The B2B Podcast Index
The Vacation Rental Show, Hosted by Lynell Gordon

Why Traditional PR Is Now Your AI Secret Weapon with Rebecca Lombardo of Rebecca Lombardo Agency

The Vacation Rental Show, Hosted by Lynell Gordon · 2026-06-09 · 36 min

Substance score

46 / 100

Five dimensions, 20 points each

Insight Density9 / 20
Originality10 / 20
Guest Caliber11 / 20
Specificity & Evidence9 / 20
Conversational Craft7 / 20

What our scoring noted

Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.

Insight Density

9 / 20

The episode has a handful of genuinely useful tactical ideas—owning your AI project rather than letting agencies own it, using Gemini for analytics and Claude for storytelling, and the AI-sourcing-of-editorial-PR insight—but the conversation is heavily padded with tangents about Chrome extensions, homeowner webinar logistics, and personal anecdotes that crowd out actionable content.

We lowered our cost of acquisition by $100 per lead simply by refining all of the messaging before we pushed it out through Google Ads.
it turns out that AI loves to source articles, like editorial articles, for its answers. That's the first place it actually looks when it tries to answer your question.

Originality

10 / 20

The core claim—that traditional PR is now an AI discoverability strategy because LLMs source editorial content first—is a genuinely counterintuitive and timely reframe; the rest of the episode leans on familiar brand-101 advice (listen to your customers, be consistent in messaging) that circulates widely in marketing content.

we've come full circle on PR and traditional media now because of AI
the last place AI looks for answers is your website

Guest Caliber

11 / 20

Rebecca Lombardo has real practitioner credentials—enterprise brand work at Jockey International and references to Kraft Heinz, Revlon, eBay—and her fractional CMO positioning in VR is relevant, but she is primarily an agency consultant rather than an operator who has built and scaled a vacation rental business herself.

when I was working with Jockey International, they had been pushing out all of this content and they didn't understand why their social analytics and presence was so bad
I use Gemini to write my instructions for Claude and here's why. Because Gemini did a great job of going out into the forums that all of the marketing experts are discussing clawd in

Specificity & Evidence

9 / 20

There are a few concrete data points—$100 cost-per-lead reduction, the Rand Fishkin study figures, the $125/month Claude pricing—but most recommendations remain at the level of 'feed it your reviews' and 'create a brand book' without named tools, timelines, or measurable benchmarks from the VR context.

We lowered our cost of acquisition by $100 per lead simply by refining all of the messaging before we pushed it out through Google Ads.
Rand Fishkin did a study of like 300,000 mentions in AI about power tools or something like that, and there were like 30,000 different answers mentioning 40,000 different products.

Conversational Craft

7 / 20

The host asks some decent directional questions and occasionally pulls out a useful follow-up ('Tell me the difference between the two'), but she frequently hijacks the conversation with personal tangents, speculative commentary on Chrome browser code, and extended monologues—while never meaningfully challenging or pressure-testing any of the guest's claims.

I have a really out of the universe question. It's probably insane and very scary
There is some code that's hidden in there and you should look that up and find out what it does when it turns on some of the extensions.

Conversation analysis

Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the verbal tics along the way.

Share of words spoken

  • Speaker A55%
  • Speaker C42%
  • Speaker B3%

Filler words

so123like79right21kind of13actually11you know6basically3anyway2honestly1

Episode notes

Rebecca Lombardo started her career as a backpack journalist, reporting from Namibia, Japan, and Ukraine before going on to shape brand narratives and marketing strategy for Fortune 500 companies including Kraft, Heinz, Revlon, and eBay. Today, through her Rebecca Lombardo Agency, she works as a fractional CMO for vacation rental companies, SaaS brands, and hospitality businesses that need senior-level marketing leadership without the overhead of a full in-house team. She's also an award-winning speaker, writer, moderator, and host of the podcast Vendor Vibes. In this episode, Rebecca introduces the concept of owning your brand engine: a trained AI project that acts as an operating system for your marketing, constantly improving as you feed it more of your brand's voice, reviews, and strategy. She explains why letting an agency own your AI environment means losing your most valuable marketing asset, and how a properly built brand brain can cut your Google Ads cost per lead, tighten your messaging, and make every agency transition seamless.

