For many people around the globe, travel is officially back on! Travel confidence has certainly returned over the last few months, so it’s great to see so many tourists coming to enjoy the sunshine here in the Algarve.
An absolutely integral component in any villa rental strategy is dynamic marketing. The events of the pandemic have proven that you can’t simply rely on tried-and-tested marketing strategies anymore. It’s about adapting, evolving and using a marketing approach that is clearly communicated and caters to a wider audience.
Communicating your key messages
When it comes to marketing, it is simply all about communication. For SandyBlue, regularly updating both our owner partners and guests was one of the top priorities. Even when it wasn’t great news, such as sudden travel restrictions, keeping customers up to date meant loyalty and trust was maintained.
Moving forward, the approach to communicating developments and updates in the villa rental sector will be about speed and the use of multiple marketing channels.
Email marketing and paid social media campaigns have proven invaluable when answering frequently asked questions or sharing developments as they happen. Our database of 21,000 past guests responded positively to these frequent updates, so keeping them in the loop is a winning tactic.
For guests who have not yet booked their late summer getaway, they will be drawn to companies with a calm and collected approach.
Diving into customer insights
With regular communications reaching your audience, it is important to analyse who is seeing your content and how they are digesting this. It helps streamline a content strategy, identify key locations and consistently diversify the marketing strategy accordingly.
Having seen a huge increase in guest enquiries across territories such as Germany, Switzerland and Portugal itself, our team used these customer insights to deliver the right messaging to the right audience. Having a multilingual team definitely helped with this and, in turn, our social media audience grew significantly! Casting the marketing net wider means a much bigger audience to secure late summer bookings this year.
The journey start sat the first enquiry
When a potential guest first enquires, their customer journey begins right there. Pre-arrival updates, checking in with guests during their stay and post departure care are so important in a villa rental marketing strategy.
Why is this important for late summer bookings or even autumn bookings? Tourists who have not yet booked their holiday are likely doing plenty of research to ensure their first post-lockdown getaway is completely worry free. Showing you can offer this will put you at the top of their list.
Sharing potential villas, in-villa experiences they can enjoy and things to do in the area will really demonstrate a proactive approach. As we generate our own enquiries through marketing, we have full control of this customer journey process.
Marketing will continue to be an important channel in the villa rental market, with dynamic and adaptable approaches being the key to ongoing success!
By Joe Mountain
|| [email protected]
Joe Mountain is founder of Algarve
villa rental specialists SandyBlue.
289 392 236 | www.sandyblue.com
