You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover… but you do. So do I. After all, someone decided what to put on that book’s cover.
The branding on your facility is the book cover. Customers are browsing the shelf, and your branding tells them what sort of facility you’re going to be. Branding tells them who you are as a company, and who your ideal customer is.
You’re telling a story about what makes your business unique and what you as a business owner believe in.
Branding is more than choosing a few colors and paying your nephew to design a logo.
Whether you’re taking over a new facility, starting from scratch, or bringing a property in-house, branding can make or break the project. On our recent Office Hours, Tyler and Tommy got into the weeds of branding - how it works, how to make it work, and how operators are getting it wrong.
Branding is easy to overlook, especially as a small business. As long as it looks OK, who really cares about the “brand” of a small local facility, right?
Your brand tells customers who you are. It tells them that you’re a good choice for their needs (or not). Storage operators joke that we all sell the same boxes of air – and they’re not wrong! But that doesn’t mean branding is unimportant.
It means your branding might be the ONLY thing that separates you from the competition.
If you’re swimming in a sea of REITs, you might want to be the locally-owned and operated option. But if you’re in rural Texas, and everyone around you is local, that won’t mean anything!
Customers are looking at a screen full of options, all selling boxes of air. Branding isn’t your logo or colors. Branding is the one-sentence (or one-word) pitch that you’re making to this shopper to click on you.
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Pick one word, MAYBE two, to describe your business. What value do you want to be known for? What is different about your facility?
Maybe you have the cheapest rates - affordable.
Maybe you’ve been in this community for twenty years - local.
Maybe you’ve got the nicest, most specialized humidity control in the state - premium.
Maybe you’re on the main road in town - convenient.
Maybe your manager is the nicest person on Earth - service.
There are lots of options! But you do have to choose. You can’t tell shoppers that you’re both premium and affordable. They won’t believe you. And if you throw ten words at them, none of those words will stick.
If you try to be everything, you’ll be nothing.
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“Pick a few words to describe your facility” sounds easy, but it’s not. After all, you see your business from behind the counter, but your customers see it from the front gate!
Not only that, but your customers see your business as one of many. You might think of yourself as premium, but if the facility next door offer better amenities, you won’t seem premium to potential customers.
Here are some tips on deciding how to position your self storage business:
Once you’ve picked your one or two words, check out your highest-performing marketing channels. Check your website, your signage, your office, your Facebook profile, your Google Ads. Do they match your brand identity?
You don’t have to say the word directly, but there are ways to communicate that value. Whether you’re rebranding to something new or just doing self storage marketing for your existing facility, you must know your brand identity. If you don’t know why people should choose you, your leads won’t either.
Branding/rebranding usually comes up when either:
Regardless of the reasoning, branding/rebranding always looks pretty much the same. Whatever reputation, brand recognition, signage, colors, etc. that your business had before is wiped away, and you’ll replace it with something new.
Changing your brand is risky! You’re giving up established brand recognition and you’re spending a lot of money to put up new signage, repaint your doors, build a new website, etc.
Even if you’re acquiring a facility, you should consider keeping the brand (unless that was part of the deal). However, if you’re buying from a big regional player or a REIT, that won’t be an option. We’ll go over the benefits and risks of rebranding here:
Rebranding is a big undertaking. It’s expensive, it’s labor-intensive, and it’s risky. But it is often the right long-term choice. Good branding and a strong, consistent digital presence are worth a ton of marketing dollars. You’re weighing immediate costs against long-term gains, which is always tricky.
Can you live with the current branding? This is your business now. If you’re going to wake up every morning and cringe when you see the awful cartoon frog mascot plastered all over your facility, go ahead and rebrand now.
Is the current branding a drag on business? A 2.7 star rating on your GBP can be absolutely crushing. If you’re taking over a brand that is weak – bad ratings, bad reviews, inconsistent, whatever – that’s a strong point in favor of rebranding. Reputation and reviews are huge in this industry, and the sooner you start fixing it, the better.
Is there an opportunity to improve? For rebranding to help, your new brand has to be good. You need a good name, a good logo, and a good hook (those one or two words we mentioned above).
When you’re taking over a new storage facility, there’s a lot to do. Designing the new brand,
The exact requirements will change depending on your facility, so we’re not going to try to list every last detail – you know your facility better than we do!
We’re also not going to touch the legal side of it. We’re not lawyers, and we’re definitely not your lawyers! Check with your state self storage association for all the legal steps you’ll need to take to change business names, transfer leases, etc.
Outside of that, these are the three main tasks required in rebranding a facility:
These folks are what make the business worth buying! With average length-of-stay going up and up, each tenant is worth a year or more of monthly payments. Tenants don’t want to move out of their unit. It’s a lot of work, a lot of time, and a lot of sweat. However, a major transition, such as a change in ownership, could have your tenants reconsidering whether they want to keep the unit.
