3 Online Marketing Tips which help you grow today! | Webinar 2

In this webinar, Ivo, our online marketing expert, will give you three tips which you

can use to grow your business with today!

Online Marketing Webinar | By Ivo Wouters

Transcription

Good morning everyone and thank you for joining this webinar webinar bout online marketing in self storage! I will shortly introduce the concept of online marketing and give you three tips which can help you grow today.

Agenda

In the first part of this 32-minute webinar, I will introduce myself and Hi-Tech shortly. In the second part, which will take about 20 minutes, I will introduce online marketing and while focussing on three key areas: SEO, SEA and conversion.The third part is where I might sell you something, so be aware! This will take about 1/2 minutes. In the last 10 minutes of this webinar there is room for questions, so if one pops up during the webinar, please write it in the comments and I will try to answer all of your questions at the end.

Who am I?

So, you might be wondering, who is this guy telling me about online marketing? I am Ivo Wouters, the business development and Marketing consultant of Hi-Tech. As you might have noticed, I am from the Netherlands, where our headquarters is based.

My experience in marketing, and online marketing specifically, comes from three different sources. Firstly I completed my Masters in Marketing at the VU University in Amsterdam.

Second, before joining Hi-Tech, I was an entrepreneur running my own online business for about 5 years. This is where I gained a lot of practical online marketing knowledge and skills.

I tested a lot of SEO, SEA and conversion based concepts. I now know what works and what doesn’t. During this period I also worked as a consultant for several businesses in various markets, helping them with online marketing.

Who is Hi-Tech?

Some of you are existing clients of ours, some of you heard about us from someone and some of you might have received an e-mail invitation to this webinar. I thought it would be a good idea to explain shortly just who we are and what we do. Hi-Tech has been a supplier to the European self-storage industry for the last 20 years. We started out as a software company, grew to an IT company, and now we’re also a consultancy company.

Within the area of IT we write our own software and we offer private cloud environments for companies of all sizes. For some companies we are also their outsourced IT department, so you can consider us as the one-stop-shop for IT in the self-storage industry.

The consultancy side of our business developed from the fact that our team has about 60 years of combined experience in European self-storage. As we worked with our existing clients on various projects. We could see that we were actually quite unique in that regard.

We were able to use our practical knowledge of self-storage so we could help our clients with a second opinion or a new perspective on things. They valued our help because we really understand the industry. That’s how the consultancy side of the business start off.

We of course offer advice on IT but we also have 2 marketing consultants who have conducted research on the European self-storage market, Christel and Myself.

In addition, we also consult on business strategy and we have certified project managers that can be hired in for both IT projects and business projects.

Introduction to Online Marketing

Now, let’s start with introducing online marketing. This webinar focusses on the self-storage industry, this means I will include practical examples from this industry to clarify concepts.

Online marketing within the self-storage industry is a few years behind on most of the other markets. Designs of most websites could be better because they do not really help visitors to reaching theirs goals. This is partly because of low functionality and partly because some design elements miss or are not highlighted correctly.

Online is a huge opportunity for self-storage operators who are not using this channel to its full potential, especially because the European consumer is used to buying products and services online. There are countries where almost 90% or more of its inhabitant do have an internet connection and 70% buys products or services online. This is an opportunity which is relatively easy to utilise for self-storage operators.

The first part of online marketing is Search Engine Optimisation, SEO in short. SEO is generating quality content for your potential customers which has the side benefit of ranking high in search engines

The second part of online marketing is Search Engine Advertising, SEA in short. SEA is paying for clicks on advertisements or banners to attract visitors to your website.

Lastly, conversion. Conversion is all about converting a visitor of your website into a customer.

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation

In the following part I will elaborate the concept of SEO further.

Define your goals

The first step of utilising SEO to its full potential is to set clear goals. I worked with a lot of people who did SEO just to increase visitors, but this is not the right way. A good SEO strategy is about creating high quality content which is relevant to your target audience. So, a possibility is to write a page about unit sizes. On this page you can explain how much can be stored in a certain size room or locker. This might help the customer in his/her decision making process and possibly increases the chance of you converting this website visitor into a customer.

