Replay: Rentals United’s Secret To Growing Their Vacation Rental SaaS

Hello, hello! Welcome to the Flying Cat Marketing Podcast Summer Edition. During the month of August, I'm republishing some of the earlier conversations I've had and post clips from them on our social media channels. Today's replay is with Vanessa de Souza, Rentals United co-founder. Rentals United, now a market leader in the vacation rental tech world with $6.5 million in Series A funding, once began as a small B2B company with zero budget. In fact, before they were B2B, serving short-term rental operators, they were B2C - competing with OTAs. They were a completely bootstrapped property management agency. When Airbnb was born and scaled to the Goliath of a company it is today, they realized their marketing budget just wouldn’t be able to compete. So they changed models and became the channel distribution manager that we all know and love today.Vanessa had a background in content marketing. She knew the value that a blog can have on lead generation. But she faced a challenge. Nobody knew who they were. Why would they care about what they had to say?Her strategy? Talk about other companies in the sector.In this episode we talk about: ✅ How focusing on helping instead of selling led to more sales✅ What kind of content they created to become a trusted authority✅ How they grew their brand with zero budget to start with✅ What happened when they changed market segments✅ How they changed their content to match high-level, professional hosts✅ What their content strategy looks like today and how you can model itTimestamps 00:06 - Introduction to Vanessa de Souza00:45 - Rentals United: How did it all start?03:57 - SEO mistakes05:00 - Cold calling days at Rentals United07:15 - Marketing to help, not to sell11:05 - PMS quiz that went around13:21 - What performs best with the new audience?16:46 - Providing value to a high-level audience21:50 - The content team at Rentals United26:30 - Aligning marketing with sales in an organization