Mastering Self Storage Marketing Basics - Stora Live

But with marketing and in the sort of context of marketing, generative AI I think is a really useful tool for, especially for businesses with kind of limited resources, people that might not necessarily have entire like marketing people on site or doing two or three different marketing jobs at the same time. Data analytics is a bit like, it's a bit like a detective, detective work. You know, you have to put these questions down in place first before you actually start to look for the data that you need.

Welcome everybody to this episode of STORA Live. We're joined today by Jill Leckie from Developed by Me. So thank you for joining us, Jill.

Thank you for having me.

Jill, can you. Yeah, you're very welcome. Good to have you. Could you tell, I know we were doing a little bit of chat there earlier about where you're like while we're waiting, but can you introduce yourself please and tell us a little bit about yourself and developed by me, please?

Absolutely, yeah. So I'm called Full Stack Marketer. That means that I have quite a, a broad overview of marketing. I'm not a specialist in any particular area and I work. The work that we do at Develop by Me is we have a, we take a 360 degree approach to, you know, basically marketing and tech. You know, specifically looking at how building your mark, your mark, marketing, tech, stack from the ground up and then how that really the congruence between that and your customer journey, that's our specialty. So we work with various, various industries, specifically self storage, but also with hospitality, also with E commerce and so on. So it's a really exciting company to be working for. Definitely.

Great. Thanks Julie. I think that's, it's interesting to introduce it like that, combining the tech stack with the marketing stack because really at the end of the day they're also interconnected. So I think we're going to have a really interesting chat. Okay, so the things we're going to cover today and we've scheduled with 45 minutes roughly for this so that'll include a bit of time at the end for Q and A. So if you have any questions, hang around and ask away. So we're just going to cover setting up and connecting a marketing stack and what that means. We're going to talk about gathering data so we can all make smarter decisions and we're going to talk a little bit about innovative tools and strategies in marketing as well. So I've got a few questions so I'll start. So the first thing I wanted to ask was you mentioned in your introduction, our marketing stack, what Exactly. Is a marketing stack and why is it important for self storage businesses who are listening now to have one?

Well, I think like with everything in tech and marketing, there's a slight element of jargon here, but I think the term stack is a very good analogy to use. Like a pancake stack. It really goes into the layers of marketing and technology tools that you need to use. And I think it also is just the tech. Also the stack kind of determines like how you, how everything is connected. It's just an analogy for you to be able to understand what the. Yeah, the layers of tools or data that you need to be able to create a successful customer journey.

And are people to think of this a bit like Maslow's hierarchy of needs and kind of. You start at the bottom. You've got it.

Exactly.

Yeah. Okay.

Exactly, exactly.

So the place you're suggesting people start is the bottom rung. You start there. Once you go that place, then move up, move up, move up.

Very much so. And you know, like this is, that is the crucial step in terms of creating the foundation for ensuring that any decisions that you're going to make in the future are driven by the right data. And that's, you know, because if you don't have a well built, well structured cms, you're not going to be able to, for example, scale your SEO, you're not going to be able to attach the right tools in order to be able to get the data about your customer journey. So it's a, it's, it's a kind of crucial point in terms of the starting, yeah, the starting point for your, for your marketing journey.

So what are, you know, maybe we're starting at the bottom here, but what are the essential components that every business should prioritize when thinking about.

Well, yeah, as I said, a well structured cms. Now CMS is your content management system. So that is essentially the back end of your website. And you know, I'm a WordPress girl, so I love using WordPress to build websites on. So it's that. But I think for me WordPress offers the flexibility that a lot of the, for example, kind of turnkey solutions like this is for a bit of, forget like Wix or so on. They just don't have that level of flexibility that you need if you want to deliver especially an E commerce, a sort of intricate E commerce site that's going to have a booking management system, a property management system and other widgets attached to it. Um, so for me that's, that's the, the, the, the Main point really that you, that you start the, starting from.

So, so like I'm just thinking about myself actually for my sites going back quite a long time, maybe five and a half years ago now when I launched my first site and store didn't exist, so I had to kind of build.

