There is nothing more frustrating for Airbnb hosts and property managers than creating the perfect short term rental only to receive zero bookings.
To avoid this unfortunate situation, you need to establish an efficient vacation rental marketing strategy.
Such a strategy combines all your efforts to get your property in front of as many guests as possible. It refers to tactics applied on Airbnb and other distribution channels and those implemented elsewhere, such as on your vacation rental website, social media, and email.
With the ever-growing number of vacation rental properties, how you list and market your property becomes increasingly important. The more potential guests see your listing, the more bookings you will get, which will translate into a higher rental income and better return on investment.
In this article, we will provide 21 actionable tips on how to build and launch an effective marketing plan for your vacation rental. Our tips are organized into 9 clear categories to improve navigation for hosts and property managers and make things more manageable.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
- Understanding Your Target Audience
- Crafting Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
- Leveraging Vacation Rental Platforms
- Optimizing Your Online Presence
- Utilizing Social Media to Engage and Attract Guests
- Driving Bookings With Email Marketing
- Encouraging Reviews and Referrals
- Driving Paid Traffic to Your Vacation Rental
- Using the Right Vacation Rental Marketing Tools
Understanding Your Target Audience
One of the most important features of an effective vacation rental marketing plan is that it should be designed according to the interests and preferences of the target guest persona.
Each short term rental tends to cater to a specific demographic, and the characteristics of this group should be a leading factor in the design and implementation of the advertising campaign.
Tip 1: Identify Your Ideal Guests
As a first step, a host or a property manager needs to identify the ideal guests for their vacation rental. This should be done based on the specifications of the market, the property type and size, the furnishings, the Airbnb amenities, and the provided experiences.
For instance, if you own a beach house in one of the most popular resort towns in Florida or California, you’re likely to cater to families with children looking for the perfect getaway for their vacation.
If, on the other hand, you own a short term rental apartment in the downtown area of a business hub, you’ll most likely host business travelers.
Similarly, in case you rent out a small, cozy condo in an affordable market, you might attract digital nomads working remotely.
So, once you conduct vacation rental market and property analysis, you should be able to identify your niche guests and build your marketing strategy based on their needs and preferences.
Tip 2: Tailor the Marketing Message to Your Ideal Guests
After you have narrowed down your guest niche, you should incorporate them into your vacation rental’s marketing plan. For your strategy to be truly effective, it needs to address the exact needs and expectations of your target audience.
To achieve this, you need to conduct some research to figure out what attracts this type of guest and what they are looking for in the ideal Airbnb rental and experience.
Once you know this, you need to work on a marketing message that appeals to your target guests. This should be reflected in the value proposition of your short term rental as well as in the language that you use in your marketing campaigns.
For instance, if you cater to business travelers and remote workers, you can highlight the quiet area, the home office that you provide, and the availability of a coffee machine and a microwave.
If you want to attract couples, you can also mention the proximity to trendy restaurants and the romantic atmosphere.
Crafting Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
One of the best ways how to get more bookings on Airbnb is to create a unique space and a unique experience and to market them well in your listing and elsewhere. In other words, top-performing vacation rental properties have a unique selling proposition or USP.
Tip 3: Define What Makes Your Vacation Rental Stand Out
To be able to market the uniqueness of your short term rental property, first, you need to define what it is that makes your property different from everyone else in the market.
Plenty of factors can make your rental stand out from the competition, including—but not limited to—the location, the property type, the amenities, and the experiences that you deliver as a host or a property manager.
Your vacation rental might be located in the best area of town, close to all the tourist attractions. You might also rent out a treehouse, a castle, or a yacht, which would make your property attractive on its own.
However, even if you don’t own a unique property type located in the most desired area, you can work on offering outstanding amenities (such as a swimming pool or a hot tub) or providing exciting experiences (such as a taste of the local cuisine or a crash language course) to differentiate yourself from the competition.
The sky’s the limit when it comes to how to create a unique Airbnb listing.
Tip 4: Communicate Your USP in Your Vacation Rental Marketing Materials
The uniqueness of your rental is of little use unless you market it appropriately. Thus, as soon as you identify your USP, you need to integrate it into your vacation rental marketing strategy. Indeed, you should turn this into the central point around which your entire marketing plan is built.
