Speaker 1: Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Adam Mackey. I am the Director of Account Management for the Self-Storage Vertical here at G5. And today in this short webinar series, we are going to be discussing ways in which you can generate revenue through an effective and efficient digital marketing and online leasing strategy. I'm also joined today by my co-host and colleague, Will Harlan. Will is our Regional Sales Director, working in the market with large owners, operators, and third-party management groups to understand their business goals and objectives and ensure that they are employing the right strategies to maximize the value of their business and of their portfolios. Before we dive in, I'd like to take a quick moment just to extend, on behalf of all those at G5, our thoughts and our well wishes to you, your teams, and your communities as we all navigate through these difficult times with the global impact of the coronavirus. Currently, all 280-plus G5 employees are forced to work remote. And Will and I are currently recording this webinar series from our living room and home offices to ensure the safety and the health of our communities. And we certainly hope that you and yours are taking the same precautions so that we can all get through this together, and that today, you can, at minimum, glean some insights and some recommendations to take back and operationalize your day-to-day business. Now, Will, why don't you walk our listeners through today's agenda?

Speaker 2: Great. Glad to be joining the call today. Just to give everybody joining the webinar, let's run through the agenda. So we'll be covering four different things today. First off, we'll talk about the true cost of vacant units. Really, that boils down to a simple math equation. So we'll make sure we level set with everybody on the call today, run you through an example, and then show you the impact at facilities. Second, Adam is going to jump in and give you guys three steps to better quality leads. Really, he'll give you some tips and tricks there that you hopefully can take home with you after today's call and implement within your portfolio. Third, as we know, we're in the middle of a very unique time in US history and world history. Mastering online leasing is very, very critical because some of our facilities are having to go manless. So we'll give you insight into how our clients are utilizing our online leasing tool and then give you something to think about when it comes to online leasing, moving forward. Finally, we'll cover analyzing and pivoting in today's space. With all the data and all the technology that we have access to, we want to give you guys one way to frame things moving forward to ensure that you employ effective and efficient strategies to get the best quality leads. So really quickly, the true cost of vacant units boils down to the number of vacant units plus monthly move-outs minus signed leases. That gets you to your total exposure in units. And if we want to jump into a quick example, imagine one of your facilities with 500 units. 22 of those units are vacant. 11 leases will be expiring within the next 90 days. And then you have six leases that are pre-signed. Running that through the equation, that gets you to a total exposure of 27 total units. And really how our clients and how we think about it is if you use kind of an average for a 10 by 10 unit at $100, at this facility with the exposure that we have, we're losing out on $2,700 a month in potential profit. And if you annualize that number, that's $32,400. So we just wanted to give you guys just a level set on how we think about it. We would imagine most of you think about it the same way. But Adam will jump into a few ways that you guys can potentially address getting more quality leads and generating more conversions with those leads.

Speaker 1: So thanks, Will. So as Will laid out, and as you mentioned, we know that a lot of the operators that we work with and that those that are listening are fully aware of already, when you start at the impact of vacant units and vacant rentable square footage when it comes to potential annualized financial loss, it's quite staggering. But there are things that you can do to help combat this. And one of the ways in which you can start is by deploying an effective strategy that's not just focused on generating a higher volume of leads to fill your marketing funnel, but more importantly, it's focusing on building a strategy that's geared towards generating more qualified leads. And those leads that have a higher propensity to lease and to fill those vacant units, you can mitigate the potential loss that comes from those vacancies. So let's break down what some of the tried and true pillars when it comes to lead generation are. So first off is focusing on optimizing your search presence and having a hyper-local and location-specific SEO strategy to optimize your placement on the search engine results page. We're going to walk through five key factors of things that you can consider. Next is pairing that location-specific SEO strategy with a smart and effective digital advertising strategy and making sure that you're capitalizing on the highest value campaigns and the highest value keywords to make sure that the investment that you're making in digital advertising is maximizing the return on your investment. And lastly, once you've deployed the strategies needed to find and attract those renters, it's critically important that you have a renter-friendly website that's designed for conversion, a website that has insightful and useful content to your users, but also provides them with the opportunity throughout the site to convert, whether that's making a phone call to a facility or to a call center, to fill out a contact desk form, a reservation form, or hopefully to start their buying process by entering the online leasing journey. So when it comes to optimizing your search presence, organic search is really the best way to gain leads at the lowest cost. And we know that local search continues to grow, but it also continues to change with each algorithm update that the search engines are making. So looking at these five components that will break down in a little bit more in depth, if you're focusing in on how you can continue to optimize them, you can ensure that you're being set up for success and that your location is being ranked as high as possible on some of those search. So let's dive into these individually. Starting with Google My Business. So the first step is a pretty obvious one when it comes to optimizing your Google My Business listing. Claim your listing. Take ownership of that so that you can start to employ and update some of the critical components of that, things like updated business description, website link, proper business categorization, uploading most recent photos. And this is a critical one because recently, Google's rolled out an update where things like stock photography will now be filtered out of listings. So it's now more important than ever to make sure that you have up-to-date property photography on your listing. And then obviously, making sure that you've got the right phone number, address, and especially in today's age with the impact that coronavirus is having on local businesses, making sure that your hours are up-to-date. Next, let's move to on-page optimization. These are really the nuts and bolts and technical components of your website, things that your users won't necessarily see, but you know that Google will. So when Google is crawling your source code, it's looking for things like relevant city and neighborhood terms, regional keywords, updated title tags, alt text content, all those components that Google wants to see so that it can ensure that your website has the right useful and relevant content based on what a search query is providing. And lastly, reviews. And this is one of the most critical components that an operator can pay attention to when it comes to having an effective strategy. And it not only is having a strategy geared towards generating reviews, but also making sure that you're monitoring and responding to both negative and positive reviews so you can optimize your brand presence online. Lastly, let's take a look at these two other components. First is link building. This is one that sometimes gets forgotten when it comes to an effective digital marketing strategy. Local SEO relies more on links from other websites that are relevant to your business than standard SEO tactics. Making sure that you're taking an opportunity to capitalize on third-party websites, whether it's a small business association, local industry association, or just a third-party aggregator, and making sure that they always have links provided to your facility to direct your users back to your website. And lastly, citations. Making sure that all the information about your property that exists across the internet is up-to-date and accurate. People are engaging with sites across the web, not just on Google or through your website, but across a variety of sources, and making sure that things like office hours, business name, phone number, all that is accurate and kept up-to-date so you can ensure that people are able to reach you wherever they are online, wherever they are in their journey.

