Knowing how to properly market your vacation rental property properly is a huge factor for success in receiving bookings. An important marketing tactic is something called the consumer decision journey. The consumer decision journey has four stages: consider, evaluate, buy, and enjoy. Marketers and hosts alike should target these stages in the decision journey. Here is how you can utilize the consumer decision journey and your VR listing.
Consider
The journey starts with the consumer’s top-of-mind considerations. This stage is where potential guest are browsing homes through Airbnb, VRBO or Homeaway. This is the stage where the largest number of rentals are being featured.
For this stage, your best plan of action is to include every feature and amenity that your home has to offer. This way your home is more likely to pop up in searches.
Evaluate
The evaluation is stage is the first most important stage in the journey. At this point, consumers have narrowed down their search to properties that fit their qualifications. This stage is important because this is where potential guests search for reviews and evaluate you against your competition.
For this reason, having good guest reviews is very important! Word of mouth is what is important for the evaluation stage, which comes in the form of guest reviews of your property. These reviews include topics such as quality/comfortability of the rental, how true to the rental was to the listing, how vacation rental cleanliness and communication with host.
Buy
At this point in the process, the guest has decided to stay in your vacation rental. In the buy stage, guests go through the process of checking if their dates are available, checking the total pricing for the trip and this is your opportunity to have sales interaction with the guest during the booking process.
At this stage, it is important to make booking as easy as possible. Guests can be easily dissuaded at this stage during booking if there are any glitches on your listing that makes booking difficult. Guests may also choose not to book if there are any unlisted fees that they were not expecting to be in the price. For example, guests may choose not to book your vacation rental if you include fees such as cleaning or other hidden fees in the description, opposed to including it in the actual pricing break down.
Enjoy, Advocate, Bond
After the guest has decided to book your vacation rental, the guest then has the power to enjoy, advocate, and bond with the brand.
When guests are pleased with the time that they had at your vacation rental, they will advocate for it by word of mouth- in this case reviews on your vacation rental listing. They will advocate your property for others that are in the evaluation cycle of the consumer decision journey.
As we see, these stages are all imperative to securing guest bookings at your property. The most important stages here of considering are evaluate and advocate. Again, these stages are all about great guest ratings of your Airbnb, Homeaway or any other VR site. Considering the importance of good reviews for your listing, we will go over how to ensure good reviews. Look for our blog post ‘How to Get Great Reviews for Your Vacation Rental’ at the end of the week!
