Welcome to expand your reach and fill your RV park. We're going to talk about outbound marketing secrets today. Thanks for tuning in either live or watching on the replay. We're really glad that you were able to be a part of this webinar with Rest & Relax ROI.
About Rest & Relax ROI
We're going to get right into it today. A little bit about us to get started. We are partnering exclusively with RV parks, resorts, and campgrounds. That's what we know and like to do. We are an ARVC member, and we talk about the M5, which is an RV park centric marketing system that details and focuses on these four areas of reputation, resell, reach, and retarget.
About Mark Rowan
A little bit about your host, who is me, myself and I. I grew up on a working West Virginia sheep farm/campground. I studied communications at the world's most exciting university, which is Liberty, by the way. That's what they called themselves when I was there. I married my college sweetheart Jenny in October of 2000.
We're coming right up on 22 years. Super easy to remember how long I've been married. I have four amazing kids. Elena Kay, who is a senior in high school, Cassia, Josiah, and Addy. That's 10th grade and then 8th grade and 6th grade and then one doggo, Holly. I've been helping companies with online presence for more than 20 years and running this marketing agency since 2014.
What You'll Leave With
What we're going to leave with today. We're going to have some goals that we're going to be going after. There are three areas that we're going to upgrade our parks reach strategy, aka, and getting new guests. And then there's action items to put in place for your park. And then if you have any questions, either while you're on here or when you're watching later, you can put in the comments. I'll be glad to answer those as they come up.
We're talking about is an opportunity to reach more guests. So we're talking about outbound marketing, and we call it reach. Now, in the very strict sense of the definition of outbound marketing, we're going to go a little bit outside of that.
Traditionally, you're talking about just advertising, whether that be print or otherwise. Basically the ability to get in front of them as opposed to them finding you, that sort of thing. It does the three following things when talking about reach, raising your brand awareness, gets you in front of the right guests and helps those guests choose to visit your park. If the guests don't know about you, how are they going to visit you? That's a good question.
Here's a stat to get things rolling. In 2021, 33% of the travel industry had marketing budgets that were spent on advertising and media. It's a big deal for this space.
We always have our friendly, sad little RV at the beginning here. If it's broke, we want to fix it. When it comes to parks, we make sure they're not too empty, and we're going to take action if we're going to get some results right. There are some common issues that could be out there for anyone. When it comes to reaching those types of activities, it can be hard to track ROI, especially if you're looking at traditional things like print advertising and those type of things. You're not always sure how those are turning out. Specifically, it could be high cost and low yield, those activities.
Often those are one way communication, especially traditional, and it can be very wide or not targeted. People are not attentive a lot of times when it comes because the type of ad is not grabbing their attention or they've seen too many ads. Those are some things that you might have seen, or when you get into it, you will see if you're not careful.
Here's some stats that will boggle your mind. Much like this squirrel, his mind is boggled for sure. Ads can increase brand awareness by 80%, and search ad spending is expected to reach $191 billion by 2024. And social ad spending is expected to reach $173 billion this year alone. 86% of people ignore paid banner ads, choosing only to click on organic search results. When you're thinking of banner ads, there's really the graphic ones as opposed to a text ad. That's what we talked about briefly, people not being attentive. It's basically we've come blind to something that we're not really interested in.
Before You Reach More
We always go back and review some of our first content that we did on webinar a few months ago, starting with good communication. If you want to get more in depth, you can definitely check out our YouTube channel. It has reputation oriented webinars. Before anything else, you're going to cover the basics and be reachable.
Before you try to reach others, you want to be able to respond to those that are looking for you. Your information should be accurate across the Internet. You should have an optimized website with chat that helps people contact you. You want to inquire and respond to reviews. Make sure you have a Google business profile that's in the right place, doing the right thing.
Social media should be active, posting regularly, responding timely, those type of things. That's a review of things to start out with. If you're not doing those things up front, don't worry about doing this next thing, which is reaching new heights.
Reaching New Heights
We're going to talk about SEM, social ads and lastly, SEO. Now this is where it comes into a little bit outside of what would be considered outbound marketing. SEO not so much. The reality is we're talking about all these different areas that you're doing extra things outside of your main platforms to get more people to see you and to know about what you have to offer.
