10 different Airbnb holiday rental home marketing methods compared

Once you have selected an Airbnb property management company to look after your holiday home the work begins to create a plan to get exposure and new bookings. There are different methods you can use to market your Airbnb listing and below is a comparison of the most common methods people use;

Holiday rental marketing fundamentals

As experienced holiday rental property managers we focus on making sure all the fundamentals are put in place first which includes ensuring the property has all the right equipment, maintenance items addressed, theme & styling makes sense and even providing the linen for the property.

Once the professional photography is done our team will spend a lot of time ensuring your listing is fully optimised to attract the highest volume of people. These days ensuring your online listings stand out is the number one priority when marketing your property.

While there are lots of other options available to market your property this area is the most important to maximise bookings, rental returns and minimise vacancy rates during the year

Property marketing includes fundamentals such as crafting the right blend of copywriting together with a strong selection of images to entice people as they browse through thousands of holiday rentals online. 

Once that is done, each property owner can then choose to do other forms of marketing which could include some of the following tactics;

1 Guest eMail Database

Building a guest database is a great way to avoid the fees charged by the booking websites. To maximise its effectiveness, you must have your own website with direct booking facility.

With most booking websites now blocking email addresses it is becoming harder and harder to build a database for direct marketing but it isn’t impossible. As each booking website provides access to the guest’s phone number it is possible to bypass the booking website and ask for the guest’s email via text or phone call. Be aware, however, that most guests will not be keen to share their email unless there is an advantage – so be sure to mention the savings they can achieve by booking direct.

Our holiday rental property management company has a database of over ten thousand guests that we can also market to and we can send an eMail to people who have stayed in particular locations previously to let them know about your property joining our family of Airbnb holiday rentals.

Marketing directly to guests can help avoid the booking fees charged by a lot of the large holiday rental booking sites. We make this possible by having our own website that can take bookings directly

Most direct marketing will be done via eMail but it is also possible to send SMS messages as well depending on what Guest details are available to use. It’s important to respect the various privacy and direct marketing laws to ensure any communication is compliant with relevant laws but also not annoying people.

2. Google My Business

Google offers a free service that lets you register your holiday rental property on the internet so that it can be easily found. With the vast majority of people using Google as their method for searching it is a great idea to set up a Google My Business account, so long as you make sure that you complete all of the information thoroughly. 

Missing contact details or poor quality photos can be instantly off-putting. When potential guests search for the name of your property on Google, the listing will appear prominently. This is of great advantage if guests are shopping around to compare prices. Having your listing easy to find means that they can quickly compare your prices with the booking websites to identify where the cheapest price is.

Being on Google My Business means that your listing will also be published on Google maps which can be of great convenience to guests who may be navigating to the property on a mobile device or simply trying to find your contact details to ask a question.

3. Google or Meta Ads

Running Ads can be a quick way to get visibility to your holiday rental property. Even though Airbnb accounts for over 75% of short term holiday rental bookings it oesn’t allow you to advertise a listing on its platform.

So there are two other ways you can potentially drive traffic to your holiday rental listing; 

• Google AdWords 
  • Is a system that enables you to run ads which are displayed on Google when people search for a particular word or phrase e.g ‘Accomodation Callala Bay’
  • By signing up for an AdWords account you can set up a range of ads to be displayed when people search for specific things, you then pay a fee (known as pay-per-click) each time someone clicks on your ad but it means your property can appear as an advert above the organic search results which are dominated by the booking platforms.
  • Google AdWords is not a cost effective means of bringing in new enquiries. This is because when guests search for your property name you will be competing with the booking websites who have huge amounts of money to spend. This means that they are likely to outbid you every time. 
  • The second downside of this is that because the booking websites have so much money to spend it forces the cost per click up to uneconomical amounts. 
  • In short you’ll spend a lot of money and receive very few clicks unless you are prepared to invest significant amounts of time to increase your expertise.
• Meta Ads
  • Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and their platform enables you to run ads which are more visual in nature and rather than targeting a particular search keyword, they let you profile a type of person, someone who is likely to travel.
  • Meta has so much personal data about each person that their AI driven systems can do a good job at pinpointing the type of people like to be interested in travelling.
  • You can create a profile to include interests such as beaches, specific brands or other interests like surfing or paddleboarding or even coffee. The collection of topics helps to ‘profile’ the type of person that you want ads to be shown to.
  • Another layer you can select is age groups, demographics and locations so it means you can create your ‘ideal Airbnb holiday rental client’ to try get your property shown to them.
  • Content that is filmed at the property or in the area that doesn’t look like a corporate advertisement can potentially work really well and transport someone to ‘feel’ like they are there.

4. Blogging & Vlogging

If you have your own website, blogging can be a good way to attract visitors to your website. Search engines love new content so the more you create, the greater the chance of guests finding your website so long as you follow a few simple rules:

• Don’t just blog about your property. You need to stand in the shoes of a guest and imagine what they would be searching for.
• Create content about the area; i.e. activities, great restaurants, hidden gems are a great starting point.
• Guests love Lists, such as the Top 5 Activities, Top 10 Restaurants, etc.

Blogging tends to be a long-term strategy and requires commitment. Writing and researching articles can be time consuming and not everyone is a wordsmith.

If you are a confident and clear talker you can always go down the path of recording video blogs (or vlogs for short). These can also be uploaded to your website and to help your website to be found on Google you can send them to a transcription firm then upload the text

to your website. You can also upload your vlogs to YouTube and social media. Don’t expect to have an army of followers overnight but if you stick with it you will gain extra exposure for your property. Keep your content short, interesting, professional and enjoyable.

This is the best way to engage potential holiday makers and let them get a sense of what it is like to stay in your location. Search engines also love content like this, so it can help you property get found beyond just booking sites.

