Heads In Beds Show - Low Budget Ways To Get More Direct Bookings

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad dive into ways to get more direct bookings WITHOUT spending tens of thousands of dollars: we explain email, branded PPC and other low-cost efforts.⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'Connell🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. Hey there, Paul. How's it going today? Great, Conrad. How are you doing today?

Doing pretty good. Did you catch any basketball games this weekend? We're in the throes of March Madness. I caught a couple. It was a, my brackets do not look any kind of good right now. This is something I... Literally everybody. I do. I think everybody's busted, but this is one of those where I've always prided myself on at least making the champion, like getting my champion the final four weekend or sweet six or something. the champion, like getting my champion the final four weekend or sweet six or something. Yeah. Mine were both gone early. And then admittedly, I don't watch as much college basketball as I used to, but it was a little punch to the gut when my cousins both had teams that have continued forward

and I have not. That's funny. Yeah. And you got to tell the listeners who don't know how old are your kids? Right. Three and four, three and four. Yeah. My three and four year old are both just ripping me on the bracket side of things on the family side and yeah it's yeah this might be a retirement time actually this might be the year this is it you know what it was fun before this and now it got a lot more serious and yeah when the toddlers are beating me it might be time to call it a call today but you need to pick more freely i'm not really my thing i think growing up in western mass like who do you root for i guess not really it was a bit more of a geographically diverse sport than college football is obviously which is like very southeastern focused but yeah living

here i don't really have a strong i mean coastal doesn't really have a notable basketball team that's where i went to college so yeah i just like watching it and i like watching the underdogs and sometimes you get latched on to these stories i think it is great tv though they produce it in a way and there's a bit of drama in a way but man these kids can't make free throws it drives me because like i'm very unforgiving of that i'm like okay you are from the time that you're what 11 10 years old you're playing basketball with your buddies you're starting to play in high school it's a free throw it's the same i get it these guys can switch and okay you can't drive like you can in high school those things all make sense to me but the idea

that it's 10 feet away and you can't make 75 of those and i was watching one game i forgot what was it gonzaga or something like that where they were hitting 50 of their free throws oh yeah and like an important game and i'm like guys like that's egregious to me and it wasn't even the big guys it was the guards that couldn't even make free throws i'm just like you're gonna shoot yourself in the foot doing that so yeah you gotta make the easy ones that is certainly something that that was i took a lot of pride free throws granted high school and that was it it does it's a cringeworthy moment when they start putting up those 50 graphics and 60 season long free throw shooting percentages oh geez it's just then when you get in that foul game at the end it doesn't work at all the foul

game but it works in college because like these guys miss free throws all the time so if you can just keep telling them and they keep missing and you get, you make a few buckets, like there will be, I'm sure a comeback in the next few weeks or whatever from something like that, where someone does that kind of stuff. So yeah,

it's interesting. You know, what's also back and what else is coming back? What's coming back? Google core updates. So we'll do a quick marketing minute. We'll divert into what you caught over the last week. So I believe I saw on Twitter that

there had not been a core update in six or seven months, which is a decently long time they'd been running them. In fact, they ran some last year, like back to back almost. Yeah. So this came back, Google has done a core update. What was the news and notes that you saw on the score update? It's only been a time of this recording five or six days, but I think that caught your eye. You know, I think it's a lot more focus. I think the continued focus is on the content, helpful content, making sure that it seems like a lot of that is revolving around helpful content. And what I'm seeing as far as like some of the big examples of big shift or big volatility is people who haven't done a lot of fresh content, a lot of recent content.

So it is, if you hadn't made a lot of changes from the last September broad, the September core update, or if you hadn't made a lot of content switches with the helpful content updates, peers that you probably have taken, it is, I've seen a lot of the downward trajectory and it is, it's pretty precipitous. It's been pretty sharp drops to whether you're seeing a drop of a thousand impressions or ten thousand impressions i've definitely seen some big numbers out there on some examples so i think a lot of the core principles we talk about as far as making sure you're consistently putting content up there and making those updates and putting fresh content up

there i think google's rewarding that continues to reward that i haven't seen specifically whether there's anything related to machine written ai generated content i i, continues to reward that. I haven't seen specifically whether there's anything related to machine-written AI-generated content. I would have to assume that this was the first phase of starting to look for some chat GPT content that's out there that's maybe watermarked and is identifiable. I have to think there's probably something. If it's not immediately shifting it, that's got to be one of the markers that they're at least crawling against and looking for there. But yeah, it's, I think anytime there's a core update that it takes a while, it's usually two weeks to do the core updates when they roll out. It is, Google's always making changes. Google's making changes

