Vacation Rentals – Creative Assets Inc Blog

Is Your Vacation Rental Blog Ignoring Half Your Customers?

A blog that only caters to part of the clientele for your vacation rental management company is not really doing its job.

If you are a vacation rental management company, you know your business has more than one type of customer. You perform transactions that are both business to customer, B2C, and business to business, B2B. You do one with your Vacation Rental Guests and the other with your Vacation Rental Owners. Just like you, your blog needs to cater to both types of clientele. You wouldn’t let an employee ignore valuable customers. Why let your blog get away with it?

Blogs Generate Sales Leads

A blog attracts valuable attention to your website and to your business. Few things receive organic responses as well as blogs do. When you write regularly and stay on the key topics of your vacation rental business, pretty soon you will have a lot of key words that lead right to you. Search engines will respond, and so will those who are browsing the Internet. The question is, who does your blog cater to, your vacation rental guests, or your vacation rental owners?

Your Vacation Rental Blog Should Target both B2C and B2B Clients

Your blog should cater to both guests and owners. The first thought that might spring into your mind is that attempting to appeal to both clienteles might get your blog ignored by one or the other. If a person is dreaming of a vacation, an explanation of what lock to put on a vacation rental might not have a good appeal. Therein rests the problem that you need to solve. How do you cater to both?

Blog visitors tend to behave in similar patterns. If they find a blog they enjoy, they are likely to read another topic on that same blog site. You want them to stay on your site.

Below is a pair of possible solutions.

Two Options for Building a Vacation Rental Blog Targeting Both Guests and Owners

Creating Two Stand Alone Blogs

While this option is possible, it is not the easy route. To create two separate blogs without downloading WordPress onto your hosting site twice, you will need one of two things, some programming knowledge, or a contractor with programming knowledge. You can see an explanation of how the process is done here. It’s called MultiSite and is available through WordPress plugins. That’s a more complex route and that option is not covered further here in this blog.

A simpler option does exist. It’s one you can do on your own.

Use Categories to Divide the Topics of Your Blog

You can use the category feature to separate the topics on your blog. Categories are a commonly-used and handy feature of WordPress blogs.

On WordPress, if you go to your blog Dashboard, you will see the the option labeled Posts and under it a few options that includes one labeled Categories. If you click on Categories, you will see a form to create new categories for your blog. Create one for Vacation Rental Guests and another for Vacation Rental Owners.

Be sure your Widgets are set up to display Categories. You will find Widgets in the drop down under Appearance in your dashboard.

When you post your blogs, select the appropriate category.

Go back through your previously posted blogs and add check marks for your Guest and Owner categories on each blog.

If a blog applies to both categories, go ahead and check both.

Categories Help Marketing Goals

Following those steps, all by themselves, you will divide all you posts into two main categories. Do so regardless of what other categories you created and regardless of how many additional categories each blog belongs. By putting each blog in either Vacation Rental Guests or Vacation Rental Owners, you’ve accomplished two important things:

Readers will see that you have organized your blog with a category aimed at their specific interest
Search engines will see the words Vacation Rental Guest or Vacation Rental Owner as keywords on every one of your blogs!

Create Links to Your Blog Categories

An added bonus comes with categorization. You can create links that go to your categories. That means you could put a link for your vacation rental guests onto social media, like Facebook. When Facebook fans follow the link, they will arrive at a page that displays only the blogs from your Vacation Rental Guest category. You can use a link to your Vacation Rental Owners category in the same fashion.

With the categories in place and checked off on every one of your blogs, you will have an interest-targeted links that you can use as often as you like. The uses and locations for those links are as broad as your imagination.

A Well-Organized Multi-Purpose Blog

Creating categories on your blog is the easiest way to divide your blog between Guests and Owners. Once you have divided up your posts in that way, you can then share them with your separate clienteles.

Cater to Both Vacation Rental Guests and Vacation Rental Owners

A blog that only caters to part of the clientele for your vacation rental management company is not really doing its job. A vacation rental management company needs to appeal to both owners and guests. By tweaking your blog using categories, you can serve up targeted blogs to both audiences. The change will also inform search engines more precisely what it is that you do and that will make you more discoverable. With your WordPress blog as part of your main website, it will lead the blog traffic right onto your site. Once you have them there and interested, converting them into a customer is only a step away.