Full transcript

36 min

Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.

So brand, just to clarify, is not your logo. A lot of people are like, oh, I have a, I have a great logo. That's not brand. Brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. So if you start there and you look at what property managers tend to focus on, they focus on three USPs or three features that they want to communicate out to the homeowners that they think they should know. When really what you should do is see what your homeowners are saying about you. That's your brand. See, see what they love about you. And then that is the lever you should pull when reaching out to new homeowners. Welcome to the Vacation Rental Show. This is your essential playbook to grow and scale your vacation rental business with advice and insights from the best in the biz. I'm your host, Lynnell Gordon. Welcome to the Vacation Rental Show. I'm Linnell Gordon, your host and today we have with us Rebecca Lombardo who is a fractional cmo. She's a marketing strategist and she helps vacation rental managers, real estate professionals. She does SaaS and hospitality brands. She helps them to bring clarity to their message and connect marketing directly to their growth. Rebecca's background is really unusual. It's unusually rich. She started out as a journalist, including her early on she was like a backpack journalist guy. She did work from Namibia, Japan, Ukraine and later she wrote for outlets like the Huffington Post. And she went on to help shape brand narratives and marketing strategy for major companies, including companies guys like Kraft Heinz, Revlon, ebay, using social listening, analytics, content and strategy and effectively creating storytelling to help the brands themselves understand their market and to communicate more effectively with their customers. So today through her Rebecca Lombardo agency, she works like as a fractional CMO for companies that need senior level marketing leadership without building a full in house staff, guys. So in the vacation rental space that kind of clarity really matters to us because look, we know our brand is not just about looking like we're polished. That a strong brand can help property managers win more homeowners, build their trust and their guest, reduce their dependence on paid channels and OTAs and basically build a more durable growth engine. Now she's also an award winning speaker, writer, moderator and a host of something called Vendor Vibes. She has a book called Find a Cover and and I want to welcome Rebecca to the Vacation Rental Show. Thank you for being here. I'm so excited. Wow, Lynelle, that was quite the intro. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. So you did something really unusual that we haven't talked about. Guys, we are going to talk about AI in a way that you have not talked about AI on this show before and perhaps you haven't even heard about it before. So we're talking about AI prompts and how to use an AI prompt. So, Rebecca, first of all, tell us what the AI prompt is and then would you tell us about creating a brand engine of our own? Yes, thank you for asking. Because I saw a lot of people commenting about how they were starting to use AI for marketing and branding and they were just going into all the different AI platforms and using prompts and I got concerned about the quality of the prompts that they were using. So in order to safeguard the ownership of the brand engine at both the companies that I'm working for, I created what I'm calling kind of like a brand brain. So this brand engine is meant for like content and campaign generation that is more like an operating system. So it's constantly improving itself. And the reason that I wanted to work on an AI model that every VRM owns is because if you don't right now what's happening is some of the agencies are creating their own AI account or project for your brand because it's improving things, it's making things faster. But I'm encouraging vacation rental managers to please own your brand engine. Please create a cloud project or cloud account that your brand owns and then train that account like its own little brand engine or brain. Give it your brand playbook, train it on your material that you like and don't like, and then invite your agencies into that space. Space. That way you own the learnings. When you say invite your agencies into that space, you're talking about inviting your marketing agencies or what agencies do we mean? Yes. So like you said, a lot of the vacational managers don't hire like full staffs, right? They work with agencies, freelancers outsource, or maybe they have one in house marketing person and then they will work with other Google Ads, agencies and things like that. So if you own that AI source of truth for your brand and you train it on your brand and your marketing and your language, and then in certain platforms you can create projects and you can invite other users into your project. So what I'm encouraging everybody to do is to own that space and then invite the agency into the space rather than having the agency create its own folder on ChatGPT when it works on your