Raise your hand if you know someone who moved in the last year. 15.9 million people moved between February and July 2020. Some of these moves were “temporary” or maybe were considered temporary in March, but now they are unintentionally permanent-ish. Of course you can always move, but we know people moved for many reasons: more flexibility to work remotely, job loss, taking a new job, housing consolidation as people moved in with friends rather than live in studios alone, college students moving back with their families…and the list goes on. What does this mean for self storage? Two words: more renters. 

To answer that question further, we investigated data from G5 and our Premier Google Partnership to understand what happened in self storage marketing in 2020, and how it might change your digital advertising plans. 

A Day in the Life of G5 Data

You might be wondering, what kind of data does G5 have at our fingertips? Glad you asked. The G5 Customer Data Platform (CDP) is built on first-party data from all customer business locations to create a comprehensive reference of all prospects’ touchpoints and actions over time to form buyers’ journeys. 

G5 uses this anonymized data to make our clients’ advertising campaigns more effective. Check out these stats, and remember, this happens 365 days a year.  

A-Team = Automation + Action

Here’s the deal, in order to take action on this information, it’s got to be automated. No team member, no matter how talented, can crunch spreadsheets fast enough to update your property’s digital advertising spend to the highest performing campaigns. Every. Single. Day. But, with G5 on your MarTech team, you can. 

Narrowing your focus to understand which prospective renters have high intent is impactful. This is why we use intent-based data, paired with automation, to do the heavy lifting. This powerful pair helps us identify demand trends, and shift your property’s marketing spend to be as effective as possible. It’s this knowledge bank of data that we looked into to guide our understanding. 

Digital Advertising + Self Storage

You might be thinking…if so many people are moving that self storage already has a steady stream of renters, then why would they worry about digital advertising? Since they were comfortable, many self storage marketers started to cut their advertising budget a little here, and a little there. 

Data from our Premier Google Partnership shows year-over-year self storage search growth in Q1 2021, was up 22%.

Even more impressively, we found a threshold for self storage digital advertising. Property locations with a monthly budget ABOVE that threshold had notably higher qualified call ratios, aka move-in ready renters, than properties who spent below that threshold. This is significant because it shows there is room in the market and if you increase your property’s digital advertising budget, you can capitalize on it. 

Read our recent white paper to discover the self storage digital advertising sweet spot, plus how G5 Intent Trends technology empowers your marketing goals.