A new article on Martech.org reports that Storage Asset Management (SAM) succeeds by marketing its third-party storage owners and relies heavily on customer reviews, which get managed through Reputation.
Pennsylvania-based Storage Asset Management, known as SAM, has an effective marketing strategy. Unusually, however, the company isn't really striving to market itself. Melissa Stiles is VP of marketing and sales at SAM:
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"We are actually guilty of not doing a great job of marketing ourselves. All of our growth has been from word-of-mouth and referrals. We don't actively market ourselves as best we could."
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SAM's growth has been quite tangible, from launching with 22 management contracts in 2010, to running almost 350 contracts today. What SAM does is manage storage facilities for third-party owners (SAM owns none of them).
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"We do everything, from operations and marketing to accounting, for a facility owner. Basically, everything but file their income taxes. I think we've been using Reputation for about five years. We've always been early adopters in the marketing realm, like search, etc. We were one of the first companies to be able to rent a unit online, so we identified quickly that reviews were going to become important. We looked for a company which could help us with a reputation management program, and Reputation met that need for us."
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Reviews are important for more than just SEO ranking:
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"We know that about 50% of our customers have never used storage before," said Stiles, "so people want to read the reviews before they choose their unit. When I first got in the industry, there was a ton of facilities named 'AAA self-storage,' because that would put you first in the phone book; now it's the town and self-storage, because that helps you with your SEO online."
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SAM handles not only reputation management through Reputation but also builds websites and helps with print marketing and signage. The Reputation platform handles social media, with messages from all feeds arriving in one in-box:
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"We'll build a user-friendly website that allows you to completely do your rental online, we'll do SEO strategies -- on-page and off-page, citation building, listings, etc. -- social media, definitely Facebook, Instagram in some cases as well. AdWords and paid media if necessary. That's been a life-saver for my social team. They don't have to go across each Facebook page. Google [My Business] released its messaging feature [for desktop] a few months ago, and we're amazed by the amount of people that use it, and Google's app isn't great. When you're managing this many pages, you see a notification and then have to figure out which page it came into. Reputation's tool has been great at pulling that all together. We can see the metrics behind it too -- how long was our response time, are we getting more customer service messages or sales, etc."
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