Mike Bayer
Welcome back to the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. It's Mike Bayer, CEO and co-founder of the Vacation Rental Formula Business School, and I'm thrilled to share the fantastic response we've had to our newest training program, THRIVE Essentials. Launched in October of 2024, THRIVE Essentials is designed to be the ultimate onboarding tool for vacation rental property management teams. It's perfect for quickly bringing new hires up to speed, cutting down on training time, and ensuring they have the essential knowledge to thrive in their new role. With THRIVE Essentials, your team members gain the foundational skills they need to be effective contributors faster, building confidence, loyalty, and job satisfaction right from the start.

Mike Bayer
The feedback from property managers and HR teams has been overwhelmingly positive. Many are saying they wish they had had access to this program years ago. Enroll your new team members in THRIVE Essentials today, and you'll see how quickly they adapt, contributing with confidence and being effective within days. For more details, visit the link in the Show Notes or head to vacationrentalformula.com to see how THRIVE can transform your team.

Mike Bayer
Now, let's get into today's episode. Here's your host, Heather Bayer.

Heather Bayer
I spent the longest time in my business thinking that marketing was all about getting seen on different platforms, creating content, and trying not to throw spaghetti against a wall, which is a tactic we so often see operators using. I thought that was our strategy. Now I know differently. You have to start from a strong business foundation with clear goals that get evaluated and updated frequently. That's the game changer.

Heather Bayer
Today, I'm joined by marketing strategist Nihal Salah, to talk about the framework that can define every action you take toward a more successful business. And stay tuned because we have a really exciting announcement to make.

Heather Bayer
This is the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, keeping you up-to-date with news, views, information, and resources on this rapidly changing short-term rental business. I'm your host, Heather Bayer, and with 25 years of experience in this industry, I'm making sure you know what's hot, what's not, what's new, and what will help make your business a success.

Heather Bayer
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer. And as ever, I am super delighted to be back with you once again. You know, when I came into the vacation rental business, I was a real greenhorn. I knew little to nothing about hospitality, and although I'd been teaching marketing and communication to middle management in the National Health Service in England, that was a far cry from the travel and tourism industry I joined in the late 1990s.

Heather Bayer
I've mentioned before that the business wasn't open and 'networky' like it is now. Competitors didn't talk to each other. So I had no real benchmark to help me in my early journey, but I read a lot of books. And my favorite was The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly. And that was by a guy called David Meermann Scott, in 2010. I think he did an earlier one as well. And then there was one called Clockwork: Design your Business to Run Itself by Michael Michalowicz, and Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantch. You may have heard of some of these, and they were great. And they got me really motivated to get stuff done. But there was something missing, and I really worried that we were missing the mark. I also love bright, shiny things, so I could easily go off on a tangent at the drop of a hat and just lose focus, which I seem to do a lot of the time. But in hindsight, I know exactly what we were missing, and that was a clear business strategy to work from, and we'd never really done that.

Heather Bayer
I see it as trying to build a house without the architect's drawings, that blueprint that you go back to over and over again to make sure the work being done is aligned with the overall picture. And I still see so many others doing the same thing. You see them on the forums, on the Facebook groups asking about what social media platforms would be best for them, or whether a digital approach is actually better than a direct mail campaign for attracting new owners. What I don't see is them prefacing those questions with the business goals they're trying to achieve.

Heather Bayer
So in this episode, marketing strategist, Nihal Salah, joins me to share her wisdom on why defining business goals is the very first thing you do. And she's also going to talk about how to create a one-page marketing strategy that will become your blueprint for everything you do. We also share what we're collaborating on to bring you these marketing principles broken down into very easily digestible pieces. So without further ado, let's go on over to my conversation with Nihal.

Heather Bayer
I am so excited to have with me today Nihal Salah, who is coming in to me from Barcelona. I speak to a lot of people in Barcelona. Definitely has to be the place to go live. We will probably discuss that in a short time. Nihal is a fractional marketing officer, marketing strategist. She knows a lot about this business. You've probably seen her posting prolifically on LinkedIn. And if you haven't, make sure you follow her, and you will find Nihal's information on the Show Notes. Welcome. Nihal, thank you so much for joining me.

Nihal Salah
Oh, thank you for having me, Heather. I've been really, really, really looking forward to chatting with you on the podcast.

Heather Bayer
Well, it's always a pleasure to actually be able to sit down with somebody first thing on a Monday morning and have this wonderful smile and just energy that seems to emanate from you. And every time I speak to you, you inspire me and motivate me. So I'm so glad we're going to have this discussion this morning on marketing strategy, because I was 20 years in this business as a property manager, and I don't think I ever had what you might call a marketing strategy, because I never actually knew what a marketing strategy was. So that is something we're going to cover today, what a marketing strategy is, some common mistakes that people make, which channels to focus on, the role of data, and of course, the tricky subject of budget. So we will be covering all those things with Nihal.

Heather Bayer
But first of all, would you just tell us a little bit more about yourself? When I talk to you, you're either in Barcelona or you're in Wales, and you've always got that beautiful dog, Rosa, along with you on your travels. And I've seen you on a motorbike and traveling with a van. You definitely get around.

