The most important fundamental of digital marketing that gurus miss: understanding your customer.
Famous business advice: know your customer. So how can you run a successful business without understanding your guest? Not just any guest — your ideal guest.
All guests were not created equal. Every guest has a different value based on how suitable they are for your business and how compatible they are with your business goals.
Why All Guests Are Not Equal
If you have a guest who is more likely to become a repeat guest than one who's not, that guest is inherently more valuable. Why? Because the repeat guest has a higher lifetime value.
However, if the guest in question doesn't fully appreciate what you offer — and there are lots of competitors who can offer what they want much better — then that guest is not for you. You should be targeting the type of guest who has an affinity for what you offer and what your strengths are.
It's not only important to understand who your ideal guest is, but also to understand your strengths and how you can position your property to fulfill a specific need and match your ideal guest's desires.
Real Examples: Finding Your Right to Win
Case Study: The Medical Stay Property
I was talking to a client recently who was operating in Texas and having trouble standing out. One thing he understood about his market was that there was a high incidence of medical visits — people visiting the area for medical reasons with hospitals nearby.
When we looked at his property, I recognized it wasn't only large, but it was a bungalow — just one floor. That's perfect for people who are ill or have mobility issues. So I suggested he focus on that as a key strength and adapt the house to make it accessible.
When you see gaps like that in the market — because a lot of people aren't investing in accessibility — those who do get the benefit. They capture a niche, and they're likely to get repeat guests and loyal guests.
Case Study: The Austrian Wellness Retreat
Another client had a historic house in Austria near a spa community. It was having a hard time getting booked. We came up with the concept of creating a wellness experience — making it a private wellness retreat instead of just "a historic house."
That concept is working. When you're looking at your property, don't just look at bedrooms, beds, and amenities. Look at the problem you're solving for your guest.
Every Guest Has a "Job to Be Done"
When I was marketing for big brands globally, one of the first things we went through when briefed on projects was the ideal customer avatar and the brand promise.
What these marketers called a "right to win": Where in the marketplace, based on the brand promise and the pain points of the customer, was the brand positioned to actually have the right to that customer's business?
You have to establish those things in order to successfully position your property and move beyond the herd. You don't want to be stuck in a race to the bottom, lowering rates all the time and engaging in price wars. That will ruin your top-line revenue and lead you down a road where you can't replace the assets of your property.
How to Create Your Ideal Guest Persona (For Free)
This sounds technical — like something you'd pay a fancy consultant thousands of dollars for. But it's simple, and I'll explain exactly how you can get it done cheaply.
ChatGPT is your friend. It's a way to outsource simple and logical functions that would take hours for your brain to do. With the release of ChatGPT-5, it's even more accurate and less prone to hallucinations.
Step-by-Step Process:
- Copy and paste your Airbnb reviews into ChatGPT
- Prompt it to analyze them and identify patterns in guest types
- Ask it to give you an ideal guest persona
I actually have a custom GPT that I share with clients that helps them get this done. That's a start. Obviously, you don't want to rely entirely on ChatGPT, but it also has an agent mode that's very good for research.
Nothing beats using your own insights. You should use ChatGPT to analyze your reviews and analyze reviews of your closest competitors to understand the gaps in the market and create your ideal guest persona.
What Happens When You Know Your Guest
Once you've created this ideal persona, you'll be surprised at how much information you're now armed with that will help you make critical decisions much simpler.
It will help you really target and hone in on what the guest wants — not what you think the guest wants.
You can waste a lot of money by going for the most trendy amenities that everybody's talking about. I love this question: "What amenity gives the best ROI?"
It all depends on the ideal guest. That's it.
If you're going to spend a lot of money on a hot tub and you're not sure the motivations of your guests and whether the type of guests you're targeting with the hot tub actually value it, then you could be wasting money. And you're looking just like everybody else because everybody else is doing the same thing.
The Brand Layer: Your Unique Selling Proposition
To have a unique selling proposition — which is how you position your property and experience — you need consistency. Your brand is the idea embodied in the way you communicate, whether with a logo, colors, or your style of communication. All of it needs to be consistent.
Everybody can have a brand. Everybody should have a brand. All STRs should have a brand — regardless if you're a homeowner who rents a single room or even a couch.
What I mean is that you need consistency in the way you communicate, the way you promise the experience, and the way you expect guests to understand what you're offering.
Not All Guests Are the Type You Want
You need to be able to qualify those guests with the way you speak, the way you communicate, and even the way you use OTA channels.
Every OTA channel has a distinct user base, and each user base represents a segment of your target audience that you would engage based on the time of year, season, or time of week.
- Airbnb: Younger user base (Gen Z), budget stays, price-sensitive
- VRBO: Family-focused, multigenerational, heavily US-based
- Booking.com: More international, affluent, strong loyalty program (Genius)
You have to understand not only your ideal guest but other segments that complement the ideal guest. Every season and every month attracts different types of guests based on geography and culture.
You need sub-types of guests as well. You'll have an overarching ideal guest, but then guests at tiers below that who are responsible for uptake in other dates.
Plan Ahead or Slash Prices
It's about timing. If you're floundering and wondering why you're not getting booked and trying to do something last minute, the only thing you can do is slash prices.
You have to be thinking way in advance — a year ahead or two years ahead — and planning and structuring how you're going to promote, what your occupancy and RevPAR should look like.
At STR Booster, we create a 52-week promotional calendar. We look at the data, see who's in the market, identify market trends, and then build a whole promotional system around that.
That's something that can make your bookings hugely successful — and something you really should be considering, even if it's not our system. Reverse engineering your year is critical.
Get Started Today
Want to build your ideal guest persona? Join the STR Booster Community for free and get access to my custom GPT and prompts.
Ready to go deeper? Book a discovery call and we'll help you build a marketing system that actually works.