Heads In Beds Show - Ways To Get More Shoulder Season Bookings With Your Marketing NOW

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad talk about ways to get more shoulder season bookings with impactful digital marketing tactics and specific offers. Enjoy!⭐️ 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. Hey there, Paul. How's it going? Fantastic. Fresh off vacation, feeling semi-refreshed and probably a little more tired than you might in the regular time

because we were go-going and I guess that's what you do on vacation right before the end of the summer. How are you doing, sir? Yeah, we've talked about it before. Vacation is not vacation when you're a parent and it's watching kids in a different location. So hopefully the watching your kids in a different location was at least somewhat relaxing and fun. It sounded like it was from our little pre-recording conversation that's good to hear i'm doing good a great day yesterday first time ever four birdies played yesterday the final score wasn't a stunner but one of those weird ones three birdies on the first par on the first three par fives and it was just one that didn't hit a single one and two just stuffing wedges and i was like

one of those things you get paired up with a random and you do this and you just kind of look at them and be like yeah this happens all the time and you're just like no this is literally not happened in like years it was it was pretty good entertaining oh that's fantastic that's we did that was the nice part about the resort we were at it was a little executive par three course and we definitely got some we my both the boys played somewhere between 12 and 18 ish holes and it's hard to keep their attention that long so that's pretty good it is they're either at some point when i show this clip i'll show the picture of the snacks they were holding so one was holding around goldfish the whole time one was head cheerios and dad was caddying so it was it was

a good time just tons of fun and good memories to be made with the family. So that's what it's all about. That is what it's all about. We work and we do a lot of things that we have to do. What they're going to remember is stuff like that. So that's definitely good to hear. Yeah. Yeah. People, you know what else people remember vacations and provides them our clients, vacational managers. So we have an interesting topic today. Shoulder season is here. What can you do about it? As we record this, it is in fact, labor day. So happy labor day to all of our clients who don't get to celebrate that, who are probably working today.

But for everyone else, they're probably here on vacation, absolutely packed at the beach here. I'll tell you that. It was a lovely six and a half hour jaunt around the beach yesterday. So it's a super busy time to be here. But it feels like that bang, this is the end of the season. And then things from here on out, at least in the beach markets that I'm familiar with, start to go down a little bit in terms of occupancy. So what can you do about it? If you're a vocational manager, you know that

you're going to see a little bit less demand here in the shoulder season, but you just throw up your hands and go, ah, I guess we have 20% occupancy. Or do you actually try to market and advertise your way to a better outcome? Of course, that's what we recommend and what we try to help our clients do during this time. What's your thoughts, high level? How do we start to break down the more basic things that you should be doing already for shoulder season? And then we'll give the folks maybe some deeper, better ideas on interesting tactics that they can employ that they probably haven't already. So number one, first thing, what should people be doing in shoulder season? Oh, yeah, it is. I think it's knowing what your shoulder season is. I think

that's really the most important thing. It's if you don't, it is. And certainly there are some markets where it's not a clear shoulder season, something like that, where it's up in northern Minnesota, you get summer. Maybe there's a little winter, but that's about it. I think it's truly understanding where why people are traveling to your area and then understanding how frequently they're coming and when that prime season is, when that shoulder season is, and when your off season is. Yeah, it is. I think that first tip in making sure people know why it matters, what are the benefits there, it's cheaper. In a lot of cases, whether it's staying with you or whether it's traveling to get to you, typically during those shoulder seasons, those travel rates just generally are a little lower there. So I think that's one of the most important things about really having that understanding. So you can make good decisions on the marketing side of things and use some of these strategies that

help to improve your shoulder season occupancy. But what would you say are some of those important areas that you're looking at on the shoulder season side of things? Yeah, the first thing I had to outline there is to to like give it a name, give it some kind of fun name or something that you can market off of. So secret season was this thing that we came up with. I feel like I came up with that like a decade ago with a client.

I'm not saying I came up with that idea, but we saw that idea. We played with it for a long time and it was really impactful. We were like, welcome to the secret season of insert destination name here. Less crowded beaches. The weather's fantastic.

