Besides listing your property on online booking sites, what else can you do to get more bookings online?
Well, the most powerful foundation to any online marketing, is to focus on the needs of the people you are trying to attract, and if you can create a niche for your holiday accommodation, that’s even better. For example, become known as pet-friendly, child friendly or eco-friendly.
The niche has to be something unique, and which people are looking for when they search the internet for accomodation.
Once you’ve nailed that, it will form the foundation for online marketing success. Armed with a good foundation, these three marketing ideas are unrivalled when it comes to building online awareness:
1 Search engine driven web traffic
There are plenty of ways to get more bookings online, but the one with the most long-term pull and highest ROI, is to get more traffic to your website via search engines. To boot, this method requires no cost, but for the actual content on your website.
The key to bringing more traffic to your website is to understand the priorities of search engines. If we take Google as an example, their priority is to “provide access to the world’s information in one click.”
The vital question then becomes: why should Google send people looking for holiday accommodation to your website?
Because of its mission statement, Google will only put the best information in front of their users, and they use algorithms to determine whether your website is good enough or not. The way they do this is primarily through the content on your website.
This is why you need to add value-add content to your site regularly, and it needs to be targeted towards the kind of people you want to get more bookings from.
2 Get more awareness via social media
The best way to get more awareness online, especially for holiday accommodation, is through social media, and by using attention grabbing images to sell emotions that vacations evoke.
For holiday accommodation, the best social media channels to use are:
Twitter is good for notifications and short notices.
Facebook is for promoting your rental and creating a following. Remember that Facebook is used for entertainment and sharing between friends and family, so come at it from that angle. Use lots of images and entertaining videos to evoke emotions.
YouTube is where your videos will sit, but you can also share them on Facebook.
Pinterest and Instagram are excellent for displaying professional images, remembering that one image speaks a 1000 words…
Find out how to use each one, and it will make a big impact to your online marketing efforts.
3 Start targeted Facebook ads
Getting online traffic via search engines and social media takes time to reap the rewards, so it’s recommended that in order to start getting more traffic immediately, you create targeted Facebook ads that will appeal to the type of people who are likely to make bookings with you.
Again, do your homework to use Facebook ads properly, because it is powerful, but only if you do it properly.
Wordstream provides Facebook advertising types that when done right, will more than make up the expense of the ads (which are actually minimal compared to most advertising methods). From these, you will begin to see how effective Facebook can be as an advertising medium, especially for the holiday accommodation niche.
