Madison Marketing Group Blog

In 2020, when 86% of consumers rely on the internet to find a local business, and visitors judge your site based on aesthetics in just .05 seconds, it’s critical that franchises have a high-functioning website that attracts and engages visitors.

Here, we’ll explore 10 essential practices to help your franchise website hook visitors on the first page they visit. We’ll also explain how to ensure a convenient user experience and use SEO best practices to reach more potential customers. Lastly, we’ll discuss what to look for in a vendor if you need a partner to help you.

SEO and franchises

In the past few decades, the internet and growing popularity of smartphones has changed the way people shop at local businesses. No longer chained to a desktop, Americans are free to research local businesses and make purchasing decisions on the go. Consider these statistics:

If this year's digital marketing strategy looks the same as it did four or five years ago, you're likely missing out on new tools and techniques that have made their way into the modern marketer’s arsenal.

While the core mission of digital marketing remains the same as it always was, changes in how we interact with online content have prompted marketers to find new ways to accomplish their goals.

Franchise websites come in all shapes and sizes, but when it comes to generating quality leads online, optimized franchise landing pages are absolutely essential.

If you’re not familiar with landing pages, these are simply the website pages where your visitors can submit their information in exchange for something. That something could be a whitepaper, demo, or promise that you'll contact them directly.

If you’re intent on building a franchise website designed to attract and convert the serious buyers out there, it’s crucial to make sure you’re leading interested visitors to landing pages they can use to take the next step.

Landing pages are all over the web, but very few are actually designed with best practices in mind. Marketers have had years to test and compare all kinds of landing pages to figure what works and what doesn’t and today, we can clearly see the patterns common among the most successful pages out there.

In an effort to nail down exactly how to maximize the probability of getting a conversion on the page, the folks over at marketingexperiments.com analyzed over 10,000 trials of landing page testing in order to extract a single “formula” for the correctly optimized landing page.

Before I go any further, you don’t have to be a whiz at math in order to grasp this and apply it yourself.

Poker players go all-in for one of two reasons: Either their hand rocks and they know the pot is theirs or it stinks and they want to scare everyone else into folding.

When done right, the payoff is big, but it takes confidence, timing, and the will to actually take a chance with your chips even when you can’t be sure it’ll pay off.

The same is true with inbound. Just like sitting around the poker table, it’s hard to win big by playing it safe with little bets here and there. Winners see opportunities and make big, smart moves.

For businesses focused on selling to a local market, reviews are crucial not only for driving business to your door (as many as 90% of shoppers read reviews before making a purchase), but also for helping your business appear higher up on search results. Having positive, recent reviews can significantly improve your search rankings in your local market.

In today's data-driven, online world, it's never been easier to track the return on investment (ROI) for your marketing campaigns, channels, and tactics. That said, it still requires some level of comfortability with numbers and data analysis.

In this post, we'll take a deep dive on those numbers, and provide some guidance on tracking ROI specifically for inbound marketing, an emerging B2B marketing philosophy that promises greater measurability than ever before.

Before we do that, let's briefly define inbound marketing and discuss how it differs from traditional marketing tactics.

Each year, BuzzSumo uses data from its trending content software to identify the kinds of B2B content that get the most shares and likes.

This year’s B2B content report just came out, and BuzzSumo identified six types of B2B blog posts and articles that consistently outperformed the rest in their research:

If you’re a small to mid-sized brand, competing with industry heavyweights online (and elsewhere) can seem like a virtually impossible task. Search for any popular product or service and it doesn’t take long to realize big brands have a chokehold on the basic keywords people are searching for.

Depending on what these keywords are, this big brand dominance can consume the entire front page of results and beyond.