First, you should clearly state what you offer in your vacation rental listing on Airbnb and other platforms where your rental is distributed.
Second, you need to use similar language in other marketing channels, such as social media, email, and paid ads, to boost the results of your marketing campaign.
Leveraging Vacation Rental Platforms
While there are many different ways to market your vacation rental, the absolutely most efficient way is to list your property on short term rental websites.
Following are some tips on how to maximize the benefits that they provide to hosts and property managers:
Tip 5: List Your Rental on Multiple Channels
To optimize visibility and increase vacation rental bookings, it’s a smart idea to list your property on multiple platforms.
While Airbnb is the norm in the vacation rental industry, the power of Vrbo, Booking.com, and some more niche websites like Lastminute.com and Misterb&b should not be underestimated either. The more distribution channels that your property is available on, the more potential guests will see it, which will increase the number of bookings that you get.
If you’re a part-time host or a property manager with a big portfolio, you might be getting worried about how you’ll be able to manage multiple listings on different platforms, each with its own specifications and requirements.
The use of the best Airbnb channel manager can help you solve this problem. This vacation rental management software tool will allow you to bring all your listings under a single roof to improve titles and descriptions, add amenities, and adjust pricing.
Tip 6: Optimize Your Listing
The next step in your vacation rental marketing plan should be Airbnb listing optimization. There are many things you can do to boost your listing’s ranking in guest searches on Airbnb and other distribution channels.
For starters, it’s important to conduct keyword research to identify the most relevant words to include in your listing title and description. You can check out top-performing comps in the area or use SEO tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs.
Once you’ve found the most appropriate keywords, you should place them strategically in the title and within the description of your listing.
In addition, regarding the title, you need to craft something that is short and to the point but highlights the unique selling point of your short term rental. You can choose to use a couple of emojis to make your title more visually attractive and emotionally appealing.
In terms of the description, in addition to using keywords, you should try to make it as scannable as possible, using bullet points and numbered lists. Guests don’t like having to read endless paragraphs of text to find out whether a property provides everything they are looking for.
Thus, the easier it is for them to figure out what you provide, the more likely they are to read through your listing and actually book it.
Another key aspect of optimizing your listing is using high-quality, professional photos that highlight all your property’s spaces and amenities. The photos must be high-resolution and meet certain size requirements stipulated by Airbnb.
Furthermore, you should include all amenities that your property has, no matter how big or small they look. Along with the title, the description, and the photos, amenities play a crucial role in the Airbnb SEO algorithm, which is how you market your property on the listing channel.
The Airbnb search engine gives preference to listings that provide more extras than comps even when they are located in the same market, have an identical number of rooms, and offer similar pricing.
Tip 7: Apply Dynamic Pricing
Another key element of a well-planned and well-executed vacation rental marketing plan is dynamic pricing. The short-term rental market is very dynamic, with supply and demand changing daily, and this should be integrated into your vacation rental pricing strategy, which is part of the marketing strategy.
You should set up a baseline daily rate for your property after conducting market research and analysis. This price should be aligned with the nightly rates set up by competitors and be adjusted for the uniqueness of your property.
However, in addition to that baseline pricing, you need to adjust the rate—up or down—every day when your property is available for rent. The factors that should affect your pricing strategy include seasonality, supply, demand, and competitors’ rates.
For instance, if your rental is located in a city that bustles with business travelers during the week, you can afford to raise the nightly prices Monday through Thursday and still get a good occupancy rate. But you’ll need to drop the rates from Friday to Sunday since few people come to the area during the weekend.
To make the process easier and more efficient, hosts and property managers can use Airbnb dynamic pricing tools to automate their pricing strategy. They need to ensure that this feature is available when choosing vacation rental software for their business.
Tip 8: Provide Efficient Communication
The hosts of effective vacation rental listings need to make sure that guest communication is optimized. Maintaining a high response rate and replying to guest messages on time is a major part of the Airbnb SEO algorithm as the platform expects hosts to provide superior hospitality services.
