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In today's world, digital marketing is a crucial component of every successful business's marketing model.

Digital marketing is an indispensable tool for self-storage facilities because they are often located far away from, and out of sight of, their potential customers, and digital marketing can increase brand awareness by up to 80%.[1]

Unlike in the physical world, with just a few avenues available to advertisers, the online marketing world and online marketing strategies for self-storage facilities can utilize a whole host of different forms and channels, including:

  • Websites
  • Emails
  • Content creation
  • Social media
  • Review platforms
  • Search engines
  • and more!

Through these channels, internet marketing for self-storage businesses has the greatest effect. Let's be clear; this is not saying that good old-fashioned, real-world marketing tactics and channels don't produce results—they definitely can. But it is less likely to create as many successful leads for the same cost. Put bluntly, digital marketing for self-storage facilities is the most effective way to reach and convert customers.

What Digital Marketing Accomplishes

First and foremost, digital marketing, like its ancient predecessor, physical marketing, helps to increase brand visibility and awareness. This generates business and drives occupancy rates simply because potential customers know you're there.

However, from here on out, the benefits of digital advertising for storage facilities begin to outpace those of its ancient ancestors. Let's look at a few reasons how:

  • Build Brand Visibility and Trust: Through an online presence, self-storage facilities can increase their brand's visibility and reputation with an audience. This, in turn, can increase brand trust. This is done by actively using social media, creating helpful content, and responding on review platforms.
  • Target Specific Customers: Through PPC advertising campaigns, search engine optimization (SEO), and campaigns targeting specific demographics, self-storage advertisers can hone in on their target audience.
  • Increase Budget Efficiency: Because digital marketing allows self-storage facilities to better target their marketing efforts, it can significantly increase their budget efficiency. Leaving more cash for use elsewhere.
  • More Options: Simply, more platforms and outlets are available to marketers of self-storage facilities in the digital world.
  • Customer Interactions: Customer interactions in the self-storage industry are limited. The digital realm allows these to happen more often and easily, resulting in greater visibility, trust, and conversions.
  • Data and Insights: Digital marketing can come with real-time data feedback—allowing marketers to fine-tune marketing campaigns while they're underway to increase their success rate.

Some channels are more popular and effective than others for self-storage facility digital marketers. Here we will look at some of the must-to-have forms of digital marketing for self-storage facilities.

Self-Storage Website Optimization

First on the list for any business with a digital presence is to ensure that their website is fit for purpose, i.e., optimized. Website design for storage facilities can be easy, for the services they offer are simple. Indeed, these websites need to be simple and user-friendly. But sometimes, simple can be challenging to design. If you're stuck in the design stage, look at the websites of some of the industry's big players. These will give you an insight into what their research has said is the best way to design a self-storage website.

Self-storage website optimization means focusing on two key elements: SEO and mobile.

SEO

SEO is the process of helping a website or page rank highly in a search engine's list of results. SEO for self-storage websites needs to, first and foremost, be local. You will rarely find people outside your area searching for self-storage. So you'll want to target local keywords to increase the number of local people who see your business.

SEO optimization helps bump a website up the search rankings and increase organic web traffic. Other SEO elements will also improve the user experience of your website by improving its speed, navigation, and responsiveness. Self-storage website SEO is not a difficult task, but it is a significant undertaking.

Mobile Optimization

More website traffic goes through mobile devices than desktop devices.[2] Google, the world's largest search engine, prioritizes ranking websites optimized for mobile devices.[3] So, making a website mobile-friendly is necessary for any self-storage website optimization. On top of this, 76% of people who conduct a local search on a mobile device visit that location within 24 hours.[4] 28% of those visits result in a purchase.4 So optimizing a website for mobile, including making it mobile-user-friendly, is a surefire way to boost your rankings and convert clicks into customers.

Self-Storage Social Media Marketing

Hardly any brand can get by today without a social media presence.

While self-storage facilities might seem to be one of the least likely businesses to need a social media account, having one is definitely beneficial.

