Heads In Beds Show - When Social Media Is NOT The Right Marketing Channel For Your VR Business

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about when you should NOT use social media to get more traffic to your vacation rental business.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing🔗 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 today? Just a wonderful day. Another fantastic recording day in the short-term rental world.

We've just been discussing the latest here's and there's and all around the squares here a little bit. I feel like it's a fun time to be in the industry. You got Airbnb probably ready to run that 15-second ad that everybody's been talking about. Now we have to expand upon that. So how are you doing, sir? You were saying it's a beautiful day and i thought you were going to finish in the neighborhood are you a daniel tiger or the kids daniel tiger so close you should have done that close the listeners don't know daniel tiger probably oh man they should now yeah they should know mr rogers but that's it's

pretty soft mr rogers which i never really watched that as a kid i don't know if i just missed it age-wise or something but people were like people were saying that they were obsessed with this character. And I was like, I saw clips of him later. But I'm like, I never saw this when I was a kid. I don't know. I was a Mr. Rogers kid. Okay. Could have been.

I don't know. Yeah, Daniel Tiger is fun, though. Daniel Tiger. It's a nonsensical universe, though, when you think about it. Like the grandfather lives far away. They're on this island. There's this sort of like quasi intelligent bus that somehow drives around like trolley and picks up the kids.

I don't know. Sometimes I watch these kids shows and I just get a little confused by the structure of things. You know what I mean? Because parts of it makes sense and parts of it make no sense. I will say you are missing some of the context for Mr. Rogers in some of those items, some of the trolley and stuff like that. That's that that is there.

There's some of that baked into the, I think as a nod to the people who, who probably did watch and can trace back there. So I think just those two specific examples, I'd say you're missing just a bit of context there. And the original is the trolley somewhat intelligent without having a driver. It's just the trolley just shows up. Is that what I'm missing? No, it's no, it's just, it's that what i'm missing no it's no it's just

it's the opening scene it's that's the opening every day it's the trolley ride through through philly right or pittsburgh yeah as a philly one of those i know it's some yeah again some listener is now screaming as i can't believe you guys don't know the exact city yeah we lost any pennsylvania property manager sorry about that. Like the whole state, I'm sorry. I don't think there's many out there. Yeah, there's not many there. That's true. Poconos? It's like a joke about this before.

I did a joke on LinkedIn a few weeks back about North Dakota doesn't exist. No one actually exists in North Dakota. This is not a real place. No one's ever been there. It's not real. Again, I'll believe when I see it, and I haven't seen it yet. I'm 30-something years old, so.

Hey, the Bison have seven. Yeah, no, it's all good. You know what I have seen though, is a lot of marketing data over the years. And the marketing data that I've seen leads me to a conclusion that we're going to have some fun with today, which is that social media is a channel that you can leverage, but it's not right for everybody, nor is it necessarily the best marketing strategy that you can always spend the most time on because there's other better marketing channels out there. You and I, we mostly agree on this, but I think it's maybe not the most popular idea amongst people in our space. And there's certainly, I don't want to say exceptions, there are certainly situations that lead social media

to be a lot more successful for brand A versus brand B, C, D, E, and F. And I think it's worth going through those a little bit. So what's here when someone says, I'm a vacation manager, I want to get more homeowners or more guests, I'm going to use social media to get those owners explicitly. What's your reaction to how someone could use social in a positive way? And then what do you see as the drawbacks

to them overly indexing or focusing on just social media channels? Yeah, I think on the owner side, it's tough just because you're really trying to go after a very specific audience. So I don't think you can really separate that. And I think we've talked about it previously and just how you're talking, what you're posting.

