By Nick Bilava
Having a strong social media presence is important to any business, including self-storage companies. Even if your budget is small, paying to advertise on social media could be worth the cost. Here are three features of the equation you should understand to maximize paid advertising for your self-storage operation.
Geotags
It’s easy to assume the best way to conduct the social side of your business is to keep things general, operating on a national scale and generalizing why people might seek storage. But the quickest way to gain social support is to reach out on a local level—an effort made much easier and more efficient by the option to geotag on Facebook and Twitter.
People want storage units that are convenient to them. They generally won’t consider a facility that’s more than 10 miles from their home or office. By targeting your facility’s tweets to the ZIP code of your nearest college campus or boating destination, you can show students or boat owners that you have what they need just down the street.
The same is true of Facebook, where geotagged posts and company pages will show up in the appropriate consumer’s graph search. Offering boat storage to someone in Kansas with a non-tagged ad won’t get you much traffic, but that same ad targeted to the right ZIP code in Florida sure will.
Demographics
Platforms like Twitter and Facebook allow you to target your paid posts to the demographics that will find them most useful. If you know the majority of your units are rented by women, you can promote advertisements based on gender. If your numbers show a spike in inquiries from students ages 18 to 24, you can choose to market ads just for them, and so on.
The opportunity to earmark ads for certain groups of people can give your social posts a real boost as well. In getting the right eyes on your posts, you increase the likelihood of shares and clicks.
Reports
A big benefit to social media advertising is the opportunity to see how your posts are being received. The ability to know which ads are and aren’t performing well is incredibly valuable, allowing you to maximize your return on investment—in other words, to make sure you’re getting the right bang for your advertising buck.
Social media reports will show how many interactions an ad garners—from retweets to favorites to likes and shares—so you can improve upon successful posts and rework those that didn’t fare as well. This information can help you understand how to best use demographic and geotargeting for your ads, too, as it becomes clear which groups and locations are responding positively to your campaigns. These tools will help you save money by not paying to run an ad somewhere where it’s irrelevant, and make money by targeting ads to the users and locations that generate sales and leads at the same time.
Since self-storage is so rooted in geography, paying for advertisements that engage current and potential consumers in the right way is definitely worthwhile. Social media services are popular, and it seems like they’re here to stay. Taking advantage of the growth opportunities they present for your storage facility is just a matter of getting online and getting to work.
Nick Bilava is the director of sales and marketing for Storage.com. He’s been an active member of the storage community for more than seven years and can be found at various industry events. His goal at Storage.com is to help operators market their business more efficiently and effectively. For more information, visit www.storage.com.
