Hire Rental Marketing Options for the Economic Recovery

18 Feb

Over the last 12 months many hire and rental companies have been facing tough times.

However even with the first green shoots of recovery appearing many companies are still forced to ensure that costs are contained.

The question is should the marketing budget be one of the areas in which costs are cut?

Reduce Marketing Spend Yes or No?

For some the question became should you cut your marketing promotion?

The simple answer was no!

According to Malcolm McDonald, emeritus professor at Cranfield University School of Management in the UK, recessions can “focus the mind” and lead {sic companies} agencies to “cut out the waste”. He advises brands to focus on core customers in needs-based segments, adding: “Whatever you do, don’t cut promotional expenditure in the core business. [There is] massive evidence that cutting promotional spend in a recession is disastrous

Green Shoots of Growth

Now the green shoots of recovery are upon us, and many are now beginning to plan for the long term. The most recent McKinsey report shows that this longer term planning focus is now starting to creep back in to business thinking. But it also makes the point that many companys’ are still focusing on containing costs. click here to read the article.

The recession has created opportunities for hire and rental companies that have survived. Such opportunities include picking up new clients from competitors that are less well placed or who have closed their businesses.

Low Cost Marketing Options

There are a range of alternative low marketing options that can now be considered, the most effective of these is digital marketing.

Why digital marketing, well because as previous research posts in this blog have shown, web leads now account for over 55% of new business for progressive hire and rental companies. If you are uncertain about digital or social media marketing then read this article, 13 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing is worth your time

Achieving such increases though does depend on doing some basics:

Web Site: Enabling customers/ prospects to browse your service/ product offering and place in a booking request.
SEO: Search Engine Optimisation this is a range of things you need to do to help Search Engines, hence your customers find you.
Blog: Grossly under-rated but shown in the latest UK research to increase web traffic for small business by over 50%. This is where you post about your solutions, eg how to plan a party, or examples of Marquee Weddings, etc. Content people are looking for to read and find information, before making a decision to purchase.
Twitter: Singularly the most effective business tool for letting people know about your latest blog posts or catalogue item changes.

There are a range of other tools that you can use. But as a basic plan

Making it Easy

If this sounds hard it is not, but it does take commitment. This is where we can help. HireEzy provides you with a hire and rental business management solution that has:

WebSite: A fully integrated web site in which customers can browse and place orders requests directly in to your HireEzy system. HireEZy’s unique web integration tools, any changes you make in your catalogue can be immediately published to your website, if you so choose. What this does, is to increase your search engine rankings, if you make changes often, that in turn improves you lead generation.

Integrated Digital Marketing Tools: Furthermore it includes a full range of digital marketing tools including Twitter and blog integration. A very effective way of maintaining your marketing effort whilst containing costs in times like these is to use HireEzy. HireEzy comes with an inbuilt range of marketing tools, to assist you producing low cost but highly effective brochures, newsletters etc. All tools are inbuilt in your Hire Software and are linked to your product catalogue, so that with simple one click steps and you can email, tweet, post on line or print a range of high graphic image marketing collateral.

What more information or an on line demo, then go to our website www.makinglifeezy.com.au or email us at sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

HireEzy – Hire and Rental Software