We all have a lot of assumptions about different aspects of business, and that includes assumptions about who our customers are. Taking a look at your customer demographics might actually surprise you, though. That just makes it an even more important exercise!
In this Spotlight, Ken Turley and Josh Huff discuss the demographics of self storage customers and how to recognize who YOUR customers might be.
Question: "Who are the main types of self storage customers?"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Let's Get Digital: Understanding digital marketing, SEO, and Google My Business, we spoke with Ken Turley of Storable and Josh Huff from Affordable Storage Guys and talked about many aspects of digital marketing in relation to the self storage industry.
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Ken and Josh had to say:
The funny thing that I've experienced in all the years in this industry is it's always going to be different.
Where I live currently in St. George, Utah, it's a big University town, College town. There's a lot of College kids, high volume as far as move in, move out through the summer. So you're going to get a lot of those. You're seeing residential builds and big booms and people moving in. There's a ton of movers right now that we're seeing in our clientele, even just like looking at your age demographics.
I know one of our clients saw some article about women are the ones renting storage. And he says, like, 'oh, that can't be true.' And he goes in and he looks: 90% of the people that are in his facility are women. So I think what my thing is always to go and understand what your customers are. And then that helps you get a base and understand maybe there's other customer demographics or other types that you're not acquiring, that you can then make a plan to go get.
But I think the first step is: understand what you're currently doing and what your self storage customers and what those types of customers are currently."
- Ken Turley
"I think it's important, like you said Ken, to really know your markets. And that can be difficult if you have multiple facilities in multiple markets. And that's something that we deal with. We have a lot more rural areas, some closer to urban centers.
So we have to not only look at who is in those markets, so are there a lot of schools? Are there teachers that are going to be needing to store supplies? Are there small businesses that may be moving locations or have extra inventory that they need to store? Are there a majority of homeowners that might have bigger items they need to store? Are there a majority of renters that have apartments?
So understanding that, but also even knowing the seasons, that if you have a University, you're going to have a lot more college students that are going to be storing with you in summer to leave their stuff than maybe during the school year, when it's all back in their dorm rooms.
Everybody can store. But you have to see who specifically in your area is going to be needing storage. And that even could change season to season."
- Josh Huff
