Heads In Beds Show - [Live Show] RR Summit: People, Places, Planet: Marketing Sustainability With Your VRM Business

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad record their first ever live show for the Rent Responsibly Summit. ⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellRR Summit🔗 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.

Thank you. now the title of it is future proof your brand sustainable digital marketing techniques and we really paul and i cover this was a live show so it was kind of a different format like i said from what we normally do but we cover a bunch of different topics around how to kind of approach you know budget allocation what channels actually work the best um what are the different ways that you can attack and build a sustainable marketing plan here in 2023 so fun episode a little bit different we'd love to hear your feedback on this one if not we'll be back next week with our kind of more normal show. But in the meantime, please enjoy this live show that we just recorded on sustainable digital marketing techniques. This is Future Proof Your Brand, sustainable digital marketing techniques for long-term

success. After the last RR Summit, we got a ton of feedback of people looking for more marketing. So you asked, you got it with this session. I'm so excited for these guys to kick it off. Conrad, Paul, you guys take it away. Yeah, no, thanks Alexa. I really appreciate it. This is our first time doing anything like this. So Paul, this is normally we record in a manner in which we can make a mistake and no one's listening. So I guess we have to be on point today. So we should take it seriously. I guess that works here. How's it going? I'm doing great.

This is, this is why we've been getting pretty hyped up for this behind the scenes. So now, yeah, now it's time to deliver. So I guess we've got to present some goods here. So let's dive right in here, Conrad. Yeah. The topic of sustainability then, I guess, going right into it is one that I guess there's different ways of interpreting this term because you could, I think maybe the original intent of interpretation was like around eco-friendliness or green. That's one interpretation.

You could interpret sustainable as a way that a business could last for a long time. So that's another way of interpreting it. I don't think either one is incorrect. So maybe we go down both paths because we have 40-ish minutes to go through both paths. down both paths because we have 40 ish minutes to go through both paths. So maybe we start with that like green angle first or sustainability in terms of like community or there's different layers we go down, but I would love to hear your perspective on that first, like the green angle of this. And is that a valuable tool in marketing? What's your perspective there? Yeah, I think that's something that as a, as an idea, mark green marketing is, or anything related to green seems to have a lot of value on the marketing side of things.

It is. It's one of those value propositions that a lot of people can use. I think that it's one of those things that maybe we don't think about it as much on the digital side of things. But I think you can make the argument that as we've transitioned as an industry, as a marketing entity or as marketing in general, traditional marketing used to be very non-eco-friendly, I would say it is. All the direct mail pieces, all the newspaper ads, all that, anything like that. It would make the argument that in going, transitioning to more digital efforts, that maybe we have become greener on the marketing side of things. And that's maybe idealistic, but what are your thoughts there, Conrad?

Yeah. I always joked about this. Like I have this client that I've worked with for a long time now. I'm probably coming up on eight years or something like that. One of the first clients that I ever started working with a long time ago. And it was actually fascinating to talk with him

way back in 2014, 2015. He shared with me that he used to spend about $50,000 a year on these physical mailers that he would actually send out to everybody, all of his past guests. Then he had, it was just called a house list. It was basically like anyone who would ever reached out to him who was considering booking with him. And these were like 200 to 300 page full color mail, direct mailers that were basically, that was like the way that someone would make a booking. And then of course he's, when I first started, he started in like 86, I think he always jokes. My company's older than

you, but whatever. He doesn't say that joke anymore. He said it when I was younger, but he would always tell me about, I would send out these mailers and then we didn't take a deposit. You just send a check. And then we would need the keys back in the mail. It was just like such a, now we just would laugh at that, all those concepts. And if they would even make any sense to go down, but surely there was nothing ecological about sending out tens of thousands of mailers and spending 50 grand a year on high gloss, like high finish mailers. And I'm sure like most direct mail, 90% of it was literally chucked in the garbage immediately. Then a few percentage points, people might flip through it a little bit and then I'm not going to go to the beach this year. And then of course,

the 2% conversion rate that makes it all worth it. So from that perspective, I've never really thought about that before we started prepping for this, but yeah, in theory, there's a server farm somewhere and that server farm is taking up some level of whatever. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert in that area, but the actual nature of doing this form of digital advertising and marketing, obviously it's less like damaging from just purely like an environmental standpoint. I think that's fair to say. I think so. I think so. And it's on the other sustainable side, it is just being able to grow a sustainable business. I think we talk about it quite often, but it is, it's about having those best practices in place and best practices for different sizes

of business for different markets. It is that it's something that just because you're, you're looking around at your competitors and they're doing big things and great things and maybe expensive things, that doesn't mean that it's the right option for you. It is, there's certainly steps to scaling and making sure that you have a sustainable business, making sure you have all those, that groundwork, the bedrock in place to that. So you can scale and you can make your business, not just a one done quick little exit. It's something that can, I could see a chat coming through renting out our cabin in 1979. That's incredible. I mean, that's sustainability, right? That's sustainability.

