Heads In Beds Show - Ways You Have NOT YET Used Social Media To Grow Your Vacation Rental Business

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul dive into some fun and engaging social media posts from "Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing" that have proven to work very well for other vacation rental managers at scaling their social media followings. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingVintory CRMHubspotMailchimp🔗 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, we're live. What's going on, Paul? I've already told you about my exploits for the day. I decided I would have a little grill day during the afternoon,

help the old PTO and feed the teachers during conference day. So I'm ready to be done with the day, but I am so happy to be here recording. How are you doing, sir? No good deed shall go unpunished. So how dare you try to help your local community out? Lesson learned. Just don't help anymore. And then you won't find yourself in these pickles. Yeah, no, we're joking.

Of course, you should help whenever you can for other people. But sometimes it is an inconvenience if you have responsibilities and things to do on your side of things. I'm doing pretty good fighting allergies off. So if the voice isn't 100%, I apologize in advance. Certainly, I will aggressively leverage the mute button if and when that might be necessary

for me to sneeze in or cough. But I'm trying to put the good vibes out there, the good energy. That's not going to happen. And we've got a fun topic today. We've been critical in the past, Paul, I feel like of social media and we've not like critical of it, but just like the place that it has in your marketing mix maybe can be a little bit overstated by some people. Maybe that's the gentlest way to say that. In other words, most people don't build their vacation rental business backbone off of social. It tends to be more of a complimentary piece along the way. We talked about these three channels, right?

Search, social, email. If I could put them in order, though, it might be search, email, social in terms of like order of priority and importance for most people. Now we should carve out in advance for anyone that might say, how dare you look at Pacific Ben on Instagram, right? Which has all these followers. There are always going to be, I think, there's going to be a segment of the vacation rental inventory population out there that's going to have these like, really unique, wildly aesthetically pleasing properties on Instagram that do really

well. And they almost maybe are a category of their own and kudos to them for figuring out a marketing channel that works well, which is making something pleasing to look at. And therefore, that alone is what drives people into those properties. So maybe we'll do a different episode and like the landscape hotel concepts that some people have talked about. I think that is a valid thing for us to be exploring, but maybe today's examples are going to be a little bit more practical for the typical property manager in a leisure market. Who's trying to get more attention on social media and can only post their three bedroom, two bath, condo, home, whatever cabin so many times before they feel like they're being a little repetitive.

So that was the frame that I was coming at this out on. And certainly I think we can sprinkle in go home, whatever, cabin so many times before they feel like they're being a little repetitive. So that was the frame that I was coming at this out on. And certainly, I think we can sprinkle in some different pieces here that would tie into homeowner. These ideas are maybe a little bit more guest focused, but you could take a lot of these concepts, in my mind, and make them a little bit more homeowner focused, which should be, I think, a part of your social mix. I don't know if you agree with that. Certainly, it's not gonna be the bulk of it. But I think mentioning that is not a bad idea on social media. What are your thoughts? No, I absolutely think that there doesn't you don't want to oversell it, period. But I think just telling people because for every think about how many of these businesses, their first, or maybe their second level of owners is referrals

from people who have stayed with them from people who have done this and done that. I think that there should be a mix. I think you should be telling about, because I think guests want to know what's the relationship with these homeowners and maybe understand that you don't own all the properties. I think there's probably a misconception out here for some travelers that I just own all these properties and no, there are individual homeowners attached to these. And I don't think that's a bad idea to be able to highlight that and tell people about the process of professional property management there a little bit. But no, generally speaking, when we're looking at all of these items, I think they holistically help build it as we're talking about brand building, brand awareness.