account. Does that make sense? Yes. Tell me why. Tell me the difference between the Two. Okay, so here's an example of why this is a big one. Google Ads. When you create Google Ads, you have to use keywords and headlines and messaging. And when you typically start with a Google Ads agency, they cast a really wide net for, like, terms, who they're trying to target. And this goes for both the guest and the homeowner. Right? And the AI in the Google platform will learn, oh, this person clicked, this person converted. And so what you have in Google Ads data now is what is resonating with the audience, what's converting, and what's working. And that data is collected in there, and it learns very quickly. The problem is it starts out by casting a really wide net and trying a lot of different keywords and phrases, and that costs you a lot of money. If you would have put those Google Ads into your brand engine first and said, how well will these headlines perform compared to the brand book, compared to the Personas that the brand's been trained on, it will come back to you and say, do not use the first three headlines. Do not use that messaging. Refine that messaging so it aligns with what the guest reviews say or the owners say. And now you've gone from casting a wide net that's expensive to spear phishing, which is a lot more cost efficient in some cases. We lowered our cost of acquisition by $100 per lead simply by refining all of the messaging before we pushed it out through Google Ads. And now if you move on from that Google Ads agency and you hire a different ad agency, you're not starting from scratch again. They go right in and say, what's working, what's not? What's your favorite platform, AI platform? I'm using Claude for this purpose. I think it's the best fit right now. Do you use the other pieces of Claude that goes along with it? Are you using the code part? And what parts of CLAUDE are you using? That's why I'm asking. I'm using projects and I am using Cowork. I also use Gemini, however, because Claude is not that great with numbers. So Gemini, being a Google product, can take all of my exports from GA4 data, Google Ads data. Right. And it can learn and assess very quickly from those reports. And so I have Gemini crunch all the numbers for me and provide an assessment. And then I copy and paste Gemini's assessment into Claude and turn it into stories. I do something similar using ChatGPT with a lot of spreadsheet data that I use, but I push into Claude as well. Okay, so let's Talk about how to start. So do you need a paid account? A Claude paid account? So I would actually recommend not starting with a paid account because you need to feel comfortable with this user interface. And I have heard from people that they don't like Claude. They actually prefer ChatGPT. So again, like, you're not going to use it if you don't love it. So I would start out with a free account on all of these and just kind of interact with all of them and see which one you feel most comfortable with. But understand the language learning model on CLAUDE is specifically designed for things like this. So that's why I think it's a better fit. Perplexity is another option, but the LLM on that model is not as sophisticated as Claude. I think that spending $125 a month for saving hundreds of dollars is worth it. I don't know if anybody's going to agree with me, but that's where you're going to find yourself if you do decide to go down this path. Okay, I want to say something, just to preface it. When you create your CLAUDE account, forget to go into your settings and the things that you put into your account. You don't want that to be a part of the learning model. So turn that off. In my opinion, even if it's free, I would turn that off because you don't want that to be a part of everybody else's business. So if you have any questions about how to do the privacy in cloud, you can ask it, or you can ask ChatGPT, you can ask them all, how do I turn on privacy so nobody else can see my chats? And then click create a shared account that way. That's number one. Number two, I'm just going to tell everybody out there that my understanding about AI and what we have going with Chrome and a lot of the browsers other than Firefox and I can't remember the opera, I can't remember the second one. There is some code that's hidden in there and you should look that up and find out what it does when it turns on some of the extensions. So when you use AI, you should do a little bit of background about it. I. I don't think right now anybody's going to die from it. I don't think it's going to kill your company. You put the privacy pieces on. That's a good place to start. But there's a lot coming out about pieces that are built into claude. Are you aware of what I'm talking about? Would you like to expound on it. Yeah. So it is tracking and memory. Right. So it's remembering things, it's tracking things. So if you are not doing the privacy option where you pay for the account and then tell it not to use your data, it is taking everything that you put into it and learning what you like, didn't like, responded to and using that to feed up to the bigger motherboard, shall