Guest focus versus promotional focus, salesy focus versus an owner focus or anything like that in between. So I think that's one of those things where if someone says they want to grow their bookings, grow their inventory, it is. How are you being, I think my first question is, how are you going to be consistent? How are you going to make sure that you are posting consistently solid information and engaging with those people? This is where I think maybe this whole conversation turns into how can you justify hiring one

person to do social media? Because it is. If you really want to do social media well, it's all about that consistency. It's about posting every day. It's about engaging with people. It's about getting comments and commenting back. It's treating that as its own audience. And I think the most successful companies that I've seen on the social media side of things, whether that's LinkedIn, whether that's Facebook, whether that's Instagram, they have a following because they're devoting resources to that

following. They are engaging in the conversation and continuing the conversation. And I think that gets to the negative side of things too. The people who don't do the social media side effectively aren't doing it consistently. They will post once a week or once every two weeks. And even if they are getting engagement there, they're not engaging back out with that audience. And that social media audience should be more personal. It is. It's about when we got on social media, it was early on and it was a place where you were making friends. You're making digital friends out there or you're localizing, you're putting your in-person friends online, things like that. That's the type of community. That's the type of audience. That's the persona you're going after. So to not engage

with them outside of one post every day, or even a post every day, if you're not following that up with additional engagement, I think that's where you see people who don't see that value and give it up right away. So maybe that's the overarching look there, but what do you think there? Yeah, I think those are valid criticisms and valid problems that I think the property manager is going to face, which is you hit a few things there that we had in our outline. One is like the targeting. It's really hard on the homeowner side. I would argue bordering on possible on the homeowner side to make sure that the only people seeing the content are in fact people that actually own vacation homes. There is no category inside of Facebook for owns a second home in insert destination here,

right? That just straight up doesn't exist. So we use lots of like creative workarounds there, but that's all they ever are going to be is workarounds. And it's always going to be a little bit of noise in there with regards to targeting. So certainly your homeowner recruitment ad is going to be seen by people who are not obviously homeowners, and they aren't necessarily the right target. Now, then the question becomes, okay, if it's shown to at least some of the right people, will I get some benefit from that? We could come back to that question. But I think that's certainly a challenging side, whether it's organic or paid content. I think you're right, too, with regards to like, what sort of the appetite you have for quality and consistency.

It was so funny. A client of mine actually bought a vacation company recently, not in his core market. So he is down in a beach market. He drives up to this mountain market and he wasn't even intending to, but the deal was presented to him and he buys the vacation company. And I go, okay, so I know the playbook we're running for his company at the beach. It's doing well. We go and start to look at the playbook that we might be able to run for the company up

at the mountains. And we find, no lie, that they last posted on social media in February of 2022. Okay, keep in mind, it's February 2024, probably when you're listening to this, but it could potentially be March. Yeah, two years of not posting on social media and this property owner who's not even, or property management company owner, who's not even the most social media savvy guy himself sits there and go, if I was a renter, I would think they're out of business if I hadn't seen them post in two years. So I would take honestly a weekly posting over nothing. And that's what was happening in this scenario.

Or I would argue if you truly have no time to post anything, you might be better off just deactivating the page because people are going to find the page and assume things that maybe aren't true if they go to search and validate that it's a real company and things like that. So I think there is like a minimum, again, appetite or level of commitment that you have to have for social media, even if even to give you a C minus grade, like you have to be doing some level of activity for it to be pushing content out there and getting some level of reach from it. But it's hard, like the organic reach now that we get on Facebook, it's gone, come back a little bit, there's certainly a period there where I felt like there was nothing. Now I feel like we're getting a little bit better reach for most stuff. But the competition on

Facebook is extreme. And I don't mean other vacation companies. The fact that you go on Facebook, Instagram too in particular, and you're inundated with short form videos that are, to be completely honest, ridiculously entertaining. Some of the funny stuff that you see on there is it's hard to compete with that when it's click here and book my property, which is what a lot of social media content can look like. It is hard. It is hard to do well.

And it's really hard to do well from, I would say, from a position of me, me, which I think is often what, you know, we find with clients is they want to talk about their specials, their promotions, that sort of stuff. And the most optimal strategy is what's in it for the viewer or the potential guest on the other side. And a lot of that may mean the format of the content, you know, what you talk about, and so on and so forth. And the attention span that person has for content that's not incredibly engaging on social is virtually no. So there's people that's one thing that bothers me. I think we've picked at this before people talking about our attention spans are so short and this and that we know that's objectively not true, because people will watch two to three hours straight of Netflix content. So they'll consume content that they like, and that they're entertained

