Looking to boost your storage facility’s online reputation? This episode explores the critical role of storage facility reviews in attracting new tenants. Host Stacy Rossetti and guest Kale Leavitt discuss innovative strategies for generating and managing Google reviews. Learn how automated systems can streamline the review process, the importance of responding to feedback, and tactics to leverage reviews for a competitive edge. Discover why focusing on reviews is essential for storage facility owners looking to improve their online presence and drive more rentals.

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How To Get Better Google Reviews For Your Storage Facility With Kale Leavitt

I teach people how to get into self-storage. If you don’t know us, we own sixteen facilities. We buy severely mismanaged facilities that we get $0.50 on the dollar. It takes a lot of work to get these things leased up properly. When you buy something like that, a lot of people say, “I want to be like you. I want to buy a mismanaged facility.” You have to come out of pocket every single month for something like this, and you have to be okay with that. You have to be on top of managing everything.

That’s what we do. We buy severely mismanaged facilities and make them into income-producing properties. Whether or not that’s the right way or not, that’s what we do. You can also buy income-producing properties. You can say, “I don’t want to do all that work. I want to make money right now,” which is typically what most people do. That’s our spiel.

I teach people how to get into self-storage. If this is your very first time tuning in, then what I do is every week on Wednesdays at 1:00, I come on and teach anybody that wants to tune in different aspects of self-storage investing. This is not the same every single time. Typically, I teach, and then every once in a while, I’ll have a special guest come on. Mostly, the special guests are my students and they go through their stories, but every once in a while, I’ll have a vendor. The only time I bring a vendor on is when I’ve been working with them for a while and they have shown me that their product is amazing. That’s why I asked Kale to come on. You’re going to meet him in a second.

Overview Of Stacy’s Teaching Method

The way that I teach is find them, fund them, and run them. That’s the three-step process. Deal analysis is the fourth week. Every month, I’ll do one week of find them, one week of fund them, and one week of run them, and then I’ll do a deal analysis. That’s how it works. I can’t teach everything in one hour, so if you want to learn how to get into self-storage and how to do everything, then a one-hour session isn’t going to do that. You come every week if you can.

If you can’t come to register, then you’ll get the replay. You can go on YouTube. You can listen to me. There are all kinds of free training. If you want everything all together and you don’t want to have to sit there, search around, go around, and look for stuff, then you can buy my course. Everything is right in the course. You could go through all the videos. There are over 150 videos there. I keep adding more videos and putting more stuff in it. That’s how it works. If you go to StacyRossetti.com, the website, everything that I do is there.

The book is done. We’re doing all the marketing stuff. We’re getting the pages ready and stuff. With what I’m going to do with my book, I decided I’m going to give it away for free for the first couple of days that we release it. Anybody that has tuned into the show, go to StacyRossetti.com and then opt-in so you can get the book for free.

Once I release it, I’ll probably give 48 hours for people to get the book for free. It’s going to be on Kindle. That’s the first step. Eventually, I’ll do the audiobook. I don’t have time to record. I’m too busy. When I have some time, I’ll record that. That’s the first thing that you’re going to see when you come to the page.

I was also thinking about even giving away one of my smaller courses for free for purchasing the book as well. You want to make sure that you do opt-in to get access to the book and maybe even a course later. You have Coaching, which is the StorageNerds Coaching Program, and then Acquisitions. If you want my team to find you a deal that you can buy, that’s what’s called acquisitions.

We have a brand new page called Owners. If you own a storage facility and you are tuning into the show, then you need to go to StacyRossetti.com and click on the Owners tab. We have what’s called the Facility Owner Mastermind. I’m really going to push this because I want a lot of owners to come in. I want us to work together and share ideas and stuff so we can be better at managing our properties. We can beat all these bigger players. That’s what the Facility Owner Mastermind is about. If you’re an owner and you’re tuning into the show, please come check this out. Apply and let’s talk about it. You can learn about what we do.