we call it, so that any other competitors could ask it the same question that you asked it, and it will spit out the same answer it spit out to you. So you kind of just helped your competitor. So that's why you want to make sure that anything you're feeding into it is marked as private. The other thing to watch are your Chrome extensions. One time out, something different. There's code built into Claude. It's probably built into all the AI models that actually integrates with some of the extensions. It sits there dormant unless that extension is used. And when that extension is used, it connects. It's kind of like when you give Claude or you give chat access to your Gmail or your other email accounts and allow it to compose your emails for you and reply for you automatically or do things like that based on the browser window. So that's a browser window kind of thing. All right, let's go away from all that. Bottom part, I will say this. There is a very good group that Steve Schwab just created on LinkedIn with AI that is very interesting. You might want to join. Rebecca, you might want to join, too. It's Revika. Are you a part of it? I asked to be part of it. Yeah. So he's got it up and running and you can have a login. He's got that set now. So I haven't done my login yet. I've got a ton of things in the next two weeks, but after that, I intend to come play with that group and see what they've got going on there. Let's talk creating a project. So what would you suggest that they do to create the project? What should they feed into there? So, coming from my journalism background, I want to say that I always start with what does the audience care about? Who are my readers? So I like to look at all of the guest reviews and I like to look at all of the property owner reviews, homeowner reviews, and assimilate all of that intel into one data source. So that I've got Airbnb, vrbo, Google reviews. Everything is compiled in one place. Give it the good and the bad. Don't just give it your good reviews, give it the bad ones too, so that it can have all of the information right? So once you take a look at what your audience loves about you, you're going to have more insight into what messaging you should push out. So put that all together in your files, in your project files, I think are limited to maybe 50, but you're going to definitely need your brand book in there. Your brand book has things like your vision and mission, your colors and fonts, who is your Persona, ideal client profiles, things like that. So that all goes in the brand book. Brand book goes in there. And then you're also going to want to have your instructions put together. Now, I actually use Gemini to write my instructions for Claude and here's why. Because Gemini did a great job of going out into the forums that all of the marketing experts are discussing clawd in and it pulled all of the best insights from what other CMOs have learned about cloud instructions. So it saved me a ton of trial and error by putting together what other CMOs had already discovered the best set of instructions. So why is brand, and we're talking about brand. Why do you think that brand is one of the most overlooked levers for vacation rental managers trying to grow specifically to win new homeowners? So brand, just to clarify, is not your logo. A lot of people are like, oh, I have a. I have a great logo. That's not brand. Brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. So if you start there and you look at what property managers tend to focus on, they focus on three USPS or three features that they want to communicate out to the homeowners that they think they should know when really what you should do is see what your homeowners are saying about you. That's your brand. See what they love about you. And then that is the lever you should pull when reaching out to new homeowners. I love that it really begins with trust and that's why they trusted you and that's what they love about their relationship with you. So start there. That's lovely. I really do think that guys think about that. What do they love about you? And start there for your brand. How does a strong brand means people say good things about you, I would hope help reduce your guest acquisition cost compared to businesses that rely basically on OTAs and channels. When you're on an OTA, you're basically on a level playing field and so you're just competing on price. It kind of strips the brand experience. You know from discovery and managing expectations other than whatever you can manage to pull off between photos and text. Right. So content. Yeah, yeah. So a strong brand, it really qualifies the demand. It starts managing the guest expectations from the get go and then you resonate specifically with the guests that are a perfect fit for you and you don't waste money, time and energy. Again, going back to that wide net issue, when property owners evaluate management companies, what brand signals do you think create the most trust and confidence the fastest? I will say for sure, clarity and consistency in your messaging builds immediate trust. When you see a different message on a postcard than you see