But it is it's about holistically improving the business. So, yeah, there's going to be an aspect of the owner side and an aspect of the guest side. But I think ultimately the focus is at a higher level here. It's not just focusing on those primary drivers of your business, but just driving your business to a, to greater heights overall. Yeah. I think you bring up a really good point there. It's not the topic of what we're going to really dive into today, but this idea of like referrals are probably the number one source. How do you generate referrals? It's like this squishy thing. How do you generate any sort of brand awareness in a small business? You do a great job for an extended period of time

and people will talk to you. You could stimulate referral and you can stimulate word of mouth by prompting, by asking, by giving more specific instruction as opposed to, hey, if you know anyone, make sure you tell them about me. It's like people don't think in their day-to-day lives about your business. Like I hate to say it, like they just don't care. There's no one, you have an owner today that's super happy with you

that unless specifically prompted would never say that basically. They're just like, yeah, like they're managing my property. Of course, that's what they should be doing. That's their role and responsibility with their business. Maybe not realizing that they have it really good if you're listening and you're an excellent property manager,

maybe you're the only one they've ever used. So yeah, I do think it's one of these squishy things. And this is where like the whole direct booking debate, I feel like it's so lost where people like the nerds whip out the spreadsheets and they're like, yeah, so I pay 3% to Airbnb. And then if I go and do all this stuff, my own, show me the ROI, like they're hitting you with that, right? Show me the ROI, show me how posting these behind the scenes, which is our first content type that we'll talk about video on social media is going to help me drive an ROI down the road. And the answer is there will be moments where there's no ROI whatsoever. And there'll be days and weeks,

maybe even a month or two where there isn't an ROI. And then there will be days and weeks and months where you get four referrals and you sign four properties and you just can't backtrace as much as I would like for that to be the case. Cause then I can, what's the quote? I think we did this quote the other day, you and I, half my advertising budget is wasted. The trouble is, I just don't know what half. Probably the same thing on social media, right? Half of my brand impressions are wasted. Half of my retargeting ad budgets are wasted.

I just don't know which half. It's probably more like 90% is wasted, if we're being honest. But the people that see it, that you can make money from, that you can drive income from, whether it's on the guest side or the owner side, is what's going to carry you long term. This is my other frame on this conversation around doing social okay if you choose not to invest much money in social media or do any sort of efforts around marketing your business on social media fine we can justify that as we have before in the show with the lack of click through data right the fact that most people don't come from facebook or instagram or insert social platform

of choice here tiktok would obviously be an obvious third example in our industry. And then book in that same browsing session. That's very true for most clients, even that we work with or that we see their analytics, even ones that are decently large and get a good amount of traffic or visibility, I should say, excuse me, on social media. But there's all these impressions that are occurring that are leading to those branded searches on Google that are certainly coming from social media. And whenever they're crossing channels, right? Hey, I saw a post on Facebook about company XYZ. Then I searched for it on Google. Google is getting all the credit for brand searches that really it had very little, like that's the layup, right? It's already there at the hoop. Someone's just tapping it in,

so to speak. So yeah, a lot of philosophy in that, that maybe for newer folks, the show may be a little bit hard to follow, but it's not that we don't see value in posting on social media or creating social media content. I think what can be bad is just that repetitive nature of it and just expecting that someone's going to be scrolling on Facebook or Instagram or even TikTok, see your property and then whip out their credit card and book it right away. That's not how this works at all. The data is pretty clear on that. What does happen though, is that people will have an affinity towards your brand or an awareness of your brand on social media that helps you get your emails open more, helps you get more branded search on Google

and so on and so forth. So I don't know if you have any reaction to that. If not, we'll go into behind the scenes content. It is just a small little touch off of that, but it's, think about it. We have amazing metrics, amazing attribution in place. People who are just primarily either in a direct marketing industry

or this was a direct marketing industry in earlier times. And it's, it is, you, I think that's one of those things was how I, that was a question I got posed a lot early on. So I started to pose it a lot is how are you tracking that? How are you? I don't know if I turn it off though. I know that my revenue goes down like the, the billboard at the stadium that costs who knows what, but gets the impressions.

