The Importance Of Digital Marketing For Your Parking Facility

How you can get on Google’s good side.

7 min read

As our world continues to evolve to meet the needs of imminent digitization, businesses need to adapt their marketing strategies to keep pace. Digital marketing has grown in significance as consumers continue to make their buying decisions online.

This is no different for the parking industry. Parking facilities across Canada have seen a decrease in occupancy rates due to the lack of customers needing a place to park. However, by capitalizing on digital marketing strategies, you can get your parking facility in front of where your customers spend their time—online.

We sat down with Maria Lato, Marketing Manager here at Precise ParkLink, to discuss the importance of marketing your parking facility effectively and where the future of digital marketing is heading.

Q. Why should parking programs invest in digital marketing?

A. If you have experienced a decrease in traffic to your commercial parking facility, you are not alone. It’s no surprise that parking behaviour and occupancy rates have drastically changed over the last year due to the global pandemic. Because of this, the parking industry, like many others, continues to rely on digitization to satisfy business needs and consumer expectations.  

Using digital marketing as a means to promote parking facilities is not a new concept. However, pre-pandemic, most parking programs were able to get by with minimal marketing strategies consisting of visible signage and a simple location pin on Waze and Google Maps. Amidst the pandemic, however, low activity combined with accelerated digitization and a skyrocketed reliance on Google Search has put all businesses, including parking programs, in a spot where they can no longer overlook digital marketing as the key to sustaining their business. 

Businesses across the board have experienced the a-hah moment that marketers like myself have been waiting for, realizing that leveraging digital marketing is the way to fuel their business today and for many years to come.

Q: What is digital marketing, and how can it be used to promote parking facilities?

A: The term digital marketing is broad. It refers to advertising through digital channels such as search engines like Google, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps-- all of which are specialties in themselves. These areas of digital marketing put together can create a 360 digital marketing plan for any business, including a parking program.

Specific to parking programs, digital marketing efforts must create an SEO (search engine optimization)-friendly web presence. In a nutshell, SEO is all about making sure that the end-user experience is easy and fast. Investing in content development to give potential customers what they are looking for is a crucial consideration when it comes to SEO. 

Once your online presence is complete, it's vital to claim and nurture your location on popular online maps such as Google and Apple Maps. Once these basics are done, businesses can take it one step further and claim their location on widely used maps such as Waze, Parkopedia and various in-car navigation systems.

From here, it's critical to set aside a substantial budget for online advertising—whether it be on social media, search engines or online mapping systems such as Waze, or a combination of all three; this is where parking programs will see the greatest return on investment. Over the years, success in the digital marketing landscape has primarily become a "pay-to-play game." However, it's important to note that this phase of paid marketing should not come before the initial stages of SEO as it may risk the success of the entire marketing campaign.

Another thing to think about is email marketing. If you have an email subscriber base such as tenants, employees, permit holders or mobile app subscribers, sending communications and promotional offers via email can be very effective.

Q. What are the basic things you need to do to rank on google?

A. Ranking on Google comes down to optimizing for the Google Search algorithm—which, might I add, is constantly evolving. Google has released a 175-page document describing their Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. I’ll get more into detail about this in our webinar at the end of this month; however, in summary, parking facilities can rank on Google by following these four steps:

• Step 1: build an SEO-friendly web page that answers your visitor questions, is fast and mobile-friendly

• Step 2: claim your location on a variety of online maps. Nurture this location by linking back to your SEO-friendly web page, providing as much detail as possible on the listing, and responding to reviews promptly.

• Step 3: Drive traffic to your SEO-friendly web page by engaging on social media, investing in online paid advertisements, email marketing, and linking to and from relevant website (that must also be SEO-friendly)

• Step 4: invest in content creation to make sure your online information is always up to date and promoted through online channels such as social media.

Q. What types of digital marketing services does Precise ParkLink provide?

A. At Precise ParkLink, we believe in the power of digital marketing. Our in-house marketing team takes a digital-first approach and is widely versed in all areas such as SEO, social media, email marketing, content development, graphic and video design. The team we pair our clients with is the team we trust for our marketing.

Q. Where do you see the future of digital marketing heading?

A: The future of digital marketing is focused on answering end-user questions and satisfying their needs with accuracy, simplicity and speed. Voice search is also quickly emerging, and Google is getting smarter each day when it comes to natural language processing. As a result, digital marketers need to develop content that is simple and concise.

Like many industries, digital marketing is constantly changing. To stay successful, it's essential to keep current in the field and tune in with critical figures in the space, such as Google. This is something that Precise ParkLink plans to commit to in order to provide our commercial operations the edge they need to stay ahead of the game.

Digital marketing has proven to play an integral role in the success of organizations and their facilities. By adapting to the industry's inevitable digitization, you will be able to meet and exceed your business needs now and well into the future.

Are you interested in learning more about our digital marketing services? Watch the full interview below!