by what they won't do is tolerate mediocre stuff that's just not entertaining enough because it's just a swipe away to get to that next video that's going to be more entertaining. That's the way to think about it is not, oh, I'm competing with this vacation rental company over here or this one over here or even like an Airbnb OTA. That's not even what you're competing with either. It's how do I make this content engaging enough where people are going to sit here and consume it and stop what they're doing and stop the swipe and actually go into the next piece there. And that's really hard. One note I had on the outline on my side of things was that the property really has to be

exceptional. I think for you to get really excellent results and the more exceptional and unique and strange the property, the better it tends to do. I think if you have 20 of the same condo and you're marketing on social, you can get some success here and there. You can certainly chip away at it. It can be 5%, 10% of your traffic. Maybe the same percentage of your bookings may come from that, but it's never going to get that kind of exponential reach because it's just not interesting enough. If we're just being completely honest, like the property itself is not interesting enough to be featured on social media and get the type of engagement that it really needs for it to succeed organically. So I don't know if you've encountered this over the years, but this seems

to be the dividing line is like, how interesting is it to actually just watch this and consume it? Absolutely. I think that ultimately it comes down to, we've talked about it, it's interruption. You have to interrupt that. And if you're just doing it with the same mold, it is that one bedroom condo that can be seen in many beach markets or the two bedroom, it is. How do you differentiate it? If you're going to go wild with the interior design, okay, now we got something there. But I do. I think that it takes something that's, when we say it's social media worthy, Instagram worthy, I see a lot of different companies use that as a selling point on the owner's side of things.

That's fantastic. You got to back that up. So if I think it is, you have to actually make sure that these properties do get that facelift. And if a property has a facelift or you can show a before and after, those types of things I think are compelling. That will get the audience to stop what they're doing, but for how long? So you have to think about that time that you have them to commit with a video. Yeah. maybe you can engage them for 15 to 30 seconds, 60 seconds, something like that, if it's really good. If you're doing it just with images, your hook better be pretty quick in there of if you're presenting six images and you want to do a little hook, book here in the middle, I'd do it after four something like that

thinking about the attention span that they have but overall yeah you have to have something that's going to stop someone in their seats again it stops the scroll stop whatever they're doing and actually sit down have a chance to get off your website that's 50 50 at best too because they might stick on your profile, go to your business page, but there's still one more step to them getting ultimately to where you want them to go, where we can start to retarget them outside of page likes or something like that, engaging with the page. Yeah. It makes it a lot more difficult, I guess, is what we're trying to say here. Yeah. And to your point, to frame it a little more positively for a second, it would be even

when you do all the work to get someone to stop and consume the content and look at what you're doing, you do the hard part there. The trouble that I find too, this is, this would be the case for doing more of social media content when you are seeing some level of success is that really is just planting a seed in their brain and they're not really necessarily acting on it in that moment. So when we did this study, we did this last year, I need to go and do this again for 2023 data that should be feasible for me to do now, which is that we looked at all of our clients

and we put it all into this big spreadsheet. And by the time we added everybody in there, it was millions of visits to vacation rental websites that we were looking at. And it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 2%. It was like 1.89 or 2.01% of people come from social media and make a reservation. So it's not that you never get bookings from social. The trouble is that's not the last visit. It's probably the first visit

that they have. It's more of that discovery awareness that they might make through social media. So if you're going to do social media and you have the property that's interesting, and you can create video and photo content that's engaging the people want to consume, again, I think you've done the hard part, but you really are never going to see the tracked measurable ROI that you might actually be getting because it's this lovely discovery engine. And that's the pro here of doing it is that it can be this discovery engine for people to find you on social, find you on Instagram in particular, pin it, save it, like it to

your point, follow you on Instagram. None of those things are going to lead to a booking today, tomorrow, the next day, most likely, but they might lead to a booking 30 days later, 45 days later, and so on and so forth. And we got a chance to work with kind of one of these influencer type Airbnb accounts a little while ago. And it was really interesting to see the metrics behind the account, because they would frequently have stuff between paid and organic promotions that they were doing on the Instagram page, where they would have two, 3 million people see the properties,

