Barefoot Technologies Blog- Vacation Rental Industry News

TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel review website, has just made the acquisition of LaFourchette for $140 million in an all cash deal. LaFourchette is one of the leading Internet and mobile restaurant reservation systems in France and Spain with over 12,000 participating restaurants.  With this purchase, TripAdvisor is diversifying their offerings to more than just rental reviews.  This move is one that vacation rental management companies should start to follow for several reasons.  You can read the full article here.

While at the eastern VRMA show I was fortunate enough to meet with a few clients, one of them introduced me to their HR Manager and we discussed staffing.  With the vacation rental industry being so personable, a solid staff is crucial in both keeping your business running, and in keeping your guests happy. 

Congratulations, your web traffic is higher than ever, you are seeing more leads now and you are closing and bringing in more guests than years past.  I guess this means your inbound marketing program is over, right? Not quite, social referrals and social medias are worth their weight in gold and now is the time to turn your guests into advocates!

So your web traffic is increasing and you have been getting more leads than ever through your site, so what’s next?  Que the sales pitch right? Wrong.  This is arguably the most crucial part of inbound marketing, where we turn those leads you've nurtured, into renters or guests.  If we look at this from a typical sales process, these leads are fresh and you need to flood them with your sales pitch to both inform them and sell them at the same time.  However, this is not your typical sales funnel, this is your inbound funnel, and the leads that you are looking at have found you because of something you offer that interests them.

Summer is right around the corner which means now is the perfect time to look into booking your next summer vacation. Consumers must remember to be vigilant when making their booking online because the potential for scam artists has never been more prevalent. We wrote a blog on February 6^th titled Avoid the Pitfalls of Vacation Rental Scams if anyone wants to refresh their memory click the title.

The third segment will focus on how to convert your new visitors into leads.  In segment 1 we discussed the background of inbound marketing, in segment 2 we covered how to get your message through the traffic of the internet, to the right person.  Once you have increased your traffic, the next step is to begin converting that traffic to leads.  After all, what good is a more qualified lead funnel if your conversion rates stay the same?  You have gone through the work to get your message to the people who want to hear from you, now make the most of this targeting and increase your close rates.

In the constant struggle that is marketing, getting more people to your website is not always the answer, sometimes it’s getting the right people.  This week I will address the Paveya infographic’s first stage which is “attract website visitors”.  This is the starting point for all your inbound marketing tactics for your vacation rentals and can impact your business immensely.  The point of this stage is to move “strangers” to become “website visitors” and improve visibility for your website.

In years past, this one have been done with one word, “SEO” or search engine optimization.  Many people use the term SEO to this day but the old definition of SEO bears a minimalistic resemblance to the current methods of optimizing your website.  The first page on Google or other search engines has led to some interesting tactics in web design.  It also led to the creation of an entire industry that would focus on helping you beat the google algorithm.  However, Google has evolved and its latest stage of algorithm has left the SEO hotshots of old in the dust.  The new way to think about SEO should focus on content creation.

As I did my daily reading of blogs, news, and other industry topics I came across this amazing infographic designed to help you understand Inbound Marketing and how it can be applied to your vacation, I couldn’t help but feel like something was missed.  Here at Barefoot, I personally oversee our inbound marketing plan and it has garnished some great success!  We have moved to the first page of google search results, we have seen a 70% increase in contact rates and most importantly, our content has never been fresher.  All of this was thanks to an inbound marketing strategy implemented here so naturally, when I saw someone made an image to help you out there do the same, I was excited to read it. 

For years we have been preaching the benefits of cause marketing to our prospects but it never appears to take hold as much as we at Barefoot would like.  Today, I was reading a blog posted by Hubspot, can be found here, and thought the translation was perfect for the vacation rental market.

With the season interim rolling through and companies switching their bookings, images, and all that comes with new season of renters, scammers can creep in unexpectedly.  We preach the awareness of rental scams and how to educate your potential guests as how to best avoid a scam but seldom do we as an industry take a proactive approach to scams.  Often, we will respond to an attempted scam but many times, the damage is already done.