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.

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.

Here are some things to consider when looking at creating an adaptive marketing platform:

1. Don’t wait. There is no question that the ramp up time to evaluate and adopt new technologies and trends is expensive. You do not have to play the waiting game by buying expensive technologies. Look for industry specific solutions that are agile, quick to adapt and focused on your exact needs.
2. Buy best of breed. Look for companies who have forged partnerships with other ‘Best of Breed’ providers to bring you a comprehensive solution. This shows a focus and determination to deliver quality solutions.
3. Look for partners who share knowledge. Ensure partners are in tune to trends and data and that they will share that with you so you can more efficiently evolve and innovate at greater speed.
4. Don’t stop.  A key philosophical insight is to not stop when you think you’re at the top or you’ll go the way of the Sony Walkman as the IPod become the norm.
5. Data is the new creative outlet. As search transforms the amount of data needing analysis will multiply tremendously. Find solutions to transform mounds of data into creative content, solutions and insight tomorrow.  Data will move from advantage to basic necessity. Data is something the smartest marketers will leverage again, as a necessity, not a luxury.
6. Never underestimate the power of trying something. What data can you point to that says social media will help you boost your sales or increase your online exposure?  Better yet, what data can you point to that states it will not be an undue risk for your company?  Do not let the rush to data powered marketing trends handcuff you.
7. Personalized = Profitable. The more search results become personal the more the potential for leads.
8. Mobile search will greatly outpace PC Searches. Do not ignore the growth in the popularity of mobile applications and prevalence of local search results.  We ask you, are you optimized for mobile?
9. Lets Franchisees market too. One website will not dominate in search.  In an effort to create competition, variety and a better user experience, search engines will do what they can to ensure your site does not dominate. You can use this to your advantage by delivering truly unique and locally driven websites by giving Franchisees the power to update their own websites.
10. Searchers will continue to gravitate towards content they find useful. What marks the difference between insight and obviousness is the amount of people actually following through.  You have to dedicate marketing efforts to sharing value through search or social channels, rather than simply promotional materials.
11. Search will be about how many times you show up, not whether you’re first. The key to an adaptive approach to online marketing is that you’ll have a multi-pronged approach to showing up in organic search, pay-per-click advertising, directories, mobile, social and more. Are you mobile friendly, local readily optimized, social savvy?

Imagine how many more changes there will be in technology as well as with consumer behaviors in the coming year.

Take a look into 2012 by attending our ElementsLocal Franchise Online Marketing Bootcamp 2012, January 18th, 2012 12:00 p.m. CST.  Sign up by clicking: Franchise Online Marketing Webinar

Google is the most popular search engine in the world for a few good reasons. Its simple uncluttered interface, vast number of webpages and great results are among the top reasons.

But that’s not all Google has to offer and we find Franchise businesses using Google more and more to market and advertise, enhance their social media and mobile marketing, analyze their website traffic and even optimize and split test how effective the conversion is on their websites.

So ELEMENTS has decided recommend some of the hottest Google tools we see Franchises using today. ELEMENTS will also be conducting a FREE webinar on this topic on June 21st (click here to sign up >>).

Local Search & Advertising

1) Google Places

One of the largest impacts to the local search arena stems from Google Places, an online local directory of businesses. Most importantly, Google Places is no longer a separate search product anymore. Google now displays Google Place’s search results blended directly into Google’s general or “Everything” search when the search terms indicate that the end user might be looking for a product or service that can be satisfied locally.

Franchises now must ensure all of their locations are setup properly and optimized in Google Places in order to show up when people perform searches that can be satisfied locally.

2) Google AdWords Location Extensions

AdWords is Google’s PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising platform. Google has added location extensions to their AdWords system which allows the owner of the advertisement to display their advertisements to specified locations. Location extensions help make the consumer aware that the product or service they are looking for can be fulfilled locally.

3) Google Keyword Tool and Google Trends

By using Google’s free Keyword Tool, companies are better able to determine what keywords people are searching for and which keyword term targets would just waste their website’s valuable real estate. To receive top rankings in Google a company must play by their rules, expand their offerings and monetizing the marketability of their products or services. Getting traffic is great, but converting traffic into sales or leads is the true goal of the SEO game.

The Google Trends Tool can help your company determine search traffic trends when comparing multiple sets of keywords. For example, the following search comparing Netflix, Block Buster and Hollywood Video shows the dramatic difference in searches for those three businesses:

Social Media

4) Social Signals Effect Rank

Recently both Bing and Google have admitted that mentions of and links to web pages found in public social media postings can positively effect a website’s search engine rankings. The idea behind this is that social media users will share links to websites that they trust and enjoy so the more users sharing these links through social media the more perceived value these websites have. However, not all social media personas carry the same weight. Search engines look at the “social authority” of the user that shared that link and give more value to links shared by users with more credibility.

5) Google +1

At the time of this publication Google +1 is currently in beta testing mode. The idea behind Google +1 is to use one’s social network (Google contacts) for recommendations on which search results they found the most for their own search queries. So if your friend marked a result as valuable, there is good cause for the Google search engine to think that you might like it as well because you both exist within the same social circle.

