Real estate businesses are growing popular every day and one of the main reasons for that is real estate social media marketing strategy. One of the major types of real estate businesses is a short-term rental, where the prime business activity is to rent out your space to clients for a short time. However, the rental industry in real estate struggles sometimes. It’s mainly because they face vacancies and they have no effective way of overcoming this problem. We can also make a Facebook page for short-term rental business. But property managers and owners today have made social media advertising strategies for short-term rental businesses their priority. With its effective execution, online social media marketing can be the best source of gaining clients and avoiding vacancies even during non-vacation seasons. Here’s a brief overview of its importance.
On the Importance of Social Media Strategy
Starting a business in real estate itself requires a lot of time and effort. And at the end of the day, if you don’t get the output you deserve, then what’s the point?
As a general overview, social media marketing is the utilization of various social media platforms to advertise or sell a particular product or service. Through social media advertising, businesses can:
- Build their brand’s image and increase its awareness. On social media, you get to share your brand story with the whole world. Lastly, having a social media presence simply is enough to build your brand’s legitimacy.
- Promote their product/services to a targeted audience.
- Offer social services/customer services to the people who reach out.
- Track their overall performance and make effective improvements in their marketing strategies accordingly
How is social media marketing strategy helpful for short-term rental business?
You will have to build a certain strategy for effective social media marketing. The plan involves a written record or documentation of your marketing objectives, the techniques you will use in your employment, and the metrics you will use to monitor and analyze your success. Now, let’s jump to why social media marketing strategies for short-term rental businesses can be effective. This post is also for those who are starting a rental property business
Social media hosts the presence of people of all ages, which is why one cannot miss advertising their business online through certain platforms. When it comes to the short-term rental business, you can not only showcase your properties but also convince or influence your followers’ decision to utilize your reach. Additionally, you will find maximum exposure that can ramp up the renting potential of your short-term rentals. Here is a list of benefits you can get out of it.
Connect with Clients Easily – Social media marketing will open up a pool of potential guests for your rental business. Since you get to meet your audience just where they are, it gets much easier to connect with your potential clients. You can quickly clear up any queries they have regarding your rental place and turn them into a permanent client.
Build Connections – A big part of your job is to establish a connection with your guests, especially if you are the rental manager as well as the owner. In addition, by having an online presence, you can also connect with other businesses and homeowners and use their help later when needed.
Free Marketing – once you have successfully built a good rapport with your followers, your socials will eventually become an organic marketing machine for your short-term rental business. It will more likely be free marketing at this point. And who wouldn’t want to benefit from that?
Let’s dive further into what social media strategy is and why it can be helpful for your short-term rental business.
Successful Social Media Strategy for Short-term Rental Businesses
Just like any other business, short-term rental businesses also require an effective social media strategy. Your level of successful real estate digital marketing will be defined by the clarity you have in the following aspects. The following points include important actionable tactics used in social media strategy for short-term rental businesses.
Set up your Goals
The first and most crucial aspect of building any social media strategy is setting your goals. Your objectives, however, should be concrete, realistic, and practical. The plans will mainly include:
- Increasing your number of prospects in a week/month.
- Improving and expanding your social media reach.
- Getting additional visitors to your website.
- Increasing revenue.
Pick a Rental Niche
Your short-term rental niche is about the people you will be renting your rooms to. Start by defining an ideal guest list for your business:
- Business Travelers
- Tourists
- Families / Couples
- Younger Audience
- Large Groups
- Fitness and wellness travelers
- International Travelers
Now make a list of all the must-haves your rental property should have, to make the place more appealing and lively for your guests. If your main target guests are family members, necessities like baby cots, mini-fridges, grills, etc should be readily available. For Gen Z or Y travelers, don’t forget a pool and video games.
Another aspect that can help you make the property more accommodating for your guests, is to know about their habits. By understanding their habits and behaviors, you can create compelling marketing and promotional content.
Narrow your Target Audience
To whom are you trying to reach out through social media advertising? Once you narrow down your short-term rental niche, it will be much easier to gain the attention of this specified targeted audience. The next part is to understand and enlist your intended audience’s demographics and preferences. Find out what their challenges are regarding vacation rentals. This will assist you in making the rentals more accommodating for them. Take a keen interest in the kind of environment they require, and let your social media reflect the right ambience they need. Prove that your vacation rentals provide the same experience as a hotel. Further, demonstrate through visually appealing videos how your rental property is better than the rest in the market.
