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Effective Marketing to Take Your Small Rental Property to the Next Level
Beautiful homes and great experiences are no longer enough to stay on top in a constantly changing and growing rental landscape. Social media has made the short-term rental market a completely new and highly competitive game where property owners must actively chase and engage with their clientele to hopefully land a successful booking.
Choosing the right tools and strategy to advertise your stay while also building a community of guests can be an intimidating feat, however, this blog will help you to nail down your strategy whether you’re a long-time rental owner or a brand new one.
1. Building Your Brand
Creating a brand around your rental property begins with one question: who is your target audience? When you imagine your future guests, who do you envision? How old are they? What are their hobbies? Are they large families, solo travelers, or honeymooners? Are they looking for a relaxing and tranquil escape or a homebase they can return to after a day of nearby adventure? Defining your target audience allows you to tailor your marketing strategy to the people most likely to be interested in renting your property.
Learning what type of person your rental attracts will also provide insight into who your top competitors are. Try researching your area for short-term rental properties and sort through the comments, reviews, and social media pages to find information on the kind of guests staying at their listing and what features are commented on the most. Not only will this give you an idea of the type of person that gravitates towards your area, but it will also provide ideas on how you can become a competitive player in your local short-term rental market.
Lastly, defining your audience will determine how you design both the functionality and style of your property. Will your guests prefer a more rustic stay with log furniture, a wood-burning stove, and only the sound of nature? Or will they prefer something that looks more mid-century modern and comes with a designated workspace and a Nespresso? Whatever your guests may flock to, your job is to ensure your rental property anticipates their needs while also providing them with their money’s worth.
2. Photo and Video Media
Hiring a professional photographer to stage and take photos and videos of your property is one of the most important investments you can make. While it may feel somewhat materialistic to worry so much about presentation, the reality is that quality photos make your listing look more professional while also highlighting the most swoon-worthy features. It’s important to keep in mind that your guests don’t know you or your property and the first photos they see are what set their expectations about the safety, security, and quality of your listing. Even if you have a strong SEO-driven description and an affordable price, bad photos will push potential guests away and cause them to move on to the next rental in the area.
3. Using Social Media as a Tool
Photos can also be one of the strongest marketing aids available to you, and to wield their full potential, you can use social media. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are the current big three social media platforms for short-term rentals. Using these accounts is vital to your marketing process, however, it can oftentimes feel overwhelming. Social media management is an art and the better you use it, the more profitable your business will be. For anyone who is struggling or just looking for an easy way to boost user engagement, Cool Escapes offers help with social media management, influencer marketing, and paid ads. To better understand social media marketing, we can break it into two categories: business accounts, and influencer accounts.
Business Accounts
Business accounts are where you create a social media page that is run by yourself or a representative to post content, build a community, and keep people up to date on any news, information, or discounts that are currently relevant. To keep your account looking professional, edit your photos using a program like Lightroom and experiment with different kinds of content.
Posts, stories, and reels are three common ways to publish content on social media today. Posts allow you to select a photo and add it directly to your page oftentimes with a geotag and witty caption, and Stories are types of ultra-short form content that only last 24 hours. With Stories, you can create polls or Q+A’s to increase user engagement and, if you post an especially good photo on your story, you can opt to save it to your Highlights where people can look through a curated collection of your property’s best moments. Reels are short video clips that can be up to 90 seconds long and are one of the best ways to draw engagement to your page. You can use reels to post videos of what activities and amenities guests can enjoy at your rental property, such as soaking in the hot tub with a glass of wine or roasting
marshmallows over a fire.
Influencer Accounts
Influencer accounts are run by social media stars who have amassed a giant following of people, often in the hundreds of thousands or millions. These people make money through brand deals and can often be paid or incentivized to advertise products or experiences to their followers. You can offer an influencer a free night stay in your rental property in exchange for them to post content about your stay across their social media platforms. If you want your property to go viral, this could be one of the best ways to succeed. Using influencers to market properties is one of the fastest-growing methods of advertising, however, it’s important to keep in mind that people with larger followings often ask for more compensation in exchange for their posts.
4. Developing a Website
If you’re a modern-day owner of a short-term rental then chances are that you list your property through a third-party site such as Airbnb, Venmo, Hipcamp, or one of the countless other popular platforms. Creating your own business website and creating a Google Business Profile can help make your listing more lucrative, provide you with more growth opportunities, and make your business look more professional.
Setting up a Google Business Profile is simple and easy, and it also adds you as a result on Google Maps and makes you searchable across Google. There are also plenty of website-building platforms available today, such as Squarespace or Wix, that make setting up a website a breeze. Just choose a template and start creating an online home for your property.
You can also use other types of software to take your website to the next level. Perhaps you’ll choose to offer direct booking through your website, or you can streamline your guests’ check-in and in-stay process with a post-booking web app like this one offered by Cool Escapes.
This is also where we can loop back to the idea of building a brand. Pick a cute or rustic
name for your property, perhaps pulling inspiration from nearby natural features or areas of interest, and create a logo. Use this name and logo across your website, social media accounts, ads, and listings. Not only will this make your listing look more professional, but it will also make it easier to remember for anyone who is interested in staying.
5. Email Marketing
While email marketing may seem a little old-fashioned, it’s an excellent way to engage with your audience while directing traffic to your website. You can also use emails to target various groups of guests, such as past guests or new guests. Emails also offer a chance to send your guests tips for activities near your rental, local hotspots for food and fun, or any seasonally exclusive events that pop up year-round that may pique someone’s interest.
Email marketing can also be used to share exclusive promos and discounts. For example, offering discounts to past guests via email marketing could help to build your newsletter subscriber count while solidifying your relationship with your growing community of guests.
6. Working with Locals
Lastly, you should consider working with locals. Perhaps reach out to a local restaurant and see if they’ll give your guests a discount if you direct them their way or see if you can include a small packet of coupons for the nearby grocery store. This can be an excellent opportunity to advertise and market your rental more locally within your town while also helping the locals with their own businesses. Plus, having a strong reputation within your community will also make you more appealing and professional to your guests.
Conclusion
Creating an effective marketing strategy for your short-term rental can seem difficult, but small steps can have massive effects. Implementing the above key strategies can help with user engagement, traffic flow, and, most importantly, successful bookings.
However, sometimes life can get in the way or problems can still arise even with the most dedicated owners, so enlisting the help and proper tools of an outside company such as Cool Escapes to better take care of and market your rental is always an option. Whatever strategy you choose, help and advice will always be just around the corner.