5 Effective Online Actions to Drive Holiday Let Bookings
Last Updated on October 1, 2015 by admin
So that’s it, the temperatures are beginning to fall, the school holidays are a distant memory and those visitor numbers have subsided. It’s time to take a deep breath and begin to prepare for next year. Even if your website has proven to be a real winner this summer, competition is fierce and there are plenty of things you can be doing to make sure next year exceeds your expectations.
Drive Holiday Let Bookings by maintaining contact
Your visitors have gone home; it may now be several months before they consider booking their next break away. How do you maintain contact with them in order to make sure they’re thinking of your holiday home when it comes to making that decision?
It’s been proven that if you’re in regular contact with guests, they are far more likely to book with you again. Email marketing and social media are the best ways of doing this. If you don’t already take email addresses, or encourage visitors to like your Facebook page or follow you on Twitter then ensure you plan to have these mechanisms in place for your next surge of summer visitors.
If you already have a fantastic Facebook fan page or an ever-growing list of emails you’ll need to consider our next point.
Develop a content plan to increase bookings and reach
Content is key, but what this doesn’t mean is you need to spend an all-consuming amount of time writing blog posts. Remember, everyone else is creating content so yours needs to be of high quality and not quantity.
Making sure that you have consistent content going out will ensure the regular contact points mentioned in our first point are achieved. In turn, having a plan in place will make sure you devote the time to produce it, and give you the focus to realise results from it.
Review your target market
So if we’re saying content needs to be quality and not quantity, what exactly is ‘quality content’? Everything you do should invariably be linked to your target market. It’s success and the engagement you’re able to gain from it is linked to whether or not it interests the people that are seeing it.
It is relevance that makes your content quality.
Before you put together your content plan, think about who it is that stays at your holiday home; how old are they? What are the interested in? What will they want to do when they’re in the local area?
Placing them at the center of everything you produce will ensure it delivers results.
Photography
We’ve already mentioned that content shouldn’t become time consuming, and photography will ensure it isn’t. A picture paints a thousand words, and this is great news for holiday homes.
Photography should form an important part of your content plan; make sure you’re continually snapping that camera lens, and that you’re always updating your website with new imagery. It’ll make sure it’s fresh, inviting, and generating the bookings you deserve.
Review advertising on other sites
The end of the summer is a sensible time to take stock of any advertising you’ve been running. You should review the performance of any online memberships or advertising you’ve undertaken, whether good or bad.
Use Google Analytics to review the referral traffic from the sites, and cross-reference this with the number of bookings you’ve gained.
Drop the ones that aren’t working, and focus more of your time on generating that content and creating contact that engages.
If you’re a holiday cottage owner who finds marketing your cottage to time consuming, don’t worry, holiday home letting agents are there to take the strain:
Boshers offer specialist holiday home insurance to holiday letting owners across the UK. For more information on how a specialist insurer can help and support your holiday home business, please give us a call on 01237 429444.
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