Tag Archives: SEO Strategy

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 →

Franchise Online Marketing: The Pros and Cons of Using Call Tracking Numbers

Posted on by Jeremy LaDuque

The use of call tracking numbers in your Franchise Online Marketing ads is very useful because it is a great way to track incoming ad generated leads for your franchisees.  Search Engines like Google aim to provide the most useful and accurate information for users, so a local phone number is always preferred.  That being said, if you are using a call tracking phone numbers in your advertising you may be run up against a few challenges.

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.

Franchise Online Marketing: Effective Email Campaigning

Posted on by Jeremy LaDuque

People unfamiliar with email marketing often wonder what all the fuss is about. Didn’t spam kill email as a marketing vehicle? And if spam didn’t kill it, what about web feeds, instant messaging and all the other clever ways we can communicate online? Isn’t email outmoded?

Modern email marketing services, such as the integrated email marketing manager in the ElementsLocal platform, support database integration, segmentation and various other tricks and techniques for improving the targeting of outgoing messages. Advanced, franchise specific functionality, now allows Franchisor’s the ability to send out emails with the local owners names and addresses to reply to, thereby driving local marketing. Systems like the ElementsLocal platform also brand and content control email campaigns to be sent by franchise owners at the local level.

There are many proven benefits to Email Campaigning:

Email promotions and offers generate immediate action: sales, downloads, inquiries, registrations, etc. Informative email newsletters and other emails send people to offline stores and events, prepare the way for catalogs, build awareness, contribute to branding, strengthen relationships, encourage trust and cement loyalty.

Every email campaign you send out generates a heap of actionable data you can use to refine your approach and message.

According to research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing generated an ROI of $57.25 for every dollar spent on it. As such, it outperformed all the other direct marketing channels examined, such as print catalogs. 47% of marketers surveyed by Marketing Sherpa said that their top performing online marketing tactic was “email marketing to house lists”. The tactic was second only to search marketing in performance. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen listed an email newsletter as “probably the single-highest ROI action you can take to improve your Internet presence”.

Why does email marketing for franchises work?

  1. It allows specific audience targeting
  2. It is data driven
  3. It drives direct sales
  4. It builds relationships, loyalty and trust
  5. It supports sales through other channels

Here are some quick tips for effective email marketing:

  • Focus on building a good list of people who want to hear from you
  • Craft a message and ensure the emails get through and you have a good ‘click through’ rate
  • Couple your email campaigns with web analytics to narrow the focus of your message and target the list it should go to
  • Use coupons and other incentives strategically. For example send coupons to customers who haven’t purchased something from you in more than 3 months. existing and potential customers

Start the email marketing journey with a look at our Franchise Online Marketing System. Our platform has built in email campaign capabilities. Use the leads generated by the proven local lead generator to target your audience for effective email marketing.

Learn more about our Franchise Online Marketing platform by visiting: ElementsLocal Franchise Online Marketing System. Take advantage of our free Webinar focusing on Franchise Marketing January 18, 2012, at 12:00 pm CST by registering at : ElementsLocal Webinar: Franchise Marketers Boot Camp 2012.

Should Your Facebook Presence Be Part of your SEO Strategy

Posted on by Russ Lubin

Should your Facebook presence be part of your SEO strategy?  In short, yes!

Social media platforms are all the rage nowadays because they provide an easy and mobile solution for users looking to socially express their thoughts and statuses. If trends continue, early next year Facebook should reach over 600 million members and over 3 million businesses will be marketing through the Facebook platform. Nobody denies the benefits that a well managed viral inducing Facebook campaign can have on any given product or brand, but what most miss out on is that Facebook can be leveraged to drive traffic to your website and brands through search engines as well.

In fear of becoming antiquated Google is adding more social media content into their search results.

… we’re excited to share a few new innovations in the areas of real-time, mobile and social search that we feel are important steps in the evolution of information access.

.. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we’re announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca – along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago. The Official Google Blog

That being said, a company planning to create a Facebook presence should put some best practice SEO methods into their social media efforts.

Currently, search relevant Facebook images can be found near the top rankings in Google Images and sometimes in the general results as well. It makes sense to upload images to your Facebook albums on a regular basis that have optimized image names with a splash of relevant keywords in the comments below the picture. That possibly means more views on your brand coming directly from ‘search’ which is known for its’ great goal conversion ratio. It’s also possible to get the company’s Facebook Wall or other informational Facebook page listed highly in the search engine results as well. The Facebook and Twitter accounts of well entrenched or unique brands often land on the first page results in Google.

Facebook is also a great example of leveraging offsite optimizations to increase the view-ability of your company’s websites. Facebook itself has a very high authority ranking and is a trusted source which means that links to your corporate or franchisee websites inside of a text rich status update or comment can inject a little bit of Facebook’s link juice into the destination website, and every little bit of link juice helps.

While applying best practice SEO methods into your Facebook campaign will not make you rich overnight, any planned Facebook marketing strategy should include optimizing your text, links and images for maximum benefit.

Our Elements Local platform allows a franchisor or their franchisee’s the ability to manage Facebook campaigns directly through the content management dashboard built into our software. Our built in Facebook tools maximize the benefits of the company’s Facebook campaign strategy with a minimal amount of training and effort.