DO MORE Webinar Series Session 9: Market Corrections Operator Roundtable

Storable’s Matt Beal leads a candid conversation with Raheem Amer, President at Mini Mall Storage Properties, and Nick Newcomb, Chief Operating Officer at StorageMax. The panel talks about lessons that were learned from previous downturns and what they’re doing to bolster their business against market corrections impacting our industry today.

Watch previous webinars in this series here:

https://www.storable.com/resource_type/webinar/

Webinars

Webinar Transcript

00:00:00:21 – 00:00:26:08
Unknown
Get the power to do more with storable websites. More marketing, more engagement. More customers moving into your facility. Storable helps operators do more with the most powerful technology in self-storage. Learn more at storable dot com slash. Do more so a quick introduction just for myself. My name is Matthew Beal and I’m a product marketing manager here at Storable.

00:00:27:13 – 00:00:45:02
Unknown
And today’s session is a continuation of a multipart series. And I’m going to move pretty quickly through this slide compared to normal, just because I want to give as much time as we can to our stars of the show. Our operators here today. But we’ve been covering four main topics over the last six months or so now with this webinar series.

00:00:46:06 – 00:01:03:13
Unknown
One is this concept of shift to digital and the idea is that we’re seeing both tenants and operators move more and more towards digital forms of engagement than we’ve ever seen before. Two is the supply crunch, just meaning that we are seeing that the available inventory in the self-storage industry is not able to keep up with tenant demand.

00:01:03:13 – 00:01:26:19
Unknown
So we’re seeing things like record high occupancies across the industry, and you would expect for operators to be able to start building new facilities. But for a variety of reasons, that’s kind of been cost prohibitive for folks, things like supply chain issues, labor issues, the cost of steel, for example, are so high. And so it’s interesting what we’ve seen as operators are kind of growing via M&A as opposed to doing new construction, more so lately.

00:01:27:14 – 00:01:46:14
Unknown
So this continues to be a big trend. And the last one is this concept of market correction. So this is kind of overarching on all of this stuff. But we’ve seen record headlines a couple of weeks ago that we have record high inflation, right? A little bit over 8%. But we’ve also seen things like the supply chain issues and all kinds of different interest rates adjustments.

00:01:46:14 – 00:02:03:18
Unknown
Someone is getting a little bit more expensive when it comes to lending. So a variety of things kind of play into everything that we’re tracking here across the self-storage industry. And the purpose of the what this webinar series is to help you navigate all of these forces and kind of make sense of some of it and figure out what you can do to respond to these different forces.

00:02:04:06 – 00:02:24:21
Unknown
And so today’s discussion is a continuation of our conversation on shift to Digital. So last month we had a conversation on how marketing websites can help you address that. And today, when I want to walk you through kind of some of that data that we’ve been going over that kind of shows you how some folks are moving over to this digital forms of engagement on the tenant side.

00:02:25:03 – 00:02:43:18
Unknown
And then we’re going to quickly shift into a conversation with a couple of operators who are going to walk you through how they personally have been getting ahead of the curve and helping address this force in particular. So the two data sources I want to share with you real quick with this one is a demographic analysis that is done based off of data using the Sparefoot marketplace.

00:02:43:18 – 00:03:03:19
Unknown
So for those that are not familiar Sparefoot is the by far the leading source of tenants finding available units on the Internet is by far has the single most amount of traffic that goes through it. And so what we’ve done is we’ve segmented our number of interactions by age divisions down here on the X axis. And so there’s a few things that are interesting to see.

00:03:03:19 – 00:03:20:21
Unknown
But the one I’m going to point out in particular is that this orange bar in 20, 21, pretty much across the board is higher than both 29, 20, 19 and 2020, no matter what the demographic is. So what this tells you is that again more and more folks are preferring digital forms of engagement than they have ever done before.

00:03:22:01 – 00:03:41:22
Unknown
And we also see that when we look at facility management software data. So what you’re looking at here is aggregated data across our site link at our storage FMC in terms of lead sourcing. And you can notice the one thing I’m going to point out to you here is the green section walk walking traffic has pretty consistently over the last couple of years continued to just diminish, diminish, diminish.

