Growing your Holiday Cottage Bookings using Facebook

Last Updated on May 12, 2015 by admin

One of the most important aspects of successful marketing is identifying where your potential customers can be reached and delivering the right message to them, at the right time, whenever and wherever that may be.

Growing your Holiday Cottage Bookings

With more than 30 million registered users in the United Kingdom there’s little doubt that potential guests for your holiday home are on Facebook in their droves. They’ll also be there regularly; three in four UK adults log on to the social network every single day. So how should you be growing your holiday cottage bookings using Facebook?

So how do you find the ones that are going to be interested in your holiday cottage, and also stand out from the increasing numbers of other businesses trying to do exactly the same?

Where does Facebook currently stand?

The original perception of Facebook saw it as a free tool for businesses.

As time has gone on this has become more problematic; increased competition (there’s more and more content going on to Facebook and they can’t show everything to everybody), and a need for a growing Facebook to derive revenue from their platform, has meant that the reach you can gain without spending your money has diminished.

The average posts, without advertising, will now only reach around 16% of your likes.

So how do you advertise and then engage to gain bookings?

Promoting your Facebook Page

Having a large number of likes is great, but they don’t mean a thing if they’re not going to be interested in what you say or be likely to book with you.

Promoting your page is a great way to initially increase your audience, but the key to success is being as specific as possible with your advertising.

Facebook knows a great deal of information about their users; utilise this information to your advantage and make sure you’re only advertising to the people that are likely to stay with you.

How old are they? Do they live in a specific area? Are they interested in certain things?

200 new likes that meet the demographics of your target market will be much more valuable to you than 2,000 that don’t.

Build on social groups

Facebook is constructed, and bound together, by peer-to-peer interaction and real life connections.

What is it that makes us friends with people? It’s usually similar interests, locations or lifestyles.

This means that if you’ve already got 500 people that like your page and engage with you, it’s a safe bet their friends and family are going to be interested in similar things, such as your holiday cottage and local area.

Once you have a strong base of likes it’s a great idea to advertise to those that are friends on Facebook with the people that already like your page.

This is easy to do within the Facebook advert manager, and your adverts will display the names of their friends that already like the page when it appears on their news feed.

Boost Posts to gain tactical advantage

We’ve already said that posts don’t reach as far as they used to but what you don’t want to be doing is boosting every post with advertising in order to reach everybody.

In order to boost your holiday cottage bookings, use the boosting tool tactically, and only when the post you are making has a distinct call to action.

For example, are you offering a discount for early bookings made in the next week? Do you have some last minute availability you want to promote?

Use advertising on these occasions; the rental reward compared to the potential spend will add up if you target the right people.

Keep learning from your content

Our final thought is one on content. The more successful your content, the more people will like it, the more people you will reach and the more holiday cottage bookings you’ll gain.

Make sure you’re always learning from what’s worked in terms of your content (what gains the most likes and engagement) and also keep an eye on when you’re posting it (the day of the week and time of the day).

Once you know what works, continue to build on it; engagement and bookings will follow.

If you have any thoughts or experience of Growing your Holiday Cottage Bookings using Facebook please leave a comment below.

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.