The self-storage industry has become increasingly competitive. If you want to increase your customer base by attracting the right audience, advertising plays a crucial role in the growth of any self-storage business.
Because it’s all about increasing your brand awareness and connecting your offers to the right customer base, ultimately driving revenue growth.
However, unlike SEO, which attracts customers through organic search results by ranking for multiple keywords, advertising requires real money involvement. However, if your advertising strategy isn’t well-executed, you can lose both money and hope.
There are countless methods for advertising your self-storage business. However, Google and Facebook are the best ones to really convert your audience into sales by showing your ad to the right audience.
Everybody knows Google has the largest audience. I mean who doesn’t use Google? And it seems the best choice to advertise through their Google Ads.
But did you know that Facebook Ads often deliver even better results for self-storage businesses? But how? Let’s dig further!
Why Choose Facebook to Advertise Your Self-Storage Business
Facebook might not be as big as search engine giant Google. But it still has more than 3 billion active worldwide user base which is more than enough for advertising and scaling any business quickly.
Unlike Google Ads, which primarily relies on keyword searches, Facebook allows you to scale your audience based on highly specific criteria.
You can filter users depending on their age, geographical location, interests, and life events like moving which is especially relevant to self-storage services.
For example: if a person is preparing for a move, they are more likely to require storage solutions. And Facebook will show your ad to them in the perfect time.
But if we talk about Google instead, they need people to actively search for storage services. It means that you will miss out on the potential customers who just planned for a move but didn’t search but still need storage solutions.
This different approach makes Facebook ads a very effective platform for advertising self-storage businesses. What’s more, you can execute this all in a much more budget-friendly manner than Google Ads.
Curious to know how to create a Facebook ad that captures the customer’s interest? Keep reading!
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How to Create Effective Facebook Ads for Self-Storage Marketing?
As I discussed above, a poorly executed ad strategy can drain your Facebook advertising budget. But if you master the art of crafting the perfect Facebook ad, you can dramatically grow your self-storage business.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you create a high-performing Facebook Ad campaign, from start to finish, without missing a beat.
Step 1: Set Clear Campaign Goals
Want to know the biggest mistake most advertisers make? They publish ads before setting a clear marketing goal. This may cause unnecessary spending and poor results.
But don’t worry, we will not repeat this mistake! Because we know that defining clear campaign goals is important before diving into ad creation.
Setting clear objectives not only takes your ads in the right direction but also helps you measure success effectively. your goals might include:
1. Maximizing Unit Reservations
People love simplicity and prefer hassle-free solutions, especially when making a purchase decision. Just like you and I would, potential customers want to understand what sets your business apart.
To grow your self-storage business, prioritize convenience and clarity in your messaging. Make it easy for customers to choose you by emphasizing the unique aspects and benefits of your services.
For example, you could phrase it like this: “Running short on space? Reserve Your Self-Storage Unit Today and Get Your First Month Free! Don’t Wait – Limited Units Available!” This pitch appeals to urgency and offers a tangible incentive.
2. Promoting Special Offers
Everyone loves a good deal, and the self-storage market is no different. While people may need storage, they still want to feel like they’re getting extra value for their money.
It’s human nature. You and I can’t change it. A compelling offer like “Get Your First Month Free” or “Limited Units Available” not only highlights a financial benefit but also gives them a strong reason to choose your facility over competitors. Offering such time-sensitive deals can boost your self-storage business.
3. Generating Leads
Remember, people love to do window shopping. They always want to know more and compare other choices before finalizing the purchase.
That’s where lead generation can help you. You should offer something for free to get their attention and contact details.
For example, you can offer them a free guide on “How to Choose the Right Storage Unit” but tell them that they will only get it by email. This way you will have their contact details for free.
Once you have their details, you can mature these leads through follow-ups, emails, and special offers until they’re ready to choose your services. It’s about building relationships for long-term growth.
Once you’ve set these goals, You are good to move to step 2 which is defining your targeted audience.
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Step 2: Define Your Target Audience
Don’t think that creating a compelling ad alone will work wonders. But what if it’s not displayed to the right audience? Imagine running a self-storage website that only serves New York, but your ad targets the entire United States.
Would it succeed? Absolutely Not! Your ad would miss its mark. If you want to make your ad shine among others, you would have to focus on individuals who are most inclined to require your services.
You can easily do this by filtering your audience to specific demographics, interests, and locations. This is how you can save lots of money that would be lost if you don’t if you don’t target your audience correctly.
