Heads In Beds Show - Choosing Between Agency, Freelancer & In-House Marketing Teams For Your Vacation Rental Business

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

In this episode, we dive into the options you have to build your marketing team: should you hire an agency, a solo freelancer or build an in-house team?⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellBlog post: Choosing Between Agency, Freelancer & In-House Marketing Teams For Your Vacation Rental Business🔗 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 are you doing today? Grand. How are you doing today, Conrad?

Doing great. It is a, we're into the, we're into January. Like we're not just like beginning of it is a we're into the we're into january like we're not just like yeah beginning of it now we're like we're into it right as we record this year on monday the 23rd and it's been a not great weather down here in the carolinas it's been overcast rainy every day but i was watching the football game yesterday and i was seeing just sheets of snow pour up in new york and you've told you've shared with me your your cold weather woes and stuff like that. So I'm not complaining too much. I'm overall pretty happy where things are at. Are you okay?

Didn't you send up any woolly socks or anything like that? Are you good? It is. We're starting to warm up. I actually joked with my daycare provider this morning that it feels like we should be in like February or March with how much weather we've had. That's the scariest part is it's still January. There's still stuff around the corner. I'm cautiously optimistic that we're going to be able to make it through winter. But yeah, it was, I think the thing about Buffalo snow, it's just so pretty. It's that snow globey snow that it always looks good on the telecast when you're watching those football games, if nothing else.

Now, I don't think playing on it would be a whole lot of fun, but it's, the end is near, the end is in sight.'ll get there that's winter will end it's just hard to see that in january always so don't you have a florida trip coming up next month it's certainly gonna help you up the middle of oh it's i gotta tell you it's gonna be pretty pretty enticing to just say we can extend this another week and push back. Maybe we just missed the flight or do something like that. We can work remote. And I work remote pretty effectively right now. Right on.

Yeah, let's get into it. I think we have a quick marketing minute bringing that back here on this episode. So you caught something where Google is actually removing a feature from search, which they don't often do. You caught this podcast thing. What was your read on that from Search Engine Journal?

Yeah, so this is something that basically that Google actually confirmed that they have removed the ability to play the podcast right from search results. And that's something that admittedly I do quite a bit. It's if I find an episode, I don't always go back to a Stitcher or Apple or Spotify or anything like that. I just like to do the search and do it right in line there. The one thing I think that was notable from that article was that right now, and this is by the data that they're seeing, is that YouTube actually is the primary channel where people are listening to podcasts through. It's not Spotify. It's not one of those other streaming services. So I think it would appear that maybe they'll put more of a push towards pushing more people to listen to podcasts and YouTube. They do have Google Podcasts platform right now.

I think if you looked at the app or anything like that, it doesn't look like it's been updated in about the last 18 months or so. So maybe this was the writing was on the wall here. But it will be interesting to see if they do transition out of that or they try to build some of those features into YouTube, what that looks like moving forward. Yeah, it just caught my eye. Additionally, after we talked about ChatGPT, Microsoft, the news today was that they confirmed they're investing big. We mentioned it last week that we talked about billions. They confirmed today that they are going to invest that multi, in the multi-billion dollar

range to make sure that it's implemented really in a lot of important areas in the Azure system, being able to implement that into Office, into any of the other products. I think that's where a lot of the intrigue comes from for me in kind of the future of what that all looks like. Yeah, OpenAPI, getting a lot of money coming towards it moving forward here. So I know you had a couple items as well. What did you have there? Yeah, one more quick thing on OpenAPI. ChatGPT recently launched their pro subscription. I think I saw $42 a month. I haven't seen this yet in my account. So I've logged in. I logged in this morning just to test something and I did not yet see the $42 per month option inside of my account. But for people that do upgrade, it's going to be like basically unlimited availability. You're not

going to have issues where it goes down and stuff like that. I think you get responses quicker as well. So there's some pros there. We'll see. I suspect they have to dig out of this financial hole at their end as far as using the service. So how many people will pay $42 a month? That's a fascinating question. I don't know the answer to, but we'll figure it out. Yeah. A few other things. One of other Microsoft's other side hustles, if you will. It's funny how their side hustles make so much money. LinkedIn. I was curious how big LinkedIn was. I do quite a bit of posting on LinkedIn and 850 million users on LinkedIn, monthly active users, 5 billion in annual ad revenue on LinkedIn, which is surprising. Again, we talked about Bing last week being bigger than LinkedIn from a revenue perspective.

