Parking - March 2010 - 28

expensive quickly if you’re not careful. The key pieces to think about are: ■ ■ ■ what keywords you advertise on what you ad actually says where you send users once they click you are passionate about it and really have something to say on a regular basis, your time will probably be better spent elsewhere. Use Third-Party Aggregators to Fill Empty Spots You should test and experiment with all three of these. Make sure your ads only show up on relevant terms. If you own one lot in Cleveland, check to see that you aren’t paying for clicks for “airport parking” from Los Angeles. Test different versions of your ads. You can set up your Google account to automatically show the ones that perform best. And make sure that your ads send users to the right spot on your site. Make it obvious what you want them to do when they get there (book a reservation, print a coupon, sign up for your e-mail list, etc.). Even with your best efforts, your lot may not always be full. In this case, why not work with other firms that can help drive some incremental revenue? Sites like ours, AboutAirportParking. com, specialize solely in attracting customers online. We don’t have to worry about managing shuttle fleets or navigating real estate complexities, so we focus solely on driving new customers to our partner lots. Most visitors to third-party sites are “shoppers.” If they already had a favorite lot, they wouldn’t be on someone else’s site looking for a place to park. This means that your “cannibalization” is generally pretty minimal from working with a third-party company. The third-party sites need to make money to cover their own costs so there is ultimately nothing that they can offer a customer that you can’t offer them yourself. You can use these sites to reach customers that wouldn’t have otherwise come to your own site. In those cases, a small commission looks like a wise investment. Would you rather keep 80 percent of a $70 customer stay or 100 percent of nothing? In addition, once a customer books with you through a third-party site, that is your customer to keep. If they park with you and have a good experience, you’ve earned that repeat business. Finally, these sites give you a chance to experiment and fit them to your needs. You can try testing a low price for slow times of the year, shut them off completely at busy times of the year when you’re going to be full anyway or apportion a small inventory of parking spaces just to see what happens. With all of these techniques, the key is to test and revise. Some things may work great in your market but not perform for others. Twitter might be huge for your business for example. But try to get in a mode where you experiment with some things, see what does well and then really focus on those pieces. Good luck!  Erik Budde is CEO of AboutAirportParking.com. He has worked in Silicon Valley for 15 years at companies such as Yahoo, Intuit, Microsoft and Hewlett Packard. He can be reached at erik@aboutairportparking.com. Skip Twitter … Unless You Really Have Something to Say Twitter, Facebook and blogging have all gotten a lot of buzz over the past few years and there are all sorts of people that will tell you how important it is for your business to be using these new “social media” tools. Well, unless you’re Lance Armstrong, you may want to reconsider before you invest too many resources in this area. There are two core things you need to really be successful with social media: an inherent, passionate fan base and frequent news or updates. Lance Armstrong has over two million followers on Twitter. Of course, Lance is also a celebrity with a compelling story. People are naturally interested in what Lance is doing on a day-today basis. Plus, he’s got a lot going on! On an average day, he “tweets” three or four times, giving you insight into what his daily life is like (and trust me, his life is a lot more interesting than most everyone else’s). Now your parking facility may have some regular customers, but how many people are really passionate about airport parking? On the other side, how much do things change day-to-day at your facility? You may have some specials, you may be full from time to time, but normally there’s not that much going on of interest to the general public. None of this is to say that you shouldn’t experiment with these technologies and see what might work for your business. But unless National Parking Association PArkiNG March 2010

Parking - March 2010

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