Heads In Beds Show - What You'll Need To Build An Annual Marketing Calendar

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul dive into how to build an annual marketing plan including a scorecard, budgets by month, media breakdown and setup a plan to make sure guest and homeowner marketing stays on track. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. Happy New Year, Paul Manzi. What's going on? It does. I still feel like it's 2023 2024

it's happy time i haven't written it wrong yet i i'm sure i'm gonna have to write a check here at some point for daycare so that is going to that's going to be the first test that was always i feel like at some point along the lines i always had to sign a document or when i was in office or i had to do something like that where i had to do it. That was the true test of whether or not I had hit into the new year. So I hit right that first check and I'll be thinking about it extra carefully. So make sure it doesn't happen. But how are you doing? How's the new year treating you so far? Yeah, pretty good so far. It's a like really relatively frigid day here. It's in the 30s here in South Carolina, which is not appropriate, in my opinion, for what should be happening.

That's Minnesota weather. That's not the weather that we're 35. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Somehow we got the same weather today, which is not normally the case in January, but yeah, all good. I think we've got off to an interesting start this year so far already with what I did at the end of last year. And then in December was that a bunch of clients that wanted to start and we had folks in and out for the holidays. We had various things going on. And I said, you know what, let's just start in the new year. We'll get started now and then we'll actually bill you on the new year. So yesterday, I spent a lot of time setting a bunch of invoices where I'm like, I forgot about all the clients that we signed to be completely honest with you. Maybe some of them are listening. I didn't forget about you. It's with our account management team. They do a great job. But I have to do all the

billing and invoicing, at least initially to get things set up. And I was like, man, we've got a lot of stuff coming in here. Candidly, we've had some people who wanted to change and modify things as well. The net effect was very positive. I think we ended last year ahead of what I expected ahead of what I targeted, which is a good feeling, but ultimately you got to catch your, keep your foot on the gas pedal, so to speak, right? Things aren't just going to come to you. And I feel like as we get bigger and as we get more clients, it's actually going to be harder to keep the percentage of growth rate up the same, right? It's there's only so much out there that we can attack in the marketing channels that we have. So I spent some time over the break thinking about how we can be

doing our marketing better and how we can provide more information to people and hopefully reach out get more people to reach out to us and see how we can help them. So it was good to think about those opportunities and see how things are going to progress into 2024. And that's our topic today, which is how to set up that annual marketing goals plan, track what are your systems and so on. So I thought I'd go your way, Paul, have you done a lot of these kind of annual plans before? I think on the Victoria side, you've done some of these planning sessions that are a little bit longer in the past. What's that look like for you typically? Yeah, I think it is. It's that opportunity to do that full year evaluation, not look at it through a small window. Cause I think

so often that's what we get sucked into the small details, the tiny details. I think that's good, but it is, it's evaluating things at the right level there, but holistically, and it is taking a look at the trend, taking a look at those two week trends or four week trends and stretching them out over the whole year, annualizing those. I think it's a different way to assess. It's a different way to determine how are we really winning and setting those annual goals in addition to those monthly goals and monthly budgets and things like that. I think it's important. It's a different lens through which to look at things. And especially on the owner side, it is. I think sometimes when you get sucked into a single

deal or a couple of deals or something like that, it takes your focus off of the big picture there. So making sure people are evaluating their annual budget in a way that we are. We're accounting for growth on the owner side and then accounting for that growth as well, bringing it back to the guest side. I think it is. It's an important exercise and it's probably something that we don't do enough of. But yeah, I think that hopefully we're giving a solid outline for what people can do, how we can help you out

and make sure that you've got your goals in mind for 2024. Yeah. Also, I listed out a few things on my side and I'm sure we're going to layer in some of the homeowner side of things, some of the guest marketing side of things, but I think it all maps back to how can I make a plan for marketing or how can I at least tune up my marketing plan and leave room for, I think you want to leave a little room for improvisation, so to speak.

That's something I've said before, where it's, I have clients that are very corporate, where they give us like this budget ahead of time and say, Hey, this has been approved. I've even had clients say this before. We have to spend this money no matter what. So we're pacing under on something. I want you to go ahead and before. We have to spend this money no matter what. So if we're pacing under on something, I want you to go ahead and launch a new campaign and spend the money because if we don't spend it, we'll lose it next year. That, I detest that.