every day to the algorithm. So it's not anything like that, but this is whenever they make these big, broad core updates, usually there is a follow up of some kind. So they're going to tell you in two to three weeks what they did, what did change, they're going to say now if you're in good standing with your best practices, there's nothing you really need to do to make any changes. That is that it's just understanding what you missed on the best practices side of things. Did I not get consistent content? Well, specifically, they'll give you some hints there. But for right now it does. It looks like continuation of quality content. And I would say probably just starting to touch on some of the AI generated machine

written content and probably being able to find some of that as well. So. Yeah. We'll see before we start recording. I looked up a ranking for the first time in a few days on a client and we, a mutual client of ours, and we noticed that he had popped from about number eight to number two. So I'm hoping that's going to help us. And this is a client that is pushing a lot of new stuff live right now in terms of information, informational content, landing pages. We actually just finished really in-depth landing pages for bachelor and bachelorette parties for this client. So not only are we trying to address the need of this being in his market and him actually willing to serve that customer, that clientele on the guest side for rentals, but also we

were actually making a separate page for Bachelorette and Bachelorette. So we're trying to go to that tailored content level and make something really useful for him, which he was excited about. Yeah, we'll see. I'll do some more spot checking and review how things are going. But it's an interesting thing that these things, updates occur. I'm with you that sometimes I look at it and I go, what's the benefit or what's the point of reading the news and notes about it? Because it's usually all the same stuff from Google, which is follow our best practices, which we try to do anyways.

And if you're not, then you're not, and you're not really going to get rewarded for it. So you just got to roll with it and see what happens. Pretty much. We're going down a different path today on the topic. So I believe our title, working title is going to be something along the lines of low cost, low budget activities. And this kind of stems from a conversation that we had previously and the conversations that we've had, you and I together, where people are tightening their belt a little bit right now. I know there's been some of that going on over the past few months and we've talked

about it at a high level, but I think now that maybe the initial early season bookings have come and gone and now we're in, I think for a lot of our beach clients, at least a little bit of a dead period between now and when there's actually a money, final deposits, et cetera, coming in for summer demand. It's just like awkward spring timeframe where people seem to be looking at their budgets and maybe even cutting marketing, unfortunately. And not that results are horrible, but results aren't what they were last year in many markets. Most markets, that's the case. So everyone's having to make decisions that are best for them. So obviously, we're very biased here, because we want you to keep doing your homeowner and market maintenance, keep employed, if you will. We have some personal incentive there. But I will

say that some people do tend to make, I think, rash decisions, or they panic cancel, or they panic stop doing something that is working because of a bad few weeks or a bad month or something like that. So I thought instead, maybe we could talk today about if efficiency was the name of the game, what would be the tactics and techniques that we would employ to maximize said efficiency or put maybe a different way if you and I were plucked into inside of a vacation rental company, and we were the marketing manager or the director or the owner, and we had a tiny budget, not no budget, but a tiny budget, what levers would be pulled to try to maximize the outcome of our efforts and try to get as many bookings as possible. So I thought we'd go down that path today. I have one to start on and then maybe

we'll just trade off back and forth here and share ideas. So my first one is around Google AdWords. So even in a low budget environment, I think it'd be very challenging not to be able to, I said AdWords, ads, sorry. Google Ads. I mean, yeah, it'd be very challenging for me not to be able to not have any sort of paid search budget. Now, even in a low budget environment, maybe I get, let's say at $1,000 a month, and I had a 50 unit property management company, right? I have to be very careful with my ad spend, obviously, to maximize that. I'm still bringing in branded number one, that's still going to be my main cost that I'm going to put in place right away to make sure that if people are looking for my company specifically on the branded campaign, or on that dynamic campaign on a property detail page level, people looking for the names of my properties. Again, I believe there's actually two brands when it comes to most vacation managers that we work with. There's name of the company, Conrad's Cool Cabins. And then there's actually the name of each individual cabin, let's say on my fictional rental program. And that in and of itself is a brand. I would still focus on that first. So let's say a third or half of my budget gets put into

that where $350 to $500 is being spent on brand and cabin name stuff. So let's say a third or half of my budget gets put into that where $350 to $500 is being spent on brand and cabin name stuff. So let's say I had another 500 to work with. So this is what I would do that next 500. I'd go as long tail as possible, especially if I had inventory that matched up with that with those specific long tail search queries. So for example, we'll go down this fictional cabin rental company that I don't have. If it was pet friendly cabin rentals in area name or something like that, that might be my first one, especially if I had five, six, seven, eight or more pet friendly cabins that fit that search criteria.

