Adequately marketing your business may be one of the biggest challenges that rental professionals face. It’s not always easy to know when to invest in marketing, where to spend that money and how to gauge the return on investment. As a result, the American Rental Association (ARA) has developed Marketing Minutes as online resource to help ARA members.

Marketing Minutes is a series of short interactive modules that provide an overview of various marketing aspects including writing a marketing plan, preparing a budget and working with different media outlets. Also included in these modules are links that provide additional details and information to guide users along the way to market their businesses.

• Module topics include:
• Is Marketing REALLY Important?
• Developing a Marketing Plan
• Planning a Marketing Budget
• It’s all about branding
• Using PR & Media
• Online Marketing
• Enhance Your Site for Search Engines
• Using Social Media

“These modules are designed to provide members with clear, simple and useful marketing best practices that can be applied to all ARA members. Supporting documents and links will accompany the modules to provide the detail needed to execute each marketing function,” said Tom Hubbell, ARA’s vice president for marketing and communications.

Marketing Minutes replaces the Know Marketing Guide. “The goal of redeveloping the ARA marketing resources is to make the program more user friendly, with more relevant information. The Know Marketing Guide served its purpose, but it was time to upgrade, while continuing to serve our members with pertinent information that is useful,” said Hubbell.