Airbnb Marketing Strategy for Hosts

Creating a perfect listing with a catchy Airbnb title and beautiful photos and providing an excellent guest experience is critical for building a successful short-term rental business. But that’s not enough to boost your occupancy rates.

You must build and implement a consistent Airbnb marketing strategy to set your business apart from the competition and attract more guests. In this blog post, we’ll talk about effective marketing techniques that you can use to reach more customers and maximize your bookings.

You may also want to check out Airbnb SEO tips to increase the visibility of your listing within Airbnb’s search results pages.

How to Market Your Airbnb: Establish a Brand

Everything starts with the Airbnb branding strategy, which focuses on how you want your property to be perceived by guests and helps build trust and loyalty in the long run. Your goal should be to make your home or apartment stand out from other properties in your area and show why guests should choose yours over others.

An established brand makes remembering your vacation rental easier for your guests. They will find you faster on Airbnb when ready to book with you again. Use these tips to create a successful Airbnb branding strategy for your home:

• Give your rental a unique name or title that is easy to remember. Highlight your location and the unique features of your rental space.
• Use high-quality, professional Airbnb photos of the exterior and interior of your property. Make sure they tell a visual story.
• Complete your Airbnb profile. Create your bio as a host and include information about yourself and what you do outside of the home.
• Set a competitive price for your listing based on your specific accommodations, amenities, and general location.
• Build a complete listing—fill in all the available information and be honest.

It’s also essential to maintain excellent communication with your guests via Airbnb messages and be ready to answer their questions as fast as possible. Show your guests that you are an attentive and welcoming host. Then, you’re sure to get 5-star reviews essential for building your brand’s reputation.

Being responsive and available to travelers 24/7 is challenging. But with Hospitable, you can automate conversations with your guests and save a lot of time to focus on other aspects of your business.

Airbnb Promotion Options

Airbnb allows hosts to create promotions for their listings to drive more bookings. If you have a new and unbooked listing, you can get your first three bookings faster with Airbnb’s new listing promotion. Airbnb allows hosts to apply a 20% discount to any eligible listings for the first three bookings. To be eligible, a listing must have instant booking enabled and smart pricing disabled.

You can use a custom Airbnb promotion if your listing has at least three bookings. You can create a custom promotion if you go to your listing’s calendar, select Promotions, choose your dates, and set a discount of at least 10%.

Depending on the strength of your discount, Airbnb will apply different types of special tagging, like strikethrough pricing and a “new lower price” message, to your listing in the search results. These tags will encourage guests to click on your listing and can help increase your bookings.

Focus on Repeat Direct Bookings

Relying solely on Airbnb isn’t the best strategy for hosts. The platform charges hosts a commission on each booking, which can significantly reduce your profits. Besides, you can communicate with your guests only via the Airbnb messaging system, limiting your opportunities to increase customer loyalty.

That’s why you should create a functional direct booking website and focus your marketing efforts on driving people to book directly with you and retaining those guests as repeat customers. With the direct booking model, it can be more challenging to market your property to new prospects and convert them to bookings. Often, targeting previous guests who booked your Airbnb is more effective.

As guests arrive at your property, you can use WiFi marketing (StayFi is a good example) to collect their contact information (name and email). Then, you can use this info to establish a direct line of communication with potential repeat guests and target them with tailored promotions and special offers to entice them to book your property again.

It’s easy to create your own vacation rental booking website using our dedicated service Hospitable Direct—no technical skills are required. We’ll help you screen your guests during the booking flow (powered by Autohost) and insure your property with up to $5M worth of damage protection (powered by Know Your Guest).

Your property will also get listed on Google Vacation Rentals, so people can find your rental when searching for accommodation on Google. Travelers who land on your Google Vacation Rental listing will be redirected to your Hospitable Direct website, and you’ll get direct bookings without paying high third-party commissions.

How to Promote Airbnb Listing outside Airbnb

To be profitable in the short-term rental market, you need a solid plan to reach the widest audience possible. Your Airbnb marketing strategy is the direction you take to bring your vacation rental business in front of travelers and turn them into your guests. It’s a plan of action for how to market your Airbnb, which can include online and offline marketing channels.

Promote Your Listing on Social Media

Many travelers look for recommendations on social media when planning their future trips. So, you should use Facebook and Instagram to promote your vacation rental business.

Create a Facebook business page for your Airbnb properties to post content about your short-term rentals and share valuable tips for travelers. For example, you can provide recommendations on the top destinations in your area, landmarks to see, and things to do. Besides, you can use Facebook paid advertising to raise brand awareness and attract more followers to your page.

Instagram is a good platform to reach a younger audience—millennials or Gen Z travelers. Try experimenting with different content formats available on the platform, such as posts, stories, Highlights, and Reels.

You may also create a YouTube channel for your brand and focus on making videos that feature your properties and top tourist attractions in your area.

List Your Rental on Multiple Websites

While focusing on direct bookings is essential, you should also take steps to maintain a solid online presence on vacation rental marketplaces. This way, you can get more leads for direct bookings. To maximize the visibility of your rental property, you should list it on other OTA websites, including Booking.com and Vrbo. Just make sure to sync your calendars and availability to avoid double bookings. Although communicating with potential guests on different channels requires more time and effort, it’s really worth it, especially if you use the right tools.

With Hospitable, you can easily manage your listing on multiple platforms in one convenient location, update prices, and assign tasks to your team automatically. Our tool will also protect you from double bookings.

Join Vacation Rental Forums

By joining vacation rental forums, you can interact with other hosts about various issues related to hosting on Airbnb. You may get valuable advice on how to manage your business more effectively. You can also benefit from “word of mouth” marketing your property.

If you stay active in the community, your fellow Airbnb hosts will likely look out for you and may send some business your way. So you should build up your credibility to ensure that other hosts know they can trust you enough to send you referrals.

Build Partnerships

Local partnerships can provide a unique value for your short-term rental business and might help it stand out. Use partnerships with local restaurants and amusement parks to create special offers and discounts for your guests.

Such collaboration is mutually profitable, and local businesses can also benefit from it. And your guests are sure to appreciate that booking with you can help them save money throughout their stay with local special offers.

Final Thought

Airbnb marketing is an essential aspect of business growth, so it’s vital to get it right. Remember that getting ahead of the competition requires a creative approach, and you should be ready to go the extra mile to provide real value to your audience.

Many creative ways exist to reach your target guests on Airbnb and outside the platform. Hopefully, our tips on promoting Airbnb listing will help you increase bookings and make your vacation rental property profitable.