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Tracking Your Self-Storage Marketing = A Fantastic Way to Ensure Effectiveness and Overall Success
Regularly evaluating and adapting your marketing strategy based on what you learn is essential for growing your self-storage business and maintaining its success. This article explains why you should track your marketing efforts, the metrics to assess and how to follow them.
Derek Hines
September 8, 2024
8 Min Read
In today's tightly competitive self-storage landscape, understanding the impact and performance of your facility marketing is more than a strategic advantage, it's a necessity. Tracking allows you to see what campaigns and messages resonate with your audience, what drives traffic, and what converts leads into loyal customers. It enables you to tailor your approach to meet the needs of your target audience, ensuring that the dollars you spend yield the highest possible return. Ultimately, it provides vital insights that can guide you through industry fluctuations with data-driven confidence.
The process of tracking your self-storage marketing is comprehensive. It should cover everything from your website to your paid advertisements to your social media outreach. Let’s look more closely at the reasons to track your efforts, the metrics to follow and what they reveal about your business.
Tracking Is Essential
The cornerstone of effective marketing is an understanding of your target audience. You must know them like the back of your hand. Who are your self-storage customers? Are they people who are downsizing or moving? Businesses in need of extra space for equipment or inventory? Students who need a place for their stuff between semesters?
To track your marketing efforts is to unravel the mystery of who is engaging with your content and through which channels. This isn't just about numbers; it's about insights. Which messages are resonating? What prompts a click or a call? Understanding these dynamics will empower you to fine-tune your messaging while ensuring it speaks directly to the needs and wants of each customer type.
Tracking also tells you where your marketing investments are working the hardest and best. It's about discerning which campaigns are merely creating noise and which are genuinely driving revenue. This clarity is crucial in the self-storage industry, where every dollar needs to count toward filling units and growing the business. With precise data, you're able to allocate resources to the channels and campaigns delivering the best bang for your buck, enhancing your overall efficiency.
Finally, tracking is the key to continuous improvement, providing a roadmap of past performance, spotlighting successes to replicate and missteps to avoid. By analyzing trends, responses and engagement over time, you gain valuable insight to steer your marketing strategy.
This ongoing cycle of measure, learn and adapt ensures your efforts evolve in lockstep with market dynamics and customer expectations, keeping your self-storage operation not just competitive but a step ahead. Tracking isn’t just a tactic; it’s a calculated imperative that enlightens, guides and propels your business forward.
What to Track
Understanding the metrics that matter most can turn a marketing strategy from good to great. Following are key indicators every self-storage operator should keep on their radar.
Let’s start with traffic. Knowing where your in-person and website visitors are coming from can reveal which marketing channels are producing the best results. Are potential customers finding you online through organic search, web ads or social media, or via offline advertising such as direct mail, newspaper ads, billboards or event sponsorships? Are they reaching out directly via phone, chat or personal visit? By tracking your traffic sources, you can identify which platforms are worth an increased investment and which need further consideration.
Engagement is another key area of focus. It’s a critical barometer measuring the appeal and relevance of your self-storage marketing messages. This metric delves into how visitors interact with your content. Are they participating enthusiastically, exploring your offerings and finding value in what they see? A high rate signifies a strong connection with your audience and that your content is resonating well. Conversely, low engagement could indicate a disconnect, signaling the need for adjustments in your content strategy or website design.
There are three types of user engagement: online, offline and person-to-person. Each has it’s own metrics to follow. Let’s break them down.
Online Metrics
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) provides a detailed picture of how effectively your online content engages users. Focus on the following metrics:
New users. This is the number of first-time visitors to your self-storage website within a specific period, crucial for assessing the effectiveness of marketing strategies aimed at attracting new business. Observing this metric helps you understand the appeal of your products and services to potential customers and guides you in refining your efforts to target relevant audiences more effectively.
Engaged sessions. This metric highlights meaningful interactions users have with your website, such as exploring different unit sizes or spending significant time on your FAQs (frequently asked questions) page. It’s vital for evaluating how effectively your content captures and maintains visitor interest, indicating the relevance and quality of your online presence.
Engagement rate. This ratio of engaged sessions to total sessions provides insight to the overall engagement your self-storage website generates. A high rate suggests that your content and user interface are effectively holding users, encouraging them to explore your self-storage solutions more thoroughly.
