How to market your holiday home

Professionalism

This is of particular importance if you are planning to let your property to the general public and not just friends and family.

Holidays are not purchased lightly and people will not rent a property if they feel that the owner is not trustworthy or reliable.  Frequently you will not have the benefit of meeting your clients face to face, so their only way of judging you will be by your telephone manner and and by the professional standards that you maintain in presenting your property.

Ensure that you:

·         Use good quality stationary and brochure material.  People are much more receptive to a detailed description and quality, colour photographs of your property, than a poorly written, black & white photocopied sheet of paper

·         Have all the property details to hand when you take telephone enquiries for your property

·         Have standard letters prepared on your computer, ready to customise with the potential clients details

·         Deal with enquires promptly and keep your promises

With this in mind, you might want to prepare an info-pack, containing a covering letter, brochure and details of any local attractions, map of the area, etc.  

You can then post or even e-mail this pack to potential clients.

Advertising & Promotion

There is a whole range of things you can do to promote your property.  The most basic include placing adverts on your work noticeboard, your local club or gym noticeboard, asking friends to pass on your business cards to interested parties and leaving a stack of business cards at your property for satisfied guests to pass onto their friends.

You may consider paying to place an advert in one of the many villa and holiday homes magazines.  These are targeted towards people looking to stay in properties like yours and you should get a good response, however this generally an expensive option and you are not always guaranteed enough enquiries to justify the outlay.

Some people place adverts in their local paper's classifieds section, which can be a good idea.  The advantages of this are that the advert will be cheaper than a holiday magazine, but it will not be as targeted and probably will not reach as large an audience.

Online Advertising

This is becoming one of the most popular ways for holiday home owners to advertise their property.  Surprisingly the skills required to build a basic website are easy to learn and you could be building yourself an online brochure in no time.  Purchasing a domain name and renting webspace can cost you less than £80.00 per year and you can even use free webspace, from companies similar to the one that hosts this website.  However in the case of promoting your holiday home, it is highly recommended that you pay for webspace, as it will make your website appear far more professional.

The next stage is promoting your website online.  This is very important as just publishing your website online is not enough.  You need to get it noticed amongst the millions of other websites around the world.

To get your desirable traffic doesn't just mean registering with search engines.  Website promotion is a profession in itself and you are required to spend a great deal of time and effort promoting your site.  If you are interested in doing this, go to website Promotion, for more in-depth advice.

But what if you have not got time to build and promote your website?  What if you simply have no inclination to even try building your own site, but you still want to take advantage of the Internet as a very powerful promotional tool?

You could approach a web-design specialist to build the site for you and then promote it, but even the most basic design could cost you as much as £500.00, plus another £200.00 per year to promote your site and that's before the yearly maintenance costs.

Another option to consider would be to add your property to a specialist holiday homes directory.  The company will set up a webpage, which will become your online brochure, they will have a heavy online promotional budget to get good search engine rankings and most importantly, a substantial supply of targeted customers.  All of this for a fraction of the cost that a web designer will charge.

Take jmlvillas.com for example, they advertise in an array of national newspapers, holiday magazines, whilst spending time, money and effort building reciprocal links and achieving high search engine rankings, when combined brings heavy, targeted traffic, all looking for holiday homes.

It only costs £99.00 per year to advertise on their site - This is only a little bit more than you would pay for a domain name and webhosting, let a lone the huge promotional advantages that come with it.

Why not have a look at the jmlvillas.com site and find out how they can help you.