I’m happy to announce today our groundbreaking new deal with SelfStorage.com. We are officially taking over the storage rentals operation of the site with the goal of dramatically increasing the number of new tenants sourced for our clients.  We’re also excited to provide the thousands of consumers visiting SelfStorage.com each month with the best possible storage shopping experience.  SelfStorage.com is the #1 domain name in the industry and we’re excited to grow the property to its full potential.

Our press release went live this morning and provides more detail about the deal, but essentially SelfStorage.com is now powered by SpareFoot’s self-storage booking engine and technology.  We’ve replaced SelfStorage.com’s outdated subscription plan with our highly efficient pay for performance model.  Now storage operators don’t need to spend a dime unless we actually generate business for their properties.

Stop by and see the new SelfStorage.com in action and book your self storage unit, or, if you’re a facility owner/operator, sign up for the combined services of SpareFoot.com and SelfStorage.com.

Online marketing and marketing in general is slightly different for Boat/RV storage and mobile storage operators than it is for traditional storage facilities.  Your customers are looking for very different things in most cases.  For instance, Boat/RV owners know exactly how big their prized possession is and therefore know exactly how much storage they need.  In the case of mobile storage, many of your customers are moving and have different needs than run-of-the-mill self storage customers.  These are just a few examples of why you should think about marketing your RV/Boat storage facility or mobile storage operation differently than traditional storage.  In this article, I will walk through some tips and tricks to help you get more out of your marketing dollars and generate more tenants.

Most people who own a boat or RV spent a large sum of money on the item and really care about it.  These owners  are very attached to their toys and because of this, you need to make them feel like it will be safe with you.  On the Internet, this translates to investing in a quality website.  The look, feel and design of your online store front has a higher likelihood of influencing the buying decision for RV/Boat owners than the average storage customer due to the nature of the items being stored.  If someone spent 20k, 50k or even 100k on their boat, do you think they want to store it at a facility that can’t be bothered to build a nice website?  Unlikely.  People will correlate the quality of your website with they quality of your operation.  It is worth investing at least 5k on your website.

The decision making process is not the same for mobile storage customers.  These folks are looking for convenience.  You should still build a quality website, but the emphasis should definitely be on why your solution is the simplest and most convenient option for their move or on-site/warehoused storage needs.

Once you have a high quality website, the next step is to bring people to it.  Unfortunately, the Internet is not like real estate…when you build it, they will not come.  The easiest way to get started is to buy pay per click ads from Google and Bing.  You pay only when someone actually visits your website.  However, this can be expensive and hard to manage.  Another way is by working to get your website ranked in the natural (free) listings of search engines.  The first step is to setup your Google Local listing (also free), and then work to optimize your website.  This becomes complicated quickly, so you might consider hiring a third party marketing agency specializing in the storage industry to help drive traffic to your site.  Storage Marketing Solutions (www.storagemarketingsolutions.com) is one of the best in the business, I highly recommend talking to them.

Another way to drive people to your website is to work with local boat and RV dealers.  Many of their customers will need storage as soon as the purchase is made and you want to be in front of the customer at that very moment.  You can partner with the dealers to link to your website from theirs and even run a promotion where you give away a few months of storage to anyone who purchases from that dealer.  You will also want to incentivize the dealers to promote you, so offer to pay them for referrals.  Even better, some might be willing to give you a link if you simply give them a link…this is definitely worth doing.  Mobile storage operators can do the exact same thing with local moving companies.

The last major channel for acquiring new customers online is through aggregator websites like SpareFoot.com. We’ve built a comparison shopping site for consumers who prefer to look at all their options in one place.  We spend a significant amount of money driving traffic to our website and refer tenants to you on a strictly pay-for-performance model.  This means you don’t pay a dime unless a tenant actually moves in.  Aggregator sites are a great way to complement your other marketing initiatives with little or no risk.

Every RV/Boat storage facility and mobile storage operator can market online relatively easily by investing some time and money.  There are millions of prospective tenants online looking for storage every month and it is in your best interest to be found.

The legal seminar will help those in the self-storage industry learn how changes made in the recent legislative session affects their business. It is also a prime opportunity become more familiar with the procedures and forms pertinent to the industry. Those encouraged to attend this seminar include self-storage owners, managers, and developers.

More specifically, according to a press release, “This is an opportunity for self-storage professionals in Texas to acquaint themselves with the critical changes made to vehicle and boat lien sale procedures.” The TSSA’s executive director, Ginny Sutton, says that the association has seen a recent increase in calls from members about lien sales procedures. They hope this seminar will answer lingering questions about these important changes. Other topics covered will include collections, sales taxes, towing laws, court orders, meth labs, bankrupt tenants, and more.