This means that in order to market their vacation rentals well, owners and managers must respond to guests quickly and efficiently before, during, and after their stays. Moreover, they must be proactive in guest communication by supplying guests with all the information they need for a quick check-in, comfortable stay, and convenient check-out.
This can be achieved without the need to be available online 24/7 through the communication automation tools offered by the best vacation rental software.
Optimizing Your Online Presence
While listing your property on the top vacation rental websites is a must, it is not enough to optimize your marketing efforts. Building your own vacation rental website can drive direct bookings, bring in even more reservations, and further grow your revenue.
Importantly, with direct bookings, you don’t have to pay Airbnb host fees and commissions to third-party listings platforms.
Tip 9: Build Your Own Vacation Rental Website
More hosts and property managers are launching their own websites to market their short term rental properties. This is an effective addition to listing your rentals on Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, and other third-party distribution channels.
Many guests don’t use these platforms but search for vacation rentals on Google. Your vacation rental website can take advantage of these searches to attract even more guests.
In the past, having your own website used to be a costly and time-consuming endeavor that required the hiring of a software developer or an entire team. Now, you can benefit from the website builder functionality available on the best Airbnb management software tools to launch your website in a matter of minutes, with no technical skills.
Tip 10: Implement SEO Best Practices
Just having a website where your vacation rental is listed is not enough. You need to enhance your marketing efforts through the best vacation rental SEO tips.
First and foremost, you need to start with diligent keyword research, just like when you are learning how to list on Airbnb and other listing websites. Indeed, once you conduct keyword research for one of these channels, you can use the same keywords for all other channels, including your own website.
Then, you should look for a domain name that incorporates some of these keywords as well as use them in your website title, headings, and content. Make sure to write detailed descriptions of your property, the local market, and tourist attractions. You need a good volume of unique content to boost your Google rankings.
Once again, the overall message of your short term rental website should resonate with your target audience, and this is largely achieved through the use of the right keywords.
Moreover, local SEO is very important for this type of website as you’re trying to market a specific location. This translates into mentioning your neighborhood, city, and state as well as local places of interest as often as relevant in your content.
In addition to keyword optimization on the site, you should also apply some off-page SEO best practices, such as backlink building, to boost your website’s performance on Google and increase its ranking. You could try to connect with real estate agents and travel bloggers to get them to link to your vacation rental website from their websites.
Tip 11: Enhance Your Vacation Rental Marketing Website
Technical SEO is equally important for the performance of your short term rental website. You should make sure that you apply a user-friendly website structure and design which also makes the website easy to discover and read for search engines.
Fast loading times are another crucial factor for vacation rental SEO. Pay close attention to images. While high-quality photos are at the heart of vacation rental marketing, as guests want to know where exactly they will stay, images must use optimal dimensions and sizes so that they don’t negatively affect your website’s speed.
Social media for vacation rentals is an integral part of any marketing strategy. No matter what types of guests you cater to, they are likely to spend a significant amount of time on social media, so you should try to grab their attention there as well.
This is a good opportunity to market your property to a wide range of potential guests who are not even actively searching for vacation rentals at the moment.
Tip 12: Choose the Right Social Media Platforms
The first step in your social media vacation rental marketing planning is to identify the websites and apps where your target audience spends the most time. This will help you concentrate your efforts where they will have the biggest impact.
Generally speaking, social media platforms with strong visual capabilities, like Instagram and Pinterest, are a good place to start. These platforms allow you to highlight the attractiveness of your short term rental through photos and short videos, catching the attention of even those casually scrolling through their accounts.
Moreover, it’s worth exploring video social media websites like YouTube and TikTok, where you can upload videos of your rentals. The good news is that various AI-based vacation rental marketing tools can help you create cost-effective short videos of your property without hiring a professional video maker.
Tip 13: Use Different Content Ideas for Social Media
For the best results, it’s a good idea to share various types of content on your social media channels. In terms of format, you can use images, videos, infographics, and even pure text as long as it’s short and to the point.
Most importantly, you should showcase the unique selling points of your short term rental through high-quality photos and videos that highlight the space, the amenities, and the local area.
But you can go beyond these basics of vacation rental social media marketing by sharing 5-star guest reviews and testimonials, where guests discuss what they liked the most about your property and the experience you provide. This social proof can be a highly effective way to attract more bookings, as customers tend to trust other customers.