Now, I think where some clients that I work with that are a bit smaller get into trouble is they want to attack these long tail search queries, but they have one or two properties that meet that long tail search criteria, demand or intent. And that's where I think it becomes very challenging. So if you only have one pet friendly property and you're advertising on pet friendly

and your competition has 50, then like your result is just bad objectively compared to their result. And that's where I think it becomes very challenging. So if you only have one pet friendly property and you're advertising on pet friendly and your competition has 50, then like your result is just bad objectively compared to their result. Even if the property you have is amazing, it's just not going to line up well with like intent and demand and things like that. So you have to figure out a way, what do I have the most to offer the marketplace or to the guests that are searching out there? And what's a little bit more specific of a search term than just bidding on area name

cabinet rentals, which is sure it's good traffic, but it's also going to cost you a lot. And you're probably not going to get the best conversion rate, the best yield on that in terms of your return on that spend. So I would take that budget and I try to slice it up the best of my ability, depending on the search volume for that particular market. And I may make one or two additional campaigns focused on those long tail keywords, do the landing page, and then ideally map the landing page intent to the best of my ability with

the search term. So if they search pet friendly, i'm bringing them to a pet friendly page with the heading the text a little picture of a dog over on the right side nice little thumbnail i'm trying to match that intent and that's probably how i'd spend my thousand dollars let's say on google ads same logic would apply by the way with any other ad platform whether search ad platform the obvious one being bing sometimes our clients will actually get a lower cost per click and a higher return on their ad spend running Bing ads because there's less people in that ecosystem competing. And we've talked about Bing and touched on it recently because of all the chat GPT stuff

that they're integrating into it. But the idea just broadly of Bing being less popular and therefore cheaper seems to hold out pretty well for us in our testing. So that could be another angle that you play is I just can't make my traffic convert well enough on Google to be profitable. I'm just going to take that $1,000 and put it into Bing. And then I'm going to get more traffic over there relative to my dollars. And I'll get some conversions off that will be useful.

So that's another way to play it, by the way, that wasn't in my outline, but something that's worth mentioning. So once I had that $1,000 and I'm spending it, hopefully it's turning a profit, a modest profit. And I would go back and ask for more because that's what I do. But even if I only had that $1,000 to spend, I would then go into the mechanics of the actual ad campaign itself. So I would introduce day parting. If I know I'm most likely to get a conversion, let's say from 8am to 10am Eastern, and then I'm most likely to get a conversion or a booking on my website from

4pm to 9pm Eastern, I'd only run my ads during those times. Again, if I had enough data, hopefully to me or just based on my own intuition and what i know the phones are getting or when i know people making online booking because i've observed that for some period of time i would take a look at that and say hey could i pause the ads on tuesdays no one books on tuesdays i don't know why but people don't book on tuesday could i pause the ads then and try to it's like a we're stranded on a desert island and i've got a few bullets to kill some wildlife and hopefully eat and i got to shoot those bullets very carefully i can't just be like I can't be whatever it is, right? I can't be Vin Diesel-ing it. I need to be very thoughtful about how I'm firing those bullets. That's how I'm

going to think about my clicks. If I can only be able to afford 500 clicks a month at two bucks a pop or something like that, I have to be very thoughtful about where they're coming from. The next layer of maybe additional targeting I would do, and then I'll turn it over your way here, Paul, would be geographic restriction. Not only I know what time of day maybe I'm most likely to get a conversion on Google ads, or just people coming to my website in general, but I know they're likely from these seven markets or these five markets or something like that. I would only show my Google ads in those markets. Yes, I know that 30% of your people come from this part of Ohio or this part of California or this part of Texas. And that's true. But if we're trying to be very diligent with our ad spend,

if we know that the majority of people come from Houston when they go to Galveston, then I'd only focus my campaign on that geography alone. And I wouldn't worry about all the volume that I'm missing because I know that I can't capture it all anyways with my budget. So that's kind of my approach on the Google ad side. I'll go your way. And you have some other ideas for hiring these low budget bullets. What's your thoughts?

