Marketing for Vacation Rentals, Bed and Breakfast, Inns, Accommodations, 2nd Home Owners in Real Estate, Motels and Hotel Owners.
Marketing in the 21st century for Vacation Rental Owners has gone through so many profound changes that it’s difficult to keep up with, especially business owners who were in business before the year 2000. I happen to be one of them.
I started my first business in 1982 in New York City and at that time I had a hard time using the answering machine! Boy have a lot of things changed! I can hardly believe it and I can hardly recognize my own business. From the way you do things globally and socially, to the way you get information across to your end user.
Having a business website, I had one in 1993 and that was a first for many businesses. Now you can’t function without a website. The other big change is reaching out to your customer via social media, something we like to call ‘social media marketing.’ Social media marketing has been around for years, maybe even decades—but, it has changed drastically. Newsletters, or mailing out ads to get your business out there, is now done from your computer. I remember receiving newsletters via snail mail or via the fax. Nowadays, you put your ad on socially used websites, so the current era can see them faster and easier.
The modernized era is the internet era, teens and twenty-year-olds spend quite a bit of time on the internet, as well as websites such as Amazon, EBay and most importantly Google. You even have the use of blogs such as WordPress, which is becoming popular by the second.
Remember that our future vacation rental guests will be these very same Millennials who will be trying out our vacation rentals. How do we reach them? We go to where they are, which is, on the web and on the social media sites.
Speaking of WordPress, which brings me to the blogging aspect of the modernized era. The importance of social media marketing is also in tune with blogging. A blog means writing an article or a weblog and what a blog essentially does is create a faster revenue for word-of-mouth for marketing and businesses.
The modernized era’s word-of-mouth tactic has been used widely since the beginning of the era. The current era talks a lot about what they see, what they hear and if it catches their interest they tell other people to check it out as well; which, leads to more people getting information and the cycle continues.
Blogging can also be noticed easier by the media, which can lead to interviews by well known people. Such as, if you aren’t in any sort of business and you are just starting out, a major company may see your blog and you could potentially have a job lined up.
You don’t want to come off on your blog as if you’re preaching to your audience, it’s more on a friendly chat level instead of a client level. One important aspect about blogging amongst many other things is the fact that search engines use blogs for key words, meta tags and tags on a specific topic content. Blogs are read generally, by a community of people with similar interests, it allows people to comment on what you say and therefore create a conversation from it.
There are some cons that come along with blogging, as with most things in life. Blogging needs constant attention, it’s required that you spend and take your time to create daily postings.
You don’t want to clutter your blog, but you also don’t want to make too few postings on the opposing end either. In the marketing of the current era, blogging seems to be the top runner when it comes to marketing other than internet ads. So maybe this is the route to start taking. It will take some time and much needed research, but we need to adapt nonetheless to the present-day’s media marketing adventure. For vacation rental owners you can blog about upcoming events, activities, shopping and restaurants.
Yes, I know it takes time to blog, but since google is looking for new material, you can add an activity blog on your vacation rental’s website, that way your website will move up Google’s listing.
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Reaching Out to Generation X and Y as a Vacation Rental Owner
Advertising to the Millennial Generation or Generation Y is one thing, but advertising to the millennial about travelling is another thing. It’s different because the 21st century consumers don’t travel as often as the generation before. If anything, the present generation only travels on holidays or spring breaks when they get a chance to get away from school, work or their business.
Most of the 21st century consumers either go to school full-time/part-time, or have a job that’s similar as well. The best time to get into the peripheral vision of the new generation consumer is to advertise at the right time The best time to advertise is around holiday’s, and around times where you know traveling is going to be something that they are going to be doing, summer is a perfect time to attract the Millennial Generation of travellers.
When it comes to consumers and traveling, the Millennial Generation is one of the most tech savvy generations. They book online more so than they book anywhere else, and that is important to know because you want your ads to be where the consumers are.
Another thing that is good to know is that the new generation goes off word-of-mouth quite a bit. If they hear that something works and it works very well, there’s a good chance they are going to use it. That’s how websites such as Amazon and EBay got their popularity. Someone told someone else about how reliable and cheap it was and then that someone told someone else and so on, the cycle continues. For vacation rental owners, it’s important to get good testimonials from past guests and publish the comments on your website so the younger travellers have a source of testimonials to refer to from past travellers.
Apps are something to look into, young travellers are owners of smartphones and the smartphones do everything for them and more. They can be used for pretty much anything in daily life. There’s booking hotel/motel apps made for smartphones especially and that’s another way to get your brand off the ground and hit the consumers you want to hit.
The Millennial Generation or Generation Y download all kinds of apps, especially if they’re free. They are constantly on their phone and it’s rare when they are not. Today’s generation also trusts social media quite a bit, they are huge on Twitter and Facebook and things that cause us to interact with a company personally. As long as they don’t have to talk on the phone, or drive to a destination, the Millennials are up for it. Whatever they can do in the comfort of our own home, or on the comfort of their own phone, that’s the way to get to them.
Vacation rental Apps are important because it’s something the new generation is constantly into. A way that a vacation rental, or hotel, or even motel could get that kind of demographic traffic would be to create a business app.
An app that lets the new generation buy and check out your business while on the go. They should be able to see and make a reservation with the vacation rental or Breakfast and Breakfast owner, and they should be able to contact the owner directly through the App as well. That’s something that the Millennial traveller really enjoys.
There have been apps that let you do all the above and it has been shown to really help. Sometimes consumers don’t necessarily book hotels, or bed and breakfasts’ in advance, they wait until they get to the town or city they are going to and then do it.
An app is perfect for that because they can do it right when they are in the city/town/country and they don’t have to call or go to the hotel and risk them not having a room. A good App would be one that shows you if there is availability and then the consumer can choose if they want to continue or not to contact the accommodation.
Learn how to transform your rental property into the money making machine it can be!
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