Heather Bayer
In today's episode, I'm joined by the host of the Bombshell Business Podcast and author of The Bombshell Businesswoman, the one and only Amber Hurdle. I was motivated by a newsletter she sent recently that highlighted how AI is being used in personal and professional branding. I wanted to explore this topic in more detail. And as ever, Amber delivers in the most inspiring way, and you're going to love the tips and advice she offers on getting the most out of AI when you use it the right way.

Heather Bayer
This is the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, keeping you up-to-date with news, views, information, and resources on this rapidly changing short-term rental business. I'm your host, Heather Bayer, and with 25 years of experience in this industry, I'm making sure you know what's hot, what's not, what's new, and what will help make your business a success.

Heather Bayer
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer. And as ever, I am super delighted to be back with you once again. So the early summer holidays all out of the way. Canada Day has gone. Independence Day is done. Everybody's really honing in and doubling down on busy, busy time, I'm quite sure. I remember it so well.

Heather Bayer
Oh, my goodness. I was thinking back on the Canada Day weekend that just passed. The weather was awful for the Saturday and Sunday. And fortunately, the sun came out and it was a beautiful day for 1 July, which was Canada Day, which was the Monday, which actually gave us a long weekend. We don't normally get unless Canada Day falls on a Friday or a Monday. But it just got me thinking back to what I was doing for years on that check-in day, which for us, we'd rented for the majority of the time I was running my property management company, we did weekly rentals only in high season. That changed towards the end. People were wanting shorter breaks, etc. But for the majority of the time, it was Saturday to Saturday rentals, occasionally Friday to Friday. And I just hated it on a Saturday if it was raining, if it was miserable, if it was cold, which it was for the Canada Day weekend. So my heart went out to all my ex-colleagues at my company, CottageLink Rental Management, because I knew they would be dealing with hundreds of check-ins on the Saturday.

Heather Bayer
And of course, poor weather always brings people who aren't happy. They're not happy. They've planned for this vacation. They've anticipated that it's going to be amazing. They're going to arrive, they're going to leap into the lake and go swimming and sit outside and have a barbecue and sit around the campfire. And of course, it's pouring with rain, it's cold, and it's pretty miserable, and they want someone to blame. So I hope it all went well for you at CLRM. I was thinking about you, and it is good to see that the weather forecast has improved for the next...., for the rest of July, in fact. So I hope it all goes well.

Heather Bayer
But while I was having a bit of downtime over the long weekend, I had time to go through some emails, some newsletters I'd put on one side to read, and I came across one that inspired me to this podcast. So there's a lot of newsletters out there. I'm sure you get a ton into your inbox, but there's a few, very few, that I really take the time to read and digest and put on one side to come back to later.

Heather Bayer
I read one on trust by Rachel Botsman, and that's always very insightful. I love the thoughts that Rachel has around the whole topic of trust, not necessarily in our business, and it always makes an interesting read. Then there is AI Superhuman, which I think we are all interested in what's going on in artificial intelligence at the moment. AI Superhuman is just a really good newsletter that is not too...., it doesn't go too deeply into coding, but it offers ideas on prompts and shares new ideas and new platforms and new software and things that are going on in the artificial intelligence world as it relates to us, normal people; I open that one. There's always Matt Landau's emails. Always open those, always come back and sometimes two or three times.

Heather Bayer
And then there's a newsletter by Amber Hurdle. It always captures my attention as soon as it pops into the inbox. And last week's was no exception at all because the headline jumped out at me, Are You Making AI Mistakes in Your Brand? I mean, who wouldn't check that out? And it was particularly relevant for us because as we grow the Vacation Rental Formula Business School and the THRIVE Training System, we're developing our brand. And that means a bit of a revamp of our website. And that's our About Us pages and other content. And of course, ChatGPT is getting quite the workout to give us outlines, suggested formats, etc.

Heather Bayer
So as I was reading through Amber's newsletter, she says, Before you use artificial intelligence willy-nilly in your business for the sake of jumping on a bandwagon, fill in the blanks of this statement. I wish AI would help my business _____ so I can _____. That is brilliant. Why didn't I think about that? She's talking about intention. My word of the year for 2024 is intention. I'm striving to be more intentional in everything I do. So that little sentence there and those blanks stopped me in my tracks. Are we being intentional with this revamp with our branding. Then further into the newsletter, she offers tips on personal and employer and business branding and the involvement of AI, all of which is so relevant to what you and I probably are exploring right now. We want to use these tools, but I, for one, am pretty much overwhelmed, I don't know about you, with what's out there, what's useful, what we should be doing, and what is probably not effective, and perhaps what is it that we're doing that might be delivering the negative impact, the complete opposite of what we're striving for.

Heather Bayer
So today, I am thrilled to have Amber Hurdle join me to share her insights into developing your authentic voice, training ChatGPT to work for you, and to build content that is uniquely your own, but so much quicker to create. So without further ado, let's go straight on over to my interview with Amber Hurdle.