We finished this page. All this stuff that’s offered is on this page. I’m really excited about this. We’ve had this mastermind for a while and it has been for my students. I decided to open it up to other owners because I want other owners to be good at managing their properties. I talk to owners on a weekly basis and most owners have no idea what they’re doing. That’s what the purpose of the Owner Mastermind is

The course is there. My weekly free webinar training is here. For the Deal Analyzer, if you need to learn how to run numbers, it’s there for you. The Deal Analyzer is available for you. It also comes with a course. Our next boot camp will be in September 2024. If you want to come to the boot camp, it’s there. If you’re an investor and you want to invest with us, that is here as well too. My website is amazing. It’s awesome. Everything that I do is there, so please check it out. If you need anything, it’s there. All the different levels of pricing are there as well. That’s enough for my spiel.

Introducing The Special Guest Kale

We are going to have Kale come on. Somehow, I found you, Kale. I’m not sure how. You’ve been working with us to try to get our presence a little bit better out there. This session here, we’re going to be doing management. That’s the topic. When you become an owner, my saying is may the best marketer win. We’ve been talking about this a lot. This is so you have an idea over the past couple of months. My topic is may the best marketer win. This is something that we’ve learned over the past couple of years.

Marketing wasn’t such a huge topic before then. I know you started your company not long ago. Getting your presence out into the world is a huge way that you’re going to be only the other competition out there. One of the main things that you have to do is have a really good Google business listing. We talk about that quite often here. You and I go over Google business listings. If you think about how people search for storage, they go search, “Storage near me,” and look at all the facilities in the area.

If you’re looking to purchase something, what do you look at? For me personally, it’s reviews. Whoever has the best reviews and is right around the price that I want to be wins. I went on to Amazon right before this because I woke up in the middle of the night and had a migraine. I was on Amazon trying to figure out what I could do for my migraines. I ended up buying this cool eye thing.

It’s Prime Days on Amazon. This cap was on sale for whatever it was. It was 25% off. On top of that, it had 20,000 five-star reviews. I was like, “That’s it. That’s the one I’m getting right there.” That’s all it took for me to buy that product. The same concept goes for storage. It’s the same exact concept. This is what you do. You help us to be better at that. I want you to introduce yourself and go into your spiel and stuff.

First off, thanks for having me on. I’m excited to be here. To answer a few of your questions, you saw a post on Facebook of us and messaged and said, “Reach out.” I reached out and set up a demo. From there on, we’ve been working with you. It has been awesome. It has been very successful. It has been doing well.

Use my stuff as an example like you did with the mastermind You’re more than welcome to do that.

Kale’s Background In Storage Marketing

That’s perfect. I’ll do that. I’ll talk about the importance of reviews and introduce myself. Let me hop right in. I’ll start out by introducing myself. My name’s Kale Leavitt. I started out in storage about several years ago. I was the Vice President of Marketing at Easy Storage Solutions. Some of you may have used them in the past.

I helped Easy Storage with their marketing clients. My job was to do SEO and online marketing for Easy Storage clients. We started in 2015 with about 10 clients that we had. By the time I left, there were about 2,000 clients we were doing SEO and online marketing for. I’ve really had a good experience diving deep into the trenches of marketing facilities and seeing the impact that a good marketing strategy could have.

Fast forward to 2022, I believe, Storable purchased Easy Storage Solutions, so I moved over to the Storable team. If some of you aren’t familiar with Storable, they own Easy Storage, storEDGE, and Sitelink, the biggest player in the industry as far as software providers go. I moved over to the Storable team and helped with their marketing team for about a year.

At the end of 2022, I got laid off from Storable. The whole marketing department got laid off. It was a big adjustment for me. It was a big, “Now what?” Once that happened, I focused on what I saw and a need that we felt was important in the storage industry, and that was reviews. When I was doing SEO and online marketing for those Easy Storage clients, we saw the power that reviews had and how big of an impact those would have on facilities. We would always recommend to facilities, “Focus on reviews. Try to generate reviews.”

The problem we have is people would focus on reviews and they generate reviews for about a week, and then they’d taper off. They wouldn’t continue to do that, so they wouldn’t get that power that reviews would help. If somebody continued to do it and somebody continued to push, we’d see astronomical numbers of a 30% increase in traffic or a 5% occupancy boost by focusing on reviews. Depending on the facility size, that can be a huge benefit for them. That’s what I wanted to do after I got laid off. I fell back in and decided, “We’re going to build this product. We are going to focus only on storage facilities and make an affordable option.”