Nihal Salah
I do get around. I think I have learned over the years that I am deeply uncomfortable in my comfort zone. Anything that pushes the boundaries, I'm ready to do. And yes, as you know, also my rescue dog is, well, she rules my life. But yeah, I'm half Egyptian, half English. I was actually born in Wales, hence my connection to Wales. And I lived in the UK for over a decade. But then the Egyptian in me just missed the sunshine and decided to move to Spain, because that felt like a good in between culturally and weather-wise. So I do travel back and forth a lot.

Nihal Salah
But I've been in marketing now for, I think 17 or 18 years. I stopped counting a couple of years ago because the numbers kept getting really big. I'm like, oh, I'm getting older. But I actually started my career in the corporate world. One of my first jobs was with Nokia, back when we all had a Nokia phone and the only game any of us ever played was Snake. And remember when the snake would get really big, and it would fit within the screen, and you were done?

Heather Bayer
Oh, my gosh. I honestly didn't think you would have been around to remember those days.

Heather Bayer
I was. I worked for Nokia for several years, and I started off as a data analyst. And I think that was one of the best decisions.... I mean, I accidentally fell into the job, but it was one of the best accidents that ever happened to me, because it gave me a really solid foundation for becoming a marketing professional that was always very data-focused and data-driven. And I spent a couple of years working at Nokia, massive corporate, so you had millions of marketing budget at hand. You had massive agencies helping with all of the execution of the strategy. So you're basically like, you're orchestrating all this stuff. And I was managing campaigns off across six markets in North Africa, had a ton of fun doing it. But I got to a point where I'm like, it just feels disconnected. I want to get my hands dirty.

Heather Bayer
It wasn't ticking all the boxes.

Nihal Salah
No, it wasn't fulfilling me. I learned tons, and I was really grateful for the experience, but I was reflecting on why I ended up then pivoting into working with small businesses. I was thinking about this over the weekend, Why did I make that change? And why do I keep going back to working with small businesses? I realized it was... My father, bless him, he passed away in 2012, but he was a surgeon, and he was a very talented surgeon, and he did extraordinary surgeries on primarily young children who had cerebral palsy, other types of paralysis, and he would operate on them. And many of them, they would walk for the first time in their life, Heather.

Heather Bayer
Oh, my goodness.

Nihal Salah
After these operations. And his patients loved him so much. And you saw the impact when I'd watch the videos, the VHS videos. So I would go in sometimes and record the surgeries, and then I would go to the clinic, because I wanted to be a doctor. That's another story for another day. But that's how I sat, like scratch that itch. And then I would go into the clinic for the post-op examination sometimes, and I would get to see firsthand just the impact of this tiny little business, which was just my dad, was having on these people's lives. And he would say to me, Could you help me with my marketing? Because when he moved from the UK back to Egypt, no one knew him in Egypt. He was known in the UK. So he had to build his brand awareness and everything. But I'd worked in corporate, and I'm like, I didn't know how to help a small business. And I really struggled. So even though he had a lot of PR, featured in lots of newspapers and stuff on the marketing front, I had no clue how to help him. And that became a bit of a mission for me.

Nihal Salah
And it only dawned on me this week, as I was preparing for this podcast. I'm like, what was the turning point in my head when I decided it's small businesses and that was it? Because everyone has a 'Why', and we'll talk about 'Why' in the context of marketing strategy, especially in a little bit.

Heather Bayer
I never would have thought that a surgeon would have been considered a small business. But yeah, I guess because I was brought up in the UK with the NHS, and now here I am in Canada with public health. So yes, I can imagine now, when I think about it, yes, it is a small business, and it's a one-person job.

Nihal Salah
Yeah. I mean, well, it was a couple of people because he had nurses and admin staff and so forth. But he is the main product developer, if you like, right? But then after that experience, I decided that I wanted to.... I left corporate, and I decided that I wanted to focus predominantly on really small startups and small businesses and scale-ups. I just wanted to experiment with working with different business sizes. And over the past, probably 11-12 years of work, probably across a dozen different sectors with businesses of all sizes, I always end up going back to the small businesses. It's where I end up being. And just learning all these disciplines of marketing, but really figuring out what my unique point of view is on marketing, because you go into all these different organizations working as a fractional marketer of what was so many businesses.

Nihal Salah
So seeing how many businesses spend money and time on marketing that isn't revenue-focused, that isn't based on any data, whether it's quantitative or qualitative, just a lot of guesswork, and then the frustration of why isn't it working? And I just find it immensely satisfying to go into those businesses and work with them and set some structure and put together a really simple strategy because strategy doesn't need to be complicated.

Nihal Salah
And then I ended up in short-term rentals by accident, like everyone else I've met in the sector. A friend of mine was working with a payment processing company and asked me if I'd like to lead on their content marketing side of things. So I launched a podcast for them and put together a content marketing strategy and managed the execution of that, which has been a lot of fun. And yeah, working with different businesses at the moment as a fractional marketer on strategy and supporting them with managing the execution of what they do.

