By Christine Munther
In self-storage marketing, the goal is to position your business to be where the audience is when people are making a purchasing decision. Promotional materials—such as brochures, print ads and calendars—help drive brand awareness and recognition. These elements add a tactile feel in an age of digital takeover, giving those you’re trying to reach a more well-rounded understanding of your brand while providing trust and authority.
When creating promotional materials as part of your marketing strategy, it’s important to consider your style, how tangible materials unite with digital, and how to track your efforts. Here’s more information about each.
Your Style Guide
Developing a well-planned brand style helps provide consistency and value to your business marketing. A style guide will standardize the creative approach that supports the brand identity, maintains control over your brand and voice, and ensures a cohesive approach across all materials—from collateral to signage.
A style guide can range in density. Some operators will use the bare minimum while others will build it out, providing example uses and how to execute them. Any style guide should include these key components:
- Logo with size and placement rules
- Color palette
- Fonts and how they’re used in different circumstances
- Image style with photography examples
- Voice and tone with specific words and phrases
Uniting Tangible With Digital
As the digital space evolves, consumers will continue to maneuver through the myriad brands and their offerings. Having both online and offline promotional materials adds value to your business by providing more instances in which your brand is visible. The more your audience sees your brand, the more likely they are to engage with it, whether on social media or an interactive piece of collateral they came across.
Fifteen years ago, marketing plans were centered on offline strategies and tactics, while online extensions were a secondary focus. Now, it’s the opposite. Your digital experiences should be supported by touchable brand elements that teach your audience something about your business offerings. To unite your online and offline efforts, map the customer journey and find where those key touchpoints are. You’ll then be more informed to make decisions on when to blast an e-mail and when to make a poster.
Tracking Your Efforts
By making your online and offline materials work together, you can start to get an idea of what’s resonating with your audience and what isn’t. For instance, if you hand out a brochure or flier that includes a trackable phone number or the URL for a promotional landing page, you can determine which materials spurred your audience to action. If your promotional piece drove them to your website, you can continue to track their journey and gain insight through Google Analytics or other tools to evaluate what they find valuable and what they bypass.
Mapping your customers’ journey will provide you with insight to where they’re going for information, how they’re researching, and how you can jump in and provide solutions right at the moment they’re asking questions. Once you’ve developed these personas, you can find out when decisions are being made and position promotional materials to support that decision-making process.
Christine Munther is director of client success at G5, a digital-marketing provider in the real estate sector and a premier Google partner. She has four years of digital-marketing experience in the self-storage industry. For more information, call 800.554.1965; visit www.getg5.com.
