Check out the full article here.

Jeremy and COO Michael Boyer also hosted a free webinar of the same title this morning. To sign up for future webinars here.

]]> http://blog.elementslocal.com/2012/05/16/elementslocal-article-published-on-franchising-com/feed/ 0 http://blog.elementslocal.com/2012/02/29/localizing-key-to-conversion-rate-optimization-for-franchises/ http://blog.elementslocal.com/2012/02/29/localizing-key-to-conversion-rate-optimization-for-franchises/#comments Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:59:20 +0000 Jeremy LaDuque http://elementslocal.com/blog/?p=1687 Here are a few simple ways you can optimize your Franchise websites for lead optimization. Read on to also see our 8 Point Checklist For LOCALIZING your Franchise/Franchisee’s Websites.

Have a Locally Optimized Website

Having a website that is optimized for local exposure gives your local franchises ‘credibility’ with the search engines.  The franchisee will be seen as a local business and can enhance their authority as a local professional and expert and boost website conversion.

Keep Your Website Updated

Having up to date news and content on each Franchisee website, including local ‘Grass  Roots’ news and information, is important to convey ‘freshness’ with search engines.

Put What the Consumer Wants Upfront

Put information about your services and products upfront. Also, make your join pages easy to get to! Front page access is best.  Give them this information upfront; don’t make them dig around your site looking for it. Your website visitors have a need – i.e. the service you provide - and the sooner you demonstrate that you can satisfy that need, the better.

Local Address and Phone Numbers on Websites gets 60% More Attention

As well as being an important factor for Google Places ranking, it gives consumers confidence that you are a genuine local business.

8 Point Checklist For LOCALIZING your Franchise/Franchisee’s Website(s)

If you want to take full advantage of these great tips then ask yourself:

• Do you have your physical address on every page of your website?
• Are your contact details – i.e. phone number and/or email address – displayed near the top of your website?
• Do you have a full list of services & prices on your site and is there a clear link to them from your homepage?
• Do you have a special offer on your website and is it clearly visible on the homepage?
• Was your homepage updated in the last 7 days?
• Do you have a blog or ‘latest news’ section on your homepage?
• Does your website look better or worse than your top search competitors? (be honest here)
• Do you have at least 1 positive quote/testimonial from a customer on every page of your website?

For more information on branding local visit www.elementslocal.com .  Sign up for a free webinar on BrandLocal  http://elementslocal.com/Join/Elements2012WebinarSchedule.php

Many franchises struggle with this issue as there is cross contamination of intended and un-intentional advertising and marketing content for a franchises anchor identity as well as well-meaning franchisees advertising outside of the franchise system.

This contamination causes confusion and noise for consumers in their search for business information through online, mobile, social and email channels thereby

cutting into the number of leads generated by your marketing efforts.

Now, we are all dealing with formerly offline-only media (e.g., newspapers, Yellow Pages) offering online versions, the intermingling of advertising information hascreated even more conflicting data.

Your franchise online marketing ecosystem should follow these best practices to achieve a consistent business identity:

Be cognizant of your online brand identity.  Regardless of the types of media you include in your advertising and marketing programs, incorporate the same standards so your widely accepted corporate identity remains universal.

Be sure to monitor your identity on search sites that are important to you for traffic. As an example, franchises should track how franchisees come up on their local and vertically-focused sites. If something doesn’t look right on the results, contact the site. Identifying the root data source is vital to fixing these errors.

Additionally, give your Franchisee the tools they need to build the franchise brand locally by using local advertising campaigns that are brand consistent.  This solidifies the franchises anchor identity. Tether your ads to existing correct identities. There are helpful tools for querying the common data sources to retrieve the identity of record.  Also, ensure that you conform to standards for the company’s brand identity by using the proper local business name, a standardized business address and the commonly accepted main phone number.

ElementsLocal software, gives the franchise a tool to protect brand integrity with BrandProtect™ included in our franchise online marketing software platform.  The software platform contains controls that allow the franchise to have control of the brand through work flow for content and protect the integrity of the brand with standard content across franchisee websites.

The digital age has forced the intermingling of online marketing and user-generated content sometimes to the detriment of the sanctity of the franchises true identity.  As the search for local information continues to rise so does the need for a consistent identity across all platforms.

Brand consistently- Brand locally - Brand protect.

Pinterest is a new, innovative and exciting site that allows its users to ‘Pin’ images from anywhere online. It has quickly become a large social community of people who like to view the world through imagery.  Pinterest is built upon SHARING.  Sharing personally built life categories with personally built content.

The best thing about Pinterest is the ability to get personal with others. For a business that could be showing and demonstrating their products and services to customers in a whole new way. This is a great platform to establish franchisees local presence through the personal ‘boards’ in Pinterest.

One of the biggest advantages to Pinterest is the demographic that has made the site so popular. The site caters to a female audience (reportedly nearing 70 percent), most of whom are under the age of 45. This much sought after demographic can play a key part in the purchasing decisions of the average American household and your bottom line.

How can your franchise brand use an image sharing website?

