Month: May 2014

5 Must-Haves To Create A Powerful Franchise Website

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yogurt & cookieI’m crazy about frozen yogurt and cookies, and I’m clearly not the only one. If you’ve been following TCBY and Mrs. Fields, you’ve recognized that they are taking a bold and innovative approach to growing their franchise operations. And, it’s getting them results – big time. I know this because they are a client of mine.

So, what is their secret recipe? Let me tell you by walking you through their new website we created for them at http://www.franchise.tcby.com. Overall, you’ll notice that the site is clean, visually appealing, and reflects the current graphic style where visitors scroll down the page. But, here are five things their website provides that visitors are eating up:

  1. They lead with a groundbreaking, incredibly powerful offer right from the start, showcasing it prominently on the home page: Buy a TCBY, get a Mrs. Field’s FREE! Two for one? That’s forging new ground!
  2. The site is overflowing with strong content. That helps with SEO.
  3. There is a link to their blog so visitors can easily access more in-depth information on the brands.
  4. They feature tours and webinars to educate and influence visitors.
  5. There is a press section that is heavily loaded with their breaking news and updates on what they are doing with their brands around the world.

The trends and technology for website content and design are always evolving. If your website remains static, you’re missing a huge opportunity to generate business. I recommend you pay close attention to your site to see if it is keeping abreast with current trends in design and if the content is still effectively delivering the right message and delivering the results your are seeking. You should be making design and content tweaks to your site regularly and plan a complete redesign about every year or so. Is anyone else craving a sweet now?

 

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Blogging Is The Most Cost-Effective Way To Generate Leads

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blog imageAccording to a recent study by HubSpot, for the third year in a row, marketers are increasing their inbound spending nearly 50%. What have these marketers discovered? And, why have they interrupted their traditional methods to adopt inbound marketing? Because it works. 43% of marketers generated a customer via their blog with less than 10% of total time allocation.

When considering communication channels to help you drive leads, you can see the importance of considering blogging. According to a study by eMarketer, there are an estimated 200 million blogs on the Internet that are read at least monthly by about 55% of Internet users.

A corporate blog is an essential vehicle that allows you to make a deeper connection with your customers and potential customers in ways not possible before. A blog helps develop a voice for your company. Your blog can be used to inform customers and potential customers, to make announcements, share links and content, and to drive sales.

A Word About Content

Careful consideration should be given to your blog content. Not only can you engage customers and build a relationship with them, but you can also influence their buying decisions. Keep that in mind whenever you post.

Through your blog you can create fresh content on a regular basis, making it rich in the keywords and phrases you want to get found for on Google, Bing, and other search engines.

The Big Picture

Blogging is just one more tool at your disposal to direct customers and potential customers down your sales funnel. It should act in harmony with your overall sales and marketing plans. A blog is a good springboard to guide customers to videos, white papers, links, landing pages, and other resources to help you deliver the intended message to impact sales.

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Four Secrets To Implementing Effective Marketing Automation

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The success of your marketing automation lies in the amount of thought and time you put in to preparing and building your plan before implementation. It’s worth the time and effort. A strong start leads to better long-term success. So, invest the time necessary to build the best processes and content offers you can.

Follow these four steps for an efficient implementation of your own killer marketing automation solution:

1. Carefully select the best time for implementation

Marketing automation makes sense from the beginning for a start-up. More seasoned businesses; however, should consider marketing automation when making an investment in their marketing to provide accountability and ensure that investments are driving results. Marketing automation also makes sense when a business has outgrown its manual processes and doesn’t want to add staff. Marketing automation can also be helpful when you’re managing a high volume of leads, ensuring none fall through the cracks.

2. Pay close attention to detail

Marketing and sales need to work together to determine the specific process and goals in order for your marketing automation to be the most successful. Without proper buy-in from sales, it likely won’t succeed.  You’ll want to consider the following:

  • What are your current promotion techniques?
  • How are you going to qualify leads?
  • Are you going to assign lead scores?
  • How are you nurturing your leads?
  • What is the process for marketing to turn leads over to sales?
  • What happens to leads that don’t close?
  • How do you measure conversion ratios?

