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Let’s face it, the typical vacation rental or B&B just isn’t going to have the marketing budget of Renaissance Hotels and therefore you’re likely to have to tone down your proposal to the advertising executive looking after your account. Of course, chances are, you are the advertising executive and it’s your own place that you’re marketing.

Now, you might think that this means you’ll not be able to produce something quite so classy as the Renaissance campaign and, on the whole, that’s probably true. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t produce something similarly effective and memorable for your own place, albeit on a much smaller scale than the Renaissance campaign.

This image is one composed with a great deal of care with each element of it representing some aspect of Renaissance Hotels in general or of a specific Renaissance Hotel. Thus, we have the two hotel staff on the left representing the high level of service on offer in the hotels and carrying appropriately exotic looking dishes for the guest. Then there’s the individual attention from the pool guy offering the towel on the right. The pool is from their hotel at Seaworld and from the Hamburg hotel we have the arched building in the background. Right in the middle, of course, we have the most important aspect of the composition which is the representative hotel guest. The overall message is that you can expect elegant surroundings with personal service when you stay at a Renaissance hotel.

Obviously all that is specific to their hotel chain and clearly a lot of work went into creating the composition (this is only one of a number of images which they used in the campaign). Whilst you’re probably not going to produce something quite so sophisticated you can follow their principle of reflecting your message throughout your own marketing. They’ve emphasized elegance and service, what are you going to emphasize?

For example, say you have a luxurious chateau then make sure that in every image you use there’s a hint of that luxury. Perhaps by something as simple as a Louis XIV chair in the photo of the pool, or the Mercedes parked in front of the entrance. The idea is that you follow through on your core message of “a hint of luxury”. Or perhaps, your message is that yours is the place for outdoor persuits. In that case, each image should contain something hinting at one of those. The racing bike resting against the wall, the hikers heading off down the path, etc.

Doing this isn’t always as difficult as it might first appear. However, the key thing is to be clear on what message you want to get across. Once that’s clear in your mind you’ll be able to make the small changes in the images that you take which are required to get a consistent message across to potential guests.

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Surely not, it can’t be the new year already can it?

Ah, well, whilst many owners don’t begin their marketing for the new year until they’re actually into the new year, in fact it’s now that you should be starting to gear up with your marketing. Sure, you’ll not be able to go full pelt at it just yet as you’re still busy dealing with the summer guests but it’s time to make a start.

The first task is to assemble a list of all those sites that you’re currently advertising on. If you’ve not been keeping track of your listings, check things like your bank or paypal account for payments made for advertising and searching for yourself in google.com, live.com and yahoo.com.

Once the list is complete, go through it and add in the cost per year for each entry and, if you can, the number of bookings provided in the previous year and how long each one was for. When you’ve done that, you can examine it in more detail over a week or so and decide which subscriptions you’ll be renewing. For each listing, look at:

1. Is is free? If it is, you may as well keep it regardless of results.
2. If you’re paying for it, did it provide more bookings than it cost? If it’s a close call and the bookings are good quality, it’s probably best to renew anyway as you may be getting bookings from them which you’re unable to trace back to them.
3. If it’s providing a sensible number of bookings, are they good quality ones? Longer term bookings are better than shorter term ones and by dropping a site providing a stream of overnight bookings you’ll make space for more longer term bookings. For example, we dropped one site that was providing a lot of overnight bookings this year and ended up substantially increasing our occupancy in the form of more longer term bookings.
4. If it didn’t provide you with any bookings then consider not renewing it or downgrading to a cheaper entry if that’s an option. Remember that you may not be able to trace all bookings back to the original listing that people found you on.
5. Consider upgrading listings on sites that have brought you bookings eg we prioritise the search results on premium listings thus those with premium listings get more bookings from us and many sites operate similar prioritisation policies for listings (typically called bronze, silver and gold or something similar).

You might think that if a site hasn’t provided you with a booking and you’re paying for it then you shouldn’t renew the listing. However, remember that it’s quite common for people to look you up on a site and then e-mail or phone directly ie you wouldn’t know for sure where the booking is coming from (and asking them rarely produces the correct answer even if they think they know where they found you); similarly even direct click-throughs to your own site don’t always appear in the stats. What you don’t want to do is to cancel a listing only to find that it was really providing you with substantial numbers of bookings. Finally, remember that it’s the first place that they found you which is important but, usually, it’s the last place that they will quote to you.

Next you need to consider new advertising which is a whole different ballgame so we’ll look at that separately next.

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We’ve talked about registering your domain, getting somewhere to host it, what you need to include on the site and how to get the perfect photos. Next up is getting it written either by yourself or paying someone else to do it but before we get to that, I thought it better to start with what you shouldn’t have on the site.

The first thing you need to bear in mind is that your site is there to sell your property to prospective guests. In particular it’s not there to show off the skills of the website designer. If you’re getting someone to write it for you, remind them of that; if you’re writing it yourself, keep in mind that it’s not a showcase for your webdesign skills.

How will they find your site? To sell your property you first need the people to see your site which usually means that they will find it via a search engine. Search engines can’t read images so it’s vital that your site actually has text on it (as much as possible). There’s something of a trend for some site designers to put everything in an image (even the text) which has the effect of making the page appear completely blank to the search engines.

What’s your place look like? When they reach your site people want to see what your place is like which is where your photographs come in. These photos need to be “Internet size” which means no larger than about 300 pixels wide. If you just upload the image from your camera chances are that it’s more like 3000 pixels wide which means that the page will take around one hundred times as long to load as it should. That 100 fold increase means that instead of taking a second or two to load it will take a couple of minutes even on ADSL and possibly an hour or more on dial-up (which is still used by a lot of people). Many people just don’t have the patience for that and will look elsewhere. Large images should be accessed by clicking on the small ones but even then “large” means no wider than 800 pixels.

What’s going to be on your homepage? This is one of the most important pages of your website yet a number of people use it merely to hold a large photo of their property and “click to enter”. In practical terms, you may as well not have that page there if that’s all that’s going to be on it. Websites aren’t like brochures with a front cover: people want to arrive on real content when they go to your site.

Background image? Think plain if you’re using one. Much as the faded image of your property as background to all the text might sound great and look fantastic on your computer, you can’t depend on it looking good or the text remaining readable on other screens and, of course, a full-screen background image is massive and therefore takes ages to download.

Animations? By and large these just eat up your bandwidth and annoy readers of your site. Avoid them.

Javascript? Many people block this with the security settings so you’re eating bandwidth un-necessarily. It’s best to think “plain vanilla” for the HTML that you use as it will load much faster and work on a much wider range of setups.

Background music? Another eater of bandwidth. Personal spoken greetings fall in the same category.

Finally, remember that each page is important in its own right and people can arrive directly on any page on your site. Therefore make sure that you can reach the rest of your site no matter what page they start with. Make each page unique and you can increase the number of entries that you have on the search engines: many people use the same title and description on every page which just throws away the possibility of extra entries. You’re going to lock down your site so they can’t do that? That would be one of the worst things you can do as the search engines won’t be able to access it either and it’s seriously annoying for users of the site too.

I was going to put an image of one of the worst sites around as my photo for this post but as that would only encourage them, I’ve left it to your imagination how bad they can be: think glaring background, flashing text, menu constantly circling around the page with each menu choice animated and tune playing in the background. Hard as it may be to believe, that was all on a single website that I came across this morning for a holiday property although it was actually worse than that as they didn’t even have any text on the page “describing” their property. The images were so large that the site crashed the browser so I don’t really know what their property looks like. Oh, and the site was done by a “professional” website designer.

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