As consumers rapidly shift to mobile and digital channels, competition in search engines and social media is growing at an even faster pace. This surge in demands can leave local dealers and franchisees feeling overwhelmed. As a result, brand marketers must find ways to alleviate the burden on their marketing partners in the field. This is where leveraging a local landing page tool becomes crucial. By providing digital marketing expertise and designs, brand marketers can offer a polished online presence, while local marketers contribute their knowledge of the local marketplace to convert more customers.
Let's take a closer look at the evolution of branded local landing pages and the benefits they bring to multi-location brands.
With all of these new demands, local dealers and franchisees — always more inclined to operate their businesses than to market them — are feeling increasingly overwhelmed. And that means brand marketers have got to find ways to lighten the load for their marketing partners in the field.
This is where a local landing page tool comes into the picture. Brand marketers provide the digital marketing expertise and designs that give the brand a polished presence, and local marketers supply the knowledge of the local marketplace that converts more customers.
A Quick Timeline of Brand-Compliant Landing Pages
For multi-location brands, creating a large volume and variety of landing pages required by hundreds or thousands of franchisees or dealers has always been a challenge. The local landing page has long been the core of the local digital marketing strategy. In its early stages, local landing pages served as extensions of the brand's main website, equipped with basic content management tools. Although these tools allowed dealers or franchisees to operate under the brand's umbrella and update text content and visuals, they lacked advanced features.
The Second Generation: As web technology advanced and consumer-oriented design platforms like SquareSpace and Weebly gained popularity, local marketers began seeking greater independence and control over their customer experiences. They wanted to customize text, images, and layouts without sacrificing the simplicity of point-and-click functionality. Additionally, they desired integrated SEO features to ensure their content's discoverability, as well as basic reporting on page views to assess their visibility.
State-of-the-Art Branded Local Landing Pages: Today, local marketers expect fully responsive, brand-compliant, content-managed, and SEO-optimized landing pages. They also seek detailed demographic reporting capabilities. Fortunately, brands now recognize the importance of landing pages in the local marketing mix. As a result, they are implementing templated landing page solutions that seamlessly integrate all these features, making the process simple and enjoyable.
Evolution of Branded Local Landing Page Software
The development of robust local landing pages has mirrored the rise of connected consumers. Local marketers can no longer rely solely on traditional methods; they must meet the demands of customers expecting exceptional cross-device experiences from the brands they engage with.
The Business Case for Branded Local Landing Pages
To illustrate the growing demand for branded landing page tools, let's consider the example of a major hospitality organization with over 4,000 properties worldwide. By implementing CampaignDrive by Pica9, a brand management platform with a local landing page tool, even inexperienced users can create and publish professional-looking landing pages within minutes. These pages include local imagery, an integrated booking widget, brand-approved content, brand-defined SEO, and a fully responsive format suitable for desktop and mobile devices.
Brand-controlled landing page tools like these provide five key benefits for franchise and dealer brands:
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Ensuring Brand Compliance and Integrity: Branded local landing pages empower local marketers to leverage the brand effectively, attracting new customers and supporting favorable pricing. Additionally, brand-compliant landing pages prevent the erosion of brand equity caused by off-brand executions.
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Building Social Media Presence: Branded local landing pages can help local marketers establish a strong social media presence. For many pages created through such tools, the local property's Facebook page becomes the top referrer. This symbiotic relationship demonstrates the power of branded local landing pages in transforming relationships into revenue. By enabling local operators to market and engage with their audience, these pages foster brand reinforcement instead of unintentional erosion.
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Saving Time and Money: Branded local landing pages significantly reduce costs and save time. For instance, creating a landing page based on a brand-supplied template often required a web agency fee of $2,000 or more. With an efficient tool, manual costs decrease by over 90%. The time needed to create and publish a branded local landing page is also drastically reduced, from three weeks to less than three days, even accounting for brand-level review and approval.
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Optimizing Discoverability: Rather than burdening thousands of local property managers with the intricacies of SEO, branded landing page tools incorporate SEO best practices into the template-building process. This ensures that pages are "born discoverable," driving traffic and revenue beyond the local property's natural reach.
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Increasing Conversion Rates: Independent testing by Omniture has shown that adding landing pages to an upstream advertising campaign can boost response rates by 25-50%. Localizing landing page execution promises even higher lifts. For example, an analysis of over 3,500 unique landing pages in the hospitality industry revealed average click-through rates to the reservation system of 8% of visits. This generated incremental revenue of over $100,000 per month.
Although the digital marketing arena continues to evolve at lightning speed, and local marketers may be overwhelmed at the prospect of creating the kinds of digital experiences their customers want, branded local landing pages offer multi-location brands a perfect solution to the perennial local digital marketing headaches. With brand-approved templates available to customize and publish in just a few simple clicks, and integrated reporting built-in, franchisees and dealers can finally take advantage of the state of the art in digital marketing.
See how a hospitality giant improved digital marketing response rates for franchisees with local landing page templates generated from CampaignDrive by Pica9.