The parking is free now. Like after a certain date, the parking gets free at the beach. And so we were able to like market that and call it and branded something. And instead of calling it like, oh, this is the not summer, we turned it into something a little bit different. We call it the secret season. And we did a lot of advertising. And our messaging and marketing promoted that idea. Welcome to the secret season, it was open, it was available, we chopped our night minimums, we're going to talk about some of these individual tactics, but that helped me quite a bit, actually, I think giving it some kind of name or giving it some kind of identification, you know, as far as dates or something like that. So that was something that, you know,

comes to mind for me is give it a name and market and advertise based on that name. For sure. That's something that even I can remember partners out in the Northwest, up in the Orcas Islands and stuff like that, doing whale hunting season and stuff like that. It is really identifying whether you're calling it that or whether you're calling it, you're naming the season around something that people are doing. Up on Lake Superior, it's the gales of November, the gales of December. It is. It's that notable thing that people can attach themselves to and they're going to keep looking for that over and over. Once they've done it once, that is, you've created that idea,

that concept that they're going to want to recreate that experience. And now you've given them that opportunity to do so. I love the idea of naming the shoulder season, giving it something like shoulder season. Okay. That's an industry term, but how can we make it more guest friendly, more traveler friendly and secret season? That's perfect because it does. It's that little what can I what do I get here? This is the big question mark box and from the Mario game. So I love that. Yeah, yeah, I think that helps quite a bit. So we had some things here that we're going to put in our outline. And we'll run through these quickly, because this is like obvious basic stuff you should be doing, but also things that some people don't necessarily take advantage of. So we're not pricing experts, but lowering your rates,

making sure you're competitive. That's kind of the obvious consideration. Certainly, if you're saying that the property was $2.99 a night beforehand, and now it's $2.79 a night, that may not be a movable enough number for people to really get excited about it. So instead, it may be that you have to go from $2.99 to $2.29 or $1.99 or whatever. I don't know. Again, we're not pricing experts. Use a pricing tool that knows what you're talking about. So I'm not going to give you right advice, but that idea of lowering rates and making sure you're competitive, I think is a key thing to be thinking about. Certainly someone shouldn't be going onto, let's say a listing site, Airbnb, Vrbo, et cetera, and then finding your properties way priced above other properties. That's going to be challenging if you're trying to attract the

more picky value seeking, in some cases, off season type of guest. This is big for us. I think, again, it's obvious, but some people don't end up doing this. Lower that night minimum as much as you can tolerate. We brought it down. We have clients who bring it down to two, three nights at this point around this timeframe of the year who are typically five, seven-night minimum type property managers outside of that. So that does make a difference in my opinion, because having the lower night minimum, you can mark it off that too. Hey, we just launched our night minimum. It used to be five nights, seven nights. Now it's a three night minimum. Now it's a two night minimum. I think one night almost makes no sense. In many cases, that tends to attract more problems. But I can talk

with your team and understand what makes the most sense there. But again, you can market and advertise that based from here to the end of the year. We have lower night minimums usually except for Christmas or New Year's or those kind of holiday type seasons. So yeah, that definitely comes to mind. Make sure you're doing lower rates, make sure they're competitive, lower night minimums, talk about it, put it on the website, mention it in copy, mention it on Facebook, mention it in your email campaigns, all those kind of things. And then we have make canceling easier as well. So people might be a little bit booking a little bit more last minute, but they do appreciate the flexibility. If you can sustain it, and if it's not something that's going to harm things, like you're trying to, you're trying to

slide as much risk off of you and or sorry, the guest that onto you as is feasible so i think making canceling a little bit easier or being a little bit more flexible with cancellations can help that guest that's on the fence book a little bit more of a last minute shorter trip and feel a little bit more confident that if their plans do change for some reason they can still book with you so those kind of come to mind as the basics but let's go through some of the like better meteor ideas because i think these are the ones spending more time on that we've tested and had success with. So what's your thoughts on free night bonuses or doing like checkout offers for marketing? I think the free night bonus is really something that it is. And we talked about it just before here. But in a lot of cases,

it's not like you're you're rushing to get those rooms turned over, you're rushing to get people out. Or if you can do a free night bonus from a weekend to extend into the midweek so you're got your they've stayed friday through sunday okay throw a bonus night in to get monday to get tuesday do something like that it is are you really filling up a lot of those monday through thursday nights in a lot during your shoulder season probably not so if you can get more people to get that initial stay in, I love that idea. Just making sure that you can, again, keep people there. Give people that experience that they want to come back. I think ultimately everything we're doing here is trying to create something that's memorable and where people do want to stay longer. It is the last thing you'd want to do is have people coming through coming for that Friday,

Saturday, Sunday, and they don't want to stay longer because they didn't have a good time. They didn't have a good experience. So hopefully you're providing that there. But what are your thoughts about either or the free night bonus or the late checkout fee or trying to combine something like that? Yeah, I love the free night offers because typically I just think they perform well in copy and in testing. So if we can put out an email or you can push something out and it's free night and you 72 point font, that just tends to perform better than most other offers that we do. So I guess I'm drawn to that. Just like any guest seeing a free night is more likely to click and

see what the parameters are. If it's something where, you know, to your point, if you're not typically selling a Monday anyways, what value are you giving away here? I also feel like the free night is actually a clever way to discount because you actually are not bringing the rate down per night in terms of what they're charging. But you so you're keeping your commissions and things like that a little bit more intact. But you're giving the guest value where their net sort of effective cost per night has gone down. So I think it's a little bit of accounting tricks and accounting math here. But and messaging and how people feel about the offer versus what they're actually paying.