on a website, than you see on a Facebook ad, you kind of think these people don't have their act together. Right. That's, that's immediately the impression. That's completely true. That is true. And you're right. It's not just a logo, it is definitely a messaging as well. That's why taglines are so powerful when it comes to branding. If a mid sized property manager wanted to strengthen their brand, say let's say in the next 12 months, okay, we want to strengthen our brand, where do they start? Well, you can definitely google yourself and see what you're facing, see what you're up against, where are you starting from? That's what other people are seeing. A lot of times there's so much navel gazing. When you work at a company for so long you forget to step outside yourself. And this is actually where agencies can be a huge help because they, you can go to them and say what do we look like to people? And they'll give you the honest truth and then you can start there. So I would start with an outsider's perspective on how do I show up, where do I show up, what does that look like? And then how does that align with what is loved about me and my brand and then how do they manage that? So you can start with actually taking the exact sentiment and words and just plug that right back into your messaging. So you're talking about taglines. See if there are any similarities between what people love about you and say about you than what's in your tagline. If not, recalibrate immediately. Look at all of your materials and just start matching up what people need, what their pain points are with what people love about you. Oh, that is excellent. I love that. So find out where your strengths lie as far as what people think about you, the homeowners think about you and strengthen your brand from that. This episode of the Vacation Rental show is brought to you by Blue Tent. Blue Tent provides vacation rental pros with a powerhouse of services. Direct booking optimization, strategic account management, email marketing and channel management and distribution. All of your industry experts under one roof or inside one tent. Expand your digital float footprint and turn browsers into local bookers@bluetint.com you have a background in Fortune 500 brands, journalism, lots of agencies and hospitality. What do you think makes the vacation rental industry uniquely challenging and exciting from a brand perspective? So from my background in storytelling, I always default back to what does the audience care about? Why do they care? Why should they care? They're inundated. Just to show one example, when I was working with Jockey International, they had been pushing out all of this content and they didn't understand why their social analytics and presence was so bad. Low engagement, low growth. It wasn't working at all. So I pulled what people were saying about them not just on their brand channels, but in groups and comments and just pulled all of this intel from their audience, every brand mention, every competitor mention, into an analysis. And what I found was they looked nothing like what their audience looked like. So when I showed them like this is what your audience actually looks like, your consumer is heavier than your models, different color skin and meeting different products. And what you're pushing out to them is not resonating with them at all. And look at your stock price. So by listening and hearing what people want to see, you're able to recalibrate to say, oh, you know what, actually we do have that service. I just haven't told anybody about it. Right. I haven't really promoted it. So you listen to the pain points, listen to the audience, see what they're saying, see what their pain points are, their needs and what they love to chat about. And then go and find where your brand can match that and meet them there. Where do I go to listen and how can AI help me see what these groups are saying about me? Because I can tell you this, if you're a property manager, there is a Facebook group out there somewhere and they are talking about you. I know because I see it on my Facebook groups and I'm like, and I don't listen to Facebook groups. Honestly, I don't participate in them. I join them based on the areas where I'm helping the property managers. And then I do listen and like it comes up in my feed so I can take a look and see what people are saying when it mentions my company. What other ways can people see and use AI to see what's being said behind their backs. It's so true. Well, let's clarify the myth, first of all, that you can't go on to your personal chatgpt. Ask it, what do you know about my vacation rental company? Because the answer you're going to get is 100% customized to you. So don't assume that answer is what everybody else is seeing. And don't get angry because your brand didn't come up or your brand did come up. Let's just start there. Can you repeat that? Because I think that is so important that people do not rely on this. Please listen, say it one more time. Do not go on to your own personal chatgpt and ask it if it knows about your vacation rental company and then get upset because it doesn't. Because your answer