I think where Google is the high converting, it's the channel that we want the traffic to come through. Not that we don't want it to come through any channel if it's going to come, but I do. I think that where Facebook, where typically we would say, yeah, get that channel, make sure that's working in there as well on the advertising side. If we're going to cut something, Facebook's probably going to be what I'm going to cut on the advertising side. Conversion rate wise, it's just not there. However, you can still leverage Facebook, Instagram, any of your other social channels if you've got that following. So making sure that you are consistently posting. If you've already got that brand awareness on the Facebook side of things, or you've got enough reach that there's value to people seeing there, people are

going to see your ads, people are going to see your posts, not your ads, excuse me, but people are going to see your posts, people are going to see any of the interactions that you're having out there, even if you're commenting to get five posts a week, 10 posts a week, whatever that is. But then we don't recognize that social channel as truly a social channel and an opportunity to do outreach and to do guest outreach and prospective homeowner outreach and do stuff like that. So to be able to really take the social aspect and the social side into a more personalized conversation of when people are commenting on your posts, comment back, like a post, like some of these things, develop some of these local partnerships in the area just by organically reaching out to people on social. I do. I think that's one thing that it is. It's an under leveraged part of social media. It's just we again, we just post and post and don't really take the feedback in all the times and, and get a lot out of it there. It is if you're going to do some retargeting of some kind, be much more practical with it.

Like we talked about it. It's not about retargeting everybody who's hitting the site. It's about maybe retargeting people who are much further down the funnel. So they're hitting the booking pages or they're hitting the specific property pages. They're not taking it to the full, taking it back to the full onslaught of if you have thousands of people hitting your site, those might not be the right people to be retargeting.

But if you do have, maybe if it's three, four, 500 people hitting your checkout pages and your specific property pages that are getting booked, yeah, maybe those are the ones that maybe that's the audience you really want to go after there. In general, Facebook and social media are certainly things that we want to be exercising as frequently as possible. But from the aspect of organically, it's cheap for us to get a lot of bang for the buck. If we've got following, put all those parameters in place. But we definitely want to make sure that if you're turning on the ad side of things, we're being much more selective with the audience that we're going after there. Yeah, same logic. I think that I apply on the Google side, you're applying there on any sort of display, whether it's Google display, a video campaign, a social campaign, if you did run one, if you wanted to have some activity going on the ad side,

but be very selective. I like that. And honestly, we were saying this before I started hitting we hit record today. I believe the Instagram reels and tech talk might be one of the few places you can still get organic reach today without a budget. So like, you can go make a brand new tech talk account today called what's going on Myrtle Beach, film 1000 TikTok videos over the next year and get a lot of organic reach out of it. I promise you that if you make good videos, if you make bad videos now, and you don't deserve reach, that's how the algorithm should work, to be honest with you. But if you make good video content, and you have that capability, then yeah, and that's, that's ultimately the trade off we're talking about here,

you're trading off money for time. So like everything we're talking about, I feel like the person on the other end now might be saying, it's gonna take a lot take a lot of time. Yeah. Like, yes, that's what we're talking about. It's like, you don't have the money, so you have to spend the time on these other ideas. And these things are maybe not scalable or not efficient as doing other forms of marketing advertising, but they're free or very low cost. So that's going to trade off that you're making there. So I'll take that one and run with it. The idea of a high time investment, but low cost idea is doing personalized outreach. I have a lot of clients that have done this.

When times are good, when times are bad, I have one client in particular who's very diligent about it. And he has his reservationist, his team. He's got, I believe three at the moment. Although in the past, I think he's had four or five. I think he's just figured out ways to make them more efficient, honestly.

They focus heavily on outbound to past guests. It is a core part of their strategy. When you book out and you stay with them and you depart, you get an automated sequence, but you also get a personal note as well. It's not just all templatized emails that Paul gets. It's also, hey, Paul, hope you and your wife and your two boys had an amazing time here in the Outer Banks. My name is Linda. I'm here to help you if you guys ever decide to come back. Just that one little text the day after they depart is going to pay dividends when six months later, they're reaching out and going, hey, Paul, a happy new year. Would love to know if you guys are planning your trip to the Outer Banks this year,

dash Linda, right? That's the outbound text or it could be an email doesn't really matter too much. But these can be automated slightly through different CRM systems. They use a system called close. That's the system they have. But you can do this in HubSpot. Heck, you might even be able to do inventory. I'm not sure. I know that's more owner focused, but that may be possible inside inventory. We'll have to get JJ on here. We can ask him. But anyways, any good CRM should be able to help you handle that type of communication in a slightly more automated fashion. But certainly you're going to get replies to your inbound email or to your inbound phone number that are going to be very time consuming to parse through that.

That's, but it's a good problem to have, right? Like when you don't have bookings, getting 10, 20, 30 people to respond to your outbound text that says, Hey, are you coming this year? And a lot of them may say no, and that's okay too. She's like, Oh, no worries at all. We'd love to host you again in the future. Like just having that friendly touch point is something that's valuable and they may change their mind. People change their mind all the time about traveling and vacation. And my wife and I have done that before. Now we're not going this year. Oh, we changed your mind. Now we're gone.