I'm going to be honest with you, right? I dislike that idea of things are so corporate that we can't make the right judgment call because of some weird spreadsheet finance person somewhere who's, no, it has to work this way. I really dislike that. I prefer to have a little bit of flexibility. The example that I've given before, I think on the show is that things are going well,

we should put more money into the paid ads. For example, if we're getting, we were looking at someone just yesterday, actually first call of the year with someone, and we looked at his December results, 25 to run return on investment on Google ads. And I said, with a modest budget with 1200 bucks in ad spend. And I said, why not edge this up a little bit, look at the progress we're seeing when it's been a little bit more. And he was like, yeah, let's do it. Let's keep going up and see if we can keep increasing the returns. And I said, why not edge this up a little bit? Look at the progress we're seeing when it's been a little bit more. And he was like, yeah, let's do it. Let's keep going up and see if we can keep increasing the returns. And there's no guarantee. I can't promise you that we're going to get the same level of conversions. That's all in seven, eight bookings, right? Because he gets

these pretty high average booking values. So maybe this month goes a little bit slower. We get four or five. Things don't always work perfectly, but having the room to say, hey, let's spend 500 or a thousand dollars more because of this success we're seeing is I think good. You want to leave a little room for that. And also, things aren't going well, you may want to turn down the budget. So anyways, that's one thing that we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about scorecard concept, which is something from EOS. I do a scorecard myself, and I'm thinking of doing a different marketing one for clients and seeing how we can work on that. Just having a schedule of media or advertising channels by month, I'm curious your point of view on that, on the owner side, obviously. When to send postcards,

how to be consistent with it, what's the right gapping between depending on your budget and stuff like that. And last thing I want to talk about is looking at nights available or looking at properties in the program and indexing perhaps the budget a little bit to that. Maybe if your company's a lot bigger this year

than it was last year, you don't want to copy and paste the same budgets from 2023 into 2024 because you might have 500 more nights available per month because you've added 200 or 20 to 50 or a hundred properties, whatever the case may be. So let's start with scorecard, your perspective on using the scorecard metrics or what, what is a good marketing scorecard look like from your point of view? It is, I think certainly on our side of things,

it's about those leads, generating those leads. How much does it cost to generate that lead, that cost per conversion? What is that conversion rate? We have to take it over to the sales side a little bit as well there because we want to make sure that they're closing those leads. So that's certainly something that I think making sure that we're encompassing the whole funnel of seeing how many leads are coming in, how those leads are being worked, how those leads are being closed. What's the timeline to those? Kind of putting those metrics around those. So time to close for the sales side of things, going to the, I think, quality of leads, trying to put a measurement around the quality of leads as well. If you have some type of lead scoring in place, I think that's important. But yeah,

I think getting both the quantitative and qualitative overview of how you're progressing leads through the system is the way I like to have that in place, how you're doing it, cost per conversion, cost per lead, all that stuff, cost per click certainly is important for the digital channels. But how do you see that scorecard? And do you have that? I assume you have more of a template of how you present that information on the guest side of things. Yeah, we have a client who actually built this out and I modified it a little bit because I thought I had some of the right pieces. So we do this every week.

We have a client where we do this every Wednesday. So column A is the day of the week that we're doing it on. So it'll say like the first Wednesday of this year will be January 3rd, 2024. So the first one is new bookings made in the last seven days. The next one is any cancellations that did occur. So we try to back that out if we can't figure it out he can run a report inside a system he happens to use track but i'm sure any i'm sure any decent pms can show you that report then we also look at the website visitor just sessions how many

sessions came into the website we look at what the traffic was by source so there is like a little breakdown there it's actually a pie chart that comes in the report that shows a traffic session by source that is compared to year over year and i do like that seven days year over year year. It's a little bit of a small window, I admit, but it's sometimes it's interesting to see, hey, is Oregon a traffic climbing or falling and so on and so forth. There's an ad spend number in there. We just sum it up from both Facebook, Instagram, meta, if you will, and Google, because that's all the ads that he or she is running. Although in theory, you might have other ad sources going, right? Yeah. And I've said new booking. So that's the last thing. So just those metrics in my mind is a pretty good weekly scorecard to see what's going on because what's coming in what's gone out from