that you're getting is completely personalized to you. It is not the same answer that everyone else is getting. If you look at Rand Fishkin, right? Rand Fishkin did a study of like 300,000 mentions in AI about power tools or something like that, and there were like 30,000 different answers mentioning 40,000 different products. So there was no consistency across the board when you analyze the data at scale. So, yes, don't take what your AIs are telling you as a global answer. Do AIs hallucinate? I think they're working on this issue, but the free versions of a lot of AIs want to make you happy, right? Like, they want to get used again. So they're going to serve up answers that maybe they made up. And does AI lie? They made up. You just said it. I didn't have to ask you the second part. They do guys. AI hallucinates and AI lies. That's the reason you look at multiple AIs. That's the reason you don't just go on chat. You just don't go on Gemini. You just don't go on Claude or Perplex your. All the others. There are a lot of really good ones out there based on what you want to do with AI. Those are like three that get mentioned all the time. But they really are not the only three. And they're not necessarily the best for what you're looking at, but it is very easy to start there. But please know it does lie if you feed it information, though. Like, we're talking about creating a brand engine here. If you feed it, it will feed it back to you because like Rebecca said, it does want to please you and it does hold your project information. What marketing trends do you believe that property managers should be paying Closest attention to over the next year. I won't say few years, because my gosh, things are changing, like, so rapidly. More rapidly than I've seen tech change since we got into the Internet. I've never seen the like of it. It's insanity for me as a technologist. I'm blown away. Yes, same. So I don't know if you've noticed this, but there's now this reaction to AI that is a humanity trend. So there are more in person networking meetings. More people are trying to become a part of a smaller group because everything else has just gotten too big and too much. And so we're now craving face to face time. We want to be with each other in person more, but based on, like our cohorts. So I think what we're going to see is a trend towards being part of a community. And that community definition is going to look different than what we've seen in the past. What should they pay attention to? Should they look for creating community with their guests, with their owners? What should they be doing here? So a lot of them are already very good members of their local community, and that's a great place to start. People that you already know already communicate with locally, that's probably the easiest community to start building on. And then what you'll notice is you kind of start filtering down to your tribe inside of that community and then you can explore out from there, invite other people in. I have a really out of the universe question. It's probably insane and very scary, but if people want more community, why don't we create? Okay, so back in the day, we used to invite all of our homeowners to come into our area, wherever we were. And this is mostly on the east coast, say from Virginia down to, you know, Florida. We would have them come and we would have homeowner meetings and we would do fun things with them. Why don't we do that on Zoom? Why don't we do webinars for our homeowners and have them ask live questions and be there for them? Are we afraid to do that? Is that scary to do that? Is that wise? I've heard the argument that we don't want to do that because we don't want one set to know the percentage that they're getting on X, Y or Z. Right. We don't want them sharing information because one may have gotten a rate that the other didn't. So there are concerns around sharing information amongst themselves that we don't want happening. There's the other concern that if you're off camera, you're not dealing with somebody's face. And it's really hard to be angry and to a face. So I think the humanity of it is actually in person. So I've seen one brand have in person events where there's networking, there's growing invite a friend kind of thing, and that's working for them. That's great. Then I've seen others say that they're just going to do a webinar, but it's recorded. If you can't watch it, they just blast it out. That kind of checks a box. They can show up and ask questions, but they usually don't get a ton of. But if your owners are mainly investors, do you need to build community around that? Maybe not. So one of the tricks, the trade that you could do, guys, if you wanted to do a webinar and have people ask live Q and A. If you do a webinar, it's not really live Q and A. Everybody can't see the questions that are being asked. You see the questions that are being asked and you can answer them. You can control it that way. The other thing you miss when you're not doing community like that is you miss people sharing how much they love you. Back and forth too, because those groups exist as well. Anyway, I just