Jenna Bunnell, Guest Author at Turno

Should You Advertise Your Vacation Rental on Multiple Channels?

Jenna Bunnell — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 15:44:25 +0000

How Does Multi-Channel Marketing Work?

Multi-channel marketing involves advertising your holiday home on multiple online travel agencies (OTAs).

Many hosts use their own direct booking websites or vacation rental sites such as Airbnb. Still, it’s also possible to expand to other hosting websites, specialist vacation sites, or virtual tourism websites (where users are given a virtual experience of the location).

There are various ways to manage your vacation rental across multiple platforms. Property managers generally use hosting tools or a channel manager to automate tasks like pricing, key exchanging, and cleaning. With several properties advertised on multiple platforms, multi-channel marketing can become overwhelming if you don’t have the tools to help.

Equally, hosts working on a smaller scale may choose to manage these channels themselves. For example, homeowners renting out a room or hosts with a single property may find this is a cheaper and altogether preferable option.

The Pros of Multi-Channel Advertising

So, what are the advantages?

Grow Your Income

If your rentals are empty, they aren’t making money. Advertising on multiple channels means you’re more likely to fill the gaps in your calendar. If you struggle to make a profit on your Airbnb property, it may be a sign it’s time to branch out to other platforms.

More Exposure

As you increase your advertising, your rentals become more visible online. Still, think of quality over quantity, and choose the channels you use carefully. You want to make sure your property is being seen by potential renters, not just anybody.

Customers like to read other people’s opinions before parting with their cash. Glowing reviews across multiple platforms are a great advertisement for your rental.

Diversify

Advertising on different platforms gives you the option to widen your audience. For example, if you have a dog- and family-friendly property, you may want to advertise it on pet-friendly sites. This could help you target couples without children but with pets, who wouldn’t necessarily be looking for a child-friendly rental, thus increasing your target audience.

The Cons of Multi-Channel Advertising

Now for the downsides.

Differing Levels of Profit

Each vacation rental website will have its rules, especially regarding fees. This means you’ll have to choose between different prices for customers or differing levels of profit. You may be offering rentals cheaper on your main website, so you need to think about whether it’s worth a cut of your profits to advertise elsewhere.

You should also look at other areas that could affect your income, including cancellation policies, service charges, and cleaning fees. Some of these payments will go to the hosts, but the website may take others.

Communication Issues

There are a lot of factors to juggle when working with vacation rentals, including bookings, checking in, checking out, and cleaning. If you add multiple channels to the mix, it’s easy to make mistakes.

Keeping customer service levels high as you expand can be difficult. Double bookings are an important error to look out for. Not only could this result in bad reviews and the need to refund money, but there is the potential to ruin someone’s vacation.

Keeping Track of Analytics

When working with multiple channels, it can be hard to keep on top of the business side of your rental. If you started as an Airbnb host with one property, you may find it overwhelming to track multiple channels. Some hosts use project management software to automate daily tasks, while others use phone number apps for business calls to help keep things separate.

It’s easy to let the day-to-day tasks take over, but if you don’t keep track of your analytics too, you won’t know what’s happening within your business. You may be wasting money on a website that isn’t profitable or charging too little for your property during peak season.

Things to Consider When Looking Into Multi-Channel Marketing

Are you an independent host or a property manager?

If you’re a property manager, you may want to invest in property management software so you can list your rental on as many sites as possible. If you’re independently renting out your vacation home, you may prefer to handpick a couple of easy-to-use hosting platforms instead.

How many properties do you have?

The number of properties you have may impact where you should advertise them, as some sites are better for advertising multiple listings. You also may want to select specific rentals you think you will do better on different websites, or prioritize properties that haven’t been receiving as much attention.

What type of properties do you have?

Are they houses or apartments? Are you renting out a single room? This will help you decide where’s best to advertise your vacation rentals. And don’t just look for the most popular websites where it’s easy for your listing to get lost. Check for local and specialist sites too, where your vacation rental will stand out.

