“If you build it, they will come” is a mantra that became famous in a baseball movie, but is something that every small business owner is dying to believe. Rather than wait and see, they typically find some way to advertise whether it is in the community with flyers and/ or a billboard, city-wide with a radio ad, and/or regional to national with a television commercial.
Not everyone has the budget to produce television commercials or put ads on the radio. Billboards limit your viewing audiences to just those that drive by. Can you remember the last time you actually went to a place you got a flyer for?
Some self storage owners believe that all they need to do in order to get business is exist. People know what self storage is and will use the first one they see. However, if you don’t want to wait on tenants to find you, and don’t have the budget to do any of the aforementioned advertising there is a solution for you. You need to do what you can to let them know where you are and how to find you with the help of the World Wide Web. With minimal money and a time investment to get the ball rolling, you can make your self storage facility accessible to more and more people through the internet.
First thing you need to do is claim your listing. To do that, you want to check and see if there already is a listing for your establishment. Go to “GetListed.org” and type in the name of your self storage facility and zip code. After you hit submit, the site will peruse the major web engines (yahoo, Google, etc.) to see if your business is listed anywhere.
It will then tell you which sites have a listing for your self storage facility, and which ones do not. You will also get a link to the sites that do not list you so that you can claim your listing.
Be sure you protect and guard your listing once you get it. Make sure that any hyperlinks in the listing go to your site and not elsewhere. You want to be careful of other sites offering to list your business. They may try to go back through Google and get traffic intended for your site driven to theirs first.
Now that you have claimed your listing and safeguarded it you should learn how to make the most of it. Check out the data that the listing site offers and see who is checking you out and how many people your listing has popped up in a search for. This will let you know if you should adjust your tactics in order to hit the market you want or if your right on the mark.
Today’s world is electronic. People look for simplicity in every facet of life. Make sure that you make finding your self storage facility easy be getting listed today.
Sources Used:
“Help Customers Find You on the Web.” SSA Globe; April 2011.
“How Should You Advertise Your Self Storage Facility?” Self Storage Industry News; 10 March 2011.