The Operator’s Background
Spaceman Self Storage began working with Tenant Inc. in late 2019 to prepare its online presence for the grand opening of its property in Bath, Maine—a city of about 9,000 people—in 2020. Although Bath is small, it’s a competitive self storage market. Many operators in the area offer storage spaces, but few offer true climate control. Spaceman’s nearest competitor claims to have climate control, but only has heated spaces and lacks air-conditioned ones.
Spaceman began building its property out in late 2018 with a plan to open its three-story, 314-space property in March 2020. The plan was to differentiate this property from its competitors by offering true climate-controlled spaces—cold, heat, and humidity control—for its tenants.
March 2020 came around and Spaceman successfully opened its doors to the public. COVID-19 lockdown orders came into effect shortly after and Spaceman closed its doors for eight weeks.
Thanks to the website that Tenant Inc. launched for it, Spaceman Self Storage was able to continue renting spaces out even without foot traffic flowing through its building.
The Operator’s Objective
Spaceman Self Storage came to Tenant Inc. with various ideas to boost its online presence.
“We really needed a website that was easy to access and made sense to the average user,” said Balinda Washington of Spaceman Self Storage. “Our second concern was that the website represents our business (industrial, clean, simple.) well, and we wanted to know that we could change the website ourselves.”
We worked with them to identify and develop their ideas into three actionable objectives:
- Develop an intuitive and fully customizable website
- Grow organic traffic
- Grow brand awareness
Tenant Inc.’s Approach
We worked with Spaceman Self Storage through an unprecedented year that required creative and targeted strategies. We needed to figure out a strategy that would account for a lack of in-person interactions and cater to a brand with only one store in a small market.
We quickly launched their website and, as it worked out, many of the features that we were developing would become an immense help during the pandemic.
Once we had the website ready, we pivoted to generating meaningful organic traffic for the website. More visitors to the website meant more opportunities to convert a lead into a tenant. To do this, we researched hyper-local keywords that would have the highest potential to attract visitors. Then, we optimized their landing page for search terms potential customers were using in their city.
The Operator’s Results
After about a year working together, here are the results we delivered to Spaceman Self Storage:
Developed an Intuitive and Customizable Website
We built a best-in-class B2C website for Spaceman Self Storage that featured Touchless Rentals™, which give tenants the ability to complete the entire rental process, from start to finish, entirely online. The website is fast, responsive, clean, simple, easy to use, and offers full customization options for the operator. Features like online renter ID verification helped the operator complete rentals during a time when in-person interactions weren’t possible. The best part is that these features will still be valuable tools now that more renters are coming into the store again.
Spaceman’s property was equipped with door and lock systems that gave tenants access to the front gate and their space with an app on their phone. The operator just needed to send tenants an access code via text message. This allowed tenants to rent their space and begin loading their belongings without interacting with staff.
Some people in the Bath area are not as well connected to the internet as others, and the website helped facilitate rentals for these types of customers. Owner and managers—who were working from home—would talk to these customers over the phone and book their spaces on the website.
Grew Organic Traffic
We saw astronomical growth in their organic traffic from May 2020 to May 2021. In that year, Spaceman Self Storage’s organic traffic grew 363%, which significantly improved their bottom line.
Spaceman’s online rentals improved 433% during the same time frame, which increased website revenue by 511%.
Simply put, this phenomenal growth in traffic increased their revenue and pool of potential converting customers which resulted in higher occupancy rates. Now that we’ve set this trend, we have the strategies in place to continue this growth.
Grew Brand Awareness
Spaceman is continuing to improve its organic traffic and brand name recognition. Its customers are specifically searching for them when looking for self storage in their area and Spaceman is showing up more than most of its competitors when people search for storage-related keywords.
We’ve also developed localized blog content that will continue to grow the operator’s brand in the area. This content is designed to capture potential traffic and readership that demonstrates local authority and expertise, which adds to the credibility of the website as a whole.
if you would like Tenant to improve your web presence and user experience, give us a call at 949-894-4500 or fill out the form below.
