Integrated Digital Strategies

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

My company has about 180 to 190 franchises throughout the U.S., Canada and the U.K. They provide caregivers to families who have an elderly person in the home when that person isn't in assisted living or in a nursing home. We also provide additional staffing to assisted living and nursing homes.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I'm the digital marketing director.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal for working with Integrated Digital Strategies?

We want to maintain some branding consistency. Local marketing is becoming more and more important. We want to encourage and assist with local marketing with some control. We went from 50 to 200 offices in the past five years. That was a huge jump and the SEO [search engine optimization] provider we had before wasn't capable of that kind of management challenge. 

Please describe the scope of their work.

They manage all the SEO for the national website and they assist with national content and national social media. We've been gradually increasing the number of franchisees that are using their services. It's not a mandatory service, but we do require them to have some marketing spending. They have about half of our franchisees that are using them for their local sites. They create unique content. In some cases, they create social media posts and manage the incorporation of business listings. They did keyword optimization, offsite and onsite links, campaigns, and analytics. They were reporting to the franchisee as well as to corporate.

SOLUTION

What was your process for selecting Integrated Digital Strategies?

We interviewed many companies to see who would be the best fit. They were willing to work with our franchisees directly as well as maintain the corporate message. They would also bill the franchisees directly. Those were huge selling points for us.

Can you give a sense of the size of the initiative?

We're increasing our services, and I don't know exactly what it's going to be. We're continually increasing their responsibilities and integrating services. 

When was the work completed?

We started working with them two years ago. It's ongoing work.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Do you have any statistics or metrics on the project?

Our website traffic has increased, but I don't have hard metrics.

Are you satisfied with their performance?

They've been incredibly responsive. We have high maintenance franchisees and a wide range of markets and needs. That can be a real challenge. There's not one thing they can do across the board very often. There's a lot of customization. They've been very educational. There's been lots of one on one. It's been a good experience.

What advice would you give to future clients of theirs?

If they have an enterprise situation, I would say to request education before providing a set package. It's based on your industry. We educated after we realized that they didn't understand the packages. They were good with the webinars.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

We addressed what we thought they needed to improve and they did.