Creating a content marketing strategy for your self storage business

If you want to be successful in self storage or any other business, establishing thought leadership is key. Growth happens when you position your company as an industry expert and provide the relevant information that buyers need. As you strengthen your operations and expand your local presence, what you say along the way matters. With the right content, you can showcase your expertise, build credibility, attract the right kind of clients, and create a rent-generating machine.

Let’s explore why a content strategy is critical to self storage facility marketing. I’ll provide you with eight simple steps you can take to create and execute a plan that works. This will allow you to use your existing knowledge and skills to connect with your target audience, increase rentals and take your brand to the next level.

What is content strategy and why is it important?

In short, content marketing is the process of using various types of content to achieve business goals. The mix can include audio, visual and written elements such as videos, blog posts, articles, podcasts, images and more. The right articles will engage your target audience at every stage of the buyer’s journey. More content means a greater opportunity to engage and convert potential customers. An effective strategy should support all your marketing channels to help drive rents and rates.

Content marketing helps you reach new self-storage prospects and retain existing customers. It’s an inexpensive yet effective way to stand out in your market and get more eyeballs on your website, social media pages and other marketing materials. This type of visibility is an important part of establishing your brand presence, and especially integral to your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

Google rewards websites that consistently deliver solid and useful content to readers. If you can answer a question, give a good tip, or create a useful tool for your audience, you’re that much closer to attracting organic traffic and generating long-term leads. Once these core pieces of content are in place, your marketing team has more flexibility and freedom to experiment with other outreach tactics, such as social media, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and more.

While every self-storage company is unique, let’s take a look at the eight basic steps any facility operator can take to build a successful content marketing strategy.

Step 1: Set up Your goals and objectives

Before you do anything else, it’s important to set clear goals for your content marketing efforts. Why do you want to create content and what is your end game? Do you want to find new perspectives? Educate the community? Building relationships with existing customers? Drive traffic to your website? Generate interest in an event or charitable cause? There are many possibilities.

Once you know your goals, combine them into a comprehensive mission statement to guide your strategy moving forward. Check it often to keep things on track and make sure everyone on your personal storage team is rowing in the same direction.

Step 2: Create a tenant persona

Every good writer follows this important rule: Know your audience. This applies whether you’re a fiction writer, a true crime novelist, or a business content creator. The material you produce must appeal to people who are genuinely interested in self-storage solutions. While it may seem ideal to appeal to everyone, content that is universally appealing is often too generic to be actionable. You have to know the person you are selling to!

Think about your ideal self-storage tenant. What are their unique motivators and deterrents? Where do they live and what kinds of services do they need? How do they find and interact with your company? Answering these types of questions helps you create a “buyer persona” that you can target your content to. Just be aware that this person may change over time. With regular market research, you can ensure that you are always serving the right audience.

Step 3: Set team resources

Who is currently responsible for creating content in your personal storage organization? Based on your goals, is this person or team enough to take your marketing strategy to the next level, or will you need to expand in some way?

In addition to ensuring sufficient internal resources, consider hiring an outside consultancy to take over the reins of your content strategy. With outsourcing, you can free up your employees to focus on mission-critical work while highlighting your business in new ways. A specialist partner can help you create and leverage content that not only speaks for itself, but works integrally with other parts of your campaign, including SEO, PPC, paid social and more.

Step 4: Conduct a content audit

If you already have some kind of content marketing, you need to know what works and what doesn’t before you try something new. Start by mapping your content schedule to your customer buying cycle to more clearly understand its effectiveness. What types of material have worked well and what has missed the mark?

By understanding the tactics that attracted customers and turned prospects into buyers, you can build on those successes and expand them even further as you bring them into new campaigns. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll be able to see the areas that haven’t achieved the ROI you were hoping for, which will help you prioritize resource allocation going forward.

Step 5: Choose the right content

The content you create must be curated for the self storage industry. It must attract new tenants and foster existing client relationships. If you’ve created an accurate tenant persona, you should already know the high-level personality traits of your ideal customers. Use this knowledge to consider the type of content they would be most likely to engage with.

Whether you’re just starting out or have been in the industry for years, blog posts are a great way to get started. When optimized for SEO, they can be inexpensive but powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. Optimization means using keywords, links and images that are relevant to your online audience, including geographic locations.

In addition to blog posts, other types of content you can create include:

Electronic books
white books
reports
Email newsletters
Podcasts
Infographic
Videos

Step 6: Create an editorial calendar

Content marketing only works if you follow through. It’s not enough to just create an amazing blog post and call it a day. An editorial calendar is a simple tool that can help you stay on track and ensure consistency. That said, creating a calendar can be a complex and time-consuming task if you’re doing it all by yourself. Fortunately, a content management system (CMS) can take care of the job for you.

A powerful and easy-to-use CMS is the not-so-secret trick behind any good, high-converting website. It allows you to create, edit and produce every type of digital content imaginable and share it with your target audience exactly when and where you know they will hear it.

A CMS can automate most, if not all, of your calendar. Most of these platforms also allow you to create and schedule posts in advance.

This is another benefit of outsourcing content creation. If you work with a marketing consultant, you’ll never have to worry about hitting a deadline or getting a bad case of writer’s block. You can be sure that you will always have a constant flow of diverse and well-balanced content that turns prospects into tenants.

Step 7: Promote and share your content

What’s a great way to get as many eyeballs as possible on your self-storage content? Share it on multiple platforms! By now, you should have an established social media presence for your business. Every time you create a new piece of content, share the link between these platforms and encourage your followers to do the same. Your CMS should have features that allow you to sync your posts between social sites so you can reach your target audience in multiple ways.

The key is to reach as many people as possible at the most cost-effective price. A marketing consultant can help you understand the different routes available and guide you toward the ones that make the most sense for your company’s vision, capabilities, and budget.

Step 8: Analyze and evaluate

Once your content strategy has been implemented for a while, it’s time to check its progress. You can use website tools like Google Analytics to measure and study the source of your traffic, but don’t stop there. Define what types of content drive the most engagement and conversion based on your business goals. What topics and tactics have proven most popular with your self-storage audience?

Once you have these ideas, share them across your self-storage operation so everyone understands the critical role content plays in your larger marketing strategy. Then optimize your plans towards these high-performing content types to repeat the same success in the future.

You’ve heard that content is king. While that might be true, it’s only half the story. Effective self-storage content is strategic, well-planned, and intentional. It’s designed with your target audience in mind and adapts to their needs and interests at every turn.

Kimberly Robinson is the Creative Content Manager at OpenTech Alliance Inc., a Phoenix-based provider of technology products and services including kiosks, call center and access control solutions. Kimberly is responsible for the creation and dissemination of engaging content to create a superior brand experience. With over 12 years in marketing and communications and two in the self-storage industry, he offers experience in content design, writing and marketing. To reach her, call 602.749.9370.

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About the Author: Ted Simmons

I follow and report the current news trends on Google news.

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