When I was with Easy Storage, we would recommend Podium or Birdeye, some people you’ve probably heard of that are big players in the review industry, but they’re always so expensive. A lot of the facilities we were working with are mom-and-pop facilities where they don’t want to spend $300 a month on a review generation platform. That’s too pricey. We wanted to create something that was strictly storage-focused. We’re not trying to get into any industry that’s going to make us money. We want to make our product the best for storage, and then we want to make it affordable for storage as well.

With that being said, I’ll jump into the importance of reviews. Stacy brought that up and was talking in-depth about Prime Days. My wife’s a little different. It didn’t take her a migraine to hop on Prime Day. She’s been on it all day. It has been hard to get her to get off of it. If on Prime Day I went on and purchased something, it’s the same thing. Anytime that I am looking on Amazon, tire shops, or anything along those lines, I’m looking at those reviews. That’s how 80% or 90% of people in the world handle reviews. They look at reviews. They use reviews to search for facilities. They use it to search for restaurants. About 88% of people trust reviews more than recommendations from family and friends.

88% of people trust online reviews more than recommendations from family and friends. Make sure your storage facility has a strong online presence! Share on X

With that being said, on Amazon, I was there when one of my kids was sick. My sister said, “You should use this.” I go and look on Amazon and there’s a 3.5-star rating or a 3.3-star rating. I’m like, “My sister’s crazy.” I didn’t believe her. I ended up not buying it. That’s how impactful reviews are in my life. It’s the same thing for a majority of the people.

There are these three things, which are influence on customers, trust factor with reviews, and impact on revenue. That’s something that I can bring up as well. What we’ve seen is facilities with higher review ratings can charge 10% more and still win business over competitors because people are assured they’re going to have a good experience. They feel comfortable because of other people’s experiences. They feel the facility is trustworthy. They feel like they would rather do that than someone down the street who has fewer reviews. I’m not saying to get a bunch of reviews and you can increase your prices by 10%. I’m saying that’s the power that reviews have. They help in a majority of things.

 

Reviews and self-storage are as impactful as anywhere else. 71% of people would not consider doing business with an average rating below four stars. Getting your rating up from a 3-star to a 4-star is huge psychologically for people looking to rent from your facility. If you’re above four stars, you’re going to be a lot more likely to attract people.

Google is the most well-used search engine in the world. The last time I saw it, it was 90,000 searches per minute or per second, I believe, in the world that happened on Google. That’s where we want to focus the majority of our reviews. It is generating those reviews on Google because that’s where people are going to look. That’s where you want to get.

Marketing is important. The best marketer is going to have the best facility. For the majority of people, they’re doing those things. They’re doing SEO, pay-per-click, SpareFoot, or social media things. Everyone’s doing these things, but not a lot of people are focusing on reviews and not taking advantage of reviews as they should be.

The cool thing about reviews and your Google Map Pack is when you do an SEO, it’ll help you rank higher organically and help you rank higher on Google Map Pack. Ranking higher with your Google Map Pack also takes reviews. The cool thing is when you’re in a competitive market or you’re competing with some people with some deep pockets, maybe REITs or something in your area, they are spending a lot of money on pay-per-clicks. They’re spending a ton that not all mom-and-pop facilities and small facilities can match. Reviews are something that level the playing field a little bit. They do a really good job on reviews, but they can’t spend more to get the higher spot in proximity to your location and things.

The statistics show about 28% of people click on Google Ads, about 42% of people click on that map pack and your Google Business page, and about 30% of people click on organic ranking. By ranking in that map pack by generating reviews and doing your other marketing, you’re going to be able to compete with those REITs at a much better level or a higher level because they’re not able to buy the spot if that makes sense. I’m not sure if everyone followed that or not.

That shows the power of reviews, how important those reviews are for attracting people, and how important they are for being trustworthy in the eyes of the consumer and helping you rank higher, get more people to your website, and get more rentals. That’s the main goal of storage. I heard one time that storage is renting an experience, three walls, and a roof. Wanting to make sure that our facility stands out above those with different amenities and customer service, in general, is the best way to stand out. Reviews help to spotlight that.

