Gabfocus Spotlight: What are the best ways to lease-up my facility?

Leasing up your self storage facility is one of the biggest challenges an operator can face. In this Session, VP of Marketing for Absolute Storage Management, Grace Totty explains the different "silos" of marketing strategies and when to use them.

Question: "What are the best ways to lease-up my facility?"

Check out the video clip below for the answer.

In this Gabfocus Session: The Bottom Line, we were joined by Grace Totty of Absolute Storage Group and Nick Newcomb of StorageMax to discuss the complexities, challenges, and strategies of revenue management, leasing up, cutting expenses, and everything in between.

Check out the full Session to dive deeper! 

If you don't want to watch the clip above, here's what Grace had to say:

So to get into the lease up stuff, I like to break up marketing things into these two different silos based on what your property needs. The first thing, if you've gotten kind of that website in place, your local listing is done. The next thing I would say to add on for your lease up property are lead generating strategies, so that's like a pay per click or PPC model.

And there's different types of those. There's search campaigns. There are display campaigns, there are retargeting campaigns, and there are conquesting campaigns all kind of run through Google. I would start there if you've got some extra dollars to spend. Add one of those types of campaigns and work with a professional that can help you pick which one is best for you.

Then you can add on aggregators. So SpareFoot. Clearly one of the biggest aggregators in the industry. If you are looking to generate leads and drive more leads to your property, talk to SpareFoot because they do a really good job at it.

And there are other aggregators in the industry, too. There's StorageFront. There's a handful of different aggregators in the industry you can look at and leverage.

And then there's that other silo of awareness campaigns. And, y'all, there is a slew of different awareness campaigns. So the reason I call them awareness campaigns is it's just kind of the spray and pray approach. It's less targetable. So those PPC campaigns and the aggregators are very targeted.

Somebody's going to see your name because of those ads because they already need storage. These awareness campaigns are more like I'm going to push my brand out there, push my product out there. They are very low in cost, but you have to push out a lot of them for it to reap some benefits and even the benefits, we're talking like five leads. It's just very low lead volume because it's just supposed to push your brand, push your product and get your presence established in the community that you're in.

And those are going to be things like postcards. You can send out postcards for about 50 cents a postcard. You're going to want to send thousands of those out. You can do targeted emails. There's companies that you can buy local emails from. And so that's probably three cents an email. Again, you want to push out those multiple times, lots of batches. There are lots of different things that we can add.