From the perspective of a former hotel marketer.
As I’ve been looking through job applications, I realize much of my skills are transferable — to other industries and various hospitality groups. As far as I can tell, despite having bigger budgets to buy into more robust SaaS, pretty much everything I do at the enterprise level can be done at a small business too. Since I have the most experience marketing the hotel industry, let’s take a look and see if I’d be any good explaining how I’d market a vacation rental instead…
Set the Message
First things first, what is it the message I’m trying to get across and what does success of getting that message across looks like? In my opinion, the message now touches on cleanliness, health, and safety. Success looks like improvements on: total & specific page views and time spent by marketing channel, booking engine looks, and email/loyalty sign ups.
- Cleanliness: Not just that things are clean, but how does a guest know and what did you do to make it clean? Every guest is now a potential housekeeping supervisor. At a vacation rental this could be email messaging that explains process changes, photos of how the space should look, and methods of contact if something seems amiss when the guest arrives.
- Health: For a place that has the advantage of the great outdoors, this is a time to market outdoor at-home activities available. This could be anything from a volleyball net in the yard to giant Jenga for an oversized patio. Again, if you are aware of the weather for their trip, pre-arrival emails can encourage your guests to keep the windows open or spend time outside while at your home.
- Safety: Safety is paramount for your guest. No one wants to carry a Door Jammer with them when they travel. Touch on details of location, building or home security features that your guest may find useful.
Find the Demand
Then, I search for head terms. Head Terms are just the most popular phrases people search for your product when they don’t know the name of your product. Head terms aren’t always single words, they can be phrases too, like — dc vacation rentals or boutique hotels alexandria va.
When you know your head terms, you’ll find the major competitors and potential content strategies to implement. Search for your head terms and look at the results page for:
- map results showing result density in any specific area
- look at how many reviews top competitor listings have and their ratings & prices
- open the top organic site listings, likely to be aggregators or resellers
- read the top paid listings looking for sitelinks, descriptions, other extensions
- check out what other extensions like answer boxes and related searches
When first searching, I suspect people frequently click & expand the map section and look for availability & price in their specific need area. Once they have an idea, I then believe people go back and search for both head and long-tail terms. Long-tail search phrases are those that have slightly less search volume and probably contain more words than head terms do. Individually, they may not be as popular, but long-tail search terms frequently are more qualified, more ready to book, and give us insights into the type of person searching. I believe to influence how much presence a rental can have in both search and in maps is predicated on how much paid media and organic optimization the brand has with Google on both head and long-tail phrases.
The signals have to be natural and come from a variety of channels; somewhat specifically PPC, SEO, social media, other websites (like influencers or bloggers), directory listings as well as OTAs and Metasearch engine signals. Altogether this builds “authority” and “popularity” — things Google really likes when it ranks a page in its results.
For each search query I’ve decided are relevant and priority I look at the top three organic result sites. In the travel industry these sites are almost always aggregators and resellers. And in many cases, many of these sites are big brands with big SEO budgets, so I know those pages have probably been optimized. So on their landing page I review for their section headings, listing photos, price, reviews, and location description.
Analyze the Competition
Looking at HomeToGo.com’s DC landing page it’s obviously optimized for search queries. Based on the layout I can see there is a demand for homes with pools, pets, and balconies. If I had any of these features I’d be sure to highlight it in the initial photos and description of the property.
Similarly VRBO has a very optimized landing page for DC rentals and they too feature pets, but also family friendly — which I guess suggests larger rentals and maybe pools. I would review that category to see if I can find any obvious filters or commonalities that make them family friendly. VRBO also features a section about nearby cities which helps show competition and demand for my specific city or neighborhood in DC.
Additional Research — YouTube & Google Trends
Get a leg up on competition with YouTube and its 2 billion users watching 1 billion hours of video every day. YouTube advertising is fine for static ads, but if you have a video or series, YouTube can be a great method for increasing reach and reservations, such as with a virtual walk-through of the rental space.
Input the prioritized search terms and look for the date it was uploaded, views, video quality and length. Also, check to see if the same YouTuber is featured on the first page more than once. If you don’t have video content, perhaps partnering with a local, popular YouTuber can get you some.
In this dc vacation rental search, I found a lot of good topics: executive rentals (fully furnished, long term) and 420 rentals (if that’s your bag). I also found a new-to-me term: getaway house. If I had a remote property I would consider working this term + its closest city into relevant copy.
If I still want more insights into the types of phrases and audience looking for vacation rentals, I’ll consult Google Trends and my analytics tools — like the data from Airbnb or Google Analytics. I’m looking into additional tools to find out:
- When does the existing audience travel most frequently? From here I will focus budgets into peak seasons in order to align marketing dollars to the most profitable booking windows.
- When do they stay the longest? Now that travelers are more concerned about cleanliness, turning a rental property frequently may not be so lucrative. Knowing when travelers stay the longest can help me set rates and marketing messages to maximize revenue.
- Where do they come from? To save budget in the beginning, I can narrow a marketing campaign down to show only in specific cities, states, or DMA regions where I already receive travelers.
So, for example, if I wanted to move more stays from the nearby drive market, I can create a Google Ads campaign that shows only to people within 500 miles and who are planning travel. Within this audience, I can then narrow the audience to promote unique messaging to various types of people, such as Parents of Children <18 and Car Enthusiasts.
While the easiest sidestep, it’s enlightening to know my skills are transferable. And, if you are looking for help marketing your Airbnb, please reach out on LinkedIn and connect. I very much enjoy talking about and brainstorming digital marketing strategies with new clients.