Moreover, you can post photos, videos, and facts about local destinations to attract visitors looking for new adventures. In other words, not all social media content should be strictly focused on your property. You should also capitalize on your area’s strengths.
Tip 14: Benefit from Hashtags and Geotags to Increase Your Property’s Discoverability
Another major aspect of your social media strategy is the strategic use of hashtags and geotags. Research what tags your target guests are interested in and use them in your social media posts.
This is a very easy, straightforward, cheap, and yet effective way to boost the discoverability of your social media content.
Driving Bookings With Email Marketing
Another marketing channel that hosts and managers can use to advertise their vacation rentals is email marketing.
Following are some tips on how to benefit from this additional exposure of your listings to potential guests:
Tip 15: Build an Email List of Past and Potential Guests
The first step in running a successful email marketing campaign for vacation rentals is to build a contact list. A larger factor in the effectiveness of your email campaigns is the audience to which you send your messages.
As a host or property manager, you can start by including past guests who enjoyed their experience at your rental. If they have already come once and had a good time, they are likely to want to return and enjoy it one more time.
You should also look for other potential guests from your networks including friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances.
If you manage several properties, it’s a good idea to market different rentals to satisfied guests who have already stayed in one of your rentals. This way, they will know they can enjoy the same high-quality hospitality services in a new location.
Tip 16: Create Engaging Email Campaigns
The second most important component of email marketing—in addition to the email list—is the email campaigns that you send.
Your messages need to be short and to the point, with subjects that are exciting and attractive. Email open rates are extremely low, so you need to offer something unique and interesting for potential guests to open your email at all.
Then, you need to use a couple of attractive photos and short text in the form of bullet points and highlights to grab and retain the attention of guests. You can include your ranking on the Airbnb website as well as one or two guest reviews to prove your good reputation as a host.
In terms of specific content, special offers work particularly well in the vacation rental business. For instance, you can offer a special discount to past guests, for last-minute reservations, or for long-term stays. You can also provide discounted rates during the low season to drive additional bookings.
In addition, it’s a smart move to promote local events in your area that might be of interest to different segments of your email list. Within these messages, you can market your rental as the ideal place to stay during these events.
You can also send seasonal greetings to your contacts without necessarily advertising your listing. This will be a good opportunity to show them that you care while also reminding them of your rental.
Encouraging Reviews and Referrals
Yet another key element of a top vacation rental marketing strategy is guest reviews.
Before booking your property, the vast majority of guests will check out your overall ranking and read through a few reviews from previous guests. When choosing between two otherwise similar listings, guests will go for the one with better reviews as this means that the host really puts in the extra effort to create positive experiences.
Furthermore, the Airbnb ranking algorithm also takes rankings and reviews into consideration.
So, working on 5-star reviews will increase your listing’s visibility and boost your bookings, improving your occupancy, revenue, and ROI.
Tip 17: Actively Ask for Reviews
Of course, the most important factor in obtaining positive reviews from guests is providing excellent experiences. Your property must be exactly as advertised in your listing, or better. It must also be well-maintained, professionally cleaned, and fully restocked. Moreover, you must always be available to answer any questions and address any concerns.
But almost equally important is getting guests to write a review. The most effective way to do that is to directly ask them to do so. You might be surprised how many guests are willing to share their positive experiences with other guests, but they simply need to be reminded to do so.
So, you can automate a campaign to check up on guests a couple of days after they check out to confirm that everything was great with their stay and ask them to write a review. Sometimes it’s as simple as that.
Tip 18: Encourage Guests to Leave Reviews and Refer Friends
Needless to say, while many guests will be happy to review your listing, others might need extra encouragement to do so. It really depends on the person, and your vacation rental marketing should account for both types of guests.
To motivate the second kind of guests, you can offer them a discount on their future stays if they are willing to help you out with a review. Similarly, you can provide past guests with discounts or even a commission if they refer their friends and family to book your rental. Referrals are another efficient strategy to boost reservations.
Yet another thing you can do to encourage guests to review your property is to review them as guests. This helps enhance their reliability on the Airbnb platform and makes future bookings easier.