Self-storage-related social media marketing is more than just intermittently posting offers and adverts. Proper use of social media accounts can build brand awareness and trust and increase a brand's reach. There are numerous ways a brand can effectively utilize social media platforms:

  • Engagement: Building a strong presence allows self-storage facilities to engage with existing and potential customers. Social media engagement for self-storage facilities enables them to address customers in real time and creatively advertise themselves. Partaking in online discussions, whether about self-storage, local news, or otherwise, can raise a facility's profile. Some operators opt for a tongue-in-cheek humor approach. In contrast, others keep it strictly business. Finding and matching your online groove to your target audience can increase brand awareness, trust, and reach.
  • Advertising: Social media is one of the most fantastic advertising tools in digital marketing. Engagement might be good for growing the sentiment around a brand, but social media advertising is great for brand exposure. Instagram marketing for storage facilities allows them to put themselves in front of their target demographic visually, with their advert appearing naturally in the users' feeds. Facebook ads for self-storage businesses allow them to, again, occur naturally in a visual feed. Both platforms now have distinct demographics, allowing marketers to target a specific audience better.
  • Distributing Content: Any content you create, be it digital or physical, can be disseminated to people through social media. They can then share it and increase its exposure. Combining social media and content marketing in this sense can have a knock-on effect and significantly increase a brand's visibility.

While they're not social media networks, review sites are akin to social networks, and their ability to raise a facility's profile is similar. Through these sites, brands can engage with customers and build trust with those searching for a self-storage location. Furthermore, asking customers to review your location can boost your ranking and increase a facility's awareness.

Self-Storage Content Marketing

Social media platforms are places where brands must keep interacting to generate leads. Content creation, however, is an avenue where brands can create materials that, once published, can continue to drive customers to their site.

Self-storage content marketing can be divided into three different types of content:

  • Blog Posts: Blog posts for storage facilities can cover many topics. But, no matter what they cover, they all ultimately have the same goal: drive website traffic. These posts can cover everything from current local or industry events to educational pieces. If you're producing blog posts for your self-storage website, they must be keyword optimized. Specifically, if applicable, optimized for your local area. This will help to increase their visibility with your target audience and your post's chances of producing customers.
  • Videos: Content creation for self-storage websites often includes videos, especially by facilities using social media marketing. These videos can be everything from quick educational tips to comedy pieces on using self-storage. One of the popular types of video content is a facility highlights video or virtual tour. These videos are a great part of self-storage content marketing because they showcase a facility and can be used repeatedly.
  • Infographics: In a world of scrollable news feeds, infographics are perfect for grabbing a user's attention. Infographics for storage facilities cover all things, and the most popular are topics or items that interest the facility's target market. Design is an important element of infographics and contrasting colors and stats that POP can help to increase their impact.

Content creation might seem burdensome at first. But, once a piece of content is out there, it can easily be reused through social media channels to continue reaping the benefits they produce. If done right, a piece of great content's simple existence can generate leads!

Self-Storage PPC Advertising.

Only recently, many would have thought of PPC advertising as being expensive and difficult to manage. But these severe overstatements have been quashed by the launch of platforms like Adverank. The Adverank platform allows operators to manage their self-storage PPC advertising campaigns easily.

PPC campaigns for self-storage businesses allow operators to target and advertise for exact keywords. This also allows them to have a local focus for their business. This sort of paid search marketing for storage facilities means that you only pay when a user clicks on your ad, which is still visible to all those users who don't click on it! This significantly increases a location's exposure on popular platforms, e.g., search engines, without increasing costs.

Using Google Ads for storage facilities is an excellent way to increase this exposure without increasing marketing costs. The Adverank platform is state-of-the-art and manages a facility's PPC and Google Ads marketing relative to budget and desired occupancy. Feedback and adjustments happen in real-time, and if you want to change something, you can switch it to manual and make adjustments that suit your business needs!

More than that, you can use PPC advertising to target local keywords, increase your conversion, and make each of your marketing dollars go that much further!

Footnotes

[1] Georgiev, D. “47 PPC Stats to Empower Your Marketing Strategy in 2023” http://techjury.com , Accessed May 26th, 2023, https://techjury.net/blog/ppc-stats/
[2] Bouchrika, I. "Mobile vs. Desktop Usage Statistics for 2023" http://Research.com , Accessed May 25th, 2023, https://research.com/software/mobile-vs-desktop-usage
[3] Statista. "Market share of leading mobile search engines worldwide from January 2015 to January 2023," http://Statista.com , Accessed May 25th, 2023, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1358006/worldwide-mobile-market-share-of-search-engines/
[4] Google. "Think with Google: Consumer Insights" http://thinkwithgoogle.com , Accessed May 25th, 2023, https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/local-search-conversion-statistics/