How Storage Asset Management succeeds by marketing its third-party storage owners

Pennsylvania-based Storage Asset Management, often called SAM, has an efficient marketing technique. Unusually, nonetheless, the corporate isn’t actually striving to market itself.

“We are literally responsible of not doing an incredible job of marketing ourselves. All of our development has been from word-of-mouth and referrals. We don’t actively market ourselves as finest we might.” That’s what Melissa Stiles, VP of marketing and gross sales at SAM, instructed us. But that development has been fairly tangible, from launching with 22 administration contracts in 2010, to working nearly 350 contracts right this moment.

Managing and marketing for third-party owners

What SAM does is handle storage services for third-party owners (SAM owns none of them). “We do every part, from operations and marketing to accounting, for a facility proprietor,” stated Stiles. “Basically, every part however file their revenue taxes.”

The primary focus of SAM’s marketing, then — about 95%, stated Stiles — is marketing the third-party storage services they handle, they usually execute primarily by leveraging buyer opinions by on-line popularity administration platform Reputation.

“I feel we’ve been utilizing Reputation for about 5 years,” stated Stiles. “We’ve at all times been early adopters within the marketing realm, like search, and so on. We had been one of many first firms to have the ability to lease a unit on-line, so we recognized rapidly that opinions had been going to turn out to be vital. We seemed for an organization which might assist us with a popularity administration program, and Reputation met that want for us.”

A concentrate on opinions and search engine marketing

Reviews assist with search engine marketing rating, after all, however that’s not the one cause they’re vital. “We know that about 50% of our prospects have by no means used storage earlier than,” stated Stiles, “so individuals wish to learn the opinions earlier than they select their unit.”

SAM makes use of Reputation to actively solicit opinions, and likewise to answer them “in a single place.” To perceive how vital that’s, take into account that SAM represents some 76 completely different manufacturers. That’s as a result of SAM presents owners a selection between being a part of their nationwide model — Storage Sense — or adopting their very own branding, typically naming services for the city they’re in.

“When I first acquired within the business, there was a ton of services named ‘AAA self-storage,’ as a result of that might put you first within the telephone e book; now it’s the city and self-storage, as a result of that helps you together with your search engine marketing on-line.”

SAM handles not solely popularity administration by Reputation, but in addition builds web sites, and helps with print marketing and signage. “We’ll construct a user-friendly web site that permits you to utterly do your rental on-line, we’ll do search engine marketing methods — on-page and off-page, quotation constructing, listings, and so on. — social media, undoubtedly Facebook, Instagram in some instances as nicely. AdWords and paid media if obligatory.”

Related: Read concerning the rising significance of user-generated content material.

The Reputation platform handles social media, with messages from all feeds arriving in a single in-box. “That’s been a life-saver for my social crew. They don’t must go throughout every Facebook web page.” Seventy-six manufacturers, keep in mind.

“Google [My Business] launched its messaging characteristic [for desktop] a number of months in the past,” stated Stiles, “and we’re amazed by the quantity of folks that use it, and Google’s app isn’t nice. When you’re managing this many pages, you see a notification after which have to determine which web page it got here into. Reputation’s device has been nice at pulling that each one collectively. We can see the metrics behind it too — how lengthy was our response time, are we getting extra customer support messages or gross sales, and so on.”

Stiles makes use of SpareFoot, a nationwide storage discovery website which she describes because the Expedia of storage, but in addition depends on native outreach by having representatives construct relationships with facilities of influences prone to be good sources of shoppers — condo complexes, for instance.”

To construct web sites, SAM companions with The Storage Group for its vertical experience, however every part else is completed internally by a marketing crew of eight.

And that’s how SAM has grown with out attempting too exhausting to market itself. “We’ve achieved a great job of specializing in our shops,” stated Stiles. “Driving success for our shops has inspired our owners to maintain on shopping for, or to advocate us to another person.”

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech Today. Born in London, however a New Yorker for over 20 years, Kim began masking enterprise software program ten years in the past. His expertise encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- advert data-driven city planning, and purposes of SaaS, digital expertise, and knowledge within the marketing area.

He first wrote about marketing expertise as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a devoted marketing tech web site, which subsequently grew to become a channel on the established direct marketing model DMN. Kim joined DMN correct in 2016, as a senior editor, changing into Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a place he held till January 2020.

Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local information website, The Local: East Village, and has beforehand labored as an editor of an educational publication, and as a music journalist. He has written lots of of New York restaurant opinions for a private weblog, and has been an occasional visitor contributor to Eater.

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