Simple RE

I Was Wrong About Blogging

In my last post I mentioned that self storage owners should blog to help with their search engine optimization and to get better results out of their web presence.

I was wrong.

The problem is that blogging well enough to attract any incoming links is probably too much work for most operators.  To write things about your self storage on a regular basis that a regular human would consider reading, let alone find interesting enough to link to, is a challenge. 

Because I'm not a defeatist, I still hold out hope that someone could make it work.  The successful storage blogger would have to take a unique spin on the topic. Maybe humor.  The Onion made storage and humor work.  Heaven knows I have seen some humorous things happen at the StorageKings properties.  

The upside is that if you are a gifted writer who also happens to own self storage properties, you will have very little competition.

Your Self Storage Site Needs a Blog ASAP

I'm not talking about setting up your self storage website with a spam blog that is stuffed with keywords, but makes you gag when you read it.  I mean a real blog that is useful or entertaining or informative.  Something a real human being would read. 

Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing, makes the case on his blog that Blogs are your best search marketing investment.

Using Google's keyword suggestion tool for building a pay per click campaign, you'll see that the search term "Self Storage Sacramento" is likely going to cost you $3.95 per click and there is "High Advertiser Competition" according to Google.

For as much effort as we put into SEO in the self storage industry, this should be a no-brainer. 

As Andy correctly points out "if it stops when you stop paying, it's advertising. If it keeps going, it's word of mouth marketing."

Sell More When Your Self Storage Managers Practice

The better you are at converting callers to customers the fewer leads you need to reach your occupancy goals, and the less you have to spend on marketing. 

About two years ago I was desparate for my self storage store managers to be more effective on the phone.  I knew they had no training and telling them to "sell" and "get persuasive" wasn't going to help. So I created a written document to help them understand the sales process and included very specific guidance on what to say to get prospective customers to the store to rent storage spaces. 

It didn't help.

Then I did some conference calls to review the wtitten guidance.  I thought this way I would know for sure that they were exposed to the material and the calls would give them a chance to hear some examples and ask questions. 

That was even worse! 

The conference calls took a lot of my time and it was hard to be engaging to a group of people that I couldn't see and who couldn't see me.  Plus, my students were being interrupted with customers and potential customers who all took precedence over our phone call.  

My latest iteration (innovation) was to create a series of 5-7 minute audio segments covering everything from how to answer the phone, to how to ask effective questions, to how to talk about features and benefits, and how set an appointment. 

This last effort has really paid off.  The audio can be listened to over and over again without my involvement.  Since each segment is a bite-sized chunk, my people actually listen to it.  New employees don't have to wait until I'm available, but can get going on training right away.  

The audio training has really laid the foundation.  However, the real secret is practice.  Check out these DJ's from Daly City, CA.  (Go ahead and click, it is a fun video, and you'll learn something even if you only watch for one or two minutes).  These guys are phenomenal.  Listen to the first minute or so and you'll see why practice is the reason they are featured in this video (and you'll be entertained).  

Wouldn't selling skills also benefit from practice?  Of course our business is competitive, so there is ample motivation. The question then becomes, how can we get the right kind of practice?  

I highly recommend these two books.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his bestseller Outliers, shows through a series of facinating stories how successful people like professional hockey and baseball players, and virtuoso musicians, and people like Bill Gates got to where they are largely because their circumstances allowed them the opportunity to practice. 

In Talent Is Overrated, Geoff Colvin cites reams of scholarly research that concludes the same thing. Practice it the key to skill building and successful execution.  He biggest contribution is in showing us what it means to practice effectively. 

Once my on-site managers understood what they were supposed to do (because they listened to the audio training) they then had to actually develop the skills to do it.  It's the difference between watching a football game and knowing what the players are supposed to do on a given play and actually being able to do the right things to execute the play. 