an ad plan perspective how's traffic going and are we basically on track or not on track and if you look at that over a month you can see pretty solid trends there for sure so are you seeing just as you're looking at that when you're doing the comparison are you doing period over period are you doing week over like the weekday, week over day over week, so like Wednesday to Wednesday type of stuff? Because that date always, when you're doing those date ranges, and I think that's something that's important to consider as you're putting together any scorecard with analytics or anything like that in mind is that week over week, like date over date is not typically game, you're going to have different date ranges,

whether that's a weekend following on a specific date there. How do you, I guess, how do you toggle that to make sure that you're showing the right data there, especially over a seven day period? So embarrassingly, I made this mistake myself with my own scorecard this year. It was really embarrassing. I'm going to be honest because I was actually going in and I was pulling revenue Wednesday to Wednesday. So I'd fill out the scorecard and here's the thing. I wouldn't always fill it out the same day, the same time on Wednesday. Sometimes I actually get to the scorecard. And here's the thing, I wouldn't always fill it out the same day, the same time on Wednesday. Sometimes I actually get to it first thing. Sometimes it's like the last thing I do at the very end of the day. So what happens throughout the day, we send out invoices, and some of those invoices get collected. And some of those invoices

were getting counted twice, because I was counting them on the Wednesday. So imagine Wednesday, the third, so let's go through this really quickly. So Wednesday, the third, let's say you log in at 9am and fill it and fill it on the 3rd. And you're looking at all the invoices that happened from this would be December 27th to December 3rd. That's seven days. But if you then go the following week and you pull the 3rd to the 10th, you're going to end up double counting stuff.

So I learned my lesson on this one personally with my own scorecard that I do for my purposes. And then I went back and said, no, never again. So in my mind, I think the best thing to do is Monday to Monday. So when you're filling out the scorecard on the 3rd, for example, I would pull the 25th to the first, and then that's your first one. Or maybe you start then on the 10th, that's fine. And then you pull it from the first to the eighth. That would be pretty clean in my mind. So you're always actually, if anything, you're giving yourself a buffer because sometimes conversions may take a day or two to actually come in as well. So your spend happens in Google the day that you get that click right on Tuesday, someone's going click on an ad today, they're gonna book in three days, but it's

not gonna show up in our report, but it will show up in the next report as long as we so it's I also have a week where you go goose egg. If that's not a major shock for you, I wouldn't even be that worried. If you typically get two to five bookings a week, and then you have a week where you go zero, I wouldn't panic, maybe I want to look and just make sure everything's working on the website. But I think if you're going to do a scorecard, that's how I would do it. And that's how I'm going to do mine going forward. So I'm actually just going to pull this one I have on Wednesday for myself. I'm going to pull the 25th to the 1st.

Yep. And then boom, we're off to the races. And we're just measuring that Monday to Monday. Because then any little weird oddities and scheduling or quirks and things like that is carried out on Tuesday. You're not reporting on that day. That'll get pulled into the next one. And then you're going from there.

So yeah, super embarrassing. And the short story of that is that I was over reporting my own revenue and my scorecard and i thought i was further ahead than i was from a revenue perspective and from a reporting perspective and i was looking i was cross-referencing with my accounting people bookkeeping people and my numbers and i'm like why are we off here and it's five figures off it's not oh eighty dollars off or a hundred dollars off it's like over ten thousand dollars off and i was like i just had that moment where i breathed out and breathed out look at figured out what the problem was and we won't curse on the show but i

was like holy beat you are so dumb like i felt so bad about it so yes keep your dates very clear and clean and make them communicate to everybody in fact put it right in the scorecard what the dates cover and what it doesn't cover exactly so there's no confusion when you do fill that out. Yep. There you go. Embarrassing conditions here. And it is. I think this is important because this is something you're looking at every week, bi-weekly, something like that. You want to make sure that data is right and that you are looking at it in a very effective and efficient manner.

