How Our Influencer Strategy Made Millions - Isaac French, Experiential Hospitality

Isaac: So a lot of people ask me, how do we do social media? Tell us the magic secret sauce or give us the band-aid for our problem of not getting bookings. And it has to start with the actual product, or in this case, the experience. If you do not have a truly one-of-one, meaning there are not any others like that, especially in your region, in your state, kind of property. And design is paramount here. I mean, design influences everything. Design is the biggest lever that you can pull. If you do not have that property, no amount of money that you spend is ultimately going to create that value. You may be able to, in the short term, get a lot more eyeballs, but you're not going to create those long-term, word-of-mouth, just wildfire type of enthusiasm in your guests. So, the way I look at influencers is it's just another form of word-of-mouth marketing, which is the most powerful form of marketing. Because these influencers, they have built trust and rapport with their audience. And when they can genuinely stay at your property and show that off and just go on and on about how incredible it is, that's obviously going to spark something in their followers, and their followers are going to come and stay and do the exact same thing. And anecdotally, that's exactly what we've seen. We've had people come back four times in 12 months, and each time, they bring back new family members and new friends and create family traditions around it. So you just create this amazing flywheel of success by actually having a truly experiential, one-of-a-kind, unique property. So social media is the biggest factor in the valuation, and the biggest factor in social media is actually having the property that stands out.

Josiah: I appreciate you breaking that down because as you pointed out, the media landscape is constantly changing. And so for people watching and listening to this, it's not necessarily about, okay, I'm going to take this exact playbook. I think you spoke to design, starting with design being one of one, right? So that is something that is universally applicable, whether you're watching this right now or you're watching it 10 years from now or 100 years from now, that's going to remain constant. I want to talk more about social media because I'm curious about what you think about working with influencers. There are so many types of influencers, but can you go back to when you were first starting to do this? How were you thinking about this?

Isaac: Absolutely. So as far as travel influencers, I didn't even know these guys existed prior to actually doing this. So, when we got kicked off, one of my friends told me about an account in Dallas, which is one of our target markets. It's an hour and a half away from here. One quick note on that, I have to say, when you're looking for a property to invest in, to build your experiential hospitality retreat on, this is really important to find the right location, right? There's a whole hierarchy of factors, which I've outlined before, but the number one most important is your proximity to the right population and demographics. Where we are here in Central Texas, and I'm just showing all the cards that I have, there are already plenty of people coming to build stuff here anyway, but it's a perfect example of this. There are plenty of others, and I could list them, but the reason for that is we are within two and a half to three hours of 20-plus million people between Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. On top of that, there's a ton of GDP. I mean, there's like some insane amount of GDP represented in that entire area. On top of that, Texas is not the most beautiful state. So the fact that we're creating an outdoor theme, you know, nature-oriented retreat, that is actually beautiful, that is transportive, that when people step onto the premise, they feel like they're in a different world. it's the perfect recipe to attract like a magnet all of these hungry travelers who want to take a two or three-day staycation. On top of that, I guess another factor is that Texas is a huge state. So you typically have to travel a long way to do that. Look for population bases that are large, I would say 500,000 plus, but then get away from that. One to two hours is a great distance to be away from that. And there's a whole lot of other benefits to building in nature where, you know, it's cheaper land, there's less regulation and all of that. But anyway, I wanted to tag that on there as an important bit of advice for choosing a location. As far as the travel bloggers, there ended up being like five or six big accounts in Texas, I think actually kind of for the same reason, that are trying to capitalize on, okay, what are cool destinations and experiences that we can highlight for our audiences for them to go and do. And I just happened to get really lucky with the first one, which was a really good one. So I paid them $900 for this account called Dallasites101. And that first one, they didn't even come out and stay. I just sent them photos of the property. I mean, we had just launched, the grass hadn't even grown up, so it didn't even look nearly as pretty as it does now. We got $40,000 of direct bookings and about 5,000 followers in one week from that giveaway that we spent $900 on. So I was totally obviously convinced that that was the right channel to market to. So then it was just… following the crumb trail, and then connecting with other property owners in the state that were also beginning to utilize this marketing channel. So there were probably about 30 or 40 different individuals that I worked with in that first six-month span, and about 50% of those yielded no results, to be totally honest, some of which I had paid, others which I had given away free nights, almost all of which I had given away free nights to. So, there was definitely a learning curve of figuring out who is real here. There are some obvious things that I should have known, but I learned along the way of being able to detect a fake audience with no engagement or other obvious signs that I shouldn't work with them. And that's where really leaning into the growing network that I was developing with these other owners was extremely valuable because it's actually not that big of a The world is pretty small, especially in your region of experiential hospitality retreats. And so, offering value and reaching out and forming these relationships with these other owners was really valuable. But the return on investment from just even the handful of the 50% that did yield results, maybe only 10% were massive results that really moved the needle. And of those, I mean, it's so overwhelmingly paid for all of the other mistakes. I just gave the numbers. I think I spent about $40,000 on all of that. And you see the value creation and building that audience. Again, I could have applied the same recipe to a property that was pretty humdrum, commoditized, average Joe kind of house and would not have seen anything close to that. I wouldn't have seen any results, probably.