1. Geographical Area
When it comes to self-storage, proximity should be your top priority. Imagine you’re a customer looking for storage options. Where would you choose to keep your items? Close to home, work, or somewhere easily accessible.
Right? That’s exactly how most people think. They want local storage facilities. You can easily do this by targeting your ads in a specific geographic area, ensuring they reach the right audience without unnecessary ad spend.
For example, if your facility is in New York, narrow your ad targeting to users in that region to maximize return on investment (ROI) and attract new customers who can benefit from your services.
2. Life Events
Big life changes often lead to a need for extra storage. Let’s say you have narrowed down your audience but everybody in New York won’t be needing storage service. right?
A question arises: who would be your potential customer? People who are moving, downsizing, or remodelling. Correct? By targeting your ads to people going through these transitions, you’re offering a solution to a specific set of people who are already facing problems.
It could be a family who wants to store some of their extra furniture or someone in the middle of a move, you can create an ad that speaks directly to them with a solution. For example, your ad can mention, “Moving Soon? Secure Your Storage Space Now and Enjoy Flexible Access!”
3. Interests and Behaviors
One thing that I love about Facebook ads is that they provide you with so many tools to reach the right audience. Life events can be a great targeting strategy but don’t occur on a regular basis.
You would need a steady flow of customers who regularly look for storage solutions to expand your business. You can do this by targeting people who are already interested in related areas, like real estate, moving services, or home improvement who regularly need storage spaces nearby.
This approach can boost your chances of finding big and regular customers all the time.
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Step 3: Choosing the Right Ad Format for Facebook Advertising
Now that you’ve set your goals and filtered your audience by geographical area, life events, and interests, it’s time to choose the right ad format to maximize conversions.
Selecting the right ad format can dramatically impact the success of your self-storage campaign. Here are some ad formats to consider that can boost your business quickly:
1. Carousel Ads
If you ask me, I’d say carousel ads are one of the best ad formats to boost both visibility and conversions of your self-storage business.
Why? Because with carousel ads, you can easily showcase multiple images, videos, or unit sizes and promotions within a single ad.
It doesn’t matter if you want to highlight all storage unit options, share some customer testimonials, or have special offers.
Carousel ads can effectively provide a full view of your business that keeps your audience engaged and encourages them to take action!
2- Video Ads
While carousel ads are fantastic, video ads are equally powerful for promoting your self-storage business. You can create an amazing animation video by using video animation tools like Canva that gives a short tour of your storage units, security features, and 24/7 access.
Or you can put a video review featuring a satisfied client who shares their positive experience with your services. With video ads, the possibilities are endless!
This ad format not only helps build trust with potential customers but also allows you to effectively communicate your unique selling points (USPs) compellingly.
3. Slideshow Ads
Although online video creation tools can help you make a compelling video ad production. However, many people are unaware of how to effectively use them or have enough time to create a perfect video that gets the audience’s attention.
For those individuals, Slideshow ads are a perfect fit. Slideshow ads are more like a carousel. That means you can use images of your place, services, testimonials, captions, or promotions. The main difference is that slideshow ads are automated. People won’t have to scroll through each slide manually.
4. Photo Ads
It’s a famous quote: Simplicity is best! Photo ads are the perfect example of this. You can simply convey your message with an amazing photo of your storage units or a graphic that highlights a special offer.
Did you know that a high-quality image can grab customer attention and lead to a higher click-through rate (CTR)?
5. Retargeting Ads
Have you ever wondered what to do if someone viewed your ad and showed interest but didn’t convert into a customer? Well, this is why Facebook gives options with retargeting ads to specific people who have previously engaged with your ad but they are still looking for other options.
They are your potential customers. All you have to do is to keep showing up to them with great offers and deals. You can create any of the above ad formats and retarget them with a fresh pitch that encourages them to take action!
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Step 4: Setting Your Budget and Bids
At this point, your ad is now just one step away from launching which is setting the budget and bids for your campaign.
It’s the most important part because this will make your ad visible to the audience without overspending on your advertising campaign. Here is how you set your budgets and bids:
1. Choose Your Budget
Before running the ad campaign, it’s important to decide the daily or overall marketing budget you’re willing to spend for the entire campaign. This is a common mistake many advertisers make.
They often run Facebook ad campaigns without a clear budget or cost-per-click (CPC) in mind and that drains their whole marketing budget quickly.