And that's fascinating to me. And then LinkedIn, yeah, 850 million users, 5 billion in ad revenue. And with all the tech layoffs and people going and looking for work, I feel like it's only going to get bigger. If you're looking for a role, a professional role, you were laid off by Google and you broke Google ads this morning. First of all, that's a bummer for everybody. I hate that people are getting laid off, but like the data that I've read said that when people get laid off, they go to LinkedIn and they start updating their profile. They start, Hey, I'm open for work. I, they hear my skills and stuff like that. Good platform, I think to do it on there. And interesting to see how big it is. I hadn't looked in a while. Another thing

that I saw that kind of caught my eye, half of young people, 18, 24, and even younger are buying for are buying things or specifically intentionally purchasing things that they discovered first through TikTok. So you talked about TikTok before as like a visibility channel. And now 50% of young people are using it as their primary kind of like search mechanism or how they discover products. A lot of people think I think they misconstrue that as Oh, they're only using TikTok. It's another not only using TikTok, they're only using TikTok. It's like, no, they're not only using TikTok. They're just saying TikTok influenced them. Half the things that they bought recently were influenced by TikTok. It doesn't mean that search is over or anything like that. Maybe we do a different

episode on that. One more thing that caught my eye, email marketing wise this week, MailChimp has been hacked. I think this was actually two weeks ago, but I just caught it here for this episode. Second time in six months, MailChimp got hacked. 133 customer accounts were hacked, which isn't a lot considering how many accounts they have. But one of them was WooCommerce, which powers tens of thousands of customer accounts with regards to e-commerce. It's a WordPress alternative to Shopify and things like that. Expose the insensitive data of many users, which I think means they got hashed emails and stuff like that. So it's not the end of the world, but MailChimp, you can do better. We're like MailChimp fans here over on the buildup side of things, And we recommend people use them. And this isn't

exactly breeding confidence. So keep an eye out for that. Make sure they're doing what they need to be doing from a security perspective. And they want to just double check your account, make sure the right people have access to it. No rogue API keys sending out there, stuff like that. Awesome. Today, let's pivot into our topic. So we're going in a different path today. We're not really talking about the tactical pieces of SEO or paid search or some of the stuff that we typically talk about. We're talking today about choosing between an agency, a freelancer, or an in-house marketing team for your vacation rental business.

So this is something that you and I have quite an interesting perspective on, I think. You and I have not been in-house, but we've been on the agency side and we've seen, I feel like every permutation of how to assemble a marketing team. We've seen the Avengers model, if you will. We got this team, these people teamed up, these people teamed up and so on. And some of these options work well, some of them don't work well. And a lot of it depends on the company. So I thought I'd go to you first and just talk a little bit about how you see these kind of working in the real vacation rental world when it comes to agency freelancer, or in house marketing team. And then

we talk about like your general point of view on like, the appropriateness of these different channels when to use one, some or all of them. What's your frame on that? Yeah, I think it's because there's such a vast, I would say, divide as far as the people who are from on the low ends of we were mom and pop with just two people running things. And the people and someone who's got a much more scaled out enterprise system in place for the way they operate their business. It is there. I think there's a lot of different fits. There's a lot of different, you can make good points. We pick, pick out all the areas there and find the right fit for your business. I do. I think I've seen freelancers who have been very effective at what they do and helping some

vacation rental and help grow and scale their business. I've been in the agency side and seen that be an effective way to supplement. I would say there are certainly some points that come up over and over again. Because we're in some of these markets, in some cases, very primary markets, heavy travel markets, easy to get some good employment, whether that's very qualified employment or maybe some cheaper labor that is just entering the system, entering the job force, entering the workforce, stuff like that. But it is in some of these areas that are a little more remote, it's just plain difficult to find people.