Heather Bayer
So I am super happy to have with me today, again, Amber Hurdle from Amber Hurdle Consulting and the Bombshell Business or Business Bombshell?

Amber Hurdle
Bombshell Business Podcast. But we are actually in our final season of that. So we're wrapping that up and I'll be moving over more on YouTube. More to come. I'm not going away. I say to those who have reached out to me, they're like, what do you mean? You're a part of my week. And I was like, Oh, I still will be. It's just less lipstick and high heels. It'll be fine.

Heather Bayer
I'll be interested to see that. Podcasting is changing.

Amber Hurdle
It is.

Heather Bayer
And I've been around this microphone for nearly 11 years now and need to make some changes here. So I'll be interested to see what you're doing. Anyway, welcome, Amber. It's so good to have you back.

Amber Hurdle
Always good to be with you. I was so excited when I saw you in my inbox. And so, audience members, before I ever got into the vacation rental industry, I knew who Heather was because she is prominent in the podcasting industry, of which I'm a participant of, and obviously a member of that. So every time I'm around you, I'm like, oh, I'm just your casual fan girl over here. It's fine.

Heather Bayer
No, it's great to have you, but there should never be a reason to have you back on. But I saw your newsletter last week, and it just struck such a chord with me. I thought there was no way I could not have you back. And now I'm just trying to find that [newsletter], you're going to have to come back with me. What was the title of that newsletter?

Amber Hurdle
Oh, gosh. Hold on. Let me think about it. Maybe what you're doing wrong with AI. I'll tell you real quick.

Heather Bayer
Are You Making These AI Mistakes in Your Brand?

Amber Hurdle
That's it. Yeah.

Heather Bayer
That was exactly it. I read all your newsletters anyway, and I was saying in the introduction, there's only a couple that I always pick up and read. Matt Landau's is one, yours is another, and then there's another one called AI Superhuman, which I really, really enjoy. So that title, Are You Making These AI Mistakes in Your Brand? Just jumped out at me and I read through it. And the first thing I saw was you're talking about intention. And intention is in fact my word for 2024.

Heather Bayer
But you know, Amber, before we kick off with that, I've got so excited about talking with you that I completely forgot to ask you to do a quick intro of yourself. I've done it in the introduction, but I want you to bring your style and voice to who Amber Hurdle is and why we are listening to you.

Amber Hurdle
Yeah, absolutely. It's so funny because I just got off with my copywriter because we're redoing my website. And I'm like, wow, I'm hard to nail down because I do a lot of different things in a lot of different industries. And to me, though, it's all branding. So the easiest way that I can say it is I help leaders and organizations define and position their value. And I do that through a proprietary process that I have, which breaks branding down. People think branding, and they're like, Oh, logo, colors, fonts. And I'm like, No, those are the pictures that go with the story. But what's the story? We have to write the story first, and then we can illustrate the book. And so the way that I do branding is I look at the owner or the senior leader or all the leaders, and we have to understand what their personal brands are. What are people saying about you when you're not in the room? If we have that under control and we can optimize those brands, then we build trust with our employees. Now we're motivating high performing teams. Everybody's playing by the same rules. They respect their leader.

Amber Hurdle
They respect each other and each other's personal brands. They're collaborating. They care. And guess what happens when you have happy employees who care? You have a good product, and now you're upholding your brand promise proactively, and your customer experience is amazing. And Stan Slap, the author/thought leader says, If you can't sell it inside, you can't sell it outside. And he's talking about culture, and I'm totally in agreement with him, but I think it has to even go down further into the individual level of the people who are leading the culture. So that three-prong process is how I approach branding. And then we dress up the person in their outfit as a personal brand. We create career websites or things like that for the employer brand or all the internal communications and engagement things. And then, okay, now we're going to talk about the logos and that stuff to represent what all of that means to the consumer.

Heather Bayer
Great. That gives me a great understanding of what you do. Do you know, I'm not sure I did actually know what you did before.

Amber Hurdle
And that's why we're correcting the website.

Heather Bayer
No, that's fantastic. But we wanted a great introduction. And so I'm going to go back to what I started with before I remembered that I hadn't introduced you properly. So I wanted to talk about intention because you opened that newsletter with a sentence, and I'm going to share that. It says, well, you said before you use AI, and this is what you're talking about is AI and branding, before you use it, artificial intelligence, willy-nilly, and I love willy-nilly, that's a very English expression, in your business, for the sake of jumping on a bandwagon, which we've all leapt on with abandon, fill in the blanks in this statement, I wish AI would help my business ____ so I can ____. And that came to me like a ton of bricks, because I realized that we're trying to do a rebranding exercise on our website and our company and I'd taken intention out of that process.  So just describe to me what you meant by that and how helpful that would be to anybody that's in my position, rebranding, but in fact, what are the benefits of using AI intentionally across the board?