If all of a sudden you're counting the wrong period or you're capturing a different weekend, there's so much that you can mess up there. And if all of a sudden you're counting the wrong period or you're capturing a different weekend or there's so much that you can mess up there that it's and it is. It's when you're relying on just pulling the right dates and the right data and stuff like that. It's all a matter of a data point that can throw you off and yeah,

make you look a little silly on the reporting side of things. I don't even dislike a scorecard, honestly, where it's like you pull it. Maybe you don't start until the 10th, but then you're starting with the third and you're going backwards from there. So you're actually always measuring the week behind. I think that's fine because it's like, it's not meant to be like exactly what's happening today. That's so easy to fall into that trap. It's more so just a weekly check in of like, where's our pacing? Where do we expect to be? How's our spend and our traffic relating to the number of bookings that we're getting? And how does that compare from where we are? That's really what you're trying to figure out. The numbers we can sit here and debate on the guest side. On the owner side, like you said, it's really about what's our effectiveness of leads, what's our cost going out, and then what's our effectiveness of closing those leads. Those are really the main

things you want to figure out. The rest is details and we can debate how we structure things and things like that. That's why you have those weekly meetings or at least a weekly check-in. The scorecard that I fill up by myself, the meeting is with no one. There's no one else that owns the company. So I have to do it. I do it myself, basically. But I still find that's useful to sit there and write it down. And just another little philosophy that I've had myself. I think it's actually healthy to not automate this process and to not sit there and figure out tools to pull it in automatically.

I don't mind logging into my system and looking at it. I don't mind logging into my bank account and pulling the cash balance. That's one of the items in my scorecard because I don't want to automate it because then the automation just runs the background. You're not looking at it and it's just easy to become very passive. It takes 15 seconds to log into the system. Just log in, look at it.

And then every once in a while, you catch something weird. What's that? I didn't see that. And then you can go back and correct things. Really high in doing some kind of weekly report scorecard, whatever you want to call it, doesn't really matter.

Again, scorecard is the idea from EOS. You can check that out in the book Traction by Gino Wickman, but you can use any system. That's just one flavor of a system. And I think it can work well for your overall marketing efforts and your agency. If we have clients who use that system, we don't mind updating a few numbers and popping it in there. That's something, if it takes us two minutes to do, we're happy to do it because then everyone's on the same page and we can see what's going on. And we don't have that awkward

end of the month conversation. Hey, we're way off. What's going on? I don't like those conversations. I'd rather catch things a little bit early, maybe a week or two. If things are really off for two weeks, we can do something about it. If we wait till the end of the month, then we can't always do something about it from like a rates perspective or a marketing perspective and so on and so forth. So being in tune, I think, is a valuable skill to have and having a set structure for it, I think, can be really helpful for sure. No doubt. Awesome. Let's turn the page then maybe to like PPC budget by month. Obviously, this could apply to both the homeowner and guest side. Again, did a bunch of these over the past month or so. In December, for mostly existing clients, a new client, I don't really know what your

PPC budget should be until we figure out what's going to make the most sense. But for a lot of clients, we bump things up maybe a little bit. If things are pretty static, we bump them maybe 2% to 5% year over year because we just assume we should probably be investing a little bit more. But certainly, we don't have to. We have clients who kept the same budget for 24 they had in 23. Maybe they lost some inventory, maybe they gained some inventory. We'll talk about that in a minute when we talk about nights available. But pretty simple. We just go in and we just have a simple spreadsheet, Google Sheet for each client,

which is January 24, all the way to December 24. We put a certain budget in there. We use a tool called Optimizer for budget pacing. I think we've talked about that one maybe a little bit before. But long story short, what it lets you do is actually put a budget number into Google Ads, into Optimizer, which then connects to Google Ads. And it'll tell you how you're pacing. Let's say it's the 10th of the month. At that point, you probably have spent about a third of your budget or so. It actually lets you know how far on or off pace you are, which is really helpful so you don't weigh overspend and then have to cut things down to the bone or weigh underspend and then have to weigh overspend towards the end of the month. And then the spend is very uneven. So love that tool. I open that tab constantly and I'm constantly

checking on things because it lets me keep things on track. I know I pitched it to you before. I'm not sure what you ended up with there from a budget-based perspective, but how do you guys do maybe just let's call it digital advertising budgets by month. And then we can talk about some other owner marketing pieces as well. Yeah. I think on the PPC budget, it's, I think the one, having the PPC budget by month is important because if you would see that and it was a flat chart of you're going to spend the exact same amount every month, all 12 months of the year, that'd be a red flag for me. That's something where unless that's all you're comfortable spending and it's the very bottom level of something around a recommendation or anything