Further than that. But yeah, and that's, there's, you can look at my LinkedIn posts. I talk, try to talk about that stuff a lot. The core values, the missions, how you're building that business, because it is, those are small parts that maybe some people don't think of. They're thinking about getting a new cabin, getting a new condo, getting a new gigantic luxury home. But yeah, I toss it back over to you, Conrad, what does that sustainability on our side of things look like for you? I've read about this concept a while ago called inversion thinking. I think this is a monger thing where you say the opposite of what you actually are trying to accomplish. And then through that, you can find out where you actually want to go. And I did a post a little while ago on this topic of all the master lease companies

that took on all this funding. And I don't, we don't need to name all the exact names, but like Sonder is one that's public. So I feel like it's okay to mention them as a good example of what we're talking about. And these companies got literally billions of funding. $1.5 billion of funding was poured into these master lease companies from like 2018-ish was when the bigger funding round started. And then unfortunately, some of them died during COVID.

If you go back and look at that post, you'll see people were referencing some of the companies that didn't make it actually were profitable pre-COVID. And then COVID just obviously threw them a heck of a curve ball that they couldn't recover from. But it seems to be that example is there's a lot of people that are chasing obviously an unsustainable model where you have to take in all this funding to actually operate the business. And it doesn't seem like there's much efficiencies that are actually built over time. It's just, we're paying this building so much money, and then we're going to try to make money on the spread. And I get it. There's a path to driving revenue there. I'm not disputing that. Obviously, these companies are making hundreds of million dollars a year of revenue,

but it doesn't seem sustainable. It feels like they're walking on a tightrope and any sort of wind or someone nudging them one direction would make them fall off. And going back to some of the folks that might be tuning in today, I think that's in my mind what sustainability is. When I first heard the topic and Alexa talked to us initially in advance of this presentation, that was the, that was immediately where my brain went is that how can I be thought sustainability was a good word. The word that I thought of a little bit was like resilient.

And I think resilient is a good word to describe how I think about where one or two bad things could happen and you can recover from them. And then some of these companies during COVID were not able to recover. Basically, that was perhaps a one in a lifetime event, but when it happened, they put them in a rough spot and they couldn't really drive through. When I think of sustainable or this long lasting path of these companies, I think of the person in the chat who was sharing that she's been doing it since 1979. She's probably seen everything good and bad as far as like, this is the old way of doing it. This is the new way, but she's probably have to been probably would have had to been pretty adaptable to still be doing it at this point in time, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to keep up that pace. So as things come and

go, it's always that challenging piece of, is this a trend or is this something that's like a fad that's short-term that might come in and flare out? And I think that because you and I have been doing this for some time, we've seen both. We've seen like trends that have actually occurred. There are people who dismissed Airbnb when I first got started and said, oh, a professional manager would never list their properties on Airbnb. That's not obviously the case today. So that's an obvious trend. And some things are fads. Like I think some of these like business models or techniques or things that people have tried have kind of fads. They had a little peak of popularity, they faded out, and then they don't work anymore. Or going into maybe our examples here that are digital marketing specific,

I think Google Plus was like a fad. We thought maybe that there was something there. There was people even in our space that would advocate for this as a marketing channel and said, hey, this is Google. You should be putting your effort and energy behind this platform. There's going to be a way where you're going to be able to drive revenue from Google Plus. Obviously that never materialized. And if you did that, you did waste a little bit of time. But in marketing, like that's what happens. Like I'm sure you have examples that you can rely on where you've tried something and it hasn't worked. And it's never going to be like, you're never going to bat a thousand when it comes to all the different marketing techniques and tactics you're going to try. You have to be willing to,

and allow yourself a little bit of finding some things that don't work to find what does work and is sustainable going back to that point. So maybe you have some thoughts on what those techniques and tactics could be or examples of those. Yeah, I think it is. It's how you're building that, how you're building the business. What are the framework pieces that you need to have in place? And I do, I think that for us, we see a lot of it. It's driving traffic is really important for us, making sure that using Facebook, using Google, using LinkedIn, trying different channels out. I think being able to advertise through different channels while still doing omni-channel communication, not multi-channel communication where you're just throwing disparate messaging out there across different areas. It is.

It's really unifying that voice and making sure that if you are trying different, I mean, maybe you do try a direct mail PC and here and there, certainly on the owner's side of Venturi, that's something that happens to us a lot. So we do use that. We still leverage that because it is an effective channel. I think that certainly on the Google side of things, we've tried and failed on a lot of different areas there. And that's something that because Google is so all encompassing, 90% of all searches take place in Google. So where do you want to be? Maybe that changes with chat GPT. Maybe that changes as Bing continues to grow and evolve. But that is right right now. It's I think everybody's been trying to figure out what you can do within Google, what you can do in any digital channel to really further your exposure. And it is, and you can't be afraid to try some new things. You can't be afraid to try, keep up with the latest trends and trends versus the mirage. I think we can all acknowledge that there are some of those out there, but I think that that's something that really you have to find the

right channels for you. And you have to leverage what's available at a cheaper, free level. And one of our episodes talking about tools that we use, that's something that we have to pay thousands of dollars, a hundred dollars a month for subscription fees for an ad distribution channel or something, or to monitor your SEO. Get Google search console in place. Have your Google My Business listing optimized. Make sure that you have a good website design. Make sure that you have a, finding a good website designer. Make sure that you have a good website that you can, that you can send people to. That is your, there aren't a lot of people in the vacation rental space that are going to drive around some of these locations.