So that freelancer maybe isn't always available, that in-house marketing team maybe becomes a little more less or maybe less cost effective for you there. And it is. And then you have to look for the agency side of things. So I've seen it work in a lot of different areas. I think there are definitely some things to look out for as you're trying to hire whichever area you're looking to hire in. What are your thoughts on kind of the differences, the breakdowns of what has been most effective? Obviously, you're running the agency side, but what has been most effective even prior to when you were a part of a team, an agency team, and even before that? I feel like when I first

started, I really was a freelancer, to be honest with you. Back in 2016, when I left and put out my own flag there, I didn't have a team at all. So I really feel like I started as a freelancer. I had that perspective on things. And you bring up an interesting point of availability, like geographic availability. I think that's a valid thing to consider when it comes to in-house. Now, I would argue some of our clients now actually do have in-house marketing people that are not physically located in the same market where that person is. They happen to live, one of our clients has a vocational management company in Tennessee and their marketing director is based in Wisconsin. So I think that can occur and you know what I'm talking about. And we also have someone else that we've worked with recently,

who's based in their property management company is based in Texas and their employee, some of their core employees are actually based in Florida, like on the panhandle. So it's not a drastic geographic gap there, but they're not in the office every day, needless to say. So that's an interesting point you bring up about geographic availability. Do you actually want them to sit in your office and be with you every day? Nowadays, like in today's world, that's obviously less and less common. Like very few people have that setup. It's out there.

We have some clients that certainly fit that setup. We have an in-house team that comes in and sits in the office with them every day. But obviously, you're not going to get that with a freelancer or an agency for the most part. So my perspective on this kind of being on a few sides of the coin in my career is that I think freelancers have a lot of pros, right? So freelancers, especially if you're going to a job marketplace or something like that, an Upwork type marketplace or someone that's in the industry that's done this kind of work for a while, it's growing. There's more people doing this work today

than there was even three or four years ago. Maybe COVID accelerated that a little bit. People that are just open to flexible work arrangements. They're like, yeah, I can do this project for you, or I can do this thing for you and nothing else. And I'm good at this thing. So it's a good way to get work in that way. I call this kind of on-demand help, right? You can get on-demand help with a marketplace. You can put up a job listing today and hire someone tomorrow. Like you can do that with a freelancing marketplace

and get someone good, not just get someone who's mediocre in that respect. So that's an awesome, I think, benefit to the vacational company. You can be very flexible with regards to hours, what your budget is, how much you want to pay that person, whether it's hourly, project-based.

Often there's minimal or no startup costs as well. So you don't have to, if you're hiring a freelancer, you don't really have to like pay a staffing agency and go through a whole job search process and pay a startup fees or anything like that. Most freelancers are like, here's my fee. It's hourly or it's project-based.

You pay me half now or half when I'm done or you pay me hours accrued or something like that. So you can even test something out with a pretty minimal like budget risk as well. If you wanted to hire a freelancer just to do your social media and nothing else, you could probably hire them, pay them 25 to $100 an hour, depending on their skill. And you can get someone to work on that

very quickly, see if it's working, and then iterate from there. I think that's an awesome opportunity. I also put in here worldwide talent pool within the context of hiring a freelancer, they could be anywhere in the world, we kind of just said it a little bit with regards to office availability. So you can arbitrage and get someone maybe in a different country with lower cost of living a lot of our clients. And we've hired folks in the Philippines, for example. And you can arbitrage and get someone maybe in a different country with lower cost of living. A lot of our clients and we've hired folks in the Philippines, for example, and you can hire someone in that role at $1,000, $2,000 US monthly, as opposed to you may have to pay that weekly. We'll talk about cost here in a second for someone stateside to do a similar type of project or task capability. And then maybe something that a lot of people look for with regards to the freelancers that they like is no long-term commitment. So they're not with employment. You're agreeing to work with that

person for an extended period of time. With a freelancer, you may need them for one project. They may come in. That could last a day, a week, a month, two months, and then the engagement can end and there's no hard feelings. There's not any emotional issues with that. It's, hey, we hired you to come in and do this project. You're done with this project. Shake hands, move on. We'll call you again if we need that kind of help. So you're not committing to that ongoing cost forever, which is the implicit bias when it comes to hiring an employee. And if you certainly separate from that employee, you may have to pay other expenses to move on from that employee with regards to paid time off, benefits, unemployment, things like that. So those are some of the pros I

see of hiring freelancers. Some cons really quickly though, a freelancer is their own boss, which can be both a blessing and a curse in my experience, right? Some freelancers, and we've hired freelancers in the past, and we've seen clients hire freelance type folks in the past. They may be good at one thing and not another thing, right? They may be awesome at hunting new business and they may be very mediocre at delivering on what they promised. They may be awesome at the opposite. Maybe they're bad at invoicing. They don't send their correct invoices at the correct time. They just may not do it. It's up to that individual person, depending on their skills set and what they're great at to deliver the work in the right way.