Speaker 2: Great. So Adam was just able to walk you guys through some of the, what I would refer to as organic and critical elements to your digital strategy as they acquire customers organically and at the cheapest cost. In today's self-storage industry, however, digital advertising has become much more important and much more competitive. And here at G5, we employ smart digital advertising strategies. And really what that refers to is not only our analysts and the experience and expertise that they have, but also utilizing the technology and the data that we have here at G5. To give a couple of examples of ways that we use data and technology inside of our advertising strategies, dynamic ads, that's through an integration with the PMS systems in the industry. We pull in pricing and availability directly into ads, helping pre-qualify users, whether it's based on unit type or if they have a specific price point that they're looking for. Lead insights. Here at G5, we have a technology called call pooling, where for every user that clicks on an ad and makes it to a client's website, we utilize a unique phone number to track that individual and understand whether they convert or if they don't. And then finally, cross-channel spend optimizer. Really what that does is it looks at all the different channels that we use for our clients and pumps that data into a multi-touch attribution model, understanding along the customer journey, what advertisements and what channels really help push a customer along and help them convert when they're looking for a storage unit. To cover a couple of the different channels and how we use them with our clients, the first is going to be social ads. And really, it helps drive brand awareness, but over the last six months in our multi-touch attribution kind of analysis, we've seen that it's really important in the customer's journey, because if they're not aware of you, social advertising really helps drive that awareness. The second is display ads. It helps generate action. If somebody's made it to the website, if they've shown interest prior, we want to follow them and ensure that if they're still looking for self-storage, that we're helping target those folks. And when they go to Google, when they go to a search engine, and they type in a very specific search query, search ads really help target renters searching for those storage units. Finally, remarketing. It helps close the deal. If they've made it to the website, they've shown interest, maybe they've hit reservation or rent now, and they've stopped along the process, making sure that you retarget those folks and remarket to them is critical, kind of in the suite of channels that you have access to. And then finally, applying all those different channels into an attribution model, and using that to make better decisions is really how at G5, we employ smart digital advertising strategies. Now, Adam covered some way to get them to your website to really show them who you are. I just talked about digital advertising, which is a way to specifically target those folks. But once they make it to your website, designing for conversion is incredibly important. We really take our time with our SEO strategies, how we talk about our facilities and the unique elements of them. And if we get them to your website through an advertisement, it's highly targeted. So having units up high on the page, we know they're looking for storage. So show them what they're looking for and give them the best experience possible. That includes adding information like frequently asked questions, quick links to contact us and other information throughout the website. And knowing how users really search today, mobile devices are incredibly important. So that click to call ability to make sure that they make it to your call center or make it to a facility is really important. Just to kind of talk about a few other elements in this vein, providing answers, like I said, frequently asked questions. Somebody who's never rented doesn't really know what they're doing. Give them those answers and give them to them really clearly and concisely. Calls to action on page like lease now, review units, help guide the user to what they're looking for. Like I said, easy to contact both through forms and through the click to call and phone numbers, really, really important just to display those effectively on the webpage. And then finally, most people do this in the industry today, but pulling in real time pricing availability through your API integration with the PMS helps ensure that what the user is looking at is available. And if they're looking to take action, that they can take that action. So those are a number of different tricks and some insights into digital advertising and some conversion tactics, but let's talk about online leasing.