They're not going to see your brick and mortar building like a hotel or resort or something like that. So it is, it's important to have that good website designer and finding a good website designer. There's some good ones out there. I hear BuildUp Bookings does a pretty good job there on putting some websites together as we're just running into the chat here. But yeah, I think that's something that really understanding what is most important to driving

that business on the digital side is it's important and really having either a team, an individual, maybe you find a freelancer, having an in-house team, there's a lot of different options on how you can create the right guardrails or the right things in place to make sure that you can create the business and make it scalable, make it resilient, make it sustainable there. Yeah. We did a roundup study a little while ago. I meant to redo it at some point this year and just haven't got around to it quite yet. I should definitely do it at some point, perhaps for VRMA, I'll redo it. But we pulled down all the data from 21 and we looked at where traffic was coming from and all the clients that we work with that make a significant portion of their bookings direct,

they all get the majority of their traffic through Google search. So that is the biggest, like when we look at the channel breakdown, that is like the biggest bucket of where traffic comes from. So it'd be, it'd be hard pressed to find, maybe it's out there. I just haven't seen it where you can look at a vacation rental company. That's getting a good amount of direct bookings. Let's say an excess of 10% or 20% of their bookings are direct. And we have some clients that are in the high 90% range who are very like OTA adverse. So we've seen some of those types of sites and almost always you find that there's actually, you know, Google organic traffic is typically the number one referring source, usually direct is number two. And then the number three could be a toss up

between email. If they have a pretty large email list, it could be Google paid search. If they're being aggressive on the paid side and things like that. So that's the thing too. I think when we talk about sustainability, I do think sustainability is doing three or four things well, as opposed to nine or 10 things poorly. So in that vein, I do think it is focusing on the channels that actually have the best chance of success. You're better off spending a hundred hours of time, effort, energy, or cost on improving like your search traffic and getting more people to look for your particular management company, whether that's on the owner side or the guest side, then probably to spend 10 hours across 10 different channels, five of which probably won't ever drive you any meaningful

traffic. And that I think is probably the challenge for the rental manager out there is to determine exactly what is the priority. We always talk about these buckets of like search, social, and email. Those are the ones that we typically will focus on the most. But now to be clear, those aren't the only ways that you can get direct bookings. There's many other ways of doing that. A lot of people will share techniques or tactics that are like less scalable, but like referral or having, making connection with local tourism boards, things like that. They're all very valid techniques that don't always directly touch between search, social and email marketing.

That's just our experience. When we go look at a hundred clients that we've worked with over five, six, seven years, we look at it and we go, okay, what are the big boulders that actually move the needle? We talked about this previously on one of our SEO episodes where we were talking about technical audits and there's problems on a site that are like big boulders that have to be fixed in order for you to be successful. Then there's things that are like rocks that like you want to fix, but they're more like nice to have.

And then there's tiny grains of sand. And that's how I think about it, right? There's in the context of listing sites, you can make the same argument, right? Airbnb and Furbo are kind of like boulders, at least in the US. That's where you're going to get the majority of your bookings from. It doesn't mean that you can't get bookings on other listing sites and other channels. Of course you can, but that's a boulder. If Airbnb is the boulder, then listing site number four is like a golf ball-sized rock,

right? It's not necessarily going to be your number one source. But on this path, you're going to have to determine what makes the most sense for you. It's very possible that depending on the size of your team and your complexity and your structure and what you're trying to accomplish, you may want to disregard and say, yeah, I know I might be able to make a small improvement if I listed on this platform, but it's not worth the additional complexity and headache of my business. And sometimes I think sustainability can be keeping your costs low, like keeping your marketing as effective and efficient as possible. Maybe you're not pushing

as hard as you absolutely can, but if you're pushing to the solid level of performance and you're happy with it and your cost per acquisition is very comfortable and you could sustain a few up and downs and you're in a good spot, then I think that's an envious position to be in. There's a lot of companies who are paying as much as they possibly can per booking. And then when one or two things go wrong and the demand drops just a little bit, it's like they're on that tightrope back to that earlier analogy and they fall off and then they're in a rough spot. So I think that's part of it too, is like giving yourself some margin, giving yourself some room to breathe so that you're not on the marketing side, not constantly praying and hoping something's going to work. You actually

have a proven system for what actually is working. Again, the pitch that I would make there is like search traffic being number one, typically email and social could be number two and three and sending them to a website that can get at least a half a percent, ideally 1% conversion rate on people coming into the system for sure. Yeah. I think that's something that, you know, looking at, and I see a question that you're just looking at the KPIs, what should we be looking for? It is, I think you hit it in the head cost per conversion, really understanding how much does it actually cost? Am I investing hundreds of dollars? Am I investing thousands of dollars and not getting that return back? Am I not getting the leads to come through? I'm not getting the bookings to come through. What does that look like? And I do fear that