like that. That is, I think that's a red flag because there's seasonality involved in our industry, certainly on the guest side and on the owner side of things. It is, we don't want to spend as high during the times of the heavy travel times of year because people are pretty happy taking in that money. At that point, people aren't looking to change. They've already got reservations on the books, but it is on the owner side. We know their signing season. We know there's ebbs and flows for different markets, a mountain market versus a beach market and things like that. So I think it's really important to understand by month what you're looking at. Yeah. Have the

total picture there, but make sure. And I think maybe that's something that you're adjusting that annual number based on the monthly. It is if you have to move money around from month to month or do something like that, do it based on that. Okay. I know I'm going to spend 10 grand on, on PPC this year or 15 grand, make it take from maybe beg from or borrow from months where you are going to be slower. I think on the traveler side, it's the same way. You don't want to be spending a whole lot during those summer months unless you're, you know, it is hopefully your inventory is pretty well booked up. Now, if you've got some short weeks or something or weekends or cancellations you're trying to fill, Absolutely. But I would say hopefully it's more tactical pinpoint

and maybe that's something that you're doing there over on the guest side, Conrad. Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to, I brought up an example, one that I was working on this morning, actually. So it's very fresh in my mind, but I wanted to look at all the numbers so I could read it off to make sure I get everything correct.

So I have a client that we worked with last year. Actually, we've been working with them since 2017 and one of our longest tenure clients. So we're very comfortable with each other at this point. So last year, we spent $46,500 or so in paid advertising the entire calendar year. The budget breakdown was our lowest month. It looks like was $1,300. Our highest month, we spent $6,200, somewhere in that range. Then everything else was in between. But as we went to look at it, we realized that some of our spend early in the year last year was honestly a little bit, maybe short of what it should be. And then our spend in the summer got a little too aggressive and our return on ad spend dropped. So for full transparency, in May of last year, we spent $6,000

but only got a five to one return on investment. So we spent 6,000 to make 34,000. It's not horrible, but it's not good. It's not really profitable if I'm being completely honest with you. Whereas our spend in January, we only spent $3,400 in January, but we actually got $102,000 of gross bookings in that month. So our return on that spend that month was just a shade under 30 to one. So I say all that to say our budget this year is about 50. He's added a few new properties, but our pacing, the way that we're actually going to break it down is going to be very different. So for example, this January, we plan on spending roughly 6,500 to $7,000, which is almost double what we spent last year, but it was our best performing month.

So we're obviously hoping, hey, if we can yield more bookings out of this kind of busy season in January and February than it was for him last year. We did $102,000 gross booking revenue last January. We did $71,000 gross booking revenue last February, $62,000 in March. So those first three months, if you sum that up, it's on the order of $2 240,000 or so, a little bit less than that, of his gross bookings came in those first three months. This is a property manager, by the way, with about 100 properties, somewhere in that range, just for reference. So those numbers may be adjusted up or down, depending on your level of inventory. But anyways, yeah, our budget is going to match that a little bit because the logic is we did 41% of our budget and bookings. Why not spend it in

the first 90 days where we're getting the most reservations? Then for example, April through August, we're going to spend 30% of our budget in that six month period, right? Five month period, because during that five month period, we only did, if I'm looking at this, we only did roughly yeah, 2300 or sorry, let me add this up properly. 140,000. So we did 30 something thousand in the first three months, the next four months, five months, we actually did only a hundred thousand dollars. So a lot of numbers follow there, but the gist of the message should be, you should be waiting and biasing that ad spend heavily to where your best return on ad spend is. And I would say we did an okay job with that last year, but we could have been more aggressive. And I pitched

the client and okay, let's be more aggressive early in the year. And if we let to your point, if we have to turn it down later in the year, that's fine. We made our hay back in the early parts of the year. And any revenue manager will tell you, if you talk with them at a high level, when people book early, they tend to book at higher rates as well.

