From View Count to Bookings: Proven Strategies for Successful Advertising in the Short-Term Rental Sector with Mike Denman

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Direct Booking Success. I'm Jenn Boyles, your host, and today I have Mike Denman with me. Now, Mike introduces himself as an advertising scientist, and I want to hear a bit more about that. It piqued my interest. So welcome, Mike. Great to have you here today.

Thank you for having me on, I’m very excited to talk about direct booking, especially as I've been testing these things against Airbnb and VRBO platforms and seeing how well they do and what works with advertising. So I'm excited to talk about this.

Oh, so am I. So let's start by saying that if anybody doesn't know who you are, maybe you can tell us a bit about who you are, your background, and where you are. Yeah.

That's right, yeah.

Started posting things on social media, started being a little bit like a little bit connected. It was really kind of a wild experience. I've been banned from people's Facebook groups for talking about how to do these things. I've been told ads don't work and that they don't waste your money and it's too expensive. I was like, man, I can spend less than $300 a month and I can make way more money than the people who are not spending that $300 a month in the same areas. So I really don't see it as a big cost. I see it as like, well, I'm going to increase my dollar nightly rate. That way I cover all of my advertising costs and then I feel really good passing along the cost to my guests and I'm still making more money.

Well, and that's it. And that's why I've got you on the podcast today, so that we can talk about these things and we can bust a few of these myths as well. But going back to your title of advertising scientist now, because it's all about the experimentation, isn't it?

Yes, it really is. And actually it's funny. I was on a podcast called Live Let Thrive, and these two guys, Micah and Siva, where they were basically like, you're like some sort of advertising scientist with how excited you get by this data and numbers. I was like, yeah, actually resonated with now it is one of those things that I can say, hey, let's take a few weeks or even a month. Let's find out what people want. I'll run an ad campaign that costs minimal amounts of money. We can get a market research campaign result out of it that normally costs like 10,000 or $15,000. And the cool thing is I can find out which photos people click on most, which pieces of text they're interested in, all these different little elements that you can put into advertisements on social media that you can say, I know what people are going to click on. And then you can translate that to the PLooking platforms or even your direct booking site. And like, okay, this is how it's going to go. And ads always dump a lot of traffic to whatever website. So I know that from the SEO or search engine optimization side of things, the more traffic we drive to a site, the more relevant traffic, the more people going there for the purposes of booking and that kind. Of stuff, the more likely we are to show higher rank on Google and with Ads, I've been able to prove pretty quickly that you can go from any page on airbnb to the top page to be put enough money into advertising. Do it long enough. I had one guy who was like page twelve at the beginning of this year, and he's like, I have no idea what to do. I was like, let's just do ads for a month, man. I have no idea. After a week, he was already on page four. And so it was one of those things just like it doesn't even take that much time and effort. But ultimately it's like when you see your property showing up in that first position organically, you're going to get more. People booking from those platforms and on the direct booking site if you're going to show up anywhere because you're competing with hotels, other vacation places, all of those kinds of aggregate websites out there trying to get people's attention. Yeah, you can really make a cool brand for yourself and your property and get noticed. That's also why I'm like, I'm really interested in helping people build out digital marketing networks of where people can find them and how they can interact with them. Because people are all over the place. I don't know, weird, but you go where the people are.

Yeah, well, that's it. So let's think of that. People are listening to this. They're thinking, oh, this sounds really exciting, but I got one or two properties. I don't know what to do, where do I start? How do I get into this? And I think we need to start by talking about digital marketing as a whole, right? We need some kind of system there.

And what's more important than whatever you're creating is what you do with it in marketing.

Yes, it really is.

It is. And it's the experimentation of what is working for you. So whatever works for you, lean into it. So if it is Pinterest, lean into it. Let's do more of it. And you talked about data at the beginning there. You've got to know your numbers and what is going on so that you know what's working.

