Unwired Logic: Can you start with a little overview of your background? What do you do? Who are you? A little self-introduction for the readers.
StorIQ: I'm the founder of StorIQ. At StorIQ, we have a marketing, SEO, and Google Ads service, and we also have our own software that helps automate a lot of the SEO and Google Ads management tasks. My background originally was in SEO and ad management. I started working for a bunch of agencies in New York for like 10 or 15 years, and then eventually started doing my own consulting and then started my own marketing agency about four years ago. Then StorIQ came about just about two and a half years ago. When I was running the marketing agency, we started working with some storage facilities, and now we 100% specialize in self-storage.
Unwired Logic: You own and operate storage and also have a marketing agency for self-storage. What did one teach you for the other?
StorIQ: I started by doing the marketing, which is a huge part of the storage business, of being able to effectively acquire customers and increase occupancy, so that helped quite a bit.
The reason I got into storage, first, I was looking at it as an investment for myself. Before I was able to get my first facility, I started taking on some clients and got some good experience working with people. Then, once you get your own facilities, you see more of the operational side of everything, so dealing with issues. We had a break-in at one of the facilities, so that wasn't something I had to deal with until I was on the other side of it.
Then, kind of just getting a better feel for how the whole business model works and how marketing and the business side and everything ties together. The two have been pretty helpful. I have three facilities now, three small ones in the US.
Unwired Logic:Have you made any marketing mistakes in your own facilities that you now see other operators make frequently?
StorIQ: I think probably the biggest mistakes that I see are a "set it and forget it" kind of mindset in self-storage. I think some of that is just trying to minimize cost, but some of it's the actual vendors in the industry as well. There's kind of a combination of reasons why that happens, where you get the first month, you get a lot of marketing activity, and then after that, it kind of goes on autopilot mode.
Usually, what happens is that eventually, inevitably, performance goes down, and everyone's scrambling and trying to figure out why. So I think one of the key things we've done, and one of the reasons we're building the software, is that the software can be way more active and make more changes than any person or team can. Especially in an agency business model, where a lot of times it's hard for agencies to stay very active on your account. That's where our AI platform and software are really coming into play. Our team uses it right now. We're not selling it as a standalone thing for other operators yet, but when you work with us, our team uses it. It allows us to be way more active than we could be because we have software monitoring while still following our framework and system.
I think most operators know marketing is important now, but because SEO and Google Ads seem really technical, and they are different, it's hard for a lot of storage operators to grasp what actually needs to be done. It's also hard to vet who actually knows how to do those things. Then you end up hiring a company that you thought might be good, and they sort of start coasting. That's where I see things start to fall apart quickly. That's probably the biggest thing. Budget would maybe be the second thing. If you're going to run ads in particular, just make sure you have enough budget. "Enough" definitely depends on your market. If you don't have at least $500 in ad spend per month, I probably wouldn't even run ads. I would look at other tactics.
With advertising, I think the mindset is very important too. If you go into advertising thinking, "Okay, I'm going to try it for a month, and hopefully I get a 10x ROI," it just doesn't work that way. Almost nothing works that way when you think about it. You don't just turn something on for a few weeks, and all of a sudden, you're making a ton of money, and it's working really well. Ads are a process that takes months and months of effort to get your ads to be profitable. That's true for all businesses, too, not just storage. There are very few businesses where you just turn ads on, and immediately everything is firing on all cylinders.
So that's another mistake I see: not having the right mindset going into it, because then you have a quick trigger to just shut everything down when you don't see this massive ROI.
Unwired Logic: Say I am an operator with a facility sitting at around 70% occupancy, and have a marketing budget of around $2,000 per month. Where should that money go first, and why?
StorIQ: At 70%, you're still in lease-up mode. Everyone has a different target nowadays. Some people say 85%, some people say 90%, but essentially, you want to get to that point. You want to try to fill it up as fast as you can. I'd be looking at doing SEO. There are a couple of components of SEO, like local SEO to get into the top three of Google Maps, and then what I call traditional SEO. There are also those organic listings underneath the map, so you could essentially show up twice just with SEO. You want to allocate a portion of your budget there. SEO is probably going to cost, depending on the market, as low as $400 and as high as $1,000 per facility. That can vary by country, too, but generally, you want to allocate some of your budget there.