In the last half hour of the seminar, there will be 30 minutes of an open Q&A with TSSA Legal Counsel Connie Heyer, so come equipped with your questions.

Registration is still open for the legal seminar. To sign up, call 888-259-4902 or register online. Those who attend will receive a free copy of an auction handbook that explains how to handle self-storage foreclosures step-by-step.

This post is intended for individual self storage owner/operators who are just starting their online marketing initiatives.

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.

The Self Storage Confidence Index (SSCI) reveals a drop in rental income expectations for Q4 as the self-storage industry realizes they may not escape the recession unscathed after all.

“As awareness that recession recovery will be slow and modest sinks in, consumer confidence continues to be depressed and prospective new renters are likely to shy away from added household expenditures. We have reached the point where survey respondents are no longer predicting slowed growth in rental rates; they are predicting rental rate contraction.” – SSCI Q4 2009

Although this may be discouraging, there are a number of ways self-storage operators can make the best of the economic climate and improve their business.

Managing director of Valuation Services for Cushman & Wakefield’s Self Storage Industry Group, Chris Sonne, said in the SSCI Q4, “Most operators are focusing on management and marketing. Cash flow is king and close attention to operations is the key to success.”

Cash Flow and Marketing

As storage operators see their occupancy rates drop, they are looking for new ways to bring in customers. But, blindly increasing the marketing budget without thinking about cash flow is not the answer.

When thinking about cash flow, it is important to calculate customer acquisition cost. Simply put, customer acquisition cost is the cost associated with acquiring a new customer.

If the average value of a storage customer is $1,300, then the cost associated with acquiring this customer is hopefully a far smaller number. Although the lifetime value of a storage customer gives storage operators a lot of marketing leeway, all things being equal, reducing acquisition cost means increasing cash flow.

It’s easy to think that it only cost you a $10 referral fee to get a customer who is worth $1,300 to you. But, in reality, you are probably spending a lot more than that to acquire a customer.

Your customer acquisition cost:

To calculate your customer acquisition cost, add up your total marketing costs for a given period of time, which includes all advertising costs – Yellow page listings, magazine ads, Google AdWords, quote leads etc… Then, divide that number by the number of new customers you acquired during that given period of time, and the result is a rough estimate of your customer acquisition cost.

Total marketing dollars spent / Number of new customers  =  Customer Acquisition Cost

I call it, rough, because not everyone agrees on what is and what is not considered an acquisition cost. For example, some people consider promotions, such as offering the first month free, a customer acquisition cost, while other people don’t factor this in as a cost because it is not actually money leaving the bank.

Nonetheless, facilities are increasingly turning to these types of promotions, according to the SSCI.

“In 2008, the percentage of respondents offering discounts of some kind ranged from 53 to 62 percent. It went up to 72 percent in the first quarter of 2009, dipped in the second quarter to 66 percent, and shot up to a new high of 75 percent in the third quarter. One dollar move-ins and discounts of 20 percent or more remained the most frequently offered incentives.” – SSCI Q4 2009

Whether or not you consider this a cost associated with acquiring a customer, there is something great about “spending” this kind of money to acquire a customer. That is, you are guaranteed a customer.

Ads and monthly listing fees for the Yellow Pages and other directories might not be paying off. If possible, start tracking these campaigns and find out what your customer acquisition cost is for these individual mediums to evaluate what’s worth it and what’s not.

In addition to promotions, there are other smart ways to spend money with a guaranteed return. Whereas paying for a lead is not always going to translate into a paying customer, paying for a reservation is guaranteed rental income for you.

Take advantage of risk free services that charge only for a reservation, allowing you to trim your marketing budget, while increasing your occupancy rates.

Think about it on the bright side, this recession can force your business to make better operations and marketing decisions.

For a more detailed look at survey Results: http://www.selfstorageconfidenceindex.com/US_4Q-09.html

That’s “AAA Self Storage Names,” now put me in the Yellow Pages.

Once upon a time there was good reason to name your company something like, “1 AAAA Storage.”

This dawned on me when I was flipping though the Yellow Pages and saw names like, “A-1 Self Storage,” “A A Olympic Centinela Storage,” “A AA Dootson Mini Storage,” “A AAA Mini Storage,” “A All Storage,” “A Mobile Mini,” “AA Discount Storage,” “AAA Personal Storage Garages,” and “A-American Self Storage.”