How to Answer Vacation Rental Reviews

The power of reviews is monumental for any company that seeks its customers online.

Answering reviews written by vacation rental guests can be hard. Even warm reviews can create dilemmas when responding. The question arises if you even need to answer all those reviews. The answer is yes. Answered reviews demonstrate that a business is connected, listens, and cares. Whether the review is good or bad, you improve your reputation by answering. After writing replies to hundreds of reviews, here’s what I’ve learned.

Answering Angry Vacation Rental Reviews

When a guest has a valid complaint, responding can elicit multiple cringes. Whether it is a cleaning oversight, an unexpected living condition, or a mistake in the booking system, the error is yours. Those can be the hardest to answer. However, when done properly, they might also turn out to be the easiest. Here’s how.

1. Investigate the Problem

Find out who is responsible and why. Call your cleaning company and find out what happened or ask your sales team how the booking error occurred. You can’t fix a problem that has “no source.” Establish how the problem occurred in the first place.

2. Solve the Problem

Solve the problems the customer noted, even if they’ve already left. Have the cleaning manager train the person who made the mistake. If the guest complained about a living condition, such as too much noise, put a note about that condition in the rental description. While such a note won’t make the noise disappear, it will no longer come as a surprise to guests, which will help a great deal. If it is a booking error, perhaps you have another rental that guests can use. In some situations, a refund may be the only solution. Follow your company policy for such situations but do something to resolve the customer upset.

3. Report that the Problem Is Solved

Now that you solved the problem, it’s time to write the response to that bad review. Am I saying you should let that bad review sit while all of the above is going on? Yes. On some sites you only get one shot to answer. Make it count. Resolving problems like the ones above should not take too long. If you find time stretching on, you can do two things; change the way your company operates and take action regardless of the resolution.

Streamline your operations so that, in the future, problems resolve faster.
- It can be done. When a staff writer, I had the company owner’s support in getting the above system in place. It was the owner’s task to ask why the problem happened, but when I asked if it was resolved, the staff answered to the best of their abilities. As soon as I got my answer, I wrote the review response. After a short time, we all got quite good at working together.
When the time stretches too long, it’s time to take action despite not reaching a resolution. Write the response. Note that your business takes the problem seriously. Then state that you are currently looking into it or mention whatever steps you are taking. This is a temporary patch for the hard-to-solve issues. It should not become a habit. If people realize that you offer such as a standard response, it will damage your credibility.

No matter how bad the problem is, when you report that it is solved and how you did it, review readers will be satisfied. Instead of seeing you as a bad company, they will see you as a company that had a problem and then solved it. It will show that you care and that, if they have a problem, you will support them.

Never Respond in Anger

In all the time of answering reviews, through all those hundreds of responses, I only considered a remarkably small number of them be bad apples. Only two, in fact, turned out to be impossible to satisfy. One of those turned out to be a professional “troll.”

A vacation is supposed to be a dreamy time of relaxation and fun. Lots of expectations go with it. When that bubble is burst, upsets occur. If you paid thousands for your vacation rental, the tub should be clean, shouldn’t it? Well, of course it should. Those guests should never receive a response that makes them wrong for their dissatisfaction. It is up to the person answering your reviews to maintain a cool, kind, and understanding demeanor – at all times. That doesn’t mean that person can’t roll their eyes once in a while, but when it comes time to put fingers to keyboard, disparaging thoughts should be cast aside.

Please note: a passive-aggressive response isn’t going to fool anyone.

Fighting a Damaging Review

Once in a while, a guest will defame you in a way that is untruthful and damaging. You do have recourse when that happens. If you can show that the review is dishonest, many sites will take them down. That doesn’t mean they will make it easy for you. You will have to contact the company that published the review and ask for its removal. If you are certain it is false and adamant that it should be taken down, perseverance may bring success. Be prepared, however. Sometimes it is impossible to get them removed.

What to Do When Guests Threaten a Bad Review

When a guest threatens a bad review, it might seem like they have you over a barrel. That is usually not true. You see, if someone says, “Give me a discount or I’ll write a bad review,” that’s extortion. It is an illegal act. One company I worked with would politely point that fact out to the customers, reminding them that they were speaking over a recorded phone line. That dissolved 99% of those threats. Reviews have power and modern customers know it. How you solve that volatile situation is up to you, but you do have options.

