After two difficult years because of the pandemic, the events sector is finally picking up again, and now is the time to go digital to simplify your business and make the most of your time with customers.
Event equipment rental and party rental have a bright future. Don't wait until it's too late: make the difference against your competitors.
In this article, we share practical tips to grow your event equipment rental business.
1. Find event equipment partners 🤝
Always listen to your friends and the people around you 😇
With that in mind, the first options for growing your event rental business are fairly easy to find.
a. Venue-finding platforms
These days it is very easy to find a venue near you. Use the same approach to grow your rentals.
Do you rent out tableware for corporate events? Find the venues directly where you could rent out your equipment.
Do you rent out wedding equipment? Find reception venues where you can offer your services.
b. Locals, your best friends
We mentioned it in the introduction: the people around you are probably still your best source of growth. Talk about your rentals: you will always know someone who knows someone who needs to rent equipment, whether B2B or B2C.
They are also your first business card. These are the people you will look after, and who will then talk about you.
At a party with friends, a family meal or at your local bakery, it always pays to get noticed (🙄) and spread the word about your event equipment rental business.
2. Get the right tools for your event equipment rental 🔈
a. Go digital
The COVID-19 pandemic turned the event equipment rental market, and the events sector as a whole, upside down. To respond to the new constraints it created, the event equipment rental market had to rethink itself and offer customers a simpler way to rent equipment directly on their website.
What role does digital rental play?
For Marie Seignolle, marketing director at MyEvent, the answer is to build events through digital.
“We used this period to run a study with our event service providers so we could build tomorrow's events with them, by offering new digital services.”
For Yves Rallet, marketing and sales director of the Loxam group, the whole challenge is transferring the customer's trust to an app.
He explains why:
“The next step will be the growth of booking directly online or through the customer portal, probably at the expense of the phone. This will give customers better tracking of their bookings and rentals.”
b. A management tool
Tracking your equipment bookings in real time is essential.
Tracking the life cycle of your products is essential.
Keeping an up-to-date booking calendar is essential.
But how do you get all that? How do you avoid mistakes on each of these points?
A tool to help you manage your event equipment rental business becomes essential.
It saves you time. You focus on what matters: your customer relationships and running your business well.
To choose your software, here are the key questions to ask yourself.
3. Boost your event equipment rentals 🚀
a. Online booking
By adding an online booking tool, you will generate more revenue for a simple reason: you get bookings at any time of day. Even while you sleep! 😴
You can quickly see how your bookings are evolving and how your business is growing, and you can focus on your core business.
📊- The Lokki figure
48% of bookings are made when you are closed.
At Lokki, we have noticed that half of all online bookings are made when shops are closed. Our statistics show it in the spread of booking times across our rental businesses:
Lokki online booking statistics over one day
28% growth for our rental businesses that use online booking
Adding online booking makes the customer journey easier and simplifies your management. Our customers see strong growth with this tool.
b. Local SEO
Local SEO is a Google tool that helps local businesses improve their visibility in their catchment area.
To answer this question and illustrate our point as clearly as possible, let's look at a concrete example.
Imagine a group of friends who want to organise an end-of-school-year event in Nice. They will need speakers, lights, structures and so on. As it is a one-off need, they turn straight to rental. They search on Google for "event equipment rental Nice" from their smartphone. The world's best-known search engine will then geolocate them and show the nearest event equipment rental businesses.
That's where you come in! Your goal? To be in the "local pack" or the "3-pack": you know, that block of businesses that appears under the map.
The image shows the location of event and party equipment rental businesses in and around Nice: see the advantage you can gain over your competitors.
Is local SEO really that important?
Take advantage of the rise in mobile searches:
💡 "Did you know?"
- 72% of people who run a local search visited a shop within 9 km
- 30% of mobile searches are related to a location
- 28% of searches for a nearby item lead to a purchase
- Local searches lead 50% of mobile visitors to visit shops the same day
- 78% of mobile searches lead to offline purchases (in a physical shop)
Source: Hubspot
Smartphone searches bring high-quality traffic: these are people looking for physical shops near them that can meet an immediate need.
In other words, local searches such as "party equipment rental" come from highly interested customers with very specific queries, who are often looking for an immediate solution.
We wrote a dedicated article on the subject, with lots of tips straight from our customers, including event equipment rental businesses.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are a thousand ways to grow your event equipment rental business.
By keeping it as concise as possible, we hope we've helped you (at least a little) come up with ideas to grow.
Either way, the rental sector is very promising. Revenue from equipment rental has grown by 26% since 2013 (Statista, 2019). A good sign for the rest of your journey as a rental business.
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