Writing an page about this, will eventually help you ranking higher into the search engines which has the benefit of you attracting more visitors. This is a result of you writing quality content, therefore the content quality should be your goal and increasing visitor numbers is considered as a positive side effect. It is all about helping your visitor with a problem or question.

Select keywords

After defining your goal, it is important to select which keywords you want to target. Since self-storage is location bound, it is wise to use keywords which imply your location. For example, targeting self-storage as a keyword is probably not the best thing to do because you will not be the only one. Also, the chance that the searcher is near your site is limited and therefore you will probably not be relevant. It is far more interesting to target a keyword like “self-storage in Berlin” or :furniture storage in Charlottenburg”. Charlottenburg is a part of Berlin so therefore even more specific to your customer.

Target locally

Targeting local keywords also helps you focussing on your target audience. In your content, you should find a balance between steering towards conversion and helping your visitor with their problem. It is most likely that someone who visits your website is there because he or she needs to store their belongings for a certain period for whatever reason. This contains a lot of opportunities, because you can write about what can be stored in your facility and for which occasions they need storage. If you have separate pages for each instance, you can help your customer solving their particular problem while attracting them via search engines.

This brings us to my first tip of the day. You should create a page named self-storage (your city) and write a story about it. If you are not in an English speaking country, you can of course use the translation of self-storage into your language because that will be more relevant to your target audience. My advise is to write about 600 to 1200 words about this and include images if needed. In my blog about online marketing you can find some additional tips about some technical aspects of the content. I will send the link after the webinar.

SEA - Search Engine Advertising

Now, lets talk about SEA. As I told you, SEA is about paying for a click. In this webinar, we will focus on Google Adwords only, because Google is the most used search engine and this is the largest opportunity for now. About 80% of the online searches are done in Google.

In the table you can see the average searches per month for certain keywords related to self-storage. As you can see, a lot of broad and specific keywords have vast amounts of search volume.

London is one of the cities were self-storage is developed the most in Europe, this can be seen in the search volume for storage London. However, Hamburg is a way smaller city with far less self-storage facilities and lagerraum Hamburg also has about 590 searches a month. Most likely these people are looking for storage space or are investigating what the opportunities for them are, so if you have a self-storage facility in Hamburg, all of these searchers are interesting.

These keywords can be targeted in two ways, both SEO and SEA. SEA is relatively easy because you set up a campaign and pay for the clicks. In addition, advertisements are presented first on the page and below the advertisement organic results are presented.

A large benefit of using SEA is that you can measure results immediately, so you can find out whether your investment is worth the money or not. This is partly true for SEO, however, this is a bit harder to measure and has a delay since your adjustments are not delivering results immediately.

This brings me to my second tip of today! 1. I advise you all to create a Google Adwords campaign targeting the area of a store you are trying to promote. You can adjust your target area in the first step of creating an Adwords campaign. Select the city you are located or where your store is located and continue.

2. Google Adwords will ask you for keywords, fill in specific keywords like “self-storage Vienna” for example. You can also include keywords like “furniture storage Vienna”, ”lagerraum Vienna" or any other related keyword.

3. Your third step is creating a catchy advertisement which activates people to click on it. Here you can see an Example of MyPlace for one of their stores in Vienna. They linked their location to the advertisement so people can navigate directly to the store. If you click on the advertisement you can immediately book a storage room or locker which suits your needs.

4. The fourth step is setting a budget. Especially for locally targeted campaigns, the chance of very high costs is limited because the total potential traffic is not enormous. Therefore, you are probably covered by starting of with a budget of 10 euro’s a day per store. If you have more stores, I would advise you to start with one or a few stores so you can gain experience with Google Adwords, later on you can expand your campaigns and take your learnings with you. If you have just one or two stores, you can start campaigns for both of them and test what works best in you area.

