Inbound Marketing Blog

How can you make sure your franchise website is ready for inbound marketing?

Often, franchisors believe they can unleash new marketing tactics on their existing site and achieve optimal inbound marketing success.

This doesn't always work. 

Why?

Because for inbound marketing to work best, you need to take a holistic approach.

If your website is too slow, for example, people may leave before they have a chance to read your inbound content.

If you website is not secured with an SSL certificate, visitors may hesitate to submit forms on your landing pages. 

This post provides a short checklist to ensure your franchise website is truly inbound-ready.

If you’re a marketer conducting research in advance of an upcoming website build, you may have heard the terms data-driven design, data-informed design, UX design, and user-centered design batted around.

For the uninitiated, this can be a bit confusing.

In digital marketing, some things change fast.

In the last few years, businesses invested more in digital, and customers showed a preference toward increasingly digital and personalized experiences, as well as fast service that enabled them to engage on their time.

These trends lend themselves perfectly to inbound marketing—inviting marketers to provide content and advertising that is increasingly tailored to individual consumers or accounts.

Read on for bandwagons worth jumping on and B2B-friendly tactics to consider for your digital marketing strategy.

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 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.

We’ve talked at length about the importance of developing a content strategy built to attract serious franchise buyers combing the web for an opportunity that speaks to them.

The second logical step in the inbound methodology is converting those interested visitors into leads you can nurture through the franchise sales process and eventually close—the final step of the inbound process.

This post will focus squarely on how to create a compelling call to action that will earn the clicks of your website visitors, leading them on the start of their conversion path.

In 2023, your manufacturing company’s website can be a primary channel through which prospects find your solutions.

According to Matt Danford of Modern Machine Shop, manufacturers with a higher number of customers that are actively under contract—not surprisingly—earn more revenue.

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 identify an optimal landing page "formula.”

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

You’ve taken the time to build out your franchise website with a wealth of information you know will attract the serious prospects, but all of that content means very little when there’s no clear next step these buyers can take after getting interested.

I’ve talked about the first vital piece of the conversion puzzle, calls-to-action, and how in many ways, they’re the first step visitors take to becoming a lead.

For something that can work so well, executing a B2B website content marketing campaign sure can be difficult.

First, you have to figure out to what to write about. It's easy enough to list out your most important target keywords or talk to your sales team to see what customers are asking about.

But then you have to take those ideas and convert them into content that people actually want to read, and that has a chance to make it into potential customers' search engine results.

There's also a sometimes-prohibitive time commitment involved with B2B content generation. It takes a long time to write quality content, not to mention any social promotion, ad promotion, or outreach programs that are part of your post-publishing plan.

So how can you be sure the content you're producing worth the time investment and worthy of search engine placement? These five strategies are typically where we start for our B2B clients that are new to content marketing.

As search engines get better at connecting consumers' questions to companies with answers, it’s up to businesses to create the kinds of websites web-savvy consumers want to explore.

For most traffic coming to your website—especially new visitors—the homepage is your site’s front door, the gateway to the network of “rooms” that makes up your website.

Just like in the real world, no one arrives at your house only to admire the door - they want to go inside. The same is true for websites.