OWNERS IN CHARGE: our goal at Second Porch is to give you the control of how you market your home to a very desirable channel of potential guests you can trust. We are not a “set it and forget it” site and that is intentional. Our view is that you are smart homeowners and you would prefer to be in charge and have the tools at your disposal to market your own homes, but with a set of tools that are extremely easy to use, and result in tasteful and effective marketing messages being created.
With that spirit, we recently released a completely new way for owners to publish updates almost effortlessly to their best potential renters—friends, family members, friends of friends, and past guests, which according to the industry experts at Phocus Wright travel research, collectively make up 73% of vacation rental home inquiries from owners in the rent by owner category.
Second Porch now gives you a rich set from 5 to 7 different marketing tools to tastefully create meaningful updates about your second homes to share with your connections, whether you want to load new photos, share recommendations, and promote upcoming vacancies, events, or simply highlight the new season and its opportunities for relaxing or exploring.
Today, our owners with a home listed in Second Porch has the new, redesigned MANAGE HOME page at their command:
The new Marketing Toolkit for Second Porch has multiple ways to build a community and to promote your home now.
At the top of the marketing toolkit you will see the button to WRITE NEW UPDATE, which give you a simple way to write a news update about your home, and we will automatically attach your primary second home photo, but also allow for other photos to display when people click the SEE MORE link in the message that results. See below for a message I just wrote for my second home on Mount Hood:
This new update took me about 30 seconds to create, and what’s great is that it links to my Second Porch property detail page when its clicked at any point. Note on the top of the photo the new orange highlight stripe with the text “news update”. Each item results in a different highlight stripe to accompany your posting so your posting gets a little bit more attention when displayed on your friend’s walls.
Also new in the Second Porch marketing toolkit, is the ability to easily share new photos, which are now also loaded into a photo album for you automatically as well.
Another great new promotional tool is the SHARE FEEDBACK button, which allows you to share comments or recommendations made about your home. Just simply click the share button in your community section and we take it from there:
Simply clicking the SHARE link and you can now get these comments onto your Facebook wall
The result of sharing a recommendation today looks like this:
A nice message on your Facebook wall with links to your listing
Again, notice the orange bar with the text “recommended” in this one. This helps give additional visibility to your message and helps it stand out a bit in a cluttered Facebook world.
Well that is it for now, we will cover a few more ways to use the new marketing toolkit in the next post, but please just click and experiment by visiting your property in Second Porch. The beauty is that you can undo virtually anything very easily, so have fun and try some new things taking advantage of the new toolkit now at your fingertips.