A few cool things on the reviews too are what Google reviews functions are most useful. 47% of people sort by newest. They’d go to reviews and click Newest. They want to see how recent those reviews are. If they’re older than three months, about 60% of people decide those aren’t relevant anymore. That’s another thing we want to do. We want to make sure we’re getting consistent reviews and consistently focusing on that.

When our clients at Easy Storage would focus on it for a week, they wouldn’t see a big benefit. That’s because 2 or 3 months down the road, people don’t hold as much weight and value to those reviews. We want to keep those consistent. They sort by highest rating, view individual photos, and the other options. About 33% of people search by lowest rating as well. They want to see, “I’m sure people have had a bad experience. What did the facility do to try to fix that experience?” That’s where the responses come in on reviews.

With pain points, gathering, and managing reviews, what we’ve seen is a lot of facilities have a hard time with the manual process. A lot of facilities focus on generating reviews by asking, which is great. Asking for reviews is going to be your most successful way to do that, but not everyone is going to be able to be asked. A lot of people are moving to a remote system or they’re remote moving, or maybe somebody rented online and didn’t even speak with anybody.

Manual processes can fail in a way. Our goal is to create a backup system for that manager or the person asking for those reviews. In case somebody slips through the cracks, we are there to target those people. The thing with managers is that a lot of times, managers will ask and they’ll do it really well for a week, and then they taper off a little bit. It’s about being a backup.

Let’s talk about the lack of integration. For a lot of systems out there, you can go online and find a lot of generation review managing websites. Not all of them are focused on storage. There are not a lot of integrations that are able to automate that process. You’re still having to go in. You’re still having to upload tenants. You’re having to manually send messages. You’re having to manually request those reviews, which causes some pain points and causes a lot of people to not worry about it. That’s time-consuming at the same time.

There are the managing report reviews. If you have multiple facilities, you have to bounce around to different locations and different business pages to respond to those. If you’re not responding to them, it can hurt your reputation a little bit because responses to reviews are also a portion of your Google ranking algorithm. Google likes to see you respond to reviews within 24 to 48 hours. Everything after that, the longer it gets, the less of an impact that response has.

We still want to make sure we’re responding to everything and making sure that if there is possibly a negative comment, we’re using those responses to show Google that we are actively working, actively trying to continue to improve our facility, and actively trying to fix the issues that happen. If we do that, then we are going to show Google we’re trying to be a better business. They are more likely going to recommend us.

I already talked about reviews and the importance of reviews. I’ll talk about our company in general and what we do. We want to be focused on storage. We want to make it possible for people to generate as many reviews as possible for storage facilities. Our goal is to streamline the review generation for our management process for storage facilities. Our goal is to integrate with everybody that we can to make it as automated as possible and then make it affordable so they can do that without breaking the bank.

In StorageReach, we integrate with many of the self-storage management software. We integrate with storEDGE, SiteLink, and Easy Storage. Cubby is a new one coming out that is getting popular. We integrate with Self Storage Manager. Tenant Inc. is another new one we’re getting that’s coming out. We also integrate Storage Commander. Our goal is to integrate with everybody. We’re working on that integration with everybody.

How The Review System Works

I’ll talk about how our system works. Since I’ve talked about the reviews, I’ll talk about how it works, what we do, and what we do differently. Our system automates the process and sends out review solicitations. We also do move-ins, move-outs, and current tenants. I’ll talk about the current tenants piece in a second because that’s a little different, but move-ins and move-outs are pretty similar.

Let’s say someone moves into your facility. They’re getting a bunch of information that day. They’re signing the lease agreement. They’re getting their gate code or getting the lock. They’re getting all the different things, like their auto-payment taken care of. They’re getting a lot of things that day, and then they’re also moving into their facility hopefully that day or within the next few days.

What we found is that it has been more beneficial for us to wait a day after the move-in or move-out to request a review. What we do is send a text message out a day after someone moves in and say something along the lines of, “Thanks for joining us at Cherry Station Self-Storage. If you have fifteen seconds to give us some feedback, you’ll be able to win a $100 gift card,” or something along those lines.

What happens is in that text, there’s this link. This link pulls this page up that has your logo on it and says, “How would you rate our facility?” If they say 4 or 5 stars, then we take them to Google. If they say 1 to 3 stars, we first take them to a survey in order to put a buffer in between any negative experiences people may have.

