The digital world has drastically changed how consumers interact with brands and how marketers need to respond. The role of the consumer is more powerful than ever, and companies from e-commerce to self-storage are shifting from being business-centric to a customer-centric approach. It’s no longer enough to incorporate customer experience methods as part of your marketing strategy. Customers are now in control, and they expect real-time personalization and interaction with a brand.
Shifting Priorities
This shift in control demonstrates how powerful a growth driver customer experience is and calls for marketing strategies that respond to the needs of a tech-savvy consumer base. According to a recent report by Salesforce.com, 68 percent of marketing leaders say their companies are increasingly competing on the basis of customer experience.
Today’s consumers are more loyal to the experience or result of a product or service, rather than a specific brand. This gives marketers an opportunity to earn customer loyalty by engaging them in authentic, efficient ways. Marketers are called to respond to this challenge by utilizing insights to identify their ideal customer profile and using this data to create hyper-personalized customer experiences. As a result, self-storage marketing initiatives must incorporate new marketing technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), to best respond to renters in the digital age.
AI for Marketers
The newest marketing technologies leverage AI to predict how a potential tenant will interact with your brand and deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences. According to Salesforce.com, 61 percent of marketers agree that AI helps them hyper-personalize their campaigns, and 59 percent believe AI increases their productivity.
To address the types of personalized interactions consumers have grown to expect, marketers need to utilize massive amounts of data from a variety of sources. With large quantities of data available but siloed in different channels, it’s challenging to process and interpret this information. Fortunately, marketing providers who understand the dynamics of self-storage have begun to launch AI-powered platforms capable of interpreting data to better understand customer behavior, deliver one-to-one personalization, and predict customer journeys.
Leveraging AI in Self-Storage
You may be thinking this AI stuff is way too high-tech or futuristic to apply to self-storage. Sure, it works for big brands like Nike, but why do I need it? It’s applicable because your customer base is being conditioned by the Nikes of the world to expect personalization and digital ease with every purchase they make.
Investing in AI tools will ultimately help you understand what you’re spending, what the return on investment is, and how to move around resources to get the most from your marketing budget. These insights will allow you eliminate wasted advertising dollars, while increasing leads and conversions because you’ll be targeting the right prospects who are ready to lease. AI gives you better control of your budget, higher quality leads and conversions, and a customer experience that earns loyalty. What do you have to lose?
Celena Canode is a marketing campaign manager at G5, a provider of Digital Experience Management (DXM) software and services to the self-storage industry. It is a predictive marketing software-as-a-service company that uses AI and other emerging technologies to help marketers amplify their impact. Its Intelligent Marketing Cloud offers predictive analytics, hyper-personalized customer experiences, and continuous spend optimization. For more information, call 800.656.8183; visit www.getg5.com.
