Vacation Rental Marketing

Episode. I wanted to say a massive thank you to Wheelhouse. Who are the sponsors of this podcast? You need to go check them out. It's one of the most important tools you will get for your business in 2021. Dynamic pricing, pricing software, tools, whatever you want to call it, it is going to be so essential in 2021 and beyond. The boostly.co.uk forward/wheel if you enter boostly75. If you ever want to upgrade then you get the first month 75 off everybody right now for a very limited time free account and a free listing on there. You can link it up to your PMS, link it up to Airbnb TripAdvisor and it will give you all the data that you need. Wheelhouse is faster, it's better, it's easier to understand and most importantly, it'll make you more money. Please, whatever you do, go and check them out. Say thank you for sponsoring this podcast. So without further ado, let's get on with the show. Hi, my name is Mike Simpson and I give hosts just like you the tools, the tactics, the training and the confidence to go and get your own direct booking so you don't have to over rely on OTAs to do it for you. And today I want to give you a little bit of a vacation rental marketing one on one. And the most important thing, and this is true for any business, is that relationships are key. Your network is your net worth. You'll have heard this time and time again and it can't be more true than than in hospitality and vacation rentals. So what you need to do is you need to be building relationships. And those relationships can be a number of things. Number one, you can be building relationships with local businesses in and around you that will impact and make your guest experience better. So if there's any really good takeaway places, if there are any good days out, if there's any good places that you recommend to go eat or drink or anything that's around your customer avatar. Build relationships with these businesses and add them to to your digital guidebook hostfully. So do that, add it to them and you can work out a bit of a discount. One of the best places that I've ever stayed, they presented with us a map, a map that they had drawn, hand drawn and then distributed replicated loads and loads. But what they had on the map was their local area and they had highlighted the specific places that they had special discounts and offers and rates with the property with. It was fantastic, we loved it, we used it, we Recommended it and I still remember it to the day. So what can you do along those sort of lines? Building relationships with your guests? Your guests will be your biggest word of mouth marketing that there are. What you have to do though, is you've got to stop treating them like a number and actually treat them like a human being. So how can you keep in touch, you know, social media, WhatsApp, you know, how can you make their guest experience so fantastic that they want to stay in touch with you? You know, the stereotypical hospitality line is, you know, come as guests and leave as friends. Well, let's start doing that. You know, some of our best guests are the ones that we still keep in touch with today. There are guests that have come to stay over year and year and year and they went to mine and my wife's wedding. So again, how can you build relationships? How can you make your guests feel like super fans and, you know, whatever that may be, whether that is sending them something in the post every now and again, whether that is handwriting them a letter now and again or when they do come and stay, you literally make them feel like $1 million. And also as well, building relationships with your peers in this industry. So there will be other people in your town, your city, your area that do something similar to you. You've got to stop treating them like the competition and reach out for collaboration. I really believe that 2021 and beyond is going to be the year of collaboration. So how can you utilize collaboration and work together? So main way, join a little network, create a little network, maybe create a WhatsApp group between all of you and, and if somebody contacts you saying, I need a booking and you're full, to say, I can help, don't worry, I'll help. Give me, give me an hour and I'll call you back and we'll get you booked in or take all the details and say, yeah, we'll get you booked. And then get into the WhatsApp group and say, who can take this booking? This is the way how you keep the bookings in your area, in your local area and in your collective and, you know, you can even sort of work out maybe a little commission rate, maybe 1 or 2%, 5%, whatever. It may be something that again, you, you can get the book and you can go, I'll go and get it for you, I'll go and sort it out and you get those details and you can go and find it again. Really, really effective way of building relationships, passing it around and, and just sort of again, building your network. Because the the. The one thing that I attribute to the growth of Boost Lee and how we created the Granary into being as big as what it was, was because of the relationships that we made and the relationships I am making to this day. People now recommend me all the time for website design, for training, for content creation, and it's because of the relationships that I am making and continue to make. And it's because from the start, I didn't look at what the competition was. I looked at who I could collaborate with. So those are my little marketing one on one tips. Please let me know what you do and how you do it for yourself. Get in touch, send me a message on Instagram Ostleruk. But thank you very much for tuning in and I will see you again very soon.