Online Marketing = Staying Ahead.

Social media, email marketing, and local search marketing are changing how we do business. It is now more critical than ever for your franchise to be visible in all areas of online marketing in order to stay ahead of the competition.

Integrating Online Marketing = More Leads.

Three industry experts from both ElementsLocal and Exact Target will be discussing how to leverage technology by bringing different types of interactive communications together to drive deeper customer engagement, customer loyalty and new customer acquisition.

This webinar will be held March 19, 2010 at 10am PST. This is part of the “Online Marketing Made Easy” Webinar Series.

Reserve your spot here!

With over 80% of people searching online to find local businesses prior to purchasing goods and services, more and more franchises are responding by getting local with their franchise online marketing.

One way franchises are getting local is by having websites for each franchise location.  Using localized websites, franchise marketers are driving more and more traffic from local searches directly to the franchise locations their customers prefer.

However, large franchise systems run into “territory conflict” when they have multiple franchise locations in one densely populated metro area. This can cause confusion with consumers when they type in ‘hair cut Austin TX’ and find five locations near them. And what could be worse is if the first listing they find in the search engine is the furthest from them.

Elements, Inc., developers of the ElementsLocal™ software platform for franchise online marketing, has developed a new concept called “Metro Pages” to help avoid territory conflict.  By placing all of the neighboring franchise locations on a “Metro Page”, and placing a Google Map on that page, it allows customers to select the franchise location of their choice.  This drives more online leads to every franchise location, unveils more options   and simplifies the customer experience.

“One of the great things about our Metro Pages is that our system automatically creates the listings based on the pre-defined metro areas, or regions, of a franchise system.  This is just another example of our platform creating automated ways to increase organic, natural listings”, stated Jeremy La Duque, CEO Elements, Inc.  “Ultimately, we’re always looking for new ways to improve the expansion of a brand through online marketing while deepening customer engagement with that brand.”

Metro Pages will be released this month  as another valuable component of the ElementsLocal™ software platform.

We thought this was interesting. The national survey conducted by Cision and Don Bates of The George Washington University’s Master’s Degree Program in Strategic Public Relations found that 89% of journalists are using blogs, 65% are using Social Networking Sites, and 52% are using Microblogging Sites to find newsworthy content. Reliability, however, is one of the biggest concerns with these online sources. Read the full report.

“I really enjoyed the Webinar. It was very informative and well done” – Susan Black-Beth, CFE, Director of Franchising at Super Wash, Inc.

In the first in the series titled, Localized Online Marketing: Winning Over the “Locals”, Elements’ CEO and online marketing expert, Jeremy LaDuque, teaches how to create a local presence for every franchise location in order to improve local search engine rankings, reduce pay-per-click advertising, and ensure brand consistency. Webinar will take place on Friday, February 19, 2010 at 10:00 AM PST. http://elementslocal.com/register

There are 10 Billion unique searches done each month on various search engines and it’s estimated that over 57% of those are for local businesses. Google alone has over a Half Billion unique Local Searches per month. The bottom line is that over 50% of people find what they want through local search.

Online Local Marketing
For most businesses the majority of their customers are local, especially if you are a brick and mortar business, a local service provider or a restaurant. Even with the internet the majority of purchases are still made within 30 miles of home. So it is critical to be found for as many pertinent local searches as possible.
What this means is you want to be found under as many combinations of words as you can, locally. For example, you want to come up in search engines for both “San Jose CA Plumber” as well as “Bay Area Plumber”. The more keywords that relate to your local area the better.

The Challenge for Franchise Marketers
Franchise systems have the particular challenge of showing up local because it’s difficult to have unique websites for each location. Typical solutions franchises implement include such things are micropages (http://franchisename.com/franchisee.html), sub-domains (http://franchisee.franchisename.com) and local websites (http://franchiseename.com).

A branded local website, such as http://pdromaha.com for a Paul Davis Restoration franchise in Omaha, NE, can deliver significant local search impact. The image below shows the results for both Maps and Organic search that a branded local website can deliver.