Five Effective Marketing Strategies for Vacation Rental Properties
Making a living from renting out vacation properties can be fulfilling, but also hard work. Maintaining a steady stream of clients requires a lot more than an iPhone camera and a stunning property. It requires trial and error, a solid marketing strategy, and a constant willingness to embrace new technology and trends.
Given rental properties’ highly competitive and very lucrative yields, let’s take a look at some strategies that will ensure your listing is always occupied.
Find the Right Online Travel Agencies
The first aspect to consider is where you’re listing your property. Some vacation rental properties have their own websites, others have dedicated social media platforms. But an overwhelming majority are advertised on OTAs, or online travel agencies, that cater to holiday-seekers.
Online travel agencies are relatively easy to locate. Hundreds of millions of people use the most recognizable platforms such as Airbnb and Booking.com. The tricky bit is identifying which platform to advertise your property on.
You could start by comparing your target audience to the user base of the OTA in question. Depending on the type of property you’re offering, its location, and the most popular season, you can pick a platform that best meets your requirements.
For example, Airbnb attracts young adults and budget travelers while booking.com caters to a broad population of business and leisure tourists.
That said, the best option is to hedge your bets and maintain a presence across OTAs.
Optimize Your Listing
There are two general aspects to optimizing your listing page.
First, you need to ensure that it reaches the largest audience possible. To do this, it’s worth familiarizing yourself with basic SEO practices and good keyword hygiene. Include relevant keywords in your descriptions and property’s specifications.
Ensuring the information is accurate and up-to-date goes a long way in boosting your ranking within the platform. If you’re still stuck, analyze some of AirBNB’s most popular listings to see what they’re doing right.
The second aspect of optimizing your listing is improving its visual appeal.
Capture high-quality images of your property. Consider consulting a lighting and photography expert to give them a professional feel.
Many platforms also host virtual listings which can be immensely beneficial. In fact, Matterport finds that virtual real estate listings get 65% more inquiries. There’s no reason why that shouldn’t apply to vacation rentals too.
Target Social Media Ads
The biggest advantage in your line of work is social media and vacations are a match made in heaven. If you can follow a consistent social media schedule and design high-quality posts, it will be hard not to attract organic interest.
If you find yourself struggling, consider sponsoring posts on social media.
There are a few benefits to this. For one, it’s one of the most cost-effective ways to reach a wide audience. More importantly, social media ads are highly targetable, which means they can lead to conversions.
To make the most of your investment, research the vacationers who are most likely to visit your property. Study their hobbies, interests, locations, income, and preferences. Then, leverage your insights by promoting posts that have a higher chance of succeeding.
Understanding the minor differences between each platform comes in handy when you’re deciding which social network to use. It’s highly unlikely, for instance, that people will look up vacation homes on LinkedIn, or that you’ll grab the audience of young adults on Facebook.
Leverage Guest Reviews
Let’s face it—in the hospitality business, the customer decides your success. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been in the business a long time or are trying to break into the industry. Positive reviews are invaluable.
So, why not promote feedback and testimonials? These reviews can have a dedicated place on your website, be posted to your social media account, or be highlighted in promotional flyers. This doesn’t just give you more credibility as a renter, it can also attract repeat bookings.
If you’re struggling to come up with promotional material and ways to showcase your valued testimonials, consider scouring one of many real estate flyer templates for inspiration.
Create a Mailing List
While social media takes time to conquer, and OTA platforms require serious SEO consideration to improve traffic, email marketing remains a valuable tool for immediately reaching out to interested customers.
If you don’t already have an email list of past customers and anyone who’s shown an interest on your platform, there’s no better time to create one than now.
Some strategies that can help include creating a landing page and offering discounts and incentives in exchange for email IDs. You can find more strategies here.
To craft emails that grab attention, on the other hand, you can use an online tool like PosterMyWall. Its extensive library of templates has something for everyone, allowing you to make social media posts, YouTube thumbnails, posters, flyers, emails, and newsletters within minutes.
We get it—making time to promote your listing when you already have so much on your plate isn’t ideal. Fortunately, with the help of certain online tools and the strategies we outlined, you’ll soon realize it doesn’t have to be that difficult.