But I'm picturing my wife and that's the kind of thing that she would do. Oh, we get Monday for free, pay 300 a night for these three nights or these two nights or whatever the case may be. And it's really like we're getting three nights or four nights. There's an additional benefit there to that. So just purely from a, what's going to work well and get people to actually pay attention. Cause that's kind of what you need in the off-shoulder season, the off-season, all the little things that we're going to talk about here is who's the target guest. We'll talk about that in a second. And what's going to make someone break out of their apathy and say, Oh yeah, I'll come down for a few nights because they might

really want to come down for a week during the peak season. That's like the ideal scenario. But if they can't do that, what can you offer them in lieu of that's going to make them want to take action. And that's the hardest part in shoulder season is getting someone to actually take action or do what you want them to do. So I like the free night, certainly late checkout for free or a late checkout included or something like that isn't a bad approach. If you really can't do something where it's no, we do actually have to turn over the property for a midweek stay that's going to come in Tuesday, because you're just going to likely have lower overall demand, maybe you can take the same team and get a late checkout in there for free. But again,

just purely from like a what works well on email copy on Facebook ads, copy on the website, specials pages, all the stuff that I've seen over over the last five, six years has led me to think that a free night special is often the thing that gets people engaged, gets people clicking on stuff for sure. And even think about it just from the perspective of changing that traveler mindset of okay, I'm buying, let's say I'm buying three, I'm paying, I'm getting the four three, that's like 25% discount. If you put that 25% discount, a 25% off discount on there, people aren't going to click twice

or people aren't going to think twice about it. You put that free night. It is all of a sudden, it isn't maybe that much of a discount from their overall total, but it's that free. They think they're getting something for free, even though it is,

it's really only maybe technically a 25% discount on what they'd pay if they paid for that fourth night in there too. We've talked about this before, I think on the email marketing context, but on pop-up emails, I've talked about this on LinkedIn a lot too. We find that almost universally, and everyone's smile, this is not the case, but almost universally, it's better to offer a fixed dollar discount as opposed to a percentage discount. So $100 off actually works better than 10% off, even when 10% off is actually a greater

discount than $100. That sounds counterintuitive, but that is in fact what our testing has led us to believe. So this is the same kind of thing. A free night is the equivalent roughly most of the time of a 25% discount. And yet if you were to go run a 25% promo code and put that to your email list and then run a free night promo code, I would feel confident that most of the time the free night would perform better from a click-through rate a order perspective from a conversion perspective than 25% discount. That's just the way our brains think free night seems more valuable. That's right. Awesome. What about like understanding who comes talk on that a little bit. So this is something I say a lot, but target market, those kind of pieces work through that as well. Yeah. So I think during that shoulder season,

I think the likelihood that you're going to have people who are traveling great distances begins to decrease a little bit there. You still may have some people going there, but more frequently, and I think much more so since COVID, you do, you have people who are going for more of those staycations, the local staycations, or giving an opportunity to do some school remote. Work from home and school from home is not exactly, it's not out of the norm anymore. So making sure you understand that there is a likelihood you're going to have people who are doing work while they're staying with you. They're not just going to be staying and doing the traditional vacation getaway things. You might have kids who are going to be doing

some school and then having vacation time. So thinking about that remote setup, thinking about Wi-Fi and some of those specific rentals across your entire portfolio, but making it more of a focus time or a focus place where people aren't maybe going to do all the activities that you have in the area, but they will be there to experience those when they can. But yeah, it is. I think as a society, we've gotten used to being outside of the house and taking those opportunities to be able to work from home or to be able to do things away from our home. I do think that it's important to understand that those are the people who are going to

be traveling. It's not your, probably not the big groups that are coming in. And you may still have big parties and stuff like that and larger groups coming through, but most of the time it is going to be those smaller getaways from shorter distances that it is even offering like a gas card or something like that for those people who are coming from drive-to destinations. I think that's another opportunity to just get that mindset of that extra value in there but oh you know does that kind of mesh with what you've seen for people who are your partners who do have those travel during the off season and shoulder season times yeah i like that idea the gas car promotion we did that a lot when gas prices went crazy a little while ago in most drive

