5 growth hacks you can learn from the car hire industry.

One of the great things about pursuing an entrepreneurial venture is the creativity in the marketing campaigns that you choose to execute. Most startups are strapped for cash and need to implement low-cost strategies that will also yield a good ROI.

An industry that yields several examples is the car hire and rental industry. The market is competitive, yet providers that work with lower commission rates find that they need to develop creative marketing and lead generation solutions in order to make their business model work. The team from Car Rental Buddy have shared some insights into some of the creative practices in the industry.

Partnering with local accommodation providers.

This can be hotels, hostels or Airbnb. Teams will work to develop a relationship with key stakeholders and gain recommendations or referrals from their website. If the stakeholders within the organization are familiar with the brand, they will simply recommend the service to their guests.

We recommend you identify potential local partners and approach them with a pitch to partner with their business.

Conversion rate optimisation.

The most important thing for startups is to maximize the number of conversions. This will minimise the amount of advertising waste and the bounce rate on the web page. For example, Car Rental Buddy did a split test on their Perth car hire page to improve the loading sequence and call to action on the web page on both desktop and mobile devices. Within a month, conversions on the page increased by 10%.

Partnering with travel agents, brokers or advisors.

It’s important that you find those people in your industry that act as brokers, agents or advisors. These people or organizations will have a client list that they can refer to you in exchange for a fee. It is a win-win for both parties since the startup will pay on a performance-only basis.

Implementing retargeting.

Implementing a paid media campaign can be quite costly. So it is ideal for the startup to target site visitors that are more likely to convert. This can be done with retargeting through Google Adwords or even Facebook. There are other options that are also available via different networks.

Targeting a visitor that has already visited your website will increase the brand recall and may trigger them to convert or refer your business to another person in the future.

Partnering with influencers.

There are several travel influencers that have a large and engaged following. Advertisers in the car hire industry reach out to relevant influencers in the industry whose audience would be interested in the products or services that they offer.

You will need to research and create a database of influencers across the different web platforms. This may include, but is not limited to:

• YouTube

• Facebook

• Twitter

• Blogs

• Instagram

The influencers will offer different advertising rates. You can negotiate a deal with them in exchange for exposure to their audience. You can use this video guide to find influencers.

Try to implement some of these in your organization’s growth hacking strategy so that your organization’s leads and sales scale up quickly. Try out this strategy for 90 days and evaluate your results.