Driving Paid Traffic to Your Vacation Rental
Organic marketing efforts can achieve a lot, including listing on different platforms, launching your own website, using social media, and deploying email marketing.
However, paid vacation rental advertising strategies can help you improve your business’s performance and attract even more reservations.
Tip 19: Run Google Ads
The most obvious choice to enhance your vacation rental’s visibility is to launch a Google Ads campaign. This can be a particularly helpful step for new listings as it usually takes time for the Airbnb and Google algorithms to pick up your property and website and start ranking it.
So, paid ads might be able to get you these highly coveted first few bookings, so you can start working on 5-star reviews, building a list of email addresses, and optimizing other components of your general marketing strategy.
However, you should keep in mind that Google Ads can get pretty expensive, especially in the hospitality industry in general and the vacation rental business in specific, where competition is tough, and bids are high.
Thus, this strategy might be counterproductive for hosts unless they have experience in paid marketing. It might be a better fit for Airbnb property managers who are familiar with ads or can hire a marketing expert to help them out.
Tip 20: Try Social Media Paid Ads
Vacation rental professionals might also utilize social media ads. You can incorporate paid ads into your social media marketing plan.
Sometimes, boosting one of your posts for a few dollars per day might bring in a high volume of potential guests to get things moving, particularly if you’re just getting started in the business.
It’s important to note that boosting social media posts is somewhat more intuitive than launching a Google Ads campaign. However, elaborate social media ad campaigns are equally complicated.
With both types of campaigns, it’s crucial to keep a close eye on the cost and make sure that the additional expense is producing the expected results by attracting more bookings.
Finally, building and implementing an effective vacation rental marketing campaign can easily turn into a full-time job. While this might work for short term rental management companies with large teams, it’s not plausible for DIY hosts or independent property managers.
The good news is that using the right tools can considerably decrease the amount of manual work required while boosting results.
Tip 21: Get the Best Vacation Rental Software
The final tip on how to market your vacation rental is to get access to the right vacation rental software that incorporates the required marketing tools.
The Mashvisor vacation rental software offers all the tools and features that hosts and property managers need to launch their marketing campaigns:
- The Mashvisor channel manager helps you manage all your listings from a single platform, no matter how many properties you own or websites you advertise on. To enhance efficiency, you can edit your listing titles and descriptions to optimize them for SEO once and then push these changes to all listing platforms without retyping the same text repeatedly.
- The Mashvisor dynamic pricing allows you to automate your pricing strategy to maximize revenue and return on investment. By integrating your listings with Mashvisor, you can choose whether to receive recommendations based on the performance of rental comps that you manually approve or have the optimal daily rates automatically pushed to your listings.
- The Mashvisor multi-calendar allows you to view all your listings with available, blocked, and booked dates simultaneously. You can adjust availability and edit pricing directly to boost your marketing efforts.
- The Mashvisor website builder allows hosts and property managers to launch their own vacation rental website in a matter of minutes. The process requires zero technical skills, while the website is already optimized for SEO from a technical point of view. Moreover, all content is fully customizable so that you can use the right keywords to target your ideal guests.
- The Mashvisor unified inbox brings all guest communication into a single inbox to ensure that you never miss a message and, thus, a booking. Moreover, the feature helps automate a large part of standard communication with guests through automatic responses and templated replies.
Mashvisor’s vacation rental channel manager allows you to link your OTA accounts to one dashboard so you’ll only need to update your listings once and they’ll sync with the connected platforms in minutes.
Final Words on Your Vacation Rental Marketing Strategy
An effective vacation rental marketing plan is essential for maximizing bookings and boosting revenue. While a strong marketing strategy incorporates multiple components, it doesn’t have to be difficult to design and implement, as long as you take it one step at a time.
With the 21 actionable tips provided above, you can start enhancing your short term rental’s visibility today: on distribution channels, the Internet, social media, and email.
Check out Mashvisor to streamline and automate some of your marketing strategy’s most time-consuming aspects. Our vacation rental management software can help you with listing optimization, dynamic pricing, launching a vacation rental website, and communication, among other tasks.