Whether you sell something that’s exciting, seemingly uninteresting or especially offer a unique service that’s hard to understand Pinterest will make it exciting and simple to understand through imagery. W a bit of creativity and research you’re bound to find a way to use the new platform.  Especially if you use Pinterest to invite your customers into your personal franchise business or local franchise life.

Here are some creative ways to establish your brand locally with Pinterest

Hold a Contest

One creative way to utilize Pinterest is to hold a contest. Lands’ End recently held a contest they coined: “Pin It to Win It”. Participants were encouraged to browse the Lands’ End site, create pins of items they liked and the most creative and stylish entries won prizes. This kind of contest can engage your audience and also gets them to your site, browsing your products and linking to them!

A hair and beauty franchise could give a demonstration on quick hair styles or hold a contest as such while a food and beverage franchise could hold a local photo at the location contest. Again, creativity and making the contest unique with a local twist would be advantageous.

Conduct Market Research

Have plans to revamp services or products in 2012?  Why not test out new products or even your upcoming ad campaign on Pinterest?

Other brands have started using Pinterest as a platform to conduct market research or test product launches. In a recent Mashable post, one creative suggestion was to use Pinterest as sort of a social online focus group to see first-hand reactions, on a platform not as inundated as Facebook.

Feature Customers

One way to appeal to this demographic is to play to their vanity. Feature customers on your Pins, especially if you have a clothing boutique or store. “Customer A paired these shoes, belt and top to create this stylish winter cocktail party look!”. Showcase customer purchases that exemplify their style or pin photos of products that go well together and that customer X recommends.

Present Concepts in a New Way

Pinterest allows you to add contributors to your boards. Have a few team members put together a storyboard on Pinterest to present to a customer. Or co-Pin with a customer to create a board full of ideas for their next event or shopping spree.

If the product or idea is presented in a clean, simple and creative way using Pinterest it can stand a chance of being better received. Not only that, it allows you to creatively engage with customers and prospects can see too!

Put a Face to Your Franchise Brand

Personalizing and localizing your brand can be a hard thing to do with plain ol’ web copy. Use Pinterest to showcase your brand uniquely, what makes you different, what your brand stands for and use it as an opportunity to highlight your employees too. Putting a face to your brand is key to localizing your brand and easily done with Pinterest.

Promote Your Franchise Image Content

A franchise brand could start a board on  infographics.  Feature all of your image content in one place for easy access.

Infographics, product photos and your own photography can be featured. Do your research and see how other brands are using Pinterest to share their image content.

Pinterest can help a customer see the full picture of their needs before they even know they need it. Pin photos of activities in the area and how they relate to your franchise, landscape photos, photos of the local business and of course the staff. The possibilities really can be endless.

These are just a few of the creative ways your franchise brand can use Pinterest to spark interest and engage with customers. And to wet your palate for Pinterest even more, check out the announcement from Facebook – 60 new and exciting apps were unveiled including a Pinterest app.

A picture is worth a thousand words, in Pinterest’s case, an image could be the local exposure your franchise brand is needing to establish that local location to generate more leads.

Here is a great article on Pinterest’s popularity and it’s ability to drive traffic:  http://mashable.com/2012/02/01/pinterest-traffic-study/

Brought to you by ElementsLocal – the leader in branding your franchise locally.

Visit us in booth #724 to find out what all the excitement is about!

1. Build LOCAL Content
2. Deploy LOCAL Domain Names
3. Link LOCAL Websites      Together
4. Insure LOCAL Unique and Descriptive Titles, Headers and Descriptions are written for every page
5. Create Regional Websites connecting your LOCAL websites together
6. Send LOCAL Email Campaigns on a consistent basis
7. Send LOCAL Promotions Via Facebook/Twitter/Foursquare/Yelp
8. Use call/number tracking to capture your LOCAL phone leads as well as your form leads
9. Measure your LOCAL goals using Google Analytics
10. Test, test, test using Google Website Optimizer – Which LOCAL CTA gives the best conversion

All of this equals BrandLOCAL.  Visit BrandLocal.net for more information or call us at 805-547-1160 ext. 205

The easily embeddable widget lets users either +1 a webpage or add that page to their Google+ circles. The widget also displays the faces of other users who have +1ed the webpage. It doesn’t have Facebook’s ability to display your friends’ faces first  though.

The launch of Google+ Badges coincides with Monday’s launch of Google+ Brand Pages, finally giving businesses the ability to create a presence on Google’s growing social network.

The Google+ Badge has a few other tricks. The Google+ badge also contains a snippet of code that connects your website to your Google+ page. And In addition to helping Google better index your Google+ page, this snippet will help you show more personal recommendations around the web by linking your +1’s on sites, your Google+ page, search and display ads.

Google also revealed that the badge is a requirement for inclusion in Google Direct Connect, a feature that makes it possible for users to find a Google+ Page from Google Search. Users type in the “+” operator, followed by the name of a brand participating in Direct Connect. The search result will lead users directly to the company’s Google+ brand page.