00:03:41:22 – 00:04:09:15
Unknown
So where it was 55 ish percent, even up to 60% at times, it’s pretty consistently closer to the 40% now. It is. And that traffic is being replaced mostly by these orange and teal bars at the bottom with website and sparefoot. So these digital forms of shopping for tenants are where your customers are coming from. And so this is why we wanted to focus on a conversational marketing website to be able to see how it can you use that to actually help address these, these kind of market forces and market trends.

00:04:11:13 – 00:04:34:07
Unknown
And so I want to introduce our two panelists today so we have Melissa Stiles from Storage Asset Management and Jeff Ley from Guardian Storage, who have joined us. And both of these are operators that are both in the marketing space, very familiar with their marketing websites, but are also very forward thinking. And a lot of the things we’re talking about, they’ve been tracking and being able to kind of develop their marketing website for years now based off of kind of predictability on this kind of stuff.

00:04:34:20 – 00:04:54:01
Unknown
So Melissa and Jeff, we appreciate you guys joining today. How are you guys doing Thanks for having us. David. Good. Thanks for having us. Awesome. Well, guys, I want to jump right into the conversation. Just we can make sure we have use as much of the time to hear from you guys. One of the where I want to start the conversation is, you know, we just went over this data.

00:04:54:01 – 00:05:14:11
Unknown
We just tracked where tenants are preferring more and more of these digital forms of engagement. What I’m curious is that it’s kind of aggregated data that we’re seeing. But you guys are also seeing this on a very micro level, comparatively in terms of your own operations. Is this kind of the same trends that you guys are seeing? And what are the specific things that you guys are tracking in addition to some of the stuff that I was just walking through?

00:05:15:07 – 00:05:40:04
Unknown
Melissa, we’ll start with you. So, yeah, so definitely echoing what you are showing on your graph. Our online rentals, pre-COVID probably under 10% of like for complete online rentals, not talking to a manager at all and then spiked up to about 40%. And now coming up a little bit back down but still about, you know, ten to 15% higher than pre-COVID levels.

00:05:40:18 – 00:06:20:17
Unknown
So that want for that online is still there about ten 15% that’s a lot. Jeff what about you. Yeah. So we to echo your slide five years ago our walk were probably 18% and now that’s gone down to 9%. And the way that is actual business if you’re tracking your closely by the source typically those quantitative closing 90% and early store your sales people are probably close to three maybe if they now are going to a digital space we know that closes much lower because they see other sites there’s just that much more opportunity for them to research search smarter.

00:06:20:18 – 00:06:40:22
Unknown
Now that’s a giant hit if you’re taking a subset of the needs that have closed so you can’t say that it works in your favor because some of those easier to close usually you really want Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Hey, real quick, I’m sorry, Melissa and Jeff, I just want to make sure I’ve got a question that came in.

00:06:40:22 – 00:06:56:10
Unknown
Can you guys still see the slides as well on your side? And then that same kind of goes out for anyone watching. If you guys can not see the slides, would you mind letting me know of your questions or chats? And we can troubleshoot that accordingly? I can see your slide. It has our three pictures on it. Okay.

00:06:56:11 – 00:07:13:15
Unknown
Perfect. Just wanted to make sure, but we don’t want people not seeing what we’re talking about here. Okay, perfect. Well, guys, I appreciate that. Jeff, I know there’s another thing that you and I were discussing a little bit before the call, which is this idea of like, we hear a lot from operators that there’s kind of a minimum standard for their website.

00:07:13:15 – 00:07:29:00
Unknown
It is it kind of a bare minimum that they need to be able to hit. And a lot of folks feel like that is exactly what they need to do, is kind of hit that bare minimum and then they can kind of move on and they feel like that’s going to get them what they need to. But you had some interesting kind of thinking into the standard being more of a moving target.

00:07:29:00 – 00:07:53:16
Unknown
Would you mind kind of elaborating how you’re thinking about that? It’s definitely a target if you were to look at Uber or Lyft, right. What else doing of the people existing as you probably witnessed it and you probably would like them to get out of the way. That to me is probably the standard vehicles which again you to be.