to markets and that seemed to work for a minute. It tailed off pretty quickly. It seems like gas prices are one of those things where this is my frame on it. It's an inelastic price, isn't it? We're getting way off topic here. But you're going to pay the gas price unless you're just like impoverished or you can't like you can't get to work or something like that. But for people who are middle class, working class people, if they can, if it means the

difference between them getting to their vacation and not getting to their vacation is $100, $200 in gas, then they're just going to pay it. I just find that's one of those inelastic price things. It's like your whatever your electric rate is, are you just not going to pay your electric bill? Like pretty much no matter what it is, you're going to pay your electric bill because you want electricity, especially given that there's no alternatives to that. So I find that's just sort of a non sequitur in the case of like, people actually wanting to do it. But I do think that it's again, one of those psychological things that it's I don't like paying high gas prices, I would prefer to pay lower gas prices than higher gas prices. No matter how affluent someone is, I think they prefer that the idea of again, $100 off my vacation, or $100 gas card or $200 gas

card that's going to get me to where I want to go. And I don't feel the pain of swiping my credit card and seeing a $85 bill filling up my Chevy Tahoe or whatever the case may be. Again, psychologically, that may actually work well. But yeah, this is I said this a second ago, but this is actually what it comes down to for clients for me is that they don't actually know who comes on the weekdays. So they say our weekends are busy, our weekdays are full during the season. And then I go, Okay, understand, that's common. So who comes on the weekdays? And they just go up the hem and haw, they have no idea. And I'm like, Okay, let's try to figure that out a little bit. So what I put that line from my perspective is we did this for a client in this mochi some time ago homeschool from our homeschool your kids from our vacation

rental granted now i think we're a little bit less of this kind of work remote school remote type thing it's a little bit less of that but i still think that there is an audience of people out there who would be like i homeschool my child anyways why not go during the midweek where it's cheaper and but the backside of that is set up the cabin set up the property or the vacation rental home to accommodate that too. So what they were doing is some of the properties have added little desk setups, or they added little seating, additionally to the dining room area where there was like cubbies type things, and they could quickly be taken on or off the table. I thought that was clever. So they modified the property slightly and in a very cheap way, like it wasn't a huge

economic investment to make it more favorable to the person coming in that scenario or in that context. The obvious one, of course, too, would be a nice remote setup. So not just a table stuff somewhere in the corner and then say, I have a desk on my property. I noticed a lot of quote unquote, Airbnb hosts doing that where they claim to have a desk. It's no, my desk at home that I'm sitting out right now is sit stand. It has a light up here. It has obviously a microphone for the podcasting. Now this might be a step too far to like really take it out but like certainly just having one or two nice things i think a a $200 external monitor a nice comfortable office style chair not a just random chair taken from the living room and stuffed into a corner like making two or three small investments to

make a work from home quote unquote home work from vacation home set up a little bit more appealing and then placing that as one of your initial photo sets in the gallery of that property is certainly something that people who don't care about it aren't going to bother aren't going to it's not going to mind them that it's there. That's kind of my frame on it is they're just going to skip it. Oh, okay, I don't need that. But the people who want it, they're gonna be drawn to that it's gonna be like a magnet, they're gonna be like, Oh, man, this is perfect. That's actually what exactly what I need a room that has this sort of optionality to it where where I can go in here, work, get my work done. And then I can still go and experience the destination at the end of the day or take a break or whatever the case may be and go and experience

what you have to offer. Yeah, it's we're so far into this trend. We're coming up on year four of this COVID work from home trend sort of thing. And yet most vacation properties I look at are prioritizing a lot of other things on top of this. And the way I look at it is I think there's a way to do both in most properties, even if it's something where there's a little like linen closet somewhere that you could hide some of the stuff if you need to, and then bring it out during certain times and make it more accessible to people. So I'm really bullish on that. And then show people the Wi-Fi speeds.

Like you can save fast Wi-Fi, show it to them. If you can do that. I know Airbnb credit to them actually has a function on their listing page where you actually have to go to the property verify the speed like on their app they do some kind of speed test and then it shows in the actual listing that's really clever but if you know in lieu of that on your own website why can't you do the same why can't you say just like an amenity this property has wi-fi okay yes but this property also has 100 megabits down internet check like why not why couldn't that also be a valid amenity for you to be talking about and focusing on it's valid all year round, but I think it makes a lot of sense.

