Product Marketing for Vacation Rental Tech Companies – Travel Product Management

product marketing

Develop relevant vacation rental tech products and get users to adopt them.

Schedule a 15-minute consultation

We help vacation rental tech businesses, such as technology vendors and large property managers, create and launch the right product, for the right target customer, at the right time, to ensure adoption and commercial success.

Do business problems like these keep you awake at night?

• Why did our latest product launch fail?

• Our vacation rental software gets overlooked in an overcrowded market. How to stand out and win sales?

• Why do homeowners start registering their property on our property management site but then drop and never come back?

• How to drive adoption of some key product features of our property management system to reduce customer churn?

• Our product teams are spread thin. Which existing features should we drop? Which new ones should we prioritize?

• How to pivot our product, services, sales team, and customer support staff from focusing on homeowners to property managers?

• How to combine insights about our competitors with our internal data to determine what to do next?

Product Marketing helps you
BEFORE developing your product (e.g. competitive
insights and market trends) and
AFTER (e.g. how to drive adoption of a new feature)

To make your vacation rental product or service successful, you need to combine Product Management with Product Marketing.

In vacation rental tech, Product management (PM) focuses on gathering the right set of requirements and features for building a product. Product Managers work with software developers and engineers to build a product roadmap, keeping the project on track.

A Product Marketer’s role, on the other hand, centers on customer research (i.e. guest, host, or property manager) and validation from beta to launch, go-to-market planning and execution, building the value proposition, gathering competitive intel, and running the marketing programs necessary to launch the product.

Recognition That We
Can Share With You

Rental Scale-Up is regularly mentioned as a trusted news source. Just in the first half of 2021:

• Official contributor to Skift Research’s report “Impact of COVID-19 on the Short-Term Rental Market”.

• Official media partner for the upcoming Vacation
  Rental World Summit 2021

• Interviewed on podcasts such as Simon Lehmann’s Red Shoes Talk, Short Term Rental Titans, Get Paid for your Pad, Flying Cat Marketing, Short Stay Podcast.

• Panel member for the launch of the French edition of the Short Stay Week.

Tech and Product Marketing in our DNA

• Founder Thibault Masson brings his experience as a property owner, as the former global head of product
  marketing at Booking.com’s shortterm rental business unit, and as a recognized industry voice.

• As part of the Strategy & Operations team at Booking.com, he has created,
  overseen, and implemented several
  highly successful projects for the vacation rental industry.

• He’s regularly consulted by startups and scaleups to give strategic and
  tactical insights.

Discover our product marketing offers:

Research: Find Your Direction

Create: Develop Your Product or Service

Launch: Grow your business

Research: Find Your Direction

How we get you there

• Kickoff Call: A strategy call to become acquainted and understand the key decisions on your plate.

• Report Development: We conduct a deep dive of market research, look into your data and provide tangible recommendations in a digestible report.

• Actionable Takeaways: Tangible recommendations to solidify your path forward and determine immediate next steps.

Deliverables

• Market Assessment: Market definition and Industry vertical and geographic market analysis.

• Competitive Analysis: Identification of major competitors
  (background, products and marketing strategies).

• Audience Research & Insights: First degree survey of your clientele, secondary research on our report library.

• Internal Data Analysis: Strategic inputs built on your existing business metrics (e.g. sales numbers , customer support issues).

Create: Develop your product or service

How we get you there

• Kickoff Call: A strategy call to become acquainted and understand the key decisions on your plate.

• Report Development: We conduct a deep dive of market research, look into your data and provide tangible recommendations in a digestible report.

• Actionable Takeaways: Tangible recommendations to solidify your path forward and determine immediate next steps.

Deliverables

• Value Proposition: Business statement that summarizes why a consumer should buy your product or use your service.

• Persona Creation: User personas are archetypical users whose
  goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users.

• Product Development: We work with your product team, bridging strategy and execution, from initial wireframes through development to launch.

Launch: Grow your business

How we get you there

• Kickoff Call: A strategy call to become acquainted and understand your marketing and sales goals.

• Strategy Mapping: We craft a single marketing roadmap
  covering your marketing messaging, channel distribution, and campaign mechanics.

• Actionable Takeaways: Tangible recommendations to solidify your path forward and determine immediate next steps.

• Execution: We use Rental Scale-Up’s channels and third-party
  channels as part of your go-to-market strategy.

Deliverables

• Product Marketing: An overarching strategic plan responsible
  for taking your product or solution to market by building the Go-To-Market strategy and driving its execution via
  differentiated product messaging and launches, thought
  leadership and awareness, demand-generation, and sales
  enablement.

• Go-To-Market Strategy: an action plan that specifies how your
  company will reach target its customers and achieve
  competitive advantage.