Content Creation
Social media management tools will help you with the frequency of posting, as you can keep a schedule and stay ahead in planning. But even though some tools help with post-curation, it is important to know what should be posted. By offering a little creativity to your content, you will gain more engagement from your audience. Once in a while, post engaging stories or posts where you ask questions from your audience and get to know their likes and dislikes. A perfectly crafted post is bound to increase the number of bookings. But what does a well-crafted post look like?
Captions
Social media users barely spend a few seconds reading a post. So long and descriptive captions will do you no good. You have a brief moment of seconds to capture the user’s attention. So keep your captions short and sweet. For example, instead of writing a description of a vacation rental ad, use questions or captions like “What’s your best vacation memory?” the more people engage with your post, the more advantage you have.
Media
Creating catchy and engaging content isn’t enough. Because the first impression of a post is left by the attached media. social apps like Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat are almost entirely visual. Being in a short-term rental business, you must create a visually appealing post. Create a perfect image of a vacation in the mind of your audience. You can use various real estate advertising ideas for this.
Location
Adding location brings credibility to your business. Whenever a customer sees your rental on a listing site and visits your socials, the website’s listed location will match the social’s posts. This confirms that your business is real. But this is not the sole benefit. Whenever you feature nearby restaurants or cafes, always add location. By doing so, you will also gain traffic from travellers who are visiting those places to your social media account.
Hashtags
Consider hashtags as keywords for media. They explain what you are trying to show through your pictures. Use hashtags of what you want to highlight in your pictures as well as related ideas. Adding some generic themed tags like #vacationtime, #adventure, etc will do you good too.
Monitor and Analyze your Progress
An important part of social media strategy for short-term rental businesses is analyzing your performance and bringing improvements to it. After promoting your rental business on social media, it’s time to monitor the results and grow more. This is where you can take the help of a good tool, and keep a track of your social media performance. To see what type of engagement you are getting, you can simply use Facebook insights. You can also try Google Analytics, to check up on the kind of traffic you get.
To improve performance, you need to get creative with your areas of improvement and think of new ways of reaching your audience. Just remember to keep the content relevant and engaging.
Expand Client Base
Try to get your rental properties on different listing sites. This will give you the advantage of free social media advertising. In addition to that, you will be able to reach a diversified audience. Because by scrolling through listing sites, the users will naturally find your social media which might otherwise not have been possible.
Posting Vacation Rental Plans
One of the most popular short-term rental niches on social media is vacation rentals. So start by targeting vacation rental guests as your business’s potential guests. And, instead of going for a full-on blog or detailed caption post, make a story highlight on Instagram. Why stories? Because they get viewed the most, they are simple to create, and you can always add your creativity to them.
But when it comes to property-related media, the images have to be high-quality. Take captivating captures of both interior and exterior. Add a special touch to your unique points. Revive the story highlight once a week or so to keep the followers engaged. Don’t forget to include information and positive reviews of your surrounding area. Try to be more inclusive of local attractions and restaurants because it is one of the biggest drives for vacation rental customers. Lastly, don’t forget to grab and add those hashtags!
Advertise Sales
Everyone enjoys a good vacation deal. So if your business plans to offer any renting or vacation discount, let all your followers know. Facebook is a great way to spread the news through paid promotions. Instagram can help you get the attention of your followers through stories and posts. It’s best to plan your discounts around seasonalities and holidays.
Top Social Platform Picks for Short-term Rental Marketing
There is no single perfect platform that can cover all needs of your business and help you reach users of diverse demographics. You have to experiment with various platforms to finally decide on the ones that fulfill your business needs the most.
Facebook’s audience is forever-growing. Through Facebook groups, live discussions, and ads, you can reach various clients in several ways.
Instagram knows how to keep its users hooked. Every update adds new compelling features for its users, as you know with the recent update you can add music to your posts. A real estate business of any type can take advantage of this. The story features with layouts, grids, polls, questions, etc will improve your engagement.
The users of Instagram are all about aesthetics. Now as a short-term rental business, it is up to your potential of utilizing that advantage.
Pinterest is a visual heaven. The platform can be used for little DIY posting and interior decor. Make short vacation or rental niche-related posts and use these images to direct traffic to your website.
how can Postredi Help?
Postredi is a social media management tool designed to help out realtors with their online social media presence. The tool will generate wordy social media posts for you, keep all your social platforms in a single place, enlist and organize leads from all socials in your Postredi account, and much more.
FAQs
Final Words
Social media is a crucial marketing tool and it’s best to have social media strategy planned for your rental business. By following the above-mentioned outlined tips, you can successfully map out social media strategy for your rental business.