Yeah.

How to build a, a sort of static website and I started to create content and I had a really basic cms. I can't even remember what I, what I use now, thinking back to it, but I was able to go in there easily, log in and write content just myself.

Yeah.

But I suppose the key thing here is just at least have the ability to go and write content. At least know where to go, where to log in. You know, if you've got some really complicated system, maybe that you just, you can't remember the login or you have three different systems. Yeah, that's going to stop you, like make sure you have something and obviously there's stuff that's better than others. But you know, having a cms, having the ability to go on, create content easily and publish, that's. That's important, isn't it?

Yeah, and, yeah. And you know, and I think a lot of people are, there's a lot of talk in the industry at the moment that SEO is dead. It is by far not dead. You know, we're going into a situation now, I'm sure we'll cover it later on where we've got search, search generated AI. And it is still, I mean it's very, still much dependent on content. So delivering content, creating content is crucial if you want to be sort of pivot into that next stage of SEO.

So the essential components then are your website being able to like update content, social media, you want to get all those things in place as well at that stage. Is that important?

Yeah, for me that comes later. You know, this is, we're still talking at the very basics here, which is, you know, having the cms and then this is where your marketing and sales kind of become congruent. And I think that's a really important thing to remember. The two are quite separate, but you have to get them to actually join up at some point. So having the cms, connecting it to your CRM, connecting it to your booking system, if you have a booking widget that's separate from your CRM and then starting to test the customer journey and this is where you start to kind of optimize your conversion rate optimization. You get to the point where you understand if there are any points within the system which may stop your customer from actually converting. And I think it's interesting. So when I get a lot of clients, that's, that's the point that they come to me when they go, something is just not working. What is it? That is just, that is we, you know, like we get loads of traffic, we get loads of visitors to the website and then nothing happens. And I think that's the point where we, you know, I usually step in, we do a CRO audit, we have a look at heat maps, we have a look at, you know, the loops and drop offs from websites and we identify the point at which there is this blockage somewhere along. And it's usually in that system, it's usually in the CMS CRM and then the booking widget. That's where you usually find the problem.

Yeah, yeah. And I suppose that's why you said at the start, you know, technology, the tech stack and the marketing stack are so intertwined because you are, maybe this is too simplistic. But you know, if your marketing is getting people to the site and then it's kind of, then sales takes over and that sort of hand handover and different systems being involved, you know, it can, it can go wrong, can't it?

Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, we're, I was talking to somebody yesterday and they used the term cottage industry and you know, we're in that position at the moment where, you know, we are. There isn't one system, there isn't one system that deals with all of the things that the self storage industry needs to deal with, you know, yet it's coming, it's almost there, but we're still in the position where we are using you one thing for one thing and another thing for thing and we're all kind of, it's all kind of getting. Because tech is changing and we have to try and keep up with tech and it depends on, you know, what kind of system you're using. Do you need to add a plugin or a widget or something or you know, another landing, another lead generation form to achieve that next step in technology?

Yeah, yeah. Cool. So once, once you've got these basics in place, how can businesses monitor and improve on their efforts to make sure the marketing stack evolves as they grow? So, you know, it's one thing opening up in first 10 bookings, but when you're on two years down the line, like things are different, how do businesses kind of keep up with that and what they need to do?

So I think this is where testing, testing becomes really crucial. And also I think this is where having in place reporting structure also helps. So something where you're kind of looking at your data regularly and reporting on that data and then actioning that data. But you know, to get to that point first you have to make sure that you've got the dashboards in place in order to be able to analyze, analyze the data and also understand your audience, understand where your customers are coming from, understanding what your, you know, what your audiences react to. You only find that out by looking at patterns and deciphering patterns and the data that you get, you know, and I can understand that that is, that's not a whole answer to the question that you, that you, that you asked me there, but it is. The basics are testing and iterating. So if you are regularly monitoring your data and regularly monitoring your analytics, you will begin to see patterns that keep going. And from there you'll be able to see traffic source patterns and for example, customer data patterns, demographic patterns and so on, and be able to make inferences from that as to what works, what doesn't work, and so on and so forth and what.

