When people come looking for self-storage, they’re looking to meet an immediate need. The goal of self storage marketing is getting those people to choose your facility over any of the other options!
The ins and outs of marketing on Facebook will put new tools in your hands. But unlike most articles you’ll read about the advantages of Facebook ads, it’s important for us to take a thoughtful route to gain a lasting advantage over the competition. Because of how the self storage industry works–and how it differs from conventional markets–we need to cherry-pick the right tools and use them to our benefit.
But let’s first address some of the reasons why you’d even want to use Facebook Marketing. After all, is Facebook still relevant as a platform?
Here are some quick stats: Facebook has over 3 billion active users, its ads have an average conversion rate higher than Google ads, and generally gives a higher return on investment per click–though the ROI fluctuates significantly based on various factors. And because Facebook has such accurate user data, its targeting tools let you narrow down your ad visibility to the most relevant users. We’ll delve deeper into that later.
It sounds like a worthwhile investment…okay, but what’s the catch? On the surface, marketing on Facebook sounds more effective than Google Ads. Of course, a little number-crunching reveals a lot–while these stats are accurate for Facebook, and while it does yield a compelling conversion rate, it also has less reach than Google. Facebook may have over 3 billion users, but Google has…well, everyone.
And Google serves up your ads to people who are actively searching for storage units.
Combine that with the fact that word-of-mouth marketing holds such power in our industry and you might wonder if Facebook marketing is right for you.
The short version is this: Facebook marketing is an advanced step, to be done after you’ve checked all your other boxes:
But let’s say you’ve done all of that–and you’re seeing results. You’re in a good position with your overall marketing strategy, and you want to add more. In that case, you’re ready for Facebook marketing–and the good news is, when done correctly, we can get your ads targeted to the right people.
But how does setting up an ad campaign on Facebook work? Does it take a long time, or cost a lot? What are all these buttons?!
If you’re feeling adventurous and want to learn how to use a powerful tool to boost your business, then get ready: it’s time to launch our Facebook Ads Crash Course. This is a two-step blog series, with the end goal of using Facebook’s Ads Manager to perform a tactic called Retargeting. To get there, though, we’ll need to start with the basics, and build up from there.
Shout out to Davie Fogarty for his in-depth video guide to setting up Facebook Ads!
Let’s take a few preliminary steps that, while not as exciting as generating new leads, are necessary for the process. These three steps will not only lay the foundation of your ad campaign, they’ll offer clarity in moving forward.
With our setup stage finished, it’s time to meet our new partner: Facebook Ads Manager.
On the Facebook Page for your business, click on Ad Center on the left-hand side of the screen. From the dropdown menu that appears, click All Ads. Then, you’re looking for Ads Manager. Welcome to your command center–we’ll be using this tool to create and run ads.
A quick tip: you can also do all of the following steps from our phone! Just download the Meta Ads Manager app, log in with your business account, and follow the same steps as if you were on a computer.
Feel free to click around in the Ads Manager for a minute to get used to the layout. Facebook might give you a brief walkthrough as well–take in whatever’s to your comfort level.
When you’re ready for your next move, let’s learn how to make an ad.
Click on the Create button beneath the search bar (look for a green button) to move forward. For this tutorial, you can work with an ad you know you want to send out, or just create a sample that you don’t launch at the end.
Facebook will prompt you to choose a buying type and campaign objective.
Buying type: you can choose between auction or reservation. The titles can sound confusing, but it really comes down to how you’re paying for and using the ad space on a page. Here’s a quick and simple breakdown.
Consider which is best for your ad campaign before choosing–and remember that many renters choose based on distance from their home, making the focused, local reach of an Auction an attractive choice for our industry.
As for your campaign objective, we’re again faced with a choice.
Remember when we decided on our overall goal for our ad campaign? That decision will help inform what we’re looking at here. Facebook offers six goals to choose from–and whatever you choose will help Facebook decide how to package your ad.