we've certainly looked at enough accounts over the years that we've seen some people that spend and spend, and I don't know exactly how they justify being able to spend it more because when you look at the ultimate conversion rate or the bookings or what revenues, the bottom line, really, those bottom line KPIs, how are you justifying the spend? I think on the search side of things or on the, where any traffic is coming through, understanding how much is it costing you to get those conversions to come through. to come through. On the email side, which is more of a free thing, a low cost option for deployment, really understanding what is it open rate? Is it click through rate? Is it how are people actually engaging in there? I do. I think that really understanding some of those KPIs. And I think that's something that in thinking about it, maybe that's something that we're going to have for an upcoming episode, because I think that those are some things that maybe people don't understand

what they should be looking for, what you should be looking for, average cost per click or for a average cost per conversion. Or in some cases, if you're going for brand awareness, what is your CPM, your cost per thousand? So how many impressions can I get? Or how many times can I get a thousand impressions for X amount of money? Those are important to understand how your business is running, how effective your marketing is, and really whether you should be investing in specific areas as opposed to other areas.

It is. It's all about getting the most bang for the buck. And in the times that we're in right now, where the economy makes you think twice about every business decision you're making, I think that it's understanding what gives you the most bang for the buck there. I'm not sure I got a lot of value out of my college degree. Maybe Coastal Carolina alumni might not be happy to hear me say that, but I believe it's true. But one, a few things have stuck with me. One thing that definitely stuck with me, I had a marketing professor in college and I think this was like a brand or a placement class or something like that, that I was taking my senior year. And he said he was a part of EPS

during these like downsizing. I think he was like VP of marketing for brand at UPS or something like that, that I was taking my senior year. And he said he was a part of EPS during these like downsizing. I think he was like VP of marketing for brand at UPS or something like that. And when he was there, they had started slashing their budgets and they were like, Hey, sales are down. We're going to go ahead and slash all of our marketing and advertising budget for this brand unit. Like we can't figure out a way to get people to ship more packages. Basically, it was like the high level problem they were facing. And they came to the conclusion that he was like, okay, sales are down. What helps sales at this company? And they're like sales marketing helps sales at this company. And he goes, great. So we're cutting sales when sales are down. What do you think is going to happen to sales? And he made them finish the process,

make someone finish that loop in their head. Cause most problems are like a yes. And, or this is something that I've heard quite a bit with, with another podcast that I listened to quite a bit Lombardi. It's an NFL podcast. And he talks a lot about, there's no such thing as binary decisions. Like very rarely is it this decision or that decision? It's usually this or this or this. So it's like, there's 10 different options that you can take. And it's really more so about the optimal outcome that you can have there with regards to like the way that you're approaching it.

So if you're cutting something out of your marketing budget, because you deem it to be not effective, great. That may absolutely be the case. And you should do that if you've given it enough time, effort, and energy for that to not work. But you also have to realize, to your point earlier, what is the KPI? For example, in our data set, we learned that people don't come off social media and then book in that same browsing session. It does not mean that social media does not help drive direct bookings. It absolutely does, but it's not the sense of they see the cabin on Instagram right now and they want to go book it

instantaneously. That is not how that works. Instead, it's almost more like visual inspiration and that brand building. And then when they see you on a platform, let's say like Instagram, they might come back later and actually reserve and stay with you, but it's not a direct path. That's not a, again, it's not from here A to B, it's like A to okay, brand influence. They thought about your cabin. It has something unique that they want to potentially consider down the road. Then 10 days later, they're talking to their spouse or they're talking to their brother or their sister or their mom. And they go, oh yeah, we were thinking about it.

Let me go look on this website and see, because I remember that might be a good place based on what it is, what we're looking to actually enjoy in this particular market. So that's the thing too, is that I think a lot of people are measuring the wrong things. They just want to look at like, how many bookings am I getting from social media? Let's say, and that's not really the goal. You're asking the wrong question. So you're not really going to get an appropriate answer because you're thinking about it in terms of someone going directly from here to there.

And that's not really how it works. Instead, it's I'm creating brand awareness so that people know my company so that when they go to think about where to book next, they think of me. We talked about this in a previous episode. We talked about brand search volume. I believe brand search volume could apply to every single person that's listening, whether you have one property or 10 or a hundred or a thousand, because branded search volume. I believe brand search volume could apply to every single person that's listening, whether you have one property or 10 or a hundred or a thousand, because branded search volume is people looking specifically in the sea of 6 million listings on Airbnb. They're looking

specifically for your company, let's say, or in theory, even possibly your individualized listing. So that's the best volume to measure over time. If you're trying to look at, if you're actually building brand influence is how many people go and look for your company. We have a client that we're not working with quite yet, but we're hoping to soon who has almost a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. And he gets literally hundreds, if not thousands of people a month searching for his cabins that he's promoting. And it's not because he does a good job with SEO. He actually doesn't really know what he's doing with SEO. I would argue it's because he has so much freaking influence on Instagram that people just go to Google and they search for it. So a lot of things to are cross channel. I think some people don't quite understand that either, or