Amber Hurdle
Well, just like anything, you have a problem that you need to solve. That's my definition of business, is you have a problem, I solve your problem, you give me money. That's business. And so if there's a problem internally in the business that is prohibiting you from solving your customers' problems or being efficient or it's costing you money or you could save money, then we need to look at those operational efficiencies. And branding and marketing is such a great and easy way to use AI. But I mean, like PriceLabs, by the way that's AI. Zappier is AI. Grammarly is AI. This isn't some new cool sexy thing. We've used AI.... Have you ever had a chatbot, that's AI. But the challenge with AI and using it willy-nilly, as we say, is that if you don't have the intention, then it's garbage input, garbage output. So yes, jobs are going to be eliminated, but then new data scientists and analysts and AI, I don't know the correct term for it, but people who feed the machine are going to be needed. So when we take a step back and we say, Okay, I wish AI would help my business create a cohesive brand so I can differentiate myself from my competition.

Amber Hurdle
Okay, well, now we're cooking with gas. So now we look at the gajillion AI tools. But if we want to just be very simple and do the one that everybody knows about, it's AI equals ChatGPT, and that is just such a little part of it. But let's just say ChatGPT. If we want to create a consistent and compelling brand so that we can differentiate ourselves from the competition, then I would want to ask ChatGPT to search for the competitors in this particular area. Okay, so now that I have that, now I can do a competitive analysis on each of them. I could even use a tool like PriceLabs or something to see what's everybody charging, what are the rates for this particular weekend or just in general. I can use that to analyze my competition. There's one thing, right? Now I can put in all of my favorite guests. I can put in guest feedback I can put in, because we'll have to stay on guests, and then we'll go over to homeowners. But I can put in all the questions that I've been collecting via emails or text messages. I can have a repository of all of these things.

Amber Hurdle
Then I can say, Okay, tell me about my ideal guest? Are they families? Are they couples? Are we a very great LGBTQ destination? Are we pet-friendly? Those type of things. And it'll spit out like, Well, based on all of the feedback that you got, here's where you shine. Okay, so now we have this piece of information. So then we could go in there and we can say, Here's all the questions that we've been asked. Now we have a comprehensive FAQ for the website that tells why we're different and special and unique and how we can solve all the albums that meet all your dreams, hopes, and aspirations of a vacation. And so we've got all of this competitive analysis, ideal customer. So we're just putting all this to the side. And then we can say, Okay, well, here are several of the blog posts, whatever that we've put out over the years, analyze my brand voice. Tell me what those type of things are. So now I'm going to know, for me, for example, I'm very direct. I know you're so surprised. I'm open and friendly. I use a lot of storytelling. I give very actionable advice. And so it's putting these parameters around. So then I can say, All right, using this information as a brand voice, I want you to create this many posts. And so now I have posts.

Amber Hurdle
And let me go back a couple steps. I'm word-vomiting you at this moment. This is like how expansive the opportunities are. It's not like, Create a blog post about Vacationing in Orange Beach and things to do. That's not enough. We can put in, give me 52 ideas that would be relevant to this target demographic of what those topics can be. And then you go and you say, give me three, cite the sources and give exact examples based on each of these things. Now you're building out your content calendar. Now you're speaking in the voice that you have been speaking in before, that it's not just being made up by AI, it's coming from your own words. And then once you get those, now you can throw it into Grammarly, make sure the grammar is right. Now you can use the SEO terms that you looked up using AI. Now you can put your headlines and your H1 tags and all that stuff.

Amber Hurdle
But, what you can't do, Heather, is just say, Write a blog post for me. And then it's like, And now we're going to soar to new heights. And it sounds like everybody else in your ChatGPT is showing on LinkedIn. You have to go in then and be like, Okay, this is a great start. Thanks for the rough draft, AI. But now I'm going to go in and I'm going to massage it using our heart, our soul, very specific examples, very hyper-local opportunities. We're going to give a shout out to another organization in our market where we co-brand together. It's just like research. So research, feeding it the data to spit out clarity for your brand. And then once you have the research, the clarity based on what you fed it, now you have a plan. Now you're developing that plan and hashing it out. You can take your blog post and say, based on this blog post, I want five social media posts targeted towards these customers. And again, do you see how much information I'm putting in in order to get information out? And the way that so many people are using AI right now is write a blog post for this and make sure it's optimized for SEO.

Heather Bayer
Okay, I'm going to come back on a couple of things because....

Amber Hurdle
Okay, so that was a lot.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, I got a few notes here, because these are the few things that really bogged me down before I realized that there was stuff out there that was going to make this so much easier. You said put in things like reviews and like your target demographics and other research information. When you say put in, what do you mean?

Amber Hurdle
So you have to have a prompt. So this is your ladies maid, if you will. It is there to serve you, but it cannot serve you if it doesn't understand what it is that you're looking for. And so your prompts have to be very specific. So it could be that you say, use the following guest testimonials to create a compelling brand promise, or use the following guest testimonials to create sales page copy for exactly your brand name, exactly the location that serves exactly these people. And you have to have all of that data to inform the AI model so that it can spit back something that's specific to you. And you know me, branding is about being distinct. And so if you don't want to sound like every other brand, then you have to ask it to do very specific things. And then sometimes it comes back out and I'm like, you got that off Reddit. I want the sources for all of this. And then I go to the sources and I look through the sources. And then I come back and go, okay, here's what I want. And I want you to give specific examples, cite your sources.