This is another case where conventional marketing data may conflict with the self storage market. Generally, we’re looking for traffic or sales as our objectives–and while building a stronger overall marketing campaign with engagement and awareness works well in other markets, it’s less important in the needs-based self storage industry.
Once you’ve made your choices here, don’t forget to name your campaign. After that, Facebook will ask you to select an ad category. Without getting too in-depth here, the short explanation is: don’t click any of those boxes! Ad categories are specialized for tax purposes when handling things like housing or political ads. Self-storage is considered a general ad, so you can leave this step blank.
Our next option is A/B testing. Toggling this setting will let you run two versions of your ad with different placement, images, text, or even an entirely different audience. A/B testing is a great way to see whether or not your ad is effective, and can give you information about the kind of ads you want to run in the future. When it comes to your marketing budget, more data means more informed decisions about how you’re spending your money–but if you’re just starting out, it’s okay to keep this feature toggled off. If you do turn it on, you’ll get some additional prompts later in the process.
The next setting is Advantage+. This feature will only show up if you’re using an Auction buying type, and uses AI to find what it considers the best price per viewership to automatically distribute your funds for ad placement. If that sounds complicated, the short version is that Advantage+ automates your spending for pure efficiency and reach, but gives you less control. You might know something about your market that AI doesn’t, especially considering that self-storage markets behave differently than markets in general! If this is your first ad, it’s worth noting that Advantage+ works better with more than two ads running at the same time.
Facebook will also display an option to narrow down your performance goal (it will match the name of the performance goal you chose earlier). For first-time users, it’s best to leave this step alone, but we can have a look at it for future reference. As a quick summary, if choosing your performance goal answers “what,” then narrowing it down answers, “how.” You can target even more specific metrics with this setting, and effectiveness is more of a trial and error–perfect for advanced users who want to tinker and maximize.
Next up is your ad budget and schedule. This is a tool to pay close attention to–it’s how much money you’re willing to spend on your ad! Facebook doesn’t want to take more money from you than you want to give, so we set hard limits here. You won’t go over the limits you set, and there are two ways to handle it: as a Daily budget or a Lifetime budget.
You may be wondering which one is best to use. If your budget fluctuates regularly, a daily budget is easier to manage. But if you’d rather sit it and forget it, the lifetime budget is a form of automation that lets you play the long game.
Customizing your audience is another step that needs our attention. While Facebook lets us customize our audience based on location, age, and language, self-storage functions heavily around proximity. There’s not much use in our ad reaching someone in a specific age range, but over an hour away. For that reason, we recommend targeting location primarily and then filling out age and language as secondary objectives.
As a bit of additional info, Gen Z and much older leads tend not to use Facebook as much–though Gen Z does use Instagram regularly, something we can take advantage of when choosing Ad Format.
You can also use Advantage+ to automate some of your audience settings, if you want to let the AI handle it for you–but keep in mind that AI currently functions as a very top-down approach to marketing, where self-storage represents a market sometimes different from traditional markets.
But there’s a better way to do this. Even if you targeted a specific location within a set radius of your storage facility, you’ll still be sending ads to people who aren’t interested in self storage, potentially wasting money. That’s why, when you’re setting up a real ad that you’re ready to spend money on, we’ll be using a Custom Audience for the purposes of Retargeting. For now, we’ll go over the remaining specifics of how to create an ad, and proceed on Retargeting in our Meta Pixel and Retargeting Guide later.
Now that we’ve settled our audience settings, we’ll turn our attention to ad placement. This is another setting you can let Advantage+ automate for you, but if you want more manual control, you have a few options for what kind of content on Facebook will play your ad:
You may be asking why you wouldn’t just click all of them. There are two major reasons to be more strategic: first, each type of ad placement has different costs and format requirements. Second, when you’re looking to track the effectiveness of different types of ads in the long term, more variables means data that’s more difficult to interpret. If you’re just running ads in feeds, for example, you can test against that information when you run that ad in search results instead.
Next, you’ll choose which social accounts you want this ad to be associated with. The Facebook Page for your business is an obvious choice here.