What I do, I think it depends, a little bit depends on the market, too. If you do have people in the traditional vacation markets where, I mean, you've got Myrtle Beach, Hilton Head, all those big ones. Yeah, I think that there's going to be the remote, the working remote, the homeschooling remote, doing anything like that. The remote, the working remote, the homeschooling remote, doing anything like that. If you're in one of those urban markets, I think it's a no brainer to have kind of that remote setup because it is the I think there's a greater likelihood during these shoulder seasons. And we saw that just it is it's more about that business travel. If you're in an Austin, if you're in maybe a San Diego, if you're in something like that, San Diego, that hybrid there where it is urban, but it's also a vacation rental market. But thinking about some of those where you do that, it's simple to make that investment of, yeah, I love the up-down chair and the up-down desk as well. I stand during most of our podcast episodes now because it's comfortable for me and I move around a lot.

But at the same time, I would love this to be a setup. If I'm going into specifically on a business trip, I want to be able to get to any of the things that I'm going to. And I want to be able to come back and work at the end of the day. And knowing that a lot of those Monday to Wednesday, Monday to Thursday conference going people are going to be looking for that experience. Yeah, that's absolutely something you want to get into that, that traveler mindset and make sure you're creating that experience for them. It is the travel experience, whether it's a vacation experience or that business experience, give them the desired outcome they're looking for. If they're looking for business travel and you're creating a vacation experience for them, it's great, but functionally it's not what they're

looking for. And they'll probably look somewhere else next time when they're looking for something that's a little more focused. Yeah, it's I think the market does play a little bit of a role there as well. And your willingness or ability to want to make some of those changes for maybe business versus school and stuff like that. Yeah, let's be honest. Our lives are so blended together at this point. It's not really like a line for the most part.

Yeah. All right. So let me go in this direction, then we'll do local or staycation promotions. So again, it's something that we've talked about a little bit, maybe in the past, having a local offer, having a staycation offer is certainly something that you can explore where people can actually, it's so funny, because 99% of the ads that I run, we're excluding people who live in a 50 mile radius and saying, let's build a campaign where we do the opposite. Let's include all the people who are within a 50 mile radius. And depending on your type of property,

what you're hoping to do, that may or may not be a valid approach for you to be have marketing. I know clients tell me all the time, locals are always problems. So they don't want to typically rent to people who are local. But I have a house that now is much larger. But a year ago, I was in a much smaller house, where if my family all wanted to come down here, we want to stay together, it wouldn't have been possible. So if that were to happen today, I may be able to accommodate my sister and her husband now and things like that. But certainly a year ago, that wouldn't have been possible. And I certainly would have considered booking a vacation rental home during the off season, lower rates.

Oh, yeah, let's all stay together. Why not? It's fun. It's interesting. It's exciting. That's something that an ad that would have been appealing to me. And I think a lot of clients that were in a lot of their markets, they do have family who might come and not always be able to stay with them.

So what a fun opportunity to give them come book this place, split it three, four different ways. And yet you're going to get a great value from your family coming and staying here. Or even I'm sure you've had this experience as well, having kids and all that a smaller property may be appealing to a couple who just wants like that staycation experience, maybe the drop the kids off at grandma sort of feeling and then you just get to go to the beach for a few days or go up to the mountains for a few days or hang out at a cabin by the lake for a few days. Those are also appealing things. So I think you can position the properties to be used in different ways. That's the idea behind doing like a local or

staycation promo. And then again, on the ad copy itself, you can target it locally. If you were doing something on Facebook, Instagram must show your Minnesota driver's license, your South Carolina driver's license to get this deal, make a little bit of a hook, feel like they're the only ones getting that deal. And you can certainly do dollar discounts here, you could do the free night offer here, you could do a lot of different things here to bring that value to someone but it's a different audience that doesn't get a lot of advertising typically that might be open to what you have to offer during the shoulder season for sure that was one that we used a lot in both canadian partners they just have having making sure that this was or for the u.s versus canada and coming back and forth those specific

promos of people that it is it's anything you can do to tie that hook and make people feel one of a kind, unique, special, anything like that. That just adds to the, that it's all about psychology. I really wish I would have taken those psychology classes in college now because I feel like they would have been effective. Now we're just swinging and hoping for the best here. But yeah, it is. effective now we're just swinging and hoping for the best here. But yeah, it is.

It's I think certainly the willingness to do local and staycation is up to those managers and or the business themselves as do they want local people and I do think that is one of those things that for whatever reason, we're maybe we're biased against people from the area actually staying in homes close by. But hopefully, that's something that if you need to get more people through, that's a great promotion. And again, if you're posturing it right, and you're using the right content, you're using the right calls to action, stuff like that, those can be really beneficial in filling up some of those shoulder season nights there. Right on. Let's go the different direction then towards amenities then maybe.