The rest of it I would put toward ads. In the US, we mostly focus on Google Ads. In European countries and the UK, sometimes Meta ads can actually work as well. We haven't had as much success with Meta ads in the US, but those are your main options. On Google, there are a couple of types of campaigns we like to run. With the remaining money, maybe $1,500 or $1,000, we would set up a regular search campaign, which targets Google and is the traditional pay-per-click ad. There's a newer ad called Local Service Ads that Google also offers. We're having pretty good results with that, so we always allocate part of the ad budget to it. You actually pay for phone calls instead of paying per click. Google charges you every time they send you a phone call. That's only available right now in the US, so that's a tactic we favor there. Those are probably the main ways we would allocate the budget. Really, the goal at that point is trying to get to 85% or 90% as quickly as we can.
Unwired Logic: In terms of marketing, what are the differences between a lease-up and a stabilized facility? What changes in the marketing between those two?
StorIQ: I think one is the budget. You want to be more aggressive and spend more aggressively when you're leasing up. When you're stabilized, that's the time when you can go more into maintenance mode, where you're just trying to maintain your SEO. Maybe you could throttle your ads down. In some markets, you may not need ads at all.
What I find is that it depends on facility size. If you have a 100-unit facility, you probably can stay full just with SEO once you're stabilized. If you have a 1,000-unit facility, you're probably always running ads because of how many people are moving out every month. That would be the other variable we would look at. When stabilized, we're looking at maintaining. During lease-up, we're really looking at being aggressive to get new customers, which does require more ad spend.
The only other factor we look at when stabilized is whether you're going to be aggressive with your revenue management and start doing existing customer rate increases. If you're really pushing that side, a lot of times you still need to be pretty aggressive with marketing. What we see is that the first year or two is leasing up. Then the next year is typically focused on revenue management, where a lot of people take their foot off the gas on marketing, occupancy drops to 78% again, versus staying aggressive, pushing rates, and then really being stabilized after that.
Stabilized gets interesting, too. Some people look at it just in terms of occupancy. Others look at it as when revenue is maximized. That's where there's some debate on the right approach, but we'd like to stay pretty aggressive if people are going to be raising customer rates. Generally, you can be a little less aggressive when you're stabilized and take your foot off the gas a little bit to conserve some of that money. Lease-up is not the time to do that. Sometimes we see the mistake where people get to 50% occupancy and start taking their foot off the gas, when really you want to keep pushing until you hit whatever your target is. Then that's the time to conserve some of the cost.
Unwired Logic: Many operators can't tell what exactly a move-in costs for them. When you're designing a marketing strategy for an operator, what are three KPIs you want them to know, and how would they find them?
StorIQ: So the main thing with marketing is move-in volume. There are a lot of factors. Marketing is one factor, but your rates are a factor, your competitors are a factor, and market dynamics are a factor. Sometimes we only look at marketing, but usually a lot of these metrics are influenced by a bunch of things in your operations, and you really need to dial all of those in.
Cost per move-in is a very important metric. It is hard to calculate automatically because all your cost data is in different places. You have your Google Ads account, but then you're paying people and team members, which might be in QuickBooks or another accounting software, and then your actual move-in data is in your facility management software. So you need a way of combining all of those. We have a couple of different ways we do that because we integrate with pretty much all the main FMS software, so we can pull a lot of that data into one place and do those calculations.
Cost per move-in can be hard to calculate for another reason, too. Even with online rentals becoming more popular, in the US, we see around 35% as a pretty good number for online rentals versus offline, like a phone call or an in-store visit. That still means the majority of your move-ins are not coming through online rentals. That means you need a way of tracking phone calls and knowing what marketing source drove the phone call. Then the next step is knowing which of those phone calls converted into a paying customer. That closes the loop and gets you the true move-in numbers.