• Lead Generation: Rental Scale-Up’s media channels offer several ways to collect qualified leads.

• Partnerships & Distribution: List of distribution channels and qualifies partners to grow your sales.

• Authority Building: Rental Scale-Up’s media channels help increase the visibility of and trust in your company.

Mission Example #1: Identifying and
Prioritizing Blockers in Your Booking Process

Helping your team identify, prioritize and solve blockers before going big.

This work helps identify existing blockers in the booking process and prioritize the ones that need to be solved before the marketing phase. Solving the issue may be either a marketing / copy problem or a dev problem.

Goal

Find blockers, share them with you, prioritize them and create solutions

a. Optimize copy
b. Optimize design
c. Optimize product

Benefits

a. Improve conversion metrics
b. Improve marketing campaign ROI
c. Provide a better user experience

Mission Example #2: Conducting Customer
Research Before Starting Product Development

Goal

a. Hear a user talk about their current pain, hear how they
are solving the issue at the moment, and watch them
discover what your solution.

Benefits

a. Easier to understand the WHY behind a user’s motivation.

b. Analyze how they perceive your solution. Does they
understand what it does? How to use it? Would the use it?
Would they pay for it?

Methodology

a. Four 1-hour interviews.

b. Rental Scale-Up and your team build a discussion guide.

c. Moderated by Rental Scale-Up, with your team listening in (+recorded).

d. Conversation is moderated, but the discussion is as open as possible.

Deliverables

a. A report on user pains and how they perceive your solution. Report on possible blockers, improvement, change needed.

Examples

a. How do property managers pick additional channels to get bookings? How do they consider your site when we show it to them? Do they understand how to get listed?

b. How do guests book direct? How did they find your website? Why did they go ahead and book direct?

c. Testing a new feature: What are the pains of booking a trip for a family? How do they use your site to find something that fits a the needs of their family?

Mission Example #3:
Conducting User Testing on a Prototype

Goal

a. Give a mission to users, watch and hear them go through
it to understand what is on their mind when they make a
decision on your website.

Benefits

a. Visually easy to understand motivations and blockers.

b. Always to get more volume of users, focused on a
specific mission.

c. Get more analytics with multiple choice questions, written
responses, and rating scales.

Methodology

a. We define a mission and questions together.

b. 20 users fulfilling a mission or job to do.

c. We analyze their behaviors and responses.

Deliverables

a. A report on user pains and how they perceive your solution. Report on possible blockers, improvement, change needed.

Examples

a. Book a 2-night stay in a hotel in NYC, pay with a crypto-currency.

b. Go to the website, find whether there is a loyalty program, and explain how it works.

c. List your property.

Mission Example #4: Data-based User
Marketing Campaigns to Increase Product Adoption

Goal

a. Boost your success metrics (e.g. revenues, cost savings)
by increasing how much your users (e.g. guests,
homeowners) adopt and use your new or existing
products and features.

Benefits

a. Successfully launch new products or features,

b. Increase adoption of existing products and services,

c. Create a feedback loop from users back to product
teams to solve any blocker for adoption.

Methodology

a. We look at your product portfolio, KPIs, and marketing
channels,

b. We pick the best channel(s) to drive adoption and agree
on success metrics,

c. We amplify the success by adding more adoption
channels.

Deliverables

a. A go-to-market strategy, with prioritized campaigns and channels.

b. An audit of your existing adoption channels (e.g. emails, in-product notifications, sales team).

Examples

a. Get existing travelers to come and discover a new site feature (e.g. long stays)

b. Get property owners to use a new feature (e.g. list all the safety features that have).

c. Get more customers to use your loyalty program.

Mission Example #5: We help you set up and run best-of-class product marketing at your company

Goal

a. Accelerate and structure the growth of your product
development function by helping you upskill your team,
use recognized frameworks, and deliver on your first
product marketing campaigns.

Benefits

a. Upskill your team.

b. Understand which new feature or product to create,

c. Get a practical knowledge of how to successfully launch
new products at your cpompany.

Methodology

a. We work with you and your team to assess what is
already there and what is missing.

b. We transfer best practices and the minimal list of
deliverables needed to be successful.

c. We work with you on your first product marketing
campaign.

Deliverables

a. Mapping of the short-term product roadmap from a product marketing viewpoint (e.g. list of live and upcoming products until the end of 2022 states in the product lifecycle).

b. Mapping of the adoption and promotion channels (e.g. which ones are available, how they have been used so far, metrics of past campaigns, resources needs to make use of each channel).

c. Customer segmentation and personas.

d. Product marketing RACI matrix to map out who owns what, from data insights to copy, user testing to support (current state and proposed state).

Schedule a 15-minute consultation