Mayfly Internet Marketing

Growing a Franchise Through Web Marketing

liam — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 14:59:52 +0000

The following article was printed in the Dec/Jan issue of Franchise World. To view this article online, you can read it here. (it’s on page 27)

As the resident guest author in Franchise World contributing news, tips & advice on how franchisors & franchisees can use the web to market their franchise, this article details our ongoing work with the domestic cleaning management franchise, Bright & Beautiful.

Expanding a Franchise

In this article, I will detail how we worked with the franchise, Bright & Beautiful, to help them get the most out of the web, and ultimately increase the exposure of each of their franchisees. This work is ongoing, but this case study should highlight how we have put together a structure & plan for all new franchisees that come on board.

Bright & Beautiful was started by Rachel Ray in 2007. It is a profitable, flexible, and ethical franchise within the domestic cleaning industry. The franchise itself trains women across the UK to manage a team of professional housekeepers delivering a high quality home cleaning service. Since its inception, Bright & Beautiful has grown rapidly and now has more than 25 franchisees.

When Rachel first approached Mayfly to look at their internet presence & online marketing strategies, we first looked at how to streamline their use of Google Adwords. This had always been a good source of franchise enquiries, but more importantly a source of leads for their franchisees. Setting up individual campaigns to match franchisees with their areas, plus tailored adverts helped to improve the number of clicks, but also reduced the average cost per click. By reducing the wasted clicks, each franchisee’s campaigns are now more efficient, and an important source of enquiries for the franchisees.

To improve the franchisee’s local presence, we set each franchisee up with a Google Places listing. These regularly show in the natural searches for their geographic area. They also allow clients to leave feedback on their service, as well as view recent images and key info such as contact information.

Bright & Beautiful are very pro-active in ensuring that the franchisees get a flying start when they join. On launch of their business, there is a co-ordinated effort to have their web page put live (this is part of the main Bright & Beautiful site), along with a live Google Adwords account and their Places listing submitted.

The main Bright & Beautiful website is managed in-house, however working with them we have encouraged and advised on the best ways to improve the site and improve its search engine rankings.

In the past 2 months, we have started to undertake a full revamp of the franchisee’s web presence and build each their own website. All sites will be managed from head office, but we are building in a system that the franchisees will be able to have some input into editing & updating parts of the site with their latest news & testimonials. The benefits include improved search engine rankings for the franchisee, clients are able to see more information about the service, the Adwords accounts will result in better click through rates, thus cheaper clicks, plus the Bright & Beautiful brand itself is expanded. First to go live is the flagship franchise in Altrincham.

At Bright & Beautiful we are committed to being at the forefront of technology and Liam is helping us to keep ahead of the game. We ensure that our franchise owners have many marketing strategies in their armoury but an online presence is critical. In this area Liam is our trusted adviser who helps us to work smart with our budget. We are also in the process of launching our You Tube channel and developing our intranet and document library further to include video tutorials which will be a great resource for franchise owners.”

– Rachel Ray, Director, Bright & Beautiful

Although extensive, Bright & Beautiful are laying very solid foundations to not only run a successful franchise, but to also expand on what they already have.

If you are interested in becoming the next successful Bright & Beautiful franchisee, email rachel@brightandbeautifulhome.com or call 0845 241 0818. More information at www.brightandbeautifulhome.com

For more details on the services we can offer your franchise, view our franchise marketing services, our web design page, or our PPC Management or SEO pages.

It’s Official! Award Winning Web Design

liam — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 12:49:45 +0000

Over 170 guests from the oil heating industry celebrated the OFTEC Awards for Excellence at the Central Convention Centre in Manchester. There were eight categories of awards, and our client, Grant UK, had a fantastic evening winning 3 of them.

A Gala dinner, followed by the awards ceremony was then followed by the US comedian, Rich Hall, who as expected, was extremely funny.

Grant UK, a leading renewable heating company, received it’s 7th award for ‘Best Training Centre’ since the centre opened in 2003. Their Grant CombiSol product won the ‘Innovative Product of the Year’ award, whilst the icing on the cake for Mayfly was the final award they won which was for ‘Best Website 2012′.

