Hi,

I recently attended the ISS Expo in Las Vegas (great show ISS!) and presented a roundtable on Marketing Tracking - how to accurately track your marketing to make sure it's working and not wasting your $$.

It was great to get to talk with owners/operators in the industry about their marketing and what they are doing to track it. It seems that many people in the industry have questions on how to accurately track their marketing efforts to tell which ones are actually bringing tenants and how much those tenants are costing. We discussed some great strategies at the roundtable, but I want to know what all of you are doing out there to track your marketing. Let's hear your great ideas for tracking calls, walk-ins, visitors to your website, etc. - beyond just asking the customer how they found you!

Also, if you've seen some surprising data after tracking for a while, let's hear that too!

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Megan Eckert
Executive Vice President
USstoragesearch.com
886-880-0742

One thing about people is they always want to help. When you ask them how they found you they always tell you something...problem is it's usually not the right answer. They'll say drive by when they found you in the yellow pages or they say yellow pages when it's a drive by and they actually got your number from the white pages. We’ve even had people say they saw our commercial when we have never done TV.

If you ask a question that assumes you know the answer and the customer knows it’s the wrong answer they will be compelled to help you get the right answer…for example, at the time in the sales call ask “did you get our number from the airplane banner flying over the fourth of July parade?” (Well of course they didn’t, you didn’t have a plane flying that day) the point is the customer will feel you struggling and their natural tendency to help will come through. They will say something like “no, I got it from Google (to which you can ask what terms they searched) or “no, got it from the phone book (to which you can ask, what page) then follow up with “before going to the phone book, had you ever seen our sign or business before? (they may then say, yes I drive by all the time) or they saw your moving truck or they got it from the direct mail piece or the menu add or the pens you give away etc…the point is find out where they got your phone number to call at the time they call, other marketing could be at play.

Of course they are going to say your sign, they just drove by the darn thing before turning into rent a unit, I bet they saw other marketing before the sign, the ‘sign answer’ is just the easiest answer they can come up with unless you get them thinking a little. If you struggle a little they will give you better answers.

We started doing this and saw our yellow page leads start to fall off and our Google leads pick up.

Good Luck!