WhatsApp icon Skype icon
Car Rental Business Marketing

How to grow your car rental business using marketing?

Want to grow your car rental business? But you don't know where to start? Here are ten marketing strategies to think about to help your startup succeed.

Mohamed Natheem
Mohamed Natheem

“It's not what you sell that matters as much as how you sell it!” — Brian Halligan, CEO & Co-Founder of HubSpot.

🤟 Love for HubSpot never ends, as I love how they market themselves.

Marketing helps your car rental business identify your customers' needs and serve them better.

In this article, with all my marketing expertise, I will share the tips and tricks that you can use to improve your car rental business revenue.

Let's get this party started.

[Stay till the end to get a bonus marketing tip from a car rental business owner like you 😉]

Reasons why marketing is vital for your auto rental business

  1. It will help you reach your target audience using the best medium possible.
  2. Your customers can understand what you offer and how you differ from your competitors.
  3. Marketing helps your car rental business customers to make informed decisions.
  4. Marketing educates your audience and helps them find the best possible solution to their problem.
  5. Your business might get multiple sources of revenue with omnichannel marketing.

1. Have complete knowledge of your target customers 🎯

Not everyone is your target customer!

Identifying your customer persona is the first step before getting started with your marketing plans.

Marketing your business to everyone will dilute your marketing budget and bring unfit leads.

Here are some of the customer persona for your car rental business:

✳️ Business people
✳️ Families
✳️ Travel enthusiasts
✳️ Newly-wed couples
✳️ Long term rentals

Find as many customer personas as possible to market to them effectively.

2. Go Social 📲

Social media is powerful because most of your customers hang out there.

You need to find the best social media channels and go all-in on them.

Instagram is the best platform for car rental companies to engage with their customers.

Instagram is a visual-oriented platform, and humans are attracted to colorful images.

But don't take our word for it. Do your research and find the one that works best for your business.

If you're going to dive deeper into Instagram marketing, this guide will help you get started.

💡 Pro-tip: Incorporate User-generated Content [UGC] into your social media strategy.

Turo Car rental business's UGC post on Instagram for marketing
Turo Instagram UGC post

3. Create a website and a blog ✍️

Customers can book and rent cars directly through your website.

A car rental website can also help your business gain a reputation and establish a strong brand.

After you've finished building your website, add a blog to educate your consumers about your company.

Turo's blog and support articles bring in about 70K organic visitors per month. This could be a wonderful place to start if you're beginning a car rental business.

Turo Support Page Organic Traffic Data From Ahrefs
Turo support page's organic traffic data from Ahrefs
Turo blog page's organic traffic data from Ahrefs
Turo blog page's organic traffic data from Ahrefs

Need support creating your car rental app?

4. Start doing SEO 📣

You might have heard from many marketers that SEO is free, and your marketing strategy should begin with SEO.

That is incorrect.

You have to invest a lot of time in SEO to gain traction. But It is worth it.

SEO is a long-term marketing technique that consistently outperforms all other marketing channels.

You can hire an SEO agency or in-house SEO to perform the task. However, keep in mind that everything you do in SEO should be related to your business.

It is easy to misinterpret SEO success, so stay away from the vanity metrics and tie them with your business goals.

SEO vs PPC vs Social media
Source: Semrush

5. Partner with businesses 🤝

You can diverge your car rental business by partnering with corporates. Corporates offer car rental services to their employees and management.
By providing excellent rental service, you can tie-up with them.

6. Provide best in class customer support 👨‍💻

Acquiring a new customer can be five to 25 times more expensive than holding on to an existing one. - Harvard Business Review

The best way to keep your vehicle rental business customers is to provide 'second to none' customer support and service.

Here are some tips to provide better customer service:

✳️ Be polite; Always.

✳️ Offer a cleaner and safer experience.

✳️ Get feedback for every ride.

✳️ Offer quick support.

🔰 Start your Car Rental 🚘 Business Now!

7. Monitor supply and demand 📈

Supply and demand are the crucial components of marketing and your car rental business's financial growth.

Unlike any other business, car rental marketplaces should attract two groups - car owners and renters.

In the marketplace, this results in the chicken-egg problem.

It is hard for early-stage marketplaces to gain traction. The solution is to be creative with your pricing, loyalty programs, and referral payments.

8. Use pay per click advertising 💲

You can use pay-per-click advertising channels like Facebook ads and Google ads in addition to the previously defined marketing strategies for your car rental business.

Use Facebook ads to target frequent travelers, business people, and also retarget your website visitors using the Facebook pixel.

Here is a video that will explain how you can retarget website visitors on Facebook.

9. Sell the benefits ✅

People aren't used to handing their car keys over to complete strangers. As a result, persuading people to rent out their cars on your platform may be more difficult than you anticipate.

Sell them on the possible benefits, such as extra income from car rentals and financial independence.

10. Personalized marketing

Personalization in marketing your car rental business helps you remove the gap between you and your customers.

Segment your P2P car rental marketplace customers based on their renting and other user behaviors.

And use that data to provide better promotions, messaging, etc.

Here is a tip from Reece, Co-Founder of Mirrortrip, about marketing your car rental business

Being a new company, among our various marketing initiatives was a way to improve brand trust. Typically testimonials are one of the strategies used to adopt this type of thing.

We decided to take a more novel approach & leverage our 5 star Google review average & embed those Google reviews directly into our own website.

Interestingly, Google My Business doesn't provide a way to do this - so we built a widget of our own. The results were great; our A/B tests showed a 30% increase across the board in engagement-related events (E.g: search, sign up, checkout, etc.)

Thanks, Reece, for sharing this with us!

You can find Reece's widget here.

That's it.

We have seen some of the best marketing strategies to boost your car rental revenue.

It's time for you to implement these.

😎 Have anything to say to us [Like any other marketing idea or a project to do with us]? Feel free to contact us via WhatsApp.

Need support creating your car rental app?

Growing your business

Mohamed Natheem

Mohamed is our former SEO analyst and content creator.