Barefoot Technologies Blog- Vacation Rental Industry News

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.

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.