What is Destination Marketing?

Think of destination marketing as a means of advertising your vacation rental’s location in a way that is inspiring, educational, and provides motivation for visiting the area. 

Now then, what do you consider your location?  It could be a town, city, region, county, state, province, or country.  Actually, it could be a combination of several of these areas.

In this article, you’ll find several ideas for using destination marketing in your vacation rental’s business strategy.  You’ll learn ways to “sell the experience” in a way that provides value to your guests and potential guests. 

Destination Marketing:  Inspiring, educating, and motivating people to go places,  learn something new, create new memories, and try new experiences.

The Value of Destination Marketing for Vacation Rentals

Travelers are looking for an experience.  Destination marketing provides opportunities for owners to educate travelers about what your location offers.  In turn, travelers will be inspired to travel to your area to experience it for themselves.  

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest are excellent platforms for promoting your area.  Your audience will find value in your knowledge of the experiences available to them when they visit your destination. 

With consistent, valuable social media content, travelers will begin searching out your social media posts when planning their trip.  As a result, travelers see you as a tourism expert, which generates trust.  

Tourism marketing is also valuable in building relationships with local businesses and community leaders.  By sharing local businesses’ social media content, business owners and community leaders will more readily view you as a partner in the community.  Again, by building trust with these local leaders, your professional relationships become stronger. 

In the Trendy Hospitality Social Media Marketing Bootcamp, you’ll get access to many more ideas for incorporating destination marketing into your vacation rental business.  Within the course materials, worksheets and templates walk you through brainstorming and developing content for your Facebook and Instagram social media platforms.

How Can I Use Destination Marketing to Increase Bookings?

As I mentioned in the previous section, building trust with your audience is an important part of your business strategy.  As a vacation rental owner, destination marketing should be a key component in your marketing strategy.

Generating additional bookings comes naturally when you “do” tourism marketing well.  Your social media posts should be no more than 20% rental advertising.  Therefore, highlighting your destination can easily help in filling up the remaining 80% of your social media content.

When done well, your audience will never realize destination marketing is part of your business strategy.  

7 Ideas for Destination Marketing

1. Newsletters
2. Calendar of Events
3. Restaurant Reviews
4. Event Live Feeds
5. Monthly “What’s New in ________(city)”
6. Historical Sites Series (see other ideas for “Series Posts” here) 
7. Blog Posts

Above, I have linked several examples.  I have incorporated destination marketing into my vacation rental’s marketing strategy.  “Restaurant Reviews” is a great example of a blog post about a new restaurant in our area.  I used that article to throw in some marketing for our vacation rental.  This post has been viewed over 800 times so far this year (2019). 

I also created a car show events calendar.  This article has been viewed over 1,500 times, so far this year.  Again, you’ll see how I incorporated the vacation rental marketing into that article.

Using Facebook Notes as a Destination Marketing Blog

If you don’t have a blog for your vacation rental, check out this article  How to Use Facebook Notes for Vacation Rental Marketing as a convenient way to add larger chunks of content to your Facebook page.

Learn More About Destination Marketing