So I think what's very challenging is to hire a freelancer when you don't know how to evaluate the quality of their work. We talk about this quite a bit internally. So if you're hiring a design freelancer, it's obvious, right? You can tell, I like the design.

I don't like the design. But if you're hiring, for example, a freelancer to build you a website or develop some custom coding for you, and you can't look at their code and tell you if it's good or not, then it's really hard to hire freelancers because you can't really evaluate if the work's any good or not. You're just kind of looking at it and going, oh, it looks okay, but I don't really know. That's very challenging. So I think that the individual freelancer,

their skill, like you kind of have to trust them and believe that person is really going to deliver for you. And that person has a specific tactical approach that they're using that's going to be beneficial for your business. And if not, I think it's really challenging to evaluate that freelancers. And this was speaking from personal experience, they get very busy, they get booked up, and they can't get back to you right away. Maybe they take on five projects all at once, because it's very feast or famine when you're a freelancer. And then I go back to you next week, that can be a challenge. Lack of accountability goes back to my earlier point with regards to delivering the work on time, there's really no one responsible for them, they don't really have like a leader of them or anything like that. And

then as a for my last point here, as a fully external team member, they don't really integrate into your systems for the most part. So they are this person outside of your bubble, outside of your company that you're having to manage a little bit. So those are some of my pros and cons of freelancers, but you've worked with freelancers in the past. What's your perspective on anything else that I missed there? Pros and cons of working with you? I think it is. I think the biggest question I always had, and it's, you don't, it's trust, but verify, I think with any of the freelancers you're bringing on, but it is, it's that reliability. I think if you can find someone who is reliable, who it is, there's going to be some lag. I don't think there's any doubt about

that. If you're looking for a tight deadline and something or something like that, where you need a deliverable in a very short period or a very short time window, hope that you have a really reliable answer for that. Because it is, if you're because just exactly what you said, if they're taking on multiple projects, they're taking on all this work, there is a high likelihood that they're going to be either, maybe they're going to charge you more to get that tighter deadline, or you might just not hit the deadline. So I think that's certainly a reality there. Again, if you find someone reliable, I think they are great options. And I do think they're great options, especially for those people who are kind of growing into the business a little bit. You may not need a whole in-house marketing team. You certainly might not

need an agency because you might not know what you need or what you don't need at that point. Kind of being able to identify those smaller tasks or those smaller projects, things that are going to get you off the ground. I think that's where the freelancer fits in best. Obviously on that one-off basis, whether you're a huge company or a small company there, if you find the right person. But I think that most of the time, I think it does take a little work and a little bit of vetting. I don't think you're always going to, if you do find the right freelancer right off the bat, you're in good shape. You're really fortunate there. But that would be the other thing is you're probably going to have to test a few

freelancers, I would say, just to see who maybe can do it better. Test against each other if you've got the capability, the money to do that, to be able to kind of really do a true A-B test if you're going to look at it that way. But I think that's where you're going to have the most pain points, I guess. I think you laid out the pros and cons really effectively there. Yeah. Then let's turn the page a little bit. Freelancers, good and bad, depending on how you do it. And that's the spoiler alert here is that all these options are both good and bad, depending on the quality of the operator you're working with and stuff like that. Let's go down a different path. So I want to preface this a little bit with, we just signed a client recently last week, and this person had gone down this path. They hired an in-house marketing person. I think on

the proposal, or sorry, on the outline here, we said in-house marketing team. In this case, it was really just one person, but I was talking to this individual and I was saying, look, it's really challenging to find someone who can do a lot of what you're asking here, right? This person had a whole plan of what they were attempting to do, search social email. There was some guest marketing stuff. There was some copywriting stuff in there. I'm like, it's very rare that you're going to find someone who can do all this stuff. And I think he needed to experience it first for this person to maybe understand the process of going through what that looks like. And then at that point, I think he needed to experience it first for this person to maybe understand the process of going through what that looks like. And then they, then at that point, I think he understood further what I was talking about. So we reconnected, this was a few months ago that I originally told him I'm