Heather Bayer
That sounds so interesting. What I love, I was talking to Valerie Gangas from Juniper Holiday + Home last week, and we were talking about how important it is to bring diverse skills in from all the other things that you've done. I mean, Valerie has one of the biggest things that she brings to her company is her spiritual entrepreneurship and her experience in transcendental meditation. It was a fascinating discussion about this, but it just opened up that idea that everybody that's in this business now has brought in these skills that we've learned from so many different areas of work and opportunity. And I love that you're bringing all this into our industry and are making such a huge difference, because I said at the beginning that you're prolific on LinkedIn. There's a few people whose posts, every post they make, I read beginning to end. Then I read all the comments, and then I make a comment, and then I like it. I mean, that is the power of working in LinkedIn, but you're definitely one of them. Chris Maughan is another. Richard Vaughton, you know Richard, too, Richard is another. And each of them is bringing their diverse skills and knowledge from previous work into what they do. So I'm glad that you have found your way into this business. And I intend 100% to keep you in it.

Nihal Salah
Okay. Well, first of all, I'm beyond flattered that someone like Heather, gives me such wonderful feedback, and that you put me up with the likes of Chris and Richard, because I'm just very flattered. Thank you for that feedback.

Heather Bayer
Well, it's culminating in you and I working together, and we'll be talking about this at the end of this episode, because this episode about marketing strategy is really the start of something that you and I are doing together, which I'm so excited to share. But we'll talk a bit more about it at the end.

Heather Bayer
But I want to talk about this strategy idea because we used to talk about, Oh, we've got to have a marketing strategy meeting. And we'd sit there, and we'd go, Okay, so what are we posting on Instagram this week? And, Should we do reels? Should we do more video? And then I came out of it at the end and I realized this was not a strategy meeting, this was an operations meeting, which involved somebody who's going to do something. But we didn't have anything to... There was no foundation to it. So let's go back straight to the beginning. You're starting from scratch, because I think there's a lot of people out there listening to this who are nodding at the moment and going, Yes, I don't have a strategy either in terms of what I think a strategy is.

Heather Bayer
So I think we've got to start with that. Let's say we're starting from scratch. What is the first thing you should do before you go out and start posting on Instagram or Facebook or do some TikTok videos?

Nihal Salah
Okay, so first of all, really important point is that strategy doesn't need to be complicated, because I think whenever anyone hears 'strategy', they think long, boring documents or presentations and lots of fluff. You should be able to put a strategy on a page. That's when you know it's a good strategy, that it can be really simple. But the first thing I would always do is I would look at what are the business goals? What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to generate more first-time bookings? Are you trying to acquire more owners or retain more owners? Are you trying to generate more repeat bookings? Are you trying to generate more revenue from your existing bookings? Are you trying to do a combination of those? And I would go back to the overall business goals, which, unfortunately, often are not very clear, but it's a really good prompt to go and say, Okay, what am I trying to achieve? Do you have set revenue goals for the year? Do you have set profitability goals for the year? And I think profitability is an interesting one to talk about because a lot of the time we talk about revenue-focused marketing, and actually, I was reflecting on this over the weekend.

Nihal Salah
I'm like, It needs to be profitability focused because I could put together a marketing strategy and plan that will generate revenue, but that's pointless if my cost of acquisition is so high that I'm not even making a profit, right? So understanding what the business goals are and actually making sure that those business goals are clearly articulated across the organization. Because I think the other thing that's often misunderstood is that marketing isn't just something that sits within a marketing function. Even if a lot of businesses that will be listening to this won't even have a marketing function. It will be person, even if they have a person dedicated, or it's something that lots of different people do. But marketing is really about representing your company and your brand to the outside world. So everyone needs to be aware of the business goals. Everyone needs to be aware of what the marketing goals are. And it's really important that those marketing goals are very, very tightly linked to those business goals.

Heather Bayer
It bothers me sometimes because that whole issue of business goals is often something that we do right at the very outset of our business. And we might revisit it each year with, Okay, what are we going to do in the next six months? And that may or may not be written down. More than likely it's not, or it's just... I mean, now, of course, we've got things like Fathom and Otter that records everything and that will give you your action points, but it's what you do with them that makes them so important.

Heather Bayer
I'm doing a presentation at the Vermont Short-Term Rental Association Summit, and I'm talking about Brooke Pfautz's book, Vacation Rental Secrets, where he got together 50 property managers and asked them what their... If they were to share their 10 biggest mistakes they made in business, what would they be? And not having a business plan or a strategy or goals came out loud and clear from so many of them. And that one is a really simple one. It's write your business plan, and It doesn't matter where you are in your business.

Heather Bayer
And I'll share this. We did not have a business plan, really, until five years before we sold the company, because I realized if we were selling a company, we had to have three solid years documented. And that meant having a business plan that was updated every single year. So we did that for the latter five years. We created a business plan, and then each year we sat down and we took out that business plan, and we said, Here are the goals for the business over the next year. We're going to take on this many new properties. Gross income is going to increase by this amount. And it was percentages and numbers, which I'm not very good at. But we had fun doing this. But the fact that we then revisited it the following year, and we brought with us all that data that we collected over the year and then applied it to the previous business plan and updated it and going forward. That made such a massive, massive difference. And we did that for the last five years.

Heather Bayer
I think if we'd done it for the previous 15, we might have been in a different position when we sold than we actually were. And part of that business plan was setting those business goals. And it was being very clear about them. It was articulating them to everybody, just like what you said. Tell everybody, share it. These are our goals, and this is what your contribution is going to be.