I don't want anyone listening to this thinking, okay, I want to do ads. This is amazing. And I'm going to have a million bookings like in the next week. And it's like, yeah, not really. There is a small you've got to hit, it's the numbers game. You've got to hit like what you said about Spaghetti on the wall. That's a perfect analogy because you're throwing all this out there and people have to come across it. We know social media, the algorithms and all that kind of jazz. You have to be consistently out there so that it picks up on what you're doing and more people see it. So you need a lot of people to see it, a lot of people to click for a few people to book.

Yeah, and we don't really need a lot of people to book because we don't even have a full calendar available to have a lot of where you go. We have a finite resource, right? Yeah, finite.

And if you've got one or two properties, yeah, if you're sitting if you're a vacation rental property manager with 50 or 60 properties, well, you need a few more. You need a lot more people to be looking at the book.

Let's see what that does.

$13 a day. So there's incremental steps that you can take. You're ultimately like, I'm getting too many bookings. Your prices are too low. I'm getting barely any bookings. Your prices might be too high. So you have to kind of wiggle through all these little pieces or all the tool sets we have.

Yes. They could also be clicking through to your website and going, oh, that's not what I got from the ad.

Right. And really a lot of the ads are interesting. So I found that most people don't click on any of the ads that are like interior images, like the living room, the bedrooms, any of that kind of stuff. They really like the exterior photo of the house and they like the view of where you can hang out.

Like this?

Yes. And so it's like the view and then the house. And so it's funny because I've had people, they look at the numbers, I'm like, well, these are the most popular photos. And I don't believe that. I don't know the answer to that. But this is how many people clicked on that one compared to all the other. You know, you can do it as you please. I recommend people replace their current whatever profile photo is with the high click through ones. That way any of the organic stuff works through. I know that Google my business shuttered the ability for people to be on Google for the short term rentals. And it was definitely one of those bummer moments because they're trying to roll out their Google vacations for the past years. There's a whole slew of that stuff. Now if you're on with some of those, like there's some Google platform stuff that you can get into, but you can still compete with all these Google places by doing ads and having to spend that much. And you could even compete with them by having just a bunch of different links going to your direct booking site. And the cool thing about direct booking sites that none of the other platforms have, this is my favorite part. You can put a Facebook pixel on there and every single person who lands on your page, you can know where your Facebook account exists. You don't know it, you don't know their name, you don't know the details, but you know that you can tell Facebook. I'd like to reach people that touched my website and they're like, oh yeah, you mean this person over here? They love your site. They're running for this amount of time. We're going to send the ad to them. And so that kind of retargeting remarketing piece is one of the best pieces of the puzzle. In fact, on retargeting, I find that the click through rates are like 20% click through rates. I'm like, oh, these people love this because they're seeing it for the 7th time, maybe or the fourth time.

It's not that they didn't book because maybe they've forgotten life got in the way. Maybe their wife's husband came and yelled at them, the dog pooped, whatever happened, everything distracted and then yeah, and they go, oh yeah, man, I forgot to book that trip that I wanted to take.

And I was working with this guy over the summer, he's got like an entire lake in California. I was like, you have a lake? Yeah, airbnb a lake for like $190 a night. I was like, so what happens here? He's like, well, people fish, we have boats, we have all these things. I was like, a lake? That's amazing. So it's like, yeah, there's some interesting things out there. I think that people, when they see about these, they're like, oh, I didn't even consider going to that weird missile silo thing in New Mexico until you told me about it.

Yeah, there's some really cool places to go to, aren't there? Really unique places out think, you know, we're covering a lot of ground in a short amount of time here. So I hope people are just staying with us tonight. But I think the bottom line here is that yes, you can do advertising. It is accessible. You don't have to spend millions. I know that when people come up to me, there was a question, I was speaking at an event in the spring, and somebody put up their hand and they were like, yeah, but direct bookings are so expensive. And I almost fell off my chair. I'm like, what are you talking about? And they were under the impression that they had to go right to ads, that ads was the only way to do it and that it was going to cost so much money. And I think it's important to know that you need a plan to start.

