5 Simple Ways To Improve Your Short-Term Rental Marketing And Boost Bookings
Short-term rental property owners are facing more unbooked calendar dates than ever before.
My last few blogs focused on ways to refresh and reboot your online listing and photos to ensure they were showing your short-term rental (STR) property in the best possible light, creating an emotional connection with prospective guests, and differentiating your location from those of your competitors to make your property more compelling. Before you take advantage of the marketing tips in today’s column, I strongly urge you to review those blogs and use those tips to polish your Online Travel Agency (OTA) listing.
The STR industry is encountering significant economic headwinds right now, and Vacaygency has been fielding an unprecedented volume of inquiries from new and experienced owners who are facing unnerving gaps in their booking calendars. Inflation and higher gas prices are taking their toll on the travel sector, for sure, but there are plenty of tactics you can use right now to boost your bookings. What’s been interesting to me is how many owners are ignoring these simple tactics to widen their sales and marketing efforts because they seem so basic. Well, they are basic. And they work!
There are dozens of OTAs to choose from for your rental property. Don’t limit yourself - use as many as is appropriate and reach the audiences you need.
Tactic #1: Add Additional OTAs To Your Mix
After you refurbished your preexisting rental listings, it’s time to review your options to expand your reach. While Airbnb and Vrbo receive much of the press, and both have significant consumer marketing campaigns active lately to acquire new guests and increase bookings through their respective services, they are by no means the only OTAs you should use. Literally dozens of individual sites exist, each with their own pricing structure, unique market focus, service features, user base, listing content presentation, and equally varied success rates for generating bookings. You should investigate what’s available to see where you can expand your reach with booking sites that integrate well with your current channels.
While we never recommend a shotgun approach – it takes too much time, effort, and energy to manage and maintain listings on too broad a range of OTA websites – we do routinely place a property’s listing on an average of five sites, and eight to ten when appropriate. Ranch properties are an example of a unique rental type that is appropriate for more than the usual mix of listing sites, as there are sites like Hipcamp focused on those types of listings. Of course, each OTA site will need a listing post tailored to its unique content design.
A Facebook business page is an essential marketing tool for your short-term rental property
Tactic #2: Create A Facebook Business Page
You should have a Facebook business page dedicated to EACH of your listings. And don’t be dissuaded because you’ve heard the user base skews relatively high in age; it has a strong user base in the 25- to 45-year-old segments, and we successfully market hip urban locations via FB pages and FB ads. It’s killer for the 35- to 65-year-old family markets, and targeting female travelers in particular (currently the primary booking gender segment) is a sound marketing strategy. These pages are searchable by search engines, so the pages show up in prospective guests’ online searches for matching properties / locations.
Treat the page as you would any other OTA listing site, and make your property info as complete, engaging, emotional, and dynamic as possible. We do recommend couching the actual property address and your personal info, to ensure privacy. A simple page can be set up and live in under 30 minutes, but we recommend you take your time, transfer as much info as possible from your existing OTA listings, and load the page with photos (including captions and details!). You can post to your heart’s delight on your own page to promote yourself and all the cool local adventures that await your guests. It also gives you an easy conduit to ask visitors to join your mailing list(s) so you can send them direct promotional emails.
Some owners choose to use one FB business page as an umbrella for all their properties. We strongly disagree with this. Each property should stand alone so you can post photos, descriptions, offers, and property-specific upgrades and notices only on the page dedicated to that property and its specific audience. It’s easy to post info about one of your properties on the page of another, if need be. If you have multiple properties and are determined to group them for simplicity, we suggest doing so only for properties in the same geography (city, or other relatively small region). Anything more and you look like a corporate real estate portfolio manager, and the crucial emotional connection between the property and the prospective (or past) guest is lost.
Create an creating an impressive, compelling website for your property
Tactic #3: Create A Website For Your Property
Admittedly, this one is a little more complex, but the cost is minimal. Maintaining your own website for your property (in conjunction with the OTSs, not in lieu of them) has huge advantages. It’s searchable online, so if it has been optimized with the right words, phrases, and photos, you can capture online searchers when they look for rentals in your area. Search engine optimization (SEO) as it’s called is a big topic and challenging to accomplish. As a starting point, use the content from your recently revitalized OTA listing. With your own website, there is no (practical) limit to the info you can post, how you arrange it, or how you present your property and the surrounding attractions. You can post descriptions and current information, capture bookings, add unlimited photos, post blogs, and capture the contact info of prospective and past guests (that all-important opt-in email address for future booking promotions). Though it can feel daunting at first, sites like Wordpress make going live with your own website a relatively quick and painless process. If you’d rather outsource, there’s no shortage of freelancers (and agencies like Vacaygency) that are available and have experience.
