Tracking Your Self Storage Marketing Campaigns

You’ve no doubt heard endless tips on how to market your self storage business successfully, or how to implement digital marketing techniques to boost rentals. While these tips are extremely valuable, they won’t be of any benefit if you aren’t also continuously tracking key indicators in your marketing. While this might sound like an arduous and meaningless task, learning from successful businesses will show you that investing time and money into effectively tracking your marketing goals will pay off in the long run. With that in mind, here are the whys, whats, and hows of tracking the marketing efforts of your business.

Why Should You Be Tracking Your Marketing Campaigns

Marketing is a massive part of any business’s success. Sounds intuitive enough, but before closing the sale, customers need to hear about your service or at least be aware your business exists. Since it’s an integral part of a business, it’s wise to invest time and effort into how you market your self storage company. To get the best results for your money or the best return on investment (ROI). The best way to make sure you’re doing it right is to track what’s working and what’s not.

Running your marketing campaigns (or business in general) without analytics is like driving a car without a dashboard. The chances of arriving where you’re supposed to be without knowing how fast you’re going or how much fuel you have left are slim. Hook up analytics and get a realistic view of what works and what doesn’t.

Without tracking, you won’t know whether you’re reaching the right audiences or are you using the right messaging, channels, visuals, etc. Knowing all that is key to optimising your customer conversion. What website design choices are the most successful in having customers land on your webpage? Is the copy on your website optimised for better search engine rankings? Where are your customers finding your website? Again, all of this vital data can and should be tracked.

What Should Exactly Track?

When it comes to what specific metrics you should be tracking, it should all be focused around a particular goal, and won’t be universal across all businesses. This could be increasing rentals, increasing online reservations, walk-ins, or even specific things like increasing the sales of one particular offer. Whatever the goal is, keep it in mind when deciding what to track, and choose metrics that will be illuminating towards that goal. That said, you should still have a list of metrics and indicators to track, here are some common ones:

• Number of reservations that led to rentals

• Number of website visitors that led to reservations/rentals

• Number of website visitors

• Number of phone calls

• Number of phone calls that led to reservations/rentals

• Number of website visitors that originated from a social media ad

• Average length of a tenant stay

• Common purchasing bundles

• Cost of each marketing campaign

How To Track Your Marketing Goals?

The simple answer is that in all digital marketing suites, there will be tracking features already present. Google and Facebook are the best examples of this.

Not surprisingly, Google Analytics is the best way you can assess how people access your website. Use Google Search Console to track how your website shows up in search engine rankings. Create specific goals you want to track and define what you determine to be a successful customer conversion. Is it a website visit from an ad? Or is it a completed reservation form or a phone call? Whatever it is - track it. This is the only way of getting data-backed insight on which marketing tactics are successfully converting prospects to customers. Conversion pixels on Google Analytics or Facebook’s marketing suite let you effectively track what your customers are doing on your site. This means you’ll get a clear view on what parts to keep and which ones to drop, lowering your expenses on marketing and maximizing your profits.

A/B testing is also an incredibly useful tool. It’s present in both Facebook and Google ads. Basically,  you can run two separate ads for the same service, on two randomised groups. Then you track which advert was more successful, again also with the ability to define what a successful conversion is. This will inform you of what design choices, calls to action, targeting, or any other choices you can make to optimise ads you should run. In terms of tracking online marketing, the aforementioned methods are still only the tip of the iceberg, online marketing suites will have a wealth of other features which will let you more successfully analyse and leverage data.

On top of tracking online marketing, you should also track your offline marketing efforts. The easiest way is just to pose the question ‘where did you hear about us?’ to customers over the phone or in person. Another simple way to track is to funnel the customers from offline marketing to a single telephone extension or specific landing page. From there it’s just a matter of checking the numbers to see if your ads on radio stations, flyers, and billboards are working.

Managing Your Self Storage With Storeganise

Track your marketing efforts by integrating Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel with your marketing website. Our self storage software is able to integrate with both, as well as with other business operations and customer service tools. Learn more about our integrations or book a personalized demo.

Related Article: Branding your self storage business