And you need to establish a presence. And so if we had ads running without some sort of landing page for people to go to, or some sort of Facebook page for people to see what it is to even run the ad in the first place, there's some stuff you got to do. And in fact, even when I start people off with working with me, there's a 30 point thing that we have to work through to even get going. I was like, well, you got to make sure there's no alcohol. You have to make sure there's all these things, there's all these laws and requirements they have to follow. Otherwise we as advertisers get shut down. And that's another thing I've run into is like, I've run into a lot of people try to run their own ads, but they don't use the correct category, like housing. And then they get their ad account shut down because they listen to some people who are like in New Zealand, where you don't have to follow the ad category because it's not a law. But in the United States, in a lot of parts of Europe, this is something actually Canada, United States, and parts of like, those are where some of the real estate laws are the hardest. So some of these things for regulation, like, we just have to be like crossing our T's and dotting our I's and appropriately looking at things, checking twice. But I've got a pretty good system to help people onboard how to do this, because that's a lot of stuff. Luckily, I keep up on these advertising changes, the policy changes, and all the shifts. There's so much that even going through this whole year, they changed the marketplace on Facebook to where now real estate things go into the marketplace where they weren't necessarily before. And I found people were spending a lot of money into the marketplace, but they weren't getting bookings. I was like, oh, I have to turn all the marketplaces off because that's not where people are going for that. That's where people are going for midterm rentals and long term rentals. And so if you have mid term or long term, that's a good game to play. But like, the short term rental, like, you got to tread all in the areas. It's going to be appropriate. You're going to find people who want to book you. Yeah, it's a delightful thing trying to figure it out. It's always changing.

Yeah, well, that's it. And you've got to keep up on it, all the different changes. Definitely, yeah.

Well, it's good because if anybody's listening to this and going, oh, my goodness, there's so much I want to do. Well, Mike's going to be coming to Direct Booking Success. He is one of our speakers this year, and he's going to be talking more about advertising. And I just think it's great because it's breaking down those barriers when you're thinking, oh, I can't do that. I'm not somebody like Airbnb who has this massive budget. What can I do? Yeah, exactly. So I'm glad that you're coming this year to sort of break down those barriers even more, and again, for free, doing the presentation, can you maybe give us a little bit about what you're going to be speaking on at the Direct Booking Success?

Yeah, so essentially, one of the first things I'll end up doing is, as part of signing up and getting into it, there'll be a little bit of a cheat sheet, kind of a one sheet guide as to these are the top learnings you need to know about running a digital marketing campaign for your property. And so it's really all about the basis of it. So we were like, okay, where do you need to go online? What platforms do you need to get on? And then how do we present ourselves in the first place? If you have a direct booking site, making sure that people have links, all the stuff, it's all important, all that's necessary. And so once you have those things set, good quality photos, all of that that you feel really solid about, then you can have a solid digital marketing experience. And I'll go into some of the ad structure, the doing of traffic ads, how I structure them, how I do complex retargeting and also traveler ads. So I do, like, a three hit punch where it's like I'll do, like, a top funnel ad. Everybody in this certain area kind of thing, I'll do a mid funnel ad like, hey, everyone who saw that, come back and look at it again. And then I do a traveler one where it's like, hey, you might be in here temporarily, maybe you're visiting, perhaps you need to stay in a different place. I know that you might be interested in this for even your next trip here. So all those little questions.

Yeah. I never thought about people that are already in the area. That's really interesting.

It's wild, actually. When I started doing that this year, for some of the people I was just running my standard advertising campaign for, I was like, oh, we're catching more bookings from this. People started really seeing it. When I started really adding the retargeting piece into it's, like, those start going up even. So, like, I worked with a gentleman. He's got, like, three properties in Crystal Beach, Texas. And I only had, like, one property, Crystal Beach. His three properties did better than mine. With the ads I was running, I was like, wow, this is even more complex than I've ever done on my own. Intense. I was like, all right, this is a good learning. I feel like I've gotten a good system down, but I've only been doing this for, like, two years, so it's like, I'm still new at the short term rental game in general, but for the advertising stuff, luckily, I've been doing it for long enough that's, like, I got this, this is fine. And it's a pretty good system. Ultimately, you have to tweak a little bit. But I've been able to help people find out that their properties are not that viable, that they should sell it, and it's not really going to work out. It's not visually appealing. There's a whole slew of folks that I'm like, well, we've tried ads for X amount of years, not really, but, like, month stays, that kind of thing. And so when it was like, one gentleman I was working with from like, three months, I was like, what is going on? He had, like, a minimum night stay requirement for his local city ordinances. It was like six days, but no one wanted to book six days. I was like, You've got to do midterm rentals, man. You can't do short term rentals in that area. You're obviously regulated out of that opportunity. And so he was, like, adamant of still doing it. I was like, you're not going to make money this way, though.

