Planning your off-season marketing will really make the difference on your year end balance sheet and will help ensure your are meeting the mark to get in the black with your vacation rental property. There are many tools out there to help get these marketing ideas down in a logical plan but I have my favourites.

I use Mind Mapping to plan my off-season marketing. Here's an example:

I came up with a few ideas for the three low season months and have used the map to plan how to promote each idea. For the Maple Syrup weekend I'll be promoting it to family web sites and 'mommy bloggers' via their Twitter accounts since it's a great family experience and it's an easy way to reach them with an offer. Training/Fitness weekends will be promoted to fitness centres in our nearest city and on triathlon forums, as well as in direct mail to personal trainers.

Blog posts and articles will be created to market different activities that can be posted on the web site and blog to get maximum SEO traction and linked to the new Special Offers page on our web site.

Planning in this way gives a nice visual of the tasks needed to ensure the marketing activities are carried out efficiently. I use Mind Manager from Mindjet for mapping but there are a lot of free and less pricey options. Here's some to consider.

If you use any other planning tools, let me know in the comments so we can share them with other owners.

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