How Holiday Rental Owners can use Social Media for Brand Building

Today rental marketing is at an entirely different place than it was even 3 years ago.  Whether your rental business is new, or well established, to stay competitive you have to use all the new trends in brand building.  You don’t need (and won’t get) as well known as Macdonald’s or Apple but that’s not your objective – it’s about identity.  You don’t want to build something just around your bricks and mortar product, either: there’s nothing in your product that somebody else can’t duplicate, copy, and reuse (and probably hasn’t already) and therefore it can’t be ‘the difference‘ in your marketing.

Brand is about personality and trust and an experience. Brand is about you being in front of mind when a holiday who has connected with you in some way eventually makes a decision to rent somewhere.

Ignore social media branding at your peril. Social Media isn’t about sending messages to your friends about what you ate for breakfast. It’s about grabbing access to thousands of potential customers that you couldn’t dream to reach out to  3 years ago.  Customers who rent holiday homes also use Social Media to follow their interests and hobbies and to ‘follow’ experiences that to them are new or interesting.

You simply must tap into the magic of social media marketing.  Here are a few tips to get you started.

Social Media Marketing is more than Facebook and Twitter

Facebook and Twitter are undeniably the most popular and well known social networking sites, but when you’re using social media as part of your marketing, you need to be aware of, and utilize, all of the social media marketing tools available to you.  Stumbleupon, Linkedin, Delicious and Digg are powerful social media tools as well.  In fact, you can link your Digg account with your other social media accounts to save yourself time in posting to accounts individually.  So, the first step in creating a successful social media marketing strategy is to establish your self within all of these online communities, perhaps through Digg, and begin building your online presence.

Social Media Marketing is for Building Relationships

Social media marketing isn’t about selling anything.  It is to set your self apart from your competition through developing personal relationships with people that will result in loyal customers and being ‘front of mind‘ when someone wants to rent somewhere (or someones friend or friend of friend wants the same).

Give Your Network a Reason to Shop with You

You mustn’t persistently push your business  -  you will simply be ignored or ‘un-friended’ -  and you don’t want to tell poeple what you had for breakfast (they aren’t interested), but do offer your knowledge about your locale, high quality content about what’s happening around you.  They can be events, changing seasons, wine growing, olive cultivating, festivals, religious holidays, and so on. In doing so you will establish yourself as and someone who ‘knows’ and have given your networking visitors something of value, for free.  Subconsciouly they will develop a sense that they ‘owe’ you something in return.  Becoming your follower fulfills that.

Your Start Up Checklist

For those who are new to the whole idea of using online tools to build your rental brand, here’s a checklist to help you get started.

• Open a Facebook account.
• Open a Twitter account.
• Open a StumbleUpon account.
• Open a Digg account.
• Open a Google Buzz account.

Coping with all of these sites can be time consuming and take a lot of effort.  But there are some shortcuts, and here’s what you can do next.

• If you haven’t got a blog already, get one. Go to WordPress (or whichever free blog hosting site you prefer) and start a blog on your rental. It’s really very easy to do (and a little while ago I wrote here about how)
• Set up a complete, friendly, profile for your self in the ‘About’ section.
• Post some pictures to help people feel a personal connection to you.
• If you can, post some videos.
• Start posting stuff – information about your locale, your property as a living thing, and best of all if youy can, tell stories about your rental (readers love stories and stories are better remembered if they resonate with someone)
• Use  your posts to update your social media network automatically (there are WP plugins that do this automatically)
• If you have a website, link it to your blog.

You’re creating a ‘funnel’ for  your contacts on your multiple social media accounts and giving them easy, convenient access to your rental by simply keeping them up to date on current happenings through your blog content.

If all of this sounds like a little much to do, don’t worry, because you still have options.  With the growing importance of social media marketing has come a host of resources to assist you with the multiple tasks involved in making a  campaign work successfully.  You can outsource  specific startup or ongoing tasks, such as social media page creation, grabbing contacts or followers, updating posts at a regular weekly rate, and so on.  This gets you established fast. You can contact me for more help on good people to outsource with or for help in how to do some oif the implementating yourself.

Tagged as: branding, Facebook, Marketing, property advertising, social media, Twitter, vacation rental marketing