like it was like a group of properties every month between all the advertising they were doing. And they would see people go specifically out into Google, do a search for the name of the company and the name of the brand of the properties and then book. So then Google gets all the credit and we weren't working with this client on SEO or paid search or anything. But I'm like, really, all that technically, yes, they did click from Google and then made a reservation. But social media can be, this is the good part about it, can be this discovery engine where people find it and they're drawn to it like a moth to a flame, they're drawn to that property, they think, wow, this looks really interesting, this location looks really interesting, and so on and so forth. And that's where you

actually see the benefits. If you're envisioning your property, and you're being honest about the condition and the location, the design and all those things that you were talking about earlier, you have to think to yourself, is this the best channel for me to be focused on and putting a lot of effort into if I can't generate that flywheel of people looking at it, liking, commenting, sharing, tagging, and so on and so forth, and then getting results on it. Some of the best social media work that I think we do is half the work was already done by the property and the photos and the video work that was done before we showed up. And then we're just repackaging it and formatting it into different ways and trying to share

that in a way that's engaging to people. And it takes us the same amount of work, whether it's a good or bad product to market. But one, we see this exponential kind of growth and exponential follower count. And one, we just see a flat line. People just not really caring too much. We're not really seeing anything that really speaks to them. So it's tricky. It's hard. And this is not a silver bullet. I saw, I was listening to a podcast the other day, a client of mine sent to me and it was, I forget exactly who said it, but it was something to the effect of there are no silver bullets. There are a hundred BBs, a hundred gold BBs is what he said. I thought it was clever because I think social media is

that. It's one piece amongst many that you can use to help grow your business, your vocational business for sure. But it's not a silver bullet like some people make it out to be because it's always going to have to be supported by an awesome direct booking website. So if they go to that website and they're interested in booking direct, they better be pretty confident that you're going to deliver on what it is they're after. It's going to be followed up by honestly, it works better when it's followed up by remarketing by retargeting. It's followed up by an email, maybe that they hop on the list, and then they get an email asking them to book later. It's part it's like the more pieces that you put into place, the more results you're going to get. And I think that that's the

mistake that I see people making is they assume that one channel is going to get them where they want to go. And then they overly fixate on social for some reason, because they might have heard that this is the way or they consume social media themselves. So they think surely I can do this for my business. They see a very clear path to doing marketing on social media versus SEO might be foreign to them. Paid search might be foreign to them. They don't really know how the systems work. They feel like they understand how the social systems work, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, or something like that. So I think that's where a lot of this stuff comes from, if I'm being honest. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I'll say, just throw out some other ideas there

is that rent an audience and social media is a rented asset. You don't necessarily have the same level of, I'm saying control in air quotes for the listener, control over your social media audience. There's been situations in the past, we've had a client that dealt with this. Certainly on the ad side, you and I deal with this all the time, which is that Facebook can just decide, nope, we're not going to approve your ad. You guys are advertising housing. It's not housing Facebook. They're getting a little better. They're getting a little better. I will say that, but I still seem to get stuck in these loops lately where I'm getting rejection after rejection. And it's like Facebook's permission to allow us to market to our audience or to an audience that we have, even if we're targeting people who follow our page or people that are fans of us or people

that are on our email list. These are all valid targeting methodologies and systems inside of Facebook. I say Facebook at like across Facebook and Instagram. But it certainly is something where tomorrow Facebook could close your page, Instagram close your page, and there really is not a lot you can do to potentially control that. So in the world of people talk about Airbnb having control their business, certainly social was the same situation. They really have control of your list, your followers, your audience, unless you're working diligently to take them off that platform and go in another place where you can potentially get their permission a little bit more easily. Email being the most obvious one that we just talked about an episode or two ago about doing

email marketing, then I think you have to figure out ways to realize that you're on a rented audience there, no different than a listing site in some respect, and you've got to plan accordingly. And I think we've talked about previously how that meta business manager account, I just told you, I'm working through with a business who literally is trying to get access to a business that they own. But because the owner of the business manager, the user, the email address, could not find the access, could not access it. I don't know.