Amber Hurdle
And so let me just give you an example of what that might look like.... Thought I had ChatGPT pulled up for this conversation, but apparently, I don't. So I put in, give example. So this is a very elementary question. Give examples of how vacation rental management companies can use AI to optimize their operations. I didn't want to do about branding because I could talk all about that. It said dynamic pricing, guest communication, predictive maintenance, personalized marketing, la la la, revenue management, all the things we know, fraud detection. All of that's happening behind the scenes in many of the products that you're using, by the way. Then I said, How specifically can AI help with competitor analysis? AI can significantly enhance, la la la. And then it gives another laundry list. Well, also still not super helpful. So then I said, What AI tools would you use for each of these options? And then it gave me, there are some things on here that I've never even heard of. And so then now I'm going to go, and I'm going to go research what is that? Now I'm going to understand, does that even fit into my budget?

Amber Hurdle
So you're building out this AI system, this AI process, by asking AI to tell you exactly what to do. But if I just would have stopped at that and I would have read that, I've been like, Okay, well, then how? And again, not to... Like, AI is on here, PriceLabs is on here. Wheelhouse is on here. Beyond Pricing is on here. We know and love and trust all of those brands. ChatGPT is telling me and validating, you're making a wise decision using this to do this, that, and the other. I would advise anyone, whether you're talking about branding or you're talking about optimizing your operations, to have an AI model that you follow, that you're consistently asking certain questions, that you have specific expectations of the type of information that you need to come out of it. And then the more you use it and the more that you're refining your prompts, the more efficient you're going to get with it and the faster all of this will go.

Heather Bayer
We found that using... A couple of things is using the attach feature. It's super helpful because you've probably got personas, your target market, your personas in a document somewhere. That is just an attachment. You can just tell ChatGPT, I have attached this. But the other thing that we've been using, I'd like your thought on, is CustomGPT. We've been creating for our training system So we've built out a complete training system. So we have a CustomGPT that in there it has every single module, every single lesson. So we can ask questions of ChatGPT based on what's already in that CustomGPT. Could you explain what a custom... See, I can use it, can't explain it.

Amber Hurdle
Yeah. So you're basically setting up your own ecosystem as you explain. So It combines instructions, any additional knowledge, any combination of... It's like instead of ChatGPT going out into the entire interwebs, and again, it is pulling from Reddit and Quora and like non-validated places where there are keyboard warriors expressing opinions with no data to back it up. So what you're doing is you're creating an ecosystem in which it's only searching through. And so a great use of that is exactly what you said. But then it also could be if you want to develop your guest journey, what are all the touch points? Here's everything that we know about them, and here's our testimonials, and here are our process to get somebody checked in. Amen. This is the communication series that they get once they booked. And if you work with Tyann, you're certainly going to have 30,000 messages that goes to them. And that's a lot of information, a lot of good, juicy information. So now if you want to just tweak something within your customer journey or your guest journey or a homeowner journey, then you're just asking within the context of information that's relevant to you and not what's relevant to the entire universe, Forever Amen.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, it's been really useful for us. And I think the great thing is, is that Custom GPTs were only available on the paid version until just recently, and now they are.

Amber Hurdle
Yeah, when they release the new updates and everything.

Heather Bayer
So now they're available freely. Because when I first started, and I'm sure a lot of people do, they think, Oh, I got all this information. I'm piling it into this one document, which is now just you're scrolling forever. You can't remember where... ChatGPT came up with something really, really stupendously useful. Which one was it? It was tremendously useful. Where the heck is it? I got to go back to it. So I'd found that I was using attachments to have all that information just almost like sitting to the side for it to look at rather than feeding it into the main document was so much more helpful.

Amber Hurdle
Yeah. And so for those of us who have sparkles in our hair, we remember when we used to have the Dewey Decimal system in a card catalog, right? And so you go to a section of the library in which you're going to find that information. And so for those of you who don't remember libraries or use a lot of libraries, that might be a little more... Let's think about your your library at home. So you have all of these business books that you've had. Well, you have ones on marketing, and you have ones on growing your business. You have ones on financing. You have ones on leadership. And you're not going to go to the marketing section if you're trying to figure out how to coach, counsel, and discipline one of your team members. And what's the best way of doing that? You're going to go to the leadership section of your library. So this is just creating that library, this repository of data and information that you're narrowing your search down to to optimize the outcome.

Heather Bayer
So you don't have to keep going back and searching through your G:Drive and Dropbox or whatever to find this information every time you ask ChatGPT a question. Absolutely. What did we do without this?