Heather Bayer
So I went off in a little tangent then because you mentioned business goals, and it always fires me up, because I think, oh, my gosh, I wish we'd done that for the 15 years prior to starting it and being diligent in updating that plan every single year.

Nihal Salah
Better late than never.

Heather Bayer
What it did make, it made a huge difference, because when we did come to sell the company, we had all this record, this documented process and progress of how the business had grown, even if it was just in those previous five years. But that was enough. And I can't say often enough that anybody who is in this business must be preparing for its sale from day one.

Nihal Salah
Oh, absolutely.

Heather Bayer
That's another thing.

Nihal Salah
Yeah. I mean, we could talk about that for hours. But I think just to unpack a couple of really important things that you alluded to there. I think that having the business goals, the number of companies I see where they...., even if they do have those goals really clear, they've not thought through how those cascade into the different functions and the different job roles. Because anyone you're hiring, and we recently had a podcast on hiring and onboarding, right? Anyone you're hiring needs to understand how their job, how the tasks they're working on a day-to-day basis, link back to those business goals. Otherwise, everyone's just going in a different direction. So you want those business goals, and then you cascade them down to, right, so how is marketing contributing to that? How is ops contributing to that? How is sales contributing to that? And then within those functions, how is finance contributing to that? And then within those functions, how is each individual contributing? So we should all have, no matter what the size of the company, even if you're a three-person company, it doesn't matter that the structure is still the same. All those jobs must have those objectives that tie back up to the overarching objective.

Nihal Salah
But yes, the first thing I would say, just going back to your question of what's the first thing someone does if they don't have a strategy and need to get started would be, figure out what your business goals are and off of the back of that, figure out how marketing is going to contribute to those particular goals. If you don't have goals, you're going to end up running your business in a really reactive fashion. And this is where you see lots of companies like, okay, maybe I should be on TikTok, or maybe I should be on Instagram, or I'll be on LinkedIn, or I'll make sure I sponsor this thing, or shouldn't I? And you're just all over the place, and you feel like you're out of control. You're not getting a return on your marketing investment, and you just feel like you're spiraling with it.

Nihal Salah
So step one is figure out marketing business goals and how marketing goals link to that. The second thing I would do is, I would look at where the funnel is leaking, and I would very quickly address any leaks. And what I mean by that is, when you think about marketing in terms of the guest journey, let's just say we're talking about guests rather than owners for a minute, you could apply the same principles.

Nihal Salah
And you think about the point at which they become... They start contemplating going on a holiday, or even before that, you could start. Then they start searching for options, and then they get a bit more specific in their search when they figured out, Yeah, I would like to go for a holiday in Egypt, to Sharm El-Sheikh, a beach holiday, take my family, and then they start actually using very specific search terms, and then they land on a couple of websites. They're probably going to be looking at Booking.com, Airbnb, but also they will be looking at direct booking websites that are ranking because they are searching on Google, or they might on social media be clicking on posts that are promoting properties or experiences in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt, right? Now, what you want to be doing is gather whatever data you have and look at where is the journey broken.

Nihal Salah
So are people, for example, landing on your direct booking website and not booking? Are you doing a ton of stuff on social media and getting no traffic to your website or no inquiries? And the reason I say look at where the funnel is broken and fix it quickly is because the challenge I often get back from particularly small businesses is that I need the revenue now. I need it yesterday, right? So if you do the strategic piece of business goals, what do we want marketing to achieve? And then we'll come back to the detail that follows. But then alongside that, you look at where your funnel is broken, you can very quickly see all those leaks so that you're not bleeding your potential revenue across that guest journey.

Heather Bayer
Okay. I'm going to ask you to break this down a bit more because you've talked about funnel, and I think maybe there's a few people out there. What do you term a funnel?

Nihal Salah
Sure. Okay. So a funnel is...., just think of it literally as a funnel, right? Imagine in your head, a funnel starts wide at the top and it goes really narrow right at the bottom. What happens is at the top of the funnel, we are attracting as many potential [guests], again, I'm going to focus on guests here. As many potential guests as possible that fit within our target audience. And we'll talk about targeting later on in the discussion.

Nihal Salah
So we're doing lots of activities, potentially social media marketing, perhaps you're doing some paid ads, maybe you've got some PR going on, you're working on your search engine optimization so that you're attracting organic search traffic and so forth. And you have a bunch of us - just for the ease of calculating - so you've got a thousand people at the top of your funnel coming through. Then what happens is they go through different stages along that funnel, and they start to drop off as they go through those phases. So once they're aware of, perhaps, where they want to go on holiday, they start to look at specific search terms. So they might be searching for a particular city, like I mentioned, or a particular town, or a particular activity, whatever that might be.

Nihal Salah
And you are offering something. So say you have a vacation rental business in Sharm El-Sheikh, in Egypt, and one of the key things that you promote as part of that is that they have access to a diving club, right? So what you don't want to be doing is attracting lots of people who are not interested in diving or beaches or sunshine, because they will be really, really miserable. So the number of people from that top of the funnel who will eventually convert and actually become a guest at the bottom of the funnel is a very small percentage of the top, which is why you need quite a big number at the top and to be conversing them at a high enough rate. I don't know if I explained that well. I feel like I'm a bit overcomplicating.