But whatever it is, we are having to go through a four-month long process in order to get the, and we still don't have it, to get access to a Meta Business Manager account. They have access to the page. They have access to the Ads Manager account, but it's giving access and providing access to anything else that they need within that account. For a while, Facebook, Meta, whatever, when they did the rebrand, really it was to Meta, they put these Meta Business Manager accounts over top and they put a prerequisite in to do

remarketing or any type of custom audience targeting that you had to have this meta business manager account over top. What happened is, okay, all of a sudden, agency A owns your business manager account. Agency B owns your business manager account. And we got into this whole complex level of, yeah, for a while, you didn't know who owned your Facebook business page ultimately. And that's scary. That's it is that not even the concept of just meta going down at some point and all that equity you built up. Goodbye. Yeah. And it's the audience size too. It's not even just the fact of like access. I think you point out a valid thing there. It's the fact that I remember when I first started looking at social stuff, I wasn't even on the social team back then, but the agency

I used to work for back in 2014, 15, that era, there was certainly a time when you would be, it would be pretty straightforward for you to run contests and do posts and giveaways and things like that. I remember we did this one where we gave away, I think it was like a week or something like that. It was like a week long stay at a, I forget exactly what it was, a larger property. I remember that for sure. And we, I remember looking at the numbers and we reached the entire population of South Carolina. So it was like 6.7 million people saw our Facebook post organically. This was almost like before ads or before you could like, it was called dark post

back then. That's not what we were doing. This was just like a regular organic post on Facebook. And we did it by forcing people to like, and comment in order to enter the contest. And then we ran like a random number giveaway. And like, you can't even do that now. If you do that now, it's just not going to get very much organic reach. You're going to have to use paid ads to potentially get that reach. And the rules change. You can't even do what I was describing there

where you can force people to enter a contest by liking and sharing, even though people seem to get away with it all the time. But technically, if you read the rules and the bylaws, the privacy policy, all that kind of stuff that is the world of meta, can't force anyone to like a page in order to get access to something.

So it feels one of those platforms and one of those situations where if they're not careful, you realize that the control you have again is significantly, significantly more less stable than you think with regards to audience, because it can change at any moment in time. And people just don't always understand that until they get further into the process. The algorithms as with Google, as with any of the search, it is, it's, you never know how they're going to change. Ultimately, it's not us that gets the priority of what we want, what our needs, the businesses, we're working afterthought. It's how can meta make more money? Hopefully, how can they get the end user a little better experience, but make more money while

they're doing it? The advertiser, the business, the third part, where the middleman is always going to get the shaft there. So you kind of roll with the punches. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Maybe we can round out by doing some inverse thinking. This might be fun, which is that when does social media work well? So social media works well when you have a lot of time to dedicate to it and you can put out consistently great, engaging, interesting content that should include both photo and video content. Social media does well, or you can do better on social when you can put out a high volume of content and when you can break through the noise, right? If you're able to post once a week, okay, that's better than nothing. Again, you don't want people to think you're out of business, but it's better if you can certainly post three times a week, or if you can post every day,

if you have the ability to put out good stuff, that certainly can do you justice. Social media works better when you have exceptionally unique properties that have a certain aesthetic look, feel, indoor slides, theme rooms, massive properties that are in a beautiful setting in nature, all these kinds of things. If it's catchy, for lack of a better term, you're going to do a little bit better on social media. You're going to do a better job if you can reach your target demographic without necessarily needing to use a lot of paid access.

So instead of having to go in and boost every post or promote every post through Facebook as manager, by the fact of your posting on Instagram, your audience is the Instagram audience, you're going to see some benefit from that. You're going to benefit from social media if you can get someone to know and trust you. So if they wouldn't maybe trust you before, you're a new company, you don't have reviews, but you can do video content, photo content that humanizes you, that makes you look like someone that people want to do business with or want to stay with, you're going to benefit from social media. There's no way for me to frame this positively. Social media algorithms are unpredictable,

so I'm not even going to try. That was on our outline as well. Social media is one channel that you don't need as much permission to market into, right? So you don't have to go get approved by Airbnb or anything like that. If you are following the rules, generally speaking, you'll have a good time on social media. And if you put out the right quality and you put out the right appeal, you can do a lot of good things on social media, that's for sure. But if any of those things I just said over the past minute and a half or two minutes are not true, I think you're going to have a little bit of a harder time to have success in social. It's not that you'll have no success, not that you'll see no bookings coming in. But it's

