How Independent Self-Storage Wins: Google Reviews, Local SEO, and Customer Experience Truths

In the first episode of No Vacancy, we dive right into self storage marketing, covering everything from paid ads, SEO and reviews as well as covering the extremely important topics which include hashbrowns, bands and concerts.  It's fun, informative, funny and raw.  Brought to you by Access Self Storage and hosted by 3 Access directors, Brian Russ, Director of Third Party and Project Management, Chris Feild, Director of Operations and Andrew Rockoff, Director of Marketing

Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:49)
Alright, play us in.

Andrew Rockoff (00:50)
No Vacancy is the self-storage podcast that pulls back the roll-up door on the industry's most outrageous stories, toughest challenges, and unexpected laughs. Hosted by the team at Access Self Storage, each episode brings together real operators, sharp marketers, and off-the-wall personalities to talk about what really goes on behind the gate code, from crazy tenant tales to hard-won lessons in customer service.

It's raw, unfiltered, and a little irreverent, just like life in

Andrew Rockoff (11:39)
We'll be right back.

Andrew Rockoff (11:40)
Access Self Storage is a family-owned company that's been helping people since 1976. Founded by Foy and Ken Cooley, Access built the first self-storage facility in the greater New York, New Jersey metro area. The company has grown to serve the entire Northeast from New Jersey to Maine, earning a reputation for experience, reliability, and community commitment specializing in third-party management.

Andrew Rockoff (12:03)
And now back to the show.

We'll be right

Andrew Rockoff (22:17)
Whether you're a facility manager, owner, vendor, or just someone who's curious about what happens when the auctions are over and the gate closes, No Vacancy delivers a smart, funny, and authentic take on the business. With guest interviews, honest debates, and plenty of laughs, the show puts people first. Because behind every unit, there's a story worth telling.

Andrew Rockoff (22:38)
Now back to the show.

Speaker 2 (22:39)
So I've seen the documentaries about Woodstock 99. was, you know, my wheelhouse. Yeah, so it's really, really passionate about that. So much great

Speaker 1 (22:48)
Is that the one that?

Speaker 3 (22:49)
like

Speaker 2 (22:49)
They set it on fire. It the one they set on fire. They did a documentary on it. Two of them, yeah. So Netflix does one documentary on them. it came out, I think it came out during COVID.

So my wife and I are watching it. ⁓ I've never seen, I've never heard, well, let me get to it. So we're watching this documentary and they're talking about all the bands and they were talking about corn.

and corn I think had one of the big slots Thursday, the biggest slot you've ever seen Thursday or Friday night.

They brought the house down. Shane Gillis was definitely correct. They had the whole crowd, just the sea of people up and down on every downbeat of the drums. So they were really worked up to a fervor. And who comes on after a corn to close the show that night is Bush. Now Bush at the time is one of the greatest, biggest bands in the world and they've got a great front man and all that stuff.

So they're talking about this on the documentary and my wife is sitting on the love seat and I'm on the couch and Gavin comes on shirtless and I've never heard my wife make the following sound.

Speaker 3 (23:54)
⁓

Speaker 2 (23:57)
And I looked over at her and I said, really? Gavin, 99? And she said to me,

Speaker 3 (24:06)
Haha. ⁓

Speaker 2 (24:09)
That was it. That ⁓ was the first time she ever made that sound ⁓ in my presence. And the last. And the last time she made that sound in my presence. Thanks, Corn.

Speaker 1 (24:22)
make

a similar sound when I see Gavin Rossdale.

Speaker 2 (24:24)
But that's

good, good for you. Well, that makes me feel a little better. That's not just her. That's great.

Speaker 1 (24:31)
Yeah, that's quite a change of energy though from what corn was I mean Bush was very like post grunge like kind of pulling off that early 90s sound and trying to bring it into late 90s and it kind of a big Turn that happened after that and rock music and things got kind of crazy there Big time

Speaker 2 (24:34)
to watch.

Make it poppier.

Yeah, yeah, they lost its way. lost its way for a while. But

I don't know if you've seen Limp Bizkit, a little bit of a comeback, because they're opening for Metallica on their 72, 72 Hours Tour. And I've seen some of the videos of Fred.

And I gotta tell you, I'm a little nostalgic hearing, ⁓ you know, break stuff, ⁓ you know, played at 3.30 in the afternoon in the Pittsburgh Pirates. It brought me back a little bit. He's still getting it done. He's a crazy weird dude, but he's still getting it

Speaker 1 (25:25)
Stadium.

Speaker 2 (25:30)
done.

Speaker 1 (25:31)
I good for him, but also for me that music just does not hold up. If I hear it once in passing on a reel or something, like a 30 second clip, I'm like, all right, good for them. But I can't tell you the last time I would have gone out of my way to listen to chocolate starfish in the hot dog flavored water.