Amber Hurdle
You know, at first, I was a little bothered by it because I didn't understand it. At my core, I'm a professional speaker. I open up conferences. I also do consulting. But at my core, I'm a writer. I've been journaling since I was in the second grade. English was always my subject. I've written multiple books, even only one that you can... Well, two now. I have a workbook, but written other books, but nobody knows that I wrote them. So to me, when I look at other people's ChatGPT showing, I'm like, You're cheapening the innovation and the creativity and the heart and the soul of the art of writing. But then once I realized that it's okay, give me the top 10 concerns of families traveling together in drive time distances for 2024. So now I'm looking at those concerns, and so now I'm just brainstorming ideas for content. Now I can say, Well, What are three ways that we can overcome concern number one, whatever that is? Now I'm getting some information. It's like, okay, using this information, write a 600-word blog post with SEO-optimized titles for this audience in this voice, all the things we talked about that we can use in that CustomGPT.

Amber Hurdle
And then when you take it back, now I'm like, Oh, all the research is done for me, which I would have had to do manually anyways, searching all over the internet. The outline is done for me, which I would have had to do anyways. The piece of information that I'm going to include in this blog post is done for me. And I've done this in 10 minutes instead of two days. But I'm still using my Amber to make it the ultimate product.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, and that's so relevant. When I started, I was doing exactly what you were saying, and I think everybody's done this. Write me a blog post. Sure. Write me a blog post in 750 words about this. That's it. Boom. There it is. Seconds later.

Amber Hurdle
And it's so baked chicken vanilla ice cream. Boring.

Heather Bayer
Absolutely. I think Amy Hinote said something on LinkedIn a month or so back about, I can see your ChatGPT.

Amber Hurdle
But Amy also is a skilled writer. She knows what it takes to compose any form of communication. And so in Neely Khan in Great Britain, she's also a writer, and she's just constantly like, You've got to be kidding me right now. And what happens, and I do emotionally-based branding because emotionally-based brands have a 72% referral, so we want that. It takes the emotion out, and it takes the empathy out, it takes the creativity out, because a machine cannot be hyper-creative and empathetic. It's not an emotionally intelligent machine. It is strictly data-driven based on data that it can find and it's going to input data. So if you understand the emotional triggers that your consumers need to experience to build trust with you, to feel inspired by you, to be excited by your brand, to have that 'iPhone 38's coming out on Friday and by gosh, I have to have it' brand, then you have to infuse it with the empathy and with the excitement and sense of adventure and all the things that inspire purchasing decisions.

Heather Bayer
There are a couple of things, again, I want to... Can you see I'm frantically making notes here? You mentioned emotionally-based branding. So I just want to come back to that. You also talked about Neely and building trust, and that all seems to tie in together.

Amber Hurdle
Oh, IPRAC. Yes.

Heather Bayer
So just tell me what you mean by emotionally-based branding and how AI can contribute to that. If it can, well, clearly it can't without the human involvement. But where could you start with emotionally-based branding with AI?

Amber Hurdle
Let's go over to the homeowner side. Homeowner acquisition or homeowner relations. You will have the profile of your ideal homeowner. We all know what it is. We don't want train wrecks of properties. You want somebody who wants to be involved in the process that if you need to update your wine glasses, they're going to update the wine glasses. And it's not the end of the world that you're asking them to replace $59 worth of stuff. So you've got this persona. But then also, where are they from? What age group are they? Because now we're understanding things about them that will definitely change what emotionally inspires them.

Amber Hurdle
I'm Gen X. I'm going to need some independence. I don't want to be told. I want freedom. I'm going to be a little sassy. You're going to inspire me with some Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre. That's my generation. I'm the MTV generation. And so if I was to do a reel, and I know that I have a, we'll say, older millennial, younger Gen X homeowner, and I'm putting out content for them, then if I use  a song that's going to take them back to junior high when they went on vacation with their family, and I'm showing imagery of those type of things, and it's not like, this is a three, two condo looking over the ocean. You should book now. That doesn't say anything to me.

Amber Hurdle
But if you have Just a Small Town Girl, and then that's it. It's a car driving down the road, which you could get from AI by the way, you could just go into Canva, be like, I need this to happen, and it will spit it out. And sometimes it's terrible, and you have to be like, Let's try that again. But there's plenty of things that can help you generate that content that then speaks to the soul and just be like, your home can be the destination that you remember growing up going to. Now, that's going to speak to me more than...., and I confused things, I'm sorry for having more of a guest-centric example, but showing them that you know how to market theirs. This is how we do things. We don't do it this way. And so you want to book with us because your intention of even having this house is to make your own memories, but then to also let other families make memories. And so we have to really get into those memories.

Amber Hurdle
I'll give you an example of Getaway Rentals in New Smyrna [Beach}. They're close to Daytona, and so you have Bike Week. And then you have a demographic that comes to New Smyrna that they've been going to Bike Week since they were teenagers, without their parents knowing. And then they were older, and they wanted to be in the thick of the chaos and debauchery and everything. They were so down for that. But now, maybe not so much. Maybe they want to go, but then they want to leave. One way that Getaway Rentals emotionally markets to them is by saying, Hey, we know you want to be in the heart of it, but just in as far enough away to skip out. And then, Here's all the other things that now matter to you in this season of your life. You can still come with the same three couples that you've always come, and we've got all these different opportunities for you. And you guys can grill out in the back here while you're looking at the ocean while all that crazy is going on over there. And you can play the songs from their generation. You have the classic rock going on. You're going to have pictures and imagery of Harleys and that sort of thing.

