How to advertise my holiday home

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Top Tips for Owners

If you’re asking, “how to advertise my holiday home?”, there isn’t one straight answer. However, from our experience, social media is the best way to grow organic bookings for your holiday let.

As you may know, as well as ToWander UK, we run Squirrels Nest Treehouses in Wales. Last year was our best year yet for bookings. So what has been a game-changer for us? TikTok. This platform has been an incredible way for us to grow our bookings organically. When we first ventured into the world of TikTok, we were late to the game and started out slow. However, with consistency and trialing different formats/strategies, it has now proven to be one of the most powerful and easiest platforms to organically grow our bookings.

Here’s what we did:

Repurposed successful Instagram content

To stay consistent without sacrificing extra time, we used reels that performed well on Instagram and reposted it to TikTok (without watermarks!) with trending audio. Click here to view one of our trending TikTok’s we posted on Squirrels Nest, which we repurposed from previous trending Instagram content. This reel hit over 1 million views and generated us 12 bookings in 2 weeks. This goes to show how powerful social media, specifically TikTok, can be for growing organic bookings.

Posted 3-5 times a week

We made sure to stay consistent, especially when a video was performing well. When a video went viral, we made sure to up the content for the week so we could engage as many users as possible while they were showing interest. Staying consistent remains to be the most important part of social media growth, as long as you’re putting out high quality content with relevant keywords. We recommend posting at least 3 times a week to start. Once you get some momentum going, up your posting schedule to 5 time a week, once a day is even better.

Storytelling

We made sure our content told a story, whether that was through the text, the imagery, or the overall theme of the post. Capturing the experience of staying with us helped users stay engaged. Storytelling can be a game-changer as it humanises a brand and creates emotional engagement. Additionally, content with storytelling and personal experiences are more likely to engage the user. Therefore, we suggest you utilise more storytelling within your content through guest content, emotive language, compelling hooks, and user experiences. Also, utilising user-generated-content (UGC) is an easy way to get free quality content. So, make sure to encourage your guests to send you videos and pictures from their stay so you can use it for your own content.

Carousels

We found TikTok carousels performed better overall. Both video and photo formats work well, however adding text to each slide while using storytelling performed best for us as it encouraged user engagement. Top Tip: Use trending TikTok’s as inspiration. This is an easy way to decide what to post and is more likely to go viral.

Used high quality content

We used high-resolution images and video clips only within our TikTok content. Also, to capture the attention of users, we made sure to include the best features of our property in our content, with the most eye-catching image/clip displayed first. You don’t have to pay thousands to get high quality content. If you have a smartphone with a good camera, you can film your holiday accommodation yourself easily. Make sure the camera is well focussed and the lighting is good.

Showing a women looking up how to advertise her holiday home while looking out at the UK countryside

Photo Credit: The Treehouse at The Fold

To summarise the question of, “how to advertise my holiday home?”, if you haven’t already, get on TikTok and start posting consistently. For more advice on how you can use TikTok to grow your holiday accommodation business, follow our Instagram page dedicated to providing social media tips and tricks for holiday let owners.

“Investing in our social media has been one of the best decisions we’ve made in our business. We’re now consistently generating double our income in a more competitive market” – Laura, Squirrels Nest