Know This! Before Advertising Your Short Term Rental

If you spend money on ads, people won't automatically buy.

Let me explain.

I was just hired by a company to help with ads. The client wasn't getting any sales and they didn't know why.

Thousands of dollars were being spent every week on ads with nothing to show for it.

I remember talking to them on a Tuesday and by Thursday $2,000 more dollars was gone.

Again, with almost no sales.

They were giving up hope. If sales didn't start rolling in by the end of the month, I was told to shut down ads completely.

The end of the month was 10 days away.

"If We Spend, They Will Buy."

This is a linear way of thinking many people have.

It's a belief that Meta or Google ads are some magic cash machine and if you just touch it, money will be made.

Honestly, I get why people think this way.

Ad platforms market themselves as get-rich-quick schemes for businesses. And unfortunately, we believe them because we correlate "big-fancy-technology-company" to "truth and magic."

I've been there. I bought into that message years ago.

Ad platforms are just tools that help us leverage one message to a mass group of people.

We still have to find the message that gets people to buy.

To do this requires testing, failing and testing again.

Good Ads Beat Big Budgets

The end of the month was 10 days away.

The first thing I did was test 42 ads all with different messages.

Within a day, four got people to buy. These were my winners.

I shut off the other 38 ads and moved the winners into their own campaign. I called it the "winning campaign."

I thought if these ads had already worked, they should work again.

In past campaigns, this client was spending $149 per day. I moved the budget down to $20.

The perfect sample size budget.

After 24 hours, I checked back in with the campaign.

I was getting more people to buy at $20 per day compared to the previous $149.

Why?

Because I only used ads:

• That had been tested

• With a message people liked

• And gotten purchases

The end of the month has come and gone. The ads are still running profitably today.

Test Then They Will Buy

It sucks losing money with advertising. I hate it as much as the next guy.

I started routinely testing my message almost two years into my career.

Two years!

Before testing, I was bought into the same idea almost every new advertiser has.

"If I start advertising, I will make money."

The saying should be:

"If I start adverting, then I should test my message so I can make money."

Figuring out what to test took me years to learn. You can skip the trial and error by:

1. Reading my guide on how to test.

2. Copying my sprint test planner.

That's all for today. I'll see you in the next article.

Before you go

I just launched my brand new direct booking marketing agency, Lodge Social.

We help rental operators get more guests to like, share, and book.

Apply to work with me and my team here.

Links you might like:

1. You might want to start email marketing. Here’s why.

2. Data is a boring topic. So, I attempted to gamify it. 

3. This is still one of my favorite marketing conversations ever.

4. Guests don’t like to guess. (Instagram).