If you don’t already have a website, you need to have one built. Expect to pay anywhere from $500 – $10,000 for the initial design and setup, depending on the quality and functionality. A simple template site from a web hosting company like GoDaddy.com will be the least expensive and a fully custom designed and feature rich site developed by an individual or a web development consultancy will be the most expensive. Most storage operators should be somewhere in the middle.
When deciding on where you should be in the spectrum, consider which features you need to achieve your goals. For example, if getting your tenants to submit online payments is one of your goals, then your site must be integrated with the payment portal of your management software. Most management software providers like Centershift, SiteLink and QuikStor offer a template payment portal that you can link to from your site.
There are a few ways to capture potential new customers from your website. Perhaps the newest and most exciting is via real-time online reservations where customers book storage units just like hotel rooms. Most management software providers offer a template solution for this as well. However, since a reservation is an action you are trying to get a visitor on your website to complete, sending them to your management software’s unfamiliar website with no cohesion to the look and feel of your own website will dramatically reduce the number of people who actually complete the reservation process.
In my opinion, it’s only worth offering online reservations if you invest the additional cash upfront to fully integrate your real time inventory and reservation process with your own website. Hiring a web developer to do this custom work will bring you toward the upper limit of the price range, but the reservation volume from your site should pay for itself in a relatively short period of time. Real time reservations can also help set you apart from the competition as technologically superior.
To be as economical as possible, you can direct your customers to a lead form, rather than offering online reservations. Instead of selecting a specific unit and pulling it out of your inventory, the customer simply submits their name and contact information. The downside to this approach is that leads require work – your managers may need to call and email potential customers 3 or 4 times. On top of that, leads convert to move-ins at a much lower rate than reservations.
There are a few bells and whistles you can add to your site as well. Videos and live chat are two examples of powerful but free features. To display a video tour of your property, simply upload the video file to YouTube and then embed the video from YouTube on the appropriate page of your website. To the right of all YouTube videos, you will notice text that reads “Embed”. The code that follows the word “Embed” can be copied and pasted onto your website allowing potential customers to watch your video without leaving your site.
You can also offer a live chat feature allowing users to engage in chat sessions with your staff. There are various free solutions, such as Volusion or LivePerson. This is a great tool for customers to get instant gratification for any questions without picking up the phone. The downside is you will need someone to monitor the site in case a customer initiates a chat session (at least during business hours).
Finally, if you are building your website from scratch it is easier to optimize it for search engines during the development period than to come back and make changes later. It is critical that you invest in someone who has a deep understanding of search engines. This type of person is called an SEO (search engine optimization) expert. If your web developer is really high caliber, he/she might have sufficient SEO knowledge to optimize your website properly. However, those are a rare breed so you will probably need to hire an SEO consultant to work with your web developer. Together, they can build your website from the ground up with search engines in mind. If you decided to keep it simple and use a template website, it is still smart to hire an SEO consultant to make sure everything is set up correctly. Search engines will deliver the highest volume of potential customers to your website—and as such your site must be search engine friendly.
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In Australia, many storage businesses still do not have websites but benefit from self storage directories and other business directories offering listings either free or for very small amounts.
Serious bigger sized storage companies, however, all have websites and are beginning to learn about SEO, Google Adwords and other online marketing measures.
I wonder what is the proportion of self storage businesses in the US that do not have websites? Love to know, please advise!