnb website and are based in Houston, Texas, and have these criteria, you can build those audiences. I think the obvious challenge that I think Google still has on that side of things is that where the ads actually show up, they have much less control over that, right? People don't go on the display network we're talking about now, not search side, people don't go on sites and be like, Oh, man, can't wait for that display ad to interrupt my article I'm reading about fantasy football or the news or whatever the case may be. So I think that's probably Google's main challenge is not the data and

the targeting is great, right? It's excellent. It has the right stuff. I think it's getting the ad in a place where it's likely to be clicked on. And it's likely to be clicked on by the person who's willing to do something after that. So for whatever reason, the social networks have cracked that code, I think much more effectively. effectively, where you see a run Instagram creative, that looks almost too like the organic content you're consuming. So it doesn't even feel like an ad sometimes when you're consuming certain types of creative or types of ads, sorry, on Facebook and Instagram, and even on TikTok, right, you scroll on TikTok, the ad unit looks pretty much the same as a typical organic post on TikTok, there's just a link on the bottom that you can click on and learn more

about the particular advertiser that they're going into. Google doesn't have that same benefit. Now they do on the search side. When you do a search, the ads on the top look pretty much the same as the organic content underneath, let's be honest. But Google doesn't have that same benefit, I think, with regards to these other platforms. So I don't know, maybe again, we're talking a little bit about predictions of 2023. How does Google take their audiences and make them more usable? In other words, find better quality people to click on them? And how do why would you want to click on a Google ad more so today than you would, let's say last year? I don't know if I have an answer to that. I wonder if it's maybe a design challenge in some respect, if it's a content challenge in some respect, how do they

get more respected sites to use their use their network to be able to monetize from? Those are tough questions to answer. I'm not sure I know what the response is. But I think the reason that the social ads work better is that people are spending more time on the platform, and they have a stronger affinity clicking on something or looking at something that comes across a Facebook feed and Instagram feed a story, a again, a TikTok for you page experience. I think those are all very different for those reasons. So those are some of the main highlights that I would hit with respect to that. Yeah, I guess the last thing I just thought of, the one thing I'm interested in seeing on the Google search ad side is as we see less search page number one, page number two, that

universal scroll coming now that we'd already become accustomed to on the mobile side of things. But now that it's happening on desktop too, where it is, you're not going to page two. You're not going to a page three. You're literally just continuing to scroll until you hit result number 37 or 38. I am interested to see really how it affects those secondary ad placements where it is, it's now at the top of the page, but it's at the bottom of the page, but it's in the, it just how Google is laying it out. As I've scrolled through some SERP pages, it's in the, it just how Google is laying it out. I, as I've scrolled through some SERP pages, it's, it, it is interesting that there's still to your, how they're sprinkling in the ads. And

again, I'm interested to see how that affects impressions and search console as well. I've seen impressions go up on some sites. I've seen impressions stagnate out as we go to that more of that universal scroll are, do we increase the number of impressions because people are just willing to scroll further as opposed to hitting that click and hitting that click. And again, it's just like any conversion we make, reducing the friction, reducing the number of clicks to get to that ultimate result you're looking for. People aren't having to click. How far are they going to go down? Are you going to see impressions down on the fifth, sixth page of Google? And you got,, still puts a premium on, on SEO and making sure you're as high as possible. But what does the actual engagement with the SERP page look like?

And do we see more zero click searches as well? I think that's another trend that doesn't get discussed a lot, but certainly zero click searches have been an issue. I think since Google My Business listings have been a main organic driver. It's, are you seeing the answers you need from the GM, from the Google My Business listing? Are you seeing it from the organic result? Or are you getting it with just the people also ask these questions here? Yeah, it's like Google is not going to give us more traffic over time as a as an overall percentage of clicks on the SERP. The question is, can Google continue to remain as popular as it is? I think that's a valid question to ask. Short term, I have no concerns. Long term, I don't

know. It's up for debate, right? Is there a better way for people to get the information they want in a more structured format or a simpler, easier to understand format or something like that? I mean, again, those are valid questions. I don't know if I have the answer to them at this moment in time. I don't know if I have a prediction either. In some respects either right i don't want to get clipped later out of context i don't want to get clipped later out of context and be like he said this said this yeah that works well here's some other trends though that i do feel confident in saying that caught my eye a little bit we touched on tiktok very briefly earlier but how about this in 2022 tiktok reached a billion users which is mind-blowing when you think about it right and year over year they

saw 142 increase in both active users and ad, like people actually going on the platform to spend advertising dollars there. So I think that'll come to a head here in 2023. Will TikTok continue the growth? Will they keep chipping away, if you will, at the Facebook, Instagram user base? Is there going to be more TikTok users here in 2023 than there is in 2022? Will they go public? I guess that's also a consideration. Those are all things to keep an eye on. And if you're still, for whatever reason, resisting the idea of like advertising on TikTok or creating organic content on TikTok,