reconnected. And unfortunately that person didn't work out and he was let go and became to the same conclusion that I think I'm going to talk about here in a few minutes, which is that hiring an in-house marketing person, I think is the most highest leverage thing you can do when done correctly. And it can also be the quickest way to ruin if you do it incorrectly with regards to not having the right person on there. So I've got to go over real quick, the pros of in house marketing team or person and talk a little bit about the cons as well. But I think this is like the highest risk reward option here that we're going to talk about, right? Yeah, I would agree. All right. So some pros, right? An in house marketing person is going to be completely

dedicated to your company and the success of your brand and your marketing campaigns, right? They're not distracted. They're not like the freelancer working on five letter projects simultaneously. They're not the agency working with 10 other clients simultaneously, right? They're working just for you and their focus and their energy and their effort can be like a laser beam on your company. That's awesome one. They can, they can change their strategy much more quickly typically than working with an outside vendor or freelancer because they can decide, Hey, here's what we're seeing in our own company. We're talking with people on our team. We're like embedded in the Slack system of our company. We're logged into PMS. We can see what's going on. And if they see something not working correctly, the time to get the information,

the data from the external person over to the, or sorry, from one department to another internally can be very fast. Like we've worked with teams in the past that actually have in-house marketing teams. And they're just like, they don't wait for like revenue to send them a report. They just log in the PMS and they go, Hey, like this set of inventory is soft. We got to go push pet friendly right now. And then we help them kind of execute upon that. So I think that can be fantastic because they have someone whose goals are very aligned with you and they can get information and they get projects done very quickly. And I think that's a huge benefit to like, really once you're at enough scale where this makes sense, I think that having a good in house marketing person who can communicate

effectively to either their own team, or even external vendors, we'll talk about that in a second, it's really the best asset you can have, because the time to fix problems goes from weeks or months to like hours, okay, it can really get that compressed in that scenario. And sometimes too, they can have extra resources to test brand new ideas without increasing your cost. If you're hiring someone, and you're paying them a fixed salary every year, you can have them maybe spend 10% of their time, 20% of the time trying other things without really any serious risk of losing a lot of money or something like that. Whereas when you hire a freelancer and you're having that freelancer tries a technique that

you're not really sure is going to work. Hey, let's try to text every guest and do something here, or let's try to do something here on the homeowner side. And it fails like you're at, you blew that money down the drain. If you have an in-house person, like you can just say, Hey, John Doe, Jane Doe, take 10% of your time, try experimental things. Let's see what happens. We don't expect you to be productive on every single test, but in those tests, you will find a winner and you can then execute on that idea over the longterm. So I think that's a huge in-house advantage is that they have time to tinker for lack of a better term or lack of a better kind

of frame on it. And tinkering can lead to really great ideas and really great outcomes. So flipping the page, I guess a little bit there, cons of in-house marketing teams. I highlighted it, right? It's really hard to find someone who can do everything. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's like the unicorn joke is real, right? It's very rare to find these people who are, it's like developers call themselves full stack. And then you learn, yeah, they're really good at the backend stuff. And then I could do a little CSS and they just like download, install, bootstrap and change your fonts. Like they're not. So finding like a truly full stack marketer, if you will, is very challenging. Again, it's not possible, but

it's very challenging. I would actually question the in-house marketer who's that skilled and talented, why they would want to be in-house in the first place, right? You're going to have to probably compensate that person at a very high level because that person can do pretty much anything. If they have the ability to really execute upon four or five different marketing channels at a high level. I don't even think I'm at this level. We were talking before we recorded. I'm like, you don't want me designing anything like I'm not a designer. But if you have someone who can design and do copywriting and do search marketing and write content and do keyword research and fix technical SEO issues and run paid search campaigns.