Upset Customers Want Acknowledgement

Remember, a person who is upset usually hasn’t had anyone listen to them and tell them they’re right, or at the very least acknowledge them for what they said. A mere “That’s not good,” or “That shouldn’t have happened,” will diffuse a surprising number of those upsets. After you acknowledge them, you may find yourself teaming up with that customer to solve the problem. Defusing problems in that way, right when you receive a complaint, can intercept bad reviews before they happen.

Responding to Good Vacation Rental Reviews

Good reviews require responses just as much as bad ones. When the review is favorable, you have plenty of options. For one, you can just say “Thanks!” Don’t overdo that one, of course. Your responses should be varied and genuine. If the customers compliment the view, agree with them and say that the sunsets on your beach are beautiful. The variations are as plentiful as the types of reviews written. Just answer positively, agreeing with their viewpoint. After all, your vacation rental is probably in a good spot and it should be easy to pull forth positive points to back up their views.

Respond to Reviews Regularly

When I took over writing reviews for one company, they had a deep, unanswered backlog. Some could not be answered because they’d been archived by the host sites. I set a cutoff date and dug in. I answered the oldest ones first and moved forward. Simultaneously, I answered all the new reviews as they came in each day. It took some doing, but I closed the gap until the company had no unanswered reviews.

Zero unanswered reviews is the ideal situation. If you do not have the staff or the time and resources to clean up your backlog, at the very least you should answer all your new reviews. You can usually do so in just ten to twenty minutes each day. The value of well-answered reviews can’t be understated in our current online shopping economy.

Where Are My Vacation Rental Reviews?

The sites where you list your vacation rentals should have reviews for your rentals on them. That’s the case with HomeAway, VRBO, TripAdvisor, and most others. Learn how to login so that you always have access to your reviews. Set up email notifications if you don’t have them already. Each site will work differently but it is worth your time to figure them out.

Evaluate the Value of the Review Site

You will also notice a number of other review sites have collected reviews on you. Not all review sites are created equal. Some have algorithms that label your five star reviews as suspicious and deem your more tainted reviews as valuable. You will have to decide if those sites are worth your time. Not all of them will be.

Answering Vacation Rental Reviews

Answering your vacation rental reviews is vital. An article on learn.g2crowd.com related that reviews influenced 97% of shoppers’ buying decisions. The power of reviews is monumental for any company that seeks its customers online. No matter how good you are, you will receive both good and bad reviews. Responding to them gives you back a measure of control. It delivers a message that you care and allows customers to see that you will fix problems that occurs. How you answer your reviews will paint an image of you to the public. You have the power to make your image a positive one.

Use Your Blog to Stake a Claim on Your Business Territory

Don’t hope your brand will become synonymous with your area. Make it happen.

A blog can help you to stake a claim in the territory where you live or work. The process is easier than you might think.

How to Claim Your Territory Using a Blog

The answer to claiming your territory by using a blog is as simple as repetition of your territory name. You should be writing blogs about what you do, what you offer, and where you operate. Each and every one of them can and should mention your territory. Do you operate throughout your county? Do you define your geography via city limits? Do you consider your entire state your territory? It doesn’t matter how small or how large an area on which you lay claim. What matters is how much you talk about it and how often.

Divide and Conquer Your Work Territory

The size of your territory is irrelevant when it comes to branding yourself as the solution for the people who go there. Let’s use a vacation rental company on the beach as an example. If a company claimed a single beach, such as Clearwater Beach, FL, plenty of options exist for dividing and conquering. Locals at Clearwater Beach consider it to have to parts, North Clearwater Beach and South Clearwater Beach. For a piece of vacation real estate that is not much more than a mile long, that’s pretty specific. It doesn’t end there, however. Clearwater Beach also has a well-defined marina area and famous Pier 60. By writing about each one of those micro-areas, you would still be writing about Clearwater Beach. Take a moment to consider the area you claim as your territory. It surely has divisions and points of interest. Use them. Blog about them and do so often. Each time you do, you will use keywords that focus on your territory even if you’re not trying!