It’s great to see that Oftec have recognised the carbon neutral website. Here at Mayfly, the Grant website was completely rebuilt last year to offer customers greater ease of use and more information at the touch of a button. One of the most recent updates includes a Biomass RHI calculator, which has been designed to assist property owners in exploring the financial and carbon benefits of installing a wood pellet boiler, opposed to a fossil fuel alternative in non-domestic premises.

The latest change to the Grant UK website has seen the homepage redesigned after a period of user testing and conversion tracking.

For more information on the award winning heating products, visit Grant UK.

For award winning web design in Liverpool, look no further than Mayfly Internet Marketing!

It’s the (Web Design) Awards Season

liam — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 15:31:01 +0000

Award winning websites from Mayfly Internet Marketing….

Well, we would say that they are worthy of awards, but now, the proof is in the pudding!

This Thursday, 18th October, sees the OFTEC Awards for Excellence 2012 held at the Manchester Convention Centre.

One of our long standing clients, Grant UK, have been nominated in the ‘Best Website’ category.

The Grant UK website has long been a front runner in the oil & renewable heating industry which we are proud to have designed, built & maintained for the last 4 years.

As well as building individual areas for homeowners, installers & merchants, we have designed other useful tools such as PV calculators and engineer & merchant searches – it’s great that OFTEC have recognised this. Added to this, we are constantly striving to attain high search engine rankings for some of the toughest & competitive search terms in their industry – we are pleased to say that Grant constantly have top 5 rankings for all of their key search terms.

The OFTEC awards evening is surely going to be a great evening. A black tie event with gala dinner, awards, a comedian and live acts. We look forward to attending!

For information about efficient heating solutions, visit the Grant UK website.

OFTEC (The Oil Firing Technical Association) establishes the standards for competence within the domestic oil heating and cooking industry. By ensuring the quality of people and businesses working in this area, OFTEC maintains standards for reputable companies and consumers alike.

The 2nd award is an equally impressive nomination for the fantastic charity, Caring Alone Support Service.

Caring Alone are a Liverpool based charity who’s website offers a free online social/support service for young carers aged between 16-30. They have been nominated by the Prince’s Trust in the ‘Celebrate Success’ category. The lads who run the charity have performed really well and are shortlisted to the final 6 nominees for the North West area.

If they win this, they then go through to the national final. The awards ceremony is being held at FACT, on Wood St in Liverpool on the 13th November.

We were really happy to work with Caring Alone. We came up with their logo, and put their ideas together to build and design the website. The website has been designed to work as a social platform, similar to Facebook, where carers can sign up, and interact with fellow carers, both in Liverpool, and nationally. There was nothing like this out there for any young carer, so this made this an additionally motivating project

Since it’s launch, the website has been a great success, and if they can win this Prince’s Trust award, as well as the added publicity, it will give the lads behind the charity the recognition they deserve! Good luck.

Google Analytics Advice For Franchisors

liam — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 20:25:45 +0000

The Power of Google Analytics

Many readers have been emailing me to shed some light on Google Analytics, its features, and how to get the most out of it. You could fill a whole magazine going through all of its qualities, how to find them in the dashboard, and how to get the most out of them. For those unsure what Google Analytics (GA) is, it is Google’s free website analytics’ software package. Installation only requires a Google account, and some tracking code placed onto your website. Once this has been done, you have access to a wealth of information about your website. If you don’t have this, I urge you to have it installed.

This is by no means a complete guide to GA, but here are some very useful elements to take a look at. Next to each feature, I have added the instructions of how to get here once logged into your analytics account.

Filters. (Admin –> Profiles –> Filters)

As the name suggests, you can filter certain traffic and remove it from your statistics. My advice here is to filter your IP address (this is the address of your own computer). If you or your staff are regularly on your website, adding your IP to filters means you can be sure that all search figures for your site are real visitors, and just people from within your organisation.

Adwords. (Standard Reporting –> Advertising –> Adwords)

Do you have Google Adwords running for your franchise website? Linking your Adwords into your GA account as well as being very simple to do is a great way to see how your Adwords traffic interacts with your site. It will show each of your campaigns and how each keyword drives traffic to your site, but also show you how that visitor interacted with your site. Bounce rates & length of time on your site are shown for each keyword.

Search Engine Optimisation. (Standard Reporting –> Traffic Sources –> SEO)

This is a relatively new features and requires you to link your GA account with your Google Webmaster Tools account. Once done, you can see which are your better performing keywords in Google’s organic/natural results, how often those terms are searched for per month, your average position, and the amount of clicks those keywords generate for you.