A lot of operators don't have good call tracking because FMS software doesn't really offer that. That's a key piece if you really want to know your cost per move-in. Otherwise, you just have cost per online rental, which is maybe 30% of your data, maybe 40% in some markets, and still only 20% in others.
The other thing I see is that there are two sides to customer acquisition. There's cost per move-in, which is the one everybody focuses on, but then there's customer lifetime value, which not as many people think about. The reason we really started looking at that is that if you increase the customer's lifetime value through ancillary revenue, tenant protection, different upsells, value pricing on your website, or keeping tenants longer, there are a lot of ways you can increase what a tenant is worth. A lot of times, you don't even need to lower your cost per move-in. Because now the customer is worth more, your ROI is better, and your cost per move-in becomes sustainable.
With the way ad platforms work, ad prices go up every year. Sometimes there's a floor to how low you can get your cost per move-in. If you just fixate on that, you're only looking at one side of the equation. If you can increase what a customer is worth, now it's profitable at the same cost per move-in.
I think that's one of the biggest things I don't see a lot of people looking at. There's a lot of focus on cost per move-in, which is good. You definitely want to focus on that, but in some markets, there are more and more people running ads, and competitors are getting more sophisticated. There is a floor to how low cost per move-in can go. Lifetime value is the other side of it, where there isn't necessarily a ceiling. You can use a lot of different methods to really increase that.
Those are probably the three things we look at most when we're evaluating campaigns.
Unwired Logic: For an operator who has never thought about it, or who's never heard of it, what is the attribution gap?
StorIQ: There are a couple of parts to the attribution gap and the issue that we see. One is making sure you can track your website. At a basic level, just tracking analytics on your website using Google Analytics or any of the free analytics tools will tell you how many people are going to your website and how they found it.
Then the customization starts. Out of the box, you just get website traffic and some basic data, but you need to tag and set up events and different tracking methods for your online rental process. If you're able to take payments, you definitely want to track that process and be able to track online payments. If you do lead generation forms like reservations, you want to make sure you're tracking those form submissions so you know how many leads are coming in and what source they're coming from. That can all be done through Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager for the most part. That's one side of it: what's happening on the website.
The second side is the call side. That's another side that a lot of operators don't look at. Once you have your website tracked and all the leads are tracked there, you need a method of tracking calls.Some systems track calls, but they don't tell you the source of the call. You may get a list of all your callers, but you don't know, "Did that one come from my ads? Did that one come from SEO? Did that person just drive by the facility and call?” So you need attribution on the calls as well for the sources. That's what gives you the full picture.
Ideally, you have a CRM or your facility management software where all the lead information gets stored. Then the other piece is that you're getting leads from all these sources, and you need to make sure there's a way to follow up and track what's happening with those leads. Are they closing? Are they progressing? Some facility management software has a CRM built in, but that's the other piece of attribution. Now you have your website tracked, online rentals, lead reservations, your calls tracked, and all the leads going into one place where you can track their progression.
If you're going to invest in marketing, investing in attribution is really worth it. I think sometimes it's underinvested, or people want to go right to marketing and ad spend, but without that data, you're not going to know what's working, and you're not even going to be able to improve what's actually happening without it.
Unwired Logic: When an operator says, "The phone is ringing, so my ads are working," what is wrong with their logic?
StorIQ: There are a couple of things. Your phone could be ringing for another reason. It might have nothing to do with your ads. I see that quite a bit. Sometimes you launch an ad, and we just assume every call is coming from the ads, but it's not. Attribution is really important because then you can identify why the phone is ringing. Is it from the ads? Is it from SEO? Is it from something else unrelated? That goes back to the tracking.
One of the reasons we like the pay-per-call ad is that Google does most of the work to track it because they're selling you phone calls. They record them all, and you get a list of every single call. So you can identify exactly who's calling from those ads without much attribution work. That's one ad where you can tell pretty quickly that the phone's ringing and who's calling.
In general, if you have the tracking in place, when phone calls start increasing or decreasing, you can identify why. Is it from a certain source? Maybe your SEO completely dropped off, and that's why your calls are down. Maybe it has nothing to do with that. The data and attribution really give you a lot of the answers.
