This Guest Post was written by Matt Schexnayder. Matt is on the SpareFoot marketing team and writes for the SpareFoot blog. SpareFoot is a large online marketplace for self-storage and offers consumers a comparison shopping experience within the storage industry.
We are all aware that social networking is fast becoming a major priority in today’s online marketing strategies. Meaning that your business now has a channel through which consumers can directly interact with you and your brand. And while that may be scary to some, it is better to think of it as a more modern take on the customer-business relationship. In this article, we are going to take a look at some ways the self-storage industry has embraced the social media trend and how it has chosen to utilize it.
The first and most important step in establishing a presence in social media is identifying your audience and how best to reach them. In the storage industry for example, you must think about whether you want to connect with your peers in this field, or, if you are a facility operator, do you want to reach potential tenants? This decision will affect the content you put out as well as the tone you use. At SpareFoot, we run a few different blogs, each one tailored to a different audience. The Storage Facilitator targets our industries insiders, while our SpareFoot blog speaks to consumers. Both use Facebook and Twitter very effectively, and recently we have just incorporated Google+. Those three are probably at the top social networks for self-storage marketing.
Once you determine your target audience, the next step is to generate a following. Thankfully, most social networking sites will give you the option to upload contacts from your email account and link those contacts with their already existing profiles (this will save you a lot of time looking up each one individually). This is a simple and as I said, fast way to establish our foundation from which you can build increasing awareness. Building industry contacts will allow you to share ideas and learn from peers while gaining more consumer participation that will surely spread awareness of your company.
By far the best feature of these social sites, and what has separated social media marketing from traditional marketing efforts, is the ability to include personality into your brand. Think of it like an extension of your company’s identity, that is what you are portraying. Consider what you might personally do to encourage potential customers to rent, or peers to share knowledge, and incorporate that in a social media context.