Heather Bayer
No, I think that's absolutely fine. That makes a huge amount of sense, and particularly when we come on to talk about target audiences. But you mentioned leaking. So I've got in my head this funnel and all these people falling down it. What does the leaking mean?

Nihal Salah
Okay, so the leaking means that the people who you want to convert to become guests are falling out of your funnel. So you want to identify why. Why is someone who is looking for a beach holiday that involves diving, not booking on my website, assuming you have a dive club, or not booking on an OTA where you're listed. So by identifying, say, for example, like I said before, that people are landing on your website, or you have a specific landing page, for example, to promote a particular property, and they're looking at it because you can see in Google Analytics, we need to be looking at the data, and we'll talk about that later, and they're just dropping off.

Nihal Salah
So a really simple fix could just be maybe the copy needs changing, maybe there's something in the layout of your website that's just not working and leading people to jump off. Maybe the pricing is not right, whatever it might be, but you have to come up with certain hypotheses to then test, and you fix it. But then these are potential guests who fit your target profile really well, so they should be converting and need to understand why they're not converting, because that's low-hanging fruit.

Nihal Salah
So by focusing first on what your business goals are and your marketing goals, and alongside that, understanding where you are leaking potential immediate revenue, you put yourself in a much stronger position than just doing one of those.

Heather Bayer
And I'll give you an example from my previous company, where we identified that our biggest leakage area was on the actual payment page, or it was on the booking page, in fact, leading to the payment page. And they were bouncing out of that page at a really high rate. And what we found is that we were asking for information before we got to asking for their credit card. So we were asking questions about the size of their group, whether they would fit into our category for that particular property. And at one time, and this is going back quite a bit, but we used to ask for the names and the ages of every member of the group. And that, at that time, was an insurance requirement from our insurance, which has since changed. But we found that asking those questions prior to getting that credit card number would have them just jumping out of the funnel because they did not want to give that… Maybe they got bored. There was too much they had to do. They're doing it on a phone. They just want a very quick transaction.

Heather Bayer
So from the time that we changed it over, and we ask simply the date of your stay, and I think it was how many people are in your group and the date of your stay, and then the credit card. We gave them the price and then the credit card. That changed the picture entirely. We got to, I think, about June of 2017 or 2018, and we just suddenly noticed that we were still 60% vacant for the summer in the beginning of June. It was just, what is going on here? In fact, we didn't get a company in. It was my other company with Mike and Jason, who were doing data analytics at the time. Jason went in, and he said, This is what's happening. People don't want to fill in your stuff. They're happy that they've got to that page, because they're going to give you a credit card number. Get in there and ask for it right now. Once you've confirmed that, you can then go back and ask them the questions. If they don't fit, he said, You don't have to press the button to actually process their credit card until you've got the answers to those questions back.

Heather Bayer
And this is, of course, talking about a direct booking site. But that, yes, I think that exactly talks about what you were sharing there about leakage.

Nihal Salah
Think of it in terms of how do you remove any friction that might cause someone to drop out of that process? And the reason that's also really important is because you've already spent quite a bit of money and time on getting them into the funnel and down the funnel all the way until the point that they are on the payment page. So if you lost them there, that is a cost of... Well, it's not a cost of acquisition because you didn't acquire them, but that is a sunken cost, basically, because you spent all this money on getting them all the way down to the funnel and then they drop off.

Nihal Salah
One of the things that I think a lot of, especially in this industry, a lot of businesses should do, but they don't, is they should walk in their guest's shoes. And that should be in terms of, think about the entire booking process. Go and open an incognito window and use the search terms that you're trying to rank for. So, again, I'll just go back to the example of the beachside villa in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, that has a diving school nearby.

Nihal Salah
If you're not ranking for those high intent search terms, like Book Villa Sharm El-Sheikh, I don't know, or diving in Sharm El-Sheikh, like thinking about the high intent where people are at the point where they're ready to book, then you'll be able to see who else is ranking just by doing that search yourself, and you'll start to figure out, okay, what am I doing wrong? What are they doing right? But then the same applies to the actual experience when the guests stay.

Nihal Salah
So if you've never stayed in your own properties, if you can get to them, stay in them, right? Because there are a lot of things in terms of that experience that will impact the future of how those guests will market to other guests on your behalf, right? So walk in your guest's shoes, not virtually, in the real world. And the number of changes that you will identify, I think, would astound people, just where they're just leaking revenue.

Heather Bayer
That is a great way of thinking about it. Now, I want to go back again. So you said you could put this marketing strategy on one page. What does that page look like? What has it got on it?

Nihal Salah
Good question. So it has the goals. We're always going to start with the objectives and the goals. Then it would have what your unique value proposition is. I like to refer that as what is your 'Why'? Why do you exist and what makes you different? And I don't think enough businesses spend enough time thinking about this. And it's really normal to start a business and then realize that you don't have a value proposition, and you do a bit later. So it's just totally fine. So once you've figured out what is that unique differentiation, what is the value that I'm offering, you want to be thinking about, in conjunction with that, who is the target audience that you're focused on? And you and I are both huge advocates of niche to marketing. So you can't be trying to be everything to everyone because you'll end up being nothing to no one.