The widget was a necessary component for Google+, given the success of its Facebook counterpart. While it doesn’t have the same benefits  Facebook enjoys with Open Graph, the Google+ Badge gets the job done. Google still has a long, uphill battle to convince both brands and users that its social network is an ideal place to do business.

Stay tuned as ElementsLocal keeps track of the impact Google+ has on your Franchise Online Marketing.

Here are some marketing and business trends that are important to Franchises:

The Cloud – Although social media and mobile get more buzz, the great change-maker for franchises comes from the cloud. Using Internet-based applications to run your business rather than locating those applications on your servers or hard drives sounds pretty liberating, doesn’t it?

Going to the cloud is transformative. You gain powerful functionality, you can spend more of your time on your business and less on your infrastructure.  Now that YOU are mobile, you can access your applications and data from virtually anywhere.  Having your customer contact management, email marketing and document storage is essential.

Social media – Social media is hot.  With good reason, Franchises are entranced with the idea of it. Social media offers the possibility of inexpensive ways to reach and interact with customers, but it seems like it takes up a lot of time with a very uncertain return on that investment.

Keep watching because this year will see the emergence of more easy-to-use tools that help you reach highly targeted customers. More franchises will embrace a wide variety of social media platforms, and Google+ will become a significant player.

Mobile -The mobile juggernaut continues in 2012, both for running your business and reaching customers. Look for greater embrace of mobile marketing, such as offering deals when people check in via Mobile.

Smart Franchises increasingly will use mobile solutions for a raft of business functions. One technology that will explode: accepting payments on smartphones, with tools such as Square (squareup.com).
More companies will embrace the power of being untethered from an office, being mobile and able to run operations on the go, especially when using cloud-based applications and tools.

Hiring – The past couple of years, workers have been “on sale” because of high unemployment, making it possible for franchisees to land great employees at lower costs.  As the workforce recovers, consider college graduates from the past three years who have been underemployed.  They can make great entry-level employees, and big corporations focus mostly on current graduates. Anticipate your needs for expanding your work force.

Credit – Credit for franchisees has been tough for years now. But it will get slightly better this year, making it a bit easier for healthy companies with strong customer demand to expand. Work with community banks that are receptive to local businesses.

Analytics – Knowledge, as they say, is power. One of the great things about cloud applications is they not only give you data, they give you reports.  You can see response in real time to actions you take. For example at ElementsLocal,  we send  monthly newsletters. From our E-Marketing Manager analytics, I am able see exactly how many people opened it, which articles they read, which products interested them and more.

Global – You may not be a global franchise yet, but I’m guessing you may be soon. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to meet many American franchises  who have grown their businesses by going international. I’ve even heard of someone who exports miniature golf courses.  ElementsLocal represents CurvesME,  the middle eastern franchise of the mega company Curves.  Think outside the box by thinking outside your borders.

ElementsLocal is your answer to adaptive Franchise Online Marketing software: Comprehensive and easy to use.

Make an appointment to meet with our Franchise Online Marketing experts at www.ifaconference.com.  Setting up an appointment will ensure you reserve your spot to roll the dice at a chance to win $25,000. Rolls are limited, so sign up now.

Tips on making this conference the most productive:

• Planning – reaching out for networking now to make the most of the IFA potential
• Bring power and power cords (We have power in booth 724!)
• Face time appointments – reaching out now to people to make time for personal interaction.
• Prepared to go with the Flow – knowing full well all plans can change at a moments notice, be prepared to move forward with any glitches that come your way and still make the most of the IFA experience

Make an appointment with your ElementsLocal team at www.ifaconference.com

There are three fundamental reasons why call tracking numbers can cause issues with Google Places, and other directories, and and even organic search rankings.

1. Google may not recognize the call tracking number as your local number and think you’re spamming.
2. You may confuse Google because many local business directories use the phone number as a key identifier for individual businesses. A phone number is often an easy ID to use for indexing businesses because they are generally prone to less variation in how they’re presented in databases or on webpages. A second phone number associated with a location may ‘devalue’ that location or produce a duplicate location.
3. If the business ever changes call tracking solution providers or stops using the tracking numbers, the phone numbers they’ve been using will stop working, yet will be published throughout the Internet

We suggest using a locally recognized phone number and when you are able to, purchase the use of that phone number for your exclusivity for use in the call tracking. That way that phone number will remain consistant when changing providers or stop using the tracking numbers. There are also new ways to place call tracking technology on your existing phone numbers.

We also suggest that as part of your inside sales procedures for franchisees, asking callers directly where they found you  You may or may not be able to collect that data from your franchisees, but at the very least encourage the collection of the data.  Have the employees who answer the phone write down responses for you to see later. This remains an excellent and free way of polling to see how effective different channels are performing.  Optimize leads by asking for referrals as well.

The data and feedback for our advertising campaigns is imperative, but you also need to follow good SEO practice to drive business locally.

ElementsLocal has worked with many Franchises on call tracking and has integrated the service directly into our platform..  Take an online tour today: elementslocal.com.