Marketing Strategy for the Spring Surge – No Storage Left Behind

It feels as if only yesterday we picked out a new Christmas tree, but lo and behold, it is February already. As the first plum trees start to bud, we know that the self storage high season is nigh. Use the last few weeks of calm to prepare your storage business and power up your marketing. Continuing our series of seasonal tips for self storage, we present – Storeganise marketing tips spring edition.

Spring Advertising Strategies for New Customers

One big contributing group to the spring surge are college kids – while some are returning home (or moving to new homes after graduation), others are heading out for courses starting in the spring semester. Whether the parents want to transform the old nursery into a guest room or the college dorm couch needs a new place to live – demand for small to mid-sized units that can hold belonging and furniture items leaps up.

There is something about the re-born nature that makes people want to change their lives, too: “New year, new job, new me.” A lot of work-related moving occurs in the spring season -  fuelling the demand for storage units while the housing situation gets sorted out.

Customers in these two categories will likely be first-time users of your service. They will be specifically looking for self storage, so if there ever was a time to fix up your Google ads campaigns and update the information of your website - it is now:

1. Double-check your keywords and make sure that they are reflected in the titles and descriptions of your ads

2. Check your biding strategy and targets (make sure you’re using the right keywords match types)

3. Consider increasing the budget for the high season to capture more audiences

4. Make sure you are targeting the right audiences

Facebook Checkup

Facebook is a must-use platform here. It enables you to target users based on their demographics (eg. students or recently moved people). To sum it up:

1. Add the Facebook pixel on your website

2. Set the campaign goal to be a conversion and define the conversion event as “purchase” or “submit application”

3. Make multiple ad groups with each one targeting a different but relevant audience

4. Make (and A/B test) more different ad variants

5. Personalise ad text and have it reflect on the buyers pain point (solving a storage problem). Keep it short and snappy.

If you want to learn more about this, you should definitely check out our post on Facebook advertising for self storage business.

A third contributing category is what we call “migrating birds.” Typically retired couples move south for the winter months and back to their northern domiciles in the warmer season. Not all of them maintain two fully furnished homes and therefore use self storage as a solution. They will most likely be existing customers, so you have other types of marketing strategies to reach out to them. Since you have their contact information, you can directly send a promotional offer for a lease. You can also set up re-targeting ad campaigns to reignite their past interest in your business.

Improving Customer Experience and CSR for Existing Customers

Self storage will also experience a lot of foot traffic from existing customers: Moving seasonal items in and out and tackling the spring cleaning. Decluttering the storage and getting rid of unwanted items is an annual rite of passage, so why not use it? Consider partnering up with a local charity or non-profit and setting up a dedicated donation space at your facility where renters can drop off their unwanted items. You will have to prepare a detailed list of acceptable items, taking some coordination effort. However, you will strike two birds with one stone: Improve your customer experience by reducing the effort and hassle in decluttering and doing something good for the local community. Corporate Social Responsibility is an essential factor in customer loyalty. It will also generate free publicity since local news usually picks up such donation projects.

If you offer containers or shelving for rent or sale, plan for a surge in demand for those as well. Again you have the opportunity to do a joint promotion with a local shop. If your customers buy a new shelf or a bunch of containers, they get a 10% discount. This offer can be a sign of appreciation to existing customers and the cherry-on-top for new customers. Traditional “offline marketing” for self storage business can go a long way.

Unit Management With Storeganise

The last weeks of winter are when you should look over your strategy and fine-tune it. What worked well last year, what did not? This also includes a review of occupancy goals. Of course, it’s everyone’s dream to have 100% occupancy, but our experience at Storeganise shows that striving for an occupancy rate of around 80% works better for most businesses. Having too little inventory leaves your business financially hungry, but you limit your ability to manoeuvre and adapt by having too much inventory. It also indicates that your prices are below average, and you could be extracting more value from your property by revisiting your pricing strategy. Storeganise comes with several dashboards and statistics to review your occupancy rates by facility and unit type. We recommend a detailed review of this analysis once a year or bi-annually. You don’t have a self-storage management solution yet? Book a demo now and see how it can transform your business.

Related Article: Tracking your self storage marketing campaigns