thought it was an idea. Meetings are much different than webinars. With meetings, everybody's on camera. You can see body's face. So anyway, that was just. I just wondered. I was just thinking, in marketing, do people actually do this? I know no one. So I'm like, what a crazy idea. I guess that in person group is the only one I know that has been really thriving. And then everybody else is just doing the one message out and not so much like the community meetings. I did want to go back to a question that you had that I didn't fully get to answer yet. And that's what's exciting about vacation rentals right now, because it is AI related and going back to my journalism degree. So it turns out that AI loves to source articles, like editorial articles, for its answers. That's the first place it actually looks when it tries to answer your question. It also looks at Reddit groups, threads and forums. So we've come full circle here. I stopped writing reviews about travel because they're like, oh, TripAdvisor is going to have reviews and you don't need to do that anymore. So we don't need travel journalists because guests write the reviews. Well, it turns out AI is like, well, I'M smart and I kind of want an educated opinion. I want somebody who's got context to give a reliable answer. So I'm going to go out to travel and leisure, I'm going to go out to media outlets and I'm going to pull my answers from there. So I've been working with brands I'm working with to get media mentions, good old traditional pr. And if they're not like a national brand for that reason, then we can hit like local communities, local forums, things like that. Get yourself mentioned out there and what you're great at, AI will go there first. The second place it looks are your Google reviews, your Google my business, maybe some other online results. And then the last place AI looks for answers is your website. And then of course, you know, you gotta have your schema markup and all your details there as well. But like, how mind blowing is that? That we've come full circle on PR and traditional media now because of AI? But that's exciting. It's very exciting. I had thought about it because there is some work that my husband's doing. He's in academia, he's a ancient Hebrew Bible philologist and he writes a lot of articles. And it's exactly that, believe it or not, talking about going way back, that is the way that opinion is changed, by writing articles that have authority. Like you were talking about when you were talking about media outlets, you were talking about mentions, PR mentions and things like that. 100%. That's exactly where AI is going to get the information. So that is incredibly good advice. I think that answers another question that I was asking, which is what are the trends that we see over the next year or so to pay attention to that would be get your name out there. Who is the magazine guys that comes out and says best 10 beaches in the US this year? There's a bunch of them that do that. But try to make sure that you are mentioned in those because when people type into the prompt just like they do in Google, best vacation rental in XYZ area, you do want your company to come back for that. So Fodders is one, Forbes is another one that does the travel guys. Forbes is who I was thinking about. Yeah. So can you help people to do that, to get their names in those things or how does that happen? Yes, you can hire a PR agency, which I can help you find one if you're not sure where to begin. But PR agencies are great at that. All right, so what advice would you give to founders of companies, property management companies? They know that marketing matters, but they're overwhelmed on where to focus because there is so much out there right now. Where should they focus over the next year? I'm going to go back to the audience to make it easy for everybody and take a look at your guests who love you. Where did they find you and why did they love you? And just keep going back there and keep echoing that same message, and you will find similar guests, and that will help you grow. So which was the last hospitality brand that really blew you away in terms of marketing that you saw? And you went, that is brilliant. Or, you know, maybe even a brilliant rebrand or a fantastic campaign. Tell me some of those, because if it blew you away, I'd like to see what we're talking about here. The Miman Group website is amazing and just launched on Friday. Completely new website launched on Friday. So it was definitely a showstopper. Very proud of it. It looks great. The best experience is very personal. So it's hard to say who's nailing it out there, because I think everybody maybe has their own way to answer that. It was kind of cool to be recognized at one vacation rental where I stayed and they knew that I was in the industry and wrote me a little note. Aww. They told my kids, like, your mom's a celebrity in the industry. And I thought, oh, that's. Yeah. And the Outer Banks. Yeah. They were just so sweet. Yes. Thank you. That means a ton. That's so precious. So precious. Loved it. And I gave him a big shout out on my Instagram. But I would love to see more