Marketing Without Data is Like Boating Without A Motor

Spoiler alert…you won’t get very far. Getting the most out of your marketing efforts means investing in data.

Come up with a tagline, use a beautiful picture of a vacation home and insert your contact information – easy as one, two, three, right?

In today’s marketing landscape – not so much. This approach to creating an owner postcard, homeowner landing page, or any other owner-directed marketing asset is known as “spray and pray” marketing. And, this no longer cuts it in the vacation rental industry.

Why?

Because your competitors are now doing data-driven marketing and are seeing better results.

How do we know?

We do data-driven marketing at Vintory for over 100 partners in the VR space, and this is also how venture-backed VR companies do it too.

 

Why Data-Driven Marketing Works

In a nutshell, data-driven marketing uses customer data to predict their needs and optimize marketing efforts for the highest possible return on investment.

Data-driven marketing will help you reap a number of benefits that traditional marketing doesn’t, including:

• Access to more leads you currently aren’t reaching
• Targeting higher quality leads that have a higher chance of converting
• Personalized marketing outreach, leading to higher conversions
• More successful, unbiased campaigns that remove the guesswork

 

How To Start Doing Data-Driven Marketing

There are a few ways you can begin to incorporate data into your marketing campaigns:

• Pull data records yourself (not for the faint of heart)
• Hire a data analyst
• Partner with a VR marketing specialist like Vintory

 

What Does a Marketing Data Analyst Do?

As the Senior Data Analyst at Vintory, I will outline what our data team does for VR Managers to boost their marketing efforts and accelerate their inventory growth.

There are two main steps we take to do this:

1. We provide customized data targets
   Here we dive deep into the specialized data VR Managers are looking for. Maybe it’s 3+ bedroom properties, has a pool, or an estimated property value of $800K+. Whatever the case, our goal is to find a healthy record count that corresponds to our VR’s criteria, resulting in highly qualified leads.
2. We provide customized data purchases
   Here we compile a data set from a variety of sources, run this data through a series of data transformations, and load this data onto our CRM platform. We follow the data integration process called ETL, which stands for Extract, Transform, and Load. ETL provides the foundation for data analytics by standardizing raw data in a methodical manner. This process results in giving the clearest, consistent, and usable data possible.

 

Extract: We get our raw data from generally two sources: Public County Records and OTA (Online Travel Agency) data.

Transform: Next, we take that raw data and customize it for our specific needs. To do that, we need to clean and unify our data (known as data wrangling) as well as run the data through our standard data transformations.

 

Our standard transformations include:

1. Skip Tracing OTA data and custom data with any & all owner information.
2. Unifying our data from multiple sources into one.
3. Removing duplicate owners.
4. Removing current owners.
5. Removing “do not contact” owners.
6. Appending emails & phone #’s.
7. Making custom A-B-C targets.
8. Providing data visualization through tools such as BatchGeo.

 

Load: Once we complete these transformations, we review the file with our partner and then load it into Vintory – our CRM and marketing automation platform.

And once we’re done, that’s not an end-all, be-all data set locked in time. We get feedback from our mail campaigns for address changes and update our records accordingly on our CRM. We also periodically offer new data purchases as well since data decays over time.

 

So what separates Vintory and our data process from others that aren’t, well… so great?

• We listen to our partners and come back with fresh data that align with their custom interests
• The quality of our scripts to provide high-quality data is superb and unparalleled
• We are detail-oriented, accurate, and ethical in how we source data
• We work closely with our partners to explain how to best use their data list and create personalized marketing campaigns to these homeowner leads

 

Final Thoughts

This article only scratches the surface of how to acquire, analyze and use homeowner data for data-driven marketing campaigns. The real takeaway is to understand why data-driven marketing will provide you a higher return on your marketing efforts and is necessary in today’s competition.

Engaging in a single purchase of data can provide invaluable insights into your target market and enhance your marketing efforts, such that it’s worth the effort to give it a try.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Vintory acquires and uses data, feel free to learn more about Vintory’s services here. You can also send me an email at: scott@vintory.com.