And again, and then it just starts the glimmer of the little trickle of that multi-touch attribution funneled i've seen all that but it is a i think the i'm not gonna say over analysis but the ability to analyze at such a deeper level it does it probably makes us less like it occurs does. It probably makes us more cognizant of things and maybe less willing to let things run in some cases. It is, oh man, I can see it after two or X period of time, 30, 60, 90 days, whatever that is. Something's up. Oh no, I have to, no, you're not going to just let it run for six months and just see what happens. I don't know. But I think a lot of that carries over into this brand awareness and into the social side of things is that, no, I can't always tangibly say, and nobody wants to be able to say,

I can't tangibly pull it out to where it came from. But that's the reality here is that it is going to take multiple touch points. Google used to say 40. I think that's cut down quite a bit of how many touch points you're going to make, how many searches you're going to make, how many things you're going to do in order to actually book a trip. But there are multiple touch points in more cases than there are not. It is one way along the lines. People have seen you somewhere, something. You've got that brand awareness out there. And if you don't, we're going to give you some tools, hopefully, to help you get there. Yeah, let's start to give some examples. Then we can paint some context around these different ideas and how they will help. Number one idea.

And by the way, some of these ideas are taken from a book, the book Mastering Vacational Marketing. Yours truly. Page 189 of your paperback copy. If you want to poke around some of these ideas, we're going to flesh them out a little bit more, I would argue, than I did in the book. I gave the ideas in the book, but we didn't give a lot of examples. So we'll give some examples today. Number one, anyways, behind the scenes tours. I feel like this is so useful on new stuff,

new things that are coming. You can share a little bit about what's happening. We have some clients that do a really good job at this. A recent client that we just started working with a little while ago sets up new listings themselves. And they're just doing these little tours. Hey, we just got to 123 blah, blah, blah street. It's a new vacation that's coming in our program, probably the next month or two. We just got here, we're doing the initial walkthrough or clean or something like that is done. Now we're doing an initial walkthrough. And we're planning out what couch we're going to put into the living room. Hey, what do you think option one or two, they like literally just on their phone, pan to the screen and show option one or two and people

will sometimes comment or give feedback, or they'll just share, hey, coming soon this property and it's not even really like very storied out. And that format, that idea of taking the potential guest or the past guest into the room with you a little bit almost through social, I think is so clever. It takes obviously this very high touch relationship with your guest and it's not this polished marketing asset. It's more of a conversational thing. If you were sending it to almost like a member of your team, hey, we're considering listing this property when you think of it? This kind of stuff I think really works well for Instagram stories. This could be put on YouTube as well. We put that in the book, but I think Instagram stories is more of the medium here. And these

are things that you could do every week. You can certainly get a lot of brain awareness out of it. And you get people excited maybe about a listing that's on upcoming. Hey, I like the way that you actually talked about this listing before it was live. And you could potentially leverage that and get some benefit of it. From an advertising standpoint too, by the way, you could show all of your upcoming listings like this and then promote those. If they were reels, for example, you can promote those reels to people that are actually watching more than half of them. People that are on your email list, you could then promote that reel to people that are on your email list and get a lot more visibility. But I think going behind the scenes obviously takes, I always say this with clients too,

there's things that we can do from afar and things we can't do from afar. This fits perfectly in that bucket of like things that we cannot do from afar. It really is a beauty to be doing. But for clients that we have that have dipped their toe into this water, I think it's been really impactful. I don't know if you've seen this type of content before and what your thoughts are on it. So this is, this goes back to, oh, I was pre COVID stuff. And this is before I really knew Hunter and Ginger at Beach Ball. But this is what Hunter used to do. This is what this goes back to, oh, I was pre COVID stuff. And this is before I really knew Hunter and Ginger at Beach Ball.