So one of the things that I find for me personally when I, like when I look at, for example, the Google Analytics dashboard, I'm almost overwhelmed by what you can do and the stuff you can look at. So if you're kind of listening to this and thinking like, where do I start? Like, what's the first metric I should be interested in? Or the first and second and third, like, is there, what would you recommend people? Where do people start? Because it can be a bit overwhelming sometimes. I think for me personally, even, yeah.

Yeah, sure, I totally understand. And I think it's actually not data patterns that you need to have to start with, it's questions. What are the questions that you actually want answered? You know, you have to have goals. So for example, maybe the first question that you have is simply just to understand your audience, like who are, who is coming to us, who is finding us, what is their demographic, what do they look like, what are they using us for, etc. Now, if you have your CMS connected to your analytics, you should be able to tell the traffic source where it's coming from. And you can also start to embed unique codes like urchin utms into your social media and into your local SEO to see that whether or not people are coming from your Google business profile, for example, or they're finding you via Instagram and so on. So traffic, you know, understanding your customers first, that should Be an absolute priority. So. Yeah, but have, yeah, back to again having the getting, putting down on paper what are the questions I need answered? You know, what are the goals I want to achieve? My goal is I want to obviously get more customers in at the end of the day. But in order to do that you have to say, okay, okay, what are the answers I need to have before I can do that? You know, and it sounds like a, it sounds like a long drawn up process, but data analytics is a bit like, it's a bit like a detective, detective work. You know, you have to put these questions down in place first before you actually start to look for the data that you're, you're, you're, you need and to see, and to see the patterns that you have. So that's how I was taught anyway, was that you know, think about yourself as a data detective and get, you know, put the questions that you need answered down first and then look for the data.

Okay. Okay. So, so the question you're saying start off with kind of understanding your customer, where they're coming from, what they're looking for. Yeah, well, and I suppose that's, that is totally the right place to start because that impacts everything. Then like, you know, if the, if your conversion rate's low, is it because you can maybe trace all those problems, could maybe be traced back to kind of, it's a different type of person than I thought or whatever. So assuming you've got the, assuming you've got your head around that, I think about it relatively simplistically, probably. So tell me what I've got wrong here. If I have is I'd be thinking if I've got a website, if I get a thousand visitors, for every thousand visitors I get, how many of them become a paying customer? I would like to know. That's a number I'd really like to know and understand and then try and find a way to benchmark that against competitors or I don't know if you can find some industry information about what is the online conversion rate typical. And if you're showing prices, obviously then it's a very different type of calculation to somebody that has a co process because sometimes we hear a lot of the times code process conversion rates of 20 to 25, 30% or something like that. But that's, that's not the thousand visitors in a website. You might end up with, I'm making these numbers up, but you might end up with a hundred quote requests and then you're converting, you know, 30% of the hundred so you've got 30. So maybe, you know, if it's that simple, it's 3% of your thousand website visitors. I'm always, I. That's something I would start with just to kind of see 0.1 or is it 3? Would that be a good place to start once you've understood the audience?

