Self Storage Marketing Series – Do You Know How to Find Your Customers Online?

Like I discussed last week, we track everything in our self storage business.  We know where every new customer comes from.

Each self storage facility is slightly different, but what is interesting is we can follow the trends and they are almost exactly the same.

Quarterly is a good time period to measure where new leases come from.  It’s enough time for trends to begin to emerge.

Below are numbers for one of our facilities that is approximately 54,000 square feet and stabilized.  This shows where the new leases came from in the last year and a half.

(Note: “Other” includes two different online aggregators we use. We know the percentage split between each of them.)

We use this information for many things, but one of them is to decide where we spend our marketing dollars.

We noticed that “Drive By” is the largest percentage source for new tenants.

What does that tell us?

1. We have a good location.  High visibility.
2. We should make sure we have a lot of money for our signage and it should always be working.

What is the second largest?

Yes, Internet.  The Internet is usually the second or third largest, behind “Drive By” for all our facilities.  Sometimes “Referral” is second.

“Referral” tells us our managers are doing a good job with customer service.

But what is interesting, year after year, quarter after quarter, “Internet “continues to grow.

Now “Internet” is a broad term. What we are finding is that the customer is not sure exactly where they first saw us on the internet. But somehow they saw us and they are standing at our counter.

Now, if that is the one source of new leases that consistently grows, what do you think that is telling us?

If we are going to spend marketing dollars, do you think that is where it should be spent?

At every conference you go to, state or national, there will be countless workshops on “How to Grow Using The Internet” or “How to Use Social Media.”

All are very good but used to leave me frustrated. I was frustrated for three reasons:

1. I didn’t really want to learn about this.
2. I didn’t really understand what they were talking about.
3. It was just another vendor I had to deal with.

But I got how important it was to have a presence in this area.  After all, the big players have entire departments who have only one job – to create a powerful and effective internet presence.

So I did what every smart operator should do.

I hired an “industry expert” to do the same thing.

Now I don’t want to put anyone down, but I became even more frustrated.  Nothing ever seemed to make a difference.

Yes, I was told my clicks and website visits were increasing.  I even moved up somewhat in the organic searches for some key search terms. But what never did change was the slow steady upward movement of my stats indicating where new tenants are coming from.

So I decided to test them in our “Lease Up” projects. I am actually currently using an “Industry Expert” vendor for online marketing.  I am also running my own campaigns to get the actual difference between my campaign effectiveness and theirs.

You see I got sick and tired of having to depend on someone else to tell me what was a good result for a subject I didn’t understand in an area that is vitally important to my business.

So I went out and began to learn for myself what “Internet Marketing” is about.

Again, I want to know. I don’t want to be told by a vendor I am paying what a good result is.

I have spent a lot of money and about two years studying this.  The more I learn, the more frustrated I am with the vendors I have been hiring.

I am currently spending my last money with “Industry Experts” on internet marketing (never say never…just get my frustration).

At least if I ever do, I will direct them rather than let them direct me.

I don’t know if any of you who are currently in the business are experiencing the same frustration I am.

The next few weeks will be a short series sharing what I’m learning about online marketing for self storage:

• What I’ve done that works and doesn’t work.
• The mindset needed for online marketing
• What results you can expect to get

My goals in this series is not to make you an expert (because I am not one).  But rather to give you enough information so you can recognize good online marketing when you see it, and to begin a campaign experiment if you want to.

At the very least, you will be asking better questions to any vendor you hire to do your “Internet Marketing.”

Let’s begin.

Basically, an online presence has two components that need to be happening simultaneously:

1. SEO: Search engine optimization.
2. Paid Traffic.

For now, let your website provider or some other vendor handle SEO. This is an entire industry unto itself.  Good SEO has your website show up “organically” as people do their searches. It is critical but really boring. It is way nerdier in my opinion than “Paid Traffic,” which is marketing.

But for some background, there are two main components to good SEO today. One is a weird thing called “metatags”.  These are word phrases, which usually the person who puts your website together uses on the “backside” of your web site.

For example, if you are reading this on CreatingWealthThroughSelfStorage.com there is a process for building SEO.  I give the Word document I write the post on to Leslie who works on my website.  She edits the post for grammar and spelling and she adds in key phrases to the post so Google, or other search engines, will pull this article if someone puts in the search term “internet marketing for Self Storage” or something similar.

I usually try to have the words “Self Storage” in the first line or two of each article for SEO reasons.

The other main SEO component is something called “backlinks” which is a fancy word for other websites referring to your site.

For now, however, let someone else handle your SEO.

Why?

For one it is very boring. Secondly, if you do “Paid Traffic” right, it will have a positive effect on your SEO.

So this series of articles is on how to use “Internet Ads” to get customers into your facility.

If you take my advice and start or grow your self storage business by doing expansions, you’re going to have a big block of new space come on the market.

What if that happens at the same time someone else is doing the same?  Or, as we are experiencing, a REIT builds a new facility that has a negative impact on my lease-up, marketing is critical.

However, there is good news about having to learn this. The best news about it is IT IS INEXPENSIVE.

Compared to what we used to have to spend, it is downright CHEEP.

When I was first around this industry, depending on the market, I could spend up to $50,000 a year for Yellow Page ads.

In a lease-up situation, $1,000 a month is a lot of money.  For a stabilized facility, $3,500 per year or so for “Paid traffic” is a lot.

In today’s world, there are two places to spend your “Paid Traffic” dollars.

1. Google
2. Facebook

I heard last week that together they account for over 76% of dollars spent on online paid advertising. And it is growing larger each year.

These are the two areas I will focus in this series of articles. How to create and place ads on Google and Facebook that will incent customers come into your facility and rent units.

Again, I am new at this but have somewhat successfully done this for an online business I own and have had some success so far for my self storage business. I am in the middle of doing a couple of campaigns now, so I will share what I am doing that is working and not working.

We will start with Facebook then go to Google.

Between now and next week, see how many ads you can see in your Facebook newsfeed or as you search on Google for self storage facilities.

You will see some, but not many.

Then also notice ads you see as you search in Google and as you hang out in Facebook for other industries. Notice which ads you think are good and which ones annoy you.

Have you ever searched for something then started noticing ads showing up everywhere you are online for that product?

How does that make you feel?  Notice if you see companies and industries that do it well in your opinion, and ones that just creep you out.

In this series, I am going to show you how to do that, or at least how it happens.

Again, my goal is not to make you an expert. I can’t because I am not one. I just know enough now to recognize good marketing when I see it and have run a few successful campaigns myself.

I am no longer at the mercy of an “Industry Expert” either.  There is real power there.

Use this week to start to get present to advertising online. Then you will do the same thing to create TRUE WEALTH in self storage.