The world of digital marketing is a competitive one. There is certainly no shortage of competition out there with big-name companies as well as freelancers all battling out to gain new business and poach clients from other marketing agencies that may not necessarily be performing as well as the should be.
On top of all this, these agencies need to keep their own clients happy by providing not just quality services but worthwhile results.
In the tourism industry, digital marketers are hailing the introduction of website builders. Well, not all of them because some just don’t do what they say on the box. There are two main website builders out there. One for hotel owners.
The other type of website builder is for vacation rental owners and property managers/management companies. It is all about finding the right site, and we believe vacation rental websites by Lodgify are the best website builders for this industry capable of helping any digital marketing company to manage multiple vacation rental websites and vacation rental homes.
Now the hotel industry has been around for years, and we really don’t need to tell you that to be honest. However, the vacation rental industry is something new. OK, so the idea of renting a holiday home has always been out there.
Timeshares, which is a form of the vacation rental business model, have also been popular with property management companies. We can certainly argue that the whole concept of vacation rentals is not a new one.
All that said, although vacation rentals were always there in the background, most people figured that if they were going to book a holiday, they would look for a hotel deal.
RELATED: Booking Fees
The Market Trend Of Hotel Bookings Is Now Neck a Neck With Vacation Rentals
New vacation rental websites now allow people to list their own property on a website for free. When someone books the property on the website it takes a percentage fee and a booking fee from the people renting the home. Before you would have more often than not had to use a property management company to book a holiday villa or private apartment.
Now with so many new vacation rental websites offering people the chance to list their properties for free, and the freedom for the likes of you or me to book someones private home on these sites, vacation rentals have never been easier to book.
This is the reason there has been a huge swing in the accommodation sector of the tourism industry on a global basis.
Cutting To The Chase: How Does This Benefit Digital Marketers?
With a large number of vacation rental websites available to list properties for free, and holiday home website builders now available online, digital marketers can create a streamlined online property management digital marketing plan that is cost effective and profitable. We are talking about huge ROIs here too.
Here are just some of the examples of how a digital marketing firm’s online vacation rental business model can help both property management companies and owners double or even triple their occupation rate.
1. Selling to property management companies
do not have the time to manage the digital marketing side of their vacation rental business. All the digital marketing company needs to do is design a managed system so they can list a property on every vacation rental website available. Now, remember, listing these properties is free. The vacation rental websites will bring in the online traffic, and as long as property Is listed on the website, then it stands a chance of being booked.
For some property management companies, they just don’t have the time or vision to put such as plan in place. Incomes the right digital marketing company and voila – bookings suddenly double or quadruple.
2. Selling to property owners
This is one concept the property management companies will not like and know the dangers of this happening. Digital marketing companies can effectively undercut property management companies and release people of the fees they pay property management companies to rent their holiday homes to vacationers, then charge a fraction of the fee of the property management company.
On top of this, the same tactics as mentioned in number 1 can be used. List the properties on as many free listing vacation rental websites properties as possible to maximize online exposure. If someone is going to FlipKey, they will see the property, if another person uses Expedia, they will see the same property. All that traffic and it is free and very easy for a digital marketing company to implement.
Now Wait Because Here Is The Best Part For Digital Marketing Companies
Selling the package is one thing, but being able to manage all these websites without making mistakes and costing the contract money means implementing some intelligent software and the resources a digital marketing company has at its disposal.
1. Graphic Designers
How do you make a property stand out amongst the competition? Well, quality and professional photos are one way to do this. With graphics designers text can be added to photos advertising features, every photo can be pristinely conditioned to reflect the properties quality, and they can brand the vacation rental. This instills a feeling of quality and trustworthiness reassuring anyone that books this property for their holiday that they will not be disappointed.
2. Content Writers
Everyone that knows anything about digital marketing knows one thing, and it is old old phrase ‘Content is King’. Describing the property and using proven sales lines and techniques in the text alongside the graphical pictorials will help to persuade people to choose this vacation rental over the competition, which by the way has text and pictures that don’t come close to the quality a digital marketing company can offer.
3. Understanding of Sales Channels
Anyone that works within digital marketing should understand the importance of sales channels. This is why the digital marketing plan described here works. It is all about those sales channels. It may sound like I am repeating myself from the sections above, and in many respects I am. Although, I am doing so for good reason. Understanding that the more sales channels used will equate to more sales is key to this online vacation rental business plan working.
