How much time do you spend planning your marketing?
You can draw up the perfect plan, spend weeks editing, revising, and double-checking. You can send it to your business buddies to look it over. You can even send it to your high-school English teacher to make sure you got the phrasing right!
But there’s another part of planning your marketing strategy that most people don’t think about – you’ve got to plan to fail, and to fail quickly.
In this article, we’ll go over why you should be willing to get your marketing wrong, how to track it and learn from it, and then at the end we’ll give some ideas that the experts have found success with.
Melissa is the Chief Marketing Officer at Storage Asset Management - a team that manages over 600 locations in 37 states. She’s got an impressive resume in marketing storage facilities, so she just knows what to do in any situation, right?
Not necessarily! But she does know how to figure it out.
The goal isn’t to get your marketing spot on the first time. Every market is different, every facility is different, and what works for your neighbor may not work for you.
There’s some self storage marketing advice that is always a good idea: have a good website, treat your customers well, and get a bunch of good reviews. These are the basics, and everyone should be doing them. But sometimes you need a bit more!
We know that most self storage customers come from within 5 miles of the facility. But, if you’re in a more rural area, that distance could be a lot larger. On the other hand, if you’re in a dense urban area, you might should target the mile or even half-mile around your facility!
In some areas, a flat discount might work better than a “third month free.” Others might respond better to a free moving truck with rental, or a gift card to a local restaurant.
Maybe you’re wondering if you should target Google ads around the local home improvement storage, to catch people who are doing home renovations.
You’ve probably got some ideas springing to mind already - Melissa’s advice is to give those ideas a shot!
Don’t let yourself be constrained by what you’ve seen other folks doing. If you think you have a good idea, try it - but then if it doesn’t work, give the next thing a try.
This is where it gets tricky, because marketing doesn’t always work fast. If you start a self storage referral program, it’s not going to get you a bunch of new renters in the first month - or the second month, or the third. Then maybe the fourth month brings you six new renters.
If that happened, your referral program was a huge success! But what if you cancel your program after month three?
Experimentation is important. Patience is important. But you’ve also got to cut bad tactics so you don’t waste too much money.
Each of these comes down to feel. Some plans, like a referral program, are going to need time. Others, like a Google ad campaign, should start working pretty quickly (if you have no rentals from an ad campaign after four months, you should cancel it!).
You can’t get a feel for any of these if you’re not tracking your marketing!
These experiments are no good if you aren’t tracking the Return on Investment. You need to know where your leads and renters are coming from so you can attribute that money to the correct marketing channel.
You can do this by assigning a special discount code to each channel, or by setting up tracking in your digital world.
Read more about tracking your marketing here!
Referrals are easy to track - every time you pay out your $50, that’s one rental for the referral program. Hopefully your self storage website already tracks your visitors and rentals, too.
When you add a new program, such as hiring a local influencer or partnering with a local realtor’s office, make sure you attach a specific discount code to the effort.
Then, every time someone uses that discount code, you’ll have a record of it!
Efficiency is the goal here. If you only wanted renters, you could pay SpareFoot a bundle of cash to send you a bunch of people. Instead, you want cost-effective, sustainable ways of bringing people to your door.
Also, don’t look for a home run with every marketing effort! If you try six different things and each of them only nets you three rentals each, that’s still eighteen new renters.
If the benefits outweigh the cost (ie, if your marketing brings you more in rentals than it costs), then you’re succeeding. With good tracking, you can figure out what type of marketing you should focus on, and which ones maybe aren’t worth the time.
If you want to check out the whole thing, here’s Gabfocus 66 - Marketing That Gets Clicks. We had a lot of people in attendance, asking great questions and sharing great suggestions!
Here are a few ideas and tidbits that stood out to me:
Storage Asset Management didn’t reach that super-impressive 25/1 ratio right away. They experimented with different ideas, tracked the performance, and refined the ones that worked best!
Make sure you’re doing the same - and that you’re actually investing in your marketing. Even a leased-up facility needs marketing, and if you do it right, you’ll see that money come back in spades.
Check out these other great posts for advice on running your self storage business!
At StoragePug, we build self storage websites that make it easy for new customers to find you and easy for them to rent from you.