My goodness, they're going to be expensive because that you're replacing four to five people in a single person and i think i want to just bust the myth a little bit if you will that these people are out there and they're available for 50k a year i'm sorry it's just not true if they are sending my way i will gladly i will take up every single one that i can at that level to do that kind of work so that's the first thing right which is that when you hire an in-house person on your team they have more time but it doesn't necessarily mean they have more skill or they have more ability than hiring a freelancer from our earlier option. So you may hire someone and then realize, wow, I'm still going to have to go out and hire more freelancers or an agency to gap fill what they're not good at. So that's the most obvious one,

perhaps the biggest one. The other thing is just the cost. We talked about this. I think you looked at some Glassnorn numbers. Do you want to hit us real quick with kind of what you research as far as cost and putting that together? So we quantify this. So the most recent, and this is as of last night, the most recent average for a marketing coordinator with zero to one years of experience is going to be $47,870 a year. That's not counting any additional, that's additional pay, any additional bonuses, any, if you're doing insurance, I kind of say taxes, insurance, anything like that.

Yeah, that's at $47,000. That's a good chunk of money. And that's your entry level position. Someone who probably you're going to have to teach them the ropes a little bit. And they may have just come out of college. They may have some really good ideas, but they're going to be pretty green. And as far as coming into the vacation rental space, I think we would both acknowledge there's certainly some nuance here where the general marketing 101 doesn't always work in this space. So having someone come in

and come in at that level, my expectation would be, yeah, if we're going to pay almost 50 grand and probably over 50 grand a year, you're going to come in and you're going to be able to make an immediate impact because again, as a business owner, I'm going to want to see that return on that investment and knowing where a lot of those people are with their experience wise, because I was hiring a lot and I'm sure you've done the same. You've hired a lot of these entry-level people on. It does. It takes some ramp up. It takes a while for them to get into, find the right channel, find the right area, find which is going to be best. And I think you are, you're not going to find that unicorn who can hop in and do all of these things right away. So it is, it's more about

that team aspect. And then it's two marketing coordinators or a marketing coordinator and the intern or a marketing coordinator and the freelancer or marketing manager who's managing an agency's performance. And I think those are the most common combinations that I've seen when you do hire on someone who is as an entry level as you would get with that $47,000 number. It is a range that they give you for that, for zero to one years of experience on glass doors, 36,000 to 64,000. And then I think that a lot of that is certainly dependent on market there. If you're in the Twin Cities, there are a beaucoup amount of people who would be able to hop in and do that marketing coordinator role.

About two hours northwest of here, you have the Brainerd Lakes area, which is a great vacation destination. But there are maybe a thousand or 10,000 regular inhabitants of that area where there's not a whole lot of marketing specialists out there. So how do you find those people? You have to come into the Twin Cities to get that talent pool. You have to pay up to get someone to move out to that area that's outstate. And I'm sure that we're not unique in that area where we have more of the metropolitan base and then people hiring out from there. So that is, I think that's the number that it's a big number. And knowing the average contract on that kind of to the next step on the agency side of where you'd be sitting in maybe a small to mid-level

business package. I don't know. That's why I would always tend to go towards our third option here. But that's me personally. And I don't want to put that bias in place. And certainly everybody's got their own individual needs and what they're looking for there. But yeah, that's always a's always a little eye opening to see how that number changes over time. If you're looking for someone who is who's a C suite level person or a director level person, you're going to have to pay them more. But in a lot of cases, they want a team underneath them anyway. So they're not going to be the doers, actually, they're going to be the ones who are leading the strategy and then putting a team around that strategy. Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly my next piece, which is like hiring a director level person is 77,000 is according to Glassdoor current number, $77,411. That's the middle. There's people though,

in that role that are getting paid 96 to 110,000. There's people in that role that are getting paid 125 to 135, according to Glassdoor. And again, these people, it's not like you hire that person, you go, okay, that's, that's my budget. I'm good. It's no, that person is actually going to demand more resources on top of that. So it can be challenging to really put together a budget. Now, some of the larger PMs out there, it's not that they don't have the money. It's more so just a matter of allocation. Do I allocate it to this or do I allocate it to other things? But these are considerations to think about and decide, hey, how do I want to break things down? The one other note, I guess, on like the cons of the in-house marketing team,

