Creating Your Business Plan –The Fuel of Your Business – Advertising

There are two aspects of marketing that you want to keep in mind as you create your business plan. You want to focus on advertising to find properties, but you also want to focus on how you are going to advertise the properties that you own. As you start to grow your portfolio of properties, you will need to juggle finding properties and keep properties fully occupied.

When you create your advertising campaign to find motivated self-storage owners, you need to make sure that you are consistent with what you do. If you advertise and bring in a bunch of leads and then focus on those leads and let your advertising slide, you will find that you are on a roller coaster. You will coast along with nothing happening and then suddenly you will get a lot of responses to your ads and marketing. Then you will be too busy to market so you will stop and lose all of your momentum. Don’t be on an up and down system, make sure that you put advertising in place that is consistent whether you are busy or slow so that your funnel of leads is always full. Use your business plan to keep you off of the roller coaster and on a smooth ride to success.

When you are in down times where your funnel isn’t as full as you wish it were, go out and be proactive. Look on Forsale.com and selfstorage.com, crexi.com, MarcusandMillichap.com, etc. As you go out and look at properties that are currently for sale, you may be able to find a property. The property may have been on the market long enough that they are finally willing to negotiate on price.

You also need to prepare an advertising plan for each individual property. How are you going to find your manager? How are you going to change the current marketing on the property to improve the occupancy levels? Are you going to offer a free month to new clients? Are you going to sponsor a little league team? How are you going to get in front of your audience? Write it down.

Advertising to keep your property pipeline full is just as important as adverting to keep your properties full. You need to have a solid business plan so that you can succeed with both. As always, happy investing.