According to booking.com, 80% of customers prefer to use a mobile device to book vacation plans. In addition to that, 70% of mobile searches generate action’s within an hour.

It’s 2018, So it’s no secret that people more than ever before are using mobile devices to access the internet.

If you are in the vacation rental business, SnapInspect suggests boosting your mobile marketing efforts. Optimizing and targeting your marketing efforts to entwine with mobile devices is one of the smartest decisions your company can make in 2018.

Check out this list of five tips that we think will give you the competitive edge against your competitors when it comes to mobile marketing in vacation rental business.

Social Media

If you’ve have taken public transport in the last year, you’ll be all too familiar with the sad sight of an entire bus staring at their mobile devices with a 90 degree bent neck as if their life depends on it. Look, it’s upsetting, but the mobile trend isn’t going away anytime soon.

It makes sense to build a social media presence that can easily be stumbled upon by potential guests.

Heres three tips that Snapinspect has found to bring success to your social media marketing efforts.

Content Is King

When it comes to posting, you need to create posts that have the “share-factor.” This means that they generate such a buzz that people viewing the post feel compelled to share with friends, family or colleagues on multiple platforms.

When brainstorming what content you want to post be sure to remain true to your gut feeling if you wouldn’t share it what makes you think someone else will?

Often we see vacation rental companies focusing on a ‘quantity over quality’ based model. Obviously, this doesn’t work in today’s social media crazed world. You need to provide your audience with high quality, engaging shareable content to be recognized.

Encourage Guests to Post their Vacation Experiences

Social justification can do wonders to increase your vacation rental bookings. It’s natural for people to trust other customers as opposed to your own words. Because of this, it’s always a smart idea to put your guest’s experiences in their own words on your social media.

Here are a few ways you can encourage your guests to share their experiences

-Create a hashtag promotion. E.g. “use the hashtag #vacationproperty to get 20% off your next booking!”
-Have multiple prompts for customers to share their images after staying in your vacation rental
-Offer incentives for customers to review your services and accommodation

Stop pitching! Instead, Post information-rich traveler experience

People on social media are not as naive as some people would like you to believe. They can smell a tacky sales orientated post from a mile off. The harder you try to mask the fact that it is a sales post, the more people will resent your post and ultimately your brand.

Transparency is vital when you want to build an audience on social media in 2018. Users would much prefer to scroll through posts on social media relating to travel experience and knowledge than be sold something via an Instagram photo.

For example, you could post photos and write-ups of all the local attractions close to your vacation rental, e.g. “Top ten things to do when in La Jolla, San Diego.”

One of your main social media goals should be to have returning traffic. To keep users coming to you, provide useful information that guests can use when traveling to your destination. The more value you, the more traffic you will get.

Potential customers would much rather book from an informative and useful company that has rich quality content than one that posts about their current promotions and sales routinely.

Mobile Email Marketing

An astonishing 60% of all emails are opened by mobile. It’s essential that you utilize email marketing and optimize it for mobile.

Keep It Short

Marketingsherpa reports that only have roughly 20 seconds to communicate what you want to say before people stop reading. That’s around 50 words; this means you have to keep things to the point. When writing your email copy aim to keep things short and simple.

Images Are A Must

Pictures do speak a thousand words. Especially when you are advertising vacation rental destinations. You can communicate so much more with pictures compared to text.

Images grab viewers attention, trigger emotions, feelings and can even be the deciding factor when guests chose to stay with you. Pick images that you know will spark interest and engage with your audience.

Layout

Reading emails on a mobile device means you see a very different email than if you were to read it off a computer screen. Break text up as much as you can. Include headers, subheadings, bold text, italic text, etc. to communicate your points and ideas.

SnapInspect suggests testing your emails layouts by sending them to yourself to see how it reads on mobile.

Understanding On-the-Go consumers

Mobile marketing is about reaching, understanding and building with the on-the-go consumer. In any situation dealing with mobile marketing, it’s essential to get into the mind of who you are trying to market too. Any new idea that comes to mind immediately ask yourself would mobile users like this? Would it work on mobile? Someone could be on the bus and reading your next marketing email, waiting for their coffee and come across a facebook targeted ad, or a blog post, You get the idea.

As technology is evolving, it’s becoming increasingly harder to gain someones full attention. Because of this, It’s better to focus on short, punchy and eye-catching marketing material for mobile.

Had success in the past using a method we didn’t cover today? Let us know in the comments!