Beating your competition used to be as easy as outdoing them with A’s, but that time, the age of the Yellow Pages, is coming to an end. Google, unlike the your old friend, isn’t going to put you at the top of their list just because your name is at the top of the alphabet.

But, to be at the top of Google, you don’t have to spend a fortune on marketing, advertising and branding to compete with the big guys. Let’s face it, with 2,200 facilities, Public Storage definitely has a leg up on that one. How many of their facilities have you driven by in your lifetime? Well, enough to create a pretty clear imprint on the average person.

So, why not adapt the strategic naming process to the times. What about calling your company “Cheapest Self Storage in [fill in city],” a popular Google search for storage. With a domain name like that, you have some real SEO value.

There are already a few companies who appear to have taken into account the “new” Internet savvy generation when naming their companies, such as, “Affordable Storage.” They have an A and, if they do things right, they are bound to rank high for “affordable storage” searches, a pretty relevant keyword to monopolize in the storage world.

“A Low Cost Self Storage” is on the right track as well. Although from an SEO standpoint they might have been better served by a name like, “Cheap Self Storage,” “cheap” doesn’t really send a message of quality and security. Especially given the number of self-storage robberies getting media attention, it could be a risky move.

Then there is, “A Safe Place.” They are definitely sending the right message in terms of a very safe storage facility, but on the other hand, when people search for self storage, they usually aren’t searching for “a safe place.” So, weigh the pros and cons.

Now that I have had fun with everyone else’s name, I’ll admit that SpareFoot.com wasn’t really thinking about SEO when we picked our name. However, another thing to consider when picking a name is the value of memorability. SpareFoot, a play on square foot, may have that going for them over a generic non-descript name like, “The Place for Self Storage.”

But, even more important, if I can leave you with one take-away point: Don’t make the same mistake these companies made because this is probably not a “Top 10 list” on which you want to find yourself.

Thoughts?

-Anna@SpareFoot.com

A few weeks ago, Matt Sobel left his life of movie-making in Los Angeles to spend a nice couple of weeks hanging out with his friends in Austin. Or, so he thought.

His storage-loving friends were excited to show him a good time in their new home, but little did Matt know, their idea of a good time was to bring him into the SpareFoot office everyday and drown him in all things self storage.

It wasn’t long before Matt was gasping for air, having had his fill of self storage for possibly life. So, we put him back to movie-making. He didn’t escape self storage altogether, but Matt and I had a good time filming this short video we played at the Inside Self Storage Expo earlier this month.

Thank you, Matt!

The Inside Self-Storage World Expo was an absolute blast! The SpareFoot team had great time in nation’s capital reacquainting with old friends and meeting new people in the storage industry.

Chuck, Claire, and Mario in front of the SpareFoot booth

I had the pleasure of attending many of the educational seminars that focused on the internet and marketing. It was helpful hearing about the many tools storage companies are using to increase their online presence. There are many options out there, so focus is key. Storage companies can greatly increase revenue by using the internet properly. However, with so many different tools, marketing managers need to figure out what resources deserve time.

I met with many owners who were concerned that they weren’t doing enough and wanted my opinion. Here’s the easy answer: You will never be doing enough. I have not met a single person who claims they have it figure all out. In fact, I caution any storage owner/manager who meets a firm who claims they are the ONLY solution.

If you just built a website for your facility, there are many quick and free resources that can increase your online visibility. Add each facility to the local business sections in google, yahoo, and other search engines. This will quickly help anyone searching for storage online find your facilities information (triple check the phone number!). You can also do the same thing in online business directories. Free online classified ads are also a fantastic tool you can leverage. Many classifieds have a storage section that allow you to easily post an ad about your facility. Be careful not to post your ad too many times or people may not see you as legitimate.

These are just the basics and there are many more advanced strategies out there. If you want me to post on a certain topic, let me know!

Image Credit: Ytrepreneur

This past Wednesday we participated in  Capital Factory’s Demo Day.  Capital Factory is the business incubator program we participated in this summer and Demo Day was the culminating event where the five participating companies (including us) presented to a group of 250 investors, entrepreneurs and press.

The event was fantastic and we met tons of great people who are really excited about what we are doing at SpareFoot.  I gave a presentation about the company and ended up winning the audience choice award.  Thanks to all attendees who voted for SpareFoot!

Our summer in Austin has been truly great and we are thrilled to be staying in town to grow SpareFoot.

PS – We used to be called Homstie – we still have to update this on the video.