What should you create blogs or videos about?

• Create content about the area – Don’t just blog about your property. You need to stand in the shoes of a guest and imagine what they would be searching online for. Create content about the area, think fun activities, great restaurants and hidden gems are a great starting point for a blog.

• Lists – Guests love lists, such as the Top 5 Activities, Top 10 Restaurants, etc. 

• Day in the life of – some people love simply consuming content of people showing what it is like in a ‘day of the life of’ which could be visiting a local beach, shops, walking etc.

It could make the difference between a fully booked rental property and one that is vacant during slow periods during the year.

5. Social Media

Nearly every person in Australia uses social media so of course if you have created branded profiles for your holiday rental property then they can also be powerful tools to create exposure and increase rental bookings.

All booking links must be changed to lead directly to your property listing on Professional Holiday Homes so that your content can be converted to bookings.

This is a great way to engage with existing guests who have stayed in your property before, they get constant reminders about the location and subconsciously places your rental home top of mind when they start thinking about going on holiday again.

What are the popular social media platforms to use?

• Facebook – the most common platform in Australia for social media. You can create an official ‘Page’ for your property to then add photos, videos and other content. Posts can be shared daily, weekly or even monthly to engage people following the page and the more local and authentic, the better.
  
  It is free to set up but you will be prompted fairly regularly to pay for ads to get more exposure, keep in mind that Facebook is an advertising platform at the end of the day. Spending money on advertising should be done with a great deal of caution.
  
  Facebook, like blogging, can take considerable time (think years rather than months) to build up an audience where you can start to see results and you may find yourself spending inordinate amounts of time on it for very little return.
  
  Take a look at some of your local competitor’s pages and you will typically see a sad state of early enthusiasm with a few posts and shares and very few updates. Even pages with hundreds of followers struggle to get one or two likes for a Facebook post.
  
  Given that you need around 200 views of your listing a day to receive an enquiry, Facebook simply takes too long to produce results.

• Twitter and Pinterest –  Social media experts will tell you how great each of these are for your business, but for holiday rentals they are largely lame ducks. Requiring extensive effort for low returns they are best avoided unless you have a property with very unique features or aspect that is likely to go viral.

• Instagram – this visual platform used to be focussed on static images, but over the years has evolved to being a video platform. So short 20 or 30 second video clips may work well which could be walking through your holiday rental, into the back yard, onto a balcony or somewhere in the local area at an attraction or popular location.

• TikTok – this is one of the newest platforms focussed on short form video, catering more to a younger audience so it may not suit all properties but is worth keeping an eye on as trends change between platforms.

• LinkedIn – if your holiday rental has space for a group of people it could be used for small group executive getaways so it may lend itself to being exposed on LinkedIn which is a social media network for professionals.

• YouTube –  With respect to generating traffic from YouTube itself, don’t expect anything other than a few clicks a year. Where YouTube becomes valuable is when your property video is embedded into websites. Think of it as the icing on the cake of your property photos and description. Include your YouTube link on your website and other websites that allow it (government tourism websites, for example).

Social media can be great if it is used well, but ultimately keep in mind that the majority of people will use the Professional Holiday Homes website, Airbnb, Booking.com, Stayz and other holiday rental listing networks to find suitable accommodation.

6. Influencers

A more modern trend is to find what is called ‘Influencers’ and these are people who already have a large social media following either in a specific niche like travel or just has a particular audience type.

Either as a paid partnership or an exchange for free accommodation they can visit the property to create content that is then shared to their audience. When they promote the property a special booking offer could be shared to try and maximise conversions from the activity.

Choosing the right influencer is important and typically paid partnerships will deliver a more professional engagement with very clear deliverables vs free exchanges of accommodation for services provided.

If done correctly you can achieve exposure to hundreds of thousands of people in a short period of time with bookings made directly on our website to maximise your rental profits. What you have to look for are profiles that have a very engaged audience and you can see this by looking at their post to see how many comments or likes they have.

So for example if a profile has 10,000 followers but each post has just a few likes and no comments then it isn’t a very engaged profile.

7. Awards

You may think that winning an award is beyond your humble property, but it’s not. This is because very few holiday rental owners enter awards (despite there being dedicated categories for holiday rentals). Whilst the process for application can often be tediously detailed, if you can get through it there’s a good chance you’ll have something to

show for it.

Despite being a humble beach shack, our property Hayes Beach House has won two major awards. This has given us additional credibility and exposure.

8. Newsletters

Of all the marketing methods mentioned so far, newsletters require the greatest effort. This is because they not only require a large database of guests to be effective but they require significant effort to not only create content of the newsletter (on a regular basis) but to also

master the newsletter software. 

Whilst software such as Mailchimp is free, to create professional looking newsletter templates takes time and a reasonable understanding of technology. After all this effort the cut through of email marketing is low and the likelihood of a guest booking is even lower.

The only possible effective way to use newsletters to market your property is to be included on one that is sent by your Airbnb holiday property rental agency who may have an existing database with thousands of holiday travllers on it.

9. Print Advertising

Advertising an online listing in print is about as effective as a car without wheels. So no matter how many readers the magazine or newspaper says they have, or what special deals they have – give print advertising a huge body swerve.

10. eBay, Gumtree and Others

Almost as ineffective as print advertising but worse in that you’ll have almost exclusively enquiries from low value guests who will try to negotiate $50 a night for your peak dates that you already booked months ago. Strictly for the lowest of budget properties.

In summary

When it comes to marketing your holiday rental property you can often be expecting to play the long game in order to see results. At Professional Holiday Homes we can help you to market your holiday rental property so that you can take the stress out of advertising.

Contact a member of our team today and see how our team can help you to manage and market your Airbnb holiday rental property.