they never thought about that, which is that if you build influence on social, it actually drives people to look for you on Google. So that booking gets attributed to a paid search campaign or an SEO campaign when really it was like other activity that you did that actually drove someone to come in and look for you. So when you talk about sustainability broadly, I think you have to bring up things like that. Like how am I influencing my whole ecosystem or if I'm doing display-based advertising, like you shared a few minutes ago, I'm advertising to the market that actually wants to stay with me. Like you could advertise to me until you're blue in the face about an amazing resort in California. My chances of driving over from South Carolina or traveling with three kids in the car is basically

zero. So that's not going to happen. It wouldn't make sense to really target me in that way. So understanding your market might actually be the first challenge before you actually go and decide, okay, here's marketing channel X, Y, and Z that I'm actually going to leverage to get results from that particular activity or channel or whatever that I'm doing. Yeah, most definitely. And I think everything is in anything we do is market specific because you are going to market to people differently in the panhandle than you are in the Smokies, than you are in the Palm Springs, than you are in some more metropolitan urban areas. And I think really understanding what is what talking about personas, what is your persona? What is your key guest persona? What is your key owner persona?

How are you really composing your messaging, composing your strategies for reaching out to these people to understand what are they actually, what are those pain points that they're driving on? It is post COVID. I think we went from a lot of national targeting for some of the search that we were doing to three hour drive, because that's what was happening. Doing more radius targeting to make sure you're hitting people in the drive to market. You know, doing more radius targeting to make sure you're hitting people in the drive-to market. And some other is, how have you gone about targeting some of those more micro campaigns to alleviate, I would say, dependence?

I'm trying to go through the chat here a little bit, but alleviate dependence on Verbona and Airbnb specifically there. One thing, I saw the chat question come through. I don't know if we were supposed to say names, so we won't say names in case that person doesn't want their name shared. But anyways, one thing that I was actually talking to a client that we're working with right now on this exact topic, and they're actually doing a lot of direct marketing and we're helping them through that. They're getting about 25%, 35%, somewhere in that range direct today. And this client shared with me that they wanted to be 80% direct. Like they really just don't do not want to be on Airbnb for reasons which we can leave up to the listeners or viewers imagination. And it was interesting to, I was like, you might want to consider like literally restricting your calendar and Airbnb. It might be just that you're putting

inventory and availability out there on Airbnb. The calendar is an asset. When you have enough visibility coming to your own website, you can actually be a little bit more restrictive. In fact, one of our clients actually only gives Airbnb 30 days of calendar at any given time. So we're recording this on April 19th. He's only showing his calendars through about May 20th, somewhere in that range. Like he's only giving them about a month at a time and he's strictly using Airbnb to fill last minute. The rest he wants to book directly and he gets bookings high. His direct booking percentage is like in the low 90% range. So you could argue he has a bit of a, more of a position of power to be able to limit it in that way. But if you're saying like, Hey, I'm doing all this direct marketing, people are coming to my website, but I'm not getting enough. I'm still too reliant on Airbnb

and Verbo. I would ask that host or that property manager, if they've considered like limiting the scope of Airbnb or any OTA a little bit, if they have enough traffic coming in again, the markers for me might be, okay, you have, let's say a thousand page views of people looking at a property detail page on a monthly basis, and you have a conversion rate of less than half of 1%. So that's the guideline for me. If you are not really in a reasonable zone of conversion to where honestly you could keep marketing until you're blue in the face, but if only one out of every 250 people who

sees your website is actually booking over like a seven or 30 day period, give them enough time to consider, then you're probably in like a danger zone of having a low enough conversion rate where more traffic isn't going to save you. It's like the patient has a broken leg. Another cast isn't going to cure the broken leg. It's just, there's other medicine that we need to give that person. So I would argue, excuse me, that you might want to take advantage of the calendar, restrict the calendar a little bit from Airbnb and you don't have to do 30 days. That's a more extreme example, but you could say, okay, every booking from 90 days out, I'm going to block on the platforms right now. I'm only going to give the 90 day plus bookings out to my own website traffic or to my own website. And then leave that as the path

for all of the early planners. If they want to be able to book directly, they're going to have to go on your website, which they're going to get a better rate anyway. So there's multiple benefits to doing that, but then you're actually taking some power away from Airbnb and you're seeing what you can actually drive in. And you may want to shift these numbers. If you book way in advance, we have a client who typically books very far in advance. The larger the property, typically the farther books out in advance, the smaller the property. Typically there's always exceptions. The shorter the booking window tends to be, but play with those. And that is a very valid technique, in my opinion, to be getting more visibility to

your actual website and consider what might make the most sense. The other thing I would say from that question about breaking dependence from Furbo and Airbnb is what's the email piece look like? You touched on it very briefly earlier, but in theory, if you're able to get emails coming in, this should be your channel over time that actually grows in influence, but doesn't really grow much in cost. Yeah, sure. Whatever email marketing system you're using, MailChimp, whatever, pick your flavor that you like. That's the one that we typically use. Your costs will go up incrementally. Let's say you end up with 5,000 past guests on an email list a few years from now. Sure, you might be paying a few hundred dollars a month to have that list, but the influence of your email goes extremely high over time. You go from being able to send to 50 past guests to 100 to 500 to

