5 Essential Tips for a Successful Online Internet Strategy

There are plenty of competitors on the Internet and it is important for your business to stand out from the crowd. This information provides five essential tips to make your business a distinct branded service to increase customer visibility and traffic while maintaining market share.

1. Get on the Internet the Right Way

The most important rule of the business world today is to “get on the Internet with a professionally designed and structured website”. Create WOW, and not UGH! Shoppers are using search engines like Google.com, Bing.com, and Yahoo.com to find a product, service, or brand. Additionally, video websites, YouTube and Google-video, and Facebook are gaining momentum with mobile devices (cell and pad). And don’t forget about blogging and tweeting!

2. Optimize Keywords for both Low and Hanging Fruit

All search engines utilizes special tags (called meta-tags) to categorize websites. If your website doesn't provide the expected tags and search keywords, the search engines will not be able to pick up and categorize your website correctly, resulting in few, if any, shoppers from the Internet. Many hosting companies provide tools to help you optimize your keywords. Some websites automatically makes your search keywords visible to the major search engines on the Internet, making it easier for your shoppers to find you. Remember to always include your products or services as well as your business location in the search keywords.

3. Describe your services well to enhance Customer Relationship

The more information you provide on your services – the more shoppers you will convert into parking customers. Compare your website to your competitors and then provide your customers with more information about your business and services. You can also include links to nearby business partners (i.e. travel agencies) to encourage others to link back to your site and improve the overall quality and experience of your site for your shoppers. And note, a picture is worth a thousand words, so don't forget clean images of your facility and services. With a digital camera it is easy to take pictures of your business and the surrounding area.

4. Provide Real-time Information in a Transactional Environment

A large number of websites are unfriendly, complicated and provide no means of allowing shoppers to make a reservation directly from the website. Instead, the shopper is provided with a contact form, email address and phone number to reach out to the business. Through the evolution of reserving a service online for travel, many shoppers favor a website that provides real-time reservation capabilities directly on the website. When your shoppers can reserve directly from your site, the sale is closed immediately thus creating a paying customer, and providing your business with valuable customer data. A real-time reservation system is open 24 hours every day, and therefore, you have no more lost sales due to shoppers trying to make a reservation outside of regular office hours or on third-party websites.

5. Utilize Affordable and Measurable Email Systems

Your business must be in the marketplace on a regular, continuing, and ongoing basis. Not necessarily the same amount every week, but on a regular monthly basis. To successfully market your service, you must first position your company in relation to the competition. Know how you want your company and/or service to be perceived by customers before they leave for the airport. In other words, get a commitment from shoppers before they leave their home or place of business. Printing just a coupon does not mean a shopper will drive right into your parking establishment!

How Important are Customer Reviews?

In a word -- VERY.

Before we get started on this important issue, let's identify both search engines and their respective pages. Google's business community is known as "Places" and Bing's is "Local". We will refer to these communities as P&L since this call-to-action will affect your bottom line.

Whether it's Google or Bing, reviews are more important than ever. If Google or Bing persist with putting competitors on your P&L pages, then the best way to deal with it is to push them as far down as possible. And the best way to do this is to add more data to your details and get more customer reviews.

How do you get more reviews:

Direct your happy customers, your reviewers, to your P&L pages. Simply ask your customers to post reviews on either Google (gmail) or Bing (live, msn, hotmail) or both. When you’re soliciting online reviews, don’t be shy about directing users to the P&L pages.

What about reviews posted on other websites?

If a customer left you a glowing review on Yelp or your Facebook page, it may be worth an e-mail asking if they’d mind reposting on the P&L pages. If they were so happy with their experience that they’re leaving one review, it’s likely they wouldn’t mind reposting it somewhere else, as well. Educate them on your preferred review process.

So how important are customer reviews?

With all branded services equal on the P&L pages, the company with the best and most reviews will be chosen when up against a competitor who has few and/or bad reviews. Make reviews a part of your online marketing strategy.

For additional information on getting noticed in your online community, I found this article interesting for any size business. Please click here to read.

Inside Information on Aggregators?

What is an Aggregator?

An online aggregator is a third-party website that accumulates and displays specific information (brands, services, prices) from multiple online sources. There are currently over forty aggregators in the parking industry.

To the consumer, aggregators appear to be a great way to land a reasonable bargain; but in reality, most will cost just as much if not more than booking direct with a company. Furthermore, many aggregators offer strict modification policies, and institute non-refundable booking fees (aka convenience fees).

If we go back 12 years and review how it all started, the large travel aggregators (i.e. Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz) were created to present best pricing and real-time inventory to online shoppers through a seamless integration into various vendor reservation systems (i.e. airlines, hotel, car rental). These aggregators have done a good job polling real-time information for comparing prices, products and services for travelers to select a brand of choice. The aggregator's success was based on the integration to seamlessly collect data from each of the vendor reservation systems. And, in turn, the aggregator was paid a fee by the vendor and the customer for each reservation booked. Sound familiar?

Aggregators in the parking industry provide a directory model. These third-party websites display various brands, services and prices. However, there is no real-time pricing or availability. So, the big difference is the seamless connectivity between databases to present real-time pricing and inventory. Having said that, parking companies are advised to contact each of the aggregators in the event there is rate change or a block of inventory or face showing incorrect information. This is a similar scenario to how the airlines, car rental and hotel companies processed information back in the 70's. NOTE: If you look carefully right now, in some cases, you may find incorrect pricing and services under your brand name.

Going Direct by Branding your Business!

The fact is, parking companies must focus all efforts on branding their business by driving consumers directly to their website. And although coupons are nice and colorful, parking companies must operate a real-time transaction system that is simple, fast, secure, instant, affordable and mobile-friendly.

We are in a generation wind tunnel. Baby-boomers are enamored with technology toys. Generation X'er's think they invented technology. And the Y Generation, well, their cell phone is an alarm clock, MP3 player, radio, TV, and social everything. With mobile devices (cell and pad) being a large part of our every day activity, brands must develop a proven marketing strategy to control costs, increase revenue and build loyalty.

Google or Bing Search: your city + airport + parking

If you find the first page of these two large search engines listing various aggregator's ahead of your brand, it is time you do something about it, and fast.

The Inside Parking Blog is about communicating to parking operators for the sole purpose of helping owners with trending in 2011 and beyond. Great success to all in the New Year!