Nihal Salah
So figuring out who are the most relevant and profitable segments to focus on, that's really, really important. And you don't have to choose one particular niche. You could choose up to three and try and choose ones that have similarities so that there is overlap and overspill in terms of your marketing and any improvements you do to the property would be improvements that are valued by all of those niches.

Nihal Salah
A really simple example actually of this is I have a rescue dog, and also we mentioned at the beginning, she's quite reactive. When I travel with her, I try to book properties that are remote, where there's lots of maybe dog fields for hire, but I want quiet. I don't want neighbors with dogs because that would just make my life a nightmare. I want a space where I can sit outside with her, ideally somewhere fenced and secure. And I was chatting with someone at Scale Barcelona earlier in the year. When I was describing this dream property to her, she said, Do you know what? That's exactly the property that a family with an autistic child would find really appealing. And I was like, Oh, I've never thought of that. So sometimes there are unexpected overlaps between niches that you haven't necessarily thought about. So you could be marketing to more than one niche.

Nihal Salah
So we talk about business goals on the strategy on a page, the marketing goals, your unique value proposition. Who are you targeting? Who is the target audience? We want to be talking about budget, which we can spend ages talking about budget. How much you're going to put towards your marketing? What are you going to spend it on? How much are you going to spend? And also what are you going to spend it on? You need to have a section about KPIs, so key performance indicators. What are you measuring to make sure that you are on track in terms of achieving those marketing and business goals in the most cost-efficient way possible, because profitability is really, really important. And what else will we have on there? And then we would have the plan. So what are the channels and activities that you're going to focus on? That should fit in a page. It really should. You do not want it to be complicated. We're not talking about a massive corporate where it's a 100-page document. This is a one-pager.

Heather Bayer
Well, I talked at the beginning about you and I doing a project together, and we have been talking about this all coming together now. And really, what we will do within this project is create this one-page marketing plan by going through each of those in very short and succinct sessions. So a little 20 minutes on knowing what your business goals are, a 20 minutes on KPIs, because how do you... I mean, this all falls out of what's at the top of that sheet, which is your business goals, and your KPIs fall out of that. So that's a little bit of a taster. We'll come back to that at the end. But in discussing it, it really comes to me how structured this is. It doesn't have to be all over...., your marketing strategy is not all over the place. It's just this, go through this list, do these things, and you have your marketing strategy. Does that make sense to you as the strategist?

Nihal Salah
Yes, absolutely. And I think the interesting thing that I want listeners to just reflect on isn't what we've said, it's what we haven't said. We have not talked about tactics. We're not telling people, go be on Instagram, go spend money on paid ads. And the reason is, of course, it differs depending on what your strategy is. But once you've got that strategy on a page, those decisions will become much, much easier to make. Because one of the biggest mistakes we see businesses making all the time, I'm sure you see this is this hyper focus on the tactics without any clear expected return on the investment. But also, even worse, is then looking at what their competitors are doing or others in the sector. It's like, well, they're not really doing a great job anyway, so maybe don't copy them. And the reason that happens is because when you don't have a foundation on top of which to build, and you don't have first principles in place, it's really hard to make those tactical decisions. And the one thing, and I sound like a broken record on this, your marketing should always be about driving revenue, profitably, but it's about driving revenue at the end of the day.

Nihal Salah
And when you're thinking about... Just to be really clear, I'm not saying you have this strategy and a plan, and then you never change anything for the year. Absolutely not. That is the foundation. You review it on a quarterly basis. You assess what's working and what's not, ideally more frequently than that. But I know people are really tight on time. You assess what's working and what's not. And a lot of the time, there'll be ad hoc marketing opportunities that come to you, and then you have to think about, do I pursue them or not? Sponsorship is one of the big ones.

Nihal Salah
My partner has his own business, and he was offered a sponsorship opportunity in Spain. And I said to him, what is it going to cost you? And he told me the number. I'm like, that's not a lot. And I said, what is the opportunity cost of that? And how does this fit with your overall strategy? And the conclusion that we reached was that the opportunity cost was too high because it wasn't just about the money. It was the time he was going to invest in going to this event and spending on designing and getting all the materials produced for the sponsorship for the brand, the visibility side of things. And we decided that at this point in his business's life cycle, it made more sense to invest in more content marketing than sponsorship. So it becomes much easier to make those decisions. And you don't spend ages thinking about them because it just becomes a lot easier to make them when you've got the foundations in place.

Heather Bayer
Those are such wise words, and I know you used those wise words with Mike the other day when he was talking about something very similar. But yes, you can get, and it's interesting because you can get so fired up about something that just seems to be this great opportunity. Let's do this. This sounds so much fun, and it's going to reach so many people. But all that's up in your head before you actually sit down and when you talk about opportunity cost, and let's lay it out, let's talk about the different factors that play in here and how much it is actually going to cost you compared to the revenue that you may be achieving. The gap is so narrow.

Heather Bayer
We did it for three years. We put on a conference for three years. And looking back, it was a little bit of a vanity exercise. We'll go out and Mike and Heather Bayer will put on this conference, this Vacation Rental Success Summit, and we loved it. It was absolutely fantastic. And this was 2016, '17, and '18. We did three conferences, three years, and every year it increased. We never made any money. There was no revenue. Although, having said that, the benefits were in visibility, brand visibility, which did that. But whether that was, and I'm sure you would have taken that into account as to the percentage of... What percentage is that brand visibility bringing you in terms of how much it actually costs against how much it actually costs you?

