Leads are essential for a successful self-storage company. Even when you are nearing capacity, you should never turn off the lead generation engine. Customers come and go, and what you thought was going to be a long lease could soon turn into a short stay.
If you stop your lead generation when you’re fully booked, you’ll struggle to get things started again when you need to increase capacity.
Lead generation is not something that should come from one channel. In fact, building your business on leads from just one channel could be a very risky move.
While Facebook used to be a great source of business leads, a few tweaks to the algorithm made it nearly impossible for business pages to connect with their fans.
If you had built your entire business on Facebook leads, this would have dried up overnight. This is why you should never build your business on a platform you don’t control.
In this article, we will look at some of the most popular methods for lead generation and how to put them to use in your business.
SEO: Think About Intent
According to the SSA UK Industry Report, self storage leads come from the following sources:
68% – Website
13% – Signage
9% – Referral
4% – Directories
5% – Unknown
Your website is clearly of huge importance. And SEO is one of the most popular methods to drive potential new customers to your website. To be able to ace SEO, you need to understand and act on the intent of search terms.
When you understand why users are landing on your website, you can shape the user experience to help drive more conversions. A business user looking for storage will have different priorities and motivations to a student looking for summer storage.
PPC: Initiate Contact
PPC can get expensive, so you want to make sure you get the most possible value from each and every click. In our research, we’ve found that conversions increase when you give users the opportunity to request a callback.
By offering an immediate or scheduled callback button on your website, you can remove a step to conversion. Securing storage isn’t always a welcome task and many people will be glad to get it sorted as quickly as possible.
Head to our article on PPC for self storage companies for more information.
Social Media: Automate
As we’ve seen above, social media isn’t a huge source of leads, but this doesn’t mean you can neglect your social media platforms. Automating the messaging on your social media accounts can help you to pick up any leads that might be missed.
Social media chat bots are commonly used on Facebook to respond to queries and questions without the need for any input from your team. This means any leads that come through your platform can be pointed in the right direction.
At the very least, you can use a chatbot to respond to messages straight away and let visitors know how to reach you. If you want to create something more advanced, your chatbot could ask questions and gather information before sending it to your sales team.
Content Marketing: Video
Not all industries are well suited to content marketing, but self-storage happens to be one of the exceptions. Hitting ‘publish’ on a blog or video might not lead to an immediate spike in leads, but it can be a valuable long-term lead generation activity.
Digital marketing for storage and the surrounding industries is all about crafting non-technical content that makes self storage more accessible and approachable. It’s easy to forget that not everyone knows how self storage works.
Video content can help to break down some of the barriers to self storage that might not be so obvious to an insider. For example, not everyone knows how to open a shipping container, so this would be a great instructional video for a self storage unit company.
Your blog might not be a leading source of leads, but it can help with brand recognition and increasing website traffic.
If you’re interested in generating more leads for your business, get in touch with Auburn to find out how we can transform your digital marketing.