with Cam Petty

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We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again, and we really probably won’t stop saying it ever. Friends, if you are in the rental business you need a website. If you already have one, great. If not, we cannot stress again that you need to have one for your business to show potential clients your products.

Fortunately, there are several platforms we cab recommend from our experience. Our office uses WordPress and Showit for our website management and design. Both of these platforms can be user-friendly and allow so much customization. That’s one of the main reasons we really like them is because we were able to make our website look exactly like what we envisioned.

Squarespace is another great option many business owners chose because of how user-friendly it is. there are a ton of templates you can choose from to edit and go. However, as you want to customize and design your page on this platform it can require a lot of coding knowledge and work.

Regardless of which platform you use, we will also always always always suggest integrating your website with your inventory. If you’ve been reading along for a while, you know that we love Goodshuffle Pro. It has every feature our team desires when it comes to showcasing our inventory to our clients.

You Need To Be Tracking Your Analytics

Much like our recommendation for you to maintain a website, we highly recommend that you begin tracking your analytics if you’re not already. You should be tracking your website analytics, your various social media channels that you pour so much time and effort into, and your email marketing.

For our website, we like to use Google Analytics! It’s free and tells you everything you would want to track while compiling information in very helpful ways. Hopefully, you’ll see that even by your first glance, the data it pulls isn’t overwhelming because of how easy they make it to read. Thank you, Google!

For step-by-step process instructions on linking your website, click here!

Website Tracking Highlights – Things to watch

• Which webpage of your business is performing best
• Which webpage of your business is performing worst
• If your inventory page(s) are not performing well, that is not good!
• How long people are on your website

Each of these bullets can assist you in developing an action plan when figuring out what your customers want from your website. For example, if your about page is performing best, maybe you should market more about your team! Either people love it and want to see more of the people behind the curtains or they don’t know who is back there and are trying to figure it out.

Meanwhile, if you are a rental company and your inventory pages are not being seen… that is an issue! You need people to navigate to that section on your website so they can build a wishlist and submit inquiries that become orders which is how you make money!

Paying attention to how long people are staying on your website can also support your engagement rate. If the average time someone is on your page is 25 seconds, what could you add to make it 45 seconds? Can you add something interactive to keep people on the site where they may find more things they like? You want them to stick around so pay attention to how long they’re on there!

How People Find Your Website

• Blogs
• Social Media (Instagram, Pinterest, Partyslate, etc).
• Organic Searches on Google (or other search engines)
• Direct (email signatures, link, etc.)

At the end of each day when it comes to your website and tracking your website’s analytics, the real question is, “what is your ultimate goal with your website?” What are your Key Performace Indicators (KPIs) to show that you’re reaching your goal? For a lot of us, it’s receiving more and more inquiries or having people fill out our contact form. So ask yourself with what you’ve put out so far… is it working?

Do You Know What Social Channels You Should Be Investing More In?

It may seem that posting on every single platform there is out there can only lead to more success and business but really, that’s not the case. Instead of setting up a company account on every social media platform, we recommend only utilizing ones that will help you reach your target client. Not sure which ones they’re on? Do some research and try to figure it out through trial and error with marketing efforts.

What we have seen in our research and through experience is that Instagram is the #1 social media for rental companies to showcase their work/inventory to their clients. Since it is an image and video-based platform, it is easy to show off what we can do with our products to our clients and entice them to rent with our team.

As you’ve seen and we’ve seen, TikTok is on the rise. Our recommendation here is to use TikTok and Instagram together. Ideally, you would still be creating different short-form video content for the two different platforms. Pinterest is another great channel for our industry. We see tons of brides and corporate clients looking for inspiration there. If they see our pins and click on them, that redirects them to our website which helps our SEO and gets them to see more of our product.

A lot of people don’t think of it this way but Pinterest is basically an image-based Google. People go there to search for outfit ideas, crafts, home decor, flower arrangements, photoshoot styles, etc. Instead of generating various articles that apply to your search, you show images and videos that align with your search. Many people even use it daily.

Producing content for Pinterest, TikTok, Instagram, and other channels have one main purpose… to get people back to your website and get more inquiries.

Cam Petty

Our ideal audience is on Instagram and Pinterest so we focus most of our marketing efforts there!

Where to find your statistics

Track your analytics in the platform you’re operating in. There is other software that will try to pull the data for you, like Planoly (Planoly we love you) but don’t do it. Instead of using the numbers, Planoly generates us for Instagram, we like to use Instagrams numbers. Nothing gets lost in translation and it feels more accurate.

With that being said, we want to remind you that you are not on Instagram just to track likes! There are so many insights on the business account that you can comb through to make the most of your marketing there. It’s also broken down into each type of content and then some (reels, videos, stories, posts, reach, engagement).

Why Email Marketing Is So Important

Email marketing is essential for success! Did you know that there is a 42% ROI for email marketing? Think about it. When you post something on Instagram, likely 3-6% of your followers see that post and might engage with it. Whereas when you have a list of email subscribers, that is a direct line of communication for you to share updates on your company, sales promotions, important announcements, etc. This is so beneficial!  

To continue our discussion on tracking analytics, when it comes to your emails you should be tracking your open rates and click rates. Are people opening your emails in their inboxes or just deleting them? If they’re opening them, are they taking the next steps from the content in the email? An average open rate for email communication/sales is between 15-30%. Of course, we’d love to see a 100% open rate, but truly anything in that range (or above) we will take!

If your open rates for email marketing are lower than you’d like ask yourself if you’re making your email compelling enough. Do you have an enticing subject line? Is your sender’s email obviously related to your company? These are factors to consider. If your click rate is lower than you’d like yourself if you’re including actually engaging material. Additionally, do you have a good call to action? There should be a clear call to action with each of your email communications when mass emailing subscribers.

Buy Our Marketing Stats Template

Every month, our team schedules a monthly marketing meeting. In this meeting, we discuss all of our analytics from every one of our platforms for the previous month. We compile highlights into a one-sheet as well to address what our best performing content was, what we need to push more of that month based on our numbers, and if there were any areas that our engagement declined figuring out why.

We want to share our template with you to help set you up for success! You can find the template for our Marketing Statistics Tracking at this link to purchase for your team today! We would not be able to track everything that we do and turn our analytics into action steps in our marketing without a document like this.

Next week we are kicking off our team series on the podcast by giving our listeners (and readers) a deeper look into what we do here at Render! Tune in to hear (or read) what Kathleen and Cam do as part of our sales team.

Joyfully,

TJ White | Content Manager