My challenge to you is to create processes that ensure your self storage managers are practicing effectively, and you will see fantastic results.  Since we have created processes that ensure that practice is happening, our conversion rates have gone through the roof and our sales of add-on products have more than doubled.

In a future post, I'll outline how to set up processes that will ensure practice is happening.  subscribe to my blog via email in the upper left hand corner if you don't want to miss it.

Screencast - Running a Sitelink Custom Query for Lifetime Value of a Customer

Here's the promised screencast that shows how to run a custom query in Sitelink. The custom query I posted yesterday works in Sitelink and allows you to find out the average lifetime value of a customer without any brain damage. If you need to download the script for the custom query you can scroll down to the previous post or click here.  

The screencast runs 3 minutes 59 seconds.  Please leave a comment and let me know if you find it useful.

Lifetime Value of a Customer - a Custom Query for Sitelink

The Custom Query

If you run Sitelink and are interested in knowing the lifetime Value of your customer here's a handy custom query that you can run to make analyzing your data a breeze. 

Download Lifetime Value Of a Customer  (right click and save target/link as)

I'll post a screencast tomorrow that will show you how to run it if you don't already know how to run custom reports in Sitelink.

Why calculate the lifetime value of your customers?

Knowing the lifetime value of your customers helps you decide whether your various marketing approaches are profitable.  For example, if a direct mail program attracts new customers, but at a cost that is higher than the likely lifetime value of your customers, then you should stop the marketing program because, on average, you are losing money.

If you don't run Sitelink

Here's a quick and dirty way to calculate the lifetime value of your customers.  For the overall average, calculate the average length of stay for your customers then multiply the average length of stay by your average rent per occupied unit.  This will give you a number a little on the low side because it won't take into account any late fees or merchandise sales of moving truck revenue, etc. You can repeat the calculation for each unit size to find out the average lifetime value for customers renting 5x5's or 10x10's or 10x20's etc.

If you're a bit geeky, keep reading for the technical details.

The script I posted above for the custom query breaks down the average lifetime value of the customer for the entire facility and for each unit size.  There is a caveat to using this data. It analyzes the data based only on customers that have vacated during the period you specify.  Vacated customers are used because these vacated customers have, presumably, stopped spending money with you. In other words, the amount of their lifetime value has been determined. 

What this analysis doesn't take into account is that there may be customers who began renting long ago, and have yet to move out, or didn't move out during the period you specified.  These customers have spent a lot of money with you and, if considered, would increase the average lifetime value calculation.  However, due to the nature of the analysis, they are excluded from the consideration set.  

Back Against The Wall

Crescendo has one portfolio property that is struggling... a lot. Our back is against the wall with it, and that is a gut-wrenching place to be. 

The one silver lining about being in a position like this is that you start looking at operational changes and marketing strategies from the perspective of not having anything to lose.  In one sense, this is a powerful place to be mentally because it allows you to try things you wouldn't have tried before.

All of the activity, creativity, effort and freedom to try may lead to a breakthrough.  A success with a strategy or tactic never tried before.  (I can already think of a few things we are trying that have huge potential).  Not only could that breakthrough be used to benefit the struggling property, but can be replicated and leveraged at other portfolio properties.  What would you do if your back were against the wall?  Maybe there's a breakthrough there, just waiting to happen.

Customers, Leg Lamps, and a Note From Your Stuff

In a previous post I talked about an idea we hatched to reach out to our current customer base for referrals.  We wanted something that was interesting and would stand out from the regular statements that we send them. The campaign also has to be motivating enough and easy enough to act on that our customers will actually do something.

Maybe I'm over analyzing, but storage isn't the easiest thing to make word of mouth worthy.  How many times has your local storage facility come up in a conversations with friends?  Probably not very often unless you are in the business.  Storage is not new or cool.  My guess is that if you were using storage because you have too much stuff, you may have even been a little embarrassed to admit you were paying for a place to keep your overflow.