Nihal Salah
It's a really interesting one because I also think that there's something about the timing. The timing where you are in terms of... If you're at a point in the year where, because now we've agreed that the business goals are really clear, and you've almost hit 80% of your revenue target or 90% of your revenue target, and you've got some budget leftover, and an ad hoc opportunity lands on your plate, and it does fulfill one of your marketing objectives to raise brand awareness or potentially generate some interest in your product or service, then sure, consider that. But if you are at a point where you are struggling to break even, don't entertain it unless you can see a very direct path between that investment of your time and money and the revenue and profit that it's going to generate.

Nihal Salah
And I think that's how I would always decide whether or not to invest in ad hoc activities that land on my plate, because we all get pitched stuff, right? And don't forget that when you're getting... We all get these emails from, Would you like to advertise in this publication? That's a marketer, trying to market you and sell you a service. So they make you feel like you get the FOMO. I'd better do it. This is a missed opportunity. It's not. You have to stick to your gun sometimes. And when you have a strategy that you're confident about, experiment. By all means experiment. But every experiment needs to have a very clear goal.

Heather Bayer
We keep coming back to this strategy. So inside that, we did say we were going to talk about target audience. And let's go back to your requirements for your vacation, which could also be the requirements for a vacation with somebody with an autistic child. I mean, those are two target audiences. There is the Nihal with the need for privacy, for a fenced yard, for somewhere where her dog can be unleashed and you can feel safe. And then on the other hand, there's a family with the autistic child that needs the sensory factor and elements taken into account, but they need that same privacy. They need to have that security of a fenced area, which is lockable so that... I know I have a severely autistic granddaughter, and I remember going to my daughter's house and seeing all the locks on the doors and thinking, Oh, my gosh, are you worried about break-ins? She said, no, I'm worried about break-outs. So that was a really big issue. But those are two target markets that one property could reach those two target audiences, right?

Nihal Salah
Yeah. And the interesting thing when you start to niche down and look at particular audiences, there's a couple of really interesting things that happen. So number one, you get to know them by focusing on a very particular type of guest, you get to know them more and more. So you understand the profile and the persona inside out. And I'm not talking about... Everyone looks at demographics and just where do they hang out online and that kind of thing. I'm talking about the psychographics. I'm talking about the emotional side of things.

Nihal Salah
So if you understand....., you understand this....., is that as a dog lover, our dogs are family. When I say it also rules my life, I mean it. My life revolves around my dog, and I love her to bits. I spend an absolute fortune on her, and my decisions, my buying behavior, when I'm buying for myself, if I'm going away just by myself, I will often look for a good bargain at a good deal. I don't need fancy, it's just not my thing. But when I'm taking Rosa with me, my buying decision is... It's very irrational to a large degree. If you're looking at it from an outside perspective, that I would spend significantly more on a property that meets her needs and my needs, right?

Nihal Salah
Because the fact that I have a dog who's quite reactive means that if I go out and I bump into... I'm going to... I'm in a crowded area and I bump into other people with dogs, she's going to start barking, she's going to get worked up and triggered, and then the rest of my day goes to shit, basically, because she's just all triggered and worked up. So it's going to upset me and it's going to upset her. I don't want that. So I'm happy to pay a premium.

Nihal Salah
But the more you get to know me as a persona, the more that you realize the really small touches that will make a huge difference in my experience as a guest. So imagine if I get my welcome email, and because you've asked me at the point of booking what my pet's name is, and it says something so simple like, I hope you and Rosa have a great stay. Oh my God, Heather, I will be the happiest woman on Earth. Oh my God, they're going to remember Rosa. I'd be so excited. If they left some nice treats for her, if there was a dog bed and a dog bowl, if they sent me, made sure that I had access to where all the great walks are or the secure dog fields. Again, that's partnerships, right? Potential dog sitters or dog walkers in the local area. Again, potential partnerships where you could be getting some sort of kickback.

Nihal Salah
There's also food delivery. Imagine I arrive, and they have partnered with a pet food supplier and I can get all this food ordered, so I don't have to cart around a bunch of raw food in my luggage. Which is impossible, because she's got sensitive stomach, so I can't keep switching her food. So you start to understand your audience at such an intimate level that you can start making those small touches, which aren't always expensive. I'm not I'm not saying start rebuilding your property. I'm not saying make it... It's all about the small touches that you can make to the property that will make that guest so much happier, so much more forgiving of things that might not work. So if the hot water doesn't work, but Rosa gets to play in the garden, and I message the property owner or the property manager, and I'm like, It's not working, and they said, We'll send someone in a few hours. Yeah, sure, no problem. I am not even going to think of that as long as they do come and fix it. It's not going to bother me. There's are some niggly bits in the property here and there, it doesn't matter because my primary purpose is I want to have a good time with my dog.

Nihal Salah
But what will happen as well, so you've understood your audience well enough that you can market to them a lot better, because you know the messages that will resonate with them. You can deliver an exceptional experience because you've made those adjustments in the property to improve satisfaction levels. That guest is much more likely to leave you a really good review. They're much more likely to refer you to other dog owners, and they're much more likely to come back. So you get so many benefits to narrowing down your focus on a particular audience.

