The target segment to consider focusing your attention on is families in the mortgage belt or suburbs. There are three key factors that drive this analysis:

Vulnerability to Unemployment Risks

The OECD has forecast that the most vulnerable labour groups are the oldest, youngest and unskilled. As a generalisation the mortage belt is generally made up of middle aged couples with either technical, trade or professional skills. Hence based on the most recent OECD forecasts, these are the least likely to face unemployment risks.

Interest Rates

Interest rates for mortgages across the board have fallen sharply over the last year. Some estimates show that this has meant that mortgage belt families have been able to free up a few hundred dollars per month. This saving to them is also being complimented by tax cuts in a number of countries.

Trend Towards Home Based Entertainment

There is a societal trend towards home based entertaining, rather than off premise entertainment. This trend has been accelerated by the recent global financial crisis.The home entertainment market is a target segment for party hire and rental companies. Another factor influencing the trend towards home entertainment.  Whilst interest rates are coming down, so are house prices.  So the overall sense of perceived wealth is declining, therefore home entertainment is seen as a low cost alternative to socialising.

A final point consideration in the potential growth of the home entertainment market is time.  During the boom years, perceived wealth amongst home owners increased rapidly but at the cost of perceived time to spend with family and friends.  Despite the increasing prosperity people seemed to work longer hours, unable to “find” the time to spend with family and friends.  As we move into new economic conditions, how people make and spend their time will be worth watching.  It may well create a new market opportunity for hire and rental companies.

Taking advantage of this segment is discussed in more detail in an earlier post Party Hire and Rental Companies could benefit from downturn.

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration.

How to Use Social Media Tools

Marketing Problem

Hire Rental Advertising Considerations
Why Traditional Marketing Fails
Yellow Pages Versus SEO

Creating a Digital Marketing Platform

Creating a Digital Marketing Foundation
Hire Rental Web Lead Statistics

Marketing via Twitter

How Rental Hire Company can use Twitter
Business Reason to Use Twitter

Marketing via Facebook

Using Facebook for Business
They worried about Social Media in the 1930′s

Marketing via YouTube

How Rental and Hire Companies can use YouTube
Big List on How to Use Social Media

Marketing via WordPress

Why Blogs are Effective for Small Business
Why Small Businesses Should blog

Let’s take a simple example of a Party Rental or Hire Company.

A customer has come in to hire a Spit Roast for the weekend, value say $75.00

Items that may also be of use to the same client, could be serving platters,  carving knives, a condiment holders, an electric meat warming tray etc.

The spit roast hire price, with gas may be have been $75 for the weekend.  But offering the related items may increase the hire price well over $100, an increase of 33%, which would be nice if it could be achieved across all orders.  The 33% figure is taken from anecdotal evidence received from our customers.

So here are some suggestions on how to do it!

Start from the Customers Perspective:

Customers when they are looking to hire or rent something from you have an idea for an event, party or task that they going to have or do.   The vast majority of sales staff merely respond to the customers specific item requests.

Good practise is to aks the client what are they planning to do?

Engage them in a conversation find out what they want to do, it is just a conversation it doesnt hurt.  Once the you or your sales staff have determined what the customers event, idea or task is, then you can begin to suggest other items.

Approached in a conversational tone the customer doesnt feel threatened by a hard sell.  For example:

Sales Rep:  Oh so your having a Spit Roast  for your son’s graduation at you place on the weekend.  That is great, how many people are you expecting.

Client:  About 30 people

Sales Rep:  Wow that is a lot, have you got tables and chairs, cutlery and plates etc?

Client:  Not sure

Sales Rep:  We have a lot of clients who have Spit Roasts parties like you are having, so we put together this Spit Roast package based.  It includes all the common items people were renting from us but we have bundled it in to a specially priced package.

This approach to offer a promotional package, is actually about turning the vast range of choices a customer has into a product offer.  Whilst people talk about liking choice in truth most don’t.  Giving them a “product” that suits there needs eliminates the need for them to think and the risk to them.

In relation to risk, consider the pyschology of a client.  In the above example if the father comes in to hire a spit roast for the Son’s 21st.   His selection of what is needed is based on his planning, so if he gets it wrong they chances of being “stirred up” by his friends and family are quite high.  However if he selects your “productised offer”, then he has in reduced the risk of him being a source of jokes at the event or task.  In effect you are doing him a favour!

Creating a Promotional Package

So how to create a promotional “product”.

HireEzy (the world’s most innovative hire software and rental software)  provides both the analysis tools and in-built marketing tools to both determine what should go in a package and the production of a high graphic brochure (digital or print).

Creating these packages is incredibly easy, but the value they can provide to your business can be exceptional.

Generate Leads

If you do produce a promotional pack, then why not send it out to your previous clients.  Use the inbuilt customer data base to send out emails with the brochure attached to your clients.  Make sure you include an opt out option for them on the email.  These tools for in-built in HireEzy are exceptionally easy to use and the results some clients have obtained have been impressive.

Web Crossing Selling

Research shows that over 50 % of new leads come from the web.  But most hire and rental companies have very limited sales presence on line.  Even fewer have an ability to cross sell or up sell to on-line customers.

HireEzy includes a fully integrated on-line site that allows customers to place booking requests directly into your system.  Not only does this substantially reduce your costs it also includes in-built workflow solutions that enable you to up-sell or cross sell more to such customers.

Summary

The aim of cross selling or up selling is to increase the revenue per client.  As discussed achieving 33% increases in revenue per sale are common.