SEM - Search Engine Marketing
We're rolling right into our first section of SEM, which you didn't already know means search engine marketing. To get a little bit deeper into this, what is it you say? Well, we're here to answer that.
Any paid advertising strategy that aims to increase the online visibility of a website in the search engine results pages, if you've ever heard of the term SERPs, that's where that comes from -- getting a little nerdy on you. It's also alternatively referred to as paid search or pay per click. We're talking about PPC in search engine results. Don't be confused with SEO, which is not advertising.
Why SEM?
Why would you ever think about doing SEM? One of the first benefits of that is that it does increase brand awareness, therefore also its accessible to anyone. It is great for local marketing when you're talking about finding people that are in your locale, whether they are traveling through or maybe there's somebody that lives in the area. It generates immediate results, whereas SEO in particular is not really immediate.
It can be a consistent traffic source. It's the quickest way to be first. We've seen people that promise different things about being first by doing different activities. The most tried and true and real way to do it is pay to be there. Then you can understand more competitive data within that. You begin to learn what other people are doing and what you can do to compete with them. It is great for mobile marketing. I think we all understand at this point, a lot of times people are picking up their mobile device to find information on brands and services and products.
SEM Stats
We're going to do some stats here to learn a little further about SEM. 68% of online experiences begin with the search engine. You're over two thirds of people are doing that. 46% of the product or service searches begin on Google. We'll continue to see Google is still champion when it comes to search engines. At one point, there were other people coming in trying to take some market share. They really haven't done that well, honestly. When it comes to Google Ads, every dollar you spend on average you're going to get $8 in profit through Google Search and Ads.
The first result on Google has an average click through rate of 28.5%. Over a quarter of the people that search stuff, when they see that first result, they're going to go through like that. That could be an SEM thing where someone's paying to be there, or in some cases there may not be ads running. It could be a map result or just an organic result. There are multiple ways you could be first, but if it's very competitive there's going to be ads.
Popular Search Engines
Here are the popular search engines today. You may have heard of Google. Like we said, that has 85% of desktop traffic, 95% of mobile. If you're on your phone searching, there's a really good chance you're using Google Bing: we're looking at 8.7% of the desktop and 59% Yahoo: 2.5% desktop, 78% mobile. DuckDuckGo is the other player out there that got some traffic. 1% of desktop users and .56% of mobile. As you can see, energy should be focused on what matters to Google when it comes to search results.
Common SEM Mistakes
Some common mistakes. Thumbs down on this activity. Structure your account incorrectly. When you're setting up advertising, those kinds of things within Google or these other platforms that'd be very similar.
Incorrect structuring is a problem. Using a broad match instead of exact match. Going too wide with what you're trying to target. Creating boring ads. No one wants to be bored, including the person creating the ad.
Never adjusting bids based on performance. Just setting and forgetting. Don't do that. Using confusing landing page. I like to rhyme here. It's not just about the ad. Maybe you have a stellar ad and then it just goes to a random page. It doesn't really do much. It doesn't connect a person that's searching well to what they searched. That can be problematic as well. Very common. Overlooking default campaign settings. That was your don't do it list.
SEM Best Practices
Let's do these things. When you add your main keyword early on in your content. If there is something like RV Park and Rocky Mountain National Park, you have something like that that you're trying to be found for. You want to have content on your page that relates to that keyword search.
You're going to write unique titles, descriptions and content. This is stuff on your page that's linking to the ad that you've done. Make sure that it's all those things are not just copy and pasted from wherever. I'm going to optimize title tag for SEO. That has to do with how you are setting up your on-page as well and then optimize your site's loading speed. This is big. Making sure that your page, especially that people are landing on, is not clunky and people will leave otherwise.
You want to track your results with the Google Search Console. That is a tool that Google provides. Good thing about Google has a lot of these things that are free because they make all their money off the actual ad. This console allows you to track what's going on with your ads.
SEM - Take Action
We've been talking a good bit about Google. Here's where someone that's a beginner who wants to put some ads out there. You can get very detailed and go very deep with a lot of different things to get into when it comes to Google Ads. They do have what's called the smart campaigns and it is designed for small businesses to reach more people.
