3 steps to boost parking sales with event partnerships
Event data enables parking companies to plan with greater accuracy
With reliable visibility into location-based event data, parking operators such as SpotHero and ParkMobile know about demand-impacting events well before their competition. As PredictHQ users, their operations teams don’t need any local knowledge of events – they simply receive an alert whenever a new event is scheduled, updated, or changed within a certain radius of their facilities. Or if there is a demand surge coming up that is expected to bring in a high volume of people into a specific area based on one large event or several events that are in close proximity to one another. This foresight powers the ability to plan ahead in various ways:
Make timely adjustments to pricing: Identify events that drive parking demand up and down in order to enhance yield and maximize revenue from your parking locations.
Gain market share via relevant promotions: Every location has a different demand profile. Take advantage of events coming up near you by promoting your parking in the right way, at the right time around events.
Prevent lost revenue: Avoid missing unticketed events such as marathons, street festivals, and parades that drive parking demand
One key competitive advantage in planning is leveraging event data to identify and prioritize partnership opportunities for specific events or event venues. It’s a marketing strategy leaders in the industry have adopted to boost profitability and brand awareness– and you can, too. Let’s go over three simple steps to increase parking sales by having visibility into upcoming events at scale.
Step 1: Identify your demand drivers
Demand drivers are events that drive demand higher or lower enough to require a strategic shift to pricing, staffing, inventory, marking and more. For parking companies that use PredictHQ, these demand drivers tend to be sports games, concerts, and community events. However, all locations have different demand profiles and identifying your specific demand drivers is key to better planning. This means more than understanding how individual events impact your demand, as looking only at individual demand spikes often leads to too small of a data set to accurately identify patterns.
Pinpointing the event categories most impactful to your operation is key to planning and forecasting for parking operators. For example: a study of over 50 parking locations in Amsterdam showed that incorporating attended events such as sports games and concerts into a 6-month off-street parking forecast improved forecast accuracy by up to 26% – and incorporating weather events can improve forecast accuracy by up to 8%.
After understanding which events matter most to your business, the next step will be to familiarize yourself with those events in advance, and adjust your plans to match incoming demand.
Step 2: Find events impacting your parking facilities
Gain event visibility based on your individual parking facilities through PredictHQ Location Insights. This tool enables you to upload specific addresses and locations into our platform to quickly see what events are happening near those locations. Once you upload your locations of interest, you get detailed insight into event impact per each individual location, powering an accurate picture of local event impact.
Let’s say you have a parking garage located in Boston, Massachusetts. Within Location Insights, you’d create a location for the address of your garage, or create a location for the entire city of Boston. September is a busy time for events in the city with baseball season being in full swing, seasonal festivals, concerts, and the start of football sparking gatherings of people all around the city.
Once you upload the location and see the events coming up, you can also set up alerts to be notified of events within the entire city, or within a set radius around your parking facility. This way, you can ensure your parking location is open and prepared for demand-driving events. For example, for the month of September 2022 there are a total of 925 events in Boston, including:
Harvard Square Oktoberfest - 100,000 attendees
Cambridge Carnival International - 80,000 attendees
Boston Local Food Festival - 50,000 attendees
The Boston Arts Festival - 50,000 attendees
Step 3: Use events to form local partnerships
Get more out of your marketing budget with partnerships that facilitate promotions based on local events. Provide event organizers and venues with a stress-free parking solution and an additional way to control the customer experience for festival and concertgoers, rowdy sports fans, and families attending local community events.
The nature of these partnerships will vary depending on the volume and type of event or venue. Whether your partnership proposal or marketing plan is for a conference, expo, festival, or performing arts event, it’s important to appeal to the venue’s or organizers’ interests by offering a seamless, easy customer experience for their ticket holders from the point of purchase, leading up to, and on their event’s big day:
Link out to your site where attendees can reserve a parking spot in advance
Promote parking spaces alongside event tickets and product sales
Partner with a transportation provider to shuttle attendees between their parking spot and the event
Other ways to build awareness of your services include signs that lead to your garage, event-specific stickers or postcards that promote event parking and pricing, and event-based promotions on your website.
Position your facility as the easiest and safest parking option for event attendees
Highlight the fact that partnering with you gives their patrons one less thing to worry about when considering purchasing a ticket for an upcoming event. Technological innovations in parking services help ticket holders get to their seats on time, and reduce traffic congestion around these venues at the start and end of events.
Predicted end times for ticketed events is another way to fine-tune staffing needs and pricing for every day of the week. Your competition knows that the Taylor Swift concert will be starting at 8:00pm, but they don’t know it will be ending at 12:00am – which is right around the time a major baseball game is ending. With PredictHQ event data, your team will know this advance, and have people ready to assist the crowds in getting out of the parking garage safely and in a timely fashion.
Make it easy and safe to park with you, so customers will associate your brand with an experience they can trust, and partners will be happy to do business with you again.
Join the ranks of parking industry leaders using intelligent event data
One national parking company uses PredictHQ to automate their event coverage, increase parking conversion, and increase their serviceable market – driving up to $5.6M in total annual benefits. Another PredictHQ parking customer had a team dedicated full time to tracking events, and that was only for 557 venues (half the venues in San Francisco).
Integrate intelligent event data for access to millions of events across 30,000+ cities worldwide. Reach beyond the events your team already knows about, and save time collecting, curating, and managing events impacting your parking facilities. Make data-driven business and operational decisions with quick, easy access to:
Event changes, cancellations, and postponements
and more