00:07:54:10 – 00:08:24:14
Unknown
But if you want to pull up the website that I sent you, I used to say that which is a website site, you can see basically any company. So this is what they’re going towards. Location, Visual Place is also see that you can see you scroll down, there’s just back that optional. There’s basically a reserve, but that’s what you get if you click over to the long lines and you’ll see what people look.

00:08:24:16 – 00:08:54:05
Unknown
Now, to us, this is not a standard. And you see there’s just many different ways to reach a sort of chat you can rent or serve, which is true, but we’re giving people options. So I think that standard is if the saying it’s customer issue and getting business, but it’s always moving because of just how fast technology is changing and how dynamic our consumer is we yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.

00:08:54:15 – 00:09:15:18
Unknown
Melissa, I kind of want to throw a follow up question related to what Jeff is talking about there, which is how do you think about that optimization process? So if you do truly believe it’s a moving target, which I know you do, we’ve talked about this a lot, but it’s like how do you think about optimizing that website, changing it, finding new opportunities to be able to, you know, make sure you are meeting the tenant experience in the way that they like?

00:09:16:19 – 00:09:39:00
Unknown
Yeah, that’s a good that’s a great question. So one of the things is really thinking about the customer experience. So I talk a lot about we mystery shops. Our customers are our managers, sorry. When we had them, you know, when we’re in stores and we still do. But how many people have actually mystery shopped their website and went through the rental process to make sure that it does make sense?

00:09:39:07 – 00:10:04:07
Unknown
You know, on the back end, we’re creating it. We understand how storage should work. But, you know, someone’s never rented storage before. That process may seem clunky to them. So definitely having, you know, an outside source looking at your website and making sure that it does work, how you believe it should work. And then we use products like Microsoft Clarity that on the back end work, like there’s also a product called Hotjar as well, that record kind of sessions on your website.

00:10:04:07 – 00:10:31:17
Unknown
And you can start to see where maybe a button doesn’t work, how you think it’s going to work, or a customer is not navigating the page that you’re going to that you think that they’re going to go to. So we actually are optimizing all the time. So we thought, especially during the pandemic, that the virtual tour was going to be super important, but we started to realize that they were skipping over the virtual tour and going right to the unit tables or going through the reviews on the page.

00:10:31:17 – 00:10:42:02
Unknown
So we’ve been working on different ways to just like Jeff showed as well, to layout our unit page to make sure that we’re getting what the customers are actually looking forward above the fold of the website.

00:10:44:13 – 00:11:00:11
Unknown
Thank you, Melissa. And I will say there’s a question that came in related, and I think you answered a lot of it how you think about this, but I want to throw it out and then Jeff, I’ll probably throw it to you to give your response as well, which is, you know, the question comes as follows, which is how many potential tenants that Select Preserve actually commit to renting online?

00:11:00:17 – 00:11:14:07
Unknown
And how do you kind of track the ones that are timing out is where they’re falling off. And so I might even broaden the question just a little bit just to say, how are you tracking the tenants experience when they are on the website and optimizing to get them to where you need to be and kind of how you’re tracking them through that funnel.

00:11:14:07 – 00:11:34:11
Unknown
And so, Melissa, you did a good job of talking about that. But Jeff, how are you guys thinking about that? A guardian. If you have a multi-step process, you can see where in the process they follow up. And of course, you want to get you want to capture the information very early on in case that fall occurs. A lot of credit cards you can point, people can lose service.

00:11:34:11 – 00:12:13:12
Unknown
They can. Something comes up. So you want to have a limited number of fields that compute information first and then as they progress through the process, you can see where they follow up. And, you know, we do the quarter, too. If you’re going to do it to watch what customers are doing, you need two things you need a service that you to grasp spot because watching customers on your site is like watching a mouse trying to get through the cheese it’s so obvious to you that they will do it and it will it will tell you things about where in that process they’re confused or where they’re not clicking with what you put for them

00:12:13:15 – 00:12:33:04
Unknown
to try to it makes a lot of sense. Well, guys, I wanted to. Sorry. Go ahead, Melissa. Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m going to say, just to add to what Jeff said, too, about capturing the information as soon as possible as we also have like a cart abandonment feature to that, as soon as someone enters that information, it goes to the manager.