It used to be called Ad Express and so now it's a smart campaign. I'll just lay out a few steps here that when you go there to ads.Google.com, which once again is free to sign up. You will describe your business first, determine your main goal. You're going to select keyword themes to describe your business. You're going to set your location and then write ads, set the budget and launch.
It's very simplified. Like I said, when you get in there, you have the option to choose whether or not you're going to do this smart campaign and they really push that when you first set up because they assume that if you're just getting started you may need a little help. That would be the action item that you can take for this is go ahead and look into a smart campaign and those are the few steps that you would take right there to get that rolling. Like I said, it is supposed to be as idiot proof as possible. All right, but you guys are all intelligent, so no problem.
Social Ads
Next section we're going to talk about is social ads and if you don't know what they are, we're going to tell you right now. It's a type of digital marketing that utilizes social networks, deliver paid ads to your target audience. It's quick and effective to connect your consumers and boost your marketing, right?
Some popular platforms you would probably heard of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok is one that has gotten a lot more mojo going in recent couple of years. Depending on who you're trying to reach your target audience, you're looking at these different platforms to see if that's something that would work to run ads on.
Social Ads Stats
We got some more statistics when it comes to social ads. 71% of adults with internet access use social media. We are all on it not all, there's 29% of it that are saying no to it, but it's a good bit of us. 69% of marketers use social media to build brand awareness. When it comes to professional marketers, that's a big part of what is being done out there. Talking about Facebook ads, they reach 63.7% of all Americans over age 13. That's still a pretty big chunk. I'm sure that number is probably in flux. Facebook, while Meta is still in control of Facebook and Instagram and all those kind of things, I know there has been pushback last year or two, but it's still not worth totally abandoning when it comes to using it for business. Still a lot of people out there. Go where the people are. 59% of us adults use Instagram daily.
Why Social Ads?
Why are we going to advertise on social media? Why would we do such a thing? We're going to connect with the guests who are looking for what you have to offer. People are out there looking around. You're going to introduce yourself this way. It offers various platforms and numerous ad formats. That's the benefit of social media ads. Whether you're on a different platform or the different types of ads. You can do videos, pictures and text, all that kind of stuff, multimedia, as it were.
It allows for targeting specific audiences. So this is a little bit different than the search engine ads. When it comes to search engine, obviously someone's typing in a specific price that's more direct. It's a lot of times more of a buying intent for those people. You always have to be careful. Maybe someone's searching a term because they're researching a paper that they were doing in school, which could be very similar. Someone might click on you that has no intent of that. This on the social media. You are going after somebody because they're like, "hey, I have an RV and I like traveling, etc."
There is a very good return on investment. That's what ROI means, and that's what we have in our name. Rest & Relax ROI. We're looking for a return on investment. The average CPC is $2.32 for CPC. The Facebook is as little as $0.12. CPC is cost per click. it's going to be higher on search engines, like we said, because there's more of a buyer intent. The reason it's cheaper on Facebook, we're targeting people that are not necessarily looking for us at that time, but because we know what they like, who they are to a certain extent, we can serve them relevant ads and then you can gain insight into guests. As you're running these campaigns, you're going to find out, okay, this particular thing worked or it didn't. You're just learning about what it is that makes sense for your particular business.
Common Social Ads Mistakes
We have some common mistakes that we want to avoid. When it comes to social ads, there's the issue of not having a small social media marketing plan. So no plan. If you don't have any goal, you'll be sure to hit that target, or whatever. That was my words. Not defining your target audience kind of along those lines. You're throwing too wide of a net.
You fail to engage in conversations. The difference as well from a search ad campaign is someone can see your ad and come in on it, whether it's Instagram, Facebook and other places. And if you're just letting it ride out there and nothing not ever responding, that's not a great idea.
You could rely too much on automation to set up the ad and other parts of it. So once again, to set it and forget it type of mentality. You don't want to go there.
Promoting yourself too much. You might be like, Mark, that's the whole point. We're promoting our business. There's a way to do that, right? You can obviously talk about yourself: Book Now. Book Now! Book Now! Versus you might have one ad like that and another ad like, here fun things to do when you're at Rocky Mountain National Park. Something like that. Just mixing that up so you're not wearing people out by overselling.