But this is what Hunter used to do. This is what he did. This is how he made a name for himself, especially at Travel Nut, because he broke his website this way, getting too much traffic coming from, he had some of these videos that were going viral. And it was slowing things down to a point where obviously we got everything fixed there. But yeah, that was a, and it's funny because as I connected with him later, I still go back to that story of the salesperson was telling

me, yeah, this is what he does. This is, he goes done. He does, he does his tours of the, of every new property that they bring on. And obviously they brought on quite a few. So he had lots of videos there, but, but I love the idea of actually turning it into a series and getting that feedback. Cause I think the idea of just going through and showing the properties, I think it's nice. It's a nice touch. It gives people that feel of, hey, maybe there's something that I, the property manager, this is my favorite part over here, the little reading nook. Or this is my favorite part, the gourmet kitchen. Or this is my favorite part, the views from the hot tub.

Something like that. But I love that getting the interaction of, hey, what should we do for, we're going to paint this. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. And actually getting that engagement through is just taking it to that next level. So I love this concept. I love the idea. And I do, I think it's, we all have phones. We all have cell phones. We all have cameras on the phone. Most of them are pretty good. Yeah, if you want to do it at a higher level, you can, but it can be as simple as that. I think a lot of times those just mobile, mobily done or phone videos are just as well engaged with as a profession.

Nice, professionally done. Pay a thousand bucks for it. You just don't need to do that, especially on the social media side of things. Yeah, no, a hundred percent. So yeah, behind the scenes, sharing from your point of view, what you're doing in your business, what you're doing with your properties. I like these examples of going to specific accounts and seeing how they do it because it helps people orient themselves quite a bit. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's dive in the second idea to maybe play with local business spotlight, which we've expanded now, I would argue, since we published the book into like roundups could

be another way to do local business spotlights. So we have a client and we're not doing their social to be clear, but they came up with this format. They've been just crushing it doing this format on Instagram specifically, where they'll do X best things in area. So imagine like five best breweries in Minneapolis or something like that. And then they'll slide one will be like the name of the number one. And then you name the property that if you have the or the brewery in this case, then you have a little clip of the outside of it or the inside of it or the beers or something like that, which you can even get this from afar if you have permission to get content

from other people on Instagram. So this is one that I think you could potentially do from afar. The other way that I'm noticing this makes a lot of sense is to take blog posts that we've already written for clients in some cases, 10 best restaurants in Orange Beach or something like that, and convert that idea into social. I think what a lot of people do with blog posts is they try to post like a screenshot of an image or something and say, click in our bio, go read our blog posts. But that's not, that format is not native to the platform. Like it doesn't make sense on Facebook or Instagram, typically speaking, that you're scrolling and you're consuming content on there and that you're going to go stop what you're doing, click on the profile, click to the link and go from there.

That would be more of the Instagram workflow. On Facebook, it would be like you could do a link post and post the blog. And that's fine. We do that occasionally. I'm not completely opposed to it. But I'm trying to push our team more into doing more of the spotlight roundup style posts on Facebook or Instagram because it's more native to that platform. You're going to get a lot more reach. And then you could always link in the comments on Facebook to the blog post if you

want to, or an Instagram, you can still put that link in your bio, there's nothing stopping you from doing that. But you're going to see way more reach if you do this versus, again, like screenshot in the blog post that say go to our website, read it. That's not what a social person wants to consume in some cases. So yeah, in my mind, this is you can also if you're new in a market to like, what a great way to build kind of some awareness around other local businesses. If you have a local business that's local, that's active on Instagram and you're tagging them, Hey, this place has no lie, the best pizza and all of insert destination here. And you should mean that obviously you shouldn't just say that, but if you believe that's the

case, like whatever you recommend to your guests, if you're talking about that and putting content on your website and on your social pages about that local business and tagging them and letting them know that they might be able to help you in some other way down the road. Link swaps would be one obvious SEO improvement. They could just tag you in content occasionally. You get some reach there. So anyways, it opens the door for future opportunity for growth. And these are like relatively easy things to come up with because you probably know what your five favorite restaurants are if you're in that local market. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on this one, but I think this could be a staple. This could be something you put out twice a week easily