Today (June 1st), Google has launched their +1 Button which can be added to any website to encourage friend recommendations in the same way that Facebook users can currently “like” a website page. In a way, Google is leveraging its’ entire user-base as quality control staff. While Google states that under the current system recommendations only come from the user’s social network, we can foresee a time when Google will recommend websites from outside of your social circle based on the number of +1’s a website has received and the perceived social authority of the rankee.

Click here for more information on the +1 Button.

6) Google Places Reviews

Earlier we discussed the importance of Google Places to local search. Perhaps the most important factor in getting a Place’s page to rank well is the number of positive reviews a business has in relation to their local competition. The reviews found on Google Places can be drawn from several places. One such place is the social review website Yelp. Google also has its’ own social review system (formally called Hotpot) which has now been integrated directly into Google Places. Both Yelp & Google Places allow users to track reviews and interact with their friends within their social network. According to Google, they now have millions of users rating places more than a million times per month.

7) Google’s Realtime Social Media Search Results

Alongside their Everything and Places search Google has various other search types. One of these variant searches is Google’s Realtime search. Google’s Realtime search results display “up-to-the-second” updates from various social media outlets including news articles, blog posts and Tweets. The search result page is no longer a static listing, but instead updates when a new post relevant to your search query is detected by Google.

These real-time searches can be beneficial for businesses looking to leverage current trends in their marketing efforts or for franchises looking to react quickly to protect their brand when trouble arises.

8) Google’s Algorithmic Changes that Recognize Brands

Social media mentions of a company name will pass along a brand impression for that company. The more mentions of a company’s name Google can find the more likely it is to treat that business as a notable brand. Brands have become an important factor to Google when determining search engine rankings because Google now considers brand name products and services as more trustworthy and therefore ranks brands higher than their non-branded competition.

Franchises can leverage social media to expand their company’s brand impression. Companies should encourage their employees to create personal LinkedIn profiles and link them to their company. Facebook posts & Twitter tweets can now be found in both Google’s Realtime search and its’ Everything search giving more exposure to a company’s brand name than franchises with inactive social media accounts that are not engaging existing or potential customers through those social mediums. Serious and authentic blog commenting with a mention of your company’s brand is just another social media outlet that can garner your brand’s name more exposure.

Aside from social media there are other very useful ways to expose your brand’s name to consumers. Successful offline advertising can have a positive impact on brand recognition. Franchises could even publish an eBook or two about franchising and about their brand which not only will receive mentions from social media and traditional media sources like press releases, but these books can also be found in online libraries like Google Scholar.

Mobile Marketing

9) Google Mobile Location Based Ads

Google AdWords offers location centric mobile advertising to allow local businesses to target leads based on the user’s immediate location. These location based ads offer the interested user an expandable map with turn by directions and a click-to-call phone number. There is some chatter at Google about other new “rich ad units” for mobile coming down the pipe to further leverage the mobile platform, including ads meant specifically for tablet devices.

10) Google Places Offer Mobile Coupons

When customers find a specific local store or service on Google Places through their mobile device, that business can offer digital coupons directly to that device in order to convert that lead into a walk-in customer. Owners of the devices can then show the business their coupon directly on their phone without having to print it out on a piece of paper. One of the best benefits of Google Place’s mobile coupons is that the coupons get distributed for free, unlike many offline paper distribution methods.

Traffic Metrics & Conversion Optimization

11) Google Analytics Traffic & SEO Metrics

Google Analytics is a free traffic reporting tool that allows companies to tunnel deeply into their visitor and website metrics in order to better determine the success of their website. Just some of the valuable visitor and search metrics one can obtain from Google Analytics are the most popular pages on your websites, the keywords that are driving search traffic to your websites, what external websites are sending your website traffic and the level of engagement of your website.

Google Analytics has completely changed how businesses look at their website’s statistics. This free hosted solution makes adding metric tracking to your website a breeze and provides in depth reporting second to none. Along with these valuable benefits, Google Analytics also allows companies to integrate their Google AdWords & Google AdSense campaigns into its reports, to set goals with varying values for conversion tracking and to build custom scheduled statistical reports.

In the franchise space specifically, ELEMENTS has begun using Google Analytics to provide rollup reporting across an entire franchisee network of websites as well as offering franchisees access to their own individual Google Analytics reports.

12) Website Optimizer for Conversion Optimization

The success of a website cannot purely be determined by the number of visitors to a website alone. Most websites have conversion goals like a checkout through their shopping cart or a newsletter sign-up for future targeted marketing. This is where conversion optimization comes into play.

Conversion optimization is the process of altering a page on a website in order to increase the amount achieved goals. Sometimes this can mean changing the call to action text or adding a big green button to the page. Conversion optimization is an art form but with Google’s Website Optimizer almost anyone can learn how to better their conversions on any given page.

In its simplest form, Website Optimizer allows you to create to competing pages and then it splits the traffic between the two pages and determines which page has the best conversion or goal achievement ratio. Website Optimizer also allows a company to alter individual page snippets in order to determine which of these snippets on the page lead to the most conversions.

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.

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.