5,000 after enough time has elapsed. So that's one thing that I would definitely consider for sure, whether someone's a smaller host or a bigger host, having the ability to control your calendar and actually leverage email and grow it over time would make a lot of sense. Like always going to do a stay five plug for sure, because that's like the one that we recommend, but there's more than one different ways of doing that. But those are two that I think could apply to anyone for sure. And I think when you're talking about email marketing, it is, you may start sending it to 50 people, but it is that consistency. It's getting that out consistently, whether it's weekly, whether it's bi-weekly, whether it's monthly, it's making sure that you stay top of mind because that's maybe that may not be a sales or direct marketing

channel where you're getting the direct bookings to come through every time, but you're going to get additional exposure to your website. Hopefully if you're putting something compelling in that email, that's actually going to get people moving in the right direction, whether it's a special offer, whether it's a blog post, there's a lot of different ways that they can, a lot of different paths we've seen that people are going to take to actually make that booking. And one thing that we may be losing in Google analytics is the multi-step attribution and really being able to visualize seeing, okay, this person came to Facebook, came through a Google ad, they came

through an email newsletter as well. And now we see the 17 touch points that it took for them to actually convert that booking. So I think that's where kind of one of the items that talking about the web designer, it's really understanding how your website is converting and how people are engaging with it. One of the tools, one of the free tools, another free tool out there, Microsoft Clarity. It's great for understanding how people are using your website. How long are they staying on the site? Actually getting session recording to see as they're clicking through your listings, as they're clicking through different pages, are they making it two pages down? Are they making three pages of down? Are they clicking 60, 70 times and they still haven't

gotten to a booking page or something like that? It's really trying to streamline that process as much as possible. And clarity is a great option for that. And just understanding how people are doing it. Hot jars out there as well. You got to pay for it, but I think that's another, it's another visualization of how is my, just looking at numbers, you can imply or interpret those numbers in Google analytics, however you want to. But that's why I like clarity is that it's adding a little color. It's actually seeing how is my webpage rendering on different devices? How are people, where are they clicking into, where are they exiting and really starting to identify some of those areas because it's those little tweaks. It's those 1% tweaks, those 1% changes that do

have the ability and opportunity to make the biggest impact. So between consistency and really understanding how people are engaging with your business, I think those are ways you can at least start to reduce your reliance. Again, doing more things like trying to take away some of that availability or distribution through verbal or through Airbnb. Those are certainly options as well, but it is, I think for certain, the one thing we can say with certainty is it's not a one, one stop shop of this one fix is going to be able to change, help everything, change all my issues, resolve all my problems. That's not the reality. That's, I think, again, talking how we started, the willingness to go outside the box, to try something new, to try something different,

and to fail occasionally. Fail fast, but fail. Make sure you're cutting your costs there because, again, you don't want to fail for a year and say, oh, maybe I should stop this after a quarter or three months or whatever that is. Think about it strategically, think about it logically. Sometimes I think we try to overcomplicate things and sometimes keep it simple, stupid works pretty well for us. Yeah, for sure. I have some other things in chat. Maybe we can keep switching gears here and answer as many as we can. I think we've got 12 ish minutes left or so. And I think we have to leave a little bit at the end. I like the question here about off season. Like what do we do during on season? What do we do during off season? So what, one tool I like quite a bit,

and this helps me orient myself, especially when I'm new to a market, I may not know exactly what the seasonality looks like. So we just started with a client that's in a mountain market that I just didn't know anything about. So it doesn't necessarily follow like this. It's not really a ski market per se.

It's more of a hiking, biking, outdoor trails kind of market. So I actually went into Keywords Everywhere, which is a tool that you can purchase credits for and get this data for a penny per line. It's very inexpensive. And I put in the name of his market plus cabin rentals, which is a dominant keyword of people searching. And on the Google Ads side, where we do have to decide, hey, where is our advertising budget going to go on a monthly basis? We actually learned when the peaks and valleys were of search demand. And usually you can map that pretty accurately, 30 days, perhaps in advance

of when the booking demand might be. So he's actually pretty busy, obviously in the fall, he's pretty busy in the summer. He has that typical mud season slowdown that a lot of mountain markets and ski markets that we've looked to have in April budget suggestion was somewhere in the range of $1,000. And then as we pick up and as we see more search volume happening in the summer, our budget suggestions was ranging to four to $5,000 on a monthly basis for his company that made sense given the number of listings that he had. Obviously, if someone was smaller, they may take those numbers and chop them and divide them by 10 or something to get the more accurate number. But that kind of curve, I think creation is something that's definitely

