Watch the 2023 Marketing Technology Trends video.
The financial boom following the blunder of people eating bats in 2020 is just about over. Most of those impacted have moved on with their lives and have settled into new lifestyles and occupations. Self-storage operators will see many changes in 2023, especially in how the market reacts to advertising and marketing, since consumers have changed how they interact with brands and how purchasing decisions take place.
During the crisis and the recovery, consumers have driven an acceleration of digital business. To get ahead of the continuing changes on the horizon, many businesses are stepping up their efforts in marketing automation through various forms of marketing technology (MarTech) and advertising technologies (AdTech). While MarTech and AdTech aren’t new concepts, their importance has grown dramatically in the past two years. Let’s look at a few strategies of interest as we move into 2023.
Stat: MarTech spending surpassed $20 billion in the US in 2022, up 15% over 2021. - eMarketer
Beyond SEO – As fast as a fever breaks, so changes consumer behavior. Traditional marketing methods are falling well short of the mark, as is basic SEO strategy. Today’s leading retailers are increasing their efforts around signal-based marketing, whereby marketers attempt to anticipate what customers want and then feed it into automated marketing processes. What does this mean for self-storage operators? Well, it means SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) strategies are slowly losing ground against anticipatory methods. In the past, self-storage operators have relied largely on the behavior of consumers searching for self-storage, whereas signals are available on Google Ads and social media platforms to tell businesses where an ideal consumer can be found. Adverank has been using Social Boost for several years to anticipate self-storage needs by focusing on signals in the networks. It has served as a successful alternative to simply liquidating excess inventory, for which there is only a fee and no lasting marketing impact.
Automate or lag behind – Gartner predicts that by 2024, “organizations that understand the needs of customers will outperform other organizations’ customer experience metrics by 20%.” This advanced understanding comes from the utilization of automation tools that increase customer engagement and improve their experiences with your social media and advertising. Software and tools that agencies, brands, publishers, and platforms use to target, deliver, and measure their digital advertising efforts will be vital to your success against your competition. Now is the time to invest in those tools are seek partnerships with organizations that understand marketing and advertising automation.
“(One trend for 2023) is the increasing use of tools for automation and personalization at scale. Doing that is difficult unless you understand the data you have, put that data into a tool, and use that to automate your communications to consumers. This could be automating things like ‘the next best action’ based on what customers have done in the past and what they might do next,” says Ken Fitzpatrick, CEO of the Digital Marketing Institute.
Data-driven marketing – Data gives you direction and improves the efficiency and impact of your marketing and advertising campaigns. Marketing is expanding beyond PPC and measurements such as cost per click (CPC) into more real-time measurements that connect your marketing campaigns to other metrics such as occupancy. Collecting and analyzing this data allows improvement in the efficiency and impact of your advertising campaigns, but also increases understanding of how different advertising strategies and channels impact occupancy. Self-storage operators will need to add more data into their decision-making processes, especially given the technologies available. Data-driven marketing, when deployed correctly, can have a huge impact on your occupancy.
Self-storage operators in 2023 and beyond will need data, automation, and plenty of MarTech and AdTech to succeed in engaging consumers in their digital journeys. We believe marketing and advertising technologies can help improve those digital experiences, grow your brand, and increase occupancy.