I see this quite a bit, which is that I think a lot of in-house marketing people, they have such a limited frame because they have one view. They have one company that they're viewing everything through. It's me with my glasses. Like they don't have the ability to see left or right. They can really only see right down the lane that they're in. And I think there's times where that can limit the in-house marketer a little bit because they don't have the ability to really understand what's going on in another market. They don't really have another understanding of going on in another industry, even they don't focus on other types of businesses either. So they tend to get a little tunnel visiony, if that were a word, it's not with their approach. This worked last year, let's try it again this year. And that

sometimes can lead, I think, to some subpar outcomes, because they don't really have all the right tools and capabilities to be like, we were able to try this thing over here. And then we got to try it over here. And it worked like three times in a row. Let's try it on this setup as well. So that also come came to my mind as well, just with regards to, again, having one focus is both a pro and a con, right? It's one focus, you can make a lot of progress quickly. But it also can be a con because that person only sees one way of doing things or one approach. And they don't have that like variety of options. It's like they're eating the same thing for dinner every night, and they don't know how to cook other things, which I think can be

somewhat challenging. But you touched on it. Let's head on over to an agency. Look, and we're very biased here, right? We essentially both have this model that we're embedded in or own in some respect. We're going to talk about the pros, but we want to be honest too and talk about the cons. It's not all sunshines and rainbows and puppies. There's problems with agencies as well. But what's your frame on some of the pros of working with a marketing agency? Really, it is. It's that you have, hopefully, all the experts that are already in place. If you're looking to do email, that's already in place. If you're looking to do social, that's already in place. PPC, conversion optimization. You can really find the agency that fits all the needs that you already have. You need someone to build you a new website.

You can find that out there. So it is. I think in some cases I've seen people using multiple agencies and relying on having a lot of different expertise because, again, maybe this agency works really well on the PPC side of things and paid advertising, Facebook, all that, but they're not that great on the website side of things. So you might hire someone specifically for that as well. I would say looking at the vacation rental space, that seems to be a breakdown. Typically you are going to have someone specifically for the web services side of things, someone else to maybe take on some of the other things. Now, certainly you can find the full service out there, but that is, I think it's about having that expertise. It's about, you know, hopefully having the experience of having worked with other vacation

rental managers, maybe in your area, maybe not in your area. I think that can certainly be beneficial. Being able to go try different things that you hadn't tried before or that hadn't occurred to an in-house marketing team or a freelancer. I think you are, you're limited by their experience. They may not have all the experience that you're looking for, and that's why by their experience. They may not have all the experience that you're looking for, and that's why you are looking for that agency. And I think on the con side of things, certainly there are some, cost can be a big issue there, certainly, but cost can be an issue in any of these areas if you're looking at them at the bottom line there. I think the other side of things is a lot of the times the agency side of things tends to be a little more protective, a little more shielded, where

they're going to take a lot of it's more proprietary, whether it is or not, is a whole nother discussion. But they see a lot of their strategies as their own, and they don't want to share those with other people. I get it. You don't want your secret sauce moving around to other agencies there. But it does. It does. In some cases, it'll silo you out of having maybe a better discussion or a better discussion or a better strategy or better performance there. So what about your thoughts on the agency side? Yeah, I think you wrapped it up well. One thing I wanted to add in with respect to a specialist angle is that really what agencies do, like this is every agency out there, is they sell slices,

right? So like you don't need 40 hours a week of an email marketer, you need five hours a week of an email marketer. And that's really what an agency does, so i think this is a pro you could have someone who's a specialist i know this was the model that you'd worked under previously with your previous role where you had specialists in different seats and then this person spent all their time focused on paid search this person spent all their time focused on email and they did it specifically for one vertical this is kind of the path that we've gone down now recently as well since we've actually had our chat a little while ago about this and i think it's very beneficial because we have people that are in these seats. They

specialize in that thing. They get really good at it, really good at it. They do it all day. And they know exactly how to set up the paid search account to have success. They know exactly what type of subject lines are going to work well. They know exactly what type of designs are going to get good click-through rates on email. And when they see something working well in another account, they can quickly adapt that and roll that out to other accounts as well. So I think that's a huge benefit of hiring the agency is that you essentially are getting the right amount. It's a Goldilocks, not too little, not too much, not less experienced, not more experienced than you need. It's just what you need at this moment in time, and just the right amount. And you're paying for that you're not

