Welcome back to the Digible Dudes podcast. Today we have a special guest, Abby Glaessner, a paid media specialist at Digible. She joined Digible about eight months ago after working in the vacation rental industry for quite a while. There’s a lot of similarities between the vacation rental space and apartment marketing, along with some tiny little details that set them apart. So we decided to have Abby on the podcast talk about her transition from vacation rentals to apartment marketing and what she learned along the way.
Abby gets into the conversation by sharing the story of how her career path was shaped and how she reached where she is today. She first joined a vacation rental company as their only marketing person. That was an excellent opportunity for her to get experience in a wide range of marketing channels related to the vacation rental industry. Then she joined Digible to work on paid media strategies.
Getting into the details, Abby explains how the marketing operations were functioning in the vacation rental space. She talks about how they managed marketing campaigns for thousands of vacation rental properties, occupancy rates, marketing mix, budgeting, and many more. She gets into details about some of the obstacles and restrictions related to targeting they had to deal with and what they did to work around those restrictions. She also shares some tactics that can be used for apartment marketing as well.
Further down the episode, Abby talks about the major differences she sees between the vacation rental space and the apartment marketing space. She explains the small details that set the two industries apart. In the next section, Abby shares her experience with the methods of marketing optimization used in the vacation rental space. She gives an in-depth explanation of the usage of CRMs, CMSs, SEO, and custom tools in vacation rentals. She also shares how the impact of social media worked differently in these two industries.
[05:45] Abby’s Story – How Abby started at a vacation rental company and her transition into digital marketing.
[09:47] Nuts & Bolts of Vacation Rental Marketing – How the marketing operations were carried out in the vacation rental industry.
[14:53] Media Mix – Abby talks about the mix of marketing channels that were used for marketing vacation rentals, some of the restrictions they had to face, and workarounds for them.
[20:36] Budgeting – How the budgets varied in the vacation rental space from one quarter to the next.
[26:04] Differences – Abby talks about the major differences of markering between vacation rentals and apartment marketing and some of the things we can absorb into the apartment marketing space.
[31:24] Marketing Optimization – What sort of a priority did CRMs, CMSs, and SEO were given in the vacation rental industry.
[35:06] Impact of Social – Similarities and differences in the way social media impacted vacation rental space and the apartment marketing space.
[39:30] Technologies Specific to Vacation Rentals – Abby talks about the usage of custom tools in the vacation rental industry.
[45:12] Final Thoughts – Tips for building trust for your website for vacation rental as well as apartment marketing.