Absolutely, absolutely. Because that's the next step in the sort of the data chain that you want to look at. So for example, if you were the most important data points that you want to look at, from my perspective was understanding the customer most and foremost looking at, you know, what is it that makes that customer convert to begin with? Being able to predict a conversion, I mean, that's the golden goose, isn't it, at the end of the day being able to do that. But you have to, starting from understanding the customer, looking at the traffic on your website and then also in your booking management system to see how that all correlates, you know, and the differentials within those correlations and then looking at the traffic sources of where those particular customers came from. But this is where it gets tricky and this is where I'm going to ask and say this is where it gets tricky because we do have technology to be able to do that full customer journey, which is from, you know, somebody clicking say for example, on a Google Ad, they land on the page, they enter a lead generation form, they send it off and eventually down the line it converts. Currently at the moment, an awful lot of lead generation forms that people are using don't automatically send that conversion back, that enhanced conversion back to Google Ads. So we're losing a huge amount of information in terms of that because people are having to manually upload information to go ads and then get that, that cycle. So there is, there is, there are gaps currently in this, in systems that people are using. And that's what, you know, is that's what's difficult to, that's why we, that's a difficult part of the data journey is trying to actually capture that section there. I mean, we can do it with purchase conversions. You know, as you say, if someone books online and they go through the booking process, they enter a card, you can capture that easily because all the data is held within that particular data sandbox, or you can call it that. But if you start to move into other, you know, if you start to use other integrations or if it goes off, it goes offline. That's when the manual work has to come in and the automation starts to, starts to kind of go off track so yeah, you know, it's, there are elements of the customer journey which are difficult to track, but the majority of like getting up to that point where you get to the lead generation form and someone hits, I want to see prices or I want to, I'm interested in this particular size. You can track that? Yeah, it's just that second part of the customer journey that we need to work on as well.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, interesting. And so hot topics are obviously AI automation. Like, do you think there's, is there anything that AI and automation can be used for today in marketing to help move it on?

Oh yeah.

And what about in a year or two? Is there any, any thoughts on, on what those, what, what they might be doing, what people need to think about for the future?

Yeah, I think, I mean it's like AI and innovation is just, I mean it's off the, off the scale really, to be honest. Right now. I mean, I think about it like this. There's two different kinds of AI. There's generative AI and then there's automations that you can do. And I think we're still kind of trying to decipher as well what is actually AI and what is just an if function. Because a lot of the time stuff that is sitting on websites is just if functions, you know, if it's a chatbot or if it's a whatever. So, you know, AI is the especially kind of automated AI when you're interacting from a customer perspective about understanding natural language. That's what we're getting at. But with marketing in the sort of context of marketing, generative AI I think is a really useful tool for, especially for businesses with kind of limited resources, people that might not necessarily have entire like marketing people on site or doing two or three different marketing jobs at the same time. Content and copy AI, generative AI. So ChatGPT, Gemini, Discord, mid journey, that kind of thing, great for generating artwork and copy. And then of course there's SEO strategy as well. There's a lot of fantastic AI tools out there that can help people with SEO. You know, I use SEMrush, that's one of my favorite tools. But you know, you can also use keyword tag or keyword tool, which is another couple of tools that help you with keyword research. So if you're looking for gaps within, you know, between you and other competitors, your keywords to increase your SEO, then you can use a tool like that will help you kind of decipher those gaps. But I think for me, AI automation is where we're going to see a huge difference for the storage market. I think there's a. I'm really excited at the moment about sentiment scoring and lead scoring. So these are tools that basically people can embed in their customer journey. So for example, their sales customer journey. I know that HubSpot and Salesforce do lead scoring so they can look at the likelihood, for example of how that lead is going to actually convert in the future. Or there's the sentiment scoring is if there's a conversation on the telephone or by email. The AI can detect sentiment within the natural language that the customer is using in order to determine whether or not that customer is likely to convert and so on, or what their sentiment is like in terms of customer feedback and so on. So there's some really exciting things.

Wow. Okay. Interesting. Okay.

I could go on for hours.

I know it isn't. I could listen to it for hours because it's a fascinating. So you know, if you're a self storage business, what I suppose what we've said so far is, you know, you need to think about foundational tools like a website analytics, your CRM and then you know, think about how do you scale, how do you scale your marketing by using some of these advanced tools. And like you've just said there, you know, there's tons of stuff to look into. You know, AI is really, you know, such an interesting area that you know, we're, we spend a lot of time using it for our business in all sorts of random ways. I don't think we're using it for marketing so much yet. And maybe I'm wrong, but certainly just day to day we're using it all the time. So the speed of innovation is insane.

Yeah.

And there's some really.

