Let’s talk about online marketing for a self-storage facility.
Let me start by saying I am not an “expert” in online marketing for self-storage facilities. But I have never worked with an “expert” that has generated any results period, much less any cost-effective results.
In fact, I have never even had an “expert” ask me what the value of a customer is or how much I can spend to attract a customer. Never.
I won’t go down this line much more, but I will share my ideas at the moment about online marketing. It is becoming very important because if we, the smaller owner, are going to be relevant and stay competitive with the REITs and larger players, we have to find a way to show up where people are looking for our product.
In today’s world, the vast majority of online advertising spend is in two places, Google & Facebook.
For me, Google is by far been the hardest to learn, but the most important in many ways.
People who are searching for self storage rentals usually start here or end up here at some point in their leasing experience. If your business strategy is to rent to people who don’t use Google, well… I’d say that is a flawed strategy.
And if you are waiting for your site to “organically” show up on the first search page of Google, I would also tell you that it is a flawed strategy.
If you want to see a good strategy, look at the big players.
They have multiple “search” campaigns going in Google so that their facilities and web sites show up when people are searching for self storage.
So, I recommend you do the same.
Types of Marketing
Let’s get super simple and say there are two basic marketing types of campaigns.
- Brand awareness campaigns.
- Offering & rent now campaigns.
Each has its place, but my coaching is put the bulk of your marketing budget on item 2 above.
Brand awareness is good to do, especially if you are building a new facility, or have just taken over one. You are re-branding and re-positioning it in the marketplace, but for the majority of people in your market area, unless they want or need self storage, your branding falls on deaf eyeballs ears.
I use “branding campaigns” on Facebook mostly. I also use them to attempt to identify a potential customer.
I don’t want to turn this episode into a training session, but I can create them if wanted. However, in general, we use Facebook’s paid advertising platform to run mostly videos telling the market something about our facility or the industry.
You have to be creative here to generate any interest.
I usually optimize the ads for “video Views” not for conversions or website visits. I want the Facebook algorithm to find people in the facilities market area that will interact and watch the video.
So, I have come up with videos like “Here is what self storage Owner’s don’t want you to know,” and talk about how disk locks are the best form of security, or “Are you tired of having self storage rent increases?”, and talk about dynamic pricing and how we don’t use it.
Then, we get data on how many people watched 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%, and 100% of the video. For the people that watched 50% or more, we can re-target them with a specific offer.
We have found that it is a much more cost-effective way of utilizing that portion of our budget.
But the majority of our ad spend goes to Google.
We run mostly search pay-per-click type advertising.
We use the Google keyword planner to see what terms people in our different market areas are using. With those results, we design a pay-per-click campaign that shows up “above the fold” (i.e., on the top part of the first page, so potential customers don’t have to scroll down) until our budget runs out.
It is expensive, and you have to design your campaign effectively to be competitive. We found it cost between $5 to $9 per click depending on the keywords you use, the competition in the area, and the size of the market.
Our facilities are mostly in markets where REITs are competing with us. It could be much lower in other markets.
One of the big mistakes I see people making is where they take the visitors who click. Most people take them to the home page of their website.
I recommend taking them to the most relevant page. If the ad offers a discount if they lease online, take them to the page where they can rent a unit.
I have often taken people to a landing page instead of a website.
If I am giving an offer, a landing page has two options, take the offer or leave. If they accept the offer, then they click on the relevant page on my website.
On our website, there is a lot people can do. They can look at pictures, check out the storage calculator, perhaps watch a video or two. I mostly want traffic from online marketing to take action, not look around.
This is just my thinking, which doesn’t mean it is right. I am just trying to get the most bang for the buck of spending.
Speaking of that, budgets for online spending are going up.
I have had consultants in the self storage space tell me we should be setting a $10,000 per year marketing budget.
In a lease-up facility, it can be even more.
If you have a $50 per day Google budget, which is low as far as Google is concerned, that’s $18,250 or so per year.
We increase the budget during peak leasing months and lower it in others.
My coaching is to learn something about online marketing, even if you plan to hire a vendor to handle it, so you can recognize a good one when you see them.
I recommend allocating 20% of your marketing budget to “Brand Awareness” and related campaigns (like our running offers in re-targeting) and the balance on keyword search campaigns.
Some people split up between Google, Bing, and Yahoo. We don’t, but perhaps we should.
I would be interested in hearing any comments and/or suggestions from you guys about what you have done that works or not works as far as online marketing goes.
The importance and relevance of this topic is only going to increase over the years. This could mean the real difference in your success going forward.
Let’s support each other in being effective here so we can compete with the larger players.