Amber Hurdle
And now I'm getting hyped up because, oh, my God, you know my story. You know what this experience is supposed to be for us. And you know what I'm trying to avoid. And you know the thing that I want in the end. Oh, and also I'm like, creeping towards a fixed income. So the fact that you're telling me that this isn't the most expensive thing either, but you're also not cheap, that makes me comfortable. And so the different language and the different stories and telling the stories of their customers is exactly how they're marketing to their guests.

Heather Bayer
I'm going back to AI, that's all about just feeding that information in, not expecting AI to know who they are. It doesn't. But telling them, these are the people we want, these are the owners we want. And once you've given all that information, then you can ask ChatGPT the question, and it's going to use your information plus everything it finds out elsewhere.

Amber Hurdle
Yeah. And then maybe you use, and I can't get into the specifics of the exact tools. I mean, I can certainly pull them from my research and that sort of thing. But if you have a brand voice that you've identified because you've uploaded everything and it's told you exactly what, now you can put it into the chatbot model of AI that you have. And when people come onto your website, it's in your voice. It's not like, somebody's here to help you. How can I help you? If you're zany, let it be a zany tone. If it's highly professional, let it be a highly professional tone. Your 404 page, if somebody goes somewhere and it's screwed up, is it 404 or is it part of your brand? The experience can be woven all throughout, and whether it's the chatbot or whatever it is, infuse that with the same emotion that carries out throughout the rest of your brand. You should have brand touches everywhere. It should express your personality as a company.

Heather Bayer
There's one site I go back to over and over again, and it's in England. And anybody who listens to the podcast, you've heard me talk about Sue Allen and East Ruston Cottages over and over again. East Ruston Cottages, Sue's company, is just pet-friendly beyond belief. So they accept.... all their owners must, they can't come on the program unless they accept at least two dogs. And the more, the merrier. And if you're looking through that, you can see that she's got paw prints everywhere, but I think done in in a wonderful way.

Amber Hurdle
It's not kitschy. It's not overdone. But immediately there is a pop-up with a picture of a dog. There's a paw in the logo. It's a dog's life. I'm looking at this dog-friendly self-catering holiday cottages and da da da da da. Winners of the dog-friendly self. I mean, like dog obsessed by the Guardian. So I have Nashville Gibbs, and I have a dog beach. So that would be really important to me that there is that. There's Salty Dog, which is a restaurant here in Venice, Florida, and it's on the Harbor, and there's a boat situation out there. And it's all dog-themed outside. Can't go inside, but outside the condiments are in a, paw print dog water bowl. You press a button, and they escort you and your dog to your table, and they immediately bring your dog out a thing of water. Everything is themed in a way that you know it's a separate VIP entrance for the dogs. It's just done really well. And guess where I eat often? Is it the best food? No. But do they love that I take my dog? Guess where I'm going? Oh, yes. It emotionally drives me.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, exactly. And that can be, maybe you're listening to this and you're thinking, I'm not pet friendly. I hate dogs. Great. I don't understand you, but I respect you. You don't love the four-footed friends and the hair and dander that they bring with them. But this applies to just so many different things, different niches. If you've got that niche, then it can be developed through your brand.

Amber Hurdle
There are 420 friendly vacation rentals, right? I mean, and for those you who are not hip to the lingo, THC, Wacky Weed, The Devil's Grass, Marijuana. There's a lot of areas where that is recreationally legal and/or you can get your card or whatever in order to consume that. There are brands that are based around, you're allowed to smoke inside or you're not allowed to smoke inside, but we have this whole experience for you outside. That one thing that you can count on at our properties is that there is an outdoor entertaining space where you can partake in whatever it is that you want to do, and it's just blatant. And so if that's something that's important to you, you're Snoop Dogg or Willie Nelson, then guess where you're staying?

Heather Bayer
I love to see these where people have a niche and really double, triple down on it. And it speaks to their audience through every page, but you don't have to be that niche dependent to speak to the audience.

Amber Hurdle
You don't. You just have to understand your audience. And usually people are like, what's the first thing you have to do to have a great brand? Like, know what colors are your favorite colors? And I'm like, your favorite color really doesn't matter at all. What's your customer's favorite color? And what emotional response do you want? What do you want them to feel with that color? And it's like, deer in headlights. And it's like, okay, well, if you don't understand your customers, then yeah, you have customer feedback. You can analyze emails back and forth, get the tone in them. You can look at pictures that they send you. But the one thing I love having people do is just pick up the phone and call. Hi, Ms. Sonja. I love that you bring your family every single year. You book the same week. We love you. And in fact, we love you so much that we're developing our brand right now, and we want more guests just like you. I'm not trying to sell you. Do you have 30 minutes where I can just run through some questions with you so I can deeply understand why you choose, why you make the choices that you make, and really what drives the decision making, and who all is involved in the decision making?

