Is marketing necessary?
In an increasingly competitive market, promoting your property is becoming a key technique to maximise your occupancy rate. The most important part of promoting your listing is by using catchy titles, stunning photos and detailed descriptions (link to internal). By obtaining key ‘status’ badges such as superhost or Airbnb Plus or Luxe (link to internal), you can stand out and catch the attention of casual browsers as they scroll through the search results. If you generally have a high occupancy rate, Airbnb will sometimes highlight that your property is rarely available which at least subconsciously encourages guests to book before it’s too late. Pricing (link to internal) also matters to make sure your listing is not too cheap or too expensive.
These great features are all available and free on Airbnb or other rental property aggregator platforms but some hosts started getting creative to expand their funnel and generate more leads.
How can I better promote my rental listing?
Using Social Media
Promoting your listing on Facebook and Instagram can be quite lucrative. You can use hashtags and location tags so people who have plans to travel to your area can find your listing. Make an impression with great photos to entice them to check it out on Airbnb. Including testimonials from some of the previous guests couldn’t hurt either.
Having a social media page for just your one listing wouldn’t necessarily help that much. If you are going to have a social media page, provide local tips and travel recommendations for travelers. The goal is to provide sufficient incentive for travelers to follow your page with useful tips and visuals – your page needs to provide value beyond just recommending a property listing. Happy guests will then share your social media pages to their friends and family traveling to the same location, improving the ROI on your social media marketing channel even more. If using social media channel, make sure to always use the hashtag #airbnb since the official Airbnb social media pages will regularly share their favourite posts.
Being Featured on Blogs
The rise of influencer marketing is relevant to property listing as well. You can invite a blogger with a decent following base (+100K followers) to stay at your airbnb and feature it in their social media pages and blogs. You can provide extra amenities to make the experience extra special and also have the blogger feature interesting things about the neighbourhood (i.e., restaurants, bars, etc.). The occupancy rate of your listing is directly related to the popularity level of the neighbourhood. In order for the investment to lead to a significant uptick in booking interest, you will likely have to provide a full-service experience with food, drinks, transportation to the best spots to check out, etc. Since these are services you can offer via Airbnb, it’s an opportunity to promote not just the property listing but the add-on services that will help you maximise your revenue.
Listed on Multiple Aggregator Sites
Most popular vacation rental site is Airbnb worldwide but there are other sites that also have an impressive base of loyal users. In Australia, there are sites such as Stayz, VRBO, Flipkey, Home Exchange, HomeAway, RentalsCombined and more. You can target various types of clientele by leveraging these different sites and maximise the occupancy of your properties. This strategy comes with its own challenges as calendar management is difficult if you’re accepting bookings on multiple sites. Property managers (link to internal) can help manage these multi-platform bookings effectively with advanced booking software.