00:12:33:08 – 00:12:37:20
Unknown
And so if they drop off, we can follow up right away. And our managers have had a lot of success with that.

00:12:41:12 – 00:12:58:11
Unknown
Jeff, a question came in for you just as a follow up to your response there, which is that what kind of analytics are you using to track your customer funnel? Is there a specific tool that you’d recommend for folks to consider that Google Analytics will track it? And then you can also we also have these in the future.

00:12:58:17 – 00:13:28:12
Unknown
So some of that is just a data couple you see here in process. And then we’re in the process that occurs to see if there’s any spikes. So because honestly, it takes all of those events and move them to the rails. But Google Analytics will show that follow through Cool. Thank you. So guys, where I wanted to take the conversation next is you talked a lot about how you’re looking at what your customers are doing and finding ways to optimize.

00:13:28:12 – 00:13:41:06
Unknown
So what are some of those things that you guys have prioritized, call it over the last year, year and a half to improving your website to actually meet the needs and why have you made those investments in those those particular things? Melissa, I’ll throw it to you first.

00:13:43:08 – 00:14:00:15
Unknown
Yeah. So we meet we did a lot of testing of different pieces that we were maybe missing from like the human element of the stores. And so I think you have a slide showing that we’ve added merchandise. So the ability to to buy, you know, the simple merchandise. And there’s also a lock option at the end as well.

00:14:01:07 – 00:14:19:10
Unknown
So being able to buy that merchandise that you maybe were buying at the store. So testing that out as well. And then we also are testing the ability to run from a map. So just like Jeff said, like the standard is not just a unit table anymore and they’re going to it, but having these different functions. So I think you have the link.

00:14:19:21 – 00:14:40:13
Unknown
So the map there and I can walk you through then as well. I do if I can get out. Here we go. Yeah. So this isn’t it’s we’re still like testing it and we’ve been we’ve been going through it, it and it’s not as intuitive as we thought. My goal was always to try to run storage, like we pick concert tickets.

00:14:41:06 – 00:15:02:17
Unknown
But I think it’s, it’s a little bit more challenging than that. But you can see the blue is where we have vacant units and if you scroll over, you see the price and more about that unit then as well. The Reds are yeah, you could see the green. Yeah. So you can see that the parking unit for $99, you can reserve it right right from the map as well.

00:15:03:07 – 00:15:17:05
Unknown
So just making these like different tweaks and just trying to be innovative in how we are enhancing the customer experience, you know also on the technical side, doing things like with page speed and ensuring that it’s just up to that standard as well.

00:15:19:06 – 00:15:39:02
Unknown
Yeah, I think Melissa, you bring up page speed. I think just one thing that’s maybe interesting for the crowd and maybe you guys can give me an idea of how you think about this, but Google is another just moving target, right? It’s so such a critical part of your your website experience and what they’re looking for in terms of listing you high in SEO and all these kinds of things and also just providing good customer experience.

00:15:39:02 – 00:16:15:02
Unknown
That’s also changing all the time too. So is that something that you guys are tracking and how do you go about doing that, staying on top of that and making those adjustments Yeah. So, you know, really just following a lot of like the search engine in my blog and just also following our own trends on our website as well to understand, you know, if we are with our search rankings, if we’re following up, but just having a great we have a great internal digital marketing team and then on top of that, attending webinars, reading those blogs and talking to actual, you know, Google our Google rep and understanding what’s going on.

00:16:16:01 – 00:16:34:04
Unknown
But it’s, it’s definitely something that we are tracking. And even though you think, you know what the next two logarithms are going to be and you try to prepare for it, Google always changes it. But we try to stay as prepared as possible, you know, making sure that our websites are optimized with with the technical SEO, the content and then the customer experience as well.

00:16:35:16 – 00:16:56:01
Unknown
Yeah. Yeah. And I know the response. I get to that a lot of the times. Melissa, just to kind of get ahead of I suspect a question might be coming in is, you know, not not everybody necessarily has the scope of a team that that someone like Melissa Storage Asset Management would do. But there are a number of also just vendors and partners and stuff in the industry that can kind of help you navigate that stuff too.