Should You Advertise on Multiple Channels?

Multi-channel advertising can be a key part of transforming and optimizing your business, but it’s not something that should be taken on lightly. Always do your research before making major changes to your marketing model, as advertising in the wrong places can quickly become a money pit.

Consider your market before deciding which channels you’ll use. Market research with your current customers may offer the answers you need. Look at how many channels you can realistically manage, and set out a plan before getting started.

The post Should You Advertise Your Vacation Rental on Multiple Channels? appeared first on Turno.

7 Important KPIs to Keep Track of in Property Management

Jenna Bunnell — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 19:35:10 +0000

1. Repair and Maintenance Costs

Wear-and-tear is inevitable. But when you’re in the property management business, wear-and-tear is a cost that can cut into your profits. Whether you look after just one property or thousands, this is one KPI that you need to track very closely.

If you are looking at scaling up your business, remember that this cost scales as well. You can’t ignore yearly boiler checks or a sudden problem like a pest infestation. Don’t forget that regular maintenance and a swift response to minor crises both contribute to your overall professional reputation.

Keep track of all your maintenance costs on an ongoing basis to make sure they don’t get out of control.

2. Cost of Unit Turnover

A related cost is that of unit turnover, which refers to what it costs to prepare the property for the next set of guests once the previous guests leave. In general, this includes the cost of cleaning, laundering the bed linens, and carrying out any necessary repairs.

One crucial point to bear in mind is that this cost increases the shorter the average guest’s stay because you incur it each time one set of guests departs. If you can find ways of encouraging guests to stay longer, do. This might include discounts for additional nights, for example.

3. Occupancy Rates

This is an absolutely essential metric to be aware of at all times. You can calculate it by dividing the number of days per given time period your property is rented out by the total number of days it’s available. In remote property management, it’s vital to be able to assess the performance of each of your assets.

Keeping an eye on each property’s occupancy rate is useful for benchmarking purposes. First, you can compare yours with the market average to get an idea of how well each property is doing.

If the occupancy rate of a property seems particularly low, it suggests room for improvement. Is the rent set too high? Is there a problem with the property that needs to be fixed? Or, perhaps you should be focusing more on marketing.

4. Average Nightly Rate

Connected with this are the average rate figures. This is evidently crucial because if rates are set too high, you won’t attract enough guests. On the other hand, if they’re set too low, you could be selling yourself short, which is bad news for your bottom line.

Make sure to keep track of the average prices of vacation rentals in the markets where your properties are located. Raising the nightly rate in line with the market is standard procedure. However, it’s not the only important factor in deciding how to price your short-term rental.

Obviously, your rental income has to cover all your costs before you can start making a profit, so it needs to be able to pay for all mortgage and maintenance costs. Finding the perfect balance can be tricky, but never feel tempted to operate at a loss just to fill a void.

5. Average Days-to-Lease

How quickly are you renting out your properties? Is there barely enough time for a quick change of bedsheets and professional carpet cleaning, or do your properties stay empty for weeks?

To calculate the average days-to-lease metric for a given property, count the number of days between bookings for a particular time period. Then, divide the total by the number of bookings during that period.

This is another metric you’ll want to compare against the market average. If your properties are falling behind, look into upping your marketing efforts. You might even want to look into your booking system to see whether there’s anything you can do to make the process easier for potential customers.

6. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

So far, we’ve mentioned quite a few traditional property management metrics, but let’s take inspiration from a little further afield. The Net Promoter Score is commonly used by companies of all kinds to assess customer satisfaction.

To arrive at your NPS figure, you need to get your customers to answer a short survey about their experience of your service. If you’ve not compiled a marketing survey before, don’t worry. There’s a lot of help out there. All you need is a marketing freelancer and a cloud collaboration service you can work with them on, and you’ll have your survey set up in no time.

