Welcome to another Ask Me Anything (Ask Us Anything?) episode! Each week we’ll answer your questions on STR, real estate, OTAs, and everything in between.

Today’s Question:

What suggestions do you have for generating direct booking leads?

Thanks to everyone who submitted questions. To hear your voice on the show and send a question to Sarah & Annette, visit Speakpipe.com/ThanksforvisitingAMA

Thanks for Visiting is produced by Crate Media.

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[00:00:05] You are listening to the Thanks for Visiting Podcast. We believe hosting with heart is at the core of every short-term rental. With Annette's background in business operation--

[00:00:14] And Sarah's extensive hospitality management and interior design experience, we have welcomed thousands of guests from over 30 countries, earning us over $1,000,000 and garnering us thousands of five-star reviews.

[00:00:28] We love sharing creative ways for your listing to stand out, serve your guests and be profitable. Each episode, we will have knowledgeable guests who bring value to the short-term rental industry.

[00:00:39] Or we will share our stories of our own experiences so you can implement actual improvements to your rentals. Whether you're experienced, new, or nervous to start your own short-term rental, we promise you'll feel right at home.

[00:01:03] Hello, listeners. Welcome back for another great episode. My name is Sarah Karakaian.

[00:01:06] I am Annette Grant and together we are--

[00:01:08] Thanks for Visiting.

[00:01:09] This is an AMA episode, Ask Me Anything, as long as it's related to business and short-term rentals. If you go to our website, thanksforvisiting.me, in the upper right-hand corner is a red button. It says Ask TFV. If you click on that, it takes you to another page where you can record your voice, ask your question. And if we think our audience will love it, we will answer it here on the show. So today we have a question about marketing.

[00:01:33] Hi. I'm just wondering if you all have a suggestion for leads and marketing outs for direct booking, if you have a specific platform that will help generate Google leads to my website and for mailing lists and things like that, but a more simple version of it than Airbnb. All right, thanks.

[00:01:55] What's that question that you're asking?

[00:01:57] She has a great question. And I love that she said Google ads.

[00:02:01] I know.

[00:02:02] Smart questions. Let's start with this. We're going to keep this simple to not overwhelm it. I learned this at a seminar many, many, many years ago, and it has just stuck in my head. Any business should be doing three forms of marketing all the time. Those three are organic traffic, referral traffic, paid traffic or organic leads, referral leads, paid leads, however you want to frame-- leads, traffic, people. Those are the three and you should be doing all of them simultaneously all the time. So let's start with organic.

[00:02:46] What does organic mean?

[00:02:47] Organic is you creating the lead, bringing it into your lead funnel. So I would say organic would be more of you reaching out personally let's say your friends, your family, your network, telling them about your property, asking them to stay, making those offers. You always have to be making offers for people to stay at your property. So our organic would be more unpaid. And that might be-- maybe that is you writing on your blog, things of that nature.

[00:03:18] Instagram call to actions, Facebook call to actions, going to meetup and having your business card for your short-term rentals and just giving it out.

[00:03:27] Your business card, even though obviously you have to pay to print that, but to me, that would be more--

[00:03:32] Boots on the ground.

[00:03:33] Yes, boots on the ground. Guerilla marketing out there doing all the things.

[00:03:36] What was that one tip? I don't even know if it's-- I don't know where we got it from, but some guy-- I don't know where this is coming from, but it was actually just inspirational.

[00:03:43] Oh, Just yesterday.

[00:03:44] Yeah, well, you share it because you saw it.

[00:03:46] No, actually, are you talking about the midterm stay thing?

[00:03:49] Yeah.

[00:03:49] Okay. Kirk told us this actually, that a gentleman goes to any of the extended stays around his area and when there's out-of-state plates, a lot of times it'll be like XYZ Electric Company, ABC HVAC. They'll have the name of the corporation on the side of their work vehicle. And he will call those companies and say, hey, who does your travel arrangements? I have amazing spaces here for mid-term rentals. And it could be short term also. It could be overnight. So be creative. It can even be putting your business card at coffee shops or a little brochure about your space in coffee shops. You know those like community boards?

