If you want to become the go-to party rental business in your local area, then choosing your marketing avenues carefully can make all the difference. While in the past, local press and radio, and things like the Yellow Pages were the main places to promote your party rental business locally, you can now make use of the huge popularity of social media services like Twitter and Facebook to specifically target and engage with people in your area.
Why Social Media Marketing Is Ideal for a Party Rental Business
Social media marketing has become the most popular marketing choice for small businesses over the past few years, partly because of the very low cost, but mainly because it allows you to target the people most likely to use your services more easily than any other method. It also allows you to interact with people, which can help establish good, long lasting relationships with customers.
For a party rental business, these benefits are particularly relevant. You operate in a certain area, and want to be able to reach anyone in your target region who is planning an event. You also have an operating model that lends itself to doing very well out of repeat business and word of mouth recommendations. Social media is the perfect way to achieve this. You can even use party rental software to manage your social media marketing as part of your overall business processes.
Tips for Targeting People in Your Local Area with Social Media
The easiest and most established means for basic social media marketing campaigns are Facebook and Twitter, and they both make local targeting straightforward and effective.
The first step is to create a Twitter account and Facebook page for your business. Make sure that your party rental business name and location are prominent in both of these, so that people who are searching for businesses in your area will be able to find you.
Your Facebook page is where you can put any new offers, promotions or news, but it also helps get people’s attention if you make your content and updates funny or interesting. The idea is to get people sharing your page, so that more people find out about your business and join up. Get your existing friends and connections involved by inviting them to “Like” your page and share it to the people they know who live nearby to get the ball rolling, and then, as you accumulate more friends, keep reminding them of your party rental business with fun status updates or promotional messages which will appear in their news feeds.
You can also, reasonably cheaply, advertise on Facebook, choosing only to have your ads displayed to people in certain locations or with certain interests. This can really help you maximize on your marketing budget’s return on investment, by making sure you are only paying to advertize to the right people. If you have a special offer for a party rental service you provide for weddings, for example, you can choose to advertise to people in a certain location whose relationship status is set to “Engaged”.
On Twitter, you can use “hashtags” (words or phrases preceded by the “#” symbol) to highlight your tweets to people searching for certain things. Include a your town’s name as a hashtag in your tweets (e.g. “#springfield”) so local people can find you, and search for other tweets relevant to your local area by doing a Twitter search on that hashtag. This allows you to see what other people nearby are talking about, and also means you can identify local people to follow. You can then reply to the tweets they post, encouraging them to interact with you and follow you back, growing your local network. Party rental software can help you manage your contacts as well as tracking your social media campaigns.