Amber Hurdle
Oh, everybody wants to be needed. Everybody wants to be a hero. And you're calling a customer saying, You're my favorite. I mean, I'll say it right now, Narelle Hooker is.... I had the Bombshell Businesswoman persona, and then Narelle came into my life, and she's pretty much done anything I've ever offered ever Amen. She's still a customer of mine, and she has been since 2020, and I love working with her, I love working with her team. I think that she's the type of person that is great for me to work with. And so I changed my buyer persona to more closely align with Narelle, because if you could give me 50 Narelles, I'm the happiest girl in the world. So think about who are... And if you're more introverted and you don't want to go through that or it's crazy season, you've just got to get this branding project done, then I want you to think about your five favorite customers and then see what they have in common. What's the length of stay? What part of the country do they come from? Or world do they come from? What's the price point that they're spending? All those type of things. When they book, do they upgrade? Do they do any excursions with you? I mean, there's all those type of things as well.

Heather Bayer
I think that is such a great idea. And as you say, you call somebody like that, they're very unlikely to say no to you because; A, they come back to you over over again. They're already a fan. They're already your raving fan, and they want to be super helpful and they feel important. And if you've just told them that they are the most important person to you at the moment, then they're very unlikely to decline to talk to you. I'm not great for getting on the phone to people. It took me 15 years, actually, to be able to pick up a phone without having to have a glass of wine and a cigarette before I made a call. So I do understand there are people out there like that, but this is, hand it over to somebody else to do. Create the questions. I love that. And the alternative is...

Amber Hurdle
...And then you upload that into ChatGPT because ChatGPT doesn't know. If you don't know, ChatGPT doesn't know. That's just how it works.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. And I think what we've done in this conversation is really filter everything down to this, you've got to feed ChatGPT the information that is important to you, not that is important to ChatGPT.

Amber Hurdle
Yeah, exactly. And then, of course, too, that's not the end all be all. Like, those of you who are running your businesses on Google Workspace, you have Gemini automatically in there. And I'm not the biggest fan of it, which is weird because you would think that Google would have the best. But it is better for some things. And so sometimes I'll ask the same exact question or use the same exact prompt in that, and then also then compare and contrast. And so there's different things to do that. Now, I've talked a lot about ChatGPT because I feel like we're at a beginner level here. And so I don't want to overwhelm people with all of the options, but there's life beyond ChatGPT for artificial intelligence tools for any business.

Heather Bayer
Well, that was my next, my final question, really, is looking ahead. What should people be looking out for? What can they try out in terms of other tools that are currently available? And then just go on to what may be coming in the future.

Amber Hurdle
Yeah. So again, I'm a branding expert who knows how to use AI, and I'm a nerd, and I'm a tech nerd. And so I just always stay on top of things because it's important to me. I have a two-sheet, a one-sheet, a back and forth growth sheet that I'll share with you to share with the audience of different tools. But the one thing that I want to say about any of these tools is know what they're used for. So for example, and I have a list here that I pulled up. So we've got Perplexity AI. We've got... Pull it up real quick. So ChatGPT ones, everyone knows. Gemini, again, it helps you more synthesize. It can help you identify business opportunities. We've got... Copilot is something that you can use across the Microsoft environment. Perplexity is one that I've seen come up a lot. So it's really for language processing. It's adaptive learning. It's like ChatGPT. But the more that you feed it, the more the accuracy gets better. HeyGen can create personalized videos. So now you've got, and I've got this too, so more to come on that. But there are these tools that you can use that create avatars, and it can be a view or it can be a random person.

Amber Hurdle
So if you're somebody who wants to put video content out, but you don't want it to be you, then just go to AppSumo. If you have an AppSumo pro account, you get 10% off everything. You get early access to different tech tools. I am an AppSumo junkie. My team grounds me from it. They're like, No more tech tools, Amber. But that's where you can get one of those avatar type AI opportunities. Then Claude is a new one. Not new, but it's like an up and coming. It's something that takes lots of information and brainstorming and text. You could put code. It can help you understand different subjects, and then it will coach you through how to work through difficult situations that can help you streamline your busy work. They're seamless AI, be human. I mean, there's so many. So we could talk about all of them, but how about I just give you a list of them, and then you can share it with the audience.

Heather Bayer
That That would be perfect. Yeah, share a list. Yeah, I'm going to go through them.

Amber Hurdle
Yeah. And the thing to remember, too, is, I mean, AI is like Spandex. Just because you can wear it doesn't mean you should wear it. And so find the ones where you're comfortable using it and find the ones, again, that are solving the business problems that you need solved. I just go back to that initial statement, I wish AI could _____ so that I could _____ in my business.