Heather Bayer
And this works. It definitely works with pet lovers. Absolutely works with pet lovers. I've mentioned so many times, Sue Allen of East Ruston Cottages mention her over and over again because that is her market. And you go to that website, and you can see it from the moment you get on the website. We had a very simple one on our website because we attracted a lot of different groups. But one of our biggest groups was pet owners. And on the front page, above the fold, it said no pet fee. And that was a hook, no pet fee. And we were the only one, we were the only company that was not charging a pet fee. And then that took them into a page that said, we love your pets.

Heather Bayer
We know you love them. We've selected certain properties that also love your pets. And it just went on from there. We never had any pet damage because pet owners are incredibly respectful in general. There's always the 2%, but you don't penalize the 98% for what the 2% might perhaps do, which was always my mantra.

Heather Bayer
Anyway, we will be going on in more detail as we create our new podcast series, and we'll be talking.... I want to take a whole episode to talk about target audience and niche marketing, because we are getting very close to the end of our time, and we haven't covered anywhere near what I wanted to, but that's the beauty of what we're going to be going on and doing with this marketing series. So do you want to touch on that at all?

Nihal Salah
Sure. So we are not so excited about this because I just think you're brilliant. I love what you do, and I've been really excited about working with you. But we are producing a limited edition series of podcasts, which we're going to dive into the detail around everything we've been talking about. So if you follow this series, by the end of it, you will be able to... You'll have your strategy on a page, and you will be a lot more enlightened and feel like you're in a lot more control of your marketing. So we touched on a couple of the topics today, but we'll be doing a much deeper dive on the specifics in this series.

Heather Bayer
Exactly. Because I wanted to talk about data. We didn't talk about data. I wanted to talk a little bit about the channels to focus on when there's so many options out there. But we will be doing that in this series. So how do they find out more? There will be information on the Show Notes about this and how you can find out more about it, so that you can make sure you do not miss a single episode of this very unique series. And it is unique, nobody's been out there and done this educational series on marketing before. So watch out for that.

Nihal Salah
First of all, make sure you subscribe to this podcast and follow on whatever platform that you're listening to. But I just had an idea, Heather. What we could do is actually just create a simple email form. Leave your email, just click on the link in the Show Notes, leave your email, and then you will get notified when the podcasts come out. The exciting thing about this that we haven't mentioned, though, is this isn't just you and I talking. What we're going to do is we're going to take listeners' questions ahead of the recording, and then we're going to focus on really specific challenges. If you're listening to this, and you're struggling with Marketing, it's your opportunity to get really personalized, actionable advice from Heather and I. So do make sure that you sign up.

Heather Bayer
Yes. So as Nihal said, there will be a link in the Show Notes for you to go and leave your email address. And we'll just send you a quick survey, which will have an opportunity for you to write out the question that you have, or the problem that you have, and we will be in touch about that.

Heather Bayer
So, Nihal, This time has gone so quickly. I can't believe it. And so I'm so glad we're going to have this opportunity to stretch it out into another 8 or 10 more smaller episodes, they won't all be an hour long. They'll be much shorter, very easily digestible, and each one will be on a very specific topic. So thank you so much. Gosh, I'm so excited about this. I think we are together bringing something that is much needed in this industry.

Nihal Salah
Thank you, Heather. I've had an absolute blast chatting with you. And I also can't believe how fast 52 minutes has gone by. When you're having fun, time just flies.

Nihal Salah
It does indeed. I will be talking to you again very soon.

Nihal Salah
Yes.

Heather Bayer
Well, don't go away yet, because after we'd finished recording that, Nihal and I realized that we needed to tell you a little bit more about what you're going to get when you start listening to this new marketing strategy podcast. So I'm handing this over to Nihal right now to give you a little bit more information and let you then go to the Show Notes and you can collect anything you need there and make sure that you register for getting some more information when these episodes come out. It's going to be awesome. So over to Nihal.

Nihal Salah
So in addition to the podcast series, which will be immensely valuable, we'll also be providing free templates that you can use and workbooks, all sorts of different resources that you'll find really, really valuable. So by the end of the series, you are able to complete your own marketing strategy and have a really clear marketing plan that you can go off and implement with clarity and confidence.

Nihal Salah
So in the link in the Show Notes, click on that link in the Show Notes, and leave your email address. We will send you for this episode, the first template will be a marketing strategy on a page template. And then you will also be notified when future episodes come out, and we will guide you through completing those different sections. So we'll be diving into all the different parts of a marketing strategy that we talked about. So that by the end of the series, like I said, you will have a strategy on a page and a plan.

Heather Bayer
That is perfect. Thank you.

Heather Bayer
Well, that's it. You have everything you need to get set up to make sure you don't miss a single episode of this new Marketing Strategy Podcast. Loads of downloads, loads of activities, stuff to do. Can't wait to hear from you to see how you put these marketing strategies into action. So until next time.

Heather Bayer
It's been a pleasure as ever being with you. If there's anything you'd like to comment on, then join the conversation on the Show Notes for the episode at vacationrentalformula.com. We'd love to hear from you, and I look forward to being with you again next week.

‍