Marketing Your Trailer Rental Business
Once you have your trailer(s) ready for rental, you should tell as many people as possible. This is the part of the business that is often overlooked or not pushed enough. It doesn’t matter if it’s a trailer rental business you’re trying to make or something like a restaurant, hotel, store, or online website; None of them are going to make money without customers!
You could have the greatest trailer in the country, but unless people know about it and can easily rent it, you’re wasting your time. Therefore, you need to market your trailer rental business effectively. So, starting close to home, look at your trailer and see where you can place a sign announcing the fact that it’s available for rent. Get a weather resistant sign and put it up.
Next, let everyone know that you now have a trailer for rent. Talk to them, call them on the phone, send them text messages and emails. Or you or your family go through your town, city or district with flyers in your hands and send them to the mailboxes. Arrange for teens to do it for you for a small fee. Contact your local newsstand and ask if their delivery person will deliver the flyers at the same time as the newspapers.
Contact your local newspaper and see if you can arrange to have your flyer inserted in each issue. Leave your flyers where people congregate: taxi stands, takeaways, and DIY stores. Leave your flier or smaller card at all the supermarkets in your district; remember to call back every 10 days to place another one. Go to local libraries and place your ad on the bulletin board.
At local stores, arrange to have your ad placed in their storefront for a small fee per month. If you have more money to spend on marketing, you can make arrangements with your local taxi company to have advertising on their taxis. The same goes for local bus companies. Visit your local container rental business and work out an arrangement for your business to advertise with them. In this way, anyone who hires a tipper may also want to rent a trailer.
Next step to online possibilities. In this country, like the United States, there are yahoo groups. The two groups you want to post messages (ads) to are: Freecycle and Cheapcycle. The first, Freecycle, has all kinds of household items and other items available for people to pick up, free of charge. Some of these items are large, too big to load in a car. These people will be reluctant to pay the fees of the moving companies. They want cheap transportation, as soon as possible. It’s the same with Cheapcycle, even though these items cost their customers, they still want a rental ride.
Online classified ads like Loot, Intergiant, FreeUKClassified, Vivastreet, Classifieds, FreeAds and Onlinexchange are all places you could advertise. There is also a website called Craigslist, which is very popular in the United States and has just as growing success here. However, Craigslist has recently attracted ‘time wasters and others who want to spend their time ‘mistaking people’. So by all means visit the website and judge for yourself. If you decide to put an ad. Make sure the person hiring your tow is ‘bona fide’ (in good faith).
As you think about online advertising and marketing, you may want to consider having your own website. Your own trailer rental website may be worth your time. Setting up a website requires the following: a domain name, hosting, a platform like WordPress (free), a PayPal account, and a Google AdSense account. This would be the minimum necessary to have an online business.