Using Social Media to Promote Children’s Equipment Rental Business

Last week I met with Sneha, who is launching a facility for people to rent children’s equipment and toys for short- or long- term. She is currently designing the website, and is considering ways to market her online business. She has a warehouse but doesn’t want the expense of a physical store at first, so she’ll be doing the majority of her marketing online.

We started off, as almost all my consultation meetings do, with the basics of Search Engine Optimization. Many new moms are also turning to blogging to exercise their brains whilst at home with baby, and to exchange ideas with other moms in the same situation. So, I suggested that Sneha make connections with these blogging moms and ask them if they would write about her business, and feature a link to it. Only a small percentage of those she asks will say yes, so contacting them all is a laborious process, but it’s well worth it to get the links in to a new website.

We did a brief introduction to Twitter, and I think she should have a presence there, but Facebook is much better-suited to this business. I did suggest that she could use it to find blogs that may feature her story, though.

I am child free, but I have many friends with children, and new parents have told me in the past that Facebook is a great way to reduce the feeling of isolation when they are at home with only a small baby for company. This study backs up my anecdotal evidence.

She is not keen to pay too much for advertising, but we discussed the pros and cons of things like Google Adwords vs Facebook. Her prospective clients may not be purposefully searching for her service of equipment rental using a search engine, so Facebook may be the ideal medium for her. She can target her advertising at a very specific market of people in her city, and alert them to the new service.

Because she will have a stock of children’s things she is in a great position to use giveaways as promotions. She can offer gifts to those to refer friends. She could offer money off her rentals for each Facebook “share” of her posts.

I showed her Pinterest and we talked about it’s market, she thinks she would use it to support her main online advertising on Facebook. I think I may even have persuaded her to start blogging herself. There is a great demand for blogs from moms and she enjoys writing, and she could use this as a medium to promote some of her products. I look forward to reading her posts!