So not only did we get a better return on investment, we actually got bookings in the door when he was actually probably charging the highest nightly rate possible, not waiting until the summer and trying to fill in last minute stuff when our return on ad spend might be six to seven to one, not because our ads are bad or that we're doing targeting very differently. We're really not to be honest with you, but it's just that the behavior of the person

on the other side of that is very different when they're booking in June for a June stay versus they're booking in January for a June stay. Absolutely. No, that's, I think that's something that we do. I think it's, we don't do enough budget, I think, adjustments or manipulation there because it is we get so set into that, okay, 30 days, we're in this 30 day, okay, it's month by month. Hey, maybe some weeks, you want to evaluate week by week, if you want to do that. And if you have a big enough budget, we're manipulating week by week, it's not probably going to have the impact you want, because Google is going to need to relearn or Facebook's going to need to relearn. But there is, if you're just adding in new pieces, I think that it's, that's something that you break it down however the frequency you want, but just make sure

you understand where you're going to have the most bang for your buck. And that's, it goes back to some of the, some of our other episodes of making sure what is one of the most critical things to have in your Google analytics setup, e-commerce. You have to understand that timing of when those bookings are coming in so that you can make the right budget adjustments and ensure that you're getting that high ROI. Yeah, 100%. Everything we do on the guest side is really predicated upon that. And when we don't have it, we're in an airplane without a windshield, right? And you're saying, hey, go fly us to wherever you're trying to go. And I don't know, maybe with the instrumentation, we can figure it out. But it feels like we're going to crash into another plane.

That's not good for anybody involved. So yeah, we got to have that tracking in place, almost to the point where when I don't see that tracking in place, and this has been the case with some template sites and things like that, that we've got from certain PMS companies, they can't get the tracking in place. I'm almost hesitant to even work with them and pitch them on something because I'm like, I feel like this is not going to be as successful as it could be. And we're talking to someone right now.

And he's working on a new website, but the website's not gonna be ready by the time we launch the campaigns. And I went, his name is X. I was like, X, maybe we should wait like a month or two, wait for the website to go live, focus your effort, your energy on getting the website live. Then let's start the marketing right after that. Because I'm like, how are we going to know exactly how well things are going if we don't have the right setup?

And that hurts our revenue, right? Like I'm saying something that's bad for me, but I think it's good for the client. I think long-term that's actually the healthiest relationship that we can have. So you got to know your numbers with everything I just described is only possible because this particular property manager has a nice custom website with one of the big property management vacation rental website design companies out there. They've done a good job and we can see all those numbers and all the revenue coming in. So yeah, without that flying blind is the phrase that I always use. Right. But all right, let's turn the page a little bit here. We got two more kind of major things that I think are worth diving into. So the next thing I said is media by month. So

this, I think in our, I would say delivery is typically like a scope of work where we say we're doing two blog posts every single month on top of those two blog posts. We're also going to manage this level of ad spend on top of that. We're also going to manage this level of ad spend. On top of that, we're also going to do an email newsletter and so on. So I think we plan that out pretty well. Not because we're like these master perfect planners, to be honest with you. I think I struggle with that sometimes because I want to be clear of what you're paying for versus what you're getting. So it's almost a forcing function on our side of here's the scope of work. Here's what you're paying us for. Here's what we're going to deliver. And then I let all the people on my team that are excellent, hardworking,

smart, intelligent people to actually figure out, okay, on this day, I'll do this campaign on this day, I'll do this campaign on this day, I'll get my writer to get everything out and stuff like that. So I don't want to take any credit for all the phenomenal work that's done by folks in the buildup team. But anyways, having a media by month on the property manager side, it's actually really rare that I find this and I find that if you can do this, like there's a lot to be benefiting from it are actually a largest client that we work with, we've had them for two years now, has one of these. They have a simple Excel spreadsheet.

It's not the fanciest thing in the world. I wish it was on Google Sheets, but they're like this Microsoft outfit. And it's, luckily you can use Excel in the cloud now. So that's beneficial. But anyways, it's this Excel spreadsheet. Everything's just coded by month. So there's a tab for January, tab for February and so on and so forth. And they just highlight green for a sale or blue for a special or orange for

a special offer or something like that. It's all just highlighted out that way. And it makes it very easy for me to understand what's going on when and then I can tailor my ads and all my content to those specific things. And it makes it very easy. I don't know your kind of perspective on this Paul with regards to having a month by month calendar. I don't know exactly what inventory does. But I think you guys do some of this planning and set up an advance of memory. That's the thing we do the planning with them. And our hope is that it makes it into a media plan of some kind. Certainly, we're doing for the campaigns that we control.

