Many property managers struggle to take advantage of the all ways they can market their short-term rentals outside of listing channels while still balancing their day-to-day operations. But marketing is critical to ensuring success, and Facebook in particular is not a medium you want to overlook.
The most successful property management marketing teams are leveraging social media as part of their marketing strategy.
Advertising on Facebook are increasingly important ways to stay top-of-mind with both past guests and prospects. And it’s easy, inexpensive, and effective. One of the best ways to advertise vacation rentals on Facebook is by using Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences.
These powerful tools allow you to market to people who have stayed with you before or to those who similar traits as your past guests!
Create a Custom Audience to drive new and repeat bookings
Property managers can ensure they’re marketing to qualified leads and audiences by adding their past guest contact database into a Facebook Custom Audience.
Facebook allows you to target custom audiences in two ways:
- Pixels, or a unique tracking code, start serving advertisements to those who visit your website, including the unidentified visitors.
- Data from your property management software - like phone numbers or email addresses - connects your business to your past customers and contacts on Facebook and targets them with sponsored ads to drive repeat bookings.
Create a Lookalike Audience to drive new bookings
In addition to remarketing to targets you’ve identified, Facebook can create Lookalike Audiences that consist of people who are similar to, or "look like," those audiences that are already interested in your business.
When you create a Lookalike Audience, you simply choose a source audience - like an imported list of email contacts or a Custom Audience created with your website pixel data, for example - and Facebook identifies shared qualities from this set of people (i.e. demographic information, interests, etc.).
The social media platform then identifies Facebook profiles that are not already in your source audience but share the same previously identified characteristics.
These options are great ways to showcase your vacation rentals to an entirely new audience, and if you have the right property management software (PMS), you can make marketing even easier on yourself.
Facebook in your larger marketing strategy
Where does Facebook fit in with your business’s marketing strategy? Facebook, and social media in general, is a great way to generate traffic to your direct channel.
When marketing your direct channel, there are two aspects you must invest in. One is long-term investments like search engine optimization or content creation, and the other is short-term investments like Google AdWords or Facebook sponsored ads.
While long-term investments like SEO are critical to scaling your business, allocating some of your marketing spend to Facebook is a tactic that can have a huge ROI in a relatively small amount of time.
But the first step is building a direct channel that is integrated with your PMS if you haven’t already. For example, MyVR’s website builder empowers property managers to create beautiful, bookable direct channels from scratch without any technical experience. Once you’ve set up a professional website, you can begin creating and executing on your social media strategy to drive bookings, free of channel fees.
With Facebook, you can target qualified prospects and guests with ads that link to your website to drive direct bookings, meaning you benefit from cutting out channel fees. And, what’s even better, any inquiries or bookings that come from your website will sync directly into MyVR’s centralized dashboard.
Interested in utilizing Facebook but don’t have the time to create Custom Audiences?
Thanks to MyVR’s integration with Zapier, a web-based service that connects more than 1,500 apps through workflows, called Zaps, that you can build and customize yourself! For example, you can set up a Zap that automates the creation of Custom Audiences or automatically targets past guests with Facebook sponsored ads.