Speaker 2 (25:53)
Yes, we're drowning that one

Speaker 1 (25:56)
Awful. Awful. Three dollar bill y'all. That was the better than biscuit aisle if I recall.

Speaker 2 (26:02)
Wow, that's good knowledge.

Speaker 3 (26:04)
we

talked a lot about marketing, ⁓ you know, as a result of what we can and can't do with the size of our properties and portfolio and what we like to do with grassroots marketing. But I mean, how much are the big players spending in comparison to us? And how difficult is it to compete with them on a

on a web level.

Speaker 1 (26:32)
So it's tough to compare because they have like thousands of facilities, Extra space is what we say, 3,500. So if they're spending.

Speaker 3 (26:40)
over 3500, yep.

Speaker 1 (26:43)
Like in the month of May, between six and seven million dollars, you're like 2,000 average across all their facilities. Now you have like the tertiary markets that aren't gonna be spending that kind of money, and you have like the primary markets that are gonna be spending a heck of a lot more than that just because of the competition.

Speaker 3 (27:02)
When you say six to seven million, do you know what they're spending that on? that a direct, is there a direct link to some type of marketing or is that overall? That's not overall budget, I imagine.

Speaker 1 (27:15)
Yeah, the only thing that we can see is that it's like paid media, like digital spends. But I'd have to take a, I don't even think we, don't even know if we have the access to like what campaigns specifically, but it's definitely digital. So it's not even really accounting for any partnerships they might be doing with like a stadium nearby or something like that. So, but that's a, I mean, that's pretty big chunk of change for, for.

spending.

Speaker 3 (27:41)
How do you compete with that?

Speaker 1 (27:43)
Like we had mentioned before, we have to make sure that our SEO is taken care of. You're showing up in the search results in the ⁓ top organic section. I think that the users today and customers today are way more savvy than they used to be. think.

Speaker 3 (28:00)
doing that's different? What are they looking at?

Speaker 1 (28:03)
I, so in my opinion, think paid search is becoming more of like branding and people are getting to a point where they know to go past the paid ads to the organic section. And that's where companies put in a lot of work. If you're doing the job correctly and you're showing up in the one, two, three positions for specific keywords, like that's where people are going to click there and the map pack. have to make sure that you're coming

up in like the first three, four, before you have to click to expand the map pack to see all the businesses in the area that you're looking for, you really gotta try and show in that first three positions and generally across our portfolio where they are organically and in the map pack.

Speaker 3 (28:49)
So what's, what's the secret formula? I mean, for people listening who want to compete with those guys in their area, what can they do on a local level, on an internet level that will get them growing in that direction? Other than spending money.

Speaker 2 (29:04)
other than spending six million. And

so what we're talking about here is the O in SEO, right? The point is to optimize your stuff, your page, everything to make sure that you show.

Speaker 1 (29:20)
So you need to constantly be on top of your website and make sure, not only is it functioning properly, making sure that it's responsive on any platforms, mobile devices now, just because that's where all of the traffic is migrating to.

Speaker 3 (29:34)
What's the percentage mobile now versus desktop? 75%. Seventy easily. Okay.

Speaker 1 (29:41)
And then you need to make for make sure that your cart for both rentals and reservations are easy to get through for us it takes a person five minutes Maybe five minutes to get through our rental process online you do that in the store It's probably like 10 to 15. So we're saving people time you get some better deals Online so you're saving some money but then beyond that you really need to take care of

like that SEO aspect, is making sure your website is optimized from a keyword standpoint and not just making sure that you're using all these keywords, just like.

Speaker 3 (30:22)
It's got be like some meat behind it, right?

Speaker 1 (30:25)
It has to be conversational and the more conversational you can make it the more you're gonna be prepared for AI And you need to be like you need to be constantly updating it it can't just be something that stays the same

we're constantly updating our H1 tags, are basically the headlines of each page. So when someone comes to our Saddlebrook location page, says, climate controlled storage units, Saddlebrook, New Jersey. That's basically telling Google this entire page is about what you're seeing here. And the more relevant that can be to this content and to the user search, the better you're gonna do. So we need to just...

regularly be updating that.

Speaker 3 (31:07)
update in this case mean changing it?

Speaker 1 (31:09)
changes to if you have an about section making sure that like landmarks are being mentioned because that's going to that's going to put you in like

It's a it's a hyper local approach. We all know that it's like three to five miles Maybe it's a little bit bigger than that if you're in a more rural area or it's a little bit smaller than that if you're in a more urban area, but It's this is a super local business. So you need to like capture that and there are definitely ways to win against against wreaths Even with spends there are ways to to win. You don't need your ads running

all day every day. Like see when the traffic's coming to your website. If it's coming to your website at 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. and then again at 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. just day part it. Have your ads running from 10 to 12 and 3 to 6 or 3 to 7. You don't have to have it running all day.