We do control a lot of the campaigns for partners, especially on the owner's side, as far as launching those and making sure that they're staying where they need to be there. I think it's one of those things where in some cases we're coming with a plan, whether that's postcard and direct mail and stuff like that, and a cold email or other warm email, different email campaigns that they can run. But ultimately it is. It's ensuring that it goes along with everything else they're doing. And admittedly, a lot of the focus shifts to the guest side. So we do, we lay it out for them and we certainly create that 12 month plan. And then it's a matter of just ensuring they're keeping the watchful eye on that, that they do on the guest side of things.

I think anytime you're getting your content, I think really trying to focus on owner content is difficult. I think there's a lot of different needs they're trying to address, whether that's how you're taking care of my home, whether that's the value you're providing me, some of those items. I think if we're putting those into a monthly messaging type of document and really having that planned out per month, people are going to do really well. Again, it's the follow through. And I think that's tough with anything. I think that's why it's really important to lay that plan out because it is good to know that your March, April, May, you want to start sending out those postcards so

that people are thinking about you before busy season. And then you're starting to restarting it after busy season. So that heavy signing season, you've still got that postcard. And I remember that one. And that was a funny one. And this one was good and talked about St. Patrick's Day or something. I don't know. You do something catchy to get that brand awareness out there and then continuing that through. But it is. It's, I think, because the volume's a little lower, the lead volume's a little lower, even though they're higher value on the back end, those owner sales, it's just harder to stay consistent with that messaging, which is why we do. We try to lay it out for people, really make it a, here, this part of

this is we do the work so you can set it and forget it and let us worry about it there. I think the importance is always there. I think the follow through because you can trace it to that more direct revenue stream. The direct ROI is just a little stronger on the guest side of things. But yes, I hope that there are more people that you'll find will have more of those plans month by month and that they're continuing to push through on that. Yeah, it is. It is hard. I get it because I'm sure a lot of the postcard and owner marketing stuff is I sent it out and I got a trickle.

I got this little trickle coming back in, right? They're going to process a typical property management company might process 20, 50 leads a year on the homeowner side, right? And they're going to process 20 or 50 bookings this week. So there's that immediacy of, hey, I got this stuff going on. I need more bookings. And no matter how many bookings they have lately, there's never enough, right? There was a period there in 21 and 22 where clients were telling us, honestly, life was easy back then from a marketing perspective too.

It was. We published stuff. Everything would just book right away. I pulled, I don't know actually the quote from this. According to Google, this is the German field marshal known as Moltke the Elder believed in battle plans, but he said no plan of operations survives first contact with the enemy. I think that's like a modern translation of it. It appears no plan of marketing, owner marketing survives first contact with life, busy stuff going on, which is I think

ultimately where the owner marketing quickly gets discarded in the face of problems going on, things happening. Why the hell do I need more owners? I'm trying to do the 25 I have right now or the 50 I have right now or 150, right? There's that chaotic feeling. And then you get to the end of the season or you get to the slow season and you go, man, if we only had more owners this year, we would have made more money. So that's the tricky part. I get it on the owner side. I won't pretend to be an expert in that arena. I'll leave the inventory folks to focus on that. Let's see if I can take us home. So this was, I touched on this concept earlier, but it was this idea of how to adjust budgets on a more, I guess, a little bit less of a qualitative angle and more of a

quantitative angle. So we had a client, a mutual client that we were talking about before you record who added about 25 homes from what I can understand based on what we told them, one of our new ones that we're just starting with this month. So I'm on the website right now. They're at 156 right now as it stands today. So let's say last year they were at 131. And then only if they added 25 homes, they've added 25 homes of higher quality of higher ADRs of higher sizes and so on and so forth. So my thought, what I was explaining to the client, as I said to T the client, I was like, we might just not want to copy and paste our budgets from 2023 and just put them into 2024. You added 25 homes. I'm like, I'll be honest with some clients

we work with. That's their whole inventory. Like they're all their budget is going to just 25 homes. So you added 25 homes. It granted a relatively big market, but you had 25 homes where you might need to have a separate budget for those 25 homes. It's not fair or correct just to assume that are the same 130 home set that we had last year is going to require the same budget to see a good ad return. And luckily they got a really great return last year. So it makes it easy to talk about, hey, could we spend a little bit more? So I'll just floating the idea out her, her way of maybe looking at, for example, nights available