in my mind, it's only ever going to be third or fourth, probably in your stack of priorities behind things like doing social marketing, or excuse me, search marketing, behind doing things like email marketing to your past guests, behind doing things like acquiring more inventory, getting more homes, so you can build that flywheel. And it's always going to be that kind of secondary third channel for us, unless you meet some of the criteria like we talked about over the last little bit. So know your business, know what you have, know what you're marketing. And then I think you can take social and do really well with it. Or you can realize that social is not for you. And maybe this is the way that I'll end this on my side. And that's okay. There's a lot of companies that we've worked with over the years that really don't have a strong social media presence at all.

We don't do their social media marketing. We focus just on SEO. We focus just on paid search, just on email. We focus on two or three things and try to do those really well. And they've done phenomenally well for their own business, right? They've, we have a client we worked with who started out like 15 properties. He just crossed 200 recently. And I think he has 200 Facebook fans and maybe a hundred followers on Instagram. Just never put effort into social media. Wasn't his focus focused on everything outside of that maybe is like the way to think about it. And his business has been phenomenally successful. It was doing seven to $8 million a year now in gross booking revenue. So this is not the only way to do it. This is one way to do it. There's some ways that it makes sense, but feel free to be go against

the grain from maybe the person outside who doesn't know our space well, and not focus on social. And I think you can still build a pretty good vacation rental marketing machine in my experience. Absolutely. It is. It's one spoke in the wheel. Ultimately, it's whether you use it, it has more weight for some less weight for other but it's it's not the wheel. Ultimately, it's whether you use it, it has more weight for some, less weight for other, but it's not the be all end all. And people who treat it like that, again, you're going to go as well or as poorly as you do. But in, I think some of the top performing companies that I've worked with, it is, it's

not overly weighted. It's used to generate what it does in the ultimate sales funnel there. And it's something that if you're good at it, who's good at it, we can see who struggles a little bit. So when you're good and continue to do it, if you're good, and if not find another channel, that's more effective for you, I would say. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's like, maybe we can start like a little series here of here's the way that this channel works well. Here's the way that this channel doesn't work well. When I was putting together the book a while ago, I was thinking of that because I made this list of like, when you're at this revenue level, there's a version of you working on social media that makes sense.

There's a version of you working on SEO when you're one property that actually makes sense. And it's ranking for the name of your property, just to give you an example, right? It's not, I'm gonna go rank for Orlando vacation rentals. If you're in Orlando and you have one condo, that's not your goal. That is a goal for someone, but not for you.

Your goal is different. So if you know what your goal is and how to work within that goal, I think you're going to have a lot of success. So awesome. We were a little doomsy today. Not like the worst that we've ever been, but a little down on some of these things just to bring a little dose of reality or a little, some metrics, some data about what we see in the real world from a marketing perspective and yeah, social. We like it. We're big consumers of it, but there's time and place when it makes sense for a vocational business. And hopefully the listener gets some benefit and value out of that.

So we'll be back next week, a fun new episode. I think we'll go into some other marketing topics as we like to tend to do here on the Heads in Bed show. If you made it this far, hopefully one thing that's not really social of you, but what certainly we're open to it being a social is you go to your podcast app of choice. I had a client actually email in, his initials are KB.

So he might know who it is if he's listening to this piece. And he said he had a hard actually email in. His initials are KB. So he might be, he might know who it is if he's listening to this piece. And he said he had a hard time finding the, the way to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. So if you email me, I'll send you like the exact link, the screenshot, or if you're unsure of where to go, email me, conrad at buildupbookings.com. I'll happily guide you through the process

for those five-star reviews because it helps us a lot. It doesn't cost you a dime. And if you, again, it's not a social activity, but if you make it a little social and email me, we can have a good time in the email inbox and that's always fun so we appreciate you if you made it this far though on a serious note thanks for listening we'll be back next week with another episode of the heads in bed show thanks so much