Sorry to interrupt, but there are some really interesting specific AI tools that are coming out for self storage. And you know, it's not necessarily marketing orientated but they are in terms of, you know, prospecting. So prospecting either customers or prospecting actual sites. And I think that's a really interesting area to keep an eye on how that help people scale at the end of the day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So if you are, if you listen to this, like I think it's one thing if you've got kind of, you know, 10 sites and a big marketing budget, but if you're a, if you're, you know, one or two or three people, so you're a smaller team, some of this stuff might feel a bit overwhelming. Like I know I often feel that way. Listen to some of These sort of things. What are some simple tools or methods that if you are a smaller team you can use to gather and analyze data effectively?

Well, I think at the end of the day I'm going back to, I'm going to repeat what I said before, which was you have to have the questions that you want answered first. That's the first place to start. Don't get overwhelmed by the, you know, industry thought leaders banging on about where you need to be, here or there or there. But you know, just focus on the questions that you want answered first. Which, you know, could be about, you know, like where you're, as you, as you asked yourself, where are people coming from and how, how many of those people actually convert. So, you know, I'm an old fashioned when it comes to data. I'm an old fashioned person. I just, I like Google Analytics and I know that it's overwhelming and I understand that it can be really kind of in your face. But giving yourself the space and the time to understand how it works for all of the, all of the jargon means and says will do, you know, it will be hugely valuable in the long run because you will, that you will, by yourself, you will be able to start to understand that without having to, you know, use or expend even more money on a fancy dashboard tool that's going to just, you know, give you the same results but it's quicker for you to do. You know, that's the, at the end of the day I'm thinking about, you know, kind of keeping costs down and also, but also upskilling, you know, as a, as a small team. But yeah, again, you know, have the questions in front of you that you want answered and then start looking at the basics. And the basics for me are traffic analysis. So looking at where your traffic is coming from. Absolutely. Looking at your customer demographics, again, who are they, where are they coming from, what do they want? And that's obviously going to need, you know, your analytics dashboard like Google Analytics and your CRM because hopefully your CRM is capturing what it is that they're using their storage for. And then, you know, yeah, just testing, testing different things, giving yourself the space to test new things and see what works. I mean, there's an example here of a customer who was very, very heavily reliant on using Google Ads and the area, the location they were living in, just, it wasn't good, wasn't a great area or location for Google Ads. They were between two very, very saturated markets and they tested using Facebook ads, Instagram Ads and it was a huge success. So it's one of those things where you have to allow yourself space to test things and that's the only way that you find out what works for your specific site, business, customer base, that kind of thing. I mean, I wish I had a more comprehensive answer than that, but it's just testing.

Yeah, and I suppose it depends is also part of the answer. Like it depends on the context. So what you said there.

It depends. Yeah.

But that's an interesting example there. So just to understand that. So this was a client between two, let's say cities or towns that were well served for self storage, competitive in Google Ads. And they found ads, adverts on Facebook and Instagram. So one, one platform. I suppose it's one ads platform. I believe that they found that they were correcting me if I'm wrong, but they found that they were converting that they actually had success with that. I haven't heard too much of that. So that's really interesting.

Yeah, yeah. And no, and you're right. I mean what you find often is that, you know, Facebook and Instagram, they are a brand awareness tool. So for example, it's about reaching new people, reaching new audiences. It's not often that you actually see conversions coming directly from those sites. This was a, this was a, this is a client in Sweden by the way. It's not in the UK but yeah, it was, you know, there. In Sweden, our kind of large conurbations or large cities are very much saturated with self storage. And this little, this little city or this little town, this town really was kind of smack bang right in the middle of these two. And because Facebook and Meta have in general have a kind of a, I don't know, they just serve more localized audiences in my, in, in my experience anyway, compared to say for example, Google Ads for when you're trying to pinpoint a location, there's a much broader, it's a much broader brushstroke than safer. I mean you can go by Postcode and so on and that's still quite, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't serve that much. It's much more localized and I think because of that it, it worked. And the ads that, I mean, obviously the ads that we served as well were much more specific to Facebook in general. We used a carousel format and it was a much more, it was about, you know, we served like a kind of a sort of menu of the services that we, we offered onto Caris using the carousel. And yeah, it converted, we got Conversions.