Now you are good to go, you can start the campaign!

It is very important to monitor your campaigns to see if you achieve desired results. If not, you have the ability to adjust keywords, advertisements, budgets or targeting so you will reach your goals. The image shows the Plan, do, check act cycle. This is very applicable for online marketing, since it is all about measure results and adjusting your actions to be more efficient and effective. After you launched a campaign (do in the cycle) you will check the results and act on the outcomes, starting a new cycle.

Conversion

So, lets assume you created a few pages with high quality content and you launched a few Adwords campaigns. Your visitor numbers increased, but how does your conversion performs?

Before starting, you must define what a conversion is for you. What is your goal a visitor does on you website? It can be various things like: subscribing to a newsletter, calling you, emailing you, asking for a quotation or even an online booking. Before you start randomly attracting visitors, you must know what you want them to do. When you have done this, you can attract as much visitors as possible!

You should consider your website as central touchpoint between you and the customer. People can visit your website 24/7 whenever they feel like they want to. You do not even need to be there!

Leading your visitors towards your desired conversion is key. You should present your visitors with what you want them to do, and if your content supports this it is most likely you will attract the visitors who are searching for you offer.

Conversion can be activated by a call to action. People must know what you want them to do, otherwise they will leave your website not knowing what you could do for them. Now I will show you some examples of how you should and shouldn’t lead customers towards conversion.

These two homepages are from car rental companies. I decided to use these instead of self-storage websites because the car rental market is a bit more advanced in online marketing.

The Bo-Rent website is an example of a very busy website without visitors knowing what they can do. It is most likely they want you to click “bestelbus zoeken” however, the button is not really popping out.

The Hertz website looks way better, but they included so many yellow buttons that none in particular is highlighted and the visitor probably is not sure which one they should click.

This is the Sixt website and in my opinion they are doing a good job. They are focussed on renting out cars and you can do that immediately on the homepage. It is clear they want you to click on the arrow, because this is the only solid orange button on the whole page. It pops out.

After you filled out some information, you will arrive at a page like this. And here Sixt did something really interesting, namely making one button solid orange and one button white with orange lettering. They probably prefer people who pay immediately, so this button is highlighted the most. The other one is fine too, but les preferred so is less visible.

If you continue the booking process, they keep highlighting just one button towards completing the conversion. They lead the visitor the way by highlighting the path towards conversion.

You probably already concluded this, but tip 3 is: highlight the path towards conversion by using a distinct color for the buttons. For example, if your website is blue you can try using a green or orange button. Make sure you choose the color carefully so the design still looks good while highlighting the desired direction.

Our Online Marketing Offer

Now, the moment where you have all been waiting for! The part where I might sell you something. I’ll keep it short.

Website analysis: as Hi-tech, we can help you with your online marketing. The first possibility is a thorough scan of your website. With this scan we investigate your whole website on SEO, Conversion and partially on the technical side. We will write a report which you can use to optimise your website on these aspects. In the report we will highlight your biggest opportunities and threats.

Google Adwords: the second service we can help you with, is your Google Adwords campaigns. We can do this complete for you, from keyword research till optimising the advertisements we made. Together we can decide on what is your conversion and steer towards it.

As a variation on this service, we can also coach you while setting up your Google Adwords advertisements. If you prefer doing online marketing yourself, this is the way we can help you speed up your learning cycle.

Custom Project: lastly, we also do project based consultancy. If you want us to review your current online marketing setup, assist you with your Google Adwords, help you with branding or another marketing related topic. Just get in touch with us and we can define a project together. Our experience with various types of projects in combination with our knowledge of self-storage helps us by generating innovatie ideas beneficial to your company.

**If you are interesting in the questions, please start the video at 18:57**

If you want our help with your GDPR compliance, feel free to contact me:

E-mail: iwouters@hitechsoftware.eu

Or call us: +31 (0)348 415 295