This is what I think a lot of people need to realize, too, is that the services you provide, the services I provide, the core part of it is being a mentor and helping, so that if somebody's going down the wrong path. Like this guy with his I can't believe that they would make six nights or whatever. That's crazy. But you're there to mentor him and try to explain other ways of going because he could be sitting there just banging his head against the wall and throwing money after money after money out there with ads and not realizing that actually he should be on a different path.

And I think there's so many different paths to this stuff. Like if you are into the short term game, if you aren't making money, you can get into the midterm game, start talking to insurance companies and be a person that can provide long stays for that kind of stuff until the house burns down. There's so many people out there doing really amazing stuff with investing in general, so you can find even arbitrage people are doing these gangbusters situations and they don't even own property. I know, they're just still making it work. So it's like when we look at this stuff, I was like, yeah, if you've got the hustle, you want to learn. There's a lot of steps, but man, there's some really good people that support these networks and it's like what you've been doing for as long as I started paying attention, I was like, oh, this is what's up. So when we started talking, I was like, my people are good, because we're all about we want to share information and help people go through these things to be successful. And we really have given more than what we could ever have earned through these things. Try and help people work through these things because we see it's important. I don't like people getting taken advantage of having some sort of, like, $10,000 guru spend where they walk out of like, well, I don't know how to do this. I'm like, oh, man, that's like, it hurts me. And I'm like, Dude, I will charge you $10 and we can do this. Not really that, but at the same time, I don't want people to be out so much that it's like it's a negative impact. No, I do think it's an important thing to think about.

Yeah. And it's finding the right person, the right fit for you as well. Because I've had people come to me and they've said, I've just spent all this money with so and so. They'll remain nameless, but they've spent money with somebody and then they come out and they go, hang on a second, what did I get for that?

I had conversations with people who have even hired some of those entities to ads for them. I'm like, well, hey, did you have any of the data from the ads? I'd love to see your ads manager. What's the report look like? They're like, oh, I didn't get a report. I was like, oh, it scares me, the data. I'm like, yeah. Because I'm like, well, there's a whole thing you could log into and see it's your ad account, it should be right there. So I think that when people kind of take moments where they're just trusting, it's like this. A lot of trusting people go in and they're not gullible, they're very smart people. There's just a lot of people who get really excited about taking their money. I'm like, I'm very excited about helping people make money. I know that that's how you are. And it's like, this is one of those things, by doing even the Direct Booking Success and having everyone come together around this topic and helping people understand what this is. And if they end up buying the All Access pass and they get all the other access poodles of access pieces, I know that there'll be a cool thing for me, there'll be a cool thing from a lot of other people, like this couple of books. So I think that for a lot of what people are going to get out of this summit, it's going to be a really cool, eye opening experience. It's not going to break their piggy bank.

No. Well, that's it. And this year, it's bigger than it's ever been. It's the third year, and right now I'm sitting at 22 presentations over three days. Like, my goodness, we've got all sorts of subjects. I'm going to be talking about building trust and moving away from how you can compete with Airbnb. Other people are going to be talking about search marketing. I'm trying to think of what else. There's lots of copywriting, creating more content in less time, using AI.

Love it.