Not tracking analytics. You can only grow what you know. I just made that up. But that's a different take on if you're tracking things and you know what to change and tweak or stop doing those kinds of things, right?
Social Ads Best Practices
We mentioned it before, not doing this is bad, but determine your target audience. You know, in general, probably. It's always good to just double check yourself on that. A lot of times, I think business owners can be like, oh, everybody uses us and all that. But there is a specific audience that you would get more of depending on what you're offering. Make sure that's true when it comes to ads.
Choose the right platform. Maybe Facebook's not right for you. Maybe you have a hip, cool place and TikTok is the realm for you. Be aware of that. You want to set some goals for those. What is it we're trying to accomplish with this particular campaign? Are we just raising brand awareness for this? Just let people know who we are. Are we offering a specific discount or a special it's off season. Maybe you need to just get more people in. Then you have a special event, things of that nature.
Set your brand tone and voice. That's kind of going back to ground zero of who are you? What is your park all about? Who are you as a business? Be consistent with that.
Create that relevant landing page. We mentioned earlier, even with search ads, having inconsistent information from the ad to the page is a problem that a lot of times people run into. Saying one thing in the ad and they get to the page, or you just send them to the home page. It doesn't say anything particular about what they clicked on. That's important. Make sure those things are consistent.
Use the right call to action. The old CTA, first of all, make sure you have one. When that's in place, what is the primary thing you want potential guests to do? Call that out.
You're going to test the ad. You might have a great idea, you think, and it's like, this would be awesome, and you just let it run for 90 days and you don't ever really check back on it. We talked about that earlier. Set it and forget it mentality. Run it for a little bit, see how it's going. Maybe you need to change out a photo or change out a video, things of that nature.
Action Item - Social Ads
We got an action item here. When it comes to social ads, boost your old Facebook or IG post. Now, if you're on Facebook, which I'm assuming most of you have been at some point or another, and you have a business page, you'll see this all the time. So what does it mean? First of all, what is the goal?
We just talked about that for your boosted post. Answer that question when you get started. Here's some tips on what that should look like. If you're doing videos, make sure that you have a vertical phone because that's what people are doing. It was a few years ago, everybody complained about people only doing vertical, but technology realized that's how people just naturally are doing things. Everything is formatted that for phones. Take that into consideration.
When it comes to images, especially on Facebook, IG Instagram you're going to limit the text. So if you create a graphic with the photo, it's been proven that less than 20% perform better. This picture here says, take action. Obviously that's less than 20% of that particular image. You can use that to grab someone's attention. If you put too much text or information on a graphic on an image, it actually is a detriment.
Shorten the copy. People are scanning quickly, so don't necessarily just go on and on and inside the copy of your text. You can use multiple images. You might see the term carousel where you can put in all different things that are relevant to that particular ad.
Use movement in the ad. So once again, whether it's images or video, boomerang, video, time lapse, these are all elements that can help catch someone's eye. Because in the social world, people are scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. You have to interrupt that. That starts because you targeted them well and they're going to find what you have to offer interesting. The creative has to be such that people just don't keep moving on past what you posted.
These are some tips when it comes to boosting a Facebook post. Just because Facebook or Instagram is like, hey, boost this. It may not actually be the best possible post to do it. They're just putting that automatically on everything. Be aware if it's just something like an informational thing that you put out there, it might not be a great thing to actually boost out to other potential guests. These are all great things to be aware of when you take action and boost your post.
We talked about CTA, forgot that this is the last point. You want to make sure you do that as well. That call to action on the post. We are talking about short copy. We got to take into consideration on the ad whether it's in the copy you also have it the way they're formatted, especially in Facebook, there's usually headlines and descriptions and things like that. You could put Call to actions in there, make those relevant.
SEO - Search Engine Optimization
That's the old SEO that we talked about earlier in the webinar. That when it comes to reach and outbound, this is a little more outside of it. Some people might consider this inbound if you want to get technical about it. What we're really focusing on here is primarily how your site can be found by people that don't already know you. That's why we included it today.
We're going to talk a little bit about what it is. It's a process of improving your website to rank higher on a search engine and so that you receive more traffic, which leads to more customers and more revenue. Simply, it's a strategy to ensure that when someone Googles your park or what you have to offer, they find your website.
