You’ve been doing your own marketing for years - you’ve built your own website, made your own logo, and even ran a Google ad campaign to drive traffic!
And overall, you’ve done a great job - but the competitor down the street has a sleek new website that offers features yours doesn’t. Their marketing has a bit of shine on it that you’re not sure yours matches.
Should you outsource your marketing like the competitor did? Are you going to fall behind if you keep doing it yourself? Or could that money be better spent elsewhere?
Like any decision in business, you’re weighing the opportunity cost.
If you pay for a marketing firm, that’s a sizeable investment you’re not spending to improve your business elsewhere!
Not only that, but if you do your marketing yourself, you’re investing a ton of time. No matter how good your hustle is, more time will help you do your job, and manage your business, better.
“Marketing” is actually a whole bunch of different steps that fall under one big umbrella. Some of these are easily done by a novice (like setting up your Google Business Profile).
Others require years of experience and multiple different professionals to do properly (coding websites that can rent storage units automatically).
We can divide these into two camps - online and offline.
Offline
Online
As you could guess, not all of these steps have the same value! And if you end up outsourcing for generic “marketing” services, you may end up wasting money on steps that won’t help your business.
Your job is to balance out your budget, the importance of each task, and the value gained by outsourcing. Some tasks can be completed by an amateur without sacrificing much quality. Other times the money spent on outsourcing will provide such a better result that it’s worthwhile.
We’ll cover a few important marketing steps and how you can decide whether you need to outsource.
Your task here is balancing what your business needs against what you can pay for and what you can do yourself.
When choosing a vendor, you can find everything from comprehensive marketing firms to those that tackle only one of the above tasks. Most marketing companies do some but not all of these things, which is great for self storage operators because it means you don’t have to pay for services you don’t need!
First, pick out which of these services your business needs. Second, pick out which of them you feel confident you can do yourself - keeping in mind that the time you invest in learning how to market your storage facility is time that could be spent working on other aspects of your facility.
Look for marketers who specialize in the most important area you’ve highlighted, then see if any of them can cover the other bits you need done.
You don’t want to be paying multiple people if you don’t have to, as you can usually get a better deal getting multiple services from one company.Choosing the exact company will follow the same plan as hiring any other company - you want to find the balance of good reviews, price, and personal preference. Meet with some different options and see who you like best because you will be working closely with your marketing team!
Even the most hands-on operator is going to need to outsource some marketing - luckily, if you choose the right partners, you can still have a great deal of input!
Your marketing team will need to know a lot about your business. There will probably be an onboarding process where they collect all the necessary information about you, including things like:
And depending on the exact services you’re outsourcing, they may be more or less thorough.
A good marketing company will keep you in the loop as they work - but if your main reason for outsourcing is time, a good marketing company will handle most of the work for you. This might end up with a more generic product, but might still be worthwhile.
You have unique information that your marketing team should be using.
You understand your area better than they do. You also understand how your brand is positioned in the market. This means you need to be the one driving the overall message.
However, when you get into the details, you need to let the marketing team do their thing. If you get too into the weeds, you’re losing a lot of the benefit of hiring a team of professionals to do your marketing!
Not all outsourcing is the same! Be careful when paying for an entire package of marketing services. You may be able to save money by getting everything in one place, but you might also get charged for stuff that doesn't really help your business.
Outsourcing marketing shouldn’t be an either/or decision! There’s a huge variety of marketing and marketing-adjacent companies, so you should look for someone who can accomplish the marketing tasks you can’t handle on your own.
Be careful hiring a team that does all your marketing for you, because you may be paying for services you don’t need! There are many avenues of marketing that work great for other industries but aren’t useful for self storage businesses.
This is primarily because your customers come from less than 20 minutes away (per the 2020 SSA Demand Study). Competing for customers outside that radius is going to be inefficient unless you’re in a very rural area.
If possible, choose a marketing firm that specializes in self storage. You want someone who understands how this industry differs from other, similar businesses, so you don’t waste time with marketing tactics that won’t target your audience.
Market your self storage business like a pro with these blogs:
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.
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