So, your job in these communications is to build up trust. They probably have a relationship with the old brand, and you want to signal that you’ll continue to treat them well. Send a letter (email or real mail) and explain the situation, introduce yourself, and reassure them. Give them the upside of this new brand and management team.
“Your rates aren’t going to change for at least six months, and we’re going to get that busted back gate fixed.”
Give your contact information, or reassert that the support email hasn’t changed, and offer to answer any questions that they have. Most of your tenants won’t reach out, but the offer can reassure them that you’re happy to talk if they do. Tell them the billing entity on their autopay statement will have a new name, too.
Keep your tenants updated when you make changes to the facility, too. Open communication will prevent misunderstandings, and it also gives you a way to brag about the improvements you’re making! Then, when it finally does come time to raise rates, you’ve already established why – you’re making this facility better.
Include both the OLD and the NEW branding in your communications. If you only send out the new name, people won’t open the email or letter to read it. We recommend using both names for a full season.
Things to tell tenants:
Updating your digital footprint is cheaper than updating your signage, but just as important (and potentially more annoying). When you rebrand a storage facility, you must find everywhere your facility exists online and update that branding as well.
The first and primary place to look is at your website domain. If you’re getting a new business name, you need a new website domain, too. You’ll want to redirect the existing domain to the new one – this passes link equity to the new site, and helps it regain any lost rank. Your self storage web developer should put 301-redirects from old pages to new pages, matching intent.
If you don’t have a self storage website developer, or you’re not thrilled with your current vendor, StoragePug handles domain redirects at the page level for every new site.
Learn more about our self storage marketing services here, or
Inconsistencies can hurt your performance with Google and AI search. If the algorithms find conflicting information about the business located at your address, they’re likely to simply not show either option. It may be clear to a human which one is accurate, but the robots have no reason to take the risk. They’ll show your more-consistent competitors instead
AI tools can actually be very helpful with this! Ask ChatGPT or Claude questions about your business, and if they say anything incorrect, dig into the source.
If it’s not too late, take over the profiles from the former owner. If they’ve already retired to an island with no Wi-Fi, the process will be harder. You own the business, though, and you can prove that in a variety of ways. Check out Google’s guidelines on getting your GBP first. The Google Business Profile is the most important digital profile you’ve got.
You’ll be updating an existing business, rather than creating a new profile. If you provide the same service at the same address, Google will consider this an update rather than a completely new entity.
Check for these:
Check out our SEO Booster: Backlinks for more places your business should exist online!
These are just the highlights! We dive deeper in our 5 Steps to Rebrand Your Self Storage Facility Online blog if you want to make sure you get every nook and cranny.
This is the most expensive, slowest step, but must be done. Some operators put off changing the signage, but this creates confusion and erodes trust among leads.
If a business has one name online and a different one in person, customers will be confused at the very least. Worse, they might assume you don’t know how to run a business. If you mess up the name, what else might be going wrong?
So replacing all your signs and updating your colors (if necessary) is vital. Get started as soon as you know what your branding will be. Temporary signage is better than no signage, but we’ve heard lots of stories about operators with “temporary” signage that stood there for years.
Quality signage shows consistency, but it also attracts new customers. According to the SSA Demand Study, driving by is one of the most common ways tenants will find your facility, second only to online. When someone drives past, your signage can give them a good impression of the business.
It’s an internally-driven decision. Are you proud of your brand? More importantly, do you think your brand can do better in this market?
External factors are less important than those two questions. There are ways to fix your GBP and patch a bad reputation without a complete rebrand! But if you think the brand you’re bringing in is better, then you should use it.
Also, calculate how much it would cost to change the brand identity. What are you giving up, and what would you spend to redo the signage? How many new tenants would you need to bring in to make that money back, and over what time frame?
These are the most common rebranding mistakes we see in self storage:
Absolutely! Even a simple reopening event will get you mentioned on local newspaper websites and on your Chamber of Commerce. You’ll also get to decorate the facility, take lots of pictures, and use those on your GBP.
Your goal with a rebrand isn’t just to say under new management. You want everyone who sees your new branding to immediately think “This new business owner cares.”
Everything listed in this blog is a way to do that. If your new signage is nice, if you communicate well, if you show up consistently everywhere, that tells people that you care about the business.
Then, if you’re doing these small things right, people will trust you’re doing the big things right, too.
Take your business further with these deep dives:
At StoragePug, we build self storage websites that make it easy for new customers to find you and easy for them to rent from you.
With Insights, our self storage marketing platform, operators get the data and digital tools they need to make the get out of their website and their self storage investment.
