Is your Vacation Rental Company new to using Inbound Marketing? Or are you thinking about incorporating inbound marketing tactics to your marketing plan this year? Either way, make sure you don’t fall victim to these 5 common mistakes inbound marketers can make. Of course, everyone makes mistakes, but we’re here to make the transition to inbound marketing a success for you.
#1: Don’t Try to do Everything at Once
You’ve read all the information you can about inbound marketing and now you want to get going! But do us a favor and resist the urge to take everything on at once. In order to win at inbound marketing, you must approach your marketing strategy slowly and take each step one at a time.
Start by prioritizing your to-do list, your blog, social media, website, email & so on. Which channel needs the most work? And which can function as is for a while longer while you work on the others? For example, If your email bounce rate is higher than 2%, but your facebook is getting decent engagement, try focusing first on your email strategy.
If you’re having trouble figuring out where to get started with inbound, let us guide you!
#2: Setting Unrealistic, Unmeasurable oals
This is probably the most common mistake we see with Vacation Rental Management companies using Inbound Marketing. It’s good to set your standards high, but make sure your goals are realistic and measurable. To make sure your goals are realistic, try the S.M.A.R.T. formula:
- Specific. Every goal should have a specific metric. Think “write 2 blog posts per month” instead of something generic like “write more blog posts.”
- Measurable. Hard numbers are the only way to properly measure your success.
- Attainable. Reaching goals are good, but they should still be attainable. Be honest about what you and your team are capable of.
- Relevant. Your goals should actually matter to your business.
- Timely. Stick to that deadline! If you keep pushing it back, your goals lose credibility and the system falls apart.
#3: No Blogs
Blog posts = more traffic to your website, and isn’t more traffic and more customers the goal for all us marketers? So why wouldn’t you blog? Every time you write a new blog post, you add another indexed page to your vacation rental website — and every new indexed page is more opportunity to show up in search engines.
Another mistake is publishing blog posts without several calls-to-action (CTAs). For example, banners on the top or bottom of each post, sidebar CTAs, links to landing pages and other posts within your post, and so on. More CTAs equal more opportunities to gather prospects information and stay in front of them until they are ready to book.
#4: Forgetting to Measure Results
We can’t stress enough how important it is for you to track the metrics you set and take time to look at how the results compare to your objective. For example, If you’ve been working on email marketing, track your email click through rate for a sense of what your audience is interested in reading about. When you see something’s working, replicate it. When something isn’t working, head back to the drawing board — the more you test, the more you learn.