This is not advertising, but it can involve paid solutions. Whether you hire somebody to take care of some of the things that we'll talk about, or you may not pay outright because you might have someone on staff that could potentially take care of some of these things. But it's not technically ads, right?
SEO Stats
Here are some more stats. We love them. 95% of search traffic goes to the first page of search results. The whole idea most people don't click past the first page of Google. That's the reality. Over 70% of people research businesses on the web before deciding to buy or visit. Think about that for new people that can be finding your park or just they're looking for a place to stay, somewhere near you.
The reality is there's a couple of different ways people will either search your name. Which could be the fact that somebody told them about you or some word of mouth. Whatever the case may be. Or they're just going to search a general term like, once again, Rocky Mountain National Park RV resorts near me. Something like that. That's what's happening when they're searching things, right?
The number one result in Google gets about 32% of all clicks. There was a similar stat we shared earlier. It was a click through rate, 28%. Still right around it's, in between that quarter and a third of traffic is clicking or going through to that very first result. If you can own that spot, it's huge.
75% of people never scroll past the first page of searching. We just refer to that. You're on page two. You might as well just delete your website. Don't do that.
Common SEO Mistakes
Common mistakes that we want to avoid. Forgetting that faster is better. It's a big deal nowadays as far as how fast your website loads. It's not just for the fact that the user itself likes a good experience. Like they don't have to wait forever for your website to load. But Google is taking that into consideration when it comes to how they serve different sites. If they have a site that loads really fast and then yours loads really slow, they're going to potentially serve that fast one before you.
Neglecting to write awesome content. If it's not awesome, it's not going to be helpful. You need to make sure that what's on your site is useful is people will not only find it useful, but I always say inform, educate, entertain. If you can do all those, it's great.
Failing to invite people to visit your site. In general, that's going to help people coming to your site actually helps your site to go up higher. If you're not letting people know about it on a regular basis, that's also a problem.
Failing to keep people on your site. That's called bounce rate when someone comes to site and leaves almost immediately because they didn't find what they're looking for.
Trying to rank for the wrong keywords. You don't want to be out there with something that's adjacent to what you do, but it's not really what you do. Then that would be a reason people would leave your site. Like, for instance, you're not ranking for RV Park near Rocky Mountain National Park. You're actually ranking for that itself. And they're like, you're not Rocky Mountain National Park.
Lastly, not considering mobile, it's always going to be a big piece of anything online, making sure that whatever you're doing is working well when it comes to mobile.
SEO Best Practices
Some best practices for this. We're going to use effective titles and headings. Once again, we're talking about on your page. It's got to be relevant. The information you're putting on your site needs to connect with what people are searching, very similar to what we talk about with some of the other sections today.
We're optimizing our images. That's the size of the image itself as well as identifying it. You can put an alt tag on an image that helps Google or search engines identify what it is and you can use key phrases and words on that. You're going to optimize your page speed. We talked about how that's a problem for folks. Don't neglect it.
Provide a user friendly design for both desktop and mobile and make use of navigation and sitemaps. Also write strong meta. Descriptions. Meta descriptions are just a description of what's on the page that the search engine reads.
You're going to develop content based on target keyword search. Once again, you can do a blog post about Rocky Mountain National Park and the things that are fun to do around the area. There's multiple things you could do with that, right? You're going to include keywords within that post that help your users, your guests, and the search engine to find you.
2022 SEO Tactics
We're going to look at the 2022 SEO tactics. If you're watching this, in 2021 you're a time traveler or in 2023, they're probably still going to be valid. These things do shift from time to time, but overall they're going to be pretty similar. This is a big part of good SEO in today's world. Google is really looking at these types of things. Core web vitals: there's three main areas. Sounds like a fancy term.
It deals with how long it takes for your page to load, how long your page responds when someone clicks or does something on the site, how long does it process that. Then the visual stability of the site. Are things shifting around? These are all kind of techy stuff. You can measure these things, but these are bigger factors than what they in the past. Ranking for search terms and all that was basically stuffing a bunch of keywords. Well, they got rid all that a long time ago. It's more and more like fine tuning your website and things of that nature.