Mobile Traffic (Standard Reporting –> Audience –> Mobile)

With my own client’s sites I am noticing a huge increase in the number of visitors through mobile devices. It was only about 18 months ago where the average percentage of mobile traffic was around 5%. Most of our client’s sites are now nearer 15%, with some receiving up to 30% of their traffic from these devices. Why does this matter? If a quarter of your visitors look at your site on their phone, are you sure that they can see everything? And does everything work? You need to make sure it is mobile friendly, and if it isn’t, you might want to look at bringing out a phone app, or designing a mobile version of your site, or redesigning your site with a responsive layout. GA will show you which devices are being used to view your site which will help you decide whether you need to take one of the above steps.

Goals/Ecommerce (Standard Reporting –> Conversions)

What is the purpose of your website? Encourage sign-ups? Newsletter sign-ups? Leads? Recruitment emails or product sales? By setting up Goals for all the above, except for ecommerce, this feature will tell you when you have had a conversion, but if you enable all of the other features above, you will see where that conversion came from, the cost of it (if it came from Adwords etc), and also how they got to your conversion page. This is all useful information to use to improve these rates.

Visitor Flow (Standard Reporting –> Audience –> Visitor Flow)

This tool was introduced at the beginning of the year and is a great visual aid to show you how your traffic flows through your website. At each stage or page, it shows where your traffic went to next, and the amount of traffic that dropped off or exited your site. One of the great things with this is that you can filter your traffic to show how Paid traffic might behave differently to traffic from referred sites or from mobile traffic.

Site Search (Standard Reporting –> Content –> Site Search)

For those of you who are running extensive sites with lots of content, for example franchise directories, you may already have a ‘Search’ box where users can search for something within your site by typing in a keyword. By activating this within your GA account, all keywords that are entered into the search box will be recorded. This is especially useful for telling you what people are searching for, and if this content doesn’t exist on your site, and then you can add it.

New Cookie Law Causes Confusion

liam — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:35:14 +0000

A new EU cookie law was introduced on the 26th May 2011, and although this was passed largely without a fuss, the 12 month grace period to make sure all websites comply is almost upon us.

Some would argue that this is a pointless new legislation, but non-compliance can lead to very heavy fines!

Come the 26th May, you will notice lots, probably not all, of websites will start asking your permission to use ‘cookies’ on their website. For many websites, we think that this will lead to many people clicking off the website as users will have no idea what they are agreeing to.

Cookies are small text files that are used for all sorts of things on websites from tracking users (for Google Analytics purposes, but also more advanced tracking uses), remembering your login details, for sites such as Facebook, but also for remembering your details when making a website purchase or completing an enquiry form.

Cookies really are essential to how websites work, so what does this new law require?

For more information on this, read our Franchise World article where we have written a more in-depth article on this EU cookie law.

In a nutshell, you will need to carry out an audit on your site to see what cookies are being used, then decide whether all of these are required. The final step is to then tell all of your website visitors what the cookies are used for, and they will need agree to these being used. The crazy thing about this is if a user understands what a cookie is in the first place but don’t agree to them used on your site, the site probably won’t function correctly!

Useful Info:

Find what cookies your site uses with the Chrome Cookie Detection Tool

Information Commissioners – these will be enforcing the law.

Our Franchise World article.

Business Support & Advice in Liverpool

liam — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:57:09 +0000

This Thursday, 26th January, sees the official launch evening of Hatch! at Hannahs Bar, on Hardman St.

Hatch! is a free advisory service which aims to help would-be business owners to get their business off the ground. The service also extends to those who have recently started their business.

Here at Mayfly we are extremely pleased to be part of the Hatch! team and to be able to offer our own knowledge of getting a business off the ground. The other business advisors from the Hatch team include RMC Accountancy, Delve PR, Emerald Law & Greenleaf UK business coach.

The event at Hannah’s Bar is free to attend, and includes a free drink on arrival plus nibbles. To register your interest, please go to http://www.hatchbiz.com and send an email. All attendees will be entered into the evening’s free raffle with some excellent prizes on offer including a website, an accountancy package, adverts in Liverpool based property magazine, Your Move, PR & Aromatherapy vouchers to name but a few.