Unwired Logic: What is a piece of common self-storage marketing advice that you personally think is just wrong?
StorIQ: I would say there are a couple of things. One piece of advice is this concept that SEO is done once. You optimize your website, update your Google Business Profile, and now you're done and don't have to do anything. I see that floated out there quite a bit. Sometimes that's from providers selling a certain solution, and they don't really do active SEO, so they build that into how they sell their solution. There are a lot of reasons why that advice is out there.
Really, SEO requires you to be pretty active. It's something you should be working on monthly, especially if you're in a competitive market. If you're in a market with no competition, then you really don't need to do much. Take this advice when you need it. But nowadays, there aren't many markets like that anymore where you can do nothing and still get customers.
With SEO, you want to be consistent. It's consistency over time that usually leads to better SEO results rather than a one-time effort where you're "optimized" or "done." That just doesn't exist. Even with ads, to a degree. Ads are a little faster because you turn them on and immediately get traffic, but there's still a consistency and ramp-up period to get them to peak performance and become really efficient. I think that's something a lot of people don't talk about or don't really focus on.
With AI tools now, you can ask them what to do for SEO. The problem is they'll give you a huge list of things, and you still need to go in and prioritize. With SEO, it's easy to do busy work that doesn't actually move the needle. So there's a balance there. If you're not doing anything monthly for your SEO, that would be the first thing I'd look at. What are a few things you could do each month, even if they're small, to chip away at it?
Unwired Logic: Can you give one or two examples of what people could be doing every month for SEO?
StorIQ: Yeah. The main things I would look at are keeping your Google Business Profile up to date to help with local SEO. That includes getting reviews by texting, emailing, or talking to your customers and asking them for reviews. There is automation to help with that, but actually having someone responsible for it and doing more than just automation is really important. Responding to reviews is important. There's also a posting feature on Google Business Profile. It's kind of like a social media post. It's not super impactful, but it's something you can do to make sure your profile stays active. I'd also recommend consistently adding media like photos and videos to your Google Business Profile. A lot of people do a one-time push, but really, you should do it at least a few times per quarter.
Then you have citations, which are directory profiles. The more consistent your business information is across those directories, the more it helps your map rankings. Our platform has a feature that syncs all that information. You connect your Google Business Profile, and it syncs to around 70 different directories. Anytime you update your Google Business Profile, all those directories update automatically.
The other approach is to do it once manually or use a service that claims your listings. That works if you have a couple of locations. If you have 10, 20, 30, or 40 facilities, syncing is nice because it keeps everything 100% accurate by pulling from your Google Business Profile. There is a monthly cost, though, so for some people, doing it once is enough.
Then you get to your website. Make updates to your website, particularly your facility pages. The way to think about it is that when someone is searching, they don't navigate your website and visit five pages. Typically, they land directly on the facility page that's near them. So you need to think about whether that page has all the information they need to convert. That includes your units, inventory, and, depending on the country you're in, pricing. I like displaying pricing, although I know some countries use quote requests instead. Embed your reviews on that page so customers don't have to go back to Google to find them. You can also add information about the types of storage you offer and an FAQ.
The other SEO item we look at consistently is the title tag and meta description. It's basically ad copy for SEO. It shows up directly on Google in your organic listing. Many people set it once and never look at it again, but just like ad copy, you want to test changes. The goal is to get more people to click on your listing, even if your rankings don't change. Everybody focuses on rankings, but rankings are kind of meaningless. What really matters is how many people click when they see your listing. That's where the copy is very important, and it rarely gets updated after the first month. That's another thing I'd look at, if not monthly, then at least quarterly.
Unwired Logic: You earlier mentioned AI in storage and marketing. Where exactly can AI shift the needle in marketing, and what is just buzzwords and noise in your opinion?
StorIQ: I think the biggest things we're doing with AI are around automating tedious tasks. One example we just built into our platform that's going live is: On Google Ads, there's a thing called negative keywords, which are the opposite of keywords. Keywords tell Google what you want to show up for. For example, you would put in "storage near me," and Google will show your ad when that's searched.