After they submit the survey, they’re still free to go online and post a negative review. We’re not going to be able to completely eliminate those. We’re trying to give people a way to get their frustrations off their chest and feel like they’re being heard before going to post about it online because we don’t necessarily want that. We want to get positive reviews. We want to keep a positive reputation so we can stay over that 4.0 mark and continue to build as many reviews as possible. That happens there. They fill out that survey form on a negative. 4 to 5 stars takes me to Google.

The cool thing too is we’re tracking everything that they’re doing. A lot of people, like me as well, will get a text requesting a review or something and forget. I’ll be like, “I had a great experience,” but I’ll be doing something and I’ll forget. We send a follow-up message three days later to people who haven’t done anything with that message. They didn’t click the link. They didn’t give us a star rating. They didn’t do anything. We see a higher conversion rate on that follow-up message than we do on the initial message. I am not sure if that’s because people are moving into the facility or they forget we’re pushing them along a little bit. It’s interesting that way.

We send everything as text messages. All those messages that I mentioned are text messages. We send emails out as well but we didn’t want to hit people too often with, “We’re doing a follow-up message.” We don’t want to annoy them or anything like that. We don’t send emails anymore. We’ve only focused on text messages because we have a much higher conversion rate. We send the message from a local phone number. Any responses get sent to you. The facility branding is on the landing page.

As I talked about that survey, with the survey response, you’re able to customize the star ratings however you want them to set them up. All of your survey responses get sent to your dashboard that we have which I’ll talk about in a moment. It allows you to have a pulse on your business as well and gives you categories that you can say, “My cleanliness score keeps getting negative results, so let’s focus on that. Let’s make sure that that’s fixed before it becomes a bigger issue.”

We do have the Drip System. One thing that we mentioned with this review system is that sometimes, we offer a $100 Amazon gift card. We provide that. There are things to be aware of because Google doesn’t want you to incentivize for reviews. They don’t want you to be like, “Pay $10 if you give us a review,” or be like, “Enter to win a $100 gift card.” What we do is incentivize this initial rating.

On our actual landing page, there’s a blurb at the bottom that says, “An online review is not required for entry into the giveaway. It’s the star rating.” They’re getting incentivized for that. If they want to continue and leave a Google review, we’re happy. That’s what we want. In order to offer that gift card, we do it for the initial review or initial rating within our system.

When we started doing that and we offered that gift card on our end, maybe one month, somebody from Stacy’s facility will win and then maybe the next month, somebody from a client of ours in Washington will win. The reason we did that is because it increased our conversion rates. It doubled them in that timeframe. Once we offered that gift card, we went from about an 8% conversion rate to about a 17% conversion rate. It pushes it and makes it worth it for us.

Let me talk about the current tenant piece. Move-outs are the same process. They have a different verbiage in the text message but they’re pretty much the same thing. With the current tenant piece, what we do is choose five random current tenants per week. Storage is a little different. You have a gold mine of people sitting there that are most likely having a good experience or they’re not going to be renting with you anymore.

What we do is send out five random current tenants per week, thanking them for continuing to store with you and asking for a review. Those people are randomly chosen. After they’re randomly chosen, they’re taken off the list to be chosen for another six months. We’re not choosing them too often. We don’t want to annoy them or anything. If they’ve left a review in the past, instead of getting a review request, they get that survey so that you can get up-to-date feedback on your facility.

We have our dashboard. What’s happening is it’s helping you to manage all of your reviews in one location. You have your dashboard here. We can integrate your Google business page. You can come to your review management page and see any reviews that you’ve gotten. We got four reviews for Stacy. We had a few negative ones come in here but there are pretty consistent positive reviews. The cool thing about this is you can respond directly from this dashboard. Instead of going into your Google business page, you can choose a template if you want to respond. If you click Save Response, that’s getting pushed directly to Google. You can break that down by facility. ,

It’s good also. Bad reviews are not bad. Bad reviews are good. It helps us to be better. Our customer support is really good, but how can we be better? What are the things that the tenants are thinking? What can we improve on? If you’re getting a lot of bad reviews, then you know you need to be better.