rebrands. To answer your question. There's a lot of branding out there that just looks like they started off with a logo and a website and just kept going. I totally get it. That's fine. No judgment. That's the hardest thing. You're there. Now maybe take a pause and step back and say, is the service level I'm providing my guest, does that look like what my presence looks like online? And maybe you need to do some realignment. I love that. I'm going to now ask you some personal questions because I'm very interested. You've really done a lot in your career. Tell me your favorite part of your career so far. Is it today, or was it before today? So I was at a vacation rental with an amazing view, and I was taking a picture of these chairs that are, like, in the pool overlooking this view. And then I was also at a conference with friends hanging out in the pool. And I just kept thinking to myself, whose Life. Did I steal like that? This is my job. Like, I pinch myself. I really can't believe it. I care so much about the people in the industry and I love these opportunities and getting to do these things. So, yeah, I've hit a sweet spot. I hope I can stay here. Well, I have to tell you, we are very happy to have you in the industry. And I tell you that I'm really impressed with some of the things that I read about you that not about you, but had better been said about you. You have created a really good brand for yourself. People say very nice things about you. And guys, if you're looking for a marketing expert as well, Rebecca is. She's fabulous at what she does and she is a forward thinker and not someone who's just going to feed you what you already know. So I am grateful for you coming on. Do you have any other advice that you'd give property managers about marketing? I would say just because something didn't work before doesn't mean it's not going to work again. So maybe let someone else take a stab at it. Ooh, I love that. That's very good advice. That's very good advice. Well, thank you for coming on the show. And again, I just want to tell everybody out there, I not go see Rebecca somewhere and say, hey, I'd like to have her. She was recommended to me. Like, she got such a glowing review that I was like, okay, you don't even have to ask me. Send her a link. During that meeting, I think I reached out to you on LinkedIn and said, Rebecca, will you come talk on the show? And you were like, yes. And I was like, fabulous. So I appreciate all that you're doing for the industry. I appreciate the fact that you care so much about this industry. So if you see her at conferences, see her around Stopper. How would they reach you if they wanted to reach out to you? Rebecca, I'm all over LinkedIn. You might have to try my maiden name. Sometimes it comes up as Rebecca Bredholt instead of Rebecca Lombardo, but that's me. And then infobeckalumbardoagency. Com is another way. And of course, thank you so much. By the way, I love your podcast. You've talked to all my friends already. So I'm like, oh, this is great. I get to be like talking after one of my friends talked with you. So that's really cool. I love what you're doing and the depth of the conversation that you get into. You really get to the essence of what people are trying to say instead of just sound bites. And I deeply appreciate that. Thank you. I love talking to people. Sometimes I love talking to them too much. And I get. Sometimes I go on tangents, especially when it's something like tech, like I did today. And I try not to give too much information. I want people to find it out for themselves. A lot of times it's much more powerful if you give them an idea and they go look at it. Like you said, just get a free account. Most people are going to have a Claude free account. And I think most people are going to know to push that privacy button. But I think that it's a lot easier than you think, guys. It's a lot easier. And think about feeding something into it. You push a button to attach an attachment and it reads it. You say, read this. Put this in this project, and it does it. It's like so easy. So please don't be overwhelmed. And if you're overwhelmed by it, please email me and say, I'm overwhelmed. Can you spend 15 minutes? Or email Rebecca and say, rebecca, I'm overwhelmed. Can you help me? And I'm certain that everyone that comes on this show is someone that is capable of being a mentor for this industry. So please reach out. We love you guys. Thanks for listening. And Rebecca, I hope to see you in a year and talk to you a little bit about what's happened over this year and see how people have made a difference in their brand by using these tools that you're talking about. Thank you. Thank you so much. This episode of the vacation rental show was brought to you by Blue Tent. To find out More about how BlueTint can help grow your vacation rental business, visit BlueTent.com make sure to search for the vacation rental show in Apple podcasts, Spotify and YouTube or anywhere else podcasts are found and hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. On behalf of the team here at Inhabit, thanks for listening.

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