A negative keyword is the opposite. It's the words that you don't want your ads to show for. So if you don't have boat storage, you would want the word "boat" as a negative keyword so Google doesn't show your ad for something you don't offer.
Our tool uses AI to check your search terms report every day, which shows the words people are typing in. We automatically flag the ones that should be blocked, and the next layer we just added can actually go into the account and add them for you. So instead of you having to click anything, it's monitoring, analyzing, and updating your account automatically.
That's really where we're going with a lot of the AI tools. You can already use AI to ask questions and get insights, but actually having AI implement those recommendations is the big push we're trying to make. It's not that hard to get analysis and advice now, but getting the execution done is where you save the most time and get better results.
What we're doing with ads is adding custom data to give Google better targeting signals. One example is conversion tracking, making sure online rentals, leads, calls, and move-ins that are confirmed over the phone are all being sent into your ad account. That's something you can't really ask AI to do yet. At some point, you probably will be able to, but right now, AI can give you the commodity stuff like ad copy and campaign structure. It doesn't give you the custom tracking, which is really what improves the ads. Google and Facebook, as well, do a lot of the targeting automatically. They just need the right signals to identify the right people.
A lot of people spend a lot of time working with Claude to come up with the best ad copy. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter that much. What really matters is the data you're feeding the ad platforms, and that requires analytics and tracking that AI can't really do out of the box yet. You need to have that configured and customized.
Unwired Logic: What changes are coming in the next two years that operators should start getting ahead of right now?
StorIQ: I think there are a few things. Local Service Ads just rolled out across every U.S. state last year. If you're in the U.S., I would start exploring those. If you're in other countries, they're probably coming soon, so I'd stay up to date on when they're available because they're easy to turn on and evaluate pretty quickly.
There's also a lot of talk about AI visibility, getting your storage facility to rank highly on ChatGPT and Claude when people ask for recommendations. That's an interesting one. As of today, it's way overblown. That doesn't mean in two months, six months, or eight months it won't become important. The tricky part is figuring out when storage customers will really start using those platforms.
Right now, based on the data we have, most operators see only a few visits per month from AI platforms, compared to thousands from SEO and other channels. I'm a big believer in taking part of your marketing budget and allocating some of it toward future opportunities. AI visibility will become more important. The question is when, and how important it will be. No one really knows how quickly it will grow or whether it will become more important than Google or eventually reach a ceiling.
You don't need to do much differently in self-storage to show up in AI search results. If you're already ranking highly on Google and the major search engines, that usually translates because AI platforms still rely on many of Google's signals when referencing nearby businesses. In other industries, especially B2B and non-local businesses, there's more you need to do. But for storage, it's still fairly straightforward.
The one difference is reviews. Getting reviews on platforms besides Google is becoming more important because some AI tools reference reviews from multiple sites, like Yelp and others. Diversifying your reviews can help. The actual text people write in reviews is also becoming more important. If five customers say you have the best prices, AI tools may start listing you as the best-priced facility because they're pulling that information directly from customer reviews. That's difficult to influence because you have to guide people when asking for reviews, or it has to happen naturally over time.
Most of the hype right now is definitely around AI visibility. At the same time, I find that most operators still aren't doing enough with their SEO. It's good to think about AI, but if you don't have the basics in place yet, do those first. Then start investing in AI search and the tactics that will help you get ahead of it. The way I frame it is this: don't expect an ROI from AI search today. If you're allocating budget toward AI visibility, you're not supposed to see an immediate return. The goal is to get ahead of the curve so that when it becomes important, you're already established while everyone else is catching up. You're not investing to get a 5x or 10x return right now. You're investing, so you're ahead when the tipping point arrives. I don't know exactly when that's going to happen, and I don't think anyone does.
Right now, it's still not generating much traffic. We have started to see a few rentals coming from AI platforms. For example, one operator got one online rental last month and one two months before that. It's still a very small number, but we're starting to see some consistency. I expect that to change over the next 12 months, but we'll see.
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