If all of this feels very tech-heavy, good news! You’re beyond novice level just by choosing these settings with intention, and we’re now to the fun part: the actual ad itself.
In Ad Setup, It’s time to choose your ad format–and delve into creating your ad. You have a few options to choose from here:
Remember that your format may affect your placement options, and vice versa–which means format will also indirectly affect price.
Under Ad Creative, you’ll upload the media you want to use for your ad–you can even include music for relevant media types. Whether it’s an image or video, you’ll also want to include text. Including a call-to-action, or CTA, is of high importance here. If you’re not sure what to say for your CTA, look back at your campaign goals–what do you want people who see the ad to do? Whether it’s subscribe, visit your website, fill out a form, or start renting, make sure you call it out!
The last feature we want to pay close attention to is Destination. This is where clicking the ad sends someone. Facebook will suggest Instant Experience, which is a landing page optimized for Facebook that stays on their platform, but you also have the option of sending users directly to your website or inbox. Just like with CTAs, aligning with your goals from earlier will help determine where you want people to go.
Like with your website, sending users to your Rates or Home page is generally a best practice. If people click on your ads, it’s because they’re looking to rent–send them to a page where they can.
Review everything once, twice, as many times as you like. And when you’re done with that…press the publish button (bottom right of the screen, we’ve seen plenty of buttons today)! Your ad won’t go live immediately–Facebook needs to review it to make sure it’s within their terms and conditions, but you’ll usually get a confirmation email of the launch within a day.
Now, take a minute and celebrate, you just launched a Facebook ad! The more ads you send out, the more comfortable you’ll get with the tools, and the more empowered you’ll feel to try out the advanced features to see what works best for your business.
We mentioned before, though, that just launching ads is not our ultimate goal. Understanding how the Ads Manager works and how to create an ad was the first step–our advanced tools, and the next two steps in our two part series will guide you toward what you’ll actually see the most use out of: using the Meta Pixel to perform a Retargeting ad campaign.
For advanced users, the Meta Pixel is your best friend, enabling you to perform two very effective plays. This little snippet of code goes into your website code where it has a single job: collect data on users who enter and leave your site and report back to you with info.
You can then use that information–which the Meta Pixel gathered for you automatically–to send ads in a more targeted manner. Using a Meta Pixel requires you to have a Facebook Page for your business set up, but it’s well worth it to get you access to the ultimate goal of our Facebook Marketing journey: Retargeting.
Interested in learning more about how to set up and use the Meta Pixel? Read part two of our Facebook marketing series in the Meta Pixel and Retargeting Guide to go deeper!
Now that you’ve mastered creating ads and putting them on Facebook, we can talk about getting those ads in front of specific people using the Meta Pixel. Since the pixel can tell you which users visited your website but left it without making a purchase, you have a perfect group to send targeted ads to. If you’re applying the magical marketing Rule of Seven, potential leads need to see your brand seven times before making a purchasing decision. Retargeting sends Facebook ads to specific people who you’ve engaged with already; it puts your ad money where it counts most by casting a more focused net–and can help push a lead over the edge.
If you’re looking to learn how to set up retargeted ads on Facebook for people who have interacted with your website already, we’ve got an in-depth Retargeting Guide just for you!
Marketing on Facebook can work in self storage, as long as you’re focused on reaching potential customers - not just anyone you can find. And while the time and money spent can yield powerful results, it’s necessary to first make sure you’re utilizing all of your other marketing tools like your Google Business Profile and Google ads before delving into Facebook ads.
On that note, you wouldn’t want to just send out a swarm of ads on Facebook right now–unless you want to throw money away. Our next two steps, setting up the Meta Pixel and mastering Retargeting are tailored towards tightly focused industries like self storage. Putting your ad in front of people with no interest in storing won’t do any good–but serving up your ads to people who have shown interest in renting by visiting your website is a much better investment.
So when you’re ready to go deeper, check out the second step of our two-part series. Let’s make your ad money count with an even more advanced tactic.
Want to learn more about how to market your facility and master the tools at your disposal? Check out these helpful resources.