It's going to be really brilliant. And I think having you there talking about advertising is sort of the cherry on the cake, because the AI and the advertising, you need to have a basic plan of what you're doing, and you've got to have all those pieces in place, like your site and your social accounts and things like that. You've got to have them set up in the right way to then be able to layer these things on top. So if anyone's getting overwhelmed by just listening to us, just take a step backwards, have a deep breath, come to the Direct Booking Success and you will have a wealth of information for free. And yes, there is a paid product, which is the all Access pass, which will have so many goodies in it for you and as well as the replays of the presentation. So brilliant. I can't wait for your presentation, Mike. I will be there taking notes. I will know. I learn a lot from you. I know we're in a similar mindset, and it's really brilliant to speak to you today. Now, before you go, I need to ask you, this is the big question. What does direct booking success mean to you?

Yeah, it's interesting. I've been thinking about this since you sent that to me, and for a lot of the success part. I know that success is always like an internal subjective thing, but I think that when someone's like, oh, this thing is working and it's doing its thing and I'm just like, I kind of sit back a little bit more and I don't have to go out every single week promoting it on Facebook groups. I don't have to do all these things to really get it. I don't have to. Like, I've got one of those things that people give me their email addresses through my direct booking site and I have all this other access where through the other systems you have to have things like Stapi or have some sort of creative way to capture email addresses and pay for that extra stuff. And so I think that with some of these things it's like, yeah, you can have a nice book and then just create a simple email structure to remind people about you seasonally and say, hey, we loved having you here, would you like to come save for a discount or whatever. They're like, oh, this is way less than I paid on the other platform. They're like gangbusters. And so I think that the success part is when you see those mechanisms start functioning for you that bring more money to your situation and you actually stop working a lot. I know that some people who do it's like, we work more than I think any normal person who invests in anything does. When they invest in short term rentals, it's like there's a lot of stuff, there's a lot of coordinating, a lot of that networking, which is why some people are like, I'm just doing a property manager. So it's like less those property managers out there handling all that stuff for people, but still at the same time, if the property managers aren't doing ads, then they're also not necessarily getting a lot of the booking opportunities to those places. And so it is really one of those things if you want direct booking success, to be able to direct book with somebody is a success. And so I think that getting those things going without having reliance on another platform that can shut you down and red flag you for any time, any reason and whatever or someone's just mad at you because you wouldn't cancel their thing, they had to cancel it because whatever the drama was going on I don't know, it's complicated. People lose super host status, they don't like that. So there's always this host versus guest kind of thing. I'm like, well, the guest is trying to do their best they can to work the system so that way they can have the best kind of vacation for their dollar. The host is like, I'm just trying to get the most out of my investment. So at the same time, how do we meet in the middle with hospitality and building trust? Oh, we're going to have to look through. Jennn Boyles I think that this is like really what it all boils down to.

Well, that's it. And I think you've also hit the nail on the head about there's gurus out there that are all about, oh, it's a passive income. Come and do this, come and do that, and it's all passive. And it's like there is nothing passive about hospitality. The only thing passive is if you give everything to everybody else, which you're giving them most of your profit. So, yes, then it could be passive if someone does all the work, but if it's your business, it's not passive. However, you don't want to get into that burnout cycle of being busy and doing this, that, this, that, and just keep going. Having that plan and an advertising yes plan, having that plan and advertising can be part of that will help you. Just things happen. And the technology now is amazing with AI and what's coming out and your email program, scheduling emails and segmenting guests and the things you can do with the tools you've already got, it's amazing. It's just setting it up. Yeah, that's exactly it. It's mind blowing, isn't it? You can set it up so, you know, chasing your tail all the time.

Man, that sounds so nice. What's it like having a weekend off where you just can actually go golf, do some sort of thing?

But there's also people like you and I, Mike, that I think you're probably the same as me, that we love what we do so much that we are at our desks in the evening, we are at our desks at the weekend, and it's like, we've got to stop doing this.

Loved it. And I'm going to have to have you back because there's just so many topics that we could talk about in digital marketing and hospitality and investing, all this space. I'm going to put a link to your website, Sdradvertising.com. I've got your link tree. We'll put that in the show notes so people can get in touch with you. The best place to see Mike, though, is at the Direct Booking Success, which is coming up in October – October third to the fifth. Registration is open, so head to Direct Booking Success to sign up for the free event. Thank you, Mike, so much for coming today.

Thank you for having me in. Have a great rest of your day. Appreciate you, Jenn.