How to Increase Company Brand Awareness through yout Vacation Rental Website?
How much value do you place on building your brand through your vacation rental Website?
Do you only focus all your efforts on listing your properties and gaining visibility on external portals?
While channel distribution is an important part of your sales strategy, your Website is also a powerful avenue to steer sales and most importantly to build brand loyalty, which in turn will bring you repeat customers. And that is what you want!
It all sounds quite simple, but you need to consider many variables, to succeed. But it is worth it! Because at the end it is an asset that you are investing in.
So let us take it step by step….
How to Increase Company Brand Awareness in 3 Steps
Step 1: Give high importance to the design of your website and its content.
Remember that it takes seven seconds to make a first impression and that the average user stays 15 seconds on a page.
So take your time to plan your website design carefully along with your project manager. Our Web team always reiterates the importance of this step to our clients and work with them side by side, because the success of your vacation rental website depends on this initial phase.
Consider the psychology of colors. Make sure that the colors and aesthetics reflect the personality of your agency, and remember to keep it consistent throughout the design to make your site look professional.
Try to appeal to your audience’s emotions by inserting high quality photos, videos and content that catch their attention.
According to Peter Noel, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, human emotions are an important variable in the decision making process:
¨An understanding of consumer purchase behavior must be based on knowledge of human emotion and include the paramount influence that emotions have on decision-making.¨
Appeal to their senses and transport them to the destinations that you are promoting. Check out here our Ambience Website Design which is quite popular with our clients as an example, we have an image in motion that immediately draws the attention of the visitor.
As for the structure of the design, the key is to help your client find the information that they need. Our Web team always suggests adding modules with offers, categories and widgets such as maps or weather conditions as the examples below:
Also take into consideration, that having your page well structured and organized makes it SEO friendly and will position better in organic search.
Another important factor is to make sure that you have a responsive design. According to Statista, there are 3.7 billion unique mobile users. And the Americas have a broadband mobile subscription penetration rate of 78.2 percent and Europe 76.6 percent. A lot of your traffic might easily come from mobile devices and tablets.
Do not forget to make your page multilingual. All of the sites that we build have this component, remember that we are in the travel sector and you will get visitors from different countries.
And do not forget the importance of designing your site with a post sale module. Keeping the contact after the client has made the reservation is very important, it gives you credibility.
Our R&D department understood how this feature was crucial for the vacation rental agencies and created the tourist intranet plus the check-in online.
Step 2: Make sure that your website loads quickly and is user friendly.
Don´t you hate those pages that are difficult to navigate and take a long time to load? This is definetely not a good way to answer the question how to increase company brand awareness. It is important that you take a look at your page from a visitor’s perspective.
Remember that the loading time is crucial in maintaining the visitor within your page. There are various ways in which you can optimize your web to avoid this.
For example, make sure to insert image files that do not weigh that much but are high in quality. You can do that by using resizing tools which compress the image.
Another way of optimizing your page is by reducing the plugins. You might get excited adding a lot of plugins, but this makes your webpage slower. Make sure to choose a few that will actually add value.
Setting browser caches, can come in quite handy to optimize your page. This way when you get a recurring visitor, information such as images, logos or the background is already stored in their hard drive and will not have to load from the beginning.
Make your page easy to navigate on. Create menus that are simple and clear, where the information is accessible.
Have a look at this example of one of our vacation rental websites that is quite popular with our clients. As you will see, the navigation menu is precise and accessible. Plus we have integrated an internal search engine, as well as custom filters in the reservation system within the site to make it easy for the user to find information.
Step 3: Tell a unique story
The design of your website and user experience are important elements, but you have to go one step further!
Great brands always tell a story, they create conversations and connect with their audience.
To understand the power of connecting with the emotions of an audience, let us have a look at some numbers. The UK-based Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, analyzed more than 1400 case studies of advertising campaigns.
Within these campaigns there were three types of content: emotional, combination of rational with emotional and rational. And guess which one outperformed! Yes, the emotional campaigns won with 31% effectiveness, as opposed to 26% and 16% respectively.
So try to build a brand story that your travelers can relate to and one that they can share with others. And build those stories throughout all your communication channels.
So you might ask yourself how to start building these brand stories? In order to do it you have to consider the following:
- Analyze your buyer persona, you have to know who you are talking to in order to target properly your message. Take into consideration variables such as demographics, motivation, needs, behaviours etc.
- Ask yourself what is the goal of your message. It usually should be aligned with the core values, vision and mission of your vacation rental agency.
- Try to be as authentic as possible when you create your content, this way your brand will become more credible.
- Find a unique message. Everyday we are bombarded with messages from many brands. Try to stand out from the crowd!
- Find out where your buyer persona searches for information, inspiration for their trips and what they are talking about, to reach them and bring them to your page.
This might take you some time, but if you create solid messages and quality content that inspires your audience you will not get leads, you will generate loyal customers that are emotionally attached to your brand.
So now that you have the first initial steps on how to increase company brand awareness, start placing more value on your own web and brand.
If you wish to get help from one of our Web specialists just get in touch with us clicking here.
And do not forget to check out our next article with an interesting interview with our Digital Marketing Specialist who will give you some tips! Speak to you soon!