For example, if you have decided that you will spend $10 a day for the next 2 weeks on Facebook ads, your ad will run each day and automatically stop once it reaches the $10 limit.
2. Set Your Bids
As I said before, Facebook ads are cheaper than Google. That means you can show your ads more frequently by spending less on bids. However, that doesn’t mean it’s free.
On Facebook ads, cost-per-click (CPC) bids can range from $0.50 – $2.00 or more. It all depends on your location, competition and audience selection.
But on Google, the average cost-per-click (CPC) for self-storage keywords can range from $2 to $10, or even higher in competitive markets. Already see the difference?
There are two ways to set the bid. You can either ask Facebook to automatically set the bid (not preferable) or set the manual bidding to have full control of ad spend based on the performance of your ad. You can keep adjusting it until you start getting fruitful results.
3. Select Your Bid Strategy
The next step is to select the best bid strategy that matches your campaign targets. Facebook offers various strategies depending on what you aim to achieve.
For example, if your goal is to maximize conversions, you can select the “Lowest Cost” strategy that focuses on getting the most actions for your budget without manually setting the bid. But if you want more control and want to set bids manually, you can either select Bid Cap or Cost Cap.
Once you’ve set your budget and bids, your ads can go live, and you can start monitoring their performance.
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Step 5: Analyzing and Optimizing Your Campaigns
Once you make your Facebook Ads live and running. It’s now time to observe the performance of your ads regularly and make adjustments to get the best results for your budget.
But how can you do it? Well, Facebook has designed Facebook Pixel for advanced users to track live ad performance.
Here are several important factors to keep in mind:
1. Setting Up Meta Pixel
As I mentioned earlier, setting up Facebook Pixel is essential for advanced tracking. All you have to do is go to Event Manager from your Facebook Ad account and then click on Pixels.
Follow the steps to create a new Pixel. Finally, copy and paste the Pixel code to the header section of your website. Once you add the code, you can start tracking key events like purchases, form submissions, or even page views to see how users are interacting with your ad.
2. Key Metrics to Monitor
Once you set up the tracking code and add it to your website, your real work starts. Now you will have to monitor the important metrics to see what’s working and what still needs improvement. Here are the key metrics to monitor:
1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR is determined by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of times the ad was shown. If your ad is getting high CTR that means your ad is going in the right direction.
However, if your CTR is low, this indicates that your ad needs don’t fulfil the audience requirement and it needs improvement. CTR above 1% is typically considered good, while a CTR below 0.5% is a signal that you need to improve your ad as it might be wasting your budget.
2. Conversion Rate
The conversion rate represents the percentage of individuals who actually bought your services by taking action on your ad.
Your CTR might be high but what if your conversion rate is low? This indicates that people are clicking on your ad but your ad targeting, landing page, or offer needs improvement.
3. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
CPA provides insight into your overall spending to get a single customer or lead. It’s normally calculated by dividing the total ad spend by the number of conversions (sales, sign-ups, etc.).
4. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) tells how much earnings are produced for every dollar allocated to advertising. It’s calculated as total revenue divided by ad spend.
For example, If you’re spending $200 on ads and earning $400 in return. Your ROAS will be 2x more likely. It means that you make $2 for every dollar spent on ads. However, if you spent $200 and got only $100 or less in sales that means your campaign is in loss. This indicates that your campaign needs adjustment to make it profitable.
3. A/B Testing
A/B testing plays a very important element in optimizing your ad campaign. You can easily find out the best elements that perform well by comparing different ad copies.
It can be an image, call-to-action buttons or ad copy. If you want to take your ad performance to the next level, the key is to change one element at a time and run an ad for a specific duration to overview its effectiveness on performance.
It can be negative or positive. You can simply check this by checking click-through rate (CTR), cost per acquisition (CPA), and conversion rate.
Remember, A/B testing is not a one-time job. It requires dedication and ongoing commitment to improvement. Think of it as a strategy to outsmart your opponent and prepare for the next round of competition.
Conclusion
Advertising on Facebook can be a turning point for self-storage businesses who want to expand their business. While Facebook is not as big as social media giant Google, it can surely provide better conversions than Google by targeting options and various ad formats.
You can easily reach potential customers who may not be actively searching for storage solutions but are in need of them due to life events like moving or downsizing.
Your Ad success depends on setting clear campaign goals, defining the right target audience, choosing effective ad formats, managing budgets wisely, and continuously optimizing campaigns based on performance data using Meta Pixel.
You can take these strategies to To scale your self-storage business to greater success.