marketing

How to Improve Your Marketing Strategy to Grow Rental Marketplace?

by Josh Biggs in Marketing on 27th December 2019

Are you running a rental marketplace? Then it is important to have a greatly crafted marketing strategy to gain a competitive advantage in the market. Year after year, the peer-peer rental industry is becoming more crowded with new rental businesses popping up every day. Airbnb alone has over 7 million listings world in over 220 countries and regions.

It is true that most rental business owners feel overwhelmed by the fierce competition and small market size when starting out. To keep up with the competition, it is highly important to have strategic marketing planning that gets updated along with the advancements of technology in the industry. In the current digital marketing scene, the focus is more on user-centric interactions where importance is given to the needs and values of customers than anything else.

If you consider Airbnb marketing strategy, they do exactly the same. Airbnb’s core focus is to build the platform as a community rather than growing as just an apartment rental platform, and they have been successful in that.

What marketing strategy to adapt to grow your rental marketplace

In this user-centric world, you should follow a marketing strategy that helps you express the business goals, missions, and strategies that ease the process of connecting with the audience. A good marketing plan is critical to executing a strategy that covers products, pricing, and promotion. Here are some key aspects to consider to improve your marketing strategy to grow your rental marketplace.

Research and collection of data

Before designing a marketing plan for your rental marketplace, it is important to analyze the market, your audience, customer preferences, and other aspects. Both research and collection of data can be divided into two- Internal and external analysis.

Internal analysis

Perform an internal analysis of your business to understand marketing missions and goals, to determine whether missions and goals are aligned with marketing plans, do you prefer short term or long term plans and so on.

External analysis

The external analysis revolves around technology advancements, competitors, economic growth, laws and legal aspects, etc. Analyze who your competitors are, what are their market size, target audience, profit, and marketing strategies. Understand the strength and weaknesses of your competitors as well. Detail out how do you think your competition will change after improvising your marketing strategy. What are the law and legal systems that support and oppose your rental marketplace and its growth?

Another important aspect is the preferences of your customers. At the end of the day, it is all about impressing your end-users. Study the demographics of your users, the medium through which they found out your brand, why they prefer you over your competitors, and what makes them continue using your services, etc.

Deduce smart insights

Gathering insights from the data collected pave the road to the success of any rental marketplace’s marketing strategy. A smart way to find clarity in the vast data collected will be to look into the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Analyze the data to get to know the strength of your resource abundance, products, and capabilities of your rental marketplace. For example, the success of a rental marketplace would be committed resources, a strong brand name and identity, a better marketing strategy, financial resources for marketing, etc.  

Weakness can be a poor brand image, low budget for marketing strategies, undertrained resources and lack of clarity. The weakness of your business can be converted into strengths by making positive changes in your marketing strategies. Opportunities in the rental business can be the introduction of new technologies and changing customer needs. Whereas threats can be the entry of new competitors, competitors adopting a new strategy, changes in laws and legal systems, etc. Analyze all these data to deduce smart insights that you can use to grow your rental marketplace.

Differentiated marketing

Once you have enough understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your rental business, the next thing is to devise and plan to target your audience in the right way. As you already have customer data, group your users into categories based on similar needs. They can be divided based on age group, the demography, price preferences, and the communication medium they use.

In today’s rental industry, the competition is intense with so many rental marketplaces available for users. A well-defined marketing strategy will help to target the user base that you want and will also enable you to retain your loyal customers.

With differentiated marketing, you can channelize your message to specific customer groups. Not just that, you can further divide groups into smaller subgroups to make it more personalized. This is called niche marketing where you target small audience groups and market your services to them. Once you have found your particular strategy, you must decide what changes to make to your current rental business practices to successfully implement the differentiation strategy into practice. You might have to expand your rental fleet, improve your customer-related procedures, or improve responsiveness to customer issues.

Determine pricing strategy

Setting the right price is crucial for any rental marketplace. If you set the price too high, it becomes difficult to cater to a broad range of audience and it won’t work if your services are not unique. Setting it too low can hinder your ability to gain profit.

To come with the best pricing strategy, research the market well and compare the prices of your competitors. If you take the Airbnb marketing strategy for pricing, it has two fee structures. The first one is where the platform takes a 3% service fee from hosts and charges 13% from the guests. The second one is the host-only see they charge between 14%-20%.

These figures speak about the quality of the services offered by the rental platform. Customers have the psychology of segregating high prices to high-quality services and low prices to poor quality services. The value is evaluated by users based on the benefits offered by the services with respect to the pricing structure. You can choose your business model and incorporate the monetization channels you prefer when building your platform. If you are using an Airbnb clone to launch your rental platform, you can either use the same revenue followed by Airbnb or customize it according to your preferences and business goals. Whatever model you choose, make sure to price your services competitively based on the quality of services you offer.

Branding

Branding is one of the most important things to consider for any rental business. It improves recognition of your rental services, attracts and retains loyal customers. You can also adopt strategies like co-branding to improve your brand identity.

Airbnb’s current brand strategy is to evolve its services from accommodation listings to experience and more. For example, Airbnb now offers experiences and curates restaurants as a part of its services to help its customers book something more than a trip.

Airbnb also features both hosts and guest stories on all of their social channels. By featuring your community front and center, you will be able to gain the trust of your target audience and this also helps in adding new customers to your user base. By increasing the quality of your services to match the expectations of your target audience, you engage the customers to stay loyal to your brand. By polishing each aspect of your brand identity, you can make sure your brand remains consistent in the market and one to remember.

Conclusion

Every marketing strategy doesn’t match all rental marketplaces. Have a good look at your rental platform and devise the right plan for you. Sometimes you won’t need all of them or implementing a few would be sufficient to bring in positive changes. If you liked any of the marketing strategies we have discussed here, please share it in the comment section below.

Categories: Marketing