Josiah: What did you learn in terms of working with these influencers, though? Because if I look on YouTube, there's a whole list of videos that have a million, two million plus views of different people who have kind of, you know, interviewed you, stayed on the property. How did you work with these people? Was there kind of like a set process you had or just let them do their thing? I'm kind of curious about what you found worked and didn't work.

Isaac: So that's interesting. Actually, in the videos that you see on YouTube, there are a couple of big videos like Shelby Church, who has a pretty big following, and Cody Sanchez. And those were almost more business-oriented, like from the investment perspective of the property. Those did not generate maybe any guest stays. So Instagram reels and giveaways are what actually grew the brand for Live Oak Lake. But those did come as a result of, again, the flywheel of just all the success that was building. So it compounds very, very quickly. In my case, it opened up a whole new avenue for me to share kind of the under the hood, scene tips and tricks, and strategies for how to create this property. I am just candidly sharing my experience, which was a whole other avenue that we can explore. With the Instagram influencers, it was in the early days, I was DMing probably no less than 20 to 30 of these every single day in wanting to work with them because I saw the value in it. And I was spending an hour to a day every single day DMing people, watching what other creators were doing, just trying to learn. And I think that's such an important lesson. You've got to be willing to experiment. with whatever you're doing, but especially with marketing, to actually see results. And by the end of it, all the way through now, we are overwhelmed with inbound DMs from influencers that wanna work with us. But most of those again are, or not most of them, but there's, I would say most of these creators are not necessarily worth working for at our stage. Now, they can be very useful when you're starting because even those without a big following, as I tell people, can play a huge role in just creating valuable content that you can then use and post from your account. Because viral reels are much more important now for us than greater partnerships. And there, it's just a numbers game. I mean, every 15 to 25 reels that we post is going to get a bunch of virality, which is going to lead to followers, and then followers are going to lead to bookings, and it goes from there. But yeah, it was just a lot of cold outreach. Then, I eventually started to get overwhelmed by the number of people, again, the flywheel at work that saw these amazing results. I think that the first three to six months of starting your property is so valuable because that's where you're actually laying the foundation of all of the hype, all of the attention, all of the FOMO that people are going to feel when they see your content, both from the creators and the guests. But it's also beneficial because that's when your calendar presumably is going to be the most open because you've just launched. So, we were able to give away a bunch of free nights that we may not have necessarily been able to fill unless we dropped the prices below a point we weren't willing to. So it dovetailed perfectly with launching out and having seven rooms to fill every single night. It's another reason why it's so good to jump on this bandwagon yesterday.