Amber Hurdle
Try them out, use their free versions before you buy anything, and then compare notes. The other thing coming from really working a lot in the employee space and culture and employee engagement, there are companies that are like, You're not allowed to use ChatGPT, and I'm like, They're doing it on their phone. So there's that. Then there's people who have no parameters on it. There is certain information. If you're analyzing financial information, there's legal implications to that. If you're uploading into this repository of information that's then going to be used to help other people using whatever gets put into it, there's legal issues. Obviously, in health care and things like that. But even with your financial data, don't let people put things into a model that you don't want out into the world.

Amber Hurdle
So getting back all the way to the intention conversation, be very clear about what you're using it for and what it can't be used for, and then have real consequences if those boundaries are crossed. But then celebrate the people who are using it well and show people that you're all about trying to streamline and optimize and all that stuff, but let's do it responsibly.

Heather Bayer
That's a great point to end this on. I've learned a lot here, and I'm sure others have as well. Yes, I'm going to get all that into the Show Notes, too. I've got a lot of things to....

Amber Hurdle
.....I hope you're using AI for your Show Notes because you could just upload the recording.

Heather Bayer
Yes, exactly. Upload the recording, ask it for the Show Notes. And then, and I think this is what you would recommend, you don't just publish the moment you've got something off ChatGPT, you go through it, you massage it, you put your own voice on it. And I know there's times when I'm pressed for a little time and perhaps go, Oh, that'll be fine. I always regret it afterwards. I look at it when it's been published and I think...

Amber Hurdle
We talked about more than that. That wasn't the most interesting part of the conversation. I should have pulled a pull quote out from that.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, and it also says, I ChatGPT'd that.

Amber Hurdle
Yeah, but you know what? Here's the other thing, especially right now, it's season for many, many vacation rental properties and destinations. You're not going to be perfect. This is a process. We're all learning together. Whatever I told you today is going to be irrelevant three months from now, and we're going to have to learn something new. The speed at which technology and business is changing and the velocity that just the sheer force of nature that it is, is requiring us to be nimble, compassionate, and we have to show ourselves in our team's grace as we continue to adapt. So another thought.

Heather Bayer
And on that note, thank you so much, Amber, for joining me. It's always an absolute pleasure. I'll see you no doubt in maybe Phoenix?

Amber Hurdle
Probably so, yes. So last year, I didn't get to go to VRMA because I was there for my my granddaughter's birth. And this year, they're doing her first birthday in Florida with me. So I think there's a little bit of an overlap there. So maybe I get there a day late, I'm not sure, but I'm going to try to make sure that I get everything to happen.

Heather Bayer
Yes, on that note, congratulations on becoming a grandmother. It's the best thing in the world, right?

Amber Hurdle
The best thing. There's no way to describe how special that relationship is. I was FaceTiming with her yesterday. Her face lights up, my face lights up, and my heart is always full.

Heather Bayer
Thank you so much. I'll see those.....

Amber Hurdle
Thanks for having me Heather.

Heather Bayer
Bring the pictures. I will see them when we meet in Phoenix.

Amber Hurdle
I will do it. My scrapbook. I appreciate you having me on, Heather, And I think this is an important topic. And while I'm not the expert at AI, I don't think anybody can truly claim that as fast as it moves. I like to be able to apply in a way that makes it understandable to people on the topic that I love, which is branding.

Heather Bayer
Thank you so much, Amber Hurdle. That was great. I learned a lot in that session. But I think more than anything else, it coalesced to me that sometimes you can look at AI and think it's so complicated, and how am I going to get to use it? But quite honestly, what Amber was talking about, about giving it the information that it needs to create what you want it to create, makes it so much easier. It may take a little time to get that information together. We talked about CustomGPTs, which is something that we use. We have Custom I have a CustomGPT for my podcast. So what I've done is feed in all the information about the podcast, who my types of listener are. I've given it examples of the Show Notes I write. So there's a lot of information within the CustomGPT.

Heather Bayer
And then when I want to create a new session, a new podcast episode, I go into ChatGPT, in that I go into that CustomGPT, I create what I want to create or ask the questions right in there. It's just drawing from that information. I might say, Okay, I'm interviewing Amber Hurdle. We're going to be talking about this and that. This is the topic. Write me 10 questions I should ask her about branding and AI. When I did that, I gave ChatGPT a copy of Amber's newsletter, because that's what inspired me to invite her onto the show. It came up with 10 questions, actually, none of which I asked because we were having such a great conversation. But we actually went through all the topics that ChatGPT had suggested we cover.

Heather Bayer
So thank you, Amber. Make sure you go to the Show Notes, check them out, make sure you download the document that Amber is preparing for us, and we'll have a list of all those different AI products that she uses and some additional information on there as well.

Heather Bayer
Okay, thank you. My time is up. I'm going to see you next week. And for now, bye.

Heather Bayer
It's been a pleasure as ever being with you. If there's anything you'd like to comment on, then join the conversation on the show notes for the episode at vacationrentalformula.com. We'd love to hear from you, and I look forward to being with you again next week.

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