if you have the budget and the capability of doing so, I think you might be missing the boat. You're well over missing, past missing the boat at this point with a billion people using it. But it's one of those things where a lot of the younger audience is going there. And I think it's foolish to just dismiss it based on your preconceived notion of what

actually is there. I think if someone who is listening and is a vacation rental manager and they think, oh, there's like dancing videos on there. How am I going to advertise vacation rental content? Awesome vacation rentals are perfect for TikTok in terms of being able to visually storytell the quality of the property, what you do for the property, the cleaning, the views, the amenities, all this kind of stuff. It is the type of content that TikTok loves and does very well with. And we've done well with the accounts that we're running. It's still a small number, less

than five at the moment. We've done very well on the nicer the property, the better it does on TikTok as like an aspirational thing. So, you know, if you're not already focused on that, it's so at one point, it'll be like, if you were resistant of Facebook in 2012, you'll sound the same way as being resistant to TikTok in 2023. I think we said this already, but the cookie is marching towards death 2023 may signal the end of cookie based retargeting ads. We'll obviously see how that all fleshes out. But I think it's very possible that if we do this episode next year, we're going to be talking about how yes, there is no future options for targeting based on website visitors or targeting based on any sort of interest based data, that's going to get a lot harder, or it's going to get a lot more broad to your point earlier,

where you have to target everybody in Texas, not just people who live in Houston or something like that. We'll see. I think that's on its last bet. If you have retargeting ads and you're running them just the standard way now, I think you're going to have to come back and change that. Another news item here, the average consumer is now taking in a hundred total minutes of video per day. Now that's across devices like mobile desktop and stuff like that. But yeah, two hours of it every day, people are consuming video content. So if you're not creating any video content in 2023, you're probably missing out on some potential opportunities, depending on your budget and your priorities with your marketing to get in front of these people who are consuming all this video content. It's something that we're pushing harder.

It's challenging because it's hard to get high quality video content, especially from afar, especially when you're not in that property every day. It's actually easier for like a resort, let's say, to do it than a vacation rental management company, just because of the distance of a lot of these properties from you. But if it's not at least part of your mix, I think you're going to be missing out. We talked chat GPT earlier. It's the fastest product of all time to reach 1 million users. That happened in 2022.

And mind blowing, right? Like how many people, I think it was five days or six days, something in that range, people started using ChatGPT and it went from zero to over a million people using it in less than a week. Mind-blowing. We've touched on this here and there in the past.

Twitter sells, goes private to Elon Musk. I don't believe that has a strong impact on the vacation side of things, but I think the more maybe apt thing to look at is just the idea of that Elon's talked about, I find interesting is how much he's cut the headcount, that they have 5000 people, 7000 people working at Twitter that he deems unnecessary, that he's chopped way back. And his belief is that you can run your company a lot leaner. And I think a lot of other people agree with him because a lot

of other tech companies have laid off hundreds, if not 1000s of people, even some of the most successful technology companies of our lifetime, Salesforce or some company like that has laid off literally 1000s of people in the last week. The economy is bad for some folks, not so bad for other folks, I guess we'll have to see how it all shakes out over the coming year crypto crashes. I think we share a mutual skepticism of the use case of a lot of these crypto currencies and crypto assets. I now see people connecting with me on LinkedIn who talk about Web3 and travel and how there's opportunities there. And I don't see it.

Maybe I just haven't been presented the right product yet. They seem to be inventing problems to, or inventing solutions to problems that don't exist. I remain skeptical. The stock market's taken a major hit. What's interesting, I'm just looking at the first, you know, seven, eight days of data for 2023. I don't feel that the booking pace is really that far off.

I think there's a lot of momentum and interest with the clients that we're working with that we have data for 2023, I don't feel that the booking pace is really that far off. I think there's a lot of momentum and interest with the clients that we're working with that we have data for that 2023 is going to be a good year for the vacational industry. So I guess time will tell. It could slow down as the year goes on, but maybe your rates have to come back. But the occupancy and the interest in people staying and going on a vacation, I still feel like we're well positioned. So as with most economic changes of economic changes it doesn't impact everybody equally right this tech industry may be struggling the real world vocational market i think is actually going to be doing pretty well this year maybe not as much as last year but i don't think it'll be the same level of concern that other folks have so those are some of the

main things that i had on my kind of roundup i think you had a little roundup of other things you want to just touch on as well let me see if i didn't i think i got most of my items it is and i think to touch on a couple of those yeah i think the tiktok video just doing video in general that's something that it is maybe it was cost prohibitive five years ago four years ago three years ago to do something like that but i do i think it's the same thing with anybody who doesn't exactly you're holding up the phone there thing with anybody who doesn't exactly holding up the phone there. I think anybody who doesn't realize that they have the same camera that was $1,000 just in their phone like 10 years ago, it is. Use what you've got. It doesn't take that much to, yes, you do a quick phone tour with your phone. Take good pictures of your image these are best practice items but i do

i think that just leveraging video assets visual assets of any kind is critical for 2023 and if when people are watching two hours worth of video today and you're not creating anything it's yeah it's a missed opportunity so it is i i think using leveraging tiktok leveraging youtube whatever video channel you want to use make make sure you're doing it. It is that it's talking about some of the other tech news type of stuff. I think as more technology, it is as more technology enters the vacation rental space. I think there will be questions as to whether we will see the same effects that a meta sees or Twitter sees or as people are downsizing more. Certainly, we've seen some cuts in the, I think that's the one thing that's non-digital related.