Get featured and the people also ask. You may have seen that in the search results. You'll see a search and at the bottom of the page you'll see how this little title "people also ask." Then in that there'll be adjacent questions and you can get in there by answering questions. You can look into that.
Schema markup are rich snippets. That's another little techy thing that you can do on your site to show up in search results. You've probably seen something like this for maybe for restaurants being able to book a table or things like that, or different things like ratings and things like that. They're specific to whatever someone's searching. A rich snippet for an RV park might be the ability to create a little blurb search result that is related to booking or reserving. There's different ones that are available out there. Check those out.
Long form content, we talked about earlier, making things that are not boring. Definitely the data shows not just to be long for long sake, but providing really valuable information is proven to work better.
Back to the basics. These are things that have been around a long time. Make sure they're being done. You once again quality content just in general, whether it's just your page or blog or anything, make sure it's good. Your on page optimization we talked about a little bit before: titles and descriptions, all those things alt tags, backlinks. That's still a thing that matters. And we're going to talk about that just a bit more.
Building Backlinks
What's that look like? It used to be kind of sketchy. There's different ways you can do it sketchy, but we don't recommend that. We recommend guest posting. It's the practice of contributing a post to another person's blog in order to build relationships, exposure, authority and backlinks. This is a legit way of doing it. It might take some time, but it will help you in the long run be found more easily.
What you're going to do is write a relevant article according to the requirements of a blogger. Get a backlink, usually at the bottom of the article, which is called the author box. So sometimes you can also get a link in the meat of the article that you wrote. Either way, it's still a backlink through a guest post.
We're going to do an action item here. Guest post on an industry site. Here's the things that you can do to get this done. You're going to find top blogs about RV parks, resorts, campgrounds that will accept guest pots or posts. After you found that, you will get the post ready. Not writing it yet, but all the elements of that that you're going to be able to pitch it to them.
It's like, "hey, we want to write about this subject matter that I think would be helpful to your readers." And then once they're like, "oh yeah, that'd be cool, we'd love to have that." Then you're going to write the post and once it's there and it's been posted, then you can follow up and respond, promote and say thank you. Respond would be if someone's commenting on this posts, you're going to make sure that you comment and then get it out to your network as well. Of course, when it comes to the blog that's on, you want to say thank you. That's polite. Those are how you can build some backlinks when it comes to getting better search engine results.
Wrapping Up
If you happen to miss the first part, this is being recorded and we'll make sure it gets out to everybody that registered. Usually things happen where people either can't make it live, but we're glad for anybody that's able to jump on or see this later and we talked about SEM social ads and SEO today. If you've had questions, obviously you can always drop them in a chat, in the comments. If you're watching the replay, be glad to help you in any way.
There all the things that we talked about, we'd be glad to go more in depth if you have more questions. We're always looking to have good conversations with people. We like to meet new folks, learn about what they're doing, see if there's anything that we can provide value for. In that realm, please connect with us.
We're out there on social. These are some of the main ones: Instagram, Facebook LinkedIn. We have all those pages out there. We are on YouTube, which you might be watching this right now on YouTube. We didn't put the icon, but we're out there.
We are going to have another webinar. It's going to be this is the end of September. The end of October, which I'm not sure what day that is, we usually do the last Thursday of the month, somewhere around there. We're going to talk about optimizing Google business and getting found online. Better organic search results.
We talk a little bit more about the advertising element of it. And we've touched on this before, but we're going to do more of a deep dive on our next webinar. We walk through how to do these things more in depth so you can get the most out of your what used to be called GMB. Nowadays it's called the Google Business Profile.
We can keep talking if you want. Like I said earlier, if we want to chat about anything we talked about today or some other stuff, we'd glad to. You can check out https://book.restrelaxroi.com and we would be super happy to say hello. Thank you all for joining today. I really appreciate you spending some time with us.
Once again, love to answer any questions that you might have. For those that are maybe watching this later, we had Hurricane Ian come through Florida and it's heading actually up the coast towards where we are in Virginia. Hopefully it's not too bad. We're hoping for the best for everybody in Florida. Quick recovery and all that. So be safe, everyone, and until next time, happy trails.
