97% of consumers search for local businesses online.
Which basically means that people are searching for you but at a local level!
This is where your partner sites fit in: as a platform to capture leads that are in need of a business like yours, but within their area.
Setting up your partner sites is the first step towards moving your brand into the Internet!
And it's a big step at that: in this first instance, your partners need to get EVERYTHING together since it's like they're starting from a clean slate. Basically, they'll need to build a whole site from the ground up.
To get a better idea of what needs to be taken care of in this stage of the process, here's an overview of what's included to set a site up and have it ready for a successful launch:
What Partner Sites Setup Entails
1. Planning
You need to figure out what your strategy is and how that affects your partner sites. Think about defining questions like: what are you going to control? what will you allow partners to edit? What materials will you provide?
2. Design
What will the partner sites' colors be? What typography are partners using in their site? What's the layout and navigation plan for the partner sites? Design is what gives off the first impression of your company to potential customers so be sure you have everything down!
3. Content
Content is the reason visitors are in your site. Design can make it appealing but, at the end of the day, content is what they're looking for. For example, there are some information musts that need to be in your site before anything else happens (like your contact info, list of services/ products you offer, among other things).
4. Elements
Now that you have some of the basics down it's time to move on to the other elements that will complete your site: buttons, CTAs, social media feeds, apps, images, and other elements in your site that need to be placed.
5. Usability
For a site to work properly, you need to think about the user experience. An unfriendly partner site can drive visitors away from it. Think about what users expect to get from your site and how you're providing it to them. For example: is your site mobile optimized? Is it intuitive enough for others to use it? And, what's the loading speed like?
Conclusion
Setting up a site is hard work because you're taking care of all the basics a site needs for it to work properly. From the design to getting it to work for mobile devices, a site is a lot more than what meets the eye. If you or your partners aren't ready to take on this step but still want to take advantage of all the traffic local businesses are driving to their sites, feel free to give us a call and try Empowerkit out!
How Empowerkit Can Help
As you can see, this task can be a handful. And, if it's not done right, it won't do much good for your partner online marketing strategy. And let's face it, doesn't matter how easy you make it for your partners to take care of this themselves, chances are they're too busy with their physical business to move into the world wide web!
But don't worry! Empowerkit can help you, your partners and your business out! We handle the initial site setup and on-boarding process to get you acquainted with our program. We take on the task of setting up your partner sites until they've reached the standards corporate have set for them.
Then, we scale this mold (known in Empowerkit as "Master Site") down to all partners who opt-in this co-op web marketing program. Plus, if there are any updates to be made for the Master Site later down the road, you can call us at 510.859.8452 and we'll work on them for you! Once they're done, the results will immediately appear in the partners sites!
The post 6 Key Elements to Launching a Successful Partner Web Marketing Program: Partner Sites Setup appeared first on Empowerkit - Local Websites for Franchisees.
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