So that in my mind, the idea of one-to-one, let's call it that. Let's call this idea one-to-one, one-to-one outreach could be through text, could be through email. Heck, it could be, you pick up this thing. You could actually call someone on the phone if you want to. There's a segment of the population that would love that, needless to say, of getting an outbound message, calling them and leaving them a voicemail and saying, hey, Linda here, just wondering if you guys are coming, planning again another trip to the Outer Banks this year, something like that. Could be potentially very impactful. That's low cost as it gets, right? You might need a small CRM or maybe you need to sign up a phone number or text message. But if you're a single property host or multi property host, you just do

it with your phone with your tax, you don't even need to do that with any sort of fancy CRM system or anything like that. And that can be very high leverage. So that's my kind of bullet that I'd fire there is one to one outreach to past guests. And then this is something that Mark Simpson says a lot from Boostly. So full credit to him on this idea, because I hadn't necessarily gone down this path before, but now I'm thinking it might make sense, which is that you actually ask them if they say no, or even departing guests, you could also say, do you know anybody? That's something that Mark says a lot. Do you know anybody that could potentially is looking to come to the Outer Banks? We'd love to host them as well or something to that effect. And you never know. Some percentage of them are going to say, yeah, I actually do

know someone. Oh, great. Here's our website link. If you don't mind sharing it with them, that'd be fantastic. Or what's their name? Maybe I could reach out to them and say that you gave their information over. Again, when you're desperate for bookings, these things don't scale when you're desperate for bookings, or you need bookings and you don't have money to do it. These are the things I think you can employ that would make it. Yeah. One-to-one. I'll fire it back to you. Yeah. And then it's jumping off of that. Do you know anybody? I think that's something we definitely see on the owner's side. Referrals are some of the biggest selling options or reasons.

That's the biggest marketing channel for a lot of these property managers to start at least. I mean, you have a lot of people who, that's exactly, do you have another homeowner? Do you have another friend who's looking to buy in the area? Do you have another homeowner? Another friend who's looking to get an investment property out there or something like that. So I think that definitely that referral traffic, while not something that we can tangibly always drop back on the attribution side of things, it's certainly a way to increase the brand awareness and reputation, but also just make sure that you've got some consistent traffic coming on the guest side

and hopefully on the owner's side as well. It is kind of maybe piggybacking off the email side of things. I think just optimizing and making sure that you are getting as many emails, phone numbers, all that as possible. So I think lead capture is still very important. Making sure that if you do, you have that pop-up, you have the trying to get those email. We've talked about that multiple times before, having that drip sequence campaign ready to go so that you can continually get those touch bases out there. I think that's the softwares to run the pop-up and the emails is usually pretty low cost. Their email is one of those in general channels that we see is just a lower cost option because it doesn't cost a lot to send the emails themselves, the software, it's the service. It's the work it

takes to actually get those emails and get that list to be able to send those emails to. I do. I think that just making sure that any place where you can be grabbing those or capturing those emails or any of that contact information, I think on the tech side of things, being able to text people, being able to do those outbound calls, it's also incredibly important. I think we focus maybe more on the digital side of things and look at those email addresses, thinking about what we can do in Facebook or with a custom audience or something like that. But there is, there's something to be said for just picking up the phone or using your CRM to reach out to someone and get that additional touch point along the way there. So I think that's important too. Just take a look at my list. I think in general, email bulk newsletters,

that's something that, you know, making sure you're getting that monthly touch base out there or biweekly or whatever that is. If you've got news happening in the area, make sure it's out there. If you've got a recent blog post that you're going to put on the website, put it in your newsletter. Make sure you're giving people some content that's easily digestible. Emails are also a great place to get those offers in there as well to make sure those, if you get good readability, or excuse me, if you get good open rates, if you get good click-throughs and engagement with your emails, then certainly you want to make sure you're leveraging those to get more people back to the website.

So I certainly think that email in general, whether that's the newsletter, whether that's those drip sequences, whether it's however you're leveraging it, certainly it's what we have to be doing when we're starting to tighten the purse strings a little bit. But what are your thoughts? I know you've got another list on the email side of things, but what specifically have you seen that's been effective there for you? Yeah, I think collection wise, I don't know if you said Stafy, but Stafy is always the one that makes a lot of sense because it's low cost.

