Marketing Your Holiday Property
By Helen Mulhern, Managing Director of Eventy – Marketing & PR
Cornwall holds a special place in people’s hearts, with many returning time and time again to a county that is much loved. Often people are introduced to Cornwall as children and return in years to come as adults, some with children of their own. Each year, huge numbers of visitors flock south, crossing the Tamar border, to explore our beautiful county and to enjoy the wealth of activities on offer.
For many, the accommodation itself is the most important factor – be it the convenience of its location for accessing different areas of the county, how many it sleeps, whether it’s dog friendly, where it ranks on the luxury scale, or the cost… to name just a few considerations.
The aim of the game for most holiday properties is to achieve as high an occupancy rate as possible, ensuring that your business delivers a profitable return. And so the competition to attract visitors to your accommodation begins as there is a wealth on offer!
The key to marketing that will produce a return on investment is targeting your audience. Very few products or services will be desirable to everyone all of the time. So ask yourself a few questions and then build your marketing strategy accordingly.
1. Who is your most likely customer?
If you have a luxury one-bedroom penthouse apartment, you are unlikely to be looking for families. Alternatively, if you have a four-bedroom barn conversion, families and groups of people sharing holiday time might be just who you are looking for. What is attracting them to Cornwall? If your property is situated on the coast path, or near footpaths, walkers or people visiting with their dogs might be your target audience. Distance and modes of travel may be particularly important to the type of guests that you are trying to attract.
These are just a few considerations. Try to build a picture of who your guest tends to be so that you can think about the bridges you need to put in place to reach more of them.
2. What makes your property unique or inviting to your profile of guests?
Think about what makes your property or offering stand head and shoulders above your competition. If your WiFi and high tech gadgets are important to your profile of guest, make sure you lead with this information. If privacy is paramount, ensure you set your property in this context.
A picture paints a thousand words, so ensure you have the best possible imagery to reflect your offering. Visitors like to see where they are going to stay and imagine their holiday environment, so make sure that a virtual visit to your property leaves them wanting to come back for more.
Feedback is gold dust. If you are unsure what your best selling points are, ask your guests, or even friends for feedback. Encourage them to tell you what they liked best, so that you can continue to highlight these aspects – you may even be able to build quotes into your marketing material. Also encourage them to share what they liked least or would want to change – this will help you to build an even better offering for the future.
Be honest – do not oversell on features you do not have. Happy guests will be a pleasure to deal with, lead to return visits and recommendations.
3. How are your current guests finding you?
Attracting guests to your property is the hardest part, so ask them how they have heard about you and monitor this information. Use it and build on it. The tool you have chosen has worked for them, so more of the same would make sense. If you are spending time and money using a tool and not one of your guests cites it as the reason for staying with you, it might be time to direct your energy elsewhere. Talking to your visitors is not just good customer care, it can reveal some very useful information you can use to build your business.
4. How do your guests shop or behave?
Having established your “typical guest”, think about how they tend to shop for their holidays and also when. Your guest may tend to book on line, use a travel agent or take the recommendation of friends. You may find that there are key times of the year that your guests tend to book their stays. You need to build this into your strategy so that the right marketing tools are used at the correct times.
Understanding where your potential guests will be looking, how and when they are influenced, is crucial to wise marketing spend.
If you are unsure about your potential guest’s buying behaviour then encourage your current guests to share more information with you. Or dedicate some of your marketing budget to conducting valuable research.
Top Secrets!
Once you know who your typical guest is and how they behave, you can be far more strategic and targeted with your marketing activities. There are a range of tools that you can use, depending on the demographics of your audience. There is no “one tool fits all” that I can recommend to solve all of your marketing needs, no “top secret” that I can share to boost your bookings above all others. It very much depends on who your guest is, how they behave and what budget you have to work with which leads to a tailored approach.
One thought I would like to leave you with is that keeping your current customers is equally if not more important that attracting new ones. If people are visiting you then half of the hard work is done – you have reached them and they have chosen you. It should be easier and far more cost effective to keep customers loyal to you than looking for new ones. Keep talking to them, both to make sure that they have a lovely stay, and will consider you for their future holidays!