and not really run out of ideas anytime soon. Exactly. I think this is more that fun, hey, I'm going to be a good ally of our destination here. I'm going to make sure that everybody is benefiting because when we're all, but it is, we all have to benefit. And we've talked about it as the vacation rental industry,

but each of these individual markets, they have their own kind of self-sustaining ecosystem there. And you want to be a part of that. And this is, I do, I really like this as an offshoot to potentially get those SEO link backs as well. But it is, especially if you're trying to grow your social following and social engagement and stuff like that, And you can leverage some of that. Again, you don't want to, you want to make it feel like you're, you want it to be a symbiotic relationship, not a parasitic relationship. But that's, I think that's the key is that

as long as everybody's getting some boost and everybody's getting some value from it, I don't think you're going to have very much difficulty in getting some of these other local businesses to participate and have fun. And again, just it's a no, it's a win for everybody involved. And the traveler gets a little benefit as well, because they get a better understanding of at a local level without having to read something or do anything like that. They can get that right in their social feed. Yeah. One thing I've noticed on Instagram, these ones that do well in this format, they get a lot of bookmarks and I don't know where it's saved on Instagram, which I don't know if that's part of the algorithm, so to speak. I'm not going to sit here and pretend

I'm an Instagram algorithm expert, but I feel like it has to be because when I see those events happen where they get 10, 20,000 people to watch a reel and then you see a bunch of saves and bookmarks on it because it's, yeah, I'm going to go to that destination later. Let me save this so I can reference back to it. Or I haven't heard of that place before. What is up with that brewery? What is up with that restaurant? And so on and so forth. I feel like that helps you with the algorithm. Again, that's just based on my own experience of what I've seen clients do. We're not writing that page, but they do a good job. So it came to mind as a really practical example. And we're dipping our toe into that water a little bit more. And again, great, like you said,

great parasitic, I call it barnacle, right? Especially if you're tagging a local business that has more followers than you and your brand new page, it's like a great way to get some awareness out there. And that local business probably needs your help. It's something that does make sense. It's not parasitic. It's symbiotic. I think you described that very well, for sure. Awesome.

Let's go into contest. That was the next idea that I had. And this could be a photo contest. I will say anytime you're asking the guest to do something, you're the drop-off of like engagement on a contest goes so much lower. So we have a client, for example, who did a contest a little bit towards the end of last year. The ask was go to this landing page, give us your email address so you can enter into the contest. That was how we let the winner know. So we needed to do that. And then it was, I think it was follow us on Facebook. We can't require it, but we encourage it. Hey,

please follow us on Facebook. We'll give you extra entries. If you click to our Facebook page, we'll give you extra entries. If you click to our Instagram profile and then share it. And then anyone you share with, you get extra entries. You can do this through different apps. King Sumo is the one that we've done before. So if you're giving away a two, three, two or three nights stay, and you're able to give away something of value like that, like a free stay, I think people are more drawn to

it. I've seen some people in our space do, by the way, like merch giveaways. I saw a client a while ago in Maine and they were giving away like one of their beach bags and like people were really excited about that. And that's obviously 20 bucks, not 2000 bucks, depending on the property you might be giving away for three days. So that might be something to play with potentially, but don't give away a pen or something like really lame. But if someone's really into it, like I could see that working. We also have a client, by the way, that did a giveaway of gift cards Christmas. And he was labeling it, let us like your local vacation company help you with your Christmas gift giving. And he was giving away like general gift cards. It wasn't like to

his business. It was like a target gift card or insert whatever restaurant gift card. And that seemed to do well, but I noticed a lot of people piling in. We're just not really a type of people that were looking to book a property with him. It was just people that wanted free stuff. So you gotta be careful with that. I think if you do any sort of vacation rental free stay giveaway type stuff on social media, obviously you want to be very hyper aware of who you're targeting and vetting and validating that guest a little bit more aggressively perhaps. But the clients that we've had that have done this so far, I think have had really good outcomes. Maybe any reaction you have to the contest idea or how you see that done recently. And I'll pull some numbers so we can share those

while we get going here. Yeah, no, I think that's something where anytime you hit it on the head is anytime you're having them submit something via a page on the site or something like that, it's you're hoping for the best. I guess I'm curious, have you ever tried like having tag that tagging them in the post or using hashtags or doing anything like that? I know that and it's admittedly, this is my and we just we don't do it enough on the organic side where you'd be doing some of those more regular posting. Have you seen that be more effective or have you tried, has anybody been willing to try something like that? Yeah, I feel like the best, most obvious thing to collect is the email address.

