Whether you are just beginning or you have been renting homes for years, it is important to adapt to the current market.
Vacation renting, or short-term accommodation is a theory that has been around for hundreds of years.
With all the advances in the travel and information businesses, it is becoming important to adapt to the marketplace to make sure that your property is getting the right kind of reach.
Here are a couple of online basics that will easily drive business your way.
Get Your Property On A Listing Channel
There are a wide variety of listing channels for you to put your property on. They range from major conglomerates with small divisions like the HomeAway family, or classifieds similar to Craigslist and Kijiji. Then there are niche marketplaces, for example, SmokyMountains.com, that focus on hyper-specific sort of rentals.
There’s a variety of channels available. The best way to get listed on the ones you want, simultaneously, is to invest in a channel manager. Much like Futurestay, which allows you to be featured on all these channels, plus get automation.
Whether you opt for a channel management instrument or do it manually, it is important to be featured within these marketplaces. In no order of importance, here are a few listing sites:
- HomeAway (and its subsidiary sites)
- Airbnb.com
- Booking.com
- FlipKey.com
- Wimdu.com
There are a handful, if not, tens of thousands of more websites that tailor to specific kinds of vacation rental homes, so it is always great to list on channels that will have the kind of guests that are looking for your type of property.
Industry-wide, the average rental owner is featured on at least 3 of these listing websites, and though the numbers aren’t precise yet, the trends show that more visibility leads to bookings.
Create A Site & Drive Engagement
Are you searching for a way to avoid fees from other websites and handle the demand on your own? Invest in a site.
Yes, it is still important to be featured on some of the world’s best listing channels and drive bookings through them. But it’s still important to differentiate yourself as an independent business with your own site.
You can even add a booking engine on your site and adjust prices to make certain that they’re up-to-date and change depending on the season. You should also use high-quality images of your property and the area surrounding it.
The more professional the site looks, the higher the booking conversion rate will be.
Driving Traffic To Your Vacation Rental’s Website
Like in online marketing, it’s important to focus on using different channels that lead to your website. Utilizing the aforementioned listing channels and having a channel manager, is the best way to get your property out there.
You’re going to have to invest a small amount of time, money, and effort to get your website flourishing. Though some listing sites give you the ability to link back to your page, others will not — fearing that they may lose their transactional fees.
So if you want to spend a little bit of money to get a solid return, you can put your efforts on these three things:
- Social Media
- E-Mail Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing
These three marketing initiatives will help drive new type of traffic to your site. More importantly, drive bookings that you may have never been able to attain.
The fact of the matter is, people are searching for a new escape or experience. If you market yourself appropriately and obtain visibility throughout all the different channels that are available; you will be able to have more guests, and hopefully, more referrals.
Utilize Social Media & Other Channels To Drive Bookings
There are two ways of going about social network marketing: advertising and creating great content. There are pros and cons to both of them, but it is ideal to balance both and test which ones work.
Creating ads consists of finding the right demographic to target and digging deep to get certain people to view your advertisements. When starting it’ll require a whole lot of trial and error, along with getting accustomed to the advertisement creation ecosystem. So start off with small investments and proceed up incrementally.
Content creation, though it sounds appealing, it is a bit difficult to master. If your content initiatives aren’t high-quality or don’t have good images or wording, you may not see the return on your efforts for quite some time. So the time spent coming up with images, editing, and adding a call-to-action can be more costly.