So we've talked about the amenities inside the property, but like just some other things that we've seen clients do that makes sense. Again, you can position the property differently in the fall than you can in the summer. So in the summer, you might be showing in a beach market, you're showing the kayaks or includes chair rentals. So do you have to bring your own chair with you,

stuff like that. In the fall, it could be show a fire pit. That's a different sort of feeling and a different sort of energy to the property inside of photography and inside of the listing itself. But that might be more desirable, people might see that and be drawn to that versus probably not going to go sit on the beach if it's 55 degrees outside, if you really get a deep in the shoulder season. In some beach markets, that's the case. But the idea of being a beach house, having a great time walking on the beach, maybe with a jacket on, but then sitting at night on a

fire pit next to the beach is actually a pretty interesting thing like Like that appeals to me. So I think that kind of thing where you position the property a little bit differently, the fire pit next to a hot tub is going to work a little bit better during a certain season than the summer. That doesn't sound very appealing when I want a slushy at night, not a fire pit next to a hot tub. But positioning the property differently, having different amenities that people are drawn towards, I think is a very valid lever to be pulling. And I don't see a lot of people doing that. But ultimately, it's it's like we've been talking about positioning the property can be marketing, just use different use cases for the same space, or it could be changing the space itself to make it a better use case. And then

people can see that through photography or through different layouts that you have of the actual photos themselves that make people drawn towards it for sure. And here's the thing, although I'm sure every web services company and PMS provider is going to be really mad at me for saying this, but you can update your listings. You can do it. You can change the copy. You can change the content. Now, if all of Conrad's partners or his customers now call in and say, or email him and say, hey, I want you to update all my copy seasonally. He's probably not gonna be very happy with me and we'll be at the end of the Heads and Beds show, probably, but anyways, I think it is.

It's the ability. No worries, I get a second order. We thought of that. But it is like, there's something to be said for giving people that experience. It is changing up your image, your gallery order, changing up the content that you're writing, writing a fall specific description for your property.

I think there is truly something to be said for. Yeah, you can improve. You can put in a fire pit. You can do all these things. But if you're already doing it, just make sure people know about it. And I do. I think that's something where too often on the web services side of things, what I always saw was that once people set that content, they never changed it again. So two years later, you may have made amazing updates to this home and it's still using your 2021, in this case, images and not talking about, hey, we went from a gas stove to a world-class, high-priced, restaurant-style, restaurant-quality gourmet

kitchen, please take a look at this. I think that is, it's just the kind of a housekeeping item to say that whether or not you're just improving the image or improving the images, whether you're swapping in new images, whether you're improving the content, swapping in new content, just making sure that you're actually talking about it in a way. Because I go on enough Microsoft Clarity sessions to know that people are sitting on those pages for a long time. They're sitting on these descriptions and they're looking through, they're hovering over specific areas and you should be making sure that you're customizing that to the season when people are staying and not just doing it. Okay, set it and forget it.

Our listing's done and we'll never touch it again. So again, from your side of things, having to make some of those changes, what are your thoughts on that? It's really interesting. Actually, I saw a feature the other day. This is a total random comparison at first, but I'll bring it back to the vacational industry. Yeah. It's a guy I follow and he has a huge YouTube channel. And he said he was running a promotion on his YouTube channel for his e-commerce store.

And he went to the, there's a tool called TubeBuddy, which you can then edit the title of every single YouTube video, excuse me, the description of every single YouTube video to include a specific message. And then when that special was over, he removed it. And so he was like, most people would just go to their latest video and put that copy in there. I put it across my entire library because people watch videos that are two years old on YouTube and why not show them, hey, there's a special going on right now. I thought that was amazingly clever. And I thought, why doesn't a PMS platform have that where I could go into a button and then insert something in line two or line one or whatever of a vocational description and say, you know, for a limited time, I'd only get a free night if you book three nights from September 15

to October 15, blah, blah, blah, everything we've talked about today, whatever the offer actually is. I thought that was really clever. And to my knowledge, I don't think that's feasible. I think if someone had 100 listings, they would have to click into 100 separate property descriptions inside of whatever PMS they happen to be using and go and make that edit. So there's a feature idea that I think that could make that a little bit easier. Right now on the direct booking perspective, it's easy for us. We do click through pages for clients. We do banners for clients. We do things that kind of show persistently on every page. That's not a bad solution. Don't get me wrong. But obviously, it's useless from an OTA perspective if they're

