THE BUSINESS OF PARKING

Your 2022 Marketing Checklist

By Bill Smith

IHAVEN’T DONE A NEW YEAR’S CHECKLIST FOR A FEW YEARS, and it’s about time. The new year is about getting a fresh start, but for many of us, it’s also about revisiting traditions. So let’s get this tradition started again.

The beginning of a new year is a great time to review your organization’s marketing to determine what’s working and what isn’t. In that spirit, here’s a New Year’s marketing checklist for 2022.

Strategy

When I wrote my last New Year’s column in December 2017, I wrote, “Many parking organizations still take a haphazard approach to marketing.” Sadly, that’s still the case. If your marketing revolves primarily around responding to RFPs and meeting up with friends at the IPMI Parking & Mobility Conference & Expo, you’re not doing enough. These are important components, but they are only a couple of the tactics you need to be pursuing.

Marketing starts with evaluating whether your marketing strategies still align with your organization’s business strategies. Where do you want to be as an organization in three, five, even 10 years? Where will new business opportunities lie over those periods of time? Is your strategy geared toward taking advantage of those opportunities? Remember, when you set marketing strategy, you aren’t just planning for your current customers and prospects—you are planning for reaching future customers too. In many cases, those future customers won’t even be known to you because the industry is changing so rapidly. As you might imagine, being ready to reach customers who may not even exist yet can take some creativity.

Traditional Approaches

Public relations (PR) is still the most effective and cost-effective way to reach people. And most parking organizations don’t have effective PR programs—many have no program at all. PR programs that revolve around publicity allow organizations to reach hundreds of thousands— even millions—of people who may have an interest in your organization’s products or services.

The question isn’t what type of parking organizations should be doing PR, because they all should. The question is what type of PR program you should put in place to help your organization meet its business goals. Where should you be publicizing your organization and its products or services? What messages should you be conveying through your program? What types of publicity will best serve your purposes? Which additional PR tactics will provide value (such as speaking at conferences or going after industry awards)? These are the questions you should be seeking to answer when deciding how to best use PR.

If you don’t already have a digital marketing strategy, make it a priority in 2022. Just remember that it requires a full-time commitment. Rely on dedicated, trained staff or consultants to implement your strategy and give them sole access to your platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. The last thing you need is for different people in your organization to have unrestricted access to your channels because there would be no way to control your messages. Also, it’s impossible to be strategic if there are too many cooks in the kitchen. It’s vital to pursue targeted tactics and strategies.

Also, use social media to convey who you are as an organization and what your corporate values are. Customers and strategic partners want to work with organizations that share their values and social media can be a powerful platform for demonstrating those values. Of course, social media is also a great way to keep your followers informed about your organization and what’s going on with you.

Fresh Starts

It’s impossible to cover everything you need to know in just this space. But this is a good start.

This is a great time to get a fresh start with your marketing. After nearly two years of COVID-induced business uncertainty, the industry is picking up steam again. A fresh marketing program built around public relations and digital marketing can help assure that you hit the ground running. ◆

BILL SMITH, APR, is principal of Smith-Phillips Strategic Communications and contributing editor of Parking & Mobility. He can be reached at bsmith@smithphillips.com or 603.491.4280.