00:16:56:01 – 00:17:07:09
Unknown
So I would recommend you do a bunch of research on that because there’s a lot of really, really great website providers out there in the storage industry that can help you stay on top of that so that you don’t have to do all that blogging. All right. So the blog surging and staying on top of trends and that kind of stuff.

00:17:08:00 – 00:17:25:14
Unknown
So it’s really good to have good part to a good partnerships with your vendors and make sure that you’re trusting them with that. Awesome. Jeff, I want to go back to the original question for you as well, which is just talking about kind of what some of the innovations you’ve made across your portfolio over the last year and a half or so.

00:17:26:14 – 00:17:49:07
Unknown
Yeah. So we I’ve noticed five major changes that we’ve made, and I think we’ve curated these for either watching customer interactions on cycle just best practices through following blogs and listening to Google and other things that we’ve seen over the years. But these five things where we’ve added a chat feature we’ve integrated the three pictures, we got it on one example.

00:17:49:15 – 00:18:31:06
Unknown
We’ve completely redesigned the user interface, as you can see from the two slides we’ve added about accessibility into the site. So all of those things really try to facilitate the larger goal of providing multiple pathways for customers to reach us in any way they choose. But I think that those the scope of this project manager size cost per day, if they do, at least for you have a high growth rate that the success we’ve seen over the years, many customers have positive impact on the site.

00:18:31:20 – 00:18:50:04
Unknown
Mm hmm. Very cool. Well, guys, I want to transition to one other question I’d like to be able to ask you guys before we kind of open it up to more of a Q&A. So I will say for all the attendees out there, if you guys have any questions, right now is a good time to get them in, because here in a moment, we’ll probably have about 5 minutes to throw some questions towards them.

00:18:50:22 – 00:19:09:06
Unknown
But the one other question I wanted to ask you guys is the reason in particular that Jeff and Melissa were invited today is that I know for a fact they’re very forward thinking operators. There they are masters of the craft. They understand what are the big changes coming down the pipeline for all these marketing things. And they’re thinking ahead and they’re constantly ahead of what the normal industry is doing.

00:19:09:15 – 00:19:25:09
Unknown
So my question for you guys is what are some of the things that you guys are starting to track now that you suspect are going to be kind of big or important in the self-storage industry as it relates to a marketing website over the next year or two years or three years? What are those big things you guys are tackling and thinking about right now as a team?

00:19:26:10 – 00:20:01:05
Unknown
And then Jeff, out there to you first So for track purposes, for me, number one is, is web traffic. I think anybody in their meetings knows is leads. And a lot of times it is. And you hold your your store teams or your sales teams to convert those days. That’s precisely what you do. But I have shifted open to the possibility of foot traffic because once you understand what that is for those numbers, you can get your Web conversion rate.

00:20:02:05 – 00:20:33:20
Unknown
If you have a store that’s getting seven visits a month and you can get your conversion rate of 3%. If I say I need from traffic to be that substantial, that that’s 3% is probably some additional fees. But how much would you spend on average to try to get these versus what can you do on your site is attached that so when you have so much traffic, you really are positioned to maximize your conversion potential from that.

00:20:33:21 – 00:21:00:15
Unknown
You can also individual locations if you have one location, shoot at all the same template site. If you notice deviations, what conversions that will tell you that there could be a pricing problem. So I’d say that’s usually very close that you have a price or maybe for pricing of those high and there’s some opportunity to increase the price potential because customers receiving that price well.

00:21:00:23 – 00:21:32:21
Unknown
So that’s a big traffic express is others do you have traffic pages is it how much is it just start? And I think consider part of your question as to where I see the future I just like to react to what customers want when I think that they’re going to look for on website. And then also when I use other Web sites for personal use or business use where I just try to change, I ask myself, why?

00:21:33:02 – 00:21:56:04
Unknown
Why did it change? Well, I have to read this and put you on part of it. That’s because it’s appropriate for this. I think you can see that. You can see it. Some of the accessibility options. Those are things that large scale companies were doing and that if you can adopt this quickly, your customers will already be used to that because they’re seeing it on Amazon.