[00:04:32] Mm-hm.

[00:04:32] Get creative. You should always be marketing.

[00:04:34] And how does that relate to her question about getting leads to her website? Well, once you get them to your site, have a way to reach back out to them. So at the very least have a-- MailChimp is free up to 2,500 subscribers.

[00:04:47] We just checked that yesterday.

[00:04:49] Have a box that pops up that says, we'll send you discounted stays. We just need your name and your email address because you don't want to get that traffic and then never to come back. You need to retarget them with some valuable marketing to email. So that's organic.

[00:05:06] And then referral. So referrals are obviously guests that have stayed and you want to ask them to share with their friends and family and business. And just pay attention to what your guest is saying to you in their reservation request. Are they coming for business? Are they coming for friends and family? Dig in a little bit there. Oh, I see you're coming for work. Where do you work? Do you have any other people that work with you that might want to stay? And you can incentivize them to give you a referral. Friends and family like, oh, my family is coming in town for this, that, and the other, well, ask them to refer your property for you. And then referrals. You could go with insurance companies, realtors in your area. Again, meetups. You can give out some incentives there for people to refer your short-term rental. And also referrals could be you reaching out to local blogs in your area, other Instagram or TikTok influencers and having them refer your space back to their--

[00:06:05] Thousand percent.

[00:06:06] A lot of ways to get creative. And then let's just get down to the paid ads. What are some paid-- and again, paid doesn't have to be an enormous amount of cash. It can be $1 or $2. I think you could probably do one or $2 a day on Facebook--

[00:06:23] Obviously, everyone has their own "rules" of what makes it "worth it." Now, that for you that might be something very different. But I would say depending on how much your property is valued at too and how much income you generate, but you could do 20 bucks a day. You could just get start with something small and do like warm audiences, so people who maybe have stayed in short-term rentals in your area or hotels because you can get that information when you use platforms like Facebook or Google, and YouTube.

[00:06:52] And Google, you could. If you're working on some information on your website, like blogs, you could pay for some traffic to be driven back to it. And again, paid marketing, I'll just say maybe you hire someone to help you go out and maybe do some of this marketing for you, you could pay them hourly to come up with marketing. I'm still going to say this because it was such a great idea at our live event. One of our members in our membership, Megan, and I'm going to always say this, she does a great thing. She goes old-school marketing and advertises in her high school program. You could do this with the theater program. You could do this-- I know we have a local magazine here, and I actually saved it this week because I want to share it with Sarah. Lots of different winery bed and breakfasts bed and breakfast are advertising in these smaller local magazines. So there's still print out there. And I'm sure they would be hungry for you to advertise with them. I know a lot of different places do newsletters and things like that, so you got to get creative. There are so many opportunities here. But the best thing that you're doing is asking the question. So that looks like you're aggressive. But again, the best place to start is asking those guests that have already stayed to come back and stay with you again.

[00:08:05] Yeah, make sure you have a budget for this. So this episode will come out at the beginning of the year. Look at last year. Where did your money go for your rental? If you're just putting it all back into it, you don't have any line item for marketing, this year maybe restructure it so you can play around with--

[00:08:20] Start small.

[00:08:21] Yeah, a little something just to see what that does--

[00:08:24] For there will be an investment. It's either going to be time or money. You have to decide which one you want to spend the most of either your time or your money. So that's it. Great question.

[00:08:32] What a great question. I love this for the AMA. So again, if you have a question that's relating specifically to your short-term rental or just business in general for your hospitality business--

[00:08:40] Bring it on.

[00:08:41] We're here for you. So with that, I am Sarah Karakaian.

[00:08:43] I am Annette Grant, and together we are--

[00:08:45] Thanks for Visiting.