Tag Archives: local websites

Localizing key to Conversion rate Optimization for Franchises

Posted on by Jeremy LaDuque

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. Continue reading →

Consistent Branding is key to your Franchise Online Image

Posted on by Michael Boyer

Your franchise online marketing program needs to be built on a foundation of brand consistency Nationally AND Locally

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. Continue reading →

Pinterest drives more traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, MySpace YouTube, and Reddit – Is It Something You Should Consider to Share Your Franchises Brand Image?

Posted on by Jeremy LaDuque

Pinterest is a new(er) social media site that could very well help you get the desired “local” exposure as well as engagement for your franchise.  Read on to see how companies like Lands’ End to Facebook are using Pinterest to their advantage.

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.

IFA 2012 is on it’s way!

Posted on by Chad Jordan

ElementsLocal is unveiling BrandLocal at IFA.  It’s exciting, it’s direct and to the point.  It is designed to escalate LEADS at the local level as well as establishing your National Franchise Brand as the locally legitimized business.  Visit www.ifaconference.com for up to date information on what is happening at IFA 2012 and to schedule a meeting with your ElementsLocal team.

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


Google’s answer to the Facebook ‘Like” box: Google + Badges

Posted on by Jeremy LaDuque

Google+ Badges for brand pages, is a widget that lets Franchise brands promote their presence on Google’s social network.  Google+ Badges are similar in form and function to Facebook‘s Like Box social plugin.

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.

Franchise Online Marketing Outlook for 2012: Creating an Adaptive Marketing Platform

Posted on by Jeremy LaDuque

Reflecting back is more than just remembering where you wanted to be. It’s an eye opener about how dramatically the sands shifted under your feet in 2011 and a clear sign 2012 will be no different.

For Franchise Marketers Google introduced significant changes to the way it displays and delivers search results. Many franchise marketers had to quickly react to the importance of social media, blogging and directories. Our own vision of being a complete solution for franchise online marketing was expanded to include new best of breed partners in directory submission and social media. Our dashboard reflects the integrated nature of how pay-per-click, organic search and directories (such as Google Places) inter-relate and converge.

This being said, what does 2012 hold in store for Franchise online marketing? Seeing future trends is exactly what we need to do in order to anticipate change and be at the top of our game.

It’s not just about how to show up, attract and sell to consumers today, but next month, next year and years to come.  Lets transcend ideas like “social network” and “search engine” and focus  on consumers and technologies. Will we be using a search engine like Google in 5 years? Will we be using desktop computers in 5 years? What will future social networks look like? Answers to those questions are answers to the future of marketing and customer engagement.

Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and plenty of other large companies are innovating at amazing speed to gain control of our attention. Some are doing it through devices, some through content, others through infrastructure.

So, what is message we got from 2011? Change… we must take a critical look at what it will take to adapt to change.  Rather than jumping from one place to the next in your franchise online marketing plan, consider developing an adaptive model that allows for rapid assimilation of new technologies and trends.

Creating an adaptive model assumes that you will have to adopt new technologies or new methodologies. Is your company an early adopter? Have you taken on the risk of adopting a technology platform before everyone else? Or have you given up first mover advantage because you felt it was going to be too expensive or time consuming. Continue reading →

Thinking beyond SEO: Website Attention = Retention

Posted on by Jeremy LaDuque

Beyond SEO

Franchise online marketing strategy is as much about engaging the visitors on your website as it is about building traffic and search engine optimization.

The goal of online marketing is to convert leads into business.  Beyond all of the SEO work to get people to your website you must also pay attention to the content, layout and aesthetic appeal of your website in order to turn attention into conversion and even better… retention (which is driving people back to your site again and again).

Here are some actions you can take today that will optimize your online marketing:Franchise Online Marketing

  • Make sure that any links that lead visitors off of your website open in new windows. Do not direct traffic off of your webiste.  Ushering people off of your website is not productive.  By opening links in new windows,  your website will still be up when they close that window.  This is also applicable to your social media icons. Make sure they open in a new window as well.  Keep the traffic on your site as long as possible.
  • Be aware of the users display.  Remember, an increasing number of people are viewing your website on mobile, or handheld devices.  Recent studies show that mobile traffic is on the rise, so having a strategy for a mobile friendly website both at the national and local levels is a must for 2012.
  • Review your website for deficiencies regularly.   It may be just as easy as mending broken paths or replacing broken code. Again your site is only as legitimate as it is functional. Use websites like http://validator.w3.org/ to validate your website and find issues with it.

Following these simple suggestions will garner results. You will see a decrease in your bounce rate (visitors to your website who land on a webpage and leave without clicking deeper into your website) and an increase in the amount of time visitors spend on your website, the amount of content that they will read and ultimately the number of leads will you receive from your website.

