Want an edge in your marketing when times are getting tough?
Stacie Maxwell of Universal Storage Group believes it's important to make your community familiar with—and friendly with—your storage brand. This is an advantage local operators have over large national brands like REITs.
It's important to get your name out there with the community. So exactly what does that mean? What types of conventional marketing can help you connect with the community?
In this Gabfocus Spotlight, listen as Stacie talks to us about community marketing that helps your business stand out!
Question: "Which conventional marketing tactics should I use for my business?"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Marketing in Slow Markets, Heather McCombs of Spacebox and Stacie Maxwell of Universal Storage Group join us to talk about marketing. Specifically, about how to handle marketing when things are slow.
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Stacie had to say:
You really have to get out there and know your community because storage customers, they're not going to rent with someone they don't know and trust and don't feel comfortable with.
So you have to spread your brand around.
A lot of people say that branding doesn't really matter because people are just going to find a storage unit and roll up to it and move in. That's not really true anymore, and it hasn't been for years. In order for that customer to rent with you, they have to feel comfortable with you.
And you can put that brand as much as you can out in the market so that they see it a lot. School sponsorships are great little league teams and helping the Girl Scouts sell their cookies. And every little thing that you can do to entrench yourself and become a valued and trusted community resource is what you need to do to get in good with your company or in your community. So that when they need storage, because you can't put storage on sale, people don't come running to buy it.
It's not that TV on Black Friday. You got three TVs already. But hey, man, a 70 inch one is so cheap today. I'm getting that.
So you either need storage or you don't. So when they need it, you want them to think of you first. And the way you do that is pushing your brand to the community.
We do special events on site to drive human traffic to the facility, because once somebody comes on site, we set up our events in a way that they are forced to kind of move through the property.
They're forced to, even though they may not be paying attention at the time.
They're still seeing your elevators, your loading area. They're seeing how the gate works. They're seeing if you have loading docks or whatever it is. So we use those events to educate our community about what we provide so that they can actually recommend with knowledge.
This self storage facility is great. I saw their great freight elevators. They're able to move great things. Or you could roll right up to the door and roll up your door and offload your truck.
Whatever your features and benefits are, we highlight those with events.
And I saw someone in the chat just now asked what type of events. We do yard sales. We do customer appreciation events. We do car washes in areas where we're allowed to do car washes. You can have like a drive through Girl Scout cookie sale. That's always fun."
—Stacie Maxwell