Plus, remember, many of these sales channels are free to list – that means free website traffic because all these large vacation rental websites are spending huge amounts of money on both offline and online marketing to lure property owners to become hosts and vacationers to book those hosts’ holiday homes. Free sales channels and free traffic. What a great digital marketing package to offer!
4. Branding Know How
As a digital marketing company, branding is the most important part of the service. Once the brand name is out there, people can search for it online. This will bring up the Lodgify website or customer website where bookings can be made directly.
And guess what? The prices here can be made cheaper because there are no booking fees and no percentage being paid to the free listing vacation rental websites. Read the section below about the Lodgify website builder that comes with a complete booking system so owners can take bookings using their own website independent of any vacation rental website.
Getting the name of the vacation rental or vacation rental company right is important. You want a brand name that is not common, so when people search for it, it will come top of the search engine results. Therefore, don’t name it Apple Enterprises because all the Apple products and stores will come up. Name it with something unique like Teperaks Vacations, and there is no competition for this keyword.
Lodgify Website Builder Makes This Entire Vacation Rental Marketing Plan Possible
We mentioned Lodgify earlier in this guide. This is a website builder that puts the entire digital marketing package together for any marketing company that wants to sell their package to those within the tourism industry.
1. The Channel Manager
This, in my opinion, is the most important component the Lodgify package offers. Your company places/lists all the vacation rentals on the Lodgify website builder in the same as any other website. Each property will have its own calendar assigned. Now Lodgify has designed their website builder so it will sync with calendars on the vacation rental websites that allow free listings.
A booking comes in on a website, the Lodgify calendar updates its calendar from the booking site’s calendar, then informs all the other websites that those dates are now unavailable. There is no need to log on to every website and block dates because the channel manager has this automated. This saves a huge amount of time, makes the entire operation very easy to manage, and there will never be a case where people book the same dates on two different websites.
What happens if the customer already has a website?
If the customer the package is being sold to already has a website, then Lodgify has channel manager plugins and code that can be integrated into almost any website, so your digital marketing package is still offering an automated booking system that syncs across multiple websites.
2. A Complete Booking System
Once people get wind of how brilliant the property was, how great the hosts were, and how professionally run the vacation rental was, word of mouth will quickly spread. As mentioned earlier, if you name the business with a unique name like ‘Teperak Vacations’, then when people remember the name, they will search for it and find the vacation rental website.
Suddenly, the booking system will kick into action. It can be set up to take bank transfers, credit and debit cards, e-wallet payments and much more.
3. Mobile Responsive Themes With No Design Experience Needed
Another huge time saver is the fact that digital marketing companies can set very fast timelines for their clients. The Lodgify website builder requires no coding because the interface is set up so that anyone without any knowledge of web design can configure a beautiful looking website.
There are over 30 themes to choose from, plus all the themes work on every mobile, desktop, and laptop device out there. In other words, the website themes have designed so they detect the size of the screen it needs to fit and sends the right version of the website to the device for giving the user the ultimate browsing and booking experience.
4. Built-in Real Time Chat and Review System
Anyone that books the property will be able to content the website via a real-time chat that can be installed on a smartphone. If no one is there to man the real-time chat, then a message will be left and the potential guest making the inquiry can be contacted back later on. On top of this, happy guests can use the review system to leave their comments and rate the property directly on the website.
These are just four of many features the Lodgify website builder offers. For digital marketing companies, it is the perfect solution to helping those with vacation rentals increase their online visibility. A quickly implemented package, branded, and of high quality. Once the results start to speak for themselves, any digital marketing company can build up its own portfolio of success stories.
The Last Word Of Advice For Digital Marketing Firms
It is easy to use the text to describe every property and copy and paste this onto every website. However, we urge you to rewrite every piece of text for each site used to list the property. This will help with search engine optimization because a variation in the way each property is described will help to avoid plagiarism penalties on the search engines and could help the property stand out on searches on websites such as Google.
This will especially help when it comes to the branding of the website. The brand name needs to take up that entire first page if someone does search for the brand. By using different text that still sells and speaks to the guests, the entire digital marketing plan will be SEO friendly.