How to Make the Most of Your Marketing Budget
4
tools to analyze your current advertising spending to get the most for your
marketing dollars.
With the economy slowing down
and fewer inquiries coming in, you may want to take a closer look at your
marketing spending. While it is unwise to stop advertising during an
economic dip, it is important to make sure that you're getting the most for
your advertising dollars. If you don't currently track how many inquiries
and bookings that you get from each vacation rental website that you're on,
you may be squandering your marketing dollars.
1) Track your inquiries -
phone calls, emails and faxes (if you still use that old technology) and
then the bookings that result.
You must have a system in place to always jot down the inquiry
information. Jotting down phone call information is especially important
because emails and bookings are recorded in other ways. This is another good
reason why you should never empty
your inbox. ALWAYS ASK RIGHT UP FRONT WHAT AD THE INQUIRY IS FROM.
Record the name of the person who inquired, which website or other source
they found you on and what cabin they inquired about. By having daily log
you'll have a running total from which you can compile a small spreadsheet
or chart of all inquiries and bookings . To complete the picture, you can
calculate the booking percentage for each source. The formula for
calculating the booking percentage for each website or other advertising
vehicle is:
(# of Email Inquiries) + (#
of Phone Calls)] / (# of Bookings)} * 100
NOTE: This can be useful for daily, weekly, monthly as well as
annual calculations.
Booking Percentages Chart
2)
Calculate Your ROI (Return on Investment) for Each Advertising Vehicle
Once you've determined where your rental income is coming from, you should
calculate your return on investment for each website or advertising
vehicle. ROI is calculated by subtracting your initial investment
(advertising fee or subscription cost) from your rental revenue from the
site and then dividing the result by your initial investment. Here's the
formula to calculate the ROI for each vacation rental advertisement:
ROI= (Rental Revenue
Generated – Advertising Cost) / (Advertising Cost)
ROI Chart
The ROI for vacation rental
websites tends to be quite high. Consider yourself lucky: the acceptable ROI
for most industries is between 200% and 500%.
3)
Determine if you're spending enough.
Most small businesses spend
anywhere between 4% and 6% of their annual revenue on advertising, and many
large companies spend upwards of 15%. If you're not booking as well as you'd
like, you may not be spending enough. If you're booking well and spending
less than 5% of your annual revenue on advertising, you're beating the
curve. To calculate your current advertising % of revenue:
(Total $ Spent Advertising
Your Rental / Total Rental Revenue) * 100
Advertising % of Revenue
4)
Decide where to spend next year's marketing dollars.
After you have a solid set of
data to look at (at least 1 year), you can determine which advertising
vehicles are working for you and which don't work as well. Then you can make
an informed decision about whether to renew/buy more advertising space or
whether to spend your marketing dollars elsewhere.
Photography Tips
1. Lighting.
Choose well-lit, clear photographs taken on a sunny day. Mid day photos using
available lighting tend to be the best for taking interior photographs. Never
use flash; instead turn on interior lights and always use a tripod. The tripod
is required because your camera, that you have set to auto exposure (no flash) will be keeping
the aperture open longer, which tends to cause the photos to blur if the camera
gets moved during the shot. Utilize the zoom-out of the lens setting to capture
more of what is in each room. With today's digital cameras it is very easy to
immediately discard and re-take photos that have any problems.
2. Timeliness.
Photos should not be more than two or three years old. Turn off the date stamp
function on your camera. Photos that show a date stamp are distracting and
unprofessional as well as giving away the recentness.
3. Variety.
Include both exterior and interior shots of your property. Travelers want to
get a sense of the size and style of your home. Include the main living room,
kitchen, and all bedrooms. Yes - if you have a 5 bedroom home, 5 of your photos
should be of the bedrooms. Site visitors want to see accurate representations
of your property. DO NOT include a photograph of your bathroom unless it is
spectacular. A toilet is pretty much a toilet everywhere. As nice as the views
might be, avoid filling space with generic nature photos. However, if you
must, try to feature some
aspect of your actual home in each photo.
4. Staging.
Help the travelers imagine what it will feel like to stay in your home. Do not
have pets or people included in any shots. Visitors want to feel they are
entering a vacant home, not one occupied by strangers. Instead of showing a bare
table and chairs, add a bowl of fruit or a vase of flowers. You might even set
the table with place settings and wine. Sofas and other seating areas can be
spruced up with throw pillows and blankets. Lamps tend to photograph better when
they are turned on as well as providing the available light as outlined in
section 1. Always be sure to turn televisions off. If you have a fireplace,
build a fire for the photo taking session. The same for candles and oil lamps.
5. Framing.
Be aware of everything that is in the frame of your shot. Is the camera
perfectly straight, are the lampshades
straight, are the curtains and blinds symmetrical, are there any piles of
miscellaneous clutter like dirty dishes, etc., etc. When choosing exterior
photos, move the cars out of the frame as they distract from the actual
home. Do not shoot from a spot that has large shrubbery, telephone
poles, power lines, etc. blocking the building. Avoid take shots straight on of
the building; instead try to get up to a 45 degree angle to ad dimension to the
shot. Make sure you aren't cropping
off the roof, sides of the building or the grounds in front of the building.
If you can't get back far enough, use the zoom out function. The same goes for selecting your bedroom shots; zoom out to get photos that show the
entire bed.
6. Format.
Newer, high definition cameras offer the wide view similar to the dimensions of
the big-screen TVs. If that is not available, standard
landscape/horizontal format is the next best fit.
7. Camera
Settings and Pixels. Take pictures using the highest possible digital settings
for best results. Never edit or compress the photos before sending them to
us.
We will do the final graphics touch-up and compression at this end. 400 x 300 pixel photos are minimum requirements.
8. Digital
Images. Use JPEG digital image format ONLY. If you don't have a digital
camera, borrow one from a friend or hire a professional photographer. You don't
want to use low-resolution or scanned photos that don't do your home justice.
Don't even try to scan a brochure photo.
9.
Send lots of Photos. MountainLodging™ allows you to include 11 photos; one
exterior outside photo for the first page and 10 more for the second photo
page. However, sending us many more allows us to select the ones that will
show the best once online. You don't want to sell your home short by only
uploading a portion of the available photos. Even if you have a small home,
take pictures of your rooms from different angles to make the most of this
space.