So I favor that versus like this post, then you get a lot of reach. But I will say maybe that's my own internal bias creeping in where I want the email list to grow. I don't want to end the month and say, we got a million people to see this post on Facebook or Instagram, but I can't really point to any specific long-term tangible benefit from that. So I feel like I'm just too close to the problems to give you an accurate read on that, to be honest with you. But I'm open to it. We have a client who has done these giveaways and pushed the email addresses. I pulled up the numbers for reference, by the way. So this particular person was able to spend roughly $400 on their Facebook ads

and Instagram ads to promote this giveaway. They got 2,800 entrants with valid email addresses, which means that 3.5% of people who clicked over to our landing page actually converted, which is a little bit lower than I'd expect. We did another one. I'm looking here. We did another one that was,

I think like a month or two later, and we got a 4.5% conversion rate, which feels a little bit closer to what I would hope, maybe 5% range. So that's people who come in on the landing page, they enter the contest, give you a valid email address, and then later click that email to validate that it's legit. That is how we confirm the entries, by the way. That's one thing that KingSumo does, which I really like, as opposed to people just putting in mickeymouse at gmail.com, which is dumb, by the way, because if you did win, like mickeymouse

at gmail.com actually was the winning entry. we're going to be emailing a fake email address i always give that example by the way i saw that early in my career if someone put in mickeymouse at gmail.com which i thought was ridiculous but someone probably owns mickeymouse at gmail.com and they probably get spam after spam i'm just that person i've heard it's hell to have conrad at gmail.com i don't have that but or like paul at gmail.com i've heard that's just like hell because people just enter it all the time. I can't speak to if that's true or not. But that makes me laugh. I'm not going to worry about that. Yeah. All right, tangent. Sorry, bye bye on that. But anyways, back to the contest piece. Yeah, so 2800 people entered the email, I mentioned the few dollars of ads before. When it all boiled down to I did a LinkedIn post on

this too a little while ago. Basically, they picked up new emails for under $1. I think it was like 70 cents or something like that, if memory serves. And that's accounting for the fact that we quote unquote lost revenue during the guest day. So I'm assuming that was part of our marketing expense. We gave away two nights of this property, three nights of this property, and the few hundred dollars of revenue that we lost. I actually don't even know if we lost revenue, to be honest with you. It might not have booked anyways, but let's just assume it would have. Cleaning fee, all that, I'm accounting all the fees into that equation. And we picked up, again, a little bit under 3,000 email addresses. It's now been a few

months and those email addresses have had a little bit lower activity than the general list, but not significantly so. They still have email open rates in the high teens, low 20s. I'm still getting clicks, still getting bookings from that email list today from this contest that was run back in December, just for reference point there. Love the contest. The idea that we have the book, actually, if you go over to page 190 of the book is to do a guest photo contest. I'm still open to those kinds of things. Again, the trouble that we have with them is just that the level of participation is very low unless you're big. If you're big, they work. Like we have large clients that have these resorts with two, three, 400,000 person email lists. They run a guest photo contest

and they get enough participation for it to be meaningful. If you're a tiny property manager with 15 listings, five listings, and you don't have the ability to get people to like take action, I think you're going to find yourself not having a great time with guest photo contests. You just won't see enough activity for that to be a valid thing. You'll just and then it discourages you in my mind to much, much bigger fan of giveaways as opposed to like photo contest stuff, unless you're big, in which case ignore it and do photo contests and you'll get some reach from them.

