Google My Business listings are extremely important for short-stay accommodation owners. A Google My Business listing is a free online profile appearing in search results and Google Maps. It allows short-stay accommodation owners to provide potential guests with accurate and up-to-date information about their properties, including contact information, location, amenities, photos, and reviews.
First, What will a Google My Business do for Your Vacation Rental?
1. Increase the Visibility of Your Vacation Rental
Having a Google My Business listing helps short-stay accommodation owners to appear in local search results and on Google Maps, increasing their visibility to potential guests.
2. Improve Your Credibility
Potential guests are more likely to trust short-stay accommodation owners with a Google My Business listing as they can see verified information about the property and read reviews from previous guests.
3. Deliver Cost-effective Marketing
A Google My Business listing is a cost-effective way for short-stay accommodation owners to market their properties online, as it is free to set up and maintain.
4. Enhanced You Guests' Experience
By providing accurate and detailed information about their properties on their Google My Business listing, short-stay accommodation owners can enhance the guest experience and ensure that guests have a positive impression of their properties
…From the Episode
Welcome everybody to the audio version of the Boostly podcast. So today, I am going into the vault and finding some of the best clips from a 24-hour clubhouse room that we ran this year. It was an amazing experience to host it and grab friends and peers from the industry into one room on the leading audio app. And helped hosts all over the world, we had a lot of fun.
We touched every single corner of the globe. And what I wanted to do was be able to put it together, find the best bits and put it into the daily Boostly podcast. So I hope you enjoy it. The section on Google My Business is not more than 10 minutes, but it's going to feature a part of the 24-hour room that resonated the most with me. So thank you for tuning in. And I will be back tomorrow with another podcast episode right now, though. Let's jump into that clubhouse room.
Google Business Listing and Online Marketing
An optimised Google Business Listing for vacation rental properties is an essential marketing strategy for short-term accommodation properties. When you look up any short-term rental hotels, we come up there as well.
I do individual listings for Google My Business. And I do that because I can take advantage of the space in my area against my competitor because I can list as many as I want. And to try and get my Google My Business before others. So that's the reason why I do it. And I would definitely say, Liam, this is most probably a very, very important thing for the travellers market, the corporate market; it's absolutely important for you to be on business locally.
We've done it; we don't do any ads, we don't run any ads, but we've always had Google My Business, and we always try and get reviews on there. And the last weekend we had from there. So far, we've already banked 18,000 pounds, and the contract is for three years. So it's about 291,000 pounds on one property for the next three years. So it's very important to get yourself listed on Business Google.
I do it per listing for two reasons. It definitely helps with guests. Also, when they're searching, you know, for the name of the property or whatever it then comes up on, on Google, as easy for them to find get directions to it. But then, also from a management perspective, we're looking to be seen by people in the area. So we do two things.
One is to make sure that our listings are by name, but in brackets, we always have our company name. So if you were to search Norwich and look through some of their locations, you'd keep seeing, you know, Hamlet's rest brackets, ginger, gold chapel, break brackets, ginger, golden, and it helps to show you know that that brand in general, and that we are where we have our locations.
On The Move? Watch or Listen to our take on optimising a Google Business Listing for Your Vacation Rental
Welcome to Boostly Podcast Episode 411. This is a recap of my Facebook live, where I talked about how important is Google My Business Listings for Short Stay Accommodation and Marketing for vacation rentals.
Here's the audio for this episode:
Here's the video for this episode:
If you're a landlord and thinking about having your place managed, you know, people might be seeing that. And, you know, Google My Business builds trust; if you're seeing in more places, people say that you need seven touchpoints to build trust. And certainly by having those multiple listings. It's easy enough to do it doesn't take long to get both set up. So yeah, definitely something that we do.
Tips for Making the Most of Your Digital Presence
Change your Wifi to your company name
Just as your vacation rental will show up and become visible on Google My Business, anybody in the area locally or travelling by will see your company name whenever they search for Wi-Fi.
Again, all these little things and the password we now use is book direct. It's just to keep things where you get your business name out there and the fact that you've got your book direct in there and your password. I just like that. So we initiated that in our business and let people know via Google My Business.
Make the most of Email Marketing for Vacation Rentals
Let's dive into Email Marketing for Vacation Rentals.
So make sure you have an email list of your guests.
If you've got leisure guests, you know, no matter what, just make sure you're building up some sort of email list where you've got your guest to stay with you.
And the way to do this is to make sure that you're able to obtain their email by directing them to join your email list for perhaps even a discount, or maybe an early check-in, or, you know, a number of different ways you can do it.
But the key thing is that you're then building up an audience where you've got direct contact to, and say, you've got a couple of last minute deals at that stage where you've built up a list of previous guests who have stayed in your place, you've got their permissions to market to them. You tell them, You're not going to spam them, but send them an occasional email about how your business is doing about last-minute deals or any news.
And you can simply send an email which will say, you know, we've got, you know, this is what's happened in our business, we've now taken on a brand new Riverside apartment, wherever it is, guys, if anybody would like to stay there, then here's a 10% off or maybe not discount, you know, if you won't be the first people who stay here that will make sure that you're treated to a bottle of bubbly on arrival or something like that.
I do have email lists; we do build them up. And we do use them to retarget our existing customers. But one point I wanted to make clear, and especially with those in the business market, very often you will have somebody booking on behalf of somebody else.
And they will actually have the contact details, or they will provide the email details of the person who's actually staying, and they are somebody else who's actually done the booking.
So part of our communication would actually say to them that Be aware that if you're providing us with any of your dates of booking, we will be using that, obviously, to facilitate the tracking detail. But also use it for marketing purposes.
However, we respect your privacy and everything else. And if you haven't, we'd be more than happy to take it off our mailing list; please click on this. So it's very important to do that. Because most of the time, it's not then booking for this stay, somebody else booking, and they actually get in there for ideation on their behalf. But not realizing that you're going to be using it for marketing purposes. So just make sure you have that somewhere in your communication.
I just thought I'd dive in on email lists because it's worth an entire clubhouse on its own. Use email lists quite a lot for all sorts of purposes.
But it's incredible how you can tailor the email and who's sent from the title, and everything else gives you such a massively different response. I just thought it might be good to have somebody who's an expert on emails jump into this club at some point to give advice.
We do a lot with it. And also because, as I mentioned earlier on, when I came on the room, about 60-65% of bookings were just returned and direct bookings.
So we open up a lot of the emails we send are seasonal bookings, like holiday bookings. And then what we try to start doing, our system does not, wasn't built for it. So we're kind of playing around with it.
But it is something Mark gave me an idea of the last 24-hour clubhouse to reach out to people on the anniversary of their bookings right about there.
Because we're seeing that there is a lot more family event type of travellers, and those tend to be very recurring, for example, mom's birthday, or Mother's Day or those type of things. So a lot of those travellers will tend to come back right around the same time. So just to keep ourselves top of mind. We use it for that as well. And any new properties.