paying for all the other stuff that's necessary to the actual core competency of that particular channel or strategy that that person is good at. So I think that's the truth. It's like this cross channel or sorry, clock cross client capability. I learned from client a I can apply to you. Awesome, You're going to get better results. And then this, hey, you don't need me 40 hours a week, you need me four hours a week. And in that four hours, I'm going to do more good for you than perhaps someone for 40 hours that doesn't know what they're doing. I think that's like any good agency that's offers the right service can have that capability. Now we're going to the cons. And I think we should be fair on these cons here really quick to any agency can't fix your problems overnight i think as agency owners we tend to want to be like hey here's the results we've gotten we talk about our wins we talk about all the success we've had on the case study side but the truth is that like any agency you hire can't just flip a switch and fix things right away there has to be a process you go through it's going to take time you want to see progress i always tell that to people right it's like you had people that we've talked to in the past they hired another agency that basically didn't do a good job and they're like well i know it's going

to take time i'm like yes that's true but take time. I'm like, yes, that's true. But like, they should be showing you progress. I think that's one thing that we hold very dear to our kind of approach is like, even if we're not where you want to be, we're at least showing you progress to where you can get to where you want to be, if you're going down the right path and making some steps there. But it takes time. You're correct about the cost, right? Like very few agencies are going to be as cheap as a freelancer, they're typically are going to be less than a full time marketing team by a wide margin. So it's usually the calculus of do I cobble together my own team with a freelancer setup? Do I do some in house and I have some freelancer, when I hire an agency,

they can handle big chunks of work. So that's a pro. But it could be expect a budget two to $10,000 a month, depending on the agency level scope of work, all that kind of stuff to actually work with a team and be able to do that for you. So you have to see where you're at in your business and understand your economics to see if a two to $10,000 per month investment makes sense. If there's an ROI there, are you going to get at least a 7, 8, 10x return on your money for that to be worth it? That's what most of our clients require. So that's a detailed conversation with respect to cost and return on dollars invested from that perspective. And the truth is no agency can guarantee success, right? Like they can use the tactics that have worked well in another market

and in their experience and apply it to your company, but there's no promise or guarantee that it's going to work well for you. You could argue that's kind of the same for freelancers and hiring people as well. With agencies, I think that there is a culture of we tried it, it didn't work. And it's easy to be shrug your shoulders and be like, we tried it, it didn't work and leave it there. I think very few agencies are willing to go through the headache of trying to really work and try to figure out how to improve things and get that thing set up. Agencies want more repeatable processes, more repeatable client situations, more repeatable reporting. So they can have their people do what they're good at and not focus on really creating really custom and boutique strategies. So if you find an agency that

kind of creates something that works well for you, hold on to them. Don't assume that don't assume the grass is greener on the other side. So we've seen that in the past where people have something working and they are, they want to switch somewhere else and then they come back and with their tail tucked between their legs. Yeah, it really wasn't that much better. I saved $500, but we lost so much more in the flip side of it. Yeah. Ultimately just to sum everything up here and put a bow on it. You have to make the right choice for your business. And the answer is, I think all three of these are the right answer, depending on where you're at, where your budget is, what your capabilities are and what strategically you're trying to achieve. And I suspect any

company that's worked in the space for any amount of time has used all three and probably will continue to use all three. There'll be a time for freelancers, a time for hiring in-house once you reach that budget level, and then a time for realizing the benefits of working with an agency. Maybe not forever, but during certain periods of time that can be successful. I don't know if you want to put anything else on it, but I think that was my take on it. Hopefully people listening to this down the road, I may send this to people who are considering working with us and I'll just be like honest with them and be like, hey, here's the pros and cons, not saying that it's right or wrong. But I think we hopefully did a fair job and didn't,

you know, pat ourselves on the back too much with respect to choosing an agency. But obviously, pick what's right for you, pick what's right for your business. We don't know your business. So, you know, you have to make some decisions for yourself. But hopefully these are some tips that help you get to that right decision quicker. Yep. Awesome. All right. He doesn't disagree. So we're going to put it on. Thank you guys so much for listening. As always, we beg for reviews every week, beg for reviews, leave us a review of Spotify, Google carrier, you can mail it to me. If you mail me a review, we'll write it down on a card and send it to me. Hit me up by email me and I'll send you my address Conrad, C-O-N-R-A-D at buildupbookies.com.

Thank you guys so much for listening to the show. We will hit you back next week. Bye.