The third full week in October is National Business Women’s Week. This year, I decided I wanted to honor some of the amazing women in management at StorageMart – the women from all over the company who work behind the scenes to keep our company healthy, growing, and on the cutting edge of the industry.<\/p>\n
The only problem? There’s no way I could recognize all of the phenomenal women in the upper levels of this company in just one week! So, in hopes of ever making it through them all, we’re starting in August. Our first spotlight is on our Global Marketing Director: Sarah Little. Read on to learn more about her journey from part-time call center rep to the head of a core department in the largest privately-owned storage company in the world.<\/p>\n
I oversee our marketing efforts, which means every day is a new adventure. We have a team of rock stars in the marketing department and we manage everything from social media to designing the website, from email marketing to a paid media campaigns – there is a lot going on behind the scenes to keep the leads flowing into Rental Manager.<\/p>\n
The best parts are collaborating with the Operations and Revenue Management teams. We get to dream up new ideas to help customers find us online or ways to make it easier for them to rent a storage unit. It\u2019s hard work, but we have fun along the way; especially when we can test new technologies like Voice technology and Artificial Intelligence.<\/p>\n
20 years. Yes, I started when I was only 12 years old.<\/p>\n
So many turning points! I started working part-time in the evenings at the call center. I had another full-time day job, but quickly saw the potential at StorageMart and made that my full-time gig.<\/p>\n
As the call center was gathering other storage clients, those owners saw an opportunity for our sales team to train their own staff. From there, the Secret Shopping Department was born and I moved from full-time phone operator to head up that team. I worked as the director of that team for about three or four years when StorageMart launched our blog. I volunteered to write the content for it.<\/p>\n
From there, I was mentored and read everything I could about how to get a website to rank on Google. As the Search Engine Optimization industry grew, so did the competitive landscape of ranking for self storage, and eventually that became a full-time job I was positioned to take on. I made another switch from leading the Secret Shopping Team over to full-time marketing as the only employee in the Marketing Department for several years.<\/p>\n
The marketing team has grown by leaps and bounds and today we have 5 full-time team members who are experts in their respective fields, and we layer on a lot of support from agencies. All-in, we have about 25 team members from various companies supporting our internal marketing team.<\/p>\n