The survey should include a question like “How likely are you to recommend our property to a friend, family member, or colleague?” Ask them to answer on a scale of 0 (very unlikely) to 10 (highly likely). Then, divide the responses into these three categories:

Promoters: answered 9 or 10
Passives: answered 7 or 8
Detractors: answered 6 or lower

The NPS is the total percentage of promoter responses minus the total percentage of detractor responses. It may seem too simple to be useful, but it’s a very accurate way of tracking customer satisfaction over time.

7. Net Income

Perhaps the most important KPI of all, your net income tells you how profitable your business is. There are many great tools out there to help you keep track of your net income, or you can simply use a spreadsheet. Useful for everything from report compilation to inventory forecasting, Excel is one of the best-known pieces of office software out there for a reason.

However you decide to track your net income, you’ll find it encourages you to think about aspects of your business you might not have previously considered. Is there any way you could create additional income streams to give the net income figure a boost? Maybe you could begin to offer complementary services like grocery delivery to your properties, for example.

Keep Watching Those Numbers

In the end, running a profitable business of any type is all about keeping an eye on the numbers, and property management is no different. All it takes is some dedicated customer service and careful attention to detail, and before long, your properties will be full of happy guests.

The post 7 Important KPIs to Keep Track of in Property Management appeared first on Turno.

How to Create a Successful Marketing Plan For Your Airbnb Cleaning Business

Jenna Bunnell — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 22:01:20 +0000

Does Your Airbnb Cleaning Business Need a Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is a framework that’s used by businesses to carry out their marketing strategies in a way that’s organized and allows them to keep track of the entire process. It breaks down the steps you need to take in order to successfully implement your marketing strategy.

There are many benefits of having a marketing plan:

Helps you define an angle to successfully market your service
Helps keep the process streamlined and organized
Allows everyone on the team to work together toward common goals
Assists with identifying your target audience and competitors
Allows you to have measurable goals that you can keep track of

A marketing plan is vital whether you’re aiming to attract new customers or retain current ones. Now that we’ve looked over some of the benefits of formulating a marketing plan, let’s look at what it takes to create an effective plan for your cleaning business.

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8 Steps To Creating a Successful Marketing Plan

1. Define Your Cleaning Business

To market your services, you first need to be able to answer the following questions:

Who are you?
What’s your purpose?
What sets you apart from others?
How does your service benefit people?

Once you have this information, you can put together a brand image that will help you connect with potential customers, create content, and market your services. Knowing what makes you stand out from other cleaning businesses and the specific ways in which you can benefit others is an important part of marketing your company.

Why should vacation rental hosts come to you for their cleaning needs? If you don’t know the answer to this, you can’t expect your target audience to either. Therefore, defining your unique selling point (USP) and value proposition will help you define your service and set yourself apart from competitors.

2. Set Your Goals

Once you’ve figured out who you are, you need to specify what it is that your business aims to achieve. At this stage, you should be detailing particular goals that you want to reach in a specific period of time. Then you can decide how to reach those aims and which tools you want to use in order to do so.

For example, one of your goals might be to improve your customer service. You may have noticed consumers complaining about not being able to reach you on the phone. To solve this problem, you could use a business call forwarding service so that any unanswered calls are routed to another number.

3. Determine Your Target Market

Looking at what your goals are and what defines you will help you determine your ideal target audience. This will also help you formulate a buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a profile that has been put together using research data of what a target customer would typically look like. This can include information about what a typical customer’s day looks like, the types of activities they like to do, and how they might make purchasing decisions.

Buyer personas allow you to develop marketing strategies and plans that are aligned with the needs and wants of your customers, as well as respond to the challenges frequently met by said customers.

4. Create a Brand and Stay Consistent

A brand is what makes a business recognizable to potential consumers and stands out from the crowd.

Before putting your brand together, make sure that you’ve carried out the appropriate market research. This will give you insight into what works for your kind of business and what doesn’t. Of course, the goal here isn’t to replicate what someone else has done but to use successful ventures as a source of inspiration for your own brand development.

