By The Hospitable Team
Preparing your vacation home for your first guests and creating the best possible listing are important for your success on Vrbo. But even the most fantastic home can sit empty if you don’t have the right strategies to ensure a regular flow of guests, allowing you to cover all costs and make a profit.
You need an effective Vrbo marketing strategy to correctly target your listing to potential guests, set your business apart from the competition, and keep your vacation rental property booked year-round.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to market your Vrbo property, reach more potential guests, and maximize your bookings.
Vrbo Marketing Strategy: Make Your Listing Stand Out
Your Vrbo marketing strategy depends on the size of your STR business, target guests, and your goals for the future. But everything starts with creating a successful listing that is targeted to your ideal guests who would be most interested in staying in your home.
Use these tips to create an eye-catching Vrbo listing that stands out among competitors to attract potential guests:
- Write an attention-grabbing headline and focus on the unique selling points of your vacation rental property. If your property has a name, include it in your headline as well—this way, savvy travelers can find you again via a Google search.
- Create a clear, accurate, and informative description—include details about your rental space, the surrounding area, and local attractions. Your goal is to sell the experience your guests will have while staying at your property.
- Provide as many details as possible, but don’t be overly wordy. Use short sentences and paragraphs and include bullet point lists and subheadings to make your listing as easy to read as possible.
- Upload at least 20 professional photos of each room in your vacation rental and highlight its unique features and amenities. Be sure to use the photo captions to explain additional details.
- Price your rental competitively and consider integrating dynamic pricing into your listing to ensure that your nightly rates align with demand, seasonality, and other factors.
- Gather 5-star reviews that are important in building trust with your potential guests and increasing your occupancy rate.
The best way to get positive reviews from your Vrbo guests is to deliver a memorable experience. Provide your guests with clean accommodation and ensure perfect communication during all customer journey stages. Be ready to answer guests’ questions as fast as possible and proactively ask guests to let you know of any issues.
It’s important to establish an effective message flow to give each guest the necessary information at the appropriate time and show them that you’re an attentive host who cares about them.
Communication with guests via messages is very time-consuming if you write and send each message manually. But with Hospitable, you can automate almost all your conversations with guests and save time to focus on growing your business.
Have conversations with your guests even when you sleep.
Promote Your Vrbo Listing on Social Media
Use social media to expand your online visibility and reach new audiences. Sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest can boast billions of users daily, offering much potential for your vacation rental to capture someone’s attention.
Create business pages on social media platforms to give users all the relevant information about your vacation rental, including photos of your property, contact information, and a link to a book. Focus on the social media platforms where your potential guests hang out.
For example, Instagram is an excellent place to reach younger audiences and people looking for travel inspiration. LinkedIn is a great option if you want to attract business travelers. And Facebook has one of the largest audiences for marketing different types of vacation rental properties.
It’s important to post content about your short-term rentals as often as possible to stay top of mind for your followers. Regularly update your photos and videos and stay engaged with your community by responding to comments, questions, and reviews.
You can also share helpful tips for travelers and recommendations on the top destinations in your area, as well as your promotions and special deals. If you have the budget, you can use Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest paid advertising to raise awareness about your vacation rental and attract new followers to your page.
List Your Property on Multiple OTAs
To succeed, you should maximize your online presence and create listings on multiple marketplaces, including Airbnb and Booking.com. Then you’ll be in a better position for bookings.
Of course, it’s a lot of work as you’ll have to update calendars and prices and keep up with guest inquiries and reservation requests across multiple platforms. But it’s worth it because you’ll be able to increase your visibility on platforms where travelers search for a place to stay most often.
And it can be easier if you use the right vacation rental software to help you put your business on autopilot. As a vacation rental channel manager, Hospitable allows you to efficiently manage all your listings from one platform and not worry about juggling calendars, messages, and bookings.
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With Hospitable, you can also easily create your direct booking website, which is always your best distribution channel. It allows you to build relationships with guests, drive repeat bookings, and save money on fees and commissions.
Offer Expert Advice on Vacation Rental Forums
A lot of people look for recommendations on online forums when they are planning their future trips. So, joining such forums and offering helpful advice to potential guests makes sense. For example, sites like Reddit or Quora have many threads dedicated to travel. Being active there can help you build a good reputation, and you may even get some bookings from your useful advice.
Bottom Line
Marketing your vacation rental property effectively is imperative to survive and thrive in the highly competitive short-term rental market. There are different ways to market your vacation home that can help you reach more travelers and maximize occupancy and profits.
We have discussed the most successful tactics to focus on when developing your Vrbo marketing strategy. Although every business’s needs are different, these tips can be a solid foundation to start with if you want to beat your competition and increase your bookings.
If you list your vacation home on Airbnb, you may also want to check out our blog post, where we discuss techniques to include in your Airbnb marketing strategy.
Vrbo Rental Agreement: What You Need to Know
To ensure your STR business runs smoothly, you must protect your Vrbo property from damages and minimize the risks of dealing with problem guests. One of the ways to do that is to have a Vrbo rental agreement that clearly defines both your and your guests’ rights and responsibilities.
Vrbo Checklist Every Host Needs
You, as a host, should be ready to go the extra mile to provide your guests with a great experience that can help you earn 5-star reviews and win more bookings. You must prepare your property for guests and ensure it is always well-stocked with the basic items and extras to make travelers happy they booked your home over another.
Vrbo Automated Messages: Built-in Solution and a Better Alternative
There are some possibilities to automate communications on Airbnb. But is there any Vrbo automated messages functionality as well? Let’s take a closer look!
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