We’re fortunate to have a great many incredible customers who give useful feedback and ideas. It’s like having a perpetually running focus group connected to our customer experience team. Not long ago, some of that feedback led to the insight that a specific bundling of our products is exceptionally valuable to a particular industry; Self Storage Businesses. Specifically, those with 10 or more locations.
Having been a customer of the self-storage businesses myself, I wasn’t aware of the inherent complexities. Imagine that you have an apartment complex with 2,000 units, a good portion of those on a month-to-month contract, tenants who are often either traveling or transitional and wide swings in seasonal business. Now multiply that by dozens of locations in different markets with different advertising landscapes, phone companies, banks, and well, you get it.
While we were chatting with many of these companies, a product bundling organically emerged: combining Prestophone with Call Tracking and our Compass Payments Suite.
First, with Prestophone, they’re able to eliminate all those different landline phone companies and phone bills for each location. Prestophone our business-class VoIP phone system in the cloud crafted to accept add-on technologies like call tracking and payments.
Lots of self-storage business use our call tracking product in their out-of-home, broadcast, print, and Internet advertising. It provides insight into which ads are driving leads by associating each with a different inbound phone number. And our payments suite enables payment alerts and accepts payments by phone, text, web, chatbot, and messenger. Rolling all that up into one cloud-based phone system from one vendor gives them both substantial cost savings and an incredible boost in efficiency.
Excellent, we have an offering that holds value for a distinct segment, time to make a campaign!
For B2B campaigns, there are three crucial “boxes” that need to be checked off:
• A powerful emotive promise that resonates with your audience
• Stand-out creative that supports the promise
• An offer that amplifies the value proposition
Based on our chats with our customers, we know that the product bundle saves them a ton of money (the more locations, the more they save) along with giving them the data they need to optimize their advertising spend. From that, our emotive promise emerged:
Let Your Self Storage Business Soar!
With the supporting descriptor: “Save Money, Improve Efficiency, And Accelerate Your Marketing With Our Product Bundle For Self Storage.”
Since our customer turn-over rate is just about insignificant (a churn of less than 2%), we can offer free set up for most new customers. In some cases, this is an upfront cost saving by as much as $4,000. So great, we have an offer that improves the value proposition.
Now for that stand-out creative. After tossing out a lot of mockups, a happy accident happened. We call her, “Storage Girl.”
A completely unexpected image in this category that is used to commercial/industrial visuals. A colorful aspirational image that doesn’t just support the promise, she illustrates the results of how we make good it.
First things first, get our thoughts together. Since Wey Wey Wong (our brilliant CXO who was first to notice the value of this bundle) was planning to attend several key events in the self-storage industry, it made sense to work on a one-pager. That’s right, a good old “sell-sheet,” “sales-slick,” or one-side brochure, whatever you like to call it, it’s still an essential component of a B2B marketing strategy.
So the one-sheet needs to be on-point with a clear benefit statement, value proposition, and a creative starting point for your visual design. I don’t like “templates” for this documents. Instead, we have a system that offers more flexibility. Here, you can see our girl and visuals take shape.
The reason we like one-sheets is that it forces us to condense sometimes complex value propositions down to very concise language. After your creative brief, I feel this is the most critical document. It centers the conversation as a starting point for telling your product’s story, no matter the channel. And in our workflow, the one-sheet is most often the first bit of product information our sales team sends to prospects.
Time round-out the campaign. Next comes a landing page featuring our girl and a strong headline featuring the core promise, “Let your business soar!”
Landing page strategy has evolved. Recent research by Jakob Nielson and similar usability and experience authorities are indicating that the short, limited content pages popularized by the templates of landing page providers are ineffective. Tall scrolling pages have become a defacto expectation, thanks to the mobile web. People want information.
So now we weave our story, explaining how we will deliver on our promise. We write in an approachable tone, knowledgeable but not stodgy, informal but not sloppy, a copy style that helps our customers get the business results they need, so they can get on with their day.
We give clear and obvious to more information about each product, including downloadable PDF’s complete with short-links that visitors can use to share with others in their organization.
Next is an easy to scan overview of our offer, and what it means, in plain language with no unnecessary jargon.
Throughout the entire page, we make sure our call-to-action is repeated and easy to recognize.
And finally, our storage girl urging the user to “get ready to soar.”
Great, we have a landing page. Now on to the rest.
An email campaign to our targeted list.
An AdWords search and retargeting campaign, complete with AdWords extensions like our offer and a click-to-call phone number.
An AdRoll retargeting campaign.
Social media outreach.
Putting together this campaign was a lot of fun. Many thanks to Wey Wey Wong and Ryan Wagner for developing the original idea for the bundle, and working with us to refine the message and offer. And also special thanks to Ashley Friedman, my right hand in the marketing department.
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