Speaker 3 (32:03)
In your experience with that type of research at one location or the whole portfolio, what is the high traffic? It really isn't. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:11)
It's not the same every day.

I mean, I think we have locations where people are comfortable coming maybe a little bit more after hours. ⁓

And we have access hours across the board. then we have, you know, ⁓ customers that like want to see the manager and want to be here when they're there. And if they can get over to the facility during lunchtime, awesome. But yeah, it changes on a location by location basis, but people can keep track that they can, if they have, you know,

GA force set up, they can see when all this traffic is coming to the website or you can in your FMS, you can take a look at, you know, what

times these rentals are coming through and use this data to plan out a good ⁓ marketing schedule with your ads so that it's more efficient.

Andrew Rockoff AI (32:57)
We'll be right back.

Andrew Rockoff AI (33:28)
Back to the show.

Speaker 3 (33:29)
to go with the reviews. I don't know why, it was just my thinking like, don't need to.

read these reviews, but then we had one horrible hotel stay. I was like, well, wait a minute. There's a whole website based on good and bad hotel stays. Why am I not ⁓ using that tool as a consumer? ⁓ Is it the same in self storage? If so, is there a way that you identify ⁓ how to push reviews? ⁓ And is it the same in every

Speaker 1 (34:00)
Sourcing reviews is pretty much the same across the board. We try to

solicit reviews from new customers right after they rent with us.

We have different ways that we do it. We could do it through text. We do it through email.

We have it at the end of the online rental process. So when someone is finished with their rental online,

But when you're a tenant looking for a facility, you should be looking at, I would kind of almost take out like the five star and take out the one star and just take a look at what people are saying in the middle. Cause I think those are really telling. So anything from two to four.

And if a facility has thousands of reviews and they're sitting at five stars, something's a little off. mean, nobody's perfect.

Speaker 2 (34:49)
For myself as a consumer, know the two things that kind of pop into my head as the purchases or experiences where I'm most inclined to check reviews first are, you mentioned hotels, that's a big one for me, especially if I'm going to a city that I've not been to before, just a new place.

checking that and even locally around my house I'm constantly looking at restaurants restaurant reviews anywhere I've even if it's places I've been for whatever reason I'm just finding like that I like to hear the feedback from other

Speaker 3 (35:27)
I

mean, it's a great barometer to see if you're off or ⁓ right on the money like taste, right?

Speaker 2 (35:31)
My team. really.

Am I. I love it. It's me. Why does it have a three point five. Those are delicious tacos. Whatever. But I can't think of. Aside from those two I can't really think of another application that suits the need more than self storage. You know I mean I think that for our customers anybody who's shopping for this service.

It's a great indicator for what type of experience people have. ⁓ we've talked about this for years as part of our kind of company training and just making sure that our frontline staff have it as top of mind, that it's the reflection of the customer experience.

Let's talk about the situations when it goes

where

we have the Karen or the keyboard warrior who had, for whatever reason,

perceived or

accurately so,

had a bad experience. Something went wrong.

And

want to air their grievances for the world to see online.

What do you think is the best way to approach those?

Speaker 3 (36:37)
Carefully. Very, very carefully.

Speaker 2 (36:42)
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:43)
Yeah, I think it's important for each company to dig into what the issue was. Research who the person is, where they store, what that issue was that they were having that made them leave a one, two, three star review.

Make sure you respond to the review within 24 hours. Google keeps an eye on not only your responses, but how quickly you do it.

before having Deja come on with us. We were at like maybe 72 hours on average that it took us to get back and now we're just under 24 hours, which has been awesome. It kind of elevates us that much more. So just make sure you're responding, make sure you're digging in and then reach out to the customer. sure that

I think in most

when we've

out to customers and we've showed them

we're

to work with them and care. I think in some instances they're happy to change the review. They just want to make sure that they're heard and their issues are going to be taken care of, but you're not always going to see that happen. But I think future tenants that are looking to come in, if they're seeing that you're having that kind of a...

connection with your customers in a sense that you're like willing to go that extra mile to do whatever to make the situation right like that goes a long way.

Speaker 2 (38:04)
So ⁓ you don't think that the appropriate approach is to just say, everything's great. Our facilities are great. We run top notch facilities. Don't worry about this. Don't look behind the curtain. Pay no mind to the wizard back here. It's a, I agree. Correct.

