Marketing Your Home Investment
Our marketing department consists of five full-time highly motivated marketing specialists with more than 75 years of combined marketing experience. We conduct extensive market research to continually improve upon the most innovative programs in our industry to market your home and we know the Hatteras Island rental market like no other company.
www.surforsound.com
Our website (www.surforsound.com) features extensive search capabilities, beautifully presented homes complete with photographs and floor plans, an easy to use booking engine, linking to area interests and homeowner websites, and a password protected owner area offering convenient and timely information about your home. Planned additions include a visitor's blog site and new interactive guest survey system. In order to direct traffic to our website and our homes we use an array of marketing techniques including; advertising on high traffic websites such as visitnc.com, channel partnerships with some of the most recognizable vacation rental websites on the web such as CyberRentals and TripHomes, sponsored links on Google and Yahoo, and advanced search engine optimization techniques.
Rental Catalog
The historical foundation of the marketing department is our professionally designed rental catalog. Our catalog, featuring all professional photography including the best in interior and aerial photographs, is distributed extensively to both past rental guests as well as guest inquiries and of course to our homeowners. Please take a moment to review the enclosed catalog and compare the photographs of our homes to those in other rental catalogs.
Direct Mail and E-mail
We feel that multiple impressions make the most impact on a prospective guest who is making a vacation decision. We make sure to communicate with our list of e-mail subscribers regularly with messages about promotions, featured homes and other useful information. In addition to our regular e-mail campaign, we also send direct mail postcards to our past guests strategically timed to reach them at the peak of their decision process and then continue to follow up with reminders.
Advertising and Promotions
We continue to utilize print media advertising running both display ads and co-op ads. In cooperation with the Outer Banks Visitor's Bureau and the state of North Carolina we are able to piggy back on their investment to take advantage of many popular national publications such as Coastal Living, Budget Travel, National Geographic Traveler and The New York Times.
Over the years we have formed strategic partnerships with organizations specializing in the activities that bring visitors to Hatteras Island. Sporting activities such as fishing, kiteboarding and windsurfing are reasons visitors love Hatteras Island. At Surf or Sound we take full advantage of promoting our business to those interest groups through feature stories and event sponsorships. We maintain a full-time writer in our marketing department who looks for timely placement of feature stories in leading activity publications both online and in print.
Our focus on the market is second to none. Our marketing team meets weekly and plans the steps necessary to maximize reservations in your home. Our timely promotions have been and continue to be the most innovative on the island and have produced the highest occupancy rates on Hatteras Island over the past ten years. And of course we continually keep you informed as to current market conditions.
Measuring Success
While most companies consider the job complete when the advertising is placed, at Surf or Sound we have just begun. Our marketing department, through a variety of specialized software programs and marketing techniques, is able to identify the source of nearly every inquiry that we receive in real time. This enables our marketing department to measure the success of each marketing campaign weekly or even daily to make necessary adjustments. Because of these processes, which are unique to Surf or Sound, we are able to adjust to market conditions immediately.