Bad reviews aren't always bad. They help us improve and show potential customers how we handle issues. Use them as opportunities to showcase your customer service! Share on X

Managing And Responding To Reviews

Exactly. Bad reviews are going to happen. Not every facility and not every business is perfect. It’s more strange if you go on and see a facility with 50 reviews and they’re all 5 stars. Those are most likely all fake. Nobody’s going to be perfect. It is taking that opportunity on a negative review to find what is an issue, find what the problem is, and then take that opportunity to fix it as well. In the response, make sure you’re looking at their problem and responding.

 

We’re going through our reviews every week. When we got 2 or 3-star reviews, I was like, “What are they saying? What are they talking about? How can we get a four-star?” It’s good to see those and then discuss it with your team, or if it’s just you. At least you know what you’re doing wrong.

Exactly. It almost turns into an opportunity as well on a negative review because your response can show people who are looking at your facility, “These guys are trying to fix the issue. They’re trying to make sure there’s not any bigger problems.” That gives them more assurance that you’re going to be taking care of them like you’re trying to take care of someone who maybe didn’t have a perfect experience.

We always respond. For instance, one of our reviews that came in was when we changed our access hours from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM. We did that and sent out an email to everybody, and then a couple of people came on and were like, “They changed their access hours.” You respond back, “We don’t want randos walking through the property at 2:00 AM. That is why access has been changed. It’s really for your security.” How can we relay that to the tenant better? How can we say that to the tenant? That’s exactly what happened.

It gives you an opportunity. It’s great keeping up with it and making sure you’re responding to those. One thing that we are rolling out, and I don’t think you’re aware of this either, is we’re adding a smart reply button. You click that and it’ll generate an AI response that you can then go in and edit to whatever you want. It will give you a starting point to work with and speed things up as well.

The review manager piece is nice. Especially if you have multiple facilities, it helps you to optimize or automate that and make it a lot easier for you. We have our feedback piece. This feedback piece is those negative responses. If you’ve had any negative responses come through those surveys, you can be able to come into here and see, “Why are these negative? What’s going on? What’s the issue?”

Let’s say Blairsville. A few people have said staff friendliness and cleanliness has been a lower score. That’s something Stacy can then look at like, “What do we need to adjust? What do we need to make changes to?” By having a pulse on your business, you can see the individual responses as well and go through, “This is the issue.” You can then reach out to them and try to fix the issue or you can worry about it. It’s up to you how you want to make that happen.

We have our current tenant piece as well in here where you can see which tenants left a review and when they left a review. That way, you can stay up to date with that. Our analytics piece is getting a revamp, but it does give you some data as far as how many review requests you sent out, how many people have clicked your Google, and how many people have left a survey. It gives you some high-level statistics on that.

The cool thing about our system is it’s fully automated. Once we turn that on, Stacy doesn’t have to go in here. She doesn’t have to manually do anything. She can come into this dashboard and she can manage it, but she doesn’t even have to do that. She can go in and it’s going to be running in the background and doing the job of making sure that people are getting requested reviews and making sure those reviews are consistently coming in.

I got 250 reviews from you. That’s amazing. It was in the last couple of months or so. That’s a lot of reviews.

Those aren’t necessarily all Google reviews. Those are internal reviews as well. Still, your average rating is 4.3 on those reviews. It gives you a good estimate of where you’re at. The ideal thing is to push those people to Google as well. We’ve gotten about 120 in the last few months. It has gone really well and is helping you. I haven’t seen your analytics as far as your go page traffic goes.

How does that work? The Google Analytic analytics from the traffic, you said you could see that or what?

We don’t have access to yours. We do have a few clients that we did have access to. For example, one of our facilities clients, Freedom Storage Management, saw a 26% increase in web traffic after 90 days. Aspen Storage saw a 33% increase in web traffic. We’ve looked at a few of them. The average is about 20% increase. By generating reviews, that’s what they’re getting. Those guys are all, and I’m sure you are as well, focusing on SEO. They’re doing all the things they’re supposed to. Hitting that last piece that other people aren’t necessarily hitting very well has been a real difference-maker in their marketing strategy.

SEO was our topic in the mastermind. SEO, your Google business listing, your website, and then getting reviews, that’s the best you could possibly be doing.

That’s hitting all the main pillars. That’s making sure that you’re well-rounded in your marketing. It’s going to set you up for success.

