Vacation rental began as a cottage industry.
Owners rented directly to travelers, and travelers returned to the same destinations every year. Every aspect of running a vacation rental business was engaged in that relationship with the traveler: creating a beautiful home for them to visit, attending to their needs, and maintaining a friendly relationship afterwards so they’d be inclined to visit again.
All of those aspects of vacation rental ownership are still important.
But they’re only half of what you need to succeed today.
Vacation rental is becoming more and more dependent on successful marketing. And as much as vacation rental owners know about running their business locally, very few of them have kept up with the evolving way travelers prefer to book lodging.
To have a successful vacation rental business, you need a marketing strategy that focuses heavily on digital marketing, as the vast majority of your travelers will be searching for you online.
The good news is that there are options for every owner, no matter what your preferred approach.
We hear from owners all the time who say that no one could ever manage their property as well as they can.
We wholeheartedly agree.
Experienced owners know their properties inside and out. They know when the roof was last repaired. They know the pipes can be a little finicky, and they know exactly what to do when they start acting up. They know their guests’ preferences for a vacation rental in their area and how to make sure their property lives up to that ideal.
Once a traveler arrives at a property, experienced hosts have their business well in hand. We doubt any large entity – and we count ourselves – could ever match the breadth and depth of your knowledge.
But to get travelers to find your property in the first place, you’re going to need a marketing strategy.
Our favorite marketing definition is simple and silly: marketing is the stuff you do to get people to buy your stuff.
Translated to vacation rental, marketing is what you do to ensure travelers can find your property, fall in love with it, and book it.
So far, pretty straightforward. But what are the things you need to do to help travelers find you?
To be sure your travelers can find you, you’re going to need to develop an online marketing strategy. It’s incredibly rare for travelers to look anywhere but online for a vacation rental, so your strategy needs to ensure you appear when they search for properties in your area.
If you want to see your website for your property rank on the first page for a search like “tahoe vacation rental cabin,” you’re going to need to perfect the following strategies:
If you have professional marketing experience, you may not find this list daunting at all. We recently spoke to an experienced owner who happened to be an online marketing expert, and she loved the idea of putting her knowledge to use for her vacation rental business. If that sounds like you, then you could absolutely knock your vacation rental marketing strategy out of the park.
For those who aren’t as experienced, you have a couple of options to incorporate marketing strategy into your vacation rental business: learn how to do it yourself, hire an expert, or depend on major listing sites like Vrbo and Airbnb to do the hard work of ranking for you.
We’ll investigate all three options – plus a bonus that saves time and substantially boosts your booking rate.
Your most inexpensive option is to develop your marketing knowledge. There are plenty of free resources for how to market a small business online: this guide by Quicksprout is quite thorough and readable. You can take out books from the library, do research online, and probably develop some pretty substantial marketing skills.
We also highly recommend Matt Landau’s Vacation Rental Marketing Blog as a resource for owners who prefer to be autonomous. His philosophy of “listing site independence” has been very successful for owners who are willing to roll up their sleeves and learn the ins and outs of online marketing.
The downside of this approach is that it takes time, and results aren’t guaranteed. You might spend several years building your website and coaxing it up through the rankings – and in the meantime, you aren’t making any money.
But for owners who are interested in learning about online marketing and feel strongly about being completely autonomous from other entities, this approach may be the right fit for you – especially if you have the luxury of not needing the rental income while you develop your strategy.
Don’t have that kind of time, but do have some money to invest in the project? You might want to hire a marketing company with expertise in small businesses like yours. It’ll be more expensive, but it is likely to bring faster results than you can achieve on your own.
Most marketing companies will give you a reasonable idea of how quickly they can get results for you, and they’ll relieve you of the burden of learning everything about marketing strategy.
If you intend to go this route, it will still take a pretty lengthy amount of time – but not as much as it would to give yourself a professional-level education in marketing. It will also cost substantially more; to get a nice-looking professional website for a small business will cost between $7,000-$10,000, and a monthly retainer for SEO strategy will cost about $251-$500 a month if you shop around for a good deal.
A good content strategy (blog posts, email marketing, social media) will cost you still more, but even assuming you only purchase the above services, you’re looking at at least $10,000 to budget for getting your website live and appearing in the search results for vacation rentals in your area.
That said: you are likely to get measurable results if you work with a reputable online marketing agency, and those results may well be worth that high price tag for you.
The first two options require ongoing maintenance and expense, and they may never achieve ideal results because your competition is stiff: you’re fighting for front-page ranking with major listing sites like Vrbo and Airbnb, which budget millions on their marketing efforts.
Instead of fighting them, your third option is to let the listing sites do the heavy lifting for you.
Major listing sites like HomeAway, Airbnb, and FlipKey pay millions to rank on the front page of every search engine. You can take advantage of their investment and their front-page status to get your property in front of thousands of people every day.
If you want to appear at the top of the results when travelers click from the front page of the search engine to the listing site, you’ll need to follow the listing site’s standards for property ranking.
Each listing site has its own algorithm for determining which properties are likely to book, but this is the basic vacation rental ranking formula for all of the major players: HomeAway, Vrbo, Airbnb, FlipKey, TripAdvisor, and Booking.com.
These standards are essentially SEO lite. The listing site does the heavy lifting for you by getting on the front page of a search engine like Google. You then make sure you rank well within the listing site – a much easier proposition, since their algorithm is far simpler and competition is not as extreme.
We broke down all the vacation rental listing site fees here, but the bottom line is that you’ll pay around $1,000 annually to have a listing on each of these major sites. If you’re willing to make adjustments to your business model to rank well on a listing site, this option will get you the fastest results for the least amount of time or money compared with your alternatives.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention our services as an option.
We list you for free on every major listing site, provide free professional photography, dynamic rates, and expertly written listing descriptions. We also field all your booking inquiries so you have prompt response times and accurate calendars. We do all of this for an industry-low management fee of 10% – which means you don’t have to pay for any of these services if we don’t do our job and get you bookings.
We’ve been able to double, triple, and even quadruple owners’ bookings for them compared to their independent efforts and those of professional property managers. That’s a fantastic return on your investment with us – and we have no contract and no cancellation fee, which means you’re welcome to leave and try another strategy at any time if you’re not happy with our performance.
You know you’re going to need a great marketing strategy to succeed in vacation rental. If you’re not up for the time and effort it takes to do it independently, why not work with the people who know vacation rental marketing inside and out – and have the results to show for it?
It’s worth thinking about.
If you’re only focused on the experience your travelers have when they arrive at your vacation rental, you’re only running half of your business. You may be the best imaginable owner with the best imaginable property – but if no one can find you online, you’re going to have a hard time making an income.
Marketing strategy is essential to every vacation rental owner today, so we highly recommend learning more about what’s involved and deciding on an approach that fits your budget and your lifestyle.
Vacation rental may have started out as a cottage industry, but it is rapidly becoming mainstream, and every owner needs to make sure they stay competitive as it evolves.
Feeling daunted by all this information? We don’t blame you one bit. This industry is changing rapidly, and staying ahead of the curve is a full time job. In fact, it’s our full-time job. If you want the easiest possible route to successful online marketing for your vacation rental, click here to learn more about what we offer.