on Airbnb, right? They don't see that. And Airbnb isn't really accommodate doesn't accommodate a lot of the ideas that we're talking about here. A lot of the ideas that we're talking about is why you want to have your own marketing engine just to zoom out and get holistic for a second. It's everything on Airbnb is going to be your commodity property shoved up against 100 other listings, make yours seem better. Some of the ideas will work like the photography, the positioning, those types of things. But a lot of this stuff, free night bonuses, limiting or showing, hey, we have two night minimums. These are all things that work on Airbnb or work on Vrbo, but they're not really natively built into that system where you can really talk about them, promote them, advertise

to them. So this is, again, a stellar case for having your own marketing engine that you could drive, having your own email list, having your own social following, having retargeting ads running, having these different pieces in place, your own website, obviously being the foundation of that so that you can actually market and advertise people more effectively. So I went a little off kilter there from your question, I think. But yeah, ultimately, all these ideas on shoulder season, because the best marketers tend to win during shoulder season. Like, yes, you have to have the right properties.

Of course, that is the case. But I find when I go and look at the clients that seem to have better occupancy they don't really complain to us as much about shoulder season i'm like oh you have the biggest email list you have this you have that and the marketing kind of takes over when we have to like i said this earlier nudge people off of their level of inaction they're not doing something so we're gonna have to like nudge them off of that and get them to do something and a marketing engine helps you do that if not then your only lever you can really play with for the most part is price. If you're one of these companies that doesn't really have much of a

marketing engine running, you can just keep lowering rates. At some point you find some clearing point where someone will pay some level of price for a decent quality property, whether that's the guest you actually want or not as a different conversation, perhaps for a different day. But that's my frame on that is that all these, everything we talked about today works a thousand times better, obviously, if you have your own marketing engine that you can build off of.

Correct. I agree. Awesome. Maybe we round it out here with local events. This is certainly something that a lot of our clients do. So what's kind of your frame on that? What's your experience doing like that local event marketing?

How do you tie those things together so that they associate an event with a lodging provider? Hopefully that lodging provider being you. That I think the easiest thing, it's event sponsors. All of these events are usually looking for some type of sponsor. And I think it's a two-pronged, it is marketing, but it's the advocacy within the community, not necessarily within Vacation Rental specifically, but it is. You're being a community member. You're being a local area member. You're being a recognizable place. You're doing your own marketing by smiling and

waving and doing what people do there. And it is a lot of these local events. This was our local events for us on Resorts and Lodges were a link building strategy. So we reached out to thousands of these things and they're always looking to tell their story. They're always looking to get, unless they're big national events, but these little local events, they're always looking to tell their story. They're always looking to get, unless they're big national events, but these little local events, they're always looking for more exposure and always looking for more partnerships. So yeah, can you sponsor the event? Can you, it is, if it's a chamber event, are you on the lodging page? If you're, do they have an email newsletter? I'm going to take some of your bullet points, but do they have the email newsletter?

Can you get involved there? Are there other marketing efforts that they're doing that you can co-brand and do items like that? I think anytime you can leverage those partnerships with the events themselves, usually it's not in most of these smaller communities. They're not one and dones where they're going to do one event and they're never going to do anything again. communities, they're not one and dones where they're going to do one event and they're never going to do anything again. So it is, it's that continued partnership of we're going to do this event, then we're going to do this one in six months, or we're going to do this, or we can coordinate with other businesses or whether they're lodging, whether the hospitality, whether they're anything. But I think that's an area where you can be, you know, it's a little more frenemy based where you may not, you may butt heads a little bit on some of these things, but truly during this shoulder season, when there are these events, that's a good time to collaborate and take advantage of kind of all winning together as opposed to trying to be all cutthroat and get your bookings and get your occupancy and do stuff like that. But what are your thoughts on those

local events and how have you leveraged those with specific customers and stuff like that? Yeah, I find that this is actually one of those things where we really have to rely on the local client to give us the advice because we can't possibly know everything going on. So it's really, and sometimes it's hard when I look at a list of calendar, I look at like the chamber calendar and I see a list of 50 events. Sometimes it's like yoga in the park with Susan and I'm sure Susan's great, but I don't think anyone's driving down from like Charlotte to go do yoga in the park with Susan.

