However, due to high fragmentation, competition is also very high and requires a perfect strategy to create viable and effective growth engines. In addition, the growth of your equipment rental market depends largely on the initial decisions you make during the startup phase.
The following guide to growing your equipment rental marketplace is suitable for both startups and mid-level businesses. By carefully implementing these tips, you can scale and grow your business in today’s rental marketplace .
Practical Ways to Grow Your Equipment Rental Business
Practical Ways to Grow your Equipment Rental Business
Source Pixabay
#1. Be Ready to Grow
Every business needs to remain agile and flexible to accommodate growth. Without these two elements, managing the rush of orders becomes impossible and will eventually overload your team and ecommerce systems.
For example, consider a scenario where your marketing efforts are working jiangsu telephone number data but the system itself cannot support that many user profiles and transactions. Your server space is also limited, and eventually the entire website will crash. You will not be able to keep track of your inventory or fulfill orders, leading to customer dissatisfaction and jeopardizing future growth opportunities.
To guard against such situations, consider choosing a fully scalable equipment rental software like YoRent that supports unlimited transactions, listings, and user profiles in the first place. Otherwise, you will need to migrate or upgrade your software package repeatedly.
#2. Set Attainable Growth KPIs
Growth can come in many forms. For reference, an increase in revenue is growth, as is an increase in the number of customers and orders. Likewise, an increase in sales of underperforming products is growth.
While we all know that revenue growth is the primary goal of every equipment rental business, this cannot be set as a practical growth measurement KPI. Instead, you can break down your KPIs into the above-mentioned metrics from which you can develop actionable growth strategies and measure performance.
To take a more holistic approach, the KPIs you set may change from month to month. It’s important to focus on each KPI to truly grow revenue, and it’s perfectly acceptable for some KPIs to outperform others. Therefore, you need to be agile and change your marketing strategies as needed to achieve your KPIs.
#3. Increase the Number of Sellers
Visualize that you have set your KPIs and implemented the right marketing strategies, but your marketplace does not have enough sellers to attract customers and convince them to convert.
This scenario is usually the case for most marketplaces that face the chicken and egg problem. They need sellers to increase customers, and customers to increase sellers. To solve this problem, we can first aim to attract sellers because they are easy to encourage and persuade. Here are some ways to persuade sellers:
By commission:
Offering them zero commission fees for the first few years
Offering lifetime zero commission to your VIP suppliers
Apply lower commission rates to the first few sellers
Apply lower commission rates for sales under $5,000 per month
Through other incentives
Offer free migration services for other marketplaces
Offer unlimited listings to first few sellers
Offer featured listings
Offer free marketing and PPC ads
#4. Join Relevant Communities
It’s hard to grow your equipment rental business by generalizing. Instead, a better option is to identify and join relevant communities that are more likely to show interest in your products. While there may not be direct conversions, these communities will bookmark your marketplace and revisit it to find deals on the equipment they need.
You can find such communities on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can also reach out to offline communities and visit their exhibitions. One such offline community for heavy equipment businesses is the American Rental Association (ARA). It helps contractors connect with heavy equipment suppliers around the world.
As mentioned earlier, joining a community may not bring immediate results, but it is definitely the right thing to do to make important business connections and start sustainable growth.
#5. Word of Mouth
Once you have joined a community, it is time to increase your word of mouth. This type of marketing is generally considered the best form of marketing as it grows on its own and gives you maximum exposure. Almost all big brands have reached their current position through word of mouth.
You can host podcasts or expos within the community to spread the word. In these expos, you can discuss the benefits of buying or joining your market. To gain the trust of the audience, you can host a Q&A session to clear their doubts.
For word-of-mouth to work, you need to have a strong value proposition and communicate it very clearly to all audiences. This may include creating helpful web pages and offline marketing collateral that clearly state your value proposition.
#6. Expand into New Geographic Markets
Throughout the article, we’ve emphasized staying agile and flexible. This includes identifying problems with your current marketing strategies and changing them if necessary, no matter how difficult it is. Likewise, you’ll need to experiment with new marketing territories.
This step is useful in both cases, such as if you have reached a plateau in your geographic market or if all your previous marketing strategies have failed. As an online equipment rental marketplace business, you have the advantage of targeting new territories without the hassle of moving your physical assets and location.
To target new geographic areas, you will need to do some keyword analysis and add these keywords to your marketing pages and ad campaigns. In addition, you can enable multi-language and multi-currency support on your website to target audiences whose native language is not English. For further localization, you can integrate local or popular payment gateways of the region, which will give customers more payment options.