And obviously the collection, the volume of emails you collect, the volume of emails you collect goes up so significantly that it makes a lot of sense to focus on that so i know it does cost a few shekels a month for stay five but i think it's worth it because ultimately you're going to grow your list so much faster that six months from now every client i work with ends up putting stay five in eight months down the road six months down the road they're like wow we have this huge email list and it's growing so fast and i'm like yeah i know because you have stay for people who don't do it are like they're like chipping away at it. They're not really making good,

big progress. Like my Stafy clients are that use that platform. So obviously a huge fan and I guess disclosure investor, I guess we have to say that now that we did their crowdfunding thing as well. But yeah, obviously a great platform. I'd recommend it either way regarding, cause I think it's critical to have that email collection in place. And a lot of people try to backend it. Oh, I'll do it through a guidebook. I'll do it through that. And okay. If you truly can't do it, I have someone tell me, oh, their wifi system isn't compatible or something like that. Or I had a client say, oh, I don't want to inconvenience the guests with it through that. And okay, if you truly can't do it, I have someone tell me, oh, their Wi Fi system isn't compatible or something like that. Sure. I had a client say, oh, I don't want to inconvenience the guests with the Wi Fi request. And I was telling him my story that I always tell people, which is go stay at any premium three, four star. I've only stayed

a handful of five stars, but like any premium hotel or resort in the world, and you will get the same Wi Fi prompt at four seasons as you do with the stay five unit. So I don't believe that's actually a legitimate reason to not do it. But I understand some people don't want to that's okay. But you can you can do it through a guidebook, you can do it through a rental agreement. It's just a lot slower. Not only is it less efficient to from an API perspective, it's just slower to do it that way, you'll get one instead of 10 per per thing, especially if you have bigger properties. So yeah, that's one I'd want to include in there for sure. Even low budget, I would have a really hard time cutting stay five from anybody's cost budget. because I think the ROI you get long term is really fantastic.

So that one comes to mind. Yeah, but beyond that, it's email. This wasn't in the outline. But one thing that it's like a broad idea that I would have is like, pushing your offers heavily and making good offers. Like instead of saying, we were at 225 a night, it's 125 a night now, please rent this property by doing that, please. But I think implicit in that is you're making a great offer. If people aren't taking you up on that offer when you go and distribute that on email, on social, on your website, and you're not able to getting people to take you up on that offer, then there's a more fundamental problem, right? Like people just don't care what you have to offer.

That may be more of a property issue, which isn't really our domain of like really deep expertise. But like you and I have both seen great properties listed on sites and bad properties listed on sites. And that at that point, I'd be considering if that's my flaw. If people are seeing my offer, a low offer, and they're not taking it, that may be is the photography good? You know, is the interior design good? Is my positioning right of this property? What am I doing to make this property look appealing? Is it missing a key amenity that people need to have? And then it may be a kind of honest and perhaps awkward conversation with your homeowner. If you're a property manager and you may have to say,

look, like your property was sustainable over the past two years because the demand was crazy. Hi, now your property is just not as appealing as it was in the past. And we might have to make some serious improvements and adjustments to this property. And you are, this is not a set it and forget it type of thing when it comes to the actual property design itself. Those two things I think are in my mind as well. They're not necessarily low cost. If you're a property manager, you're not enduring any of the cost of actually going out and improving the property necessarily, but you may have to endure some time of, I need to make this property more appealing. If you made a great offer and no one's taking you up on it, then that's probably where I

would look at that point is that this property is not appealing. Why? And then having the honest conversation, maybe it's going and collecting data, gathering data amongst your other properties that are doing okay to good right now and saying, hey, this one's doing well because it has a hot tub. And this one's doing well because look at the inside. It was recently refreshed, new siding, new furniture, new paint, new fixtures, like the kitchen looks nicer, all those things. Now for the homeowner, these may be 10, 15, 20, $30,000 investments. So they have to consider if it's worth it for them. But you also have to consider what kind of product you're putting out to the marketplace. If you're putting out a mediocre to below standard product in the marketplace,

don't be surprised when you get mediocre to below standard results. That's just common sense. So that's kind of the way that I think about that last layer is like, if the visibility isn't doing the trick for you, if people are seeing it, but they're not taking action. And the flag for me, by the way, from a numbers perspective would be less than half of 1% of a conversion rate at that point. If less than one out of every 100, 200 people see your property and don't care, don't book it, you're probably either targeting the ads horribly and they're not showing to the right people at all.