Learn more about refining your Franchise Online Marketing by attending our Franchise Online Marketing Webinar on January 18th at 12:00 p.m. CST.  For more information visit : ElementsLocal Webinar – Franchise Online Marketing Tactics

Home Helpers Partners with ELEMENTS for Online Local Marketing

Posted on by Brandon

San Luis Obispo, CA, February 28, 2011 — ELEMENTS, Inc., an industry leader in franchise online marketing, is proud to announce its recent partnership with Home Helpers, one of the nation’s leading senior care franchises specializing in in-home, non-medical and personal care and companionship for seniors, new moms, working parents and those requiring continuing and recuperative care.

ELEMENTS will collaborate with Home Helpers to redesign and optimize its corporate website and construct locally optimHome Helpersized websites for franchise owners. Local owners will be able to manage their local websites as well as perform other online local marketing such as social media, with the new platform.

“ELEMENTS is excited to partner with Home Helpers,” said Jeremy LaDuque, president & CEO of ELEMENTS. “We feel Home Helpers plays an important role in the lives of individuals wishing to maintain their independence and dignity in the comfort of their own home. Home Helpers gives families the peace of mind knowing their loved ones are safe and well cared for, so being able to help them achieve continued success is very important to us.”

About ELEMENTS, Inc.
ELEMENTS, Inc. is the developers of ElementsLocal™, an online marketing solution to franchise companies looking to leverage local franchise websites, email campaigns and social media marketing.  The ElementsLocal™ platform can be seen at www.elementslocal.com which includes a virtual tour of the franchise solution software. Based in San Luis Obispo, CA, and founded in 1999, ELEMENTS’ clients include Maaco, Glass Doctor, Sport Clips, Paul Davis Restoration, Jiffy Lube, Weed Man and Curves.

ABOUT HOME HELPERS
Founded in 1997, Cincinnati-based Home Helpers is the nation’s leading senior care franchise specializing in non-medical and personal care and companionship for seniors, new mothers, those recovering from illness or injury and individuals facing lifelong challenges. Home Helpers currently has a presence in more than 500 communities across North America and is seeking qualified franchise candidates in strategic communities throughout the country. Home Helpers was recently ranked the #1 Senior Care Franchise and “Best of the Best” by Entrepreneur magazine for the fifth straight year (2006-2010) and continues to lead the way in the senior care industry. Home Helpers is affiliated with Direct Link® Help At The Touch Of A Button, a national provider of medical alert units, including a 24-hour personal emergency response system and an automated medication dispenser that enable seniors to feel safer and live independently at home for longer than might otherwise be possible. Home Helpers does not discriminate against anyone on the basis of religion, race, sex, color, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age or sexual preference in connection with employment or acceptance, treatment, or participation in its programs, services and activities. For more information on Home Helpers and franchising opportunities, visit the company’s Web site at www.HomeHelpers.CC.

Social Media Is Important, But So is Local Search

Posted on by Jeremy LaDuque

Social Media Is Important, But So is Local Search

With all the hype about social media and speculation that mobile is where everything’s moving, it’s difficult to determine what is most important to your Internet marketing strategy.

The most important thing you can do is allow your audience to drive your decisions and not the latest and greatest technology. While many businesses may be pushing their brands and establishing themselves in social media, research by the Kelsey Group shows that over 57% of people online are performing local searches. And if you’re curious about where those people are clicking, a research study done by Cornell University showed that the top 3 Google results get 79% of all of the clicks.

So, how do you get to the top 3 in Google?

In order to achieve high local rankings for each of your franchise locations it is important for the search engines to know about each physical location and that each physical location is relevant and popular enough to make the top 3 spots in the search results.

Below are just a few key strategies any franchise can leverage to ensure the localized search results that will produce the most local leads.

Local Websites

Consider having a unique website for each franchisee, with its own domain name and the ability for the franchisee to update it. By giving the franchisee control of a portion of the website allows them to tell their story and is enough information to make that franchise location’s website unique from other franchisee’s websites and stand out from their local competitors.

Domain Names

Also consider having a separate domain name per franchise location. By having its own domain name you can use a ‘keyword rich’ name which will garner you greater search relevance for your top keywords and also allow you to create a ‘back link’ strategy by linking all of franchise location websites to each other. There are several ways of choosing how to optimize your domain name for local search, but doing so is important because Google puts a lot of weight on a domain name when deciding where a website should rank.

Local Optimization

Another essential key to ensure high localized search engine rankings is optimizing the page contents of a website for product, brand and location.  This means that on your franchise location’s website you should include location keywords into appropriate links, titles, meta-tags and images.  Another great tip is to place the address of the franchise location at the top of every web page as it allows search engines to easily find that physical location and give your website higher location relevance because of it.

Off Site Localization

Lastly it helps to have other sites linking to your website and your physical location.  Get your franchise locations reviewed in Yelp.  Submit the franchise location to directories like Google Places, Yahoo Local and Superpages.com.  The more websites linking to your website and physical location the better as those links will help increase your stature as a local business that is both relevant and popular.

These are just a few tips on how to improve your local search. It can be overwhelming when dealing with hundreds or even thousands of franchisees and websites, but a properly developed local websites program that brings in more leads and provides other value added services such as email messaging and social media, is bound to have an extremely high adoption rate amongst your franchisees.