Speaker 1 (38:23)
Yeah, that's not. I use

canned responses. So like to kind of piggyback off that yet, you don't want to use canned responses. And there's a lot of like platforms that offer like auto generated responses that are they sound pretty canned. If you have the ability to edit those, please edit them. Make sure they're they're personalized to who you're responding to. It addresses what they're talking about. Don't just like don't just set it and forget

Andrew Rockoff (38:52)
We'll be right

Now back to the show.

Speaker 2 (39:05)
That's my first concert Beach Boys. Really? Valley Forge Music Fair

and it was a stage. never seen him. I was like 10 years old, I think. And Brian Wilson was not in the band at the time because I think he was going through some of his troubles. But so the stage, it was in the round. So the performers were in the center and it rotated. It was incredible. But yeah, I really nailed it with my parents. Nailed it that year. The non-Brian Wilson, non-Stamos years of the Beach Boys is what I saw. Still a good show though, my first show.

Thank

Speaker 1 (39:40)
I had an opportunity to see the Beach Boys. I had festival tickets and I guess it was see here now in Asbury Park in 2020. Pearl Jam was headlining and it got canceled due to COVID. And so they rebooked for 2021, kept the headliner stayed the same, but the Beach Boys must've had a conflict and they did not come back on. So I was there 2021 and 2022. And I think they returned in either 23 or 24.

my one of my missed opportunities there I definitely was interested in seeing them especially on the beach.

Speaker 2 (40:19)
Yeah. I mean, they are still around. Stamos are still going hard with Mike Love. Yeah. You know, certainly not the same guys, but, when you have 36 songs, either with the Ramones with punk rock or the Beach Boys with surf rock that are three minutes or less and half the country knows them, like there, there's something to that. They were brilliant. What was your first concert?

Speaker 1 (40:42)
was hoping you were gonna go there. ⁓ Honestly, it's a little crazy, but it was at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia. It's probably 15 years old. And ⁓ it was ⁓ one of those crazy early 2000s heavy metal shows. The headliner was Static X, Wayne's, and the two other bands who I was interested in seeing there were Soulfly and

Speaker 2 (40:49)
Great place. Now Franklin Music Hall.

We're in static.

Speaker 1 (41:13)
band called Soil.

Speaker 2 (41:15)
The soil I don't think I've ever heard of.

Speaker 1 (41:18)
would need

to hear of them, but at the time I was pretty excited about it. And Soulfly was really cool, very intense, just that heavy, heavy, heavy. They're South American or something, I don't remember what country that those guys are from, but I was way out of my element. mean, that was intense. Lots of big bald headed dudes with beards, and I was like a 15 year old kid just trying not to get killed.

Speaker 2 (41:47)
So how did you get that? Like the electric tractor from your house is quite a ways. How did you get there? You weren't old enough to drive, right?

Speaker 1 (41:53)
I had a friend who

was 17, had just gotten his license and we drove into Philly and went to this concert and I cannot recall how my parents signed off on that whole situation. Looking back at it now as a parent, I'm like, yeah, my kid would not be doing that. But it was a different time.

Speaker 2 (42:11)
Yeah. But those are formative events though too. Like when you're off on your own and you're like, my God, they're letting me go to the city. I've never been to a concert before. I'm going to hear this explosion of sound. Nothing as loud as I've ever heard.

You know, I was, we attend a Vistage seminar together and when you said that your hobby was live music and taking the family to live music, I was like, that was a really brilliant answer because it is, it's a great hobby. It's one that nobody really thinks about, but it's an awesome hobby.

How about you, Rakoff?

Speaker 3 (42:50)
I was like like a tween my parents took me to a Neil Diamond concert yeah which was ⁓

Speaker 1 (42:51)
Okay, maybe I'll...

Speaker 2 (42:58)
my god, that sounds

incredible. Neil is awesome.

Speaker 3 (43:03)
Yeah, which was a pretty cool, pretty cool concert. I don't remember where it was.

Speaker 1 (43:06)
NSG, Neil Diamond.

Speaker 2 (43:08)
Neil Diamond at MSG? my God, did you know any, you said you were what, 12 or 13, did you know his songs? ⁓

Speaker 3 (43:17)
little

bit because we used to watch the movie Jazz Singer.

Speaker 2 (43:22)
yeah, sure. It's a great soundtrack. Yeah. Yeah. Cracklin' Rosin'. I love Neil. Love on the rise. Ain't no surprise.

Speaker 3 (43:25)
So we used to.

Yeah

Yeah, no, I don't remember the concert like I remember him in front of me singing and dancing around, but I don't remember like too much about it.

Speaker 1 (43:49)
Thanks for listening to No Vacancy. Lock it up and we'll catch you next time.

Speaker 2 (43:53)
You lock it up. You lock it up. You lock it up. Lock it up. Lock it up.

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