What would be good? I feel like this same process that you have, you could also do it for referrals. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I’ve been wanting to do something with referrals. It sends a text message out like, “If you do a referral, we’ll give you a free month,” or whatever. It could be an Amazon gift card or something. Maybe that’s something you could look at implementing as well too because it’s a text message.

That’s a really good idea. I’ve never thought of that. What we could do is send one text message after the move-in to say, “Thanks for renting with us as well.” Maybe we do it a week after if you want to refer a friend who has a link.

It could even be a month later or something. It’s like, “You’ve been there. Now, you know how we are. Do you have anybody that you know that’d be interested? We’ll give you a gift card if they move in,” or something.

That’s a very good idea.

Set it up so that we can manage it. We can see who does that and then we can manage internally to send those out.

We can do it either way. You can manage it or you can automate it and then it sends it to them. That way, it notifies you if someone signs up through their referral link.

I feel like you could add that as another thing.

The biggest thing we’d have to figure out is tracking it so that you know, “Emily in unit 1 34, their referral link was used to sign up.”

Even if you set the process up, we could manage it. Eventually, you could probably figure out something too. I feel like those text messages would make a big difference. This is the thing. We know that we have to do reviews but we never do them. What would happen is we would send out an email once a month or something like, “If anybody could give us a review.”

We would get a couple of reviews but it wasn’t a true system. It wasn’t set up properly for us. That’s not something that we do. We manage people and put them in is what we do. That’s why you have something that a lot of owners could really benefit from because it’s something that you could sign up for and then forget about.

That’s what I saw when I was doing SEO. It was the same thing. Managers have a million different things they need to focus on. Reviews aren’t always at the forefront of their focus. Having a process to take that off their plate is hugely beneficial. We are a newer company. We launched our software in May 2023. We’re over a year. We’ve got about 500 facilities on it, so it is something that’s growing. It’s something managers want and need. It’s the same thing Stacy’s saying. Not a lot of people are focusing on that. Having a system in place has been huge for a lot of facilities.

We’re adding a lot of things. Our goal is to continue to improve this and help facility owners in any way we can. For example, the referral idea is a great idea. That’s something that is really feasible and can be done and something that can help facilities. I probably will take that, talk to the dev team, and put a plan in place for something like that. So,

Also, the other thing is getting rid of bad referrals. I don’t know if that’s possible, but that popped up on my Facebook. I was like, “Kale could do that.”

Bad reviews are a tough subject. A lot of companies out there say, “We can get rid of bad reviews.” Nobody can guarantee they can get rid of a bad review. Google is very tight-knit. They’re hard to get a hold of to get rid of reviews. They can try. There are different tactics that you can use to get rid of negative reviews, but those aren’t always going to be successful.

What do they do? Do they contact Google? What are they doing?

There are a few different things you can do. You can go in and report their negative review on your Google business page. You flag it and then hope somebody gets back to you. You can go into a forum, post on the forum, and say, “This isn’t a client of ours. How do I get this removed?” Every now and then, you might get someone to come get back to you.

The percentage of those working is very low. Your best bet with negative reviews, for one, is to respond quickly, explain the situation, and get it fixed. From there, you bury them. Get as many positive reviews on top of that so people aren’t necessarily seeing at the forefront those negative reviews. Bury those. Report them. Do the forum. That’s about as much as Google lets you do. If people are saying, “I can get rid of this. No problem,” that’s a lie.

The Value Of A Good Review

The thing that you have to ask yourself as an owner of a facility is how much is a review worth. To me, a review is worth a lot of money because it’s going to help you to get new tenants. To me, it’s the equivalent of one month’s rent. That could be $100. That could be $200 or whatever it is. I feel like investing in getting reviews is probably one of the most important things that you’re going to be doing as an owner.

We’ve got 50 reviews. Our competition like CubeSmart or whatever has 200 reviews. I’m like, “How the heck did they even get 200 reviews? That’s not fair.” We’re building up to that as well too. They’ve been doing it for a long time. They probably do what you do, which is texting five people per month and asking them, “Can you leave us a review?”