That's plausible. But if you did what we talked about earlier, that shouldn't be the case. But if 200 in theory, relative people are seeing the property, not doing anything off of it, then I'm looking internally. I'm looking at the property itself, I'm looking at my website, are the listing sites doing okay? Can I do more over there? They are marketing distribution. And we mostly hear talk about digital marketing and how to get direct bookings. But I would certainly consider what I could do on the listing sites as well, to potentially boost results. So those

things come to mind. It wasn't in our outline. But those are other ideas of at that point, like you're getting a little desperate at that point. So you're going to try some other things for sure. Try to get it back on track. Yeah. And I do. I think that that's when it comes to some areas, some locations, some markets, some things like that. You are, you're going to have more willingness to take anything and then just see what you can do with it. But touches on what we talked about a little bit last week is not compromising. They're really making sure that you're not it is it's part of that cost cutting initiative that you're doing is making sure you got the right rentals in the inventory. And if it means that you drop your lowest two, three performers in marketing, again, that's a little

outside of the marketing realm here. But sometimes that is. You're getting that addition by subtraction or in having a higher quality portfolio and giving overall your guests a better experience when they do get to that website, when they do get to the landing page, when they get to your distribution page, whatever it is. But if you're taking out maybe some of the black eyes of sorts and you're just showing the top performers, there's probably a greater likelihood that you are going to convert more because people feel more comfortable with just the overall business presentation at that point, that you are presenting the best of the best. And I never want to hide a hide homeowner's homes, because obviously you're trying to take care of them and make sure that you're representing them as best as possible. But yeah, I think that's certainly using the analytics, using the data

that we're seeing from the website, from anything like that, and making that decision of, okay, these just simply aren't cutting it. And you can use your property management system to do that as well. But I think using the marketing side of things is another good gauge of where things are going and what your cost per acquisition is across your individual portfolio there, understanding that at a greater detail there. When you said it's not really our wheelhouse, agree but also i thought of my original kind of marketing intro class in college and what do you learn the four p's of product price place and promotion and like the p's are a little bit off because like our product is a property which is actually not a p that's

actually kind of nice anyways if it's property price is great in our case right like the rate you're charging place might be like where you're actually deciding to talk about your properties at, how are you promoting them? And then the act of promoting them themselves, right? Because place in the context of the four P's is to say what retail store you're putting in, which I would say is moving here, but whatever the nuances aren't that important in some respect at a high level though. It's okay.

What am I offering into the marketplace? How am I pricing that product or that property in the marketplace? And then how many people are seeing it if you think about just those basics of like how can i get more people to see it some of the ideas we talked about today would be that reels or you can get organic reach which is low cost right my the product in this case the property is it set up the right way again that's not really our expertise or wheelhouse but like we talked about amenity check or interior design or photography these are all things that certainly make a difference and then rate again also not really like our exact expertise but there's

price labs there's companies out there that focus on that side of it but if you feel like you're pricing it correctly if it's a good property then the promotion is the issue right if you're like no this property needs some updates like i'm probably trying to price it a little bit too high but i know people are looking at it then you need to then you know what you need to work on it's probably not necessarily doing more marketing more marketing marketing is never going to save. I say this all the time. More marketing is not going to save a bad property. It's never going to happen. Like you can turn a six into an eight on the quality scale with good marketing. In my opinion, you can't turn a three into a nine. It will not occur. So you have to figure out ways to make the

property itself, the phenomenal experience. And then it's like, we talked about this, right? It's like pushing the rock downhill versus uphill when it comes to marketing like people are going to be coming to you all the stuff you're going to do that we talked about today is going to work a lot better when you have when you're promoting the right property when you're actually talking about the right thing the people desire and demand and let's be honest right a lot of people over the past few years this is i think what's coming to a head right now some of the situations that you and i've talked about off camera off air is the idea that some people are in markets that just got oversaturated. It wasn't their fault, to be clear.

Some of the clients I worked with were there long before there was saturation. And now they're there and they're like, dang, it's just there's people willing to do what I do. Maybe a little bit worse, but they're willing to do it for a third. Or they don't really do things properly. But in the last two years, there's been so much demand,

they've been able to half-heartedly do it and still get decent outcomes. Now, although that inventory flooding the market makes a lot harder for like the average property or the average property manager to excel and exceed capitalism, right? It cuts on the way up and you like it and it cuts you on the way down when it's not really helping you. And I think we've all dealt with that over the years where we have a certain product that we're offering in the marketplace, and then it gets harder over time. And I think that some of our clients, unfortunately, are seeing that right now, where it's really becoming a lot harder. And it's not necessarily going to get easier. So hopefully, some of the tips that