3. Follow marketing automation best practices.

You want to make sure you develop a formal lead management framework that highlights the specific role and relationship between the six vital marketing tools and processes: data, lead planning, lead routing, lead qualification, lead nurturing, and metrics. Make sure sales and marketing agree on each step and use the same language to describe it.

4. Create a project plan

Marketing automation won’t be a success without a solid project plan that points out the following:

  • The goals and requirements of marketing automation
  • Proper selection of the best vendor to meet your needs
  • Commitment to the marketing automation solution with complete integration with your CRM

4 Ways The Producers Network Helps You Grow Your Business

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prod_logo_notagI know that most of you reading this blog are in sales and marketing, so you want a quick takeaway of what makes The Producers Network different and how we can help. So, I give you the four products we at The Producers Network have developed to help clients identify and accelerate qualified prospects through the sales funnel – from lead to loan. I think you’ll like what you see, so I’m also including a bit more information on our history to help you get to know us a little better.

1. Proprietary Data: Targeting The Right Market

Need to find restaurant operators who generate $3MM+ in annual sales? Or how about executives in transition? Our 20MM+ B2B and 225MM+ B2C database of e-mail addresses can be segmented and targeted to fit your marketing needs. Then we write and deploy compelling e-mail messages that help identify interest and build relationships over time.

2. Content Creation: Identifying Interest

Putting value in the hands of your prospects helps increase lead conversion, educate your prospects, and move opportunities through the pipeline. Our creative team writes and designs custom e-books, blogging on social media, brochures, white papers, offers, and landing pages that get results.

3. Proprietary Lead Scoring: Prioritizing Leads

The Producers uses a proprietary lead scoring method to help identify, organize, prioritize, and if necessary nurture leads before they are sent onto sales. Our lead scoring model increases the conversion rates in all areas of the sales funnel but prospects-to-qualified lead conversion in particular.

4. The Producers Ad Network

Advertising on our network provides custom messaging, targeting, and lead conversion for unique offers and call-to-action.

A Bit More About Us…

As a lead generation and qualification company, we specialize in assisting franchisors and small businesses with generating and qualifying new and current prospects, interest nurturing, behavioral scoring, and financial qualification.

Founded in 2005, we started by providing the marketing and advertising for the Clockwork Home Services’ brands: One Hour Heating and Air, Benjamin Franklin Plumbing, and Mister Sparky. During our four-year tenure, the franchise division grew to over 650 franchises. This experience shifted our focus to assisting franchisors with accelerating their growth. My firm was then retained by RME, the leader in financial seminar marketing, to design a similar system to help franchisors with their lead generation. During our time with RME, we worked with 70 franchisors including the Dunkin Brands, Quiznos, Papa Murphy, and 7-Eleven. We’re not only incredibly knowledgeable about what we do, we’re also extremely passionate about it. We’d love to talk to you about how we can help you. To learn more please visit: http://www.producersdigital.com.

The Producers Network happily serves the following franchisors: Hurricane Grill & Wings, TCBY, Mrs. Fields, Pie Five Pizza, Wok Box, and Toyko Joes.

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New Moneyball Marketing Techniques To Drive Sales

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UnknownIf you’ve been following my blog, you know how much I love to talk about the movie Moneyball. Today is no exception. I love this movie because it shows us how we can use analytics, statistics, and numbers to drive business. Although the movie is specific to baseball, there are plenty of applicable lessons to be applied to franchising. Here are some of my favorites.

1. Track key performance indicators at the deepest level. Don’t settle for merely tracking the number of leads generated, conversion costs, and revenue per sale. A deeper dive is possible if you’re using marketing automation tools and CRM. These allow you to determine the cost per channel and campaign to determine the cost per lead.

2. Follow the new numbers you need to know. Those include calculating the ROl per lead, your prospect-to-pipeline conversion rate, and the effectiveness (or ROI) of each of your online channels, landing pages, and affiliate sites.

3. Breathe new life into your old marketing methods. You can do this by adding a fresh, new approach that includes data analytics, customer engagement, A/B testing, content marketing, and product development.

4. Don’t be afraid to shake it up and try something new. Take advantage of the new technologies available to try different approaches, new marketing channels, and new key performance indicators that allow you to have a bigger impact on sales.

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