Awesome. Yeah. Do you want to take us into seasonal vacation guides maybe i've been running point here no that's good seasonal vacation guides i think that those are the what we always saw the value of it on the just organic side was that people do those searches specifically for season seasonal specific getaways so being able to build those out in eBooks, in a PDF format, in an infographic format, just being able to visualize some of that and putting that spring spin on what people can do in the area. I think, especially for those markets that have four seasons,

in Minnesota, we're lucky. You can write a spring, a summer, a fall, and a winter. You might get it in one day, but the thing is that you can at least be able to vary that content up. But I do, knowing that seasonality, just general seasonality, we know is in the travel space, but it is the seasons themselves factor into that seasonality. So why would you not try to deliver content that's going to be representative of what that's going to be? And looking at what you've got there, establishing yourself as a thought leader, capturing that email address for direct marketing.

Obviously that's going to be beneficial for us, but where have you seen these be especially effective? And I see, I see the example on Pinterest and on your website, but what would be some of the examples that you've seen that are the most effective here? To go to where we had the idea of rounding up a local business, I got 12 best breweries in Minneapolis or something like that. I think you can do the same thing for different reasons for travel.

So seasonal is the example we give here, right? Where it could be five awesome things to do this spring in North Myrtle Beach could be like a very specific example. So then you could flip the framing of the content a little bit into a type of business. It's a reason for visiting is the way that I think about it.

So why does someone want to come to your destination? I worked with a host, more of a host than a property manager a while ago. She owned most of the listings that she was marketing in Nashville. And her framing was like, she had different guides for come here and have your bachelorette party, a very common reason that someone might go to Nashville. So she made her social content and some of the guides on her website, tailored around things like that. Come here to go see a Titans game. There was like a guide like park here, stay at this listing. It's our best one. If you want to go see the Titans and so on and so forth. So I thought that was a

good framing of how you can think about social content is that there's a reason why people are traveling because they're interested in doing things while they're there. Of course, then there's a reason why people travel because it's a time of year, it's a holiday and so on and so forth. We have a client who marketed heavily for different holidays, like not non-traditional holidays, but like holidays that you typically don't see a lot of marketing around. We have a client who's like trying to get booked for Passover completely. But I think he shared with me on the last call that he is completely booked for Passover, but it's like not a marketing that I think a lot of people would necessarily be

focused on. But he was, he himself happens to be Jewish, I think, which helps this kind of framing of understanding that holiday very well. But yeah, like he's pretty much sold out or very close to it sold out for Passover, which for him is going to be great revenue and stuff like that. You could easily have a how to celebrate Passover in destination piece of content that goes out on social media. Then of course you could promote that content

to your past guest list or to a broader audience on Facebook, on Instagram, other sources, other places and get some value there. We have certainly done these over the years for like your ultimate guide to July 4th in North Myrtle Beach, like that kind of content. And I think that is good fodder for social media.

And I think that's good fodder for blog posts and that kind of content as well. So love the idea of doing seasonal because there's so many different things you could do. The example I always give here is the mattress store marketing. We might have talked about this before on the show, which is this idea. If you follow the mattress store, they just make up the most insane reasons to have a sale. They'll be like, yeah, as we record this, it's early March. I know you've been listening to this a little bit later, but it'll be like, yeah, like spring has sprung sale, like 20% off all Sealy mattresses or like, it'll be president's day. They have a president's day sale. What does president's day have to do with mattresses? Nothing, but mattresses just do a wonderful job. Mattress stores do a wonderful job of just manufacturing a special or a deal out of a season, out of a holiday, out of something

kind of fun. They'll have tax return specials coming up here soon, I would imagine. People get their tax returns back, hey, go buy a mattress and so on and so forth. So yeah, bullish on following kind of some other ideas like that to create some demand or create some interesting reasons for why you are reaching out. Well, I'm reaching out to you today because obviously we're having your tax return sale right now. We do this about once a year and during this special, we offer XYZ benefits and so on and so forth. And it helps to have a few different offers that you can rotate in and out. Everyone's going to get very burned out on 10% off. Like I think there has to be some other hooks in there that you can play with, but yeah, that's up to you and your marketing team to be creative on how to do that. And again,