00:21:56:06 – 00:22:28:08
Unknown
Or they’re seeing it on big box. They’re using it, and now we’re becoming more comfortable using your site just because just much more like what they’re using. And it yeah. Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense. Jeff. I think what’s so interesting and we’re getting some questions related to one of the two topics you covered there, which is just this idea that ultimately it’s like if I’m understa, if I’m summarizing what you said there, it’s like the two buckets are understanding what customer behavior is on your current website and identifying where you can improve.

00:22:28:14 – 00:22:51:09
Unknown
But there’s also just forward looking, you’re seeing what other folks are doing, not even in the storage industry necessarily in parallel industries. And what kinds of trends and consumer behaviors are they trying to address? The first piece of like the understanding your tenant behavior, I know we talked a little bit about Google Analytics and kind of the hot jar and the clarity but we’ve gotten three questions in the last 2 minutes about kind of what is the difference between these tools and how should I be using these?

00:22:51:09 – 00:23:06:14
Unknown
And so I want to spend a little bit more time just since even though we already started talking about those a moment ago, just understanding a little bit better. Like, for example, the question came in, if I only had to pick between one of those three, which one should I be prioritizing? Which one should I be doing? First and focused on?

00:23:06:14 – 00:23:30:22
Unknown
So do you guys kind of have an insight on like for someone who’s maybe getting started on understanding their tenant behavior on their website, where do you get started? What’s the low hanging fruit the most helpful piece of technology to potentially implement? I would say Google Analytics, make sure you have Google Analytics. It’s a free tool. You just put that code on, then you you can start to see what pages you have the most traffic you can start to see a funnel to and see the behavior flow as well.

00:23:31:11 – 00:24:01:14
Unknown
So if you don’t put like a Hotjar recording tool on you, at least have that information from Google Analytics, you’re just not seeing it like that with your Scotch. Like Jeff mentioned, yeah, because your foundation absolutely has to be Google Analytics. And then from there you could start bringing in other advanced tools that help to define what the customers want you conversions are they go Google Analytics Unified answer.

00:24:01:14 – 00:24:22:17
Unknown
I like it. OK, the other question that came in that I thought was particularly interesting is around chat bots in general. So Jeff, I think this one like fits very cleanly into your second bucket. Your response just a moment ago, which is to say that we are saying I personally see a lot of chat bots that are popping up on various websites I use.

00:24:22:17 – 00:24:34:08
Unknown
Right. A lot of the times the way that works out is you get a little square that pops up in your bottom right hand corner if you’ve been on a site for too long or if you’re just spending a little time so that it can say, hey, you know, I can answer any of your questions. That’s what we’re referring to there.

00:24:34:08 – 00:24:50:01
Unknown
So the questions are kind of coming in like, are those typically humans powering those? Are they automated? And I think just to broaden the question is just how are you guys thinking about chat bot in general? And is that something that you guys are exploring within your respective operations? And so, Melissa, I’ll throw it to you first. Yeah.

00:24:50:16 – 00:25:09:14
Unknown
So right now we do use one that’s human powered, but we are actually building one right now with our own technology that is an AI one. And so what we’ve done is we’ve used like reviews and we’ve used feedback that we get in Google messages or just in general, like what are the what are the first questions that a customer would ask?

00:25:09:20 – 00:25:28:14
Unknown
And being able to build that intent on an AI bot, and then if it needs escalation, it’ll go to go to a human. But we’re definitely using like the AI chat bot technical technology first and then with escalation later. But I think the most important thing is really understanding again going back to understanding your tenants and what they want.

00:25:29:00 – 00:25:46:16
Unknown
So using that feedback that you get like frequently asked questions, you know, talking to your managers about maybe if someone calls, you know, what is the first questions they ask and being able to build that intent. Then in your I bot. So it truly is an innate experience. Awesome. What about you, Jeff? Are you guys exploring it as well?

00:25:47:16 – 00:26:22:17
Unknown
Yeah, we currently I would argue that we currently have driven by so it starts and I think that you can escalate to a human being and I think I’m still in the phase of I want to know what customers expect first and then we’ll adjust as needed from there. And one thing you can very quickly learn is that as the conversation goes, the types of questions they’re asking, what can they not find about this site that tells me start chatting, but and then what can the bot not answer?

