Digital Marketing News: Help Franchisees Adopt Local Marketing

We’re collecting a host of links, videos, and assorted analysis on the ever-changing world of digital marketing. We invite you to skim, share, analyze, argue, and refute – just so long as you don’t get embarrassed at the water cooler again. Here are the latest digital marketing news and trends for the week of October 4, 2019.

How to Help Franchisees Adopt Local Digital Marketing

Franchisees often don’t have the time to become digital marketing experts, so it’s important that franchisors and their marketing partners support franchisees in their efforts. Location3 CEO Alex Porter recently shared with Forbes a few strategies for keeping franchisees engaged in the local digital marketing process. Here’s an excerpt from the post:

Show franchisees what they’re paying for.

Franchisees are entrepreneurs first and foremost, and entrepreneurs don’t rush into spending money without knowing where it’s being spent. Franchisors and marketing partners must be transparent and communicate clearly to franchisees exactly what they’re paying for.

They aren’t paying for the idea of local digital marketing. They’re paying for the promotion of their business. Before any talks of lookalike audiences and click-through rates, franchisors and marketing partners should show them which ads are being placed on which networks.

For more strategies, including training and centralization, the full post can be read here.

Optimizing Paid Search Campaigns for Seasonality

Accounting for seasonality during the traditional holiday months is a common strategy, but are there other times of the year when your paid search campaigns should be adjusted to capture an increase in web traffic?

Location3 Paid Search expert Andrea Bravo recently shared how to identify these times as well as how to optimize your paid search campaigns for these peak seasons. Here’s an excerpt from the post:

“The first way we can optimize for seasonality is tailoring ad copy to the motivations that were identified through Google Trends and client intel.

In this example, we could test “Get Your Yards Ready” and “Perfect Gifts for Mom”. The volume of searches during this peak period will give us quicker results than off-periods, allowing us to fine-tune ad copy in existing campaigns as well as apply our insights to future campaigns.”

For more tactics and how to gather and analyze data, read the full post here.

Google’s New Shopping Experience Goes Live

Google announced on Thursday the full release of its personalized Shopping experience, including local inventory and an improved checkout process.

The most prominent feature of the update is “Buy on Google”, Google’s cost-per-action program for retailers that’s currently known as Google Shopping Actions. This allows users to purchase a product from Google’s pages using payment information stored in their Google accounts. This is largely considered Google’s response to Amazon’s one-stop shop experience.

Google also will be using user shopping and search histories to push product recommendations, including the option to buy online or pick up in-store.

The new Google Shopping is likely to be a very competitive space for advertisers, who will need to tighten up their Shopping Actions strategies to stay ahead of the competition.