10 profitable marketing strategies for your vacation rental business

The vacation rental is an evergreen business model as it grows exponentially every year. According to Statista.com, the revenue of vacation rental business amounts to US$ 87,099m in 2020. 

Also, the vacation rental business is competitive in nature. Due to its competitiveness, it is important to market your business in order to reach your target customers. 

Some have attractive vacation rentals but they go unnoticed. This is due to a lack of marketing. The Ultimate goal of marketing is to increase the booking thereby increasing the profit of the business. 

Here are the ten profitable marketing strategies to skyrocket the bookings of your vacation rental business.

1. Know your target audience

For any business to succeed it is important to know who their target customers are and what are their needs. 

Marketing to a wide range of audiences may end up wasting your money and time. 

If you are a vacation rental owner then you need to know who is the potential customer for your business. 

There are a lot of potential customers for a rental business, 

• Businessmen
• Travelers
• Family 
• Couples, etc. 

By knowing who your rental business suits, you can market your business accordingly.

For example, if your target customers are families then you can provide offers exclusively for them like free passes to a park or other family activities. 

2. Good Products sell themselves

You may have heard the saying “Good products sell themselves”? In our case, it is so true. 

Marketing a good product does not take much effort than marketing a bad product.

If you have an amazing product, then you don’t have to worry so much about the marketing cost and time. But everything needs a tiny push to get it to the market. 

Here your rental property is your product. If your vacation rental is well maintained then it automatically attracts the customers to your business with a little marketing effort. 

For a vacation rental to be better, it should have a well-designed interior, neatly furnished, comfortable, and also better customer service. 

Customer satisfaction plays a major role in the success of a vacation rental business. If you satisfy the needs, then it helps you gain the retention of customers. 

3. Create a professional website

Having your own website helps your customers book their visit directly on your website. It also increases the trust among the customers.

You can create your own website like Airbnb, which helps you build a strong brand identity and you don’t have to pay the commission for listing on the other sites.

Booking directly on your website increases the credibility of your brand among the customers. 

The website should be neat and elegant to match your business profile. It should be designed in such a way to attract the customers towards it. 

The overall user experience of your website should be pleasant so that the incoming customers should convert rather than bouncing back.

From the SEO point of view, the user site on time increases the rank of your website in Google’s search result page. If you are unaware of what SEO is then don’t worry we will cover it later in this article.

All the traffic from the marketing efforts like blogging, Email marketing, etc are useful only if there’s a website to your business. 

4. Use Attractive Photographs

The first thing that the customer sees while surfing for vacation rentals online is your photos. Even when you have catchy titles and headings, if the photos of your rental are not good then you will be lost in the competition. 

Human nature is that they are easily attracted to prettiest and colorful pictures. After applying all the search filters like the number of rooms and other amenities, they look for listings with bright and attractive images.

You have to make your first impression as best as possible. Post clear and professional pictures of your rentals. Don’t post blurred images or photos shot from your phone because it tends to lose that professional look. 

Also post as many pictures as you can. It can help the customers to clearly understand what your rental has to offer. 

5. Maximize the use of simple SEO strategies

Assume that you built an awesome vacation rental website for your business. The next best thing you can do is making your website SEO friendly. 

If you have to increase your bookings from your website then you have to increase your site ranking in the search results page. 

To do so you have to make use of the simple SEO strategies. The first step is to do a complete keyword research. Make a list of target keywords in your niche that you want your website to rank for. 

Make use of your target keywords in the site’s headings, meta descriptions, etc. Also update the alt text of the images that you use on your website with the related keywords. 

Links are also one of the important factors that influence the ranking of a website. Make sure that the internal pages of your website are well structured and linked to each other. 

Also try to get backlinks from other high authority websites to boost your site ranking. 

6. List on various websites

As already mentioned, the vacation rental business is so competitive in nature. If you are available on a single platform then you definitely gonna lose some of your customers. 

There are a lot of listing sites available on the internet. But you don’t have to list yours on all of them. 

Make a list of listing sites available, pick some of them based on your preference. Post your listing on the sites with the best photos you have. 

And don’t forget to mention your phone number and website address on the site. This will be helpful to channel the traffic back to your website. 

7. Leverage Social Media 

Social media if used wisely can get you a lot of targeted traffic to your site. Post frequently across various social media channels to drive traffic from there to your website. 

Also, social media helps you create brand awareness among customers and it helps you strengthen your business online. 

It allows you to interact with the customers and helps you know what they want. Make sure you post relevant images and information on your profile.

Also images attract more than texts, so make use of high-quality images to pull more customers. 

You can also invite customers to share their experiences and post them on your social profiles. It helps in gaining credibility for your service. 

8. Word of Mouth Marketing

Before the advent of social media and other internet marketing platforms, word of mouth plays a huge role in marketing a product.

The word of mouth is nothing but when the people love your product or service, they tend to share it with their friends and families. And this suggestion makes them go for your product when they are in need of a similar kind of service. 

In modern times, the word of mouth depends on the ratings and reviews that you get from your customers. 

According to impactbnd.com, 92% of people believe the suggestions from friends and family. And the word of mouth strategy drives 4x more sales than paid advertising. 

Also almost 88% of people trust online reviews. That is why almost every online brand recommends its customers to leave a review. 

So encourage your customers to leave a review on your site and share them on your landing page or relevant service pages etc. 

9. Add Blogs to Your Website

Blogs are the backbone of every marketing strategy. Blogs build trust between the company and customers. 

It can be used to answer customer questions and can be used to address the problems of the customer. 

A good informative blog alone brings a whole lot of traffic to your website. 

Not many of the websites get organic traffic like customers type in your name and visit your website. In this case, blogs can help you solve this problem. 

Blogging helps your website to be active. If your blog is well organized for SEO, then you get a chance to be at the top of the search engine results page, which in turn drives more traffic to your website.

You can also share your blog on social media platforms and it also solves the social media content problems too. 

10. Email marketing

Based on the research done by optinmonster.com, 99% of the customers check email on a daily basis. 

This proves that email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing strategies. Any business can make use of email marketing to drive traffic to their website.

Email marketing in the vacation rental business can help you increase the traffic to your website thus increasing bookings.

The steps to create an effective email marketing strategy are,

• Collect the potential leads
• Segregate them based on your criteria 
• Build an email list with the segregated leads
• Create an email template
• Launch the campaign
• Review the analytics for open rates and click-through rates, etc.

We have covered almost every best marketing strategy for a vacation rental business to be successful. But applying any one of the above-said marketing strategies is not going to be a successful one. 

You can get better results in terms of traffic and conversions, if you use all these strategies together. Another important thing is that in order to keep surviving in this competitive market, you need to start learning and adapting the change.