Brand development research will also help you decide what kind of logo to go for, what color scheme would best suit your business, and generally guide the design of your brand strategy and plan.

In addition to brand development, brand consistency is also very important — and not just on the visual front but also when it comes to fostering trust in your brand, presenting a professional image, and making a good impression.

Given the many ways in which a customer can reach a business, consistency has become very important for managing customer experience and service. Because of this, it’s not only your visual elements that need to be consistent, but your brand message also has to be in line with the customer experience you provide.

It would be very off-putting for a business to offer enterprise application integration solutions and promise 24/7 support but not follow up on their promise. This lack of alignment between what a business says it does and what it actually does can result in a negative impact on its reputation.

For this reason, ensure that your brand image is consistent and that you deliver the services you promise to your customers.

5. Optimize Your Online Presence

Though some still debate traditional marketing vs digital marketing, having an online presence has become imperative for any business. The wonders of the internet allow businesses to extend their reach to potential customers.

For this reason, your marketing plan should include establishing or updating your online presence. You can do this by designing a website for your business or revamping the one you already have. As always, research is key. Knowing what appeals to your target audience will help you determine the kind of website design and functionality you need.

Moreover, social media marketing is an important aspect of marketing and should also have a place in your plan. This is why there are so many tools and resources out there geared toward social media marketing, such as the PandaDoc social media marketing proposal template.

The content you put out if properly prepared will help you connect with your target audience and improve your brand image.

6. Build Your Reputation

One of the biggest elements that drive customers to purchase a service is the brand’s reputation. If your service is well known for its excellent customer care and the delivery of great service, it’s far more likely that people will come to you and recommend you to others.

To build a positive reputation, and provide a great customer experience. An example of this is implementing business text messaging; free trials are usually available for businesses looking to try it out. These types of resources facilitate communication between businesses and their customers.

You can also use tools such as a cloud phone for business to help you streamline the ways in which you communicate not just with your customers but also with your team.

Beyond this, you can use positive customer reviews and testimonials to show potential consumers that you can be trusted and that your service is worth their money.

You can also use tools such as podcasts or social audio to establish yourself as a knowledgeable source in the field and foster a connection with your audience. Holding podcasts during which you give well-needed tips and tricks to keep a vacation rental clean will attract hosts who may eventually turn into potential customers.

Another avenue to explore is certification. People are much more likely to trust you if they can see that you’ve received some sort of certification attesting to the fact that your company knows what it’s doing and has knowledge of the field.

7. Use Feedback to Your Advantage

In the previous section, we talked about using positive reviews to our advantage. Now, we’re focusing on bad reviews or constructive criticism.

Although on impulse, it’s easy to dismiss negative reviews, they’re actually important and can tell you what needs you’re meeting and which you’re not. Work on meeting those needs and using this to market your Airbnb cleaning service.

8. Prepare Stellar Content

When it comes to marketing, content is key. But as with most things, research is needed for you to know what sort of content to make.

For example, market research might show you that cleaning hacks on how to remove common stains are trending; this is your cue to then produce a blog post, Instagram post, or even podcast on cleaning hacks that your business uses.

You can also look into email marketing content and how to best deliver it. Compiling an email list of potential clients allows you to reach out to them and send newsletters, keep them engaged, and inform them of discounts. It’s an easy and inexpensive way to market. You can use your website to collect the email addresses of potential clients.

Constant emails without interesting content that are always pushing a sale or pitching some new product can rapidly get irritating. However, with the right tools and some research, you can make sure that your approach to email marketing hits the sweet spot between interesting content and converting leads.

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Market Your Airbnb Cleaning Business to Success

The idea of developing and implementing a winning marketing strategy can be daunting, but a well-designed marketing plan will help your Airbnb cleaning business stay on task and keep track of progress. Using the eight steps we’ve provided in this article, formulate a plan that is right for your business and guides your marketing efforts efficiently.

The post How to Create a Successful Marketing Plan For Your Airbnb Cleaning Business appeared first on Turno.