Vacation Rental Marketing I’ve been following Vanessa Warwick’s blogs and posts recently. Vanessa is co-founder of Property Tribes – a UK based landlord and property investment community and owns several holiday lets in the UK and Cyprus. This post caught my eye this morning as it mirrors my philosophy on marketing vacation rentals and references a great bit of research that supports it. A little known fact about me is that I was once employed by Boots the Chemist in England, as a Happiness Consultant. Inspired by Robert Holden’s original Happiness Project the Boots programme offered a series of courses and seminars, but it didn’t last long….it seemed that motivating unhappy people to take a course in how to be happier was a harder job than they had envisaged. However the training programme I had to take was fascinating and I got to learn a lot about the concept of happiness and how it affects our health and well being. So this research that suggests “the happiest people were the ones in the weeks leading up to a vacation” was appealing since it tells us we should be targeting our potential guests anticipatory nature and this is something that can be done with a good marketing strategy. What does this mean? It’s important to note that “the most up to date information is always the most relevant” – therefore there is no point in your website or marketing never changing to reflect the seasons. Vanessa really hits the nail on the head with her concept of developing a ‘marketing matrix’. She describes a layered mix of events, property attributes, and ‘packages’ to deliver a focused strategy for using blog posts and marketing materials to promote what is going on in the property locations. The key issue is working well in advance, knowing what events are coming up and matching them up with features of the home, then creating an appealing and attractive package to draw in the interest. Knowing a little about SEO and social media works well too, but once the foundation of fresh content is there, the rest becomes a little easier. This is what is so vital in keeping traffic coming to your web site or blog – ring the changes and create the anticipation – after all, creating happiness is one of the best parts of doing this business.
