Marketing to the abyss of potential renters is daunting, so it’s important to get a better understanding of who you are trying to reach and how before you spend another dime on ads. A few years ago Google introduced marketers to micro-moments, which are “critical touch points within today’s consumer journey, and when added together, they ultimately determine how that journey ends.” For the self storage renter, the journey tends to be shorter than that of other real estate industries, but you still need to ensure that you are in their journey.

Self Storage Journey

The average self storage renter is going through a life change. Moving a long distance, downsizing, renovations, life is in flux. Due to this flux, they don’t always do extensive research before choosing where to store their belongings. But the research they do conduct tends to start in two ways: 1. They drove by your location; or 2. They visit a search engine like Google or Bing. Where their research starts isn’t a groundbreaking statement to make, but did you know that 51% of those self storage specific searches happen on a mobile device? That is a growth of 10% in just a year.

The journey of the renter relies on the digital presence of self storage companies, so are you doing everything you can to make sure you are the one they find?

Top of Mind of Your Ideal Customer

The most important step you can take for your digital presence is to build an optimized website. What does optimized mean? Your website is designed with SEO in mind, it’s user friendly, built for the mobile experience, and makes it easy to rent a unit. After that, you should be developing and implementing a digital advertising strategy.

Digital advertising accounts for paid search and display ads, remarketing, and social ads. But when you strengthen digital advertising with SEO, your leads to leases occur more frequently. Digital advertising gives you the ability to stay top of mind when your potential renter is on-the-go. Perhaps a young couple that just moved into town is looking for a place to store a majority of their belongings while they hunt for a home. They drive by your property and open their Google Maps application and enter your business. What are they going to find? What they should find is a well constructed Google My Business (GMB) listing with a link to your optimized website. In that short GMB listing they should be able to tell that you offer online leasing and payments.

If you’ve built your digital presence properly, they’ve either already moved to your site and leased a unit in 3 easy steps or, when they get home and start browsing the internet, you stay top of mind because you’re utilizing remarketing campaigns. It’s easy to fit into the life of the on-the-go renter when you have the right strategy and tactics.

Learn more about digital advertising and SEO by downloading the infographic.