Your Two Year Self Storage Social Media Marketing Advantage

Here’s the gist of the video:

Self Storage operators who are making a concerted effort to figure out Social Media Marketing today are getting a 2 year head start on most of their competition. Watch the video or read below for the details.

Three reasons most people are going to go slow.

1. History
2. Staff
3. Structure

Industry history slows down your competition

• The industry was remarkably slow at adopting the web in general. You would think people would learn their lesson, but I doubt it.
• Historically we have been advertisers. Social media is different. With advertising you would pay your money to place your ad and then sit back and watch the magic happen. For this reason we see a high adoption of pay per click advertising, but a low adoption of social media marketing.
• Self storage marketing with social media tools requires someone to pay attention. There has to be a real human being who cares behind the wheel. That’s different than advertising and that’s slowing people down.

The wrong kind of staff is slowing everyone down

• If you are an owner or executive you are probably looking at yourself and thinking “I’m not the person for this” and then you look at the rest of your home office staff and you might not see an obvious choice there either.
• We have begun to shift from an advertising only model to an “advertising + engagement” model of marketing and its going to take the industry a while to figure out that they might need to recruit people with a different skill set. These days you need to find someone comfortable with digital tools like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and video, and someone you are happy to have as a spokesperson for your business.
• Recruiting a different skill set is hard work.  When you pile that on top of the mental shift required to try something different, most of your peers are going to be slow to react.

Self storage industry structure is going to slow all who pay a management fee as a percentage of revenue

• I see structure messing up anyone that pays a management fee to themselves or to a management company to manage their properties. Why? Because a typical fee management relationship is for a percentage of revenue and doesn’t allow the management company the room to hire more marketing staff. Historically, advertising expense has been paid by the property entity.  Marketing staff at the home office gets lumped in with the management company’s overhead.  Most will resist as long as possible the idea of bringing on additional overhead.

You have the chance to get out ahead

One key to a competitive advantage is to make yourself differnet from your competition by creating value in areas your competition is neglecting.  The marketing shift that has brought social media mainstream means you have a great opportunity to get out ahead.

Figure out a way to get some people on your team who are comfortable with digital tools and empower them to engage with your customers and prospects online. If you can figure it out, I think you’ll have a two year head start over most of your competition.