CubeSmart has a system similar to ours in place that they’ve built out on their own. They have been focusing on it for a long time. They do a really good job of recognizing the importance of reviews. They’ve had a head start on a lot of people. We are trying to level that playing field and catch people up on that. As far as what a review is worth, each facility is a little different. Some people say, “I’m going to pay my manager $10 for every review that they get.” Some do $20. Right there, there’s $10 you’re paying, and then on top of that, you’re paying what is that going to bring in.

Creating what’s called a customer experience loop is our main goal. What that is is when you get someone renting your facility and you get a positive review, somebody comes, looks at that review, and says, “I need to go to a facility. I trust this review. I’m going to rent a facility.” They leave a review, and then it continues that circle where someone sees that review and reads it. One review can start out a customer experience loop that can end up in 20 or 30 rentals over the course of a few years. That’s the goal. Reviews are hard to quantify with how important they are, but as far as a dollar amount, every facility can be different.

A single positive review can start a customer experience loop, potentially leading to 30 rentals over a few years. Never underestimate the power of a happy customer's feedback! Share on X

I left a review for a golf course in Arizona. I went to a golf course in Phoenix and left a review. I had a good experience. I got an email a few months ago saying 5,000 people had seen my review. I would not have told 5,000 people about that golf course. I don’t know 5,000 people. Having that review out there has been able to get people to see that review.

Was it a good review or a bad review?

It was a very positive review. I had a great experience. I love that golf course. I’m sure that has helped influence a lot of people.

It has the same effect for a bad review. I did a bad review on Airbnb in Crater Lake. It was the worst Airbnb I’ve ever been to. I got an email from Google. It was like, “20,000 people have looked at your review.” Could you imagine if there’s a 1-star review and 20,000 people looking at your review? You have such a huge effect.

You want to work towards 4 and 5-star reviews. You want to know what people are thinking. This is the whole point of this software. You want to know what they’re thinking so that you can improve and you don’t get those reviews anymore. I remember a couple of years ago, we would randomly get a bad review. It was like, “What the heck did we do? Why” You can manage that. What you’re doing is great for owners, especially us little tiny people out there.

That’s the goal. That’s a lot of the clients I work with at Easy Storage and that’s the kind of clients that I want to continue to work with. It is those mom-and-pop facilities and people like Stacy with 15 or 20 facilities. One facility is time-consuming. Getting a system in place for them was the main goal.

For anybody, it is time-consuming. Hardly any of my students are worried about reviews and I’m like, “Come on.”

It’s not the main focus.

It started in the last couple of years.

There is one interesting thing. This is something I saw not long ago so it’s not happening yet or anything like that. Google is starting to run some tests of if someone searches, for example, “Self-storage near me,” all they’re showing are Google business pages. I’ve seen it a few times. It has been popping up for people. All they’re showing is Google Business pages. The only way to rank is through your Google business page and make sure that you have a good reputation there.

Google is the fastest-growing search engine.

It’s going to be even more important.

They’re really pushing it.

I’ll go through pricing really quickly. With multiple facilities, there are discounts as well, but with the pricing around our facilities, anything from 0 to 100 units is $59, 101 to 250 units is $79, and 250 units plus is $99. With StorageNerds, we are offering a $10 discount for anybody who’s tuning in to the show or is a member of the StorageNerds community. We also offer bigger discounts to make it make sense for multiple facilities and try to make it as affordable as possible so you’re not paying $300 a month per facility.

StorageReach.com/Stacy-Rossetti is the link where you can get the monthly discount. StorageReach.com/Stacy-Rossetti is what it is.

If you don’t find the link, go to our website and fill out the form. To contact us, set up a demo or something and mention that you were on this episode. We’ll honor it.

Mention my name for all the owners.

Mention Stacy.

You have a way to get more reviews when you get your facility or when you own your facility. Please check out the Facility Owner Mastermind as well. Come hang out with all the storage nerds. We can all talk storage together as well. Any final thoughts? Does anybody have any questions? Put it in the chat. Otherwise, you could reach out to Kale if you own a facility and get started on this. It’s a great product. Thank you for hanging out.

Thanks for having me. If anybody has any questions, let me know. Reach out and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Thank you guys for tuning in. I’ll see you guys at the next session. Take care. Bye.

 

Important Links

• Kale Leavitt
• YouTube – Stacy Rossetti – Self Storage Investing
• Facility Owner Mastermind
• Storage Reach – Stacy-Rossetti