Achieving this increase requires a combination of good staff training and a supporting hire software or rental software system, such as HireEzy.  The key point is that Sales Staff up selling or cross selling can be assisted by the use of HireEzy.  The result is that you can achieve substantial improvements in sales per customer.  For more information for to www.makinglifeezy.com.au

It costs nothing but can be quite effective, and is certainly worth the effort. Googles marketing description for the service is below:

Reach new customers on Google Maps and Google.com
Local customers are already searching for the products and services you offer. Why not make it easy for them to find you on Google search and on Google Maps? The Local Business Centre is the place to start.

To register your business click on the your country to open the relevant Google site.

Australia and New Zealand

United States

Canada

United Kingdom

Registering your business on tools like this is worth the effort.

How to proceed next and other Google tools are explained in the Google Must Tools article.

Remember HireEzy is the hire software and rental software for the digital age.

Some days the task list of things to do is overwhelming,

where to start,  what to next, who should do it etc etc.  For most small to medium business owners of hire or rental companies this is the daily reality.  Stressful enough to think about as you drive to work, without the background radio comments of from dire predictions of economists and commentators.

Everyone will suggest to keep things simple, easy to say harder to do.  But one very helpful way is to have a simple mental image of your hire or rental business.   Here is one simple mind map.

How to use the map.

In simple terms, the reasons you undertake marketing is to create leads. Once you have a lead, you focus is on converting that lead to a sale or booking, as quickly and efficiently as practical. Managing your stock effectively is a broad term, but encompasses all things to do with your inventory, servicing, delivery and collection costs.  Having the right stock, ready to hire at the right time in the right condition. Financials is an interesting one, what you do and how well you do it drives your cashflow and accounting transaction.  You are in business to make money, what you do is how you make money, the two are intrinsically linked.

The final stage, manage your existing customers is often forgotten.  Estimates on winning new customers range from 5 to 15 times the cost of maintaining an existing customer.

So as you drive to work, you break the broad problems you have down in to the simple stages.

Marketing to Create Leads: If your sales are declining, consider what you are doing to market to generate new leads?  Thinking about it this way, enables you to quickly think about your current marketing approach.  Are we web marketing effectively,  or newspaper advertising etc.  Where is the problem?  With HireEzy you can quickly analyse your lead sources to identify problem areas.  You can also read other posts on this site that suggest or discuss different marketing ideas.

Manage leads to bookings or sales: If you are getting the leads, are you getting the sales or bookings conversion, or are the dollar size of the hires relatively too low or are the taking too long.  Again analysing sales using HireEzy can assist in determining where the problem lies.

Effectively manage your product assets: Such a broad area, with so many potential problems.  So lets take an example problem – sales being lost because of insufficent stock.  What is the cause, is there a sufficient inventory relative to current and forecast bookings, has there been a change in product demand, is too much of the current inventory not available for hire, due to servicing, cleaning or repair requirements,  Where is the problem?  Again use the analysis reports in HireEzy to identify the cause.

Financials driven by your bookings: What you do should drive your accounts.  Not sure what your cashflow forecast is, then it is probably because your booking forecasts are not visible in your accounts.  This is the most common problem facing companies who have an accounting package either separate from or being used to manage their business.  Ideal for the accountants terrible for operating the business.  This problem is solved with HireEzy as the accounting package is integrated into the solution.  A confirmed booking creates an immediate accounting transaction entry.

Manage your existing clients:  Back to feeding your market leads, are you getting word or mouth referrals or repeat business from existing customers?  No, then look at some of the tools in HireEzy and the business improvement suggestions made in this blog, such as renewing old leads.  Remember your customers can be your best marketers.

This mind map tool is just a way of helping to simplify you business, to make sense out of the myriad of issues and problems you face daily.  Try using it and see if it helps you.

Making Life Ezy is the name of our company and the objective of our products like HireEzy, for more information go to www.makinglifeezy.com.au Available through out USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, UK and Singapore.

Many projects announced in the Stimulus packages had lead times for tendering, design and planning stages, especially the larger projects.

The Hire and Rental industry is critical to the efficient delivery of these projects, as explained in previous post.

In essence the industry is critical because it can efficiently deliver equipment, resources and solutions to the companies delivering the projects with out the need for such delivery companies to use critical cash reserves to purchase equipment.

Stimulus Packages Size and Investment

During the earlier part of 2009, Governments in the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada  announced significant local stimulus packages.   A major portion of this investment has been directed towards Infra-Structure projects designed to kick start the construction sector.

The numbers are staggering!!!

Specific details on the USA package

Whilst some major projects in each country will have lag times as the tendering, design and planning stages are processed.   However many of the government initiatives have been directed towards accelerating numerous small projects.

These projects will be small, numerous and dispersed creating a demand on tools and equipment. Construction, Tool, Scaffolding and Temporary Fencing Rental and Hire companies may well be able to benefit from this demand. In order to meet the requirements of numerous competing projects, many construction companies may not be able to efficiently allocate and re-locate in-house tools and equipment.

Hence increasing demand for more construction hire equipment.

A second related issue is that in some countries, banks are forcing property developers to expedite projects or lose their line of credit.  This has had a flow on effect to Town Planning departments, where many are under heavy workloads to meet expedite approvals.

Small Projects Flow On

Some Western Governments have handed our tax incentives or cash hand outs to stimulate demand.  This could contribute to a growth in the home repair and maintenance market. Three factors may potentially contribute to the growth in this segment:

1. Reduced equity in the home due to the fall in house prices will mitigate against many people borrowing against their house value to undertake major projects.
2. Increased disposable cash from tax cuts and interest rate cuts may assist in home owners undertaking minor projects and repairs.
3. The prospect of a greater focus on activities with friends and families, which includes home repair activities, again discussed in the previous post.

If you are considering improving your marketing to these segments Construction, Tool and Temporary Fencing then using HireEzy’s ( hire software, hire management software) inbuilt marketing tools will aid you substantially. For more information go to www.makinglifeezy.com.au