The Marketing Roller Coaster!

If you are not careful, you are going to find yourself on a roller coaster and it isn’t the good kind. You don’t want to focus your advertising and marketing on finding new self-storage properties and neglect filling the self-storage properties that you already own. However, you don’t want to just focus on the properties that you own and never grow your investment portfolio. There is a happy balance between the two types of marketing.

When you are marketing for new self-storage properties, you can get on a roller coaster. You may find that as you start advertising, you will get really busy with phone calls from potential sellers. As a result, you will start focusing on those potential properties. You have to research the properties and their markets and what a realistic offer is. This takes a lot of time. Because you are spending so much time working on this, you may decide to cut back just a little on the advertising so that you don’t get overwhelmed.

The problem is that when you do this, the leads start to dry up and then you go from super busy with several potential properties to nothing. Then you have to ramp up your marketing and advertising efforts again. You get busy, pull back and the same thing happens over and over again. When you get busy, you need to make sure that you don’t stop your marketing, advertising, and networking. You may feel overwhelmed for a short period of time, but that is better than ending up with no leads.

If you find that you are constantly overwhelmed, fantastic, that means what you are doing is working. It also means that it is time to bring in an assistant. Whether this is a virtual assistant or an in person assistant, you will need someone who can help you screen your calls and do your research so that you have time to do the most important things. You need to be building relationships and making deals.

However, if you get so focused on acquiring new properties, how are you going to keep the properties that you have purchased running at their top performance. If you never spend any time focusing on their needs, you will eventually become “the motivated seller.” You need to decide up front if you are going to hire managers to manage your properties for you. They will stay focused on the day to day running the property and you can stay focused on managing the managers.

Every time you consider buying a property, make sure that you come up with a plan for that property. How are you going to manage that property? How are you going to advertise, market and keep that property at maximum occupancy? How are you going to keep the renters that you have and how are you going to improve the occupancy levels? What repairs need to be done? How are you going to manage this and continue to focus on building your network or potential sellers?

One way to make sure that you are balancing your marketing and your managing and your rebuilding of new properties is to create a daily action plan. What do you need to do each day to meet your goals? How much time should you spend in each area? There will be times when you can spend an equal amount of time and there will be times where you have to focus on one area and barely keep the other areas running. The important thing to remember is that every area needs to be balanced daily.

Don’t allow yourself to get on a rollercoaster. Find a way to balance all aspects of your self-storage investing. Make sure that you are focusing on the properties that you own as well as the new potential properties. You can improve the properties that you have while you build your portfolio. As always, happy investing.