it can tie back to different seasons or reasons for travel, which I think is such a great thing for social media content. If you're running low on ideas, you can always follow the mattress companies and see what they're doing and try to loosely associate some random. I'm sure there'll be like the call I'm doing after this. Paul's about the solar eclipse. Like I could just picture them like solar eclipse sleep during the middle of the day. Like just I could just see them like getting creative around that. So that's a fun example.

But it goes to show if you just let your brain go loose a little bit, you can find a lot of associations that could be fun social content as well. Especially when you've got all those events happening in the summer and a lot of these destinations are in the fall and a lot of these destinations to be able to wrap something like that around. That's it. It does. It feels like we're borrowing from the local area guide and the seasonal vacation guide and just push putting those together. So I love leveraging off of those two ideas and putting something really cool out there. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Awesome. We got one more here. Maybe you can take us home on that. And then I think we're coming up against the time wise. So Q&A is thoughts on these. Have you seen these before? Worked?

I have seen these before. I think these are great. I especially if you have that following, you're trying to develop that following. It might get a little rough there. But yeah, if you've got a good, let's say a couple, a thousand followers and you can get them all, half of them to come together and bandy about some questions. I love the idea. Once again, it allows you to interact more directly with guests, but it allows you to

demonstrate that expertise in your local area. You are the, you can become a local social star if you want to. And I help, I think that helps build your individual brand if that's something you're looking to do, but also building the brand of the company. And wrapping it up to what we've been talking about here the whole time. I mean, that's a basis for a lot of these reaching a lot of people in a very short order there. I think that's where I think we can agree social is beneficial. You can reach a lot of people. Now, is it the right people? Yeah, that's up for some debate. But yeah, Facebook Live, Instagram Live, being able to

put some of these events together. I haven't seen a lot of them, admittedly, but the ones that I've seen outside of our space, for some kind of straightforward e-commerce type of sites, they get really good results. Their sales bump 50, 60% every time they do one of these over what they typically see in that given timeframe. So I think being able to tie it to something, again, tangible that people can do, like whether it is a live Q&A about an event or whether it's a live Q&A about an upcoming, I don't know, travel topic, something like that. But I do like the idea of being able to just get more FaceTime with people and whether it's literal FaceTime or that figurative online FaceTime, I think it's great. That was one of my most, no, I just, the last thing I was going to say there is my most unhinged idea of all time, which is to do cold calls through FaceTime. I haven't seen anyone

actually pull that off yet, but if someone ever does that, I would love to know how that worked for you. Just invite yourself into the living room, so to speak, like digitally, like it's old school, like knock on the door. Hey, can I come in your house and try to sell you something you don't need? But just randomly cold call someone through FaceTime instead of a phone call. Everyone in the world has a phone call, but a FaceTime call, you might be like, that's weird. Like why would someone FaceTime me? It's totally random. No, I don't know much to add other than what you said there. It's just one of my more unhinged things that I've not been able to test, but I think would be interesting. Vacation planner, FaceTiming a past guest and

being like, hey, Paul, you haven't booked your trip yet to North Merle Beach. What's going on? Are you planning on coming this year or not? We need you here. Beach is great. Missing you. So it's going to be fun. But yeah, hopefully that was a useful, fun exercise for you on the social media post ideas sort of things. Again, if you want to head over to the physical copy of the book, or this should be the same in Kindle. It's in the Up for the Challenge chapter, page 188 on the printed book. If you're on Kindle, it might be a little bit different, but just buy the printed book.

That's cool. That's actually what's selling more, by the way, interestingly, than the Kindle version. So that's all we got, Paul. This is not necessarily a social activity. You can do it by yourself. It's going to be good for you, and it's going to be good for us.

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