Speaker 1: Yeah, so we've talked a lot about how you go out and find users, whether that's through having an effective SEO strategy, deploying smart digital advertising, and then really finding a way to convert those users and pique their interest enough to where they've made their buying decision. But now let's focus on how we can effectively take them off the market and get them into that leasing process. And with just the operational changes that we've seen as of late in the last month or so, with the impact of CV19, having the ability to present an online leasing solution and an online leasing option to your prospects is absolutely critical. We're seeing a ton of changes with onsite operations with staff not being able to either be onsite at a facility or potentially having a reduced number of staff that's able to be onsite. So having an option like online leasing in a specific platform like that, the G5 offers through G5 Uber Leasing, it allows you to avoid some of those operational challenges while still being able to rent some of those vacant units that you have available. And like we talked about earlier, to mitigate that potential financial loss that occurs when you've got a high volume of vacant units or vacant rentable square footage that's on the market. So Will, you talk a lot with just a lot of the large operators that are out there on the market. What are some of the things that you're seeing when it comes to online leasing and how people are treating them?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think especially with the situation that we're in today, even small operators all the way up to the largest operators in the industry are having to leverage online leasing, knowing that a lot of states have moved to manless facilities, not having those folks onsite, you need a way to intake them. When we built our online leasing tool, we really wanted to focus on giving an insurance capability, giving a credit card, capture and processing capability and the ability to sign an online lease. Something that we incorporated, I would say over a year and a half ago was offering gate codes and knowing that the facilities are manless, having all those working components in the tool has allowed not only our clients that we have and Adam works with, use our product, but also for those folks that are out in the industry that weren't using the tool before, we've brought on about eight or nine fairly large operators in the past week and a half to ensure that they can make it through this time.

Speaker 1: Yeah, it's great points. And obviously, I mean, storage right now is being looked at fortunately as an essential business. So operators are at least able to keep doors open, but it's some good insights, just ways in which, again, you can try and find a way to overcome some of these operational challenges and at least have an outlet where you can offer a solution to people that need it. I've talked to a lot of operators that we work with that have storage facilities that are near colleges and universities and students are getting displaced right now. And we're seeing a lot of parents calling in to try and rent storage or find storage where their son or their daughter can store their things until life can go back to a little bit more normal as to what it was before. So having an option like this really just, again, it gives your prospects and your users just another outlet where they can quickly obtain storage when they need it the most and give them the ability to convert online without necessarily having to go and meet with a staff member on site.

Speaker 2: So the final thing that we wanna talk about today is really with everything that we've covered, what are some things that you can do and what things should you be analyzing to really pivot and ensure that you make it through this time? And we'll tie it to all the things that we kind of covered today. So unit level exposure, are there historical trends at the facilities that on top of what we're going through today, things that you should be looking at? Are you expecting to see 12 or 15 leases dissipate over the next couple of months? Is there other factors that you should be looking at really to prepare for what might come or what is starting to come in today's space? The second thing is total ad spend. Kind of all over the board in the industry right now, we've had certain clients increase spend in specific markets and in other markets, they've decreased spend. Look at your facilities, look at the needs in the market, ask your employees what they saw before they had to leave the facility if they were at the facility, but understand what you need in this time and if advertising is gonna help you get there, take a look at how to adjust those things. So the third bullet point here is advertising conversion rate. Really paying attention to when a person clicks on the ad and makes it to your website, it's really important that you're targeting folks really effectively and making sure that they're signing a lease or at least filling out a reservation form. And then finally, if you do utilize an online leasing tool, some of the things that we brought up today in terms of user experience, some would refer to a native experience so you stay on the website to complete the online lease, what's your conversion rate? When people click on that button, how many folks actually go and convert onto the next step, whether it's credit card information, selecting the unit, upgrading unit, you name it. Pay attention to these factors and it might really help you elevate your current lead generation strategy. So from my side, we appreciate your time today and hopefully you're able to take a few things away. I think Adam's got something he wants to kind of close out with.

Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's well said, Will. And again, folks, we appreciate you guys taking some time just to listen in. Hopefully you gained some useful thoughts and insights, recommendations, things that you can take back. We know that time is short right now and we're all struggling and overcoming the hurdles that are facing us operationally as we all have to work remote. But again, as I mentioned, when we kicked off the webinar, we're all in this together. And our hope at G5 is that we can make ourselves available to not only our clients and our prospects, but to everyone out there in the industry. We will get through this together. And again, I hope that everyone listening and your teams and your communities and the people renting your facilities are all staying safe and healthy, but also not letting this disrupt your life too much. Take some time to get out, enjoy good weather, stay in good health. And again, we hope that you guys got some useful information and we certainly hope to talk to you guys soon. If there's anything that myself or Will can do in terms of follow-up or help that we can provide, please feel free to contact us or connect with us on LinkedIn. You can also always find up-to-date information from G5 at www.getg5.com on the latest marketing updates, technologies, and ways in which our clients and ourselves and our partners are helping one another get through these tough and difficult times with the coronavirus outbreak. So with that, I wish you all well and hope to talk to each and every one of you again soon. Thank you, everyone.