Want to know how to market a vacation rental property? Whether you have a small vacation rental company or a larger operation, you need a smart marketing strategy! Read on to discover some of the worst things you can do in vacation rental marketing and what you should do instead:
❌ Relying Only on OTAs for Bookings
Posting property listings on online travel agencies (OTAs) like Vrbo and Airbnb is one of the most popular marketing strategies for vacation rentals; however, if that’s your main or only source of bookings, it won’t sustain your business in the long run. Why? The constant influx of new properties being added to these sites will only decrease your property’s visibility, and over time, you’ll see less attention and less revenue. Plus, those pesky fees are probably more than your marketing budget.
✅ Focusing on Broad Visibility and Distribution
While there are many benefits of OTAs, and they are a great tool for vacation rental marketing, you can increase your profit by lowering the dependence on OTAs for your online bookings. Even with marketing costs, booking directly through your website is more profitable and more sustainable than continuing to use OTAs as a lifeline rather than a supplemental tool. Read our tips on how to get more direct bookings!
❌ Focusing on Just Driving More Traffic to Your Website
Attention is one of the top driving factors in the vacation rental market, so it makes sense to always be attracting more visitors to your website. But if that’s all you're focusing on, you’re missing an even bigger opportunity: the existing people already viewing your site.
✅ Building a Strong Retargeting Strategy for Existing Viewers
We created Website Visitor Intelligence, a powerful software designed to turn anonymous website visitors into leads! This tool retargets your unknown web traffic, so you can grow your email database, create custom audiences on Facebook, and even help with direct mail distribution.
❌ Making SEO a One-Time Checklist
If search engine optimization is an afterthought, or you think that your strategy is fine since you completed a checklist, then you’re making one of the worst (but most common) SEO mistakes. Trends and the rise of AI demand a flexible and adaptable approach to SEO, and without the foundation of a healthy website, social media, and marketing strategy, your SEO efforts are set up for failure.
✅ Prioritizing an Ongoing SEO Process
A strong vacation rental marketing strategy is more than just creating a basic website; it’s all about building relationships, connecting local SEO with organic SEO, and constantly improving your online presence and building up your website’s authority. Keeping up with SEO can be overwhelming, but not when you partner with IMEG. Marketing is hard; we make it simple!
IMEG Can Help Your Vacation Rental Company Grow
Are you ready to stop relying on OTAs and start boosting SEO for your vacation rental? We have decades of experience working with vacation rental companies of all shapes and sizes, and our main priority isn’t selling services but focusing on results. Learn more about vacation rental marketing and see how our business growth experts can help!