00:26:22:17 – 00:26:47:08
Unknown
Right now they’re trying to me, I think this provides a very good insight into what you’re not community as the website and what customers really want to understand for yeah. And that beautifully ties back to that topic of conversation we were earlier where we’re saying how can you understand the tenants behavior and then adapt your website to just help the next tenant not have that same question.

00:26:47:08 – 00:27:06:12
Unknown
So I think that that makes a lot of sense, Jeff, that connecting those two appreciate it. Once I realized I didn’t mean to, I kind of skipped over giving you an opportunity to talk about the future of kind of marketing websites in the storage industry. What are some of the things that you’re kind of tracking or things that you’re expecting or starting to explore as it relates to websites as well?

00:27:06:12 – 00:27:31:02
Unknown
Starting at a high level, we look at search trends in general for storage and you know, are those keywords changing or are they? So during COVID and right after COVID in 20, 20, we experienced high volumes of search for self storage. And then we’re starting to see that taper off a little bit. So then we can also adjust to make sure that our website traffic is actually following that same global pattern and it gives us a good benchmark for ourselves.

00:27:32:05 – 00:27:55:17
Unknown
But then, you know, just like Jeff mentioned, the website traffic, looking at conversions, we look at the percentage of online rentals, we track that as well. And then we just talked about it. A lot of what we do is also look at feedback from the customers. So understanding the reviews and where those reviews happen within the customer journey allows us to then tailor whatever part of it, whether it’s the marketing website or an operations part.

00:27:56:03 – 00:28:17:07
Unknown
So doing a lot right now actually with the feedback in the reviews, we’re looking at really some some cool stuff as far as looking at a Google rating of one of our store stores versus the cost per move in and how that affects their budget and, and what’s going on with the search trends in general. So really tracking those kind of pieces right now.

00:28:18:00 – 00:28:34:17
Unknown
Yeah, that that last piece is really creative. I haven’t heard that before. I like that. That’s interesting. Cool. Well, guys, I want to be respectful of everybody’s time. We’re right at 1130 here, 1130 central. So more than anything though, Melissa Jeff, I just want to take a moment and just say thank you guys. So much for attending today.

00:28:34:22 – 00:28:59:17
Unknown
We’re getting tons and tons of positive comments, a lot of questions about some of the stuff that you guys have been discussing. So what if you guys are open to it? I’d love to connect you guys and just get a couple of additional questions answered for some folks that had some stuff come in. But more than anything, thank you guys so much for attending today and taking the time to just kind of help walk folks through how you guys are thinking about marketing websites, how having a smart and definitely love to live to answer any questions.

00:29:00:13 – 00:29:19:19
Unknown
Yeah, thanks. Thanks. And I’m available to you. Very good. All right. Well, thanks. Yeah. Well, real quick, just before I let everybody go, the one thing I did just want to let everybody know is, as I talked about before, this is a multipart series. So this was our marketing websites operate or roundtable. But on May 27th, we’re going to be continuing the conversation.

00:29:19:19 – 00:29:38:05
Unknown
So we’re going to be moving over to that fourth market force, which is this idea of market correction. So this is things like inflation and kind of the interest rate adjustments and what’s that’s what that’s doing to our construction pipeline and the storage industry. It feels like a really good time just with all the shifting in the market to stop and kind of have a state of the industry as the way that we’re looking at that at Storable.

00:29:38:12 – 00:29:55:18
Unknown
And we’ll also be sharing some kind of proprietary internal data to show you guys at scale how we’re seeing that play out in the storage industry. So it should be a really really cool conversation. I’m looking forward to putting together everything, but that’ll be on May 27. So just keep your keep an eye out on your email and we will be sending you guys some invites on how to register for that as well.

00:29:56:17 – 00:30:13:17
Unknown
But other than that, thank everybody else for attending today. In addition to our panelists, we also appreciate everybody coming to just attend and participate in the conversation. A lot of great questions came in and we were looking forward to putting forward putting on the next one. So but other than that, I hope you guys all have a great weekend and appreciate you joining us.

00:30:13:17 – 00:30:32:15
Unknown
Take care and get the power to do more with storable websites, more marketing, more engagement, more customers moving into your facility. Storable helps operators do more with the most powerful technology in self-storage. Learn more at Storable dot com slash do more.

 

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