worth considering. Because if you have a Google Ads budget, let's say, and it's let's just make it a round number and make it simple, it's $12,000 for the year, you probably don't want to spend $1,000 a month. That's not really necessarily the best approach. What you probably want to do is have a month where you might spend $2,500. And then you might have a month where you spend $500 because the search volume is tailed off so much. So that was just one that I saw in there

that I thought was a good question. I don't know if you want to add anything on top of that or if that's a decent summary. That definitely, that's definitely one of those things that we, anybody who's just setting a budget flat over the entire 12 months, you can do it. It really does. It's one of those things where we can see the search volume behind the scenes. We know a thousand searches happen in January and 500 searches happen in February and allocating your budget appropriately and just knowing when people are booking. And it's

not just knowing people are doing the searches. It's knowing when people are doing bookings for your area. And if you've got, on average, you're booking 60 days out, 90 days out, it's probably when you should be spending the money, just knowing that those are the trends. Some of it, we can always look at the technical tools that are out there, but leverage the tools you've got, whether it's your property management system, your booking engine, anything like that. Hopefully that data is behind the scenes. That reporting is behind the scenes to be able to extract that and get more value and make those more data-driven decisions, as opposed to just, I'm going to spend six grand over the course of the next 12 months, 500 a month sounds pretty good to me. Let's give that money a little

more value and power behind the scenes and make sure that we're spending it at a higher point when people are booking and a lower point when they're staying with you. I think those beach markets, I didn't ever spend a whole lot during June, July, and August because hopefully you're full. And if you're not, you might have some bigger questions to ask about what's happening with the business. Yeah. Just trying to look at that keyword. Keywords everywhere was the tool, I think, that you were referencing there, Conrad, for being able to find that search form. Yeah, Jenna got the link correct there in the chat. So thank you, Jenna, for that one. There's a small fee. I try to give SEO tools out on shows like this and formats like this where you're not having to pay a lot of money.

Paul and I will often debate on the show about Ahrefs versus SEMrush. I think they're both good tools, but neither of them are very cheap. So these are tools where you might have to commit $ dollars, $200 on a monthly basis to use them. But Keywords Everywhere is one of those tools where you can pay 10 bucks, literally get a hundred thousand rows of data, which for a single property host or property manager that doesn't need to access that data all the time, heck, that might last you the rest of your life. So it's not a reoccurring monthly charge. And that's a really great one to get additional keyword ideas. It also goes into a topic that's not really covered in any of the chat questions, but Keywords Everywhere does a great job of showing like blog topics because you could put in things to do in destination. And then it'll give you a bunch of suggestions on topics to cover

hiking trails, biking trails. Here's the people are looking for fishing information. And that's always great content angles to explore when it comes to creating like blog content and things like that. Again, another, maybe I'll dovetail that back into sustainability. Another sustainable way I think to drive traffic is to not just focus on these rental keywords. A lot of clients, when we start to have these conversations like we've had today, okay, you've told me SEO is good. You told me that clients who work with you get a lot of direct bookings, get a lot of traffic from Google.

Therefore, I want to snap my fingers and rank for my area plus rentals or plus cabins. Now, what do I have to do to get there? And sometimes I had a conversation with someone recently where I'm like, yeah, we're doing all the content because that's going to help us actually become relevant for the search, right? The one thing that we can do that the listing sites can't do, at least not with any level of scale is intimately cover the topics that our guest cares about inside of our destination, right? Airbnb tries to do this with like user generated content, or I guess like host generated content. But in my mind, go look at the results they've had from it. It hasn't really worked that well. Like Google actually prefers a local

property manager writing a detailed long form blog post about here's the 25 best hiking trails in the Smoky Mountains that actually is going to rank better and get more traffic in Google with your kind of core target guest market who's visiting as opposed to Airbnb is just attempted to attempt that content because they really just don't want to do that. That's not their business. They don't have the bandwidth or the scalability to create best hiking trails in X content for millions, literally millions of points of interest. They just don't have that capability. Sites like TripAdvisor probably do a better job of that. But you, the local property manager, can do that because you're not worried about the other 5,999,000 destinations. You're worried about

your one destination. So you being able to create a bunch of content about restaurants, things to do is going to give back to the sustainability point, your site, a ton of traffic, a ton of relevant traffic. And it's like you have 500 people, a thousand people a month or a week or a day, depending on how far you scale this coming into your front door and checking out what you have to offer. And yeah, you also, oh, you're looking for restaurant information here. We also have amazing places to stay. Do you need lodging? We're filling them into a retargeting list that we can build off of there. So yeah, I think sustainability is not just a marketing channel discussion. It's also how you act within that channel.

Are you doing things by the books, so to speak on the Facebook side of things? We have clients that have abused contests in the past and they got banned off Facebook because they were doing things they were not supposed to be doing. So also not sustainable to run ads on Facebook and do it in a way that's going to get you banned. Also a lot better idea on Google. If you're doing things that are actually going to drive you a lot of traffic over time, and you're not hyper-focusing on just rental keywords, you're actually creating useful information that Google actually wants to show to your users. That's forget Google doesn't care about your company.