25 homes. Let's assume that they're going to be available 300 days a year, owner blocks, maintenance blocks, things like that. I'm like, so you got to book another 7,500 nights this year in 2024 that you didn't have last year. I'll assume. And then I was trying to do some math. Okay. So 7,500 nights available that we need to book our average stay length. Let's just make it seven to make it simple. So we need 7,500 nights available that we need to book. Our average stay length, let's just make it seven to make it simple. So we need another thousand reservations. You don't need to come through here. Our average cost per reservation last year was roughly $50.

So if we take a thousand times 50, that's $50,000 of budget that we could honestly make a case for adding on top of what the budget was last year, just for those 25 homes. Now, what I hope we'll find is some efficiency. And obviously not every single reservation they need for this particular set of new homes added is going to come from their website. They're also active on Airbnb. They're active on Vrbo and so on. But it's almost just to illustrate a point of if we were trying to get a lot more bookings

for the inventory we have, as inventory expands, budget has to expand. And it's not always perfectly linear. Maybe we need to actually expand the budget a lot more because we need to fill a lot more nights or maybe things slowed down on Airbnb. We need to get more direct. So it was just a thought process. I don't know if you have really solid thoughts on this. It's not relating as much to the homeowner side, other than how do we talk about what marketing we do when we get a new homeowner? Maybe there's an angle there, but anyways,

your thoughts on this idea. Yeah. I love that idea of just making that a consideration because in most, for most property managers, yes, the ones that we work with, certainly, but we're not the only ones doing this. And there are others that aren't using Venturi. So it is, people want to grow. Unless you've gotten to a certain point where you're just happy, you're going to want to grow. So making that a point in how you're evaluating your budget, yeah, absolutely.

If you want to hit this, and especially if you're basing that on occupancy or something like that, if you want to hit an 80 or 85% occupancy, what type of budget do you need to now fill these 25 additional rooms or 50 additional rooms or even five or 10 additional rooms, depending on the size of your company. So that's absolutely a factor that you should, again, if you're measuring the return on investment, that's going to be one thing, but likely your occupancy or is going to be something if you're measuring the return on investment, that's going to be one thing. But likely your occupancy is going to be something else you're measuring the performance of your company by. And if you're not devoting additional budget to try to hit that revenue or that number goal, that percentage goal, it is. We're hamstringing ourselves there a little bit.

ourselves there a little bit. So whether you move it up or down based on that, just have it as a point of another data point that you can measure against and make sure that you're budgeting appropriately and making sure you're planning for the added growth that you have there. Yeah, definitely. And like all these plans are great. And I think that you should build a plan. And I think you should write it in pencil, not pen. I guess that's my department, right? Things are going to change. You might have something really good happen where you get a bunch of occupancy and you might need to turn ads off or turn them down because you're like, oh, I'm full. I'm not as worried about it. Or you might have a slow period.

Who knows? Property manager or a property owner with five homes call you tomorrow that are all oceanfront homes that you don't have today. And you've got to go build out some new campaigns and things like that. So the property manager listening knows this, right? Think of their feet, be quick and be willing to adjust things. But ultimately, that's how I see it. We're out of time here, Paul.

I appreciate your time today as always. We're back in the swing of things, 2024. December was a great month for our podcast downloads. I think as we're expanding things on the website, so you may see that we're actually going and publishing some of the episodes that we've done before as blog posts. So if that interests you, go and check them out there. Otherwise, we appreciate reviews and feedback. We always appreciate that.

So you can email me, Conrad, C-O-N-R-A-D at buildupbookings.com or Paul, P-A-U-L at venturi.com. Just reach out to us that way. We can see what's going on, but we appreciate you, Paul. Thanks for recording with me. We're back in the swing of things. Not a good year for our football teams, but a good year for the heads and bed show. So we're onto a new track and we're going to draft our number one picks and solve all our problems here as we go through this year. Awesome. Appreciate it. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll catch you in the next one.