It reminded me of. I remember doing this when I had my site in my first site in a town called Porta down for the first year, year and a half. I mean Covid kicked in about six months in, I think it was. Yeah, six months in and I did tons of Facebook posts and using the carousels and I remember and this was five years ago, so I'm sure the tools moved on and that you can do a lot more.

Trust me, every six weeks.

Yeah, hard. But remember I could type in the postcode of the site and then just like there's a little circle, I could expand it out, you know, number of miles outside of that exact point. You want people when they're in that area to see on Facebook and Instagram maybe if they're based there. So I was probably, I wasn't. There probably weren't that many businesses in that town paying Facebook or Meta. I think it was Facebook at the time for ads. So I was probably one of the few advertisers in the area. And so I was probably getting in front of thousands and thousands of people. But as you said, it's more of an awareness thing. And I was never sure how is this linked to booking, but I was getting comments and people saying, oh, look at this, you know, so it was definitely, it felt like an interesting place where I was probably getting good results, but I wasn't at the time. Sort of link it up with bookings.

Yeah, and I think that's the, I mean that's for, you know, I'm a big believer in top funnel stuffing. That's, that's for me, that's the. Where we need, where we need to be going. It's about reaching new people, making them understand what the opportunity self storage can present to them. And you know, Meta provides a fantastic platform to be able to do that both organically and paid.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually tons of my stuff was probably, it was just posts, just organic posts.

Yeah.

And actually probably is even maybe it was more useful in that time because that was the first self storage business, indoor self storage business in the area. So maybe it was just about awareness, you know, and I was able to get in front of lots of people and drive awareness.

And of course when you have that mindset, when you have that mindset, when you, when you sort of go, okay, this ad's going to be about brand awareness, it changes completely the tone and messaging and you know, of the ad. So that's why it's. So when you, when you start thinking about what are the when you start thinking about advertising, you have to think about, well, what's the point of this ad? Is it a brand awareness ad or do I want to get bookings immediately? So. And it's very easy to fall into that trap of going, oh no, no, I have to get bookings, I have to. That's the only thing that's interesting actually. In order for us to reach new people, we need to do the brand awareness. The brand awareness is just as important as it is as the, as the conversion. But anyway, another, another. Maybe another sore life.

Yeah, yeah, I think I did. We did drone flights of my facility one time. So kind of like outside and fly in and around the inside of it with a friend of mine who does a lot of drone work for BBC. And that was about awareness. It's kind of like, look what, look at what this is, look what's inside the building. Because lots of people don't see it. So I get that. Okay, so I want to leave a little bit of time for Q and A at the end. So just going to ask a question, then we'll move on to that. And what are the most exciting tools or trends you see in self storage marketing?

So I'm just going to use this opportunity to blow our little trumpet here. We've just built an AI FAQ format for. And this is specifically linked to how can AI helpers with customer engagement. So for example, the FAQ that we've just built instead of it, it's not just a sort of focused on keyword search, it's actually about understanding kind of natural language. So if somebody came onto your website and typed in, I've got loads, I don't know how much stuff I've got. Can you advise me? You know there's no keywords in there for you to, for the, for the, for the search to be able to generate anything. So the AI will sort of go, okay, well I can understand that you're looking for some help to count how much stuff you need or what a space calculator is and it will offer up these kind of things. So that's a really exciting thing that we've just built for a client in Belfast. But there's all sorts of other things, immediate small things that you can do, which as I said, I really like the lead scoring. So that's. There's either HubSpot, Salesforce or keep that does that sentiment scoring, which is a program called Nice and you can cook that up to your call tracking. But then of course there's also for CRO which is Conversion Re optimization. I'm really, really a big fan of Crazy Egg and hotjar. And they can give you insights into user tracking on your website to show you where customers are either having kind of difficulty finding what it is that they're looking for, that can really show you where the bottlenecks are within your CRO. But also one of the things I think is Fantastic is the WhatsApp Business API. Not the WhatsApp Business app, but the WhatsApp API. And it's a little bit more complex, a little bit more complicated, but it just creates these really fantastic automations for your customers. So they can have a natural conversation and it can feel like they're having it with a person, but it's actually a computer. And it also kind of generates a lot of different kinds of automations. You can do SMS blasts, you can do FAQs directly in the messaging system. You can also generate lead forms in the messaging system. So it's an exciting. Yeah, that's quite cool.

