How Kingdom Rental Management went from zero to 100x return per lead generated
Read on to hear how a client is getting a 100x return per lead generated after almost losing their job. This has been a fun journey and it’s only been about two months.
The problem
A friend of mine thought he might be losing his job, and had already been managing a few Airbnb’s in the Vermont ski-area. He thought this would be his best bet in starting a company, and wasn’t sure where to start with the whole marketing part.
After some brainstorming, we decided to build him a website. We did some keyword searching and SEO research; there really wasn’t a whole lot of competition in the specific town(s) he was working in. We came to the conclusion that local SEO has still not been taken full advantage of in many industries, including short-term property management.
A simple site, built well, with Headings in the right places, a sitemap that was easily legible by Google’s crawlers, and beautiful imagery with alt tags built in might get us indexed fairly quickly, and with an Ads boost, we might start to get real traction.
Getting traffic
Fast forward one month… you read that right. One. Month. Later. And about $80 in Google Ad spend, and the website had gone live with substantial traffic for it’s young age of one month. By substantial traffic, I mean with an average of 5-10 unique site visits per day with an average of 22 seconds spent on the website, he has accrued a total of TWO, real leads. This may not sound like a lot for you SaaS entrepreneurs, but read on for the best part…
Let’s talk lead value
The lead value for a luxury-focused short-term rental agency is probably around $7,000 on the low end and up to as much as $9,000. The math we used here was an estimate based on:
Lead Value = (Total Revenue Generated / Number of Individual Leads)
If we convert about 30% of our leads (we’re at 50% right now), and the annual revenue generated from a target lead is between $20,000-30,000, we get a lead value of right around $7,000-9,000.
ROI
I don’t even want to do this math, but that’s about a 100x return on our Google Ads investment. I almost don’t want to publish this it’s so good.
At the moment, it’s such a short span of time, that it might just be lucky – we will soon find out.
To follow along with this journey and to learn more about avianu.’s services, visit avianu.com.
How we work together
The client and I had a great relationship prior to the work getting started, so I had a sense of the style and layout of what it was that they wanted.
Assumption-based design
In my experience, going back and forth on design decisions typically results in non-congruent designs throughout the website/app. A designer normally has a design system in place, builds components, and can make tweaks as needed from there. When a client gets involved, they might like how a heading or a button looks in one place, and think it needs additional spacing in another. Sometimes they’re right, usually they’re not, and then your global styling gets ruined and it was all because of a change that they actually decided they didn’t like a few days later.
Don’t let how your client is feeling on a certain day ruin your design system.
There are absolutely some pieces that I bounced off of my client. I also give updates every 2-3 days throughout the build. For example, when I built the cards for the website, I wanted them to be something he is proud of. They are showing off the properties that he manages to be fair.
Options, not open-ended questions
I’ve found that giving my clients two-three options is a MUCH better approach than asking, “How do you want your cards to look”
Client: “You mean my business cards?”
Me: “No, I mean…”
— You get the idea.
In short, this approach has proven effective for me.
Unless you’re one of those old school designers that doesn’t use auto layout or components for whatever reason this might be it’s absolutely beyond me. I think these people are kind of like the people that still ride single fin shortboards when shortboards of this century clearly perform so much better (maybe an obscure surfing reference, but if you get it, you get it).
Conclusion
Anyway, thanks for reading. I hope you liked it; if you did, let me know. If you didn’t leave a rude comment about all of the productive things you were going to do instead.
Peace!
//Nick