How to Improve your Marketing Strategy to Grow Rental Marketplace

A marketing strategy should ease in connecting with the audience and express the company’s goals, mission, and, how they help customers' life to be better.

Here are the key things to consider to improve your marketing strategy.

Researching and Collecting market information

Before designing any marketing plan, you need to analyze the condition of the internal – inside the company, external – audience, and the market and the customer preference.

Internal analysis

Gather data for the following questions.

• What are the marketing mission and goals of the company?
• Whether the company mission and goals aligned to the marketing plans?
• Whether the financial resource allocated for the marketing team?
• How the current marketing strategy performed with respect to the expected outcome?
• Do you prefer short-term or long-term marketing planning? And how does it affect any marketing strategy?

External analysis

The external factors mean the competitors, technology advancement, laws and legal systems, economic growth, and political scenario. Things you need to is:

• Who are our competitors and what is their market size, profit, growth, targeted audience, marketing strategy?
• What are the competitor’s strengths and weaknesses?
• How the competition will change after improving our marketing strategy?
• How economic growth is happening in your country? And how much it affects your industry?
• What are the laws and legal system supporting and opposing your marketplace?
• What is the political scenario happening in your country and how it impacts the marketplace?

Customer preference

At the end of the day, it is about impressing the customer, things you need to find out is:

• Geographic and demographics of your customer
• The medium they found out about your brand and service.
• When the customer uses the rental platform
• Why they prefer your service compared to your competitors.
• What made them stick to your service.

Gathering insights

Deducing insights from the collected data pave the way to improving your marketing strategy.

A simple but most powerful tool to find clarity in vast data is through SWOT analysis.

SWOT abbreviated as Strength-Weakness-Opportunities-Threat.

Strength – Weakness

The strength mostly points to the internal strength of the company which is the product, capabilities of the company, and resource abundance.

The weakness can be anything that causes difficulty or delays the success to improve your marketing strategy.

For instance, the success and weakness of a rental marketplace would be of:

Strength can be:

• Financial resource allocated for advertising
• Committed employees
• Well-known brand name
• Better marketing strategy

Weakness can be:

• Low budget marketing strategies
• Poor brand image
• Undertrained employees
• Lack of direction

A weakness can be converted to strength or it can be mitigated to negligible effects.

Opportunities – Threats

Opportunities can be:

• Opening up to foreign market
• Economic boom
• New technology
• Changing customer needs

The threat can be:

• The entry of new competitors
• Evolving business models in the industry
• Competitors adopting a new strategy
• Change in laws and regulation

A threat can be considered as an opportunity if the resource or a sound strategy available to expand your market.

Customer segmentation and targeting

After having an awareness of your strength and weakness, the subsequent thing to consider is how to target your audience.

You need to conquer and divide to engage your audience.

As you already have the data, group the customers into the categories of similar needs. This kind of marketing is differentiated marketing, a way to improve your marketing strategy.

The category can be of:

• Same demography
• Age group
• Price preference
• Communication medium they use

By doing this, you can personalize the marketing message to that specific group.

Even you can further split the group into various small groups to make it more personalized. This is niche marketing. Social media is helpful in targeting a small group.

For instance, if you need to advertise a new offer of a car rental service like Uber, the targeted audience can be office-goers who have a high rate of utilizing it. So, advertising in the San Francisco area makes the demand go higher.

Pricing strategy

Setting the price is crucial to improve your marketing strategy. If you set the price too low, you stumble upon in gaining profit. Setting up too high will attract few customers to rent their property.

Research the market and see the prices around your neighborhood.

Airbnb has two different fee structures. One is the shared host and guest fee where Airbnb charges a 3% service fee and charges 13% from the guest. Two is the Host-only fee where they charge between 14% to 20%.

Homestay offers a 5% service fee, 3% credit card/eCheck processing fee, and 2% international surcharge.

VRBO pricing is similar to Homestay.

The price speaks the quality of the business. Customers have the psychology of segregating low prices into less quality and huge prices as great quality. It is more of how valuable they consider your brand. The value is evaluated by the customer based upon the benefits offered with respect to price.

Branding and positioning

Branding is an important asset to improve your marketing strategy. The advantage of branding is:

• Recognition of the rental service
• Convenient for customers to compare and evaluate
• Increased loyal customers
• Allows customer to accept any new service in any rental marketplace
• Customers would see less risk once get adopted to a rental service

To leverage brand name, strategies such as co-branding or branding licensing helps it.

Co-branding is the combining of two brands to represent a product or service. The pro to this strategy is it leverages the brand name for the individual brands.

Brand licensing is another type of brand alliance where a company allows an organization to use the brand name to a non-competitive product or service for a particular duration.

Positioning means how people perceive about the advertised product or company. Positioning decides where a product or a company stands in the market.

The key to changing the positioning is to constantly be aware of the customer needs and wants, as it changes over a period of time. By increasing the quality and expectations of the rental experience, it engages the customers to stay to your brand.

Here is the list of marketing strategies you can embrace

Internet Marketing

From the early 20s, internet marketing considered a new opportunity to reach the audience. Also, there were no rules on how content should be written compared to the print medium. At present, it is done through SEO and SEM practice.

Word of mouth marketing

An old way of organic marketing is gossiping and sharing the experience with the brands to friends and family. In this way, a loyal community built from scratch.

Cause marketing

Having a partnership with any NGO or religious group increases brand equity. It benefits both parties in elevating the social image and reaches to a wide range of audiences.

Paid advertising

Advertising is crucial for marketing. It is the first step to inform the audience about the company or new product launched. Advertising gives a wider reach depending upon the medium. It can be a print, Newspaper, Radio, Television, or online.

Co-branding – affinity marketing

Co-branding or affinity marketing is the promotion of a brand in exchange for a commission. In this way, the engagement and promotion of both brands get lifted.

Behavioral marketing

It is purely targeting a fragment of an audience for personalized marketing based upon their purchase and browser history. In this way, it is easy to observe a few quality leads and convert them to our customers.

Summing up

This blog gives a broad outline of developing a marketing strategy. Any strategy is a process of data collection, insights gathering, customer targeting, considering price offers, and how to brand and position your company. All amounts to implement a successful marketing strategy.

To set up a rental marketplace for your sharing economy business, feel free to check out RentALL.