So here's what we did to get storage out of the closet (pun intended), and make it fun.

Each customer received the following mailer written as though their stuff that is in storage is sending them a postcard:

Front

Back

Click for Larger Image (Note the web address: www.notefromstuff.com)

These were mailed to each of our existing customers.  The web address will be more prominent on future versions.  The idea behind the micro-website was to allow people to share the referral card/offer with more people more easily, i.e. electronically.  My guess is most people are not noticing the URL.

I like the campaign because we can track our results. I'm not sure if this campaign will be effective, but the only way to know is to test it and measure it and we are now on our way to doing that.  We know if it generates actual new customers because to redeem the offer they will have the card or an email generated from our micro-site.  Traffic to the micro-site is also easily tracked.  We are also using a tracking number on the card so that all of the calls generated by the mailed piece, the micro-site, or the follow-up pieces are automatically logged as being a result of this campaign. 

Here's the piece that will piggy-back in the envelopes that carry our customer's bills for the next several months as a follow up.

Front (these are 1/4 the size of the original mailer, maybe smaller)

Back

Kinda like a ticket - each section is micro-perforated so it can be torn off and shared.
We should have put the www.notefromstuff.com URL on these too! Live and learn.

I'd love it if you leave a comment to tell me what you think. 

Nice Note

I got a nice note in my inbox today from Fred Simanek at MyNextDeal.com.  Actually, it was sent from Fred's email address, but signed by the "My Next Deal Team".  So, I'm wondering if Fred really likes my blog like he says he does, or if the email is just a marketing ploy.  I assumed the email was sincere, and I replied to him.  I wonder what I'll get back. 

In case you haven't heard of them, MyNextDeal.com aggregates commercial real estate listings.  According to their website, "Our site searches hundreds of commercial real estate websites in real-time, every day, so that you need only search one..."

I'm a big user of Loopnet.com and have never tried MyNextDeal.  I'll give it a whirl sometime soon, and if it's any good I'll write about it.  Whether or not the search function is any good, I'm not sure, but they do put together an interesting and entertaining real estate blog.

Worrying about the Leg Lamp

The ad with the leg lamp has not gone out and I'm second guessing my initial reaction.  I thought it was funny.  Now I'm asking myself questions like...

If the letter is from their stuff in "storage camp" why would they be asking for a slender armoire or a leg lamp?  If you go to camp aren't you too young to be thinking about such things? 

Is someone going to be offended because there's a woman's leg-as-lamp on the page?

As I write this I'm realizing that my problem with the piece isn't that there's a leg lamp on it.  I think it needs to be a little edgy to get noticed.  I think my problem is the inconsistency between the image and the premise that the letter is coming from "camp". 

Any thoughts?  Click on the post header and then leave them as a comment to this post. 

Word of Mouth Experiment at Crescendo (It's Fra-gi-le)

At Crescendo Properties, where I work, we own or manage a portfolio of 13 self storage properties. We've been having a lot of internal discussion about generating word of mouth among our existing customer base to drive more demand to our locations and drive up occupancy. 

Like I mentioned before, I've been reading Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz.  In his book he tells about Jansport (the backpack company) and how if a customer sends their backpack in for repair they will get a postcard back from their backpack telling about the good time they are having while away. 

So, I tell Matt Telles, who we recently hired to help implement some new ideas, about the backpack thing and I suggest that maybe we could do something similar, i.e. send a letter to our customers as if it were coming from their stuff. 

A few hours later Matt sends me this rough draft.  It's supposed to be the front and the back of a mailer.  The copy in the offer needs a little work, but all in all I thought it was hilarious.  Matt's a genius.

Front                                                                                    Back

My analysis: I think its funny and that its worth talking about. The fact that this concept is designed as a mailer to be printed introduces a lot of friction to the word of mouth.  The person would have to do a lot more work to share it than if it were in some sort of email-able format that could be shared with multiple people quickly and easily.