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.

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

ElementsLocal is excitedly preparing for IFA 2012.  We are launching our BrandLocal campaign at IFA.  Please stop by our booth 724 to find out that that means for the future of Franchise Online Marketing.

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

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.

The 51st IFA Annual Convention was a success… from the Technology Summit, the new mobile app, Roundtable discussions, to Ford Saeks.

The buzz this year was about how franchises can leverage social media, local search and mobile apps. However, it was very promising to see that no one lost sight of the primary goal behind these tools: bring in local leads for franchisees.  Saeks said it best when he said “your website is your social proof.”

Franchises clearly see that a comprehensive approach, from website to social, is needed to take advantage of online marketing.

Below are ELEMENTS, Inc’s top 8 takeaways from the 51st annual IFA convention.

1. While at the previous year’s IFA Convention franchises were most interested in how to drive traffic, in 2011 those same franchises are now more interested in how to convert that traffic into leads or sales thereby creating a positive impact with their already existing traffic.  This is a direct reflection of how franchises are tightening their belts in these tough economic times by making the most of what they have already have.  Rather than spending time and money generating new traffic that will effectively be thrown at a wall to see what sticks, spending time on conversion optimization through variant testing and data driven improvements can lead to a significant increase in overall leads both in the present & future.
2. Franchises are generally interested in a three step process for online success which begins with find-ability (how easy it is to find their brand online), usability (how easy it is for consumers to engage your brand) and profitability (how easy it is to convert leads into customers).  If any of the links in this chain are broken the franchise risks never being found by potential customers, never converting those potential customers into paying customers and not being able to retain existing customers nor create brand loyal fans.
3. Another thing ELEMENTS noticed is that by and large franchises are becoming savvier in the realm of online marketing.  Instead of franchise decision makers questioning whether they should have online marketing campaigns consisting of social media, pay per click advertising and search engine optimization, they are now asking how they can best utilize those campaigns for maximum profitability.
4. When it comes to social media, franchise companies are beginning to consider ROE (return on engagement) more appropriate measure than a typical ROI.  This is a new way to look at social media where the end result isn’t merely net sales or leads but can be measured instead by other factors including reach after reposts, number of subscribers and positive or negative sentiment.  Social media campaigns judged merely on their conversion numbers look bleak, but by engaging customers in an open environment franchise companies can improve customer service which leads to improved customer sentiment and the creation of brand loyal fans.
5. Another point of interest with franchises that was noticed at the 2011 IFA Annual Convention was how effective your store locator is. Franchises have realized that not only can their locators help a potential customer find a local franchisee place of business but they can be much more than that today.  Locators can be integrated into a franchise website, have maps and directions and also work seamlessly across both websites and mobile devices. We also saw conversations around exterior locators like a Facebook app or Google Places.
6. While at the previous year’s IFA Convention franchises were mostly overwhelmed with local search and search engine optimization, there seemed to be a better understanding that local search is not a store locator nor is it searches done solely on Google Maps.  There was a general understanding of local search and the importance of it in Google’s new merged ‘Everything’ results that often place local results above national search results.
7. Mobile apps and mobile optimized websites were another big topic of discussion at the recent convention.  Most franchise companies want a way to direct mobile users to their local franchisees which is exactly what the ElementsLocal™ mobile locator app does.  Other franchises want their websites to be optimized to fit on a mobile device should one be detected.  As mobile traffic continues to increase franchise companies want to make sure they are positioned to take advantage of this fluid demographic.
8. Perhaps the most important thing ELEMENTS took away from the 51st IFA Annual Conference was the testimony of corporations and noted speakers alike who claimed that success in all areas, including social media stems from a good & valuable web property… “your website is your social proof,” as Ford Saeks said.  Without having a useful, easy to navigate, attractive website at both the local and corporate level none of your mobile apps, pay per click marketing or social media campaigns are going to be as effective as they could be.

ELEMENTS met a lot of great people at this year’s IFA Annual Convention and we got a feel for how much their companies are currently embracing online marketing and what needs they have in order to make their franchise’s online presence more of a success.  We are going to take that knowledge and continue to improve our ElementsLocal™ platform so that it continues to be the best solution for franchises looking to market online at both the local and corporate level.