we talked about today will be useful, because you can think of ways where I had a client, this will be how I round out maybe the episode on my side, I had a client who we're now in month three, and we're getting good results. And he's happy. And I think he's seeing some of these lower demand things. But I think we're overall in a good plane and good trajectory, we're getting the bookings we want to. But he said, yeah, the other agency I worked for every problem that I brought to them, they said, we'll just spend more money. That was their only solution. And look, there's a time and a place. And I tell clients all the time, they need to be spending more money when things are working and we're seeing a strong ROI. And I'm the first one to go in there and beat

the drum and say, Hey, this campaign is getting a 21 ROI. Let's put as much money as we can into it because we're printing money. Basically, I'm the first one to say that. But money doesn't solve all your problems in the sense of getting more traffic to a broken site or getting more traffic to a bad property is never going to save you. All the stuff that hopefully today we talked about, people take into account and realize that it's always a multifaceted problem. But hopefully some of the tips and tricks and things like that we talked about will help people at least get more visibility and help the promotion side of those P's of marketing and get people more visibility. And I know that's going to help some people that will be able to get more results and get more bookings. Once more people just see it, more people see what you

have to offer. That certainly helps a lot. Yeah. Any other thoughts that you want to slide in here or should we button this one up and send it off into the sunset? I was going to say that I think you hit the nail on the head is that more often than not, the default is just to spend more money. And I think that's something where you can't, you can throw all the money in the world at a problem, and it's not necessarily going to solve it. So it is. It's about being smart. It's about, yeah, spending where you can. But again, leveraging some of these other tactics so that you are not upside down in your books, and that you are. You're able to analyze some of the decisions that you make. Yeah. If you're able to analyze some of the decisions that

you make yeah if you're gonna slow stuff down slow it down incrementally don't do anything that you're doing here and like anything that we're asking to implement or recommending to implement don't do it all at once or don't do it all do it piecemeal there i think that's the key is see what you can see what steps are going to. Maybe it's the first steps is doing the email marketing. Maybe it's reducing that budget. Maybe it's taking these small steps first. That's it. We're making these recommendations as small steps that you can make to get yourself better aligned. But at the same time, if there are deeper problems there, this is what might help you identify that. And hopefully that's what you're solving and you're doing it in a way that is more

cost effective so that you can turn things back on down the road and everything works out for you. So yeah, yeah, I think all the stuff we talked about here to talk about timeline really quickly is probably a month long activity to seize at least some initial traction doing a month worth of every day or every other day organic content for video good videos is probably enough to see am I on the right track? Am I getting some momentum, right? Doing a month of email collection, and then a month of email sending will be like, are people opening the right track am i getting some momentum right doing a month of email collection and then a month of email sending will be like are people opening the email am i getting some momentum on it and the truth is to really see results it has to be a long-term thing right i like the idea of like you know a month or six weeks that's what a base game does which i

really respect what they talk about how they run their company and they do all of their software development in six-week cycles so they have to chop things down and make it fit within that time frame because then they can see the outcome of what they're working on. When you make these huge projects that take months and years, it's like you can never actually put your hands around it. It's too big. They're like, nope, you have to, whatever you're proposing has to be done in this timeframe. Then you can see how it's working. And that strikes a chord with me. Maybe that's something that could be useful for listeners is the idea of like, how can I test this marketing activity or outcome or whatever? And how can I do it in a four or six week period? Then I can try something else and rapidly maybe perhaps adjust because this is a seasonal business.

So you can't really spend all year just fooling around, not really finding things that aren't working. I always tell clients there's you got to make a well the sun is shining, right? My grandma was taught that when she was on a farm back in Western Mass in like the 40s, right? You got to when the time is right, when the season is right, and you need bookings, you got to take action and do a lot. And then maybe there's a time where you can coast a little bit and there's lower seasons. So I think that maps to marketing as well. Yeah, good, good stuff today, Paul, I think we'll do our typical ask for reviews. It's like going back to our March Madness conversation to open the episode. We're not a 16 seed, but we're like a low seed. And

we're trying to like knock down respectfully, we're trying to knock down the two seed, the three seed, and we need a little help. Reviews help us a lot get that way. So if you leave a review, and you send me an email with said review, maybe I could buy someone like a T-shirt of one of the March Madness winners or something like that. So I would appreciate that. Conrad, C-O-N-R-A-D at buildupbookings.com. You can reach Paul at P-A-U-L at ventoria.com.

We certainly will respond when it makes sense to do. And we appreciate the listeners and we will catch you guys on the next episode. Thanks so much.