Average engagement time per session. Measuring the average duration of engaged sessions offers a clear view of how compelling your content is. Longer times can indicate that potential renters are carefully considering your offerings, reflecting the success of your site in providing valuable information.
Conversions. This refers to visitors who complete a desired action on your site, such as requesting a quote, reserving a self-storage unit or completing a move-in. To track this metric, go to the “Events” section of your GA4 property and designate specific user actions as conversions.
Offline Metrics
Tracking the performance of offline advertising such as billboards, print ads, direct mail or event sponsorships requires a bit of creativity since these methods don't inherently provide digital analytics. Here's how you can measure their impact:
Use a unique phone number for each campaign. Call-tracking services allow you to assign different numbers to specific ads or locations, making it easy to see which ones are generating calls.
Create a unique URL or dedicated landing page for each campaign. This way, you can track how many people visit your site specifically because of an offline ad. Make sure your URLs are easy to remember and type.
Include QR codes in your offline materials to direct users to specific web pages. Smartphones can scan these easily. Tracking visits from these codes provides insight to ad effectiveness.
Use specific promo codes or special offers that are exclusive to your offline campaigns. By tracking these, you can measure the direct impact on sales or sign-ups.
If you're using direct mail, count the number of inquiries, sign-ups or purchases made in response to the campaign. Compare this with the total number of mailers sent out to calculate a response rate.
While the least accurate, a count of your onsite foot traffic during and after an offline advertising campaign can be a good indicator of its success.
Person-to-Person Metrics
To effectively monitor person-to-person engagement, adopt a comprehensive approach for each communication method.
Phone: When potential customers call your self-storage facility, ask how they found out about you. Ensure the response is logged accurately in your CRM (customer-relationship management) software.
Online chat: Incorporate a pre-chat survey or train chat representatives to ask users how they discovered your facility. Capture these insights directly within the platform or record them in your CRM system.
In-person visits: When customers visit your facility, ask about their discovery method during the initial greeting or tour. These responses should be documented in your CRM or facility-management software for future analysis.
How to Set Yourself Up for Success
To successfully track your self-storage marketing, it's essential to start with the right setup, incorporating these key components:
Goals. Begin by defining what success looks like for your self-storage business. Is it increasing occupancy rates, boosting website traffic or enhancing customer satisfaction? Clear, measurable goals are the foundation of any effective marketing strategy. They should be SMART (specific, measurable attainable, relevant and time-bound). For instance, aiming to increase online bookings by 20% within six months gives your team a clear target and makes it easier to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.
Tools. Choose the right ones to track your progress. For example, we already know that GA4 is a powerful, free tool that offers insight to website traffic, user behavior and conversion rates. For social media campaigns, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X provide built-in analytics to gauge post engagement, audience growth and more.
Customer-mapping software such as Maptive can also be helpful. Once you’ve entered your customers’ addresses, it renders a detailed map highlighted with pins. This visualization offers an immediate overview of your base's geographic distribution relative to your store's location.
Hotjar, a behavior-analytics platform, offers heat maps and recordings of customer website-viewing sessions, which allow you go observe and understand how people navigate and interact with your site. You’ll see which aspects engage them and which may act as obstacles to conversion.
Check-ins. Incorporating regular performance reviews into your marketing routine ensures you’re on track to meet your goals and allows for timely strategy adjustments. You might conduct a weekly analysis of social media engagement or a monthly deep dive into website analytics, for example. Consistent monitoring helps identify trends, pinpoint what’s working and spotlight areas for improvement. It also fosters a culture of agility within your self-storage team, enabling quick pivots in strategy in response to market changes or new awareness.
Assess, Learn, Grow
In today's competitive self-storage market, effectively tracking your marketing efforts isn’t just about gathering data; it's crucial for turning that information into action, ensuring your business stays ahead. It helps you understand your customers better, refine your strategy to get the best ROI and adapt to changing market trends. Simply put, regularly assessing and adapting your marketing based on what you learn is essential for growing your business and maintaining its success. Embrace these tactics to not only compete but to lead in the industry.
Derek Hines is a writer for West Coast Self-Storage, a self-storage management, acquisitions and development company with facilities in California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. He writes extensively on all subjects related to the storage industry. For more information, call 877.611.8550.
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