Should You Do Your Own Marketing To Keep Your Vehicles Booked?
Let's talk about self-driven marketing and why it matters.
I often see social media posts by people asking about running Facebook ads, Instagram, etc. Some hosts are doing a good job with this and seeing increased bookings. Other hosts downplay it by saying things like, "Why should I spend money doing marketing for Turo?" The hosts who ask that question may very well have vehicles sitting in their lot not making money, wondering why they aren't booked, while Turo is spending their marketing dollars in a different major metro area.
Before we go any further, please enable photos if you received this via email so you can see data screenshots below.
Building your own marketing program (or working with an agency to help you do it correctly) is important all throughout the year for a couple of reasons. The overarching reason is obvious, you want your vehicles booked out as many days per month, year-round, as possible. But here are two scenarios illustrating its importance.
During the peak season, when rental vehicles are in big demand, people are either running into difficulty finding available vehicles at traditional rental car companies, or they are price shopping trying to find the best deal. You're likely to get the greatest response to your marketing, and increased bookings that you wouldn't have gotten when people who don't know anything about Turo can't find you. The images below demonstrate this surge during the holiday peak.
During the slow season, people who know nothing about Turo are still renting vehicles from places like Enterprise. There are fewer of them, but people are still googling rental car companies, and you aren't coming up in the results. When it's slow, and you have empty days on your calendar, you want to attract as many people away from Hertz and Avis as you can.
The images below are screenshots from just one of our marketing channels (Google) in just one of our active markets (Atlanta) for All-Star Auto Rental Marketing Agency. I'm sharing these so you can see what kind of activity you can generate if you decide to start doing your own marketing. It may not be as strong as ours because we are doing this as a host cooperative, but you will still see results.
In December alone, in Atlanta, just through Google (we also market through Facebook, Yelp, etc.) we showed up in over 5,400 searches, got over 4,300 views, over 3,800 views of our vehicle photos, and 16 calls to our main switchboard (doesn't include calls directly to hosts). These visitors also had the ability to just click straight through to a Turo vehicle listing and book without making any trackable phone calls.
You need to think about doing your own marketing as we head into the winter slowdown in most markets.
You will get activity, you will get calls, and you will get bookings that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Target your ads wisely with the correct settings, the right copy, and the right photos. You really have to drill down into the ad settings to make sure you aren't wasting money serving irrelevant ads up to people who care nothing about you or your vehicles. Your ads need to be served up to people who are specifically looking for rental vehicle and either live in, or are planning to travel to, your market.