And then it's a blah, blah, blah beer festival. And then there then they'll be like oh yeah like 9,000 people come for that so I'm like okay we need to figure out the context between yoga in the park with Susan and the beer festival that people are actually driving in to come see so I would say that give your agency some context into what events are actually going to drive occupancy really with these types of things if you're going to be dedicating hundreds if not thousands of dollars of either time or like man hours, woman hours, whatever labor towards marketing event, like you want to make sure that you're focusing on the 510 events that really move the needle, and you're not spending a bunch of time focused on events that really don't. So that's a trap to fall into, I would say, unfortunately, we have fallen into that before, working with some sponsorship,

giving money over getting less than the lodging page, and then learning the event is very small, it really doesn't isn't going to drive occupancy. So something where would at least five bookings come from this maybe is a useful heuristic, depending on the size of the vacational company, setting some kind of floor, maybe for you, one booking would be a success. Maybe for you, 50 bookings would be a success. That's okay. But write down what you actually expect out of the event and then go to the event sponsorship with that in mind. Okay. You want my $500 for the event sponsorship. You want my thousand dollars for the event sponsorship. Okay, but tell me how I'm going to benefit from this. I think it's okay to have that conversation

and just be fair about it. Tell me about your past attendance, that kind of thing. And then ultimately you, if you're that local vacation manager in that market, should be able to give a little context to your agency. And then I think we can take over and do a good job with the grunt work. Hey, these four are the people to talk to.

We've agreed on prices. Let's make sure we get listed on their lodging page. Let's make sure if necessary, we have a landing page set up for when they click over they go to a page that talks about that event click here if you can offer a specific special or promotion i don't know if you said that but if you can offer a specific special or promotion for the attendees of paul's beer festival use promo code paul beer and you get 10 offer again 100 off to our earlier commentary about discount pricing and things like that so those are all things that i think can make it take it from a okay experience to a pretty good experience,

focusing on the large enough event, giving them a specific offer, and then trying to connect your idea of lodging with their ideal target event attendee as much as is reasonably possible. And then I think you can definitely have success with these. We have clients that do really well during certain events that are definitely in the middle of the shoulder season. And it picks them up quite a bit because they'll be like, Oh, we'll get sold out for this event. And then it slows down after that. Or it is that nice little last spike, not like a holiday,

like labor day, like we talked about today, but rather, you know, Hey, this little event comes in two weeks. It really helps us out. And that gets us through a slow month.

Otherwise we might be struggling a little bit. And some events are big enough where the rates actually climb back up, but you can start to enforce higher minimums. Okay. During this event, we have to stay three nights or something like that. So depending on the event, it it actually you begin to benefit from it it's got it's very much to your point from earlier a rising tide lifts all boats type of

scenario for sure for sure it is i think with any of these things especially when you're investing with the local events and stuff like that it's still just a marketing strategy and you have to have you want to see that return on that investment. And I think anything here, it's, it maybe is a little more delicate and you have a finer line to balance there when you are, when your nights are probably going to be a little low or your rates are going to be a little lower, but don't take them down to a point where you're just getting bookings, but you're obviously losing money there. So I think anything we're doing here is find that return and set us. I think you have to, whereas during high season, it is about the return still, but you're feeling confident that you're going to get that return. There's going to be some things here that might not be as effective and you might not

see that return. As long as you're okay with that, that's fine. Because I do think all of these contribute to better guest experience and long-term, I think that'll result in more repeat bookings and just a better experience overall. But yeah, at the end of the day, these are all marketing strategies or just some strategies to help you improve the business and you got to find that return on it. Right on. Hopefully people have got a return on their time listening to this episode, taking all of our marketing advice into account as they build their shoulder season

marketing strategy. So that was hard to get their shoulders, we did it we're here we only took a week off no one noticed because we split our last episode into two parts and not to get too meta i would say you're like tanner refreshed but you don't look any tanner at all so it must have been i'm still you know it wasn't a beachy kind of destination no i don't get tanned at all i'm the wrong person to be giving advice on that but paul's back we'll be back here with regular episodes going forward on the heads and bed show if you listen this far hopefully you've got some value if we get you one more booking this shoulder season that you owe us one thing and it's not a free night in one of your lovely vacation properties although we wouldn't necessarily turn that down to be clear what it is a review so it's very simple you go to your

podcast have a choice you click five stars you leave a review spotify apple we're not too picky whatever kind of your flavor is apple is like where I'm focused right now because that's what most people tend to listen to us on Apple according to the statistics, the analytics. I'm not that analytical of a guy. So leave it on your podcast app of choice. It's all good. Leave us five stars.

We appreciate it. We've got some big stuff coming, including an announcement next week. That's what they call a teaser in the business, Paul, about a project that we have been, where I've been working on for over six months. I'm excited to share that as well. That is it.

Leave us a review. We appreciate you. We'll see you next week on the Heads and Beds show.