Now that you've decided what grassroots marketing tactics to employ, how much time is it worth to devote to grassroots marketing?
There are a lot of variables that go into answering that question.
Stacie Maxwell of Universal Storage Group sat down with Tommy and Melissa to talk about grassroots marketing. Let's take a listen as she boils it all down and gets you on the right track!
Question: "How do you learn which grassroots tactics work best in your community?"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Does Grassroots Marketing Work in 2024?, Tommy and Melissa were joined by Stacie Maxwell of Universal Storage Group to talk about how you can use grassroots marketing methods to improve your business as competition continues to thicken.
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Stacie had to say:
Laser focused messaging requires that you have to plan your visits in a way that you're only visiting those type of businesses on your marketing day.
So what I do is we employ what I call zone marketing.
You take your entire market area, you cut it up into zones. You have four marketing days for the month, then you have four zones in your zone. So on the first week, you're going to visit all the apartment complexes in zone one, okay? And the second week, you're going to visit all the apartment complexes in zone two. And then the third week of the month, zone three, fourth week of the month, zone four.
That way the entire month is focused on that type of business, apartment complexes.
And then each time you go out, you're not zigzagging all over your entire five to ten mile radius. You're staying in a tight little area and you're not wasting time, you're not wasting energy, you're not wasting gas to get there. Okay?
You get all of your information, you plan your route, who you're going to go to. You laser target your message, create your flyer or whatever it is that you're giving out. So whatever goodie you're giving away, get that ready like the day before, days before, and put everything you need, including your marketing call report, where you're going to track where you went.
Put it all in your car the night before, don't go to the office.
Put a sign on the door that says, we will open 11:00 today. If you have the ability to be remotely covered by another store, have that store cover your phone calls and everything until you open, until you get there at 11.
And instead of going to your store, start marketing at 09:00 a.m. Go to these businesses before they get busy too. Because if you wait until 1:00, 2:00 they're trying to eat lunch.
They're probably busy because the other people who are on their lunch break are visiting.
Also plan your time to be there. Knock it out first thing in the day and then come back to your store. Open up at 11:00 or 12:00 whenever you get back, and then complete your marketing day. Fill out the rest of your form. Add all your new contacts to your email database so you can follow up with them with an email that should go out reminding them. So you want to make sure that you're taking notes every time you visit any of these businesses.
And on average, maybe ten visits can be knocked out in 2 hours, 3 hours if you're practicing this very tightly knit zone marketing program.
So it's pretty easy to do that.
That equals 40 visits a month, which is 480 visits for the year. And if only 25% of those generate a referral, then you've created another 120 leases this year, which is a lot, if you think of it that way.
And you want to make sure you're really important to take notes about what you talked about with each visit. So I tell my managers, instead of sitting and trying to write down their name, their address, their phone number and all this stuff across the form that's on their business card that you're taking away from. Right. So number the business card. And on the number one line, write what you talked about, because that's what's important.
Because the next time you go back and visit them, you're going to look at your previous marketing call report and see what you talked about and follow up with them about it.
And so, I mean, it could be as minor as they mentioned their son was in a baseball game. Well, how did his season go?
Make it personal.
Make it build a relationship with these people."
—Stacie Maxwell