We've certainly seen some cuts in the vacation rental space on the HR side of things. So maybe what does that look like? Not as much, you know, about what we do, but certainly about how the rest of the industry is moving forward and, you know, what your operations look like. What, how many people you need to do X, Y, and Z, where you're able to manage. Do you have to manage statically in one location? Can you manage across the country just by having the right pieces in place, the right technology, or the right people in place? It is. I think I would agree. My outlook on 2023 for our vertical is high. I think things will still continue to be positive

for those who have put the right steps in place in 2021 and 2022 up to this point to ensure success. For people who are just trying to enter the space, it might not be the most ideal time to do that, but I do, I think the people who are doing it and know how to do it right now and are learning, continuing to learn, those are the ones who are gonna be successful in 2023. Yeah. I think anyone coming into the space now, you're entering

into a market that's not on the same heater it was the past two years. But by the same token, it's something that I've heard before in the past where people talk about, like they have a personal goal and they're not reaching that goal. And it's because they're waiting for perfect conditions. That's something I think Alex Ramos, he talks about this stuff too, right? If you wait for perfect conditions to get fitter or lose weight or something like that, it's actually, that's actually just setting yourself up for a complete failure. Because basically what you're saying is that when the conditions aren't perfect, I'm willing to fail. Oh, when I have a bad day, I can go eat the food I should be eating.

And therefore I'm not going to follow my diet. You're going to have a bad day. That's a guarantee. Like at some point in the future, you're going to have a bad day. So by the same token, if you're entering into the vacation rental industry and you're going to have a bad day. That's a guarantee. Like at some point in the future, you're going to have a bad day. So by the same token, if you're entering into the vacation industry and you're thinking, oh, wouldn't it have been nice to have started two years ago during this amazing run up, the demand was so high, et cetera. Yeah, that might be true. That might've been a better time. But if you launch today and you figure out how to operate now,

man, you're going to look like a genius when there's the next run up and there's another spike in demand in your market. When there's regulation and you're well positioned to embrace that regulation and follow it, whereas new people are going to be turned off by it and you've been in the marketplace for some period of time and you've had success. So maybe that's a good way to sum it up in a short thing, which is that however 2022 went for you, hopefully it went amazing, but however 2023 is going to go for you is going to be predicated upon your actions and blaming the economy or blaming Google making your data harder or whatever. All these things we talked about is not really going to serve you well. And the best thing to do is be informed,

be aware of what's going on, have trends in mind, but also be focused on effectiveness. I think that's one thing that we're talking about right now with clients is, oh, we might want to turn off this campaign because it's not as effective as this campaign. So let's focus on this, even if that's a shift in what we recommended nine months ago. Al Davis, I care about being consistent, I want to be correct. So if we can be correct correct and you can make the right calls over this next year, I think to my point, I think you're going to have a fantastic year. Maybe not quite as much as last year in terms of top line revenue, but I think your occupancy will be strong. I think your rates will still be very strong. And I think you're well positioned to do even better as you go along.

And honestly, as some of the kind of junk filters out of the system, as some of the new people that came in without the right mindset, they were chasing get rich quick thing. I was sharing this with someone the other day. Some of the people that had DM me and asked for certain things on LinkedIn last year, I clicked on their profile and now they're experts in a completely different topic.

They were somehow experts on short-term rentals and vacation rentals last year. And now they're experts on something completely different this time around, I don't know if it's drop shipping or some crypto scam or something like that. So what an amazing asset to have consistency and to consistently work on your business and consistently work on your market and your website and your homeowners and your properties and making all those the best that they can be. What a huge advantage for you to have coming into 2023.

So I think that's a good frame and maybe a good place for us to put a bow on it. Like it. Phenomenal. If you enjoyed the show, as always, leave us a review. We're also looking for new topic ideas. Obviously we did a roundup here, but if you have specific questions, we're happy to do them. Whether it's something SEO related,

content related, paid search related, social, we could go back to homeowner well and dip into Paul's great knowledge on the homeowner side of things. We could talk about guest things or all the above. We'd love to hear it. Email me, Conrad, C-O-N-R-A-D at buildupbookings.com. Otherwise we will beg for reviews as we always do. Please leave us a review. I think we're doing

pretty well in the review phase. We would love more reviews. We'll never stop. But yeah, that would be our ask. If you had any value from the episodes that we did in 2022, a lot more to come in 2023. Leave us a review and send us any other show ideas you have and we will get back to it next week. Thanks so much for your time, Paul. I will talk to you next time.