Homeowner Acquisition – Your Next Digital Marketing Priority!

Ever since the great OTA fee increase, we here in the vacation rental marketing world have had one subject on our minds – BOOK DIRECT. With the glory days of being able to manage your entire business through OTAs over, it became paramount to build your own rental site, host your own properties, and take your business back. This has been the major focus of vacation rental marketing companies for the past several years; however, this focus has ignored perhaps the most effective way to grow your property management business and increase profits better than the Book Direct initiative ever could. Enter Homeowner Acquisition – your next Digital Marketing priority.

Why Homeowner Acquisition?

Though increasing organic bookings through your own website will always be a crucial part of growing a property management business, homeowner acquisition is where the real money is. Each new property you add to your portfolio provides incredible income potential by opening calendar dates for new guests and even expanding your organic site footprint (which can help with SEO!). Just remember: In 2022, the AVERAGE property in Maricopa County AZ made over $90,000 in revenue, while the average property is continually managed by the same property manager for 5 years. Do the math: With quality guest retention and a properly run property management business, even a smaller property can be worth its weight in gold.

Of course, more properties equaling more money is only the start of why you should be focusing on adding new properties to your portfolio. You can also provide new amenities for guests, more variety of properties, and all in all ensure that you are able to provide for a wider range of guests, improving public perception – which, yes, also adds to your bottom line.

How to Start Your Homeowner Acquisition Journey

Obviously, solid search presence in the search engines is your best way to get your brand’s name out and start bringing in new homes, but this is easier said than done! After the post-pandemic demand explosion in our marketplace, there are more competitors in every market than ever before, making it extremely difficult to stand out amongst the crowd. Fortunately, with a little SEO know-how and a bit of hard work, even the most layman of laymen can start their journey towards growing their property management business. Here are just a few tips to get you started:

1. Optimize Your Site with Property Management Keywords:

   As SEO experts, we know how foreign optimizing a webpage for SEO can seem to some people, but it’s not as scary as it seems! Utilizing FREE tools like Semrush, you can discover keywords that homeowners are searching in your area, then use them on your site so Google (and other search engines) know you are a source for the service those homeowners are looking for. Just start by using Semrush’s free keyword magic tool to determine what people are searching for in your market (i.e. Arizona vacation rental management). Once you find a collection of keywords with good volume, take those keywords and use them in the copy on your property management service page, and you’ll have a nice head start on showing Google – and your prospective clients – what you provide. Bonus Tip: Don’t forget to create meta titles and descriptions using the WordPress Yoast plugin! Google looks at this quite heavily when determining if a page should rank, so make sure this field is filled out!

2. Pay Per Click Is Your Friend:

   Organic SEO may be “free,” but it is time consuming and – for many – just too obtuse to understand. Fortunately, Pay Per Click advertising is a bit more time friendly, and an extremely powerful tool to add to your homeowner acquisition tool kit. Remember those keywords we gathered in step 1? Take those keywords, sign up for Google AdWords, and get some ads out about your services that bid on those keywords! In most cases, this is your quickest path to the top of the search results; so, as long as you create solid ad copy, you’ll start to see relevant traffic trickling into your site in no time. Just remember: PPC is pay to play, meaning you are going to be spending actual money on every click that brings a user to the site. With that in mind, make sure your ad campaign is as optimized as possible so you can minimize wasteful spend!

3. Don’t Neglect Guest Acquisition Marketing:

   One of the biggest mistakes we consistently see with homeowner acquisition marketing campaigns is making the sole focus of your marketing endeavors the property owner. Sure, getting to page 1 for [insert area here] vacation rental marketing is sure to get more relevant eyes on your site and services; however, you need to make sure owners actually want to use your services in the first place! If they search vacation rental terms and don’t find your site anywhere on page 1, they will (understandably) believe that their home won’t be booked with your services and won’t choose you as their manager. Make sure for every dollar spent trying to improve your property management visibility, you’re at least dedicating fifty cents to guest acquisition. This will ensure those digitally savvy owners see your services as the boon they are, not a potential money pit.

4. Mix in Some Physical Marketing to the Pot:

   Finally, if you want to draw in owners from all walks of life, it’s important that you also are investing in some physical marketing services. Mailers and brochures may be old school, but in the right hands, they are powerful tools to help ensure your services highly visible both online AND offline.

Choose Bizcor for your Homeowner Acquisition Needs

There are plenty of things you can do to make your business’s property management services stand out amongst the crowd. However, if you want the services of an expert team to take these off your plate and make sure they’re done right, Bizcor can help. Our All-in-One homeowner acquisition plan provides all we’ve mentioned here and more and is sure to help you increase your property portfolio and even increase direct guest bookings! For more information, click here to see our plan or contact us today! We can’t wait to hear from you soon!

The post Homeowner Acquisition – Your Next Digital Marketing Priority! appeared first on BIZCOR®.