While creating a guest-ready vacation rental property is a fundamental step, devising a vacation rental marketing strategy is equally important. The vacation rental industry boasts millions of listings, many of which will be similar to yours, and, to secure bookings, you will need to know how to make your vacation rental stand out. Luckily, there are many creative vacation rental marketing ideas to try. Irrespective of your property type and target audience, the following are 5 steps that should form part of your vacation rental marketing strategy.
- Target Your Ideal Guests
Your property needs to speak to guests. The best way to ensure that it resonates with guests is to identify a niche and research what appeals to them the most. For instance, if you are targeting young professionals, including a comfortable, remote home office can be a great unique selling proposition that will help you to deliver a first-class guest experience.
- Create a Listing That Stands Out
To help ensure that your listing grabs the attention and keeps it, ensure that you come up with an eye-catching title and write a detailed, yet succinct, description. For example, the most effective titles include the property type, nearby attraction, and a special feature. That’s the ultimate trifecta.
Equally important are beautiful, high-quality photographs. You will need about 20 that represent your property accurately. As you will be using these photos on social media as well, hiring a professional photographer is not a frivolous expense.
The last piece of the puzzle is reviews. While you can’t create these yourselves, you can reach out to guests to inquire about their stay and remind them to leave a review.
- Adopt a Dynamic Pricing Strategy
Price is another key building block of your vacation rental marketing plan. The goal is to use dynamic pricing so that your price remains attractive to your ideal guests, while still ensuring you will be able to cover all your expenses. For example, your weekday pricing can be lower than your weekend rates. This can be a good incentive to encourage travelers to book a longer stay.
Research what similar properties are charging and use this as a guideline. If you are brand new, you might want to ask slightly less till you have received your first 5 reviews. If you would like to charge more than your competitors, there’s nothing preventing you – just make sure that you also provide more. It’s as simple as that.
- Devise a Marketing Plan
From social media platforms to local tourism sites, there are several avenues that you can use which helps to make online marketing for vacation rentals easier. The best approach when it comes to vacation rental marketing is to identify a few sites that your target audience frequents the most, instead of simply concentrating all your efforts on just one platform that they rarely visit.
As Instagram relies heavily on visuals, it can be a powerful platform to boost awareness and interest. One of the top vacation rental marketing secrets is to advertise your destination and its attractions too. So, if you will be using Instagram, you can also collaborate with influencers in your industry to create posts about things to do in your neighborhood.
While creating a presence on social media sites is key, email marketing is far from dead. Instead of concentrating all your efforts on attracting new guests, you can also from time to time reach out to previous guests. So, be sure to create a database of the email addresses of previous guests.
- Identify Platforms Where You Can List Your Property
While Airbnb has become synonymous with vacation rentals, there are many other top vacation rental sites like Vrbo and Booking.com. In fact, you can even create your own personal website to attract direct bookings. As the competition has increased, the majority of hosts prefer to list on multiple platforms to increase their exposure. Moreover, with the latest developments in vacation rental technology, you can easily manage your listings across multiple platforms. Though, to ensure that this approach pays off, research which platforms are more suited for your type of property and ideal guests.
Wrapping Things Up
From adjusting your pricing to run Airbnb promotions during the week to posting about your destination, there are almost as many vacation rental marketing tips as there are listings. While the major platforms attract a lot of traffic, you will need to rely on other marketing channels to stand out. By ensuring that your property and communication appeal to your niche, the bookings are guaranteed to follow.