Expand Your Reach Using Your Blog

Including descriptions and features of your territory in your blog is a great idea, but don’t stop there. Plenty of points of interest surround your domain as well. Clearwater Beach is an easy target as an example. The beach region continues north and south with nearly another dozen other named beach cities and parks along the coastal strip. Your territory will undoubtedly have nearby attractions that you can use to your benefit. Write about them. Figure out a way that they have something to do with you. No matter your business, public interest in your area and the areas that surround it will target two groups; those who are there and those that want to be there.

Make Your Name Synonymous with Your Territory

Once your blog reaches a critical volume, it stands a chance of being the go-to blog for your niche in your territory. Don’t hope your brand will become synonymous with your area. Make it happen. It takes dedication and hefty amount of blogging. In my experience, the number to shoot for is about 100 blogs. On the way there, or somewhere just after, you will achieve a real impact. By covering your territory and the surrounding terrain, you will cast a wide net. By blogging about micro-areas, you will create a tighter weave in your net. When people search for your industry, with your territory attached, you will appear in the results. With a well-defined territory, blogs aimed at micro-areas inside your territory, and mentions of regional attractions, you stand a chance of appearing on the first page, organically. Your blog is a beautiful way to define your business. Use it to stake a claim on your business territory!

Cheating Time to Make Dated Blog Posts Evergreen

Modern technology has a very simple answer to the problem of stale blog posts.

Blogging about local events is a great idea to focus attention on your activities. Unfortunately, those blogs go stale shortly after the event ends. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to recycle those old posts to bring new value to them again?

Can Dated Blog Posts Ever Be of Value Again?

When you blog about something such as a 4^th of July show, a Mardi Gras parade, or a Christmas event, you have an opportunity to use those posts over and over again. It remains true that they will never really be evergreen, of course. Few people take interest in holiday promotion when holiday is six months away. However, the 4^th of July will be back and so will all the other yearly events. That provides you with an opportunity to breathe value back into those posts.

When to Promote Event-Based Blog Posts

The key to a successful re-sharing of those old blogs relies on timing. You will want to promote them anew about 30 days or so before the event occurs again. The nature of the activity will determine variations in the adjustment of that date. If a Christmas parade happens the first week of December, you might want to break the “Thanksgiving barrier” and promote a bit earlier.

Promote Blog Posts Per the Schedule of Your Industry

Special circumstances will change the dating of your blog revitalization. For example, in the vacation rental industry, a leading time of 3 to 6 months is not a bad idea. That would make a Christmas post in July make sense. Just make sure to headline your re-sharing of the post with an explanation of why they should take notice now. “It’s time to book for December vacations!” With many rentals scheduled a year ahead of time, you could even try it in January. Label that one very well. Folks are a bit tired of Christmas once January gets going. A text-heavy promo might do better than a holiday image. Regardless of the challenges or the industry you work in, the promotion is worth it and you should have a timed promotion plan.

Your calendar won’t mind when you mark events a year in advance.

Use Technology to Help Schedule Blog Post Promotion

Modern technology has a very simple answer to the problem of stale blog posts. Digital calendars and planners serve the purpose fantastically. They’re nothing new, but not everyone uses them. A generation gap certainly applies, with adoption of the tech slower among the “more established” age groups. The revitalization of old blog posts makes digital calendars worth trying, though. A simple entry into a planner, such as Google Calendar, can create alerts that appear in your Gmail or which pop up on your digital device. Plenty of other digital planners and calendars are available that offer similar features. For the die-hard paper calendar users, marking your promotion dates when you buy the year’s calendar works just fine too. You will just have to make that little chiming sound on your own.

Use Social Media to Revitalize Those Old Blog Posts

Share your old blogs on all the relevant platforms such Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and so on. You should see a spike in views of that blog. Use the text space provided on the social media platform to explain why the blog is currently relevant. When you need to share them far ahead of the event date, explain to your followers why the should take heed. When the date is within 30 days, you won’t have to work so hard. Those old posts will get your followers reading your blog again. If the event has changed calendar dates, post the new dates.

Statistics demonstrate that once visitors arrive on a blog, they will often move on to read further posts inside the same blog.

Make Dated Blog Posts Serve You Again

If your blog is part of the main site for your business, and it should be, you will generate new interest not just in your blog but in your business. That’s the reason you have a blog on your site in the first place! Use those old, dated blog posts all over again when the time is right. You will take a previously wasted resource and breathe value into it all over again.