Incidentally, creating an impressive, compelling website does go beyond just the website itself, because now we’re getting into realm of building a great brand for your property – something guests will resonate with, return to, and gladly share with their friends and family. The starting point is a fantastic and meaningful name for the property – something unique that reflects the look, feel, and above all, the experience at your location. It takes thought and care to choose a smart name that is memorable, marketable, and sets you apart from competitors, and I could write a half dozen blogs on the naming process alone. I’ve personally named companies, products, master-planned communities, real estate developments, and individual short-term rentals – let me tell you, it’s HARD to do well. But it’s absolutely worth it, and once you have the right name and a beautiful, meaningful logo to go with it, you’re on your way to creating a business with long-term viability.
Offer enticing discounts to your previous guests
Tactic #4: Send Promotions To Previous Guests
Now that you’ve revitalized your listing and made it look and sound irresistible, it’s time to message previous guests with a significant savings offer, if you haven’t done so in the past few weeks. Write a personal note, from yourself or the host (if different), tie in the season, local attractions, the benefits of some of the property’s special features. Tell them that to thank them for their previous visit you’d like to offer them a discount of xx% off the nightly rate for their next visit, then set the terms. I recommend giving at least two weeks and no more than three weeks for them to respond to the offer by booking your property (use specific dates in your message), and give them the date range for which the offer is valid (…for stays now through August 31st …for your next 2022 visit). Keep it light, friendly, personable, and relatively short. This is also a perfect way to use your previous guests as an extended sales team: let them know they can share the offer with their friends and family, and you’ll honor the discount for those stays as well.
For the discount offer, 10% is the absolute minimum; 15% is what we typically recommend as a minimum discount, and generally speaking the higher the discount the bigger boost to your bookings.
If you’re able to use actual discount codes for previous guests in a particular channel (OTA, your website, FB biz page, etc.) do so. It will make tracking campaigns and their relative success much easier. SUMMER15 is a good example of an appropriate code for a 15% discount right now.
A few cautions. First, don’t email your previous guests if you haven’t asked for and received permission to do so, or if they haven’t opted in to your email list themselves (this is where a Facebook biz page and a dedicated property website can help you tremendously). You can run afoul of the CAN-SPAM laws for commercial emails to customers, and the OTAs and your email service (in some cases) may penalize you. Instead, send messages directly to previous guests who haven’t opted-in using the messaging in the OTA they used to book your property. This can be a time consuming process, but it’s a good alternate when for folks whose emails you can’t (yet) use.
Second, if you’re sending an email to an opt-in email list, keep in mind that promotional words like “save,” “discount,” “free,” “special offer” and the like will often trigger email servers (Google, Yahoo!, etc.) to send the email directly to the recipient’s SPAM folder, unless that person has previously marked emails from you as expected and valid. You can avoid this by crafting clever subject lines that talk about your property or location instead. “We’d Love To Host You Again At (Fantastic Property Name)” gets the job done, and in the message body you can explain your discount offer.
Your personal and professional networks may be larger than you think
Tactic #5: Send A Promotional Message To Your Networks
This seems like a no-brainer, but I’m including it because lately when we’ve asked financially challenged owners if they’ve reached out to people in their personal or business networks, the overwhelming majority say they haven’t. Many mention feeling awkward promoting themselves, and not wanting to get asked for more of a discount than they are offering upfront or having to deal with special requests. Some of this hesitation is understandable, for sure, but most of these objections are manageable, and if you’re not using every audience at your disposal to (professionally) market your property, you’re only hurting your bottom line.
Facebook, LinkedIn, other social media channels, online (and offline!) groups to which you’re a member, your church or hiking group…these are all good audiences for your offer. Use the message you created in Tactic #4 above as a starting point and modify it to fit the audience. Facebook is more personal and can be lighthearted, while LinkedIn would be more straightforward and professional. When offering the discount, if you feel you need to preemptively halt anyone (especially friends and family) from asking for more concessions, simply let them know in the original message that the discount is basically your breakeven point. People understand that. Again, you can also use these audiences to spread the word for you by letting them know they can refer their contacts to you, and those referrals will receive the discount as well. Remember, you’re not foisting something onto some hapless random person; you’re extending to the people in your personal and professional worlds a substantial discount to stay at your fantastic rental property for a little while. Sounds like a thoughtful thing to do, and a win-win for everyone involved.
Until Next Time,
Mick