Very interesting on the. So we have a question here from Fiona Woodhead, which is what platform did you use for the faq? AI, please.

Sorry.

Go ahead.

Yeah, we built that. We've actually developed by me, so the agency. So my agency. We've actually, we actually built that from scratch using. Yeah, just using an algorithm and AI algorithm.

Excellent. Okay. Interestingly, we also have, we've a. We have a huge. For our store of customers, we have a huge help like articles, like hundreds of articles about, you know, store like help, basically help articles. And we have a live chat. So a lot of our customers will ask questions in the live chat. We recently, just before Christmas turned on a thing called Fin, which is in our. Which is from Intercom, which allows that chat functionality. Although we have people on it, a lot of this stuff can actually be picked up now by Finn. So if you ask a question, it will attempt to answer using, you know, using our docs and have a conversation. And that. That's so far been going really well. So we've had some success there with that. And that's. That's a platform anybody can use.

Is it a keyword, is it a keyword search thing or is it a sort of natural language?

I believe it's natural language. So it's. Whenever somebody might type in, you know, how do I do this in Stora? It'll come back and maybe if it needs to check what you mean, it'll come back and then it'll give you an answer and it'll write the answer out for, you know, with sort of, that sort of normal.

There, there are some amazing chatbots out there on the market right now. Really fantastic. We've been looking at one called Gohan as well, which is so it's got a chatbot functionality but also has other kind of conversion leads things as well. And I think, you know, chatbots I think are, they're an interesting concept for the, for the industry and I think they are great for out of hours or if there are, you know, points at which it might be difficult for an individual to be able to actually either call or email or whatever or stuff like that, find some. But I think there's a real balance between using something like that sort of chatbot and also having that, still having that personal touch which I know a lot of people are still really, really keen on maintaining as well.

Okay.

It's good. It's a sort of kind of balancing act.

Okay, I have a question just because we've chatted quite a few different things and I'm just interested. What would you prioritize if you're a self storage operator? Would you prioritize tracking the data? So we talked about looking at Google. Would you prioritize kind of some sort of automation stuff or would you prioritize, you know, the website and CRM like which is. Where would you start again?

It's got to be the CRM and the CMS as a foundation, you know, because having those systems in place to start with will be fundamental in how you're able to pivot forward. You know, having a very, very solid foundation to begin with is the most important thing. And you know, unfortunately I have seen in my time some pretty, yeah, sketchy, sketchy foundations, I'm not gonna lie. And it just makes it incredibly difficult in the future going forward to be able to scale at the end of the day. And that's, that's it. You know, it's whether it's, you know, scaling the actual business itself by adding more facilities or whether it's actually scaling your, your, your digital presence. And, and I think for me that is the priority is the, the, the basic foundations of your, of your marketing stack, which is your, your CMS and your, and your CRM and booking system.

Yeah, I think exactly the same way as you described. I think it's like when you're starting on self storage from looking at your software platform. Your software platform, which is obviously that we focus on. Your choice of software platform has a similar impact. The software platform you choose at the start, everything has limitations. You're Always going to live every, nothing's ever perfect. So really understanding what are the limitations of the system, is it going to help me scale the business? Is it going to help me grow? You know, and sometimes, you know, if you're looking for software, you might be, there's one, one, there's. That one's a little bit cheaper than the other one. Go for the cheaper one, whatever it might be, you know, you think about in price. But ultimately it's such an important decision because it's the foundation of your business. Getting that the website right, getting the conversions right, getting the ability to just sell online or whatever way you want to run the business, you've got to make sure your software is enabling that. The same with your marketing stack. And I suppose what you're saying there is start with the software, the tech, get the right tech in place and it's that, that kicks off the ability to even implement or execute on the.

Marketing or even get data. I mean, at the end of the day, that's the thing, isn't it, because you're looking to get the data to be able to make the decisions that you need to make for future scalability. So it's like having. So once you've got these foundations in place and then you've connected everything to the data, to your Google Tag Manager, to your analytics, to whatever kind of marketing dashboard that you might have decided that you want to use, that is the kind of crucial step in order for you to actually get the data, understand it and make the decisions that you want to be able to scale with.

We have another question here from Waleed. What's the best way to get started with AI or automation if you've never used these tools before?

That's a good one. That's a good one, to be honest. Waleed, I would say spend an hour talking with ChatGPT. That's the best way to get started. I mean, yeah, sit down, have a chat with ChatGPT. You will learn so much about how it works, the prompts it needs, the, you know, how it, how it extracts data and just the app, the breadth and depth of IT capabilities really, I think that's for me, where to start. And then also start using some generative AI. Other generative AI, like digital Imaging, get to use that. But if you want to go into, get into more sort of the automated stuff, you can look at scheduling. That's a good way of kind of a gentle, gentle easing into scheduling of AI. So scheduling social posts, scheduling, reporting, scheduling, maybe even caption delivery, which Is again a bit generative. But yeah, just you know, don't feel like you have to suddenly create your own LLM. I think that's the best way to do it. Start, start small and then work your way up.

So when you say talk to ChatGPT, I've been doing this quite a bit and so it's as simple as kind of, you know, you might type in, you know, I'm opening a self storage business in central London. I, you know, I've got my website, it's this, you might even have a link to it. Where should I start with some marketing and you know, and sort of have like basically what you're saying is have that conversation with ChatGPT and dig into the answers and just have a back and forth. Yeah, I recently quite a lot and I find it really, really helpful.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and when you're prompting ChatGPT, what I've, what I've kind of discovered, learned along the last couple years, you have to be very specific. You have to be, you have to really go into the, you know, the nitty gritty, the granular stuff. So you know, you go, I am so something like I am full stack marketer for this company. I've got such and such clients here. I do this, I do that, I do this. I'm looking for some inspiration for this. And it uses all of these cues to be able to deliver. Not just something that is kind of generic but it's a lot. You know, obviously it picks up on the fact that you've already got expertise in that area. You've already, you know, you have, you know, you know, whether it's experience or whether it's, you know, some kind of authority in that, that vertical and it will give you the relevant information so you know, the more detailed your prompt is, the more useful the information that you will get back from ChatGPT.

Okay, thank you Jill. We're running out of time with a final question from Carl which is more for me about stora, which is what integrations and functionality can STORA provide to link various marketing stacks with the data analytics and CRM in a system. So I'll give, I'm going to give it 30 seconds because we're out of time. So you can connect a bunch of stuff to store. You can connect your. We have the ability to connect Google Analytics so all the data goes into Google Analytics. We have the ability to add in your tracking ID for ads. So there's a section in store where you can add all of that stuff in lobbying our help desk. You can ask, if you ask on our help desk, an AI help thing will be able to point in the right direction, but there's tons of integrations there. And then you can also paste in JavaScript codes for online chat, chatbots, anything like that as well. We even did a, we did a session a few months ago about building your own AI chatbot and how to do it with Stora and even link into some of the data so it can read, you know, availability and everything live from Stora system. So maybe check that out too. So that's a really brief answer. I don't want to go into too much more than that at the moment, but because of time. But Jill, thank you so much. Thanks for sharing your expertise. Been really great to hear all that and thanks everybody for joining us as well. Thanks for the questions. Thanks for listening. If you're interested in learning more about Stora, obviously you know, visit our website where you'll find lots of stuff about marketing strategies, boosting revenue and managing your facility. Check it out at Stora Co blog. Jill, how can people find out more about you?

So you can either find me on LinkedIn Jill Lechi l E C K I E or you can go to my website which is developedbyme.com all one word and it gives you a lot of insight into what we do, our clients that we've worked with in the past and so on. So yeah, great.

Okay Jill, thank you so much. Thanks everybody and hopefully be in touch with them. Cheers.

Bye.

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