As more and more self storage businesses become digital marketing savvy, the search results are becoming increasingly competitive.
Heavy investment into Google Ads and SEO across the board can make it increasingly hard to stand out from the competition.
To tackle this, storage providers are turning towards offers, discounts and promotions to make their business stand out from the rest.
In this article we’ll take a look at some of the most common self storage promotion ideas, and see how you can use them to encourage customers to pick your storage facility over the rest.
Move In Offers
By far one of the most widely used tactics, move in offers provide customers with an initial bonus for hiring their first storage unit.
Some of the most common variations include 50% off the first 4 weeks, or first month for a nominal amount.
Here are are couple of examples of this in action:
Everyone loves a discount, and these have the ability to draw focus very well. It also helps position you as a good value offer before customers have even got to the stage of working out the actual cost of units.
It probably seems obvious, but make sure the discount codes come with terms and conditions that ensure the length of stay required to get the discount is long enough that you don’t lose money on the offer.
Free Packing Materials
This promotion will likely depend on whether you have these items to hand, but often storage companies will sell accessories their customers are likely to need.
These include packing boxes of assorted sizes, bubble wrap, parcel tape, acid free tissue paper and various other accessories to help a customer move their items into their storage unit.
If you have a warehouse full of these items it might be more profitable to use them as an offer as well as selling them separately.
If you provide a packing kit for your customers, it might be $20 at cost to you, but be $60 worth of value to your customers. This detail means you’ll easily make the money back in the lifetime value of a new customer.
Free or Discounted Van / Truck Rental
This is another promotion which isn’t available to every storage facility.
However, it’s very likely that a customer needing to store items will also need to rent a vehicle to transport their items into storage.
This is the main reason so many storage companies either offer van / truck hire themselves, or have partnered with a company that offers van / truck rental.
If you do offer truck rental yourself, consider a price reduction for people who are also storage tenants. If you offer the truck at cost to you, then you won’t lose any money, and this will likely be a factor in a customer choosing you over a competitor.
If you have times where most of your trucks are left sitting unused then this is the perfect time to create a limited time deal; an offer available for a short time only until the truck rental picks up again.
Discounts for Emergency Services, Military & College Students
Offering discounts for student storage is a no-brainer, this is a demographic that has a serious need for storage and is always looking for a bargain.
As a way of saying thank you for everything they do, you can also offer voucher codes to emergency service workers and people in the military.
People in the military are one of the main demographics of storage users as they are often away from home for long periods of time and need somewhere to store their items.
Create an incentive for these demographics and get in touch with local bases or campuses to let them know the details and how you can help.
Refer a Friend
Another classic promotional strategy, refer a friend schemes are a great way to get people mentioning your business.
While self storage as an industry doesn’t lend itself massively to this sort of scheme (people don’t always tend to need storage at the same time!), if your tenants know they can get a storage discount for themselves and a friend then they are much more likely to point people in your direction.
Not to mention the additional benefit of this scheme, which is the ability to get an idea of how many of your new customers actually do come from word of mouth.
For many businesses you may have new customers that have signed up based on a friend’s recommendation, but you never know because you don’t have any way of tracking this in your sign up processes.
Partner with Local Businesses
Forming strategic partnerships with local businesses can be a great way of promoting your storage units.
There’s a lot of businesses that people are likely to be using at a similar time to needing self storage – think real estate, tradesmen, solicitors and local colleges or universities.
Letting these businesses know that you will offer discounted services for anyone they send your way can be a great source of driving new business and building relationships in the community – something that can also have beneficial effects on your SEO efforts.
Summary
Hopefully that’s given you some ideas for the best and most relevant promotions to offer to your potential and existing customers.
As always with promotions, it’s important to have a way of tracking how many people are using each one to make sure they are effectively attracting new customers and not costing too much, you can do this using unique voucher codes for the different offers and discounts you have.