To take advantage of the Hatch! service now, visit http://www.hatchbiz.com or call 0151 2291171.

Ovenu join the 100 club

liam — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:08:24 +0000

Our relationship with Ovenu, the UK’s largest network of oven cleaning franchisees, has flourished even more with the order to rebuild and redesign the websites for all of the Ovenu franchisees.

This originally started as a project to test a couple of new designs on a segment of the franchisee sites, but such was the success with the new design, conversions and ease of editing through the admin panel, Ovenu decided to have all of the websites rebuilt. We are over half way through this project, and hope to have all 110+ websites up and running before Christmas.

To have your oven cleaned by your local Ovenu franchisee, follow this: ovenu.co.uk

Franchise World call on Mayfly

admin — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:52:50 +0000

Franchise World, the well respected franchise publication have asked us to be their resident internet marketing specialist. This is great news as it will allow us to use our extensive web marketing knowledge to help franchisees & franchisors get the most out of their internet marketing strategies. Franchise World, a London based franchise magazine which was founded in 1978, is the longest-established magazine in its field and is acknowledged throughout the industry as the most newsworthy and authoritative. Our first article was published last month and coincided with the British Franchise Exhibition held at London Olympia. It’s great to see that our work with other major UK franchises has not gone unnoticed. Our experience with the franchise fraternity will certainly help the readers of Franchise World!

Coronation St Honeymoon & Valentine’s Cottage

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:46:52 +0000

We have been working with Pullwood Bay for the last few months with their website marketing, but what a difference a TV appearance can make!! ITV and the cast of one of the UK’s favourite soaps, Coronation St, spent time filming in the beautiful surroundings of Pullwood Bay, Ambleside. Pullwood Bay is set within a 50 acre estate across from Ambleside, on Lake Windermere. The 1/2 mile driveway takes you from the B5286 on a winding drive through woodlands and past 1 of 6 cottages which you can hire. You then get to the main house, a fully restored building which offers 12, 5 Star apartments to hire. These Award winning luxury self catering apartments offer fantastic views over Lake Windermere. With over 1/2 mile of Lake frontage, and it’s own jetty, Pullwood Bay truly is a jewel within the Lake District. Wyke Bay, where filming took place for Gail Platt’s honeymoon destination with new husband Joe, sits on the Lake and has its own private driveway away from the main Pullwood house. Although Wyke Bay was only shown during one episode of ‘Corrie’, enquiries flooded (no pun intended!) through the Pullwood Bay website, as well as calls to ITV asking where this location could be found. Forums were also buzzing with people asking the whereabouts of this place. Wyke Bay is to be featured again on Coronation St in the next week or so as Gail & Joe return to the Lakes for a Valentines special. We don’t want to ruin the story line, you’ll have to watch it yourselves. Pullwood Bay can expect another hit of traffic in the coming weeks, as well as enquiries, forum rumours, and plenty of links! Thanks ITV!

Liverpool Web Design Company Complete The Double…

admin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:34:44 +0000

and the quadruple is on the cards!

We are glad to have launched the 2nd Ovenu UK website, following up our Ovenu Franchise site that we completed last year.

Ovenu are the UK’s largest oven cleaning franchise with over 100 franchisees covering the UK. They also have franchises in the US, Australia, France & Spain.

Mayfly worked around the clock to get the new oven cleaning website live in time for the busiest time of the year. The website benefits from a postcode search facility which links you directly to your nearest oven cleaner, a product area to buy oven spares and cleaning products, as well as a private forum for the Ovenu franchisees to share tips, advice and problems.

Website traffic, enquiries & conversions are at a record high for November & December.

Just a quick note by way of a testimonial to say ‘thank you’ for the recent works carried out on our behalf on our UK and Australian Ovenu web-sites.

It is hugely refreshing to work with folk that understand a customer’s requirements and can implement such needs expeditiously and with the minimum of protracted fuss.

‘Getting things done’ has always been a massive part of the OVENU philosophy and it seems abundantly clear that Mayfly appreciate this work ethic and work to a similar style.

We therefore look forward to working with you and the Mayfly team well into 2010 and beyond.”

Rick Hellewell, Ovenu

As Rik Hellewell mentioned, we have also started to work on the websites of the Australian arm of Ovenu. The franchise site is due to go live any day now, and the main Ovenu Australia website will soon be launched.