Owning a vacation rental is a great way to make some extra cash and also have a space to go away and relax if you so choose. However, because vacation rentals are a growing market, more and more people are coming to space.
As a result, you need to find ways to grow your business and attract more attention to your rentals. One of the best vacation rental marketing strategies is to use social media to bring more attention to what you have to offer.
Social media is used by over 4 billion people, and many experts believe this number will only continue to grow in the coming years. But how can you go about using social media to grow your vacation rental? Well, that is exactly what this article is going to take a closer look at.
Local Social Media Marketing
When using social media, you want to post plenty about your rentals. You want to offer up how it looks, what it has to offer, and the experience it can provide potential guests. Highlight location attractions or water front views. However, if everything that you post is essentially a giant ad for your rental, it can actually push potential followers away. It can often feel a little bit too spammy.
Instead, make sure that you vary your posting. You should be posting other content that your guests could find useful. These could be tips for packing for a rental, post helpful infographics, blog posts with sustainable travel tips, and everything in between.
Also, depending on where your rental is located, you could also market yourself as a local expert. If you can post about things to do around your rental, you can provide them value and help highlight all of the fun things nearby. In general, you want to show a little personality with some of your posts.
While it would be great if your audience and potential customers just found your social media page and vacation rental, this doesn’t happen. You need to find ways to reach out to them and show them what you have to offer. Thankfully, there are a couple of different ways to do this.
For example, using hashtags can be a good idea. If you hashtag your city or other relatable tags, people can discover your page if they are browsing that hashtag. There are also trending hashtags on many platforms that you can add to your posts or profile to help reach more people. Make sure to use location-specific hashtags such as #Biloxi, MS.
Also, there is the potential to advertise on social media, as well. This can help you reach out to a specific market and show them your profile and rental, but it will generally come with a cost.
Use Plenty of Visuals
While text content is great, visual content is generally king. This is because we as humans can process images much faster than text-based content. Therefore, if you use visuals, they will generally get more engagement and attention from those scrolling through social media than text posts will.
It takes less time to fully process these images than words, so more people are likely to consume your content in full if it is visual in nature. While text-based posts are definitely needed at times, you would be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t post plenty of pictures of your rental, highlighting the best parts of it.
In addition to pictures, also consider posting videos. This could be videos of things to do nearby or even a detailed walkthrough of the rental to show people what it has to offer. Even things like infographics or colorful posters/graphics of your rental are often better than simply writing about it.
Be Interactive and Engage With Your Audience
Social media is an interactive platform by design. It is not a one-way street, and it allows people to communicate and have conversations with each other easily. Therefore, if you want your rental business to grow, you need to be interactive and engage with your audience.
You should answer audience questions, ask them questions, respond to reviews and comments (positive and negative) and generally stay in touch with past guests. Doing all of this can help keep your audience loyal, and can help show that you are a trustworthy and high-quality place to stay.
While this is a lot of work, it can be well worth it to find ways to improve your business and reach new customers. In addition to engaging with your audience, exchanging ideas and tips with other vacation rental owners and managers can also be a good practice to adopt.
In conclusion, we hope that this article has been able to help you learn just how to use social media to grow your vacation rental business. It can be a competitive space, but with the right tactics on social media, you can certainly achieve success.