They don't not care about your company, but they care about the user. So if you're providing actually useful information for a target guest, you're going to typically win over time, not just something where you're doing the thing that benefits you or the things that easy for you, not the thing that's actually ideal for that person. We had to ask Jeeves. Google is, it's just the question. It's trying to answer the question in the best way possible. And the more content you can do, the more anything you can put on your website to support and give people that better answer. Google knows who's engaging with the sites. They know who's sticking around. They know who, they may argue that's not a part of the algorithm. I guarantee somewhere behind the scenes, that's certainly taking an effect. So it is, it's really about, I love the idea of taking it outside

of just the travel. I mean, your travel specific, rental specific keywords and really giving people that greater opportunity to reach the site to reach the site and embracing AI with the STR. Oh yeah. We always do that. It's always a topic. That's exactly it. It is. I think the really it's made it easier. AI has made it easier to create content. Now you still want to make sure that it's quality. I think that's the one thing that embracing AI is important. It's, I don't think is important. It might be scary, but it's not something to be scared of. It's something that will allow you to be more efficient. Again, I think we found a lot of ways and we've had that discussion as well in an episode of how can you leverage it to make yourself more efficient?

It's not just to throw out 25, 30 blog posts. It's to write five blog posts that are maybe a little easier and doing it in a shorter amount of time. I think maybe the scariest thing about AI is making sure you understand the prompts. Jenna, listing descriptions. Conrad, how do you feel about ChatGPT and listing descriptions? Yeah, I have two angles on it. One, I'm very biased because one of the companies that I bought back in October of 2020 is called Guesthook and that is a human written listing site description service. So obviously I have a vested interest in keeping that path to sustainability with my business there. But I do think that ChatGPT can provide a lot of value in the listing site description,

because a lot of it is work where you're describing the same thing over and over again. I actually am really bullish on being able to use a human written description plus a ChatGPT description when it comes to modifying and perhaps putting out a different description on other platforms. I had a discussion with a client a while ago and they want to put out one on their website, one on Airbnb and one on VRBO

and they're actually different. They don't actually have the exact same structure. So I said being able to use chat GPT and giving it the right prompt to Paul's point from a minute ago, plus a modifier is actually a pretty valid technique for being able to like improve or modify a listing description to make it better. But the copy you do get back from chat GBT, it sounds good,

but it's very like plain. It's very like simple. So I think the challenging part with writing a solid listing description, just using chat GBT is can you actually give it some soul? Can you actually, especially for the right type of listing, if you have a luxury 10 bedroom house, are you just describing the facts of the property? Or are you trying to give people a sense of what it's like to actually be there and be inside that property and enjoy it? Something to definitely consider. I think there's prompts.

I have some briefing prompts that are on my website. I could send them to people if they want, because we've been testing this. It's not finally published anywhere, but there's a way I think to prompt ChatGPT properly to, for example, like here's my Airbnb headline. You give the context of the description of the property, the first two paragraphs of it, and you say, you know, ChatGPT, give me 10 alternative ways that I could write this headline. You give the context of the description of the property, the first two paragraphs of it, and you say, chat GPT, give me 10 alternative ways that I can write this headline. And then you can test those if your property is down in booking. So that's my logic right now is that chat GPT today and you're leveraging some of these AI tools. It's just a heck of an assistant.

Just having it on your side, on your back, being able to work with you is a sustainable tool to have. And like we said earlier, sometimes the biggest cost that you have in marketing is people, not necessarily the actual tools that you use. So to have ChatGPT sitting in a tab where it can give you 10 different Airbnb headlines at the request of a few keystrokes is the equivalent of having like a copywriter that you might have to pay $100 an hour next to you.

So that's kind of the way that I see it. So, yeah. Alexa? Handing it back over to you. I was going to say, I handed that back over to you. I don going to say, I'm handing that back over to you. I don't want to run long. So I want to keep everybody rolling here. I've done that before.

Great timing, Paul. Thank you. Thank you guys so much. I can tell you guys could go on for hours and I am sure everybody would stick around for several more hours to listen to all of these nuggets. Let me share my screen really quick so everybody knows where to find you.

Up next, we do have a great session from NoiseAware. nuggets. Let me share my screen really quick. So everybody knows where to find you up next. We do have a great session from noise aware in between this one and that one, go to buildupbookings.com slash show, or go to your favorite podcast app, subscribe to these guys, heads in beds. All of their episodes are like this packed with information. I'm going to go back and re-listen to this one once it airs and pause it. So I can take notes. I was taking a lot and I just could not keep up. So thank you guys so much for all of this information. It was great. I am so excited to go back and listen to it again. Thanks Alexa for having us. Really appreciate it. It was fun. And if anyone has any other questions, they can definitely just reach out to us and we'll definitely cover it on a future

show as well. But we thank you. This was fun. Absolutely. Thanks guys. Awesome.