Increasing Customers for a Distressed Self Storage Building

[Nick Rutkowski]

Hey BPers, 

I'm looking at purchasing a self-storage unit in my local area, I'm looking for ways to increase my occupancy. So far, I need to drop the prices on a few units to make them competitive in the market, pass out free boxes to college students when they go home to college with the company logo. Go business to business introducing myself and my storage unit products and having a website where they can rent units online. There is also a kiosk for prospective tenants to rent onsite.  Any other ideas?

Would it be better to have social media platforms set up for their storage facility or would it be better to have google reviews and great SEO. I don't know how much content I can create because no one is living there (I hope). 

Anyways, your input would be nice!

Thanks!

[Michael Wagner]

I'd suggest those "grass roots" ideas are good ideas but I've never gotten the ROI I was hoping for. Instead, i find my best ROI is on money spent online. Use Sparefoot.com, Google Business Pages (with lots of reviews) , Google PPC and Facebook ads. You should be looking to spend 6-8% of gross potential rent on marketing...perhaps more during ramp up. Hope that helps some! If you just took over, I'd also look at something like yext.com for directory management. I have a friend who specializes in this stuff if you'd like an intro shoot me a PM.