Marketing Alphabet Soup

by Jennifer Jones, JKJ Marketing

 

When it comes to marketing, it can sometimes feel as if you are throwing money into a black hole with no idea what any of it means, where it’s going or what kind of return you’re going to get. So here is the quick and dirty of what all of those acronyms mean and how it affects your business.

SEO

  • Search engine optimization is the key to ranking in search. There are many strategies out there as to how to raise your rank and what is realistic. It boils down to the specific need for each facility, but this must be a long-term strategy as it takes time to move this needle and there are a lot of moving parts and types of optimizations that can help a website with SEO. The different types of SEO are local SEO, on-page optimization, off-page optimization and technical SEO; all of these are important for a successful SEO campaign, and depending on your website, you may need to focus on one more than others.

  •  Local SEO: When a potential customer searches for “self storage near me,” you want to make sure your location pops up at the top of the local map, and this is where local SEO comes into play. Local SEO consists of making sure Google knows about your business, services and location through Google My Business so it can connect you to potential customers in your area.

  • On-page optimization: Having a good website with correct page names, image alt text, keyword research, updating your content (a keyword-based blog helps with this), not having duplicate content and overall schema is key to improving your ranking. Remember that not all keywords are created equal. You need to know which ones will be effective for your business.

  • Off-page optimization: Getting backlinks from websites that are relevant to your business is the core of off-page optimization and one of the most vital parts of SEO since this is how Google knows if a website is relevant. The key to this is the relevance of the website to your business and industry as well as the way they are linking to you (“follow” or “nofollow”). There are many different strategies for getting backlinks to your website and many of these involve creating content.

  • Technical optimization: Technical optimization consists of having clean code on your website and making sure it is setup correctly so Google can understand the code, determine what you are serving to your visitors, and understand how it all links together. This includes header structure, proper redirect implementations, internal linking, schema and canonicalizations, among many other things.

PPC

If your facility is new to the area or your SEO is not where it needs to be, PPC (pay per click) campaigns can help your business get in front of people who are searching for self storage. You set a budget, monitor the campaign and optimize as you get data. PPC isn’t something you can just set and forget; you need to monitor your campaigns to make sure you are reaching the right people and keep optimizing so your cost per lead can decrease as you make changes. One of the most important parts for PPC success is correctly setting up conversion tracking, which seems complicated for people who aren’t very tech savvy.

SM

There are many different social media platforms: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and Snapchat are the main channels. Knowing your audience and knowing these platforms is critical to success here. If your community is primarily older, Snapchat is probably not your best bet for reaching them. However, if your facility is in a college town, it might be the perfect place. Depending on your goals for social media, you may simply want to focus on brand awareness to get more “likes” or “followers.” You may want to measure engagement with your audience or you may want your audience to end up at your website.

ROI

Whatever your goal, you want to make sure that what you are spending your time on is netting what you want out of it (return on investment). Paying attention to what you want, what you’re actually getting, what is working (and what isn’t) is important to measuring your effectiveness. Whether it comes to SEO, PPC, SM